The Investment of a Lifetime

As the time draws nigh to the day set for the wedding in July, I am beginning to feel the gravitational pull of this significant occasion - as a groom - against my conscious sense of Life. Things are awry: The work week is fleeting, finances are waning, weekends are transitory, and, to top it off, the guest list is growing. Next week, my fiancée is flying out early on Wednesday morning to Trinidad to secure the final arrangements for our wedding, bring over centre-pieces, and work out any other outstanding things. She is the mastermind of this wedding: I am forever indebted to her industrious labours.

Over the past week, too, I kept busy reading a number of horror novels: Brian Keene's Ghoul, Richard Laymon's Among The Missing, and Graham Masterton's break-out novel The Manitou. The two veteran horror-meisters, Laymon and Masterton's novels were filled with the classic terrifying Spirit of the Weird, while the only disappointment was the dull and unpoetic descriptive writing of rookie Keene. I even tried reading his Bram-Stoker-Award-winning novel The Conqueror Worms but I kept remembering the sceptical words of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know." I just can't help but insist that the quality of Keene's stilted writing falls short of his own imaginative ambition--it's especially sad that the back-cover's description of the novel was more exciting than the actual words on the pages themselves. Reading is an imaginative investment. The words of a novel ought to be more profitable than the paper they are printed on, otherwise they're not worth the paper they were printed on.