Omletteville

Living In A Rented Room

Just a short update:

I'm still adjusting to some of the bizarre anecdotes of living on my own in a rented room: such as, having to stand while filching Internet access, or the limited supply of food and drink, as well as a truncated snacking schedule, due to a limited weekly budget. Or dealing with a landlord who out-Mothers my own Mother, in addition to her daughter, who always arrives to collect rent at the earliest hours of the morning, as I lay asleep, and implores if she could have the money earlier in the month as it's convenient for her mortgage. Over a month ago, it was early morning peals of screaming between the landlord and a welfare tenant, who didn't like the way she was treating him but refused to move elsewhere. These days if I'm not shored up in my room, door locked, surreptitiously eating a late-night meal in the privacy of my room, watching a borrowed DVD movie, surfing the Internet, or reading a book, avoiding the 'little wants' ("Can you do this for me, Dave?") of the landlord, I'm spending time with Viv--the only good thing I have left in my life.

This photo (right) was taken last Saturday - we were dressed up for my work's Company X-mas Party.

Mr. Murder

Yesterday morning, at a loss to explain why some ill throbbing of insomnia has awakened me, I decided to bide this wakeful time by reading Dean Koontz’s Mr. Murder. Appropriately, after reading a few, select pages I paused to reflect on my own sleeplessness, and I formed at that moment a connection in my own mind with a character’s in the novel that helped me realize something about Dean Koontz’s fiction.

There is some truth, although it is only a kind of bleached truth, to the colorful declaration that once you’ve read one Dean Koontz novel, you’ve pretty much read everything he’s ever written. I’m enjoying Koontz’s Mr. Murder for this very sake, studying the method to his madness: recognizing a disturbing pattern of secret dread aroused in the consciousness of two characters, a mystery novelist, and a programmed killer, from whence unknown.

For a writer accused of being formulaic, Koontz never seems to let his writing style slip into sloppy long-winded sentences, clichés and poor syntax, but is quite tight and subtle, rhetorically. He is the only other writer I know of, aside from Sir Philip Sidney and Shakespeare, who can pull off a firm gradatio:

Though she knows what he wants, she does not know what he needs any more than he does. When he gets what he wants, and when it does not quench the hot need in him, Heather will learn the pattern of emotion that is now so familiar to him: need fosters frustration; frustration grows into anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred generates violence—and violence sometimes soothes. (36)

This degree of sophistication and originality is unexpected of Horror or Thriller writers, but Mr. Murder is, in terms of the evolution of 20^th Century Weird Fiction, one of the first meta-fictional novels. Comparing this novel with his earlier breakthrough novel Watchers, I suddenly realize how dangerously easy it is – in this illiterate reader-centric universe of consumer readers - to slip into the fallacy of accusing writers of being formulaic.

Back In Black

Over a month, and I finally discover - thanks to a fellow boarder - that some fool in the neighbourhood hasn't secured his wireless network, which means I am filching someone else's Internet Access. I may have had to re-arrange the furniture in my room, as well as elevate my computer atop an awkward plastic stand meant for storing magazines and miscellaneous papers to be at window-level, not to mention type standing up, but I'm back again.

Aside from sleeping, eating and working, I've kept busy reading a select of masterful contemporary novelists - mostly what I would call Supernatural Horror - over the last month: Peter Straub's lost boy lost girl, Bentley Little's Dispatch and Return, Graham Masterton's Spirit, David Morrell's Creepers and M. John Harrison's Light. Yesterday, I started reading Dean Koontz's Mr. Murder. Perhaps I'll post some of my thoughts on Mr. Koontz - having read one of his other novels: Watchers, already.