the unwanted word

Words are...words are my friends, generally. Sometimes we get a little testy with each other but by and large words help me out a lot, the way friends do. They support me, listen to me, keep my secrets and tell my stories. I like having them around. The last two days, though, there is one word that I just can't be friends with. I really don't want this word around, but it is there and won't leave me alone. Like a fly that buzzes around your head and refuses to leave no matter how much you swat at it.

The word? Why.

Why why why.

Just like that. Endless, repetitive, relentless. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person this word is tormenting this week. You see, my circle of loved ones lost a member this week to suicide. And it really fucking hurts, you know, like having your flesh ripped off. Hurt, grief, sadness, anger--all of these emotions have rolled over me like gigantic dark waves in the last few days. They knock me down, I struggle back up, I get knocked down again. They do the same to my loved ones.

But why is the worst, because it is a question that will never, ever be answered. All of the cycles of grief will be gone through, but I think confronting the fact that this act is, in the end, unknowable will be the hardest. I can't lean on words right now; I can't even find the words. Except Why. It won't leave me alone.

There is so much to say; I have nothing I to say. Actually, that's not true. There is one thing I can't say enough: if you ever feel you cannot travel along life's path anymore, reach out for a helping hand, be it your family, your friends, or a professional. Someone will be there for you and will help. You are not alone in your struggles. And most importantly: you are loved. We want you around. We want you to be part of this crazy beautiful thing we call life. We don't want to ever ask why. We want you here with us.

Reviewing, Goodreads and free stuff

While I was out of the country, I received a nice message at over at Goodreads from a writer who'd seen one of my reviews, thought I might enjoy his work, and asked if I'd like a free copy of his work in exchange for an "honest review."

And it's taken me a full week to figure out how to answer.

I don't write many reviews at Goodreads and I'm certainly not a professional reviewer. I'm just a regular fan who likes to riff on stuff I dig. Generally what makes me review something at Goodreads is if it is something I'm passionate about that comes out on a small press and can benefit from a signal boost. You'll never find me writing reviews of Stephen King books, because let's face it, there's more than enough of those in the world and I think he's doing all right. I'm well aware there has been/is plenty of controversy about Goodreads reviewing and I've no interest in wading into those waters. Life is too short. I view Goodreads more as a tool to track my own reading interests than as a community; I have very few "friends" there and I'm pretty much invisible. I always accept friend requests but don't search them out. I read reviews that other friends have written, or friends of friends who are connected within the horror/speculative fiction world (of whom I'm often too shy to reach out and friend myself.)

Anyway, I knew right away that I didn't want to accept anything free, because honestly, I'd feel obligated to a)give it a review whether it inspired me to do so or not, and b)give it a good review even if I didn't think it was good. Now, I'm not interested in writing negative reviews--if I don't have anything good to say I just won't say anything. But I also felt this author was most likely just trying to get his work out there, and I admire him for even being this far in his writing career--it's certainly more than I can say for mine. At least he's getting his work out there and trying to raise awareness, you know?

So I wrote him back and politely declined his offer, but I did purchase his book and told him so. I didn't promise a review but I'm happy to have spent a little money in support of his creative endeavors because regardless of whether I like the book or not, I respect his effort in reaching out. Obviously if I got dozens of these offers a day this wouldn't be a sustainable way of handling the situation, but I'm not fearful that will happen and I feel good knowing I've supported an artist without compromising my own ethics and providing a review that would be dishonest. Between you and me, I'm hoping that I dig the book and feel inspired to write a review--that is what makes me happy as a reader.

I'll probably never have a book out there myself, but if I did, I'd never want someone to lie about whether it was good or not. (Unless you are a friend talking directly to my face. Then you should lie a whole lot.) I hate agendas in reviewing. Signal boost the work you love and don't worry so much about the work you don't. One person's trash is another person's treasure, right?

Ireland hotel room, August 10th

I am sitting in a B&B with the odd name of Petra in Galway, Ireland and listening to U2’s October on headphones. This is the first time I have intentionally listened to music since leaving Seattle two weeks ago. That may be a “record” for me…pardon the pun, I’ve been travelling a while and words and sounds feel different to me than they did two weeks ago. U2 makes so much sense in this landscape, and not just because they are an Irish rock band. In their early work—Boy and October in particular—there is a deep longing for the spiritual, a reaching for communion that is resonating deeply in me at the moment. This music has been part of all but the first decade of my life, and it continues to be a soundtrack to my physical, mental and spiritual search. My physical, mental and spiritual yearning. Gospel for the barely adolescent and the middle-aged.

