No longer moving. Instead, renovating! It's like moving only with ten times the insanity. Also, I have this radio commercial in my head in which some girl sings Rhianna's Music and I'm starting to wonder if that's the single thing keeping my sanity this month.
I'm a little miffed at Livejournal, as are many. They're obliterating the basic accounts. Existing journals can stay but there will be no new ones. This, coming on the heels of my discovery that the filters I applied to my account aren't working, has me a tad irked. It's all about ad money, and it's piss poor reasoning. Basic accounts have no advertising on them, and neither do paid. However, as a paid member when I click on someone who has a sponsored account I see ads. Also, no one actually views the journal. People on my friends list have their own accounts and they view my posts via a friends page, which may or may not have advertising depending on their account. So I pay Livejournal so I can see ads and so other people can see ads while reading my posts? Something's not right there.
Anywho, with the moving/not moving my life and my brain are in a state of total chaos. Udolpho has been permanently placed on the backburner until summer vacation rolls around, and my attempt to read Anne of Green Gables for the umpteenth time in my life has not worked out, so Brian Keene is getting his chance to entertain me.
Brian Keene is known, in my books anyway, for writing zombie fiction. Oh-Holy-God, Never-Leaving-The-House-Again zombie fiction. I read his The Rising last year and now I cry whenever I watch a zombie movie because it will never match up to what Keene has churned out. The basic plot of The Rising is this: man is stuck in his y2k hole, alone after his pregnant wife died. He gets a call from his son by first marriage asking him for help, but his cell dies. ZOMG gotta leave the hole. This, of course, leads to a gory meeting with his dead wife and the daughter they never had a chance to have. To be completely spoilerish, the dead baby is still attached to the mother and running after the father. As if I needed another reason to be childless. Now the threat of zombie babies is rotting my insides.
There's also an old preacher and a prostitute. And the US Army, who has gone apeshit since the president ate the vice president. The way this is depicted is more frightening than the zombies. This I won't spoil on, because it's just too twisted and stomach churning to simply summarize.
I have City of the Dead, sequel to The Rising, on the shelf, calling to me. I won't read until I'm ready to dedicate a full day and night to reading straight through. What Keene has me for now is a book called Dark Hallow. One thing made me reach for this over all the others in the horror section: cloven hoof.
The blurb describes the hero of the book finding a cloven hoof in the forest at the same time women are going missing and people are going crazy. Whatever owns the hoof "is far worse than any ghost. It has been summoned ... and now it demands to be satisfied."
*orgasms*
It's been years since I've read horror fiction steadily. I think reading The Monk put me back on it. I'm steering clear of vampire fiction, at least until something fresh is introduced. I made the mistake of reading the first of the Laurel K. Hamilton Anita Blake novels and I wept for the love of all that is dark and macabre, but I won't use this as an opportunity to bash the book except to say to aspiring vampire writers: evil vampire child is so over. Move on. Find another super villain. Also, Lilith has been done to death. I don't care how cool it comes off in your head (unless you write for Supernatural, in which case carry on.)
I also recently jumped headfirst into a British series called Hex. It's about demons and witches. I was a little startled halfway through the series when I discovered that this took place at a high school and not a university because the show is heavy on the sexual content in a way Buffy might have been if Buffy had met Angelus instead of Angel (oh shit, is my geekdom showing?) and Willow wanted to have sex with Buffy while wearing sexy panties and stockings. Anyhow, it's very cheesy but put demons and sex in the same cup and I'm foaming at the mouth (as is evidenced by my unending and probably annoying love of The Monk.) When things don't progress the way I think they should I turn into a horrible fangirl and sulk, such as I did with the last book I read in which no less than 5 hot male demons/demon hunters have to save a girl who is in no position to enjoy any of it because as it turns out she's a lesbian.
It gets me thinking that I should try my hand and something supernatural, but anything I come up with is either recycled or goes the Clive Barker route which I don't think I could pull off. Take, for instance, Haeckel's Tale. If you've seen the Masters of Horror series you might have seen this. It was adapted from Barker's short story and it's all about the zombie sex. Who else could possibly make zombie sex truly erotic and disgusting all at once? (well, not the way it was on television, but the short story was pretty blow-your-mind.) I'd just squick myself out trying to describe an insane woman squatting over a grave while the rotting tongue of some dead fellow goes to town on her. I'd be considering having my head checked after I write it and be worried I crossed a line and the next step would be alien/hentai sex and eventually only the kind of weird shit that gets published on a certain anything-goes erotica site.
Of course, if I left the sex out of it and went for the full gross-out, I imagine I'd have something I could be proud of, but where is the fun in that? There's just not enough demon sex in the world, at least not good demon sex in which the demon-hero doesn't turn into a puppy dog after getting the heroine's panties off. And believe me, I've been hunting this stuff for years.
Labels: brian keene, clive barker, prattle, reading, television, writing
posted by A.M. Hartnett at 4:19 PM