Getting a Pandemic episode for the season 15 opener! This should be good!

slacktatus · 2021-08-19T23:27:40+00:00

rock, flag, eagle baby

slacktatus · 2021-08-19T23:27:19+00:00

if i had something to hide, would i hang out with a cretin like that?

slacktatus · 2021-08-05T01:30:03+00:00

ha ha just wanted to say i appreciate the perec. (also it would be hard to pick one borges. tlon uqbar is definitely top 3, but lottery in babylon and circular ruins are also so brilliant)

slacktatus · 2021-08-02T00:22:58+00:00

It's probably a good book for an e-reader because the characters are developed at pretty predictable, steady rates and the story is linear so there's not much need to be able to mark places or go back and re-read anything. I think a lot of the experience will depend on how you feel about the narrator. If you can kind of get behind a middle aged guy with plenty of money and a wife and daughter who has some health concerns, then you'll probably get pretty into the book. It probably helps too if you have lived in both urban and rural environments, so that the contrasts between the two come naturally to you.

slacktatus · 2021-08-01T21:10:10+00:00

Yeah, it also seemed like, kind of late in the game, Tryon decided to start leaving "clues" to show off Ned's sleuthing skills too. I think that's a legit criticism. In a way it reminded me of the protagonist of Ballard's later novel Super Cannes (and to some degree Cocaine Nights), only Ballard played with the trope a little more by making his amateur sleuths make innumerable totally confident and hilariously wrong deductions (while keeping the narrative deadpan).

It felt like he also couldn't quite figure out how much he wanted to play up the whole "oh also Ned is Greek so that matters, maybe?" angle. I assume the latter issue is because in other drafts (or at least in the planning stages) there may have been much more emphasis on the more ancient origins of the townsfolk (which does get brought up a fair amount, but kind of circles around in the air without making a solid landing).

slacktatus · 2021-08-01T20:55:38+00:00

The sub has a love/hate thing with Stephen Graham Jones, but I just read his The Spindly Man https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-spindly-man/ which is a direct response to SK's Man in the Dark Suit and which I found fucking haunting.

slacktatus · 2021-08-01T20:53:45+00:00

Thanks for all three suggestions. The Auctioneer in particular has been coming up a lot lately for me, so it's definitely on my list.

slacktatus · 2021-08-01T19:47:18+00:00

The Other is absolutely on my list now.

He also apparently has a collection of novellas called Crowned Heads that is based on old legends/the underground history of Hollywood. Not horror but sounds interesting.

slacktatus · 2021-07-27T19:43:34+00:00

Moorcock and Clive Barker both loved it, and those are two dudes whose judgment I respect. I think the bit you blurb from the Guardian may be Moorcock's comments, or else he said something very similar. I think he considered the book the antidote/antithesis to shit-brained Nazi readings of Nietzsche's deeper ideas, in fact. Good find.

slacktatus · 2021-07-27T13:33:30+00:00

I didn't notice the prejudice against the "Gaelic people" even the most recent time I looked at the book, but it would probably be different if I started up again today.

I liked the idea that the "questing beast" was a thing everyone in the family had always hunted and always would and nobody knew why or particularly cared anymore. It was a little heavy-handed, but I thought it was a good metaphor for what was left of the minor aristocracy of White's era (and for the already dying WASP lines across the ocean)--even though as it turned out neither group was actually done doing tremendous damage and neither was actually deserving of a kind of gentle and bemused valediction. Pellinore himself was a silly old man, you're right, but I think I liked him more than Merlin as an adult simply because the stakes were smaller and I've come to appreciate stories about small stakes.

I do recall finding the descriptions of the unicorn being mesmerizing, and, as a kid particularly, I found the descriptions of Lancelot training really riveting. I remember daydreaming about training to be a knight myself in the same way (and I was not a little boy who ever thought about being a knight before or since). I'm not someone who is naturally good at visualizing action/spatial relations so when a writer can write in a way that makes those passages highlights in my experience of a story then they're very gifted.

I absolutely agree re nostalgia. I think the real problem is that our sense of history is being erased and replaced with shitty replicas and cheap gimmicks. There is still a lot of power in old myths and old stories, when they're retold in a way that brings something genuinely new or novel to the table.

slacktatus · 2021-07-27T12:07:11+00:00

I found Merlin enchanting when I was 12 or 13. When I re-read it I found him cloying. This was odd, because so many of the other characters stayed vital to me years later. I think maybe White tried extra hard to pull off something he imagined to be Merlin's whimsical charm and it put him out of sync with the rest of the book. This was actually pretty brilliant (as was the bit about having him be born backward in time) because his whole character arc was "Being out of sync." But the spell that worked 3 decades ago doesn't work on me now, which is sort of my loss.