I’m in Ireland and I’m searching.

Searching for something I can’t define. Is that perhaps the true impetus for travel, for exploration? (Not for “vacationing,” a term that implies the need to vacate. It could be used in a quasi-Zen sense, I suppose, but it mostly makes me think of zombies. Blank. Bleak blook void.) I fell into this trip by happenstance, by lucky accident, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary. As I’ve stumbled into middle-age these last couple of years, I’ve had to fight a dangerous sense of ennui. My life is mostly predictable, safe and well-defined. There are most certainly benefits to this. I do not take stability lightly, and I’ve worked damned hard for that stability. Yet I’ve found it increasingly hard to challenge myself on a fundamental level and I’ve just not been able to shake the feeling that I’m dangerously close to becoming what I never wanted to be—bloated, full of empty gestures and unable to touch the spark that makes the heart race. Travel, with its potential to forget everything about the normal daily routine and draw up a new plan every day, has come into my life at an opportune moment. I’ve desperately needed to see things from a different angle.

U2 was the second important band in my life and the first I discovered on my own. The Doors, the first important band, were handed to me by an older brother and belonged to a different era that was long gone by the time I heard them. U2 was mine, a band of my world, before R.E.M., Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Sonic Youth and all the other important bands that I subsequently discovered. I was barely into my double-digits and still very much a devout Catholic altar boy when I found U2. Their music did not exclude either experience as so much rock does. Most rock—the best rock—offers itself as a substitute for religion. Early U2 is about the boy searching for God, innocence and the first kisses of experience set to some of the most beautiful guitar chimes these ears have ever heard. Several years later, when I left Catholicism behind, their music helped me deal with my doubts and questioning. U2’s music has never been explicitly about religion as much as the search for divine, for meaning in the daily troubles of the world and the vastness of the sky. Who among us does not want to experience that moment of ecstasy that great music can bring? At the same time, U2 has always felt more inclusive to me than the other music I like, which is very often defined by what it is not.

I’m in Galway, Ireland. I am thinking about a part of my life I haven’t thought about in decades.

I’m connecting with my Catholic upbringing in this amazing country. Not the dogma and politics and patriarchal bullshit that eventually caused me to hate the church—though I’ve mellowed some, I still harbor an intense anger at those aspects. Let me be completely honest though: I don’t want to deal with those here. They are long travelled roads that I’m tired of, that are suitable for debate in other contexts but I’m in a different space at the moment. What I’m connecting with right now is the part of me that loved being an altar boy. I loved the mystery of the sacrament and the reverence of ritual. The very silence of reverence installed a sense of awe in me, connecting me with a deeper experience of life. I thought, in those years, that I might be a priest. Later I would learn what priests too often are (human, and sometimes poor examples thereof) and later the hormones would kick in as the boy becomes the adolescent. These things, along with a critical examination of what I believe and, from that perspective, the inability of the church to view crucial parts of its teachings as metaphors as well as its stubborn lack of progression drove me away for good. Before that, though? Reverence and mystery and awe. Something I’ve felt stepping into some of the amazing churches in Ireland, something I’ve missed so much in this context. I walk into a church and I want to kneel, even though I don’t believe. The old reflexes run deep. I bow my head and I breathe. I could cry. Atheist me in a church with tears running down my cheeks.

When Bono sings of the fire in him during “Fire” he may be referring to the speaking in tongues of his youthful religious experience but for me his passion and the charging, chaotic sound of the band sound like nothing but the very essence of creativity. That is, expressing something both other and completely personal. Losing yourself entirely in the moment of sound so that the heart is laid bare. This U2 sings the songs that makes young men testify and young boys cry. U2 has been a church for me to step in when I need that building around me. Theirs is not a silent reverence but it is reverence nonetheless. This, then, is one of the ways I pray. Atheists need a spiritual practice too.

