But what do they see?

 Awesome Nerd Things, Horror  21 Responses »
Oct 242011
 

Edit: Instead of doing things I ought to have been doing, I redesigned my blog. What do you guys think? I’m not used to having dark backgrounds, so be honest. Does it work for you? Too dark? Your opinion matters to me! You’re the ones who have to look at it all the time :-)

So there is a haunted house up in the Niagara Falls area, reportedly extremely scary of course, but they do something a little special that other haunted houses don’t. You know in amusement parks they take your photo just as the car descends the big drop? Well this haunted house takes your photo at a particularly scary moment in the house. We have no idea what it is the people are seeing that is clearly causing some drawer wetting, but whatever it might be is scary enough to cause tough looking high school boys to grab each other around the waist like little school girls.

Aside from the absolute laughing pleasure of looking through the pictures posted on their Flickr account, there’s a lot we can learn from these candid shots.

What does surprise and terror look like, fellow writers? This. This is what it looks like.

It looks like an 18 year old jock about to wet himself. It looks like a train of girls in the throes of being possessed by a vengeful spirit. It looks like old men bursting into tears and facial expressions so stretched and screwed up they look like they must be fake. I like the ones of grown men pulling their one knee into their chest, their fists bunched up close to their face as if they are clutching their petticoats from a mouse.

What it doesn’t look like? It doesn’t look hot, that’s for sure. Normal people don’t look cool and determined and super hot in the face of the grotesque, surprising, and/or unexpected. They look like cartoon characters. That’s a little lesson all MCs should learn.

My friend Lydia and I play a game while looking through the pictures. We pick out the people we’re going to have on our team during the zombie apocalypse. The ones who look unimpressed by the terrible thing while their comrades cower behind them. The ones in battle stance. There aren’t a lot of them, but we’ll be a strong team.

We also point out the Can’t Handle it Guy (or gal) who we’ll kick off the island before they get us all killed. You’ll know the ones when you see them – the ones who break the line of defense while the front half gets away and the back half is stuck behind Can’t Handle it Guy as zombie snacks.

Our second favorite game is called Imminent Breakup. These are characterized by one of the pair (usually the guy) running from the terror and leaving their significant other behind to be eaten. My favorite? The guy who appears to be shoving his girlfriend away with one hand, fighting to get out of her grip while she holds onto his t-shirt. Awesome.

 

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A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

 Art, Book Reviews, Book Trailers, Books, Horror, Young Adult  13 Responses »
Oct 102011
 

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

When the cover of this book was first released, I had a nightmare about it. I dreamed about an autumn corn field, barren and dry, and that I was running away from something trying to get to a house that kept receding the faster I ran. Anyone who has spent any time out in the country knows what this phenomenon feels like. Maybe it’s a physics thing – the curve of the earth creating some optical illusion, I don’t know, but there’s something about trying to cross a corn field that feels like eternity stretching before you. You walk and walk and walk and never seem to get closer to home.

That was what the dream was like. But nevermind. That’s only interesting in the context that the first time I saw the cover, it gave me nightmares.

A Monster Calls and Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan are two books with a strong argument for including art in novels. Using engravings to illustrate books used to be the norm, but at some point along the way adult readers and adult publishers made some conscious decision that illustrating books was for kids, drawing the dividing line between serious and not-worth-your-time novels. Many books are changing this perception, and I look forward to seeing more of it.

A Monster Calls might be a young adult book, but its illustrations are profoundly beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Like a vintage, gorgeous wool coat full of spiders.

The artist’s name is Jim Kay and I love how creepy and active his drawings are. I can feel the monster lumbering across the landscape, the hoom, hoom, drum of his steps. I can’t help it. I hear Yeats in my ear, whispering, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Every page has something more than words, and I love how carefully this book was typeset. The messy India Ink drawings splash and smear and spread up and around the blocks of text, forcing the paragraphs out of their standard blockiness to fit into uneven, unnatural shapes. The white space feels contained and surrounded, and this proves an interesting effect on reading. It becomes far easier to lose your eyes inside the text, herded and corralled by the black drawings which drive out the real world like shadow. The diving into the narrative and getting trapped there is almost too easy. It provides a visual illusion of being drawn in too close to the text and characters, too close to the events, and my rational mind is tricked into feeling, for brief moments, like I am in immediate danger instead of the text boy, Conor.

While it looks like a horror, A Monster Calls isn’t traditional in any sense of the word. It’s scary, yes, but in a primal way – the same emotion that pressures you off a dark, empty street even when you don’t recognize an immediate threat. The story is sad and traumatic and haunted, but not in the way I was expecting. Like the art, the voice of the story does its own little illusion to really creep you out.

The story is written from a thirteen year old boy’s perspective and reads like a children’s book. There are simple perspectives, thirteen year old boy thoughts, but the events unfolding, the psychological hauntings, are the sort of things children are usually hidden from, their eyes covered, their curtains pulled. The juxtaposition is unsettling and visceral. Every time I put the book down I have to work to control my panic.

A gorgeous book masterfully written, language spun out of spider webs and falling leaves, characters who are neither easy to love or satisfying to hate, all culminating on a twist of storytelling that will leave you with indescribable emotions and a need to be alone for a while.

It’s only real failing is that it looks like a horror novel, a really great, traditional, experienced horror novel, and it’s not. Not in the least. The cover is very grown up, the silver metallic finish and simple, classic font choice feel too adult for the writing style found inside, and this is probably going to turn some readers away before they realize how rich the story actually is. This is a book where nothing is trustworthy – that even the cover is playing tricks on you.

