The Lighter Side of Absolute Zero

Maybe I’m alone in this, or in the minority, but I cannot play any kind of horror video game (survival horror or FPS horror) when it’s bright and sunny outside. The juxtaposition is just too great. I have a small collection of horror video games I’m itching to play, and now that the October has arrived bringing with it dark clouds, grey skies, and the nearing of an end to this accursed Daylight Savings Time, I will have plenty of time to indulge myself in some zombies and monsters!

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

All stories have a climax, a high point. Most stories put this at the end, leaving only a little room to allow the reader to climb down off the metaphorical mountain. There is good reason for this: when the point the reader cares about is resolved, they lose interest. I cannot help but wonder how, or even if, that point was missed with the latest Batman movie (The Dark Knight). We just got back from seeing the movie and I thought the movie was over and wrapped up a good 20 minutes (or more, I didn’t check my watch) than it actually was. I spent that last bit just sitting there wondering why the movie was still playing and how I could have misread the signals. I’m not sure I did; either the climax came too soon, or I assigned too much importance to a minor plot point.

Did this ruin the movie for me? I’m not sure. It did leave me with a very different experience than with the first movie, and I will need to re-watch it in order to really judge it, now that I know how to watch it. I will have to conclude that for a first-time watcher who knows a little about the Batman universe, I thought the story was over before the director did, and that is probably not a good sign as far as I’m concerned.

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I had a period of time in my youth in which I was free, and I filled that free time with the study of God and the Bible. That time has come and gone; I am now a husband, a father, an employee, and a home owner. My time is scarce, sold to the highest bidder. Some part of me has been putting off deep theological study waiting for days when things will slow down and I will find myself with an abundance of time. What a fool I have been; I will likely have no such time until I retire or die, and I cannot wait that long to resume my studies. I shall have to study deep, but in short intervals. Maybe that will be enough, for now.

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I started watching Firefly again; this is my third time through it. It was not until this time that I have finally begun to see the larger story of Firefly, and what might possibly be the “real” story Joss Whedon was going for (I may be wrong, and he is free to correct me). Firefly is a story about River, Blue Sun, and the Alliance, and it is told through the adventures of the crew of Serenity. Sure the crew make the watching and the telling that much more compelling, and they give us something to watch, but at the heart of it all is this larger plot whose story is told as the smaller adventures happen.

I happen to like this style of story telling. It’s one I’ve seen in many different places, and one I would like to emulate some day. It does not detract from favorite episodes, which are self-contained, but adds to the corpus.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m always a bit puzzled by people congratulating me when they find out we are expecting our first baby. Aren’t they about 18 years early? Just what are they congratulating me on anyway? My ability to have productive sex? Seems to me we ought to congratulate parents sometime after the kid is raised. There’s more to be congratulated.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and Halloween is at the end of this month. While contemplating doing a warm-up for next month’s marathon a thought struck me. What if the “monster” in a horror story was actually the protagonist and not the humans? I came to this idea by contemplating how Lovecraft structured his stories, in an attempt to mimic that in time for Halloween, and it seemed to me the “monsters”, while rarely seen, are in fact characters, and it could perhaps be argued they are in fact the protagonists.

Armed with this I hope to write 10,000-20,000 words this month in preparation for next month, and in order to have a story to share come this Halloween. I’m excited! Now … if only I could find an idea around here somewhere… .

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Sometimes a quote says it best:

“One cannot, except in immature pulp charlatan-fiction, present an account of impossible, improbable, or inconceivable phenomena as a commonplace narrative of objective acts and conventional emotions. Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to over come, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel.” — H. P. Lovecraft (Notes On Writing Weird Fiction)

I wrote about this once before, this time Lovecraft explains why, and I cannot argue with him. When your monsters are commonplace they lose that special quality which makes the story otherworldly, weird, or supernatural. In some sense we have made the supernatural natural and thus removed the mystery and appeal.

(I’d recommend reading that essay of Lovecraft’s. “Google” it. I’d like to link to it but I don’t want to mess with ambiguous copyright status.)

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A thought struck me this morning as I was thinking about why I am on a “horror” (or more accurately put “supernatural”) kick. These stories, the ones I like reading and the ones I want to write, are fantasies. They aren’t the sword and sorcery style fantasy we all think of when we use that word to describe a genre, but its still a fantasy in that these stories do not describe life as it is, at least that’s my take on it (I don’t think I’ve believed any part of any ghost story or other “horror” story I’ve ever read). The stories are still escapes from the our current life; they still offer something fantastical; they are still something of flight of fancy, so in that light they qualify as fantasy, and in that light it makes sense why I enjoy them.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I will say nothing new here, nevertheless I will say it. Our standard pantheon of horror monster figures have become too familiar to be frightening. Vampires are all too prevalent, zombies abound everywhere (they even march around in broad daylight now). Wolfmen (lycanthropes to get all “technical”) aren’t all that common, but still common enough they don’t cause much fright. Whether or not these monsters ever actually caused real fright is beside the point; they no longer are efficacious.

Am I tired of them? By no means, but that doesn’t mean I won’t grow tired of them. I think, perhaps, this is one reason I drift toward H. P. Lovecraft: his monsters are/were original and still sparse.

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What if there were some ancient dark power, some supernatural evil from the mists of time? What if people could make a contract with it, tap into it, or otherwise use it? What if they use their newfound power to terrorize others and get their own way? Wait a sec … did I just loosely group all myths, folklore, and superstitious tales? :)

It seems to me we have some classic material when we bridge the old superstitions with modern culture in our stories. Nothing is more strange, or perhaps even more terrifying than realizing there is something supernatural out there, and has been out there all along, and someone somewhere knows how to use it (usually for evil). Seems it me there ought to be a wealth of [good] stories still to be told by looking into the past and invoking some ancient evil.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

It’s no great revelation that some crimes go unsolved, even some murders. We only need invoke the name Jack the Ripper to testify to that fact (more recently my attention was drawn to the Black Dahlia case). The writer in me was surprised to realize this though. I like to wrap things up neat and tidy, and I like to read stories that wrap things up. The bad guy doesn’t win, the good guy does. We always know who did what to whom and why. But real life intrudes and serves as a reminder that sometimes a murder gets away without a trace.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After finishing Supernatural Horror in Literature something became quite apparent to me: horror tales work because of a belief in the supernatural. It seems to me ghost stories, haunted houses, and things that go bump in the night carry no particular attraction to one who rejects anything supernatural. It seems to me a prospective horror writer (who wants to make money at it) would be well served to pay attention to the philosophy of the day. Modernism and rationalism don’t seem much compatible with ghouls and goblins.

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Supernatural Horror in Literature/Introduction - Wikisource:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

This essay by H. P. Lovecraft is almost 80 years old, and yet I find the above words to be pertinent to today. The more I have thought about writing a good ghost story, or haunted house story, or any other story in the horror genre the more I have come to want to do just what Lovecraft is prescribing.

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Over at The Lotus Lyceum is a short article titled “How much backdrop is too much?” which simply states that stories which do not explain all the mysteries are more appealing than those that explain away all the background details and world setting, et cetera. I agree, and while the site constrains itself to fantasy literature I’ll add that this little view is what makes good horror literature. When you can define and describe your lurking fears, they are no longer lurking and not as frightening. I for one don’t always like to be told everything, sometimes a hint is more than enough.

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Three men can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” — Benjamin Franklin

It seems to me the fundamental flaw in any secret society is the very fact that it attempts to be secret. Sooner or later the secret will be compromised; the question is, will the society remain secret long enough to achieve their ends?

Posted by Seth Croston Barber at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)