Posts Tagged ‘horror’
Alone, Cold, and Hopeless
by Chris Perridas
In Horror tales, one of the most desolate of tales is sheer hopelessness. The condition of loneliness drives people to acts of insanity and desperation. “Why did he commit suicide”, we shake our heads in wonder. “Why does she put up with that abuse,” we wag our tongues. The ultimate imprisonment is solitary confinement. Loneliness. When loneliness joins isolation and hopelessness, terror ensues. Tim Lebbon claims one of the best recent expositions of this with his story White.
A reasonably kind man, Lebbon has nevertheless imagined a tale in which snow brings isolation – and something ominous and deadly comes on its winds. His ability to describe around the monsters and their fiendish results without being explicit chills the reader’s imagination.
A classic tale is John W. Campbell, Jr.’s magnum opus, Who Goes There (1938). IT has been filmed by masters John Carpenter (1982) and Howard Hawks (1951). By sheer coincidence, the story might appear to be the third of a trilogy of Antarctic horrors starting with Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (circa 1838), continuing to H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (written late Winter 1931) and culminating with Campbell’s work. All of these speak of miscellaneous and mysterious horrors in the bleakest part of our world – the Antarctic.
This story extracted from an 1855 New York Times newspaper sounds like a Jack London tragedy.
The story tells of a party trapped in a freezing blizzard, the only hope to chop up the wagons and burn them for heat. In a last desperate measure they killed the oxen, and stuffed a mother and her baby into the steaming innards. Alas, even that final hope failed, and death ensued. The human will is powerful, but ultimately a miscalculation, a brief moment of bad luck, and life snuffs out like a candle in the wind.
From this come trembling horror stories.
Previously published on the Miskatonic Books Blog on 5th October 2011. With thanks for letting me republish. Don’t forget to click through and read there as well.
I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
This book was originally published in 1954 and is a scary thought of what could happen given the technology available to us now.
Robert Neville may well be the only survivor of an incurable plague that has mutated every other man, woman and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creature who are determined to destroy him.
The premise of this book is very scary, it’s a brilliant fusion of horror and science fiction. A plague has hit, very much like the black plague, and no-one can work out how to deal with it. It reminds me very much of the advent of the AIDS virus, how it spread so quickly and how there were so many people worried about getting it and the misinformation that surrounded it at the time. With this virus they didn’t appear to have time to figure out how to combat it and they certainly have little idea of how it spreads. This plague turns people into vampires and Robert Neville is currently the last man who hasn’t succumbed, the reason is unknown as his wife died from it some time before the book is set.
The writing in this book is superb, you don’t get much better than this. Matheson has fused the two genres of horror and science fiction very nicely. There is just the right amount of each and a good story line as well.
The things I had trouble with are Neville trying to figure out the plague by himself and how the infrastructure kept going despite having no-one to run it. It was not sufficiently explained how Neville had the background to be able to figure out all the science type stuff in order to figure out how to treat the disease. I don’t know why it worries me about the infrastructure, but I’d like to know how it kept going. Many of the systems would have stopped, in fact, Neville did install a generator so he could generate his own electricity, but there was also the water and the sewerage which just seemed to keep going despite the lack of personnel.
I’d still recommend this book. Whether you like horror or science fiction I feel it has enough of both to satisfy most people. Now I have to see the movie of the same name with Will Smith in the lead role, awesome!
Squid Ink – The Ragwitch
Squid Ink - The Ragwitch
Squid Ink is reading Australian authors at the moment and the first in this series is The Ragwitch by Garth Nix. It’s young adult horror/fantasy. It is told from two different points of view, Julia and her brother Paul. They both end up in another world fighting The Ragwitch.
Borderlands Issue Ten
This is the book that caused so much consternation when I used it for Teaser Tuesday. It’s an anthology of Australian fantasy, science fiction and horror. This is the final issue and if it’s anything to go by the rest of them must have been absolutely fantastic.
It is a selection of top notch short stories interspersed with excellent essays. Some of the stories I had to take a break and do something else in order to stretch them out a bit. They were written so nicely and had such great ideas in them that I wanted them to last longer and the only way to do that was to stop part way through.
