The Bleeding Edge is a 2009 limited-run (500 copies) horror anthology published by Cycatrix Press. Since I’m having trouble writing, and managing to read, I thought I could at least use my reading as grist for some writing:
A solid collection with one weak point and a few very good ones. There was a distinct disunity of style and format (teleplays and scripts) that was actually rather appealing.
The box store near our place is being bought out, so everything is on sale. This means it is possible to do things like buy horror DVDs for somewhat less than $2. Or, perhaps, an eight-movie collection for less than $5.
These are going to be terrible.
I have started with After Midnight, the standalone DVD. The frame story is about a certain Professor Derek teaching a course in the psychology of fear, and I am bravely resisting comparisons to Clive Barker’s “Dread”. We start with Allison (our protagonist) and her friend (you know, the protagonist’s friend… it’s an 80s movie, you can fill her in) going to class, with Allison explaining that she didn’t sleep well, and she has a bad feeling about the class they’re going to take…
Plot summary, spoilers, and brief rating follows the cut.
Dinner out tonight (was lovely), involving a fluffy drink and a wonderful lamb shank (which I think was actually a bit light on the thyme, but then I am very partial to thyme) and much discussion of the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross. It’s British humour/horror, involving a government organization defending the world from eldritch monstrosities which are attracted by complex equations. Like spells. Or mathematics. I’ve read the first book, three of the four short stories, and some notes. The first book is the rockiest, but I think that’s actually pretty common–I can’t think of a series where I recommend the first book written as a good place to start.
Except the Narnia books. (Even with The Lord of the Rings, I would not recommend starting with the first book of the series. I would recommend starting with the prequel–that is, The Hobbit–and just… trying not to think about the jolly elves.)
Stopped at Chapters on the way back. I picked up Dodger and The Killer Inside Me on the same trip and am mildly amused by the contrast.
In case of needing some assistance unwinding for the weekend, I have found that this image (completely work-safe!) is very helpful. May not be suited for ailurophobes, but then again, I don’t think I know any.
Not much to say tonight, but I’m awake and can’t get back to sleep and am trying very hard not to pick up the latest Laundry novel because if I do I’m going to finish it rather than go back to sleep.
I went downstairs for a warm drink, and was cornered in the kitchen by three sadly hungry cats. “Feed us,” their eyes said. “You weren’t doing anything important, so feed us–and then hang around and adjudicate to make sure Newcat doesn’t steal all the food in Mediumcat’s dish, and Oldcat gets hers allllll to herself. You didn’t want to try going back to sleep, did you? Look, we’re cute. Feed us.”
(Given that it’s actually kind of important that we find out ASAP if Oldcat goes off her food again, I actually do need to keep an eye on her when she’s eating to see if she’s eating her food, or if the amount’s just decreasing because one of the other cats dove in when she wandered away for a bit. And given that she’s really too skinny, whenever she indicates that she wants food we give her food, because then she will have more food and hopefully put on some weight. And what this all boils down to is that I spent twenty minutes in the kitchen watching her mumble away at her wet cat food when I would much rather have spent five minutes in the kitchen making myself a hot drink and then ten minutes upstairs poking at the computer before going back to bed.)
(But she’s eating, so I don’t really mind.)
From Nolan, via Stephen King:
Nothing is so frightening as what’s behind the closed door, Nolan[1] said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. “A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible,” the audience thinks, “but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.”
Every time I see this picture of Lucy–
–yeah, that one. 🙂 Every time I see that picture of her, in my mind, I imagine a gleeful scratchy voice, specifically Isme’s voice from The Emperor’s New Groove, cackling out “–and behind the door was a bug A HUNDRED FEET TALL!”
That’s a clever girl, Lucifer. You’ll upgrade to a thousand feet any day now.
Also, I figured out what I really wanted her middle name to be yesterday, when we were bringing her back from the vet’s. It’s Tailypo.
So she is Lucifer Tailypo, and she is settling in beautifully.
—
[1] William F. Nolan, at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention.
I noticed a certain common colouration in the books I had to hand:
I’m cheating a bit with this picture, since both the hardback cover and the dustjacket of Breed are shown. (I took the dustjacket off because something about the paper just feels subtly repellant–some weird combination of sooty and greasy.) On the flipside, I’m not including The Rivals of Frankenstein, which continues the black-white-red theme, so it all balances if anyone’s keeping score, which I sort of doubt.
Am mildly amused by this, especially since the other books I am reading, or have just finished, or have just started, have a black-and-white thing going for the covers. (Apparently the subtraction of red takes you from horror to crime, who knew? Although Bedlam is an exception to that.)
Not feeling well today; I’m hoping it’s just after-effects of the flu shot, since those should clear up more quickly than anything I might have actually caught. Managed to get a little cleaning done, though, and get out of the house to pick up groceries and return library books. (Mildly annoyed that one of the books I have on hold has been in transit for just over a week, now, and is still not at the local branch. It’s a Lovecraft collection, so I suspect I could find the contents on Gutenberg, but I find I really prefer physical copies of anthologies and collections. Screens and ereaders work best for single works, for me–novels or novellas or standalone short stories, any length is fine, just not several short stories.
Probably turning in early tonight; the nap after the vet’s was nice, but I’m still wiped.
It’s… wow. I didn’t realize it had been nearly a month. I remember this time last year, when I was writing just about daily, and… Well. It’s not something I’m going to fix by not writing, I guess.