U2 is also the magical boyhood years shared with my oldest, dearest and best friend. How we dreamed and created and shared the secrets and mysteries back then! What is it, this glorious shared experience that comes alive every time I hear these records? It is comic books, The Real Monopoly, Kool-Aid, NES, Stephen King and Alien. It is treehouses, setting fires in the woods and stealing Playboys and Penthouses. It is making up rock band names, drawing album covers, writing lyrics and airbanding in the junk yard atop rusted cars as the summer trees watched. It is Something Wicked This Way Comes. That I’ve been blessed to have such a person in my life is something that I do not ever take for granted. Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall but our friendship lives on. How I wish he were here right now so we might talk of so many things in the pubs and on the streets of Ireland.  

“JE-RU-SA-LEM!” Any other band singing this exclamation would leave me indifferent at best. But U2—who were once not famous—sing with a conviction on October that reacts in me as gospel music likely reacts for many others. This is dislocated music, desperate to communicate, fire on the tongue. Strangers in a strange land. With a shout. Throwing bricks through windows. I am in my church right now. The churches here are more beautiful than any in the United States but it will still be the church of sound that calls to me.

Before leaving on this trip I told myself to be open to whatever experience it would be, to not go in with any preconceived notions which are the enemy of travel and exploration. Little did I suspect this would lead to me thinking about—and connecting with—my spiritual roots like this. Travelling, for me, is not simply about what I saw. I have no list with checkboxes that I must mark off on a trip. Pictures will be taken and pictures are just fine but probably not something I’ll ever look at again. How much will be different when I go back to “real” life? How much have I changed? Things are not static, and the answer one day is different the next. This trip has opened up so much in me and I will be a long time processing it. You find pieces of yourself in the strangest of places.

I am in Ireland. I am not the same.

six random horror literature thoughts on a hot sunday afternoon

What the title says. Well, I do have a beer on hand and a library of vinyl. So let's do this. 

1.  Turns out my first Kindle read is...Charles L. Grant's The Hour of the Oxrun Dead. One of those books I've always meant to read and since I've got less than two weeks before our big international trip, I wanted to get familiar with using the Kindle. Knocked out six chapters so far this afternoon; I have to say I'm quite enjoying it. A sad part of me says "they just don't write them like this anymore." Mostly because writing a horror novel meant something different in 1978, I think...there's almost an innocence to a book like this. And dammit, writers then didn't have to contend with smartphones and the internet. That makes me a bit jealous. 
2.  Poppy Z. Brite. I miss Poppy. Was thinking about Wormwood this afternoon, and how there's nothing that has that kind of sensual beauty to it in the genre right now. Or maybe there is and I just don't know of it. It's unfair to expect someone else to write something as decadently lovely as His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood but dammit, I wish someone would.
3. My favorite mass-market paperback cover of all time is Stephen King's Bachman Books with the skulls in the road. I still get a total thrill when I pull it off my bookshelf. Of course, that might also be because I'm usually about to do my yearly reading of The Long Walk...
4. Laird Barron's work gets better with each read. He reminds me of Ligotti in that way. I don't always fully appreciate his stories until I've read them a couple of times. But then they end up being among my favorites. I re-read Occultation last week and goddamn. So inspiring. Oddly, I didn't recall having read the story "Mysterium Tremendum" but it was my favorite in the book: horror done right, honoring its roots while living in the present. 
5. I don't know what my exact list of favorite horror short stories of all time would include, but I do know that Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities" would be on there, pretty close to the top. My friend once said Clive could do whatever he wanted because he wrote that story. I'm not sure what happened to Clive, but I'd be hard pressed to think of a more depressing reading experience than the one I had reading Galilee in early '00s. I mean, Sacrament wasn't great but it at least had potential. Galilee turned me off anything new by him forever. I still think it had to be an elaborate joke. 
6. Presumably due to the success of True Detective, there will be a Penguin Classics (!) version of Grimscribe/Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti published this fall. It's totally awesome to think more people are discovering his work. I look forward to buying this since I don't own copies of either of those and they've been out of print too long (thankfully the local library has long had both so I could read when I got the itch.)  I never watched True Detective but I'll give it props simply for exposing more people to the work of probably the most important voice in horror literature the last two decades (well, him or Ramsey Campbell...but Ramsey transcends everything.)