I’ve just pinched the following from the Borderlands website:
* “Shadows of Our Gods” by Cat Sparks
* “Red Earth” by Helen Lowe
* “In the Boo” by Stephen Studach
* “The Parent Licensing Commission” by Donetta Ditton
* “A Thousand Natural Shocks” by Simon Brown
* “As We Know It” by Lyn Battersby
* “The Man Who Murdered Love” by Shane Dix
Non-fiction:
* “Bad Film Diaries – Sometimes the Brand Burns: Tim Burton and the Planet of the Apes” by Grant Watson
* “Three Views of Mount Solaris” by Chris Lawson
Illustrations by Minouk Duin, Fiona Roberts and Sarah Xu
Cover by Sarah Xu
Red Earth by Helen Lowe was one that I had to stop in the middle. It’s post apocalyptic and is about a lady who wanders Australia giving out books, teaching people to read and write and telling stories. It is one of those awesome stories that just sucks you in and then keeps you there forever and it’s only three pages.
Bad Film Diaries by Grant Watson was an interesting essay on the power of the “Brand” and how film studios use it to make money. He talked about The Planet of the Apes and it’s remake and how the “Brand” helped it to make money.
I’m not going to say anything more about the rest of the stories and essays. You can buy most of the back issues from the Borderlands website, they’re only $AUD10 a copy, and worth much more than that.
Flashspec Volume Two edited by Neil Cladingboel
This is a lovely collection of fiction, the beauty of this is that each story is under 750 words so if you’re short of time and still want to read you can just take it one story at a time. I didn’t but maybe I should have as each story is very complete and generally needs a bit of time to digest. I found myself rereading many of the stories in order to get more of the nuances or to just enjoy the story or the writing a bit more. I do have to say I am not excited as I don’t have Volume One, this volume was published by Equilibrium Books in 2007 and I’m hoping there have been more published since then and if so I don’t have them either. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for more as soon as my to be read pile is reduced by a few books.
This collection of short stories was written by an international family of authors and some of them are listed below:
Debra Findlay
Christopher Holloway
K. A. Paterson
Bren MacDibble
Joanne Anderton
Neil Cladingboel
Julia Felicity Ker
Brett A. Hall
Simon Petrie
This is just a few of the authors in this book.
Best Kept Secrets of Australian Horror
I went into this topic at AussieCon 4 with preconceptions about horror only to have them totally overturned. The panel was composed of Lucy Sussex, Marty Young, Stewart Mayne and Kyla Ward.
I assumed I knew what horror was and that I’d never read any before Stephen King so I was incredibly surprised when one of the first books to be mentioned was The Nargun and the Stars by Patricia Wrightson. Until it was mentioned I hadn’t thought of it as horror. I read it when I was very young and was absolutely petrified but had to read it again, it’s such a wonderful book and Wrightson has scared countless children with just a rock. I actually have this particular book and some of her other books on sale on my website so you and your children can enjoy being terrified like I was.
I haven’t written down which stories they were but the panel ran through a couple of Aboriginal stories to illustrate how complex they were and how much of a horror component there was in them.
There are a number of Australian authors who were never seen as horror writers but that’s exactly what they wrote. Just a few examples: Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson and Arthur Upfield.
Frankenstein Meets Dracula
I was planning on writing more about AussieCon 4 as I still have stacks I wanted to say about the whole event but I went to school play last night and was so pleased with it I’m going to tell you all. Put on by the years 3 – 7 of the King David School it was performed at Chapel on Chapel.
While it was called Frankenstein Meets Dracula they were actually quite separate. Both of them were written by Carey Blyton (Enid Blyton’s nephew) and you can see a little more here. Dracula was first with a 20 minute interval before we met Frankenstein. I had to bear in mind that it was a school production and some of the participants were only in grade 3 so naturally they’d be taking out a lot of the scarey stuff. Anyway, I had a ball.
I’m reasonably familiar with the story of Dracula having refreshed my memory earlier this year with it but haven’t read Frankenstein for far too long. Dracula was fairly true to the Bram Stoker’s story with the deletion of most of the scarey stuff, the addition of a few songs and a lot of narration to bring the whole thing down to 30 minutes. Professor van Helsing was female and had a companion who did a lot of Buffy-style moves but both of them were terrific. There was the addition of an M & M, yellow one who was so embarrassed she was red and yes, she was wearing a red M & M suit. There was a lovely sequence where Count Dracula was mourning not being able to see his own reflection in the mirror and so we saw a pair of twins do a mirror sequence followed by a number of ‘twinned’ people doing a rather nice dance. I particularly enjoyed poor Renfield’s Dining-Room Ballad as she proceeded to tell us about some food she just had to eat.