I’m adjusting to not being on meds for depression, after five years. I seem to be better, and I am very very glad about that. I’m not okay; there have been bad days. But they haven’t been as severe as they were before I had to start seeing my therapist and go onto meds. I know that depression can sometimes mellow as you age[1], and I’ve learnt better coping strategies, and I suppose it’s possible that now I can manage without medication. I don’t know yet.
One of the more common side-effects[2] of the meds I was on was what I’m going to loosely characterize as fuzzy-brain–absentmindedness, forgetfulness, confusion, some lack of interest or initiative. That quality was more or less present in my life for the last five years. But between five years on assorted medication and my untreated depression before that, I’m not entirely clear on how integral that quality is to me. So after consideration (and medical consultation), I’m trying life without psych meds and hopefully I can get a baseline on how I think and how my brain works when I am not either medicated or severely depressed.
I would like to be able to manage depression without medication; not because life without medication is better or purer or any other such bootstrapped nonsense, not because my life when I needed medication was less worthwhile. But life without medication is marginally more secure–I never need to worry about being on vacation and losing my meds, about not being able to pay for them, about losing them in a house fire, I never need to worry even theoretically about a bad batch (although I never did worry about that, but you take my point).
…well, hey. Managed to articulate something about my life at the moment, and to get something written as well. I will call that a double win, I guess.
—
[1] Presuming, of course, it lets you age. (Pardon, a touch of habromania.)
[2] There are no side-effects; there are only effects you would prefer not to dwell on.
Alright. Despite the way the last one ended[1], I’m watching the first episode of the second season. Bunch of the same actors; after the open, it looks like they’re going with a period piece. The location for this season is an asylum–initially a tuberculosis sanitarium, turned into an asylum for the criminally insane run by the Catholic church. Given how they handled psychiatric help in the last season, I am the antithesis of optimistic. (Credits do feature Clea Duvall, who I am glad to see, but I’m not sure that’s enough.)
Okay. The light of my life refers to Mad Men as being a show that boils down to “look at these primitive savages, see how savage and primitive they are”. I think there’s more to Mad Men than that. Watching this episode, I am not yet sure I am seeing more than that here.
The woman running the asylum is vomitous. The doctor brought in to run the medical side of things is arguably worse. We’ve seen five patients talk so far, and the characterisation is… thin. Particularly for the three who haven’t proclaimed their innocence.
Common elements in our protagonists: relationships deemed socially unacceptable and kept secret. The self-proclaimed innocent murderer was a white man married to a black woman[2]; the reporter is a woman with a girlfriend. Hmh, even Sister Jude, the woman running the asylum, is a nun lusting after her monsignor.
Betting that the doctor is either operating on patients to turn them into a strange new species or grinding them up to feed them to wolves. Probably the strange new species thing. There’s a real Nazi eugenicist vibe off him when he’s talking about creating new species.
(Flashback to the contemporary open! That’s kind of cool. I hope they make it out.)
Right, so, both the religious figures and the scientific figures are sources of horror. The reporter’s been incarcerated; her girlfriend Wendy’s being blackmailed into cosigning the recommendation that she be committed with the threat of revealing the fact that she’s a lesbian (she’s a third-grade schoolteacher); and of course no-one that we’re invited to feel any sympathy for is actually insane. Kit Walker was either possessed or framed by aliens (seriously, the doctor pulled a little metal bug out of him that then got up and ran away), and Lana Winters was locked up because Sister Jude figures she can get away with it. Grace (the woman who warns Kit that the other inmates will rat him out if he turns off the Muzak in the common room[3]) claims she’s not crazy, and it says a lot about the show that given that she’s white, attractive, and accused of murdering her family (kind of like Kit!) that I am inclined to buy it.
There’s also Shelley. She’s been diagnosed with nymphomania, which (1) given the time period is a diagnosis I am looking at with a great deal of suspicion, and (2) does make me wonder how she ended up in an asylum for the criminally insane.
Everyone else? The people who we presume are actually mentally ill? They’re scary decorations. The first one we meet is a woman suffering from microcephaly who, we are told, drowned her sister’s baby and cut off his ears. And there’s poor grooming, twitching, throwing around bodily waste…
So we’ve got a show set in an asylum, where all but three and two-halves (the Monsignor and Wendy) of the characters are patients, and we still can’t actually get a protagonist who’s mentally ill? I mean, I knew it was too much to hope for, I just hate being reminded of that fact.
========
[1] In a fest of Biblical Roanoke magic spell therapy-is-all-lies and women-are-baby-crazy shit that had me earnestly explaining to the dog that if she ever meets a therapist like the one in the TV show she should bite him and she would be a good dog for doing it.
[2] She died. Horribly. Probably.
[3] He’ll get five more blows with a cane, they’ll get a piece of candy.
I could have sworn I’d written something here in the last month. Looking over where I’ve actually been typing, though, I can see how I didn’t manage that.
I’ve been chipping away at a couple of stories–one handwritten, one typed up, and it’s interesting to see how the pace is slightly different. I’ve also been working on a story for a game–the Story Nexus engine’s open to the public, now, and it’s got the potential to be a huge timesink. (You can check it out online over here.) And there were some repairs at home, so there’s some work putting everything back into place.
And I’m job-hunting, too, since my contract was not renewed. That last is probably the most draining of everything, to be honest.
I’ve never used the “Press This” function before today; I expect I should probably think rather carefully about how and when I do use it, before making any kind of a habit out of it. But for the moment, I am just going to recommend the following horror story:
