Lookin Through the Wrong End of the Glass

"One other thing he said. You'd think a man that had waited eighty some odd years on God to come into his life, well, you'd thing he'd come. If he didn't you'd still have to figure that he knew what he was doin. I don't know what other description of God you could have. So what you end up with is that those he has spoke to are the ones that must of needed it the worst. That's not a easy thing to accept. Particularly as it might apply to someone like Loretta. But then maybe we are all of us lookin through the wrong end of the glass. Always have been."

Bell in Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men

Birthday Photo #4

A dynamic snapshot of me, blowing out my birthday cupcake at the Sultan's Tent

Birthday Photo #3

My fiancée's mom, a friend, my fiancée, and I:
together celebrating before devouring the beautiful birthday cake

Birthday Photo #2

The birthday cake that my fiancée started baking at the midnight hour

Birthday Photo #1

Picture of me - on my 24th birthday

The Best Of ...

A short update tonight:

When I get them, I'll post the digital photos that were snapped this past Saturday night, on my 24th birthday--at Viv's place, at the Sultan's Tent. Until then, I'll be reading Stephen King's Insomnia and some short stories from Robert Bloch.

Blood-curdling Tales

A few nights ago, I finished reading Jack Ketchum's Off Season. Up until about a week ago Ketchum was unheard of before I happened upon his name advertised on one of those spinal-cracker paper inserts in my copy of Richard Laymon's The Cellar. Initially, when I saw his name marketed alongside Richard Laymon and two other unknown Horror novelists for an avid Horror reader book club, I expected to read straight-out pulp. Perhaps Ketchum's updated dedication to his two greatest mentors--Robert Bloch and Stephen King--was the first hint of his Minor cult status. Unlike Bloch or King, Ketchum's Off Season tears at its reader limb-by-limb in a frenzy of edgy, visceral gore - specifically, cannibalism - like Maenads in a 20th Century Bacchae. While a reader experiences the intimate psychic world of psychoses in Surround Sound in Bloch's or King's stories, in Ketchum's novel, the reader is wracked on a visceral level by a terrorizing, slasher style of natural human gore minus the violin, that splatters blood across the lens of the reader.

I'll have to read something else by Ketchum - next I'm reading Stephen King's Insomnia.

Tragic Laughter

"A joke owes its character to the miscarriage of the intended sense into something ludicrously different."

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

"It is a psychological decoy which gives a false impression of relief so that the more dangerous issues can fester undisturbed"

Tony Staveacre

"I have found--especially on the stage--that when I finish a stunt, I can get a laugh by just standing still and looking at the audience as if I was surprised and slightly hurt to think they would laugh at me. It always brings a bigger laugh."

Buster Keaton

Appeal of the Spectrally Macabre

Horror is a bleak genre, and occasionally, when our lives are steeped in dark moments, the darkness that is visible in these claustrophobic visions of the world becomes a kind of modern tragic poetry. Richard Laymon, compared with Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, John Saul, Peter Straub, Graham Masterton and Stephen King, likes to indulge in what Lovecraft called the "appeal of the spectrally macabre" in his tales. What stands for the "spectrally macabre" in Laymon's The Cellar is the sexual monstrosity associated with the Beast House: a clawed, nocturnal beast with a libido and body of exceptionally grosse and monstrous sadism, which has reigned in Malcasa Point since the beginning of the Twentieth Century. All of the characters of this novel are driven tragically somehow, by sexual abuse, or fear, or vengeance, into the morbid mythology of this small-town tourist attraction that has been the unholy site of many unexplained murders.

At the centre of Laymon's novels are the tragically destructive sexual urges, desires and delusions of the libido, or Id - human and Nature alike - that sometimes transmogrifies the world into a Freudian nightmare.

A Voice Crying In The Wilderness

"No one who had not been in the wilderness of North America could understand that experience, the way it made a man feel he could be reborn, but only with terrible hazards, the way it made him distrust language and the life of the streets or the court or the army encampment. Once it had you, the wilderness would not let go, it was magnificent beyond telling, it was worse than your worst nightmare."

Philip Marchand, Ghost Empire

Under The Rock

An update is overdue: visiting and spending time with family, blood and soon-to-be in-law kin, over the holidays is done. Kept busy with reading, too: Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas. Awaiting the Son of Stephen King, Bram Stoker Award-winner, Joe Hill's first novel to be published, Heart-Shaped Box: a supernatural tale of horror about an aging rock star and sometimes collector of things morbid named Judas Coyne, who buys a ghost for sale on the Internet. Hill's first published book 20th Century Ghosts is a rare, highly-recommended (and multiple award-winning) collection of entertaining, literary short stories that are unlike any Horror being written today. His writing skill is capably poetic but readable by today's standards, a symmetry of fear-mongering wit and delight, something that is inimitable. Clive Barker, Dean Koontz and Graham Masterton come close with their striking imagination and poetic writing in three books - Books of Blood, Odd Thomas and Spirit - to achieving works of epistolary sainthood, like Paul, replete with that halo of canonization, where Joe Hill seems with 20th Century Ghosts an iconographic writer with promise, a potential Messiah of Horror: having both literary and horror credilibity.

His father Stephen King is in that alternative league of Horror writers who describe poetically iconographic - or perhaps, iconoclastic - images, settings and situations using words to affect Fear in his readers. They are writers who plunge their readers into Psychological States of Horror usually rooted in freakishly realistic, historical and/or psychology traumas, which sometimes incorporate the Supernatural - like Bentley Little's The Burning - but usually refrain - such as Ramsey Campbell's The Face That Must Die or John Saul's Punish The Sinners.

I'm finishing reading Bentley Little's The Resort tonight, and hope to start John Saul's The Manhattan Hunt Club by tomorrow. That is, if my landlord isn't nagging me again, trying to collect the rent earlier this month -- since her daughter who handles the money is flying to Guyana for who knows how long.