bruceb

Got me a book review up at Tor.

The writings of Thomas Ligotti comprise an extended gloss upon "Duck Amuck", which is never referred to except via indirect means.

I've added a new tag for this, since I've decided that I'd like to keep a tally of things I wish for in horror and see if maybe I can fill some of them for myself. In the meantime, expect "horror wishlist"-tagged items to have a lot of whining and kvetching in the two-fisted manner you've come to expect etc etc.

The proximate trigger for this is watching The Mist while having trouble sleeping, but there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of examples in my reading and viewing behind it. I am really tired of writers too lazy to do the slightest homework and come up with actual biblical and related passages for religious loony characters to expound upon.

The Bible is full of marvelous things for psychos to adopt as their own. So are the apocrypha, the early church fathers, and on and on through the intensely deranged threads within Reformation doomsaying and right up to the modern day. There is no need to invent jumbled garbage - it's all out there lying around to be picked up, and search engines and topic indexes and stuff to bring it right to your screen. I want more loonies with authentic rants, unless they're supposed to be using the trappings and rhythms for an avowedly other message.

This began as part of my upcoming 100 movies comments on Cloverfield, but is going on long enough and generally enough that I spun off.

I notice that a lot of movie critics treat horror monsters as having no particular reality in and of themselves even in the context of the movie's imagined world. The monster is there to symbolize (I prefer to speak of symbolism rather than allegory) some aspect of the real world, and the story is basically a way of talking indirectly and in a compressed style about that aspect. This bugs me, a lot.

My alternative is to treat the imagined world as being what it looks like until and unless there's some reasonable reason to take it as anything else, and to look for real-world truth in how characters respond to their environment. As I wrote years back, I've never been a vampire, but I've felt left behind by events, locked into unsustainable routines, and stripped of choices, for instance. I've never seen a giant monster attack my city, but I know something about chaotic disruptions without obvious explanation, and I know more than I'd like about grasping onto any available course of action in desperate need to have something to lean on while hoping for answers.

(There are other alternatives, of course, like the one of more or less ignoring the human dimensions and treating it all as a technical exercise in speculative physics and engineering. I leave them to those who wish to champion them.)

The advantage of my approach, I think, is that it focuses on what film (and fiction generally) does well. It's necessarily less weighty in interconnections than reality. There are fewer things going on. But we can look at them from angles we usually can't in reality, unless we're an administration's favorite security agency or we're doing something that might make for a good LJ community but is probably illegal. And of course we can't generally get into other people's thoughts and feelings directly at all. (If you can, you should see about getting yourself hooked up with Marvel Entertainment's film unit. Real psychics are scarce and even if you can't act well, they'll probably adapt a superhero franchise to accommodate.)

So in fiction we get to construct a little laboratory, controlling for the things we want to set aside. But this isn't about answering the question "What is this like when allowed a wider choice of symbols?" It's about "What would it be like, and what else is that like?"

Thanks once again to the estimable Sean Collins for a tip....

Formula, Convention, and Cliche: Repetition in Genre Fiction is the title of a post at Groovy Age of Horror, a weblog whose writer centers on '70s horror and ranges in all kinds of interesting directions from there. Game writers, you want to read this one; so will others. I wouldn't make all his slams against literary fiction, but when it comes to looking at how genre fiction works, yeah, right on. This is good stuff.

And as long as I'm taking tips from Sean, he's got good comments on the network of comics bloggers and the absence of same for horror. This is my occasion to say something I've noticed about my own sustained reading.

The bloggers I stick with are the ones who seem to me to be interesting people who happen to share some interests with me and a knack for good expression. I find that it's the more focused-topic blogs that are most likely to drop off my list because either I got bored, or I got angry in unproductive ways. (Like my experiences with more and more political blogs, for example.) It's people who bring me back, and precisely because there'll be surprises, wanderings, and other stuff that I couldn't predict or categorize.

There are of course a handful of exceptions, like Dirk Deppey and the astoundingly good Journalista, which is a must read if you're much into any kind of comics or serial storytelling. But then Dirk does drop in asides like this one on his daily routine: "I finally haul my lazy ass out of bed somewhere between 1-3PM Arizona Mountain Standard Time — where we all understand that Daylight Savings Time is a plot by the Carlyle Group’s Zionist Masonic Bankers to floridate our water supply and turn us all into socialist homos! — and set a pot of coffee to percolating, presumably with unfloridated water. Goodness knows, I’m no socialist." His life and tastes and a strong sense of personality do emerge gradually...partly through gentle repetition, in fact, to tie this back to the earlier topic.

Anyway, I'm less interested in a bunch of blogs about horror than I am in blogs by folks who talk about horror along with other things, and from whom I learn something and/or get good entertainment.

This is one of the reasons I beat myself down whenever I start thinking about spinning off topic blogs, and instead make more use of LJ tags.