 

 

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Saturday and Sunday’s Monstrologists Hunted…

Angeline Trevena: Bakeneko – the Japanese Monster Cat
 Megan Grimit: Vampire
 Kurt Hartwig: Ouroboros

Today’s Monstrologists are Hunting…

Jason Beineke: Ghoul

 

He updated his Facebook status before laying siege to my town.

 My Life in Action, News, the Good and Bad, Things Worth Sharing  4 Responses »
Jan 072011
 

It happened Wednesday afternoon. I was standing in front of a filing cabinet, sneezing and choking on the dust I was kicking up from long untouched folders. It started first as text messages, but the emails and phone calls started rolling in very shortly after. All the cubes I was standing near began buzzing in unison and the tone of everyone’s voice was the same – something terrible was happening.

There was a shooter in a local school.

This is how I imagine the end of the world will feel. Dystopian novels always get this moment wrong. They act as if we will be completely disorganized and taken by surprise and in a moment everything will end. I don’t think so. I think it will feel exactly as it did the moment I knew something terrible was happening on an unthinkable scale even though I was standing in front of a filing cabinet in a dark corridor in cubeville. I wasn’t in front of a computer, not next to a phone, my cell phone was at my desk and yet I knew instinctively something was happening. It was the sound of their voices, maybe, or a universal telepathic emotional message we send out like a sonic bomb that screams: The world has gone terribly wrong.

I got back to my desk in a hurry and someone was already there waiting for me. “There’s been a shooting at a local high school.” I don’t even know if they said the school name before my brain automatically filled in the blanks. It’s my husband’s school. There is a shooter in my husband’s school. Even when I read the news bulletins, even when I got the text messages proving it wasn’t his school, my body was still vibrating on high alert as if, even across town, he was in immediate danger. But even though my husband was safe, I had coworkers whose nieces, nephews, and grandkids were at that school or one of the neighboring schools which were also in lock down. The effect of this moment was cast wide and we were all caught in it.

I think this is how everyone who has a kid in school when something like this happens must be thinking. It doesn’t matter how many times you are reassured that it isn’t their school, it will always feel too close and the world too small.

The news rolled in like you’d expect. Lots of speculation, some incorrect details, and truth stripped bare by emotion. It was probably over before we even really understood what was happening, but it felt like the event consumed the afternoon hours.

This is what we know, and I’m not even sure after 24 hours of hearts laid bare and vulnerable if we can even believe what we know to be capitol T truth.

He was a student. He’d only been at the school for two months. His father was a police detective. He was reported to be wearing his father’s bullet proof vest and gun. He walked into the main office and shot the principal and the vice principal before leaving the school. Someone from the office ran to the cafeteria where most of the students were eating lunch and ordered all the students into the back of the kitchen where doors were shut and locked. The boy drove a couple of miles to a parking lot where he shot himself in the head.

The vice principal was life flighted to the trauma hospital where she died. The principal remains in critical condition.

Students were released hours later in small groups to parents waiting at a nearby church.

And everyone else was left asking why. Why did this happen. What could have caused it. There must be a reason. We, as human beings, need a reason that evil things happen. We need someone to blame. It’s not like writing fiction where we must make sure our bad guys have motivations and believable, satisfactory reasons for the things they do. Readers won’t believe us if we say the bad guy did the terrible things just because. In real life, the reasons can be marginal and unexplainable or absent and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s the core of the reason why society finds hobgoblins to blame – Rock & Roll, Elvis Presley, Dungeons & Dragons, rap and heavy metal music, violent video games, violent movies, violent books, bullying, bad parenting.

We cannot accept that a seemingly good kid who maybe talked too much in class, was outgoing and funny and well liked, who got caught driving his car on the school track was then suspended for 19 days by the vice principal, would return a few hours later to shoot her multiple times for ruining his life.

We cannot accept this kid stopped first to update his Facebook page before going in.

I think it is especially telling that all the news articles are focusing on one personality trait- he was funny. But he was a funny kid. He made everyone laugh. Damn it but he was so funny. Because being funny is not a character trait we are emotionally able to ascribe to evil.

The aftermath is the worst. There is no one to hold accountable for this event because the student took his own life. I hate that. I hate that the bad guy gets away without being forced to take responsibility for taking a life, for ruining others, for bringing terror and vulnerability and emotional scarring to innocent kids who didn’t deserve it and they will never be able to feel safe at school again. Because the news is going to drag the police officer father through the mud and his friends will be stalked by the press. Because everyone is going to look for a way to explain away actions we don’t understand so we can feel that we can trust good kids as long as we keep them away from the dark influences of the hobgoblin lurking in the shadows.

But bet me money someone’s not going to call for a softening of the punishment codes of the school district. Because we can’t expect teens to be held responsible for their own actions. Because punishments are too hard on teens and drive them to be irrational and psychotic. Because it is the school system’s fault for making the teen feel bad about himself.

The teen even said so on his Facebook update.

Few people will have the guts to say the boy was to blame. That he did this on purpose, he went with intention and carried out the evil act and nothing and no one made him do it. No one helped him steal his father’s gun or break into the car his father had locked up as punishment for driving on the school’s track. Because he did it. He did it. There is no hobgoblin here.

Though we will all remained haunted by one.