 

the stars will hurt your tired eyes

Last night I watched The Babadook, a psychological horror film from 2014. The plot concerns a mother and her son and an evil spirit called The Babadook that is introduced to the story via a creepy pop-up storybook (the actual storybook, shown in great detail, might have been my favorite part of the movie.) Amelia, the mother is raising her son Samuel alone because her husband died driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. The Babadook enters their lives and things don’t go so well. One of the strengths of the film is that you can interpret the The Babadook multiple ways: as a true “other” entity, as a projection of grief, or some combination thereof. Though the film ultimately doesn’t quite achieve its aims, failing to fully coalesce and hurt by one poorly-drawn character, there is a stretch in the movie that is very affecting and powerful.

The Babadook is a movie that any parent with a kid who just won’t behave and just won’t sleep can relate to. Amelia gets very little sleep throughout the movie. From roughly the middle to the last third of the movie, the scenes of her utterly exhausted face hit home with force. What parent hasn’t been there, with the kid whining “Mom? Momee? Momee!?!” In the most powerful scene in the whole movie, Amelia (ostensibly under the influence of The Babadook), in reaction to Samuel’s endless talking/whining and desperately wanting nothing more than to sleep, lets loose a torrent of verbal abuse at him. The scene is shocking and very real and will be the one thing I will remember about this film when the rest of it fades away in my mind.

After I got over the shock of that scene, I said aloud to the screen “I hope they are paying Wes Craven royalties on this” because in many ways the movie echoes the first Nightmare on Elm Street. And that is no bad thing since the original Nightmare is, for my money, one of the best horror movies ever made. The engine that drove Nightmare was the sheer exhaustion of teen protagonist Nancy, who could not fall asleep lest Freddy kill her in her dreams. The line between wakefulness and sleep becomes blurred, and the movie strikes its most effective notes when we aren’t sure which reality we are in…or, ultimately if we can *ever* be sure. The Babadook works along these same lines, this time from the perspective of the parent, who just wants the kid to shut up so they can get some rest. When exhaustion settles in that deeply, it takes over every aspect of your life; you do not know whether you are awake or not and the simplest household chore becomes an exercise in surrealism. You wonder if you might be going insane…and you’re too tired to care.

This is very rich territory for horror to work in. Horror is at its best when it blurs the boundaries of real and not real. Horror is uniquely suited to address the changing nature of reality, and this is one of the main reasons I’ve been drawn to the genre for as long as I remember. The question of what is real and what is not is a question that can never be fully answered. In extreme states such as exhaustion—and terror, anger and all other states where you lose your equilibrium—our mental houses crumble, and we stand in the ruins. Destruction or rebirth? Both? One incomprehensible world or many? A violent shift in perspective and when you look up, the stars will hurt your tired eyes.

The main reason that The Babadook didn’t fully succeed is that the boy, Samuel, is so unlikeable that later in the film when you should be scared for/pulling for him, you just wish The Babadook would get him already. A character-driven film like this needs you to have sympathy for the characters, and while I certainly did for Amelia, Samuel was so unlikeable every moment he was on the screen that by the climactic battle you just want him to die and the movie to end. But I’ve seen hundreds of movies that have left me with the taste of disappointment. The difference with The Babadook is that middle third’s exploration of complete exhaustion and parental wipeout. For a little while the film touches on something larger, something unsettling and universal. In Amelia’s exhausted eyes I relive those nights with my small children when you just start to nod off only to snap up again to the sound of crying or whining. Those nights when the dream life and waking life are the same. When the stars hurt your tired eyes.

scapegoat

I will be your scapegoat.

I will clean your dishes and do your laundry.

I will do your shopping and pay your bills.

I will be a mirror you can break.

I will raise your babies and bury your dead.

I will write your papers and formulate your agenda.

I will apply your makeup.

I will file your tax return.

I will cook you something when you want something to eat.

I will plant your garden and weed it as needed.

I will be your therapist and your general practitioner.

I will mend your clothes and give you the most flattering fit.

I will invest your meager savings wisely.

I will massage your back.

I will give you my left eye when yours goes blind.

I will talk about the stars, but only if you want me to.

I will guide you through foreign towns.

I will highlight the appropriate passages.

I will be your scapegoat, but I will not save you. 

--6/30/15