Frankenstein was also good but I didn’t enjoy it as much. Maybe it’s an age thing as my niece (she was the flautist in the in the orchestra) tells me Frankenstein was much better. Maybe it’s because I’m not as familiar with the story. They did bring on Michael Jackson as a companion to Elizabeth (Frankenstein’s fiancee) giving them the chance to dance to Thriller and I enjoyed that very much.
I enjoyed the whole evening. The orchestra did a fabulous job and the cast was fantastic. There were few problem moments and they were totally outweighed by the whole. The sets were really well done. There was one young man who collapsed in the first few moments of Frankenstein and I do hope he’s okay, there were enough nurses and doctors in the audience to look after him.
Dracula – The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt
Here’s an interesting thought. I handed my copy of this book to my 22 year old nephew and asked him to write a review of it. He emailed to me today and so I get to share it with you. I do have to warn you he’s toned it down a bit, I can’t share with you what he really said to me.
I read Dacre Stoker’s book and after finishing, my first thoughts were “What a waste of time.” By itself it’s fairly good, well written, with the characters well defined. However as a sequel to Dracula, it lacked a certain something, and followed the really annoying modern trend of having no absolute Evil, but rather misunderstood beings fighting another being that was evil, yes, but not sheer unadulterated Badness.
If this had been a stand alone novel, I would have liked it, but it’s not. It was a disappointment, and I spent a lot of the time reading it wishing I could shout at either the characters or the author.
Dracula, Squid Ink style
There have been many books and movies written about Dracula, but the best books are the original which I’ve scribbled a few words here about and Dracula – The Un-Dead written by a descendent of Bram Stoker, you can find the few words I’ve written here. Here is the Squid Ink version.
Squid Ink - Dracula
The Enemy – Charlie Higson
Before I head into writing a few words about this book I feel you deserve to know why I haven’t been writing much lately. I’m having the odd trouble with my website and have been spending a lot of time trying to fix it up behind the scenes to ensure customers don’t have any problems with it. Things are progressing well, although somewhat more slowly than I’d expected. I hope to have everything right by this weekend, but until then my writing might suffer. I’m trying to ensure I spend enough time on Twitter and Facebook but this is at the expense of some other forums. Just before this happened I did manage to sign up as a Supporting Member of AussieCon4, I hope to be able to pay the full amount by July as I’d really like to attend. There’s exciting things happening in the Australian science fiction and fantasy writers world and I’m going to be on the periphery of it. I’ll give you more information in due course. Heading into the book now, promise.
This is one of those books I got through Twitter. Penguin were good enough to send it to me when I pointed out a typo in their online book extract during a competition. This book is set in post-apocalyptic London. The premise of the story is that every person over the age of 14 has been struck down with a deadly disease. The lucky ones die quickly, the unlucky live on with few brains just wanting to eat meat, they don’t discriminate; dogs and children are both on the menu. We don’t know what caused the disease and we don’t know what happens when people turn 14. This story shows us some of the children one year after the disease first strikes. We see it from several points of view, kids in charge, kids not in charge, boys and girls. We see what sort of person they need to lead them now and what qualities they must have in order to get their charges through this dreadful time. This is mostly from the point of view of a group of 50-60 kids who have holed up in a place called Waitrose only venturing out to find food. One day a boy comes in and says there is a group of kids building a better life in Buckingham Palace. So, off they go to Buckingham Palace with their weapons. Yes, they do make it there but it’s not the end of the story.
I have so many questions about this book and I don’t know where to start. Many of them won’t ever be answered as the story couldn’t ever go there but some of them will most likely be answered in sequels. I can’t talk knowledgably about the sequels as I can’t find anything on the web and the only mention is in the back of the book. The Enemy Is Waiting is due to come out some time this year and I will be waiting with bated breath for it as I need some answers.
Charlie Higson is a talented writer who knows how to keep the tension well and truly tight. I’m not really a reader of horror books, I have read some in my time, classics such as Dracula and the first official sequel, Dracula the Undead, some Stephen King and various other horror authors so I do have some idea of what makes a good horror book. Yes, I even saw Alien, but that was in a movie double immediately following a zombie movie so I actually laughed during Alien as it just wasn’t scary in comparison to the zombies. The Enemy lays it on the line, it tells you exactly what to be scared of and then details it again and again and again without ever letting go. The characters are believable and the situations seem credible. We are told of what happened at the beginning of the disease and it harked back to Lord of the Flies (a terrifying book) but also gives us hope by telling us that the behaviour changed when the adults started killing the kids.
Oh, and that typo? It’s not in the book.