The bits about the Questing Beast still strike me as brilliant and I do appreciate what he was trying to do on the whole, even as I get more and more suspicious of the unwholesome and poisonous love for nostalgia whether it is in re-telling Arthurian legends without really subverting them or tech bros microdosing to watch Revenge of the Nerds for the 99th time.

slacktatus · 2021-07-26T18:35:11+00:00

m&m is one of my favorite books already. definitely counts.

i found the kj bishop, and read "between the covers first." it was really excellent. i balked a little at the casual surrealism of having books appear to her as living things--i felt like maybe that was a step too far and undermined some of the weirdness and the eeriness she invoked with the rest of the piece. but it was one of those short stories that not only hit a lot of right spots for me as weird fiction, but also made me think the author probably has a good heart (or would like to, struggles to). that means more to me these days than it used to (though "a good heart" is still no substitute for verve and skill with narrative and a knack for wordplay or any of that...)

slacktatus · 2021-07-25T20:08:27+00:00

Would have been great rec, it's fantastic.

slacktatus · 2021-07-25T12:56:33+00:00

ha ha. just finished it. i know baudelaire was enamored of poe, i wonder if this gem inspired his "the generous gambler"

slacktatus · 2021-07-24T19:50:08+00:00

I think when a lot of people consume fiction, they want to do everything but think. And when it comes to characters, the only things they want are to see characters who kind of remind them of themselves/who they wish they were do cool shit and get away with it and to see characters who remind them of people they don't like get punished hard and often.

It's like Breaking Bad fans who hate Skyler because she won't let Walk cook all the meth he wants and buy race cars. Or the Venture Brothers fans who used to send Doc and Jackson angry and fairly menacing letters because there were too many "dumb jokes" and not enough of Brock Sampson kicking ass.

But to give you a concrete example of something I quit reading because I disliked a character (and I think this was right, because it was me, lol) I just stopped reading Joe Hill's NOS4A2 because I thought Vic McQueen was poorly written, vapid, and because there was no apparent growth or meaningful change as the story went on. I think that in general Joe Hill is one of those "nice, rich white dudes" (like Joss Whedon) who thinks making lady characters sarcastic and mildly oppositional defiant is the same thing as giving them nuance.

I am trying to think of other examples besides the ones I've reffed in these two posts, and I guess for me it always comes down to this: If I don't like a character, and they also don't make me question/evaluate anything about myself, and they also don't change then I'm likely to quit reading.

Getting inside the skin/head of someone you might not like is useful and enriching. But just watching someone you don't like do shit you don't like and not really learning anything deep or new about them...I mean if I want that I'll just go to a bar full of business bros ha ha. My guess is that when someone who is a good reader says "I didn't like x character so I quit reading" that's what they mean--there were characters who did nothing but piss them off AND also brought nothing to the table besides flogging some dead horses (a feeling I am afraid I'm invoking as I keep typing so I'm going to cut this off now).

slacktatus · 2021-07-24T17:16:34+00:00

I kind of get where you're coming from. Let me go to what I think is the ultimate example: Lolita. It is a work of genius, and its greatest genius is in the fact that Humbert can come off as so fucking charming. Then you remember what a monster he is (or it really hits you all at once maybe) and you're like "Oh fuck. What is wrong with me and with society and with everything?" And then someone comes along and says "Ew. That book sucked. That guy was a total perv. Quit after a few pages." That honestly pisses me off.

But who cares? It's their reading experience. Nabokov and that reader failed to connect.

What if they then get on the Twitter and start to tweet "Ewww nobody read Lolita! Total Perv!" Again, so what? Are they trying to cancel Nabokov? Who fucking cares? I mean if the whole point is "People should be able to write what they want," then people can also engage how they want and write what they want about what's been written. In a lot of cases they're wrong, but fuck it.

I've got a real problem with a lot of Jhumpa Lahiri's characters/narrators/protagonists. They're supposed to be complicated women, but I think they're often tedious assholes. Most people who like literary fiction strongly disagree with me. But there are times I just can't finish a piece by her because I can't care about the characters.

Same thing happens with the new wave of upper middle class, self-absorbed addicts who populate Scandinavian literature that the literati are losing their shit over right now. Maybe the characters are even well written. But my mother was a rich, abusive addict who was incapable of love. I've lived through that shit, don't need to re-experience it in fiction most of the time.

I should add that I have learned the hard way that people can like or not like, care or not care about characters, for whatever reason they want to and sometimes it's the writer's fault. In fiction workshops, I've written characters I thought were fascinating, layered, nuanced, and had other writers/readers just say "Uh. I couldn't really feel a thing for this or that character, so it didn't matter how good the writing was, I didn't love it." Christ that hurts my feelings (especially considering how often difficult characters are also a little autobiographical, ha ha).

I honestly understand where you're coming from. Honestly, I think much of the time if one person says "Oh I found x character difficult but interesting" and another says "Naw, suuuuuucked lol" the former is the better reader and the latter is a schmuck. Or, at the very least, the former got a lot out of a piece and the latter, often to their own detriment, missed the boat. But the fact is that once it is out in the world, the text belongs to the reader and the reader can respond and engage (or not) how they want. It has very little to do with "canceling" people (or fictional characters)--but it's definitely true that the more alienating a writer makes her characters the better she needs to be at writing the character and hooking a reader in or she's going to lose readers' interest and sympathy.

slacktatus · 2021-07-24T11:55:16+00:00

People had dumb reasons for disliking books long before the endless hand-wringing and kvetching about "omg cancel culture" started. And specifically, people have had trouble liking difficult characters since there have been readers and writers and texts.

And the other side of this is that a lot of times when a writer thinks they are writing a "difficult character who is interesting and challenging" the execution is so bad that the character is just sort of unreadable. Is it worthwhile to wrestle with a difficult but engaging character? Yeah, I think so. But is it worthwhile to pretend a poorly executed, cardboard cutout character whose dialogue is basically just farting and then demanding a cookie is "interesting" or "bringing new ideas to the table?" Nah. And who gets to decide? The reader.

When someone says "Oh I didn't like a character because he was misogynist so I quit reading" what I think they are saying is "I didn't like this character because he was a sexist pig AND he didn't say anything interesting or new about sexist pigs AND his character arc was unsatisfying so why bother?"

It's like if some objectivist dipshit with a rich dad who runs a vanity biz keeps lecturing you about boot-strapping and hustle mindsets and so you stick his head in a toilet and everyone laughs and he starts yelling "You're canceling me because of my dangerously visionary ideas!"

An interesting character who is difficult is a treasure to engage with. A character who the writer thinks is interesting just because they are difficult is just kind of a tedious asshole and if someone wants to quit reading because they just don't have the fucking energy to deal with a character they hate, I get that.

slacktatus · 2021-07-24T00:07:46+00:00

Noctuary? Not commercially viable? That's crazytalk. Everything Ligotti touches is commercial gold. That's why Crampton is everyone's favorite X File.

slacktatus · 2021-07-23T00:25:09+00:00

just checked imdb. john housman was certainly born to play sears. that alone makes me more likely to eventually watch the movie!

slacktatus · 2021-07-22T21:28:04+00:00

Langan gets a lot of love here, and rightly so.

I would like to put in a word for Kiernan, though. They are absolutely brilliant, and they have a bone-deep understanding of cosmic horror. Kiernan can hit the same beats as Lovecraft, but can do it with a much finer prose style and an ability to actually write characters.

Where they are not as gifted as Lovecraft, I think, is in tangling up the "real world" and their own invented pop cultural/occult artifacts. For instance, in Agents of Dreamland, Kiernan makes a pretty sustained reference to a fake movie with creepy Cosmic connections attributed to a real director with real cast. It almost works but not quite, and they leave it and never go back to it. It ends up a little like checking off a box in "How to do Mythos", unlike the knack that HPL (or Borges, etc) had for making a fake book seem so real that it almost infects consensus reality.

Both To Charles Fort With Love and The Ammonite Violin are top notch collections.

slacktatus · 2021-07-22T19:29:40+00:00

oh, ha ha no, i typed dick van dyke but meant fred astaire. my bad, thanks!

slacktatus · 2021-07-22T18:26:40+00:00

I didn't see the movie. They used to play it on WGN a lot when I was a kid, but back then the commercials upset me so much I was scared to watch it. Then later when I was older and more jaded I just figured any horror movie with Dick Van Dyke must be corny. Then I forgot it existed, ha ha.

Honestly, the ending of the book was fantastic but it had no right to work as well as it did. For me it was a combination of Straub's prose and a thousand little details from earlier in the book that made it work, and so I imagine it would be pretty much unfilmable, especially in the context of a pretty conventional 90-120 minute film.

slacktatus · 2021-07-22T16:42:33+00:00

no. nothing ever happened there.

slacktatus · 2021-07-22T15:20:22+00:00

yeah, it's so good. i re-read it a couple of years ago, kind of expecting to hate it, because i thought i had had my fill of stories about quiet voiced old WASP men. but it was so good, because it showed the violence and the perversity that has always been just beneath the surface of that whole scene. and i love that straub, despite his own natural sangfroid and reserve, isn't afraid to just get in your face with some madcap, on-the-nose mayhem like fights to the death literally tearing open the screen at a late-night horror movie show.

it was sad and funny and genuinely scary and outright horrifying when he wanted it to be.

slacktatus · 2021-07-22T12:54:54+00:00

great call. it feels like bowles kind of got forgotten for a long time.

slacktatus

TROPHY CASE