I was much further through this book than I thought. Turns out the last 50% of the book was an analysis of horror fiction using At the Mountains of Madness as an example. It made for a strange experience, though, because I was expecting a lot more to happen.
Regardless.
I expect horror to be “scary”, but this definitely wasn’t. It was, though, very unsettling. It felt very much like the first parts of Alien, where you know things are going to go wrong but you can’t quite imagine just how.
Emma Ruth Rundle’s Engine or Hell Live at Roadburn playing quietly is mixing with the steady whistle of my tinnitus. I can also hear my keyboard as I type away and the quiet whirr of my computer under my desk. The rest of the house is completely quiet.
I can feel my neck muscles. I suspect my posture has been off today. I can feel my chair. I can feel my feet on the ground.
I can smell the flowers on my desk. Brought by Mandi earlier in the week. Grown in her garden. Jonquils. Lavender. Others that I can’t identify.
I can’t see anything outside of my window. It’s too dark. The solstice is a week or so away. I worry about how mild the autumn and winter has been so far.
Turns out that you can send Nick Cave a short message and if you’re lucky, he’ll reply to your question in public. It will get logged in the Red Hand Files archive and it will go out in an email. Very cool.
It also turns out that Nick Cave and I have something in common: we both like swimming at every opportunity, as I found out in the most recent Red Hand Files email.
Then get in touch with me, and let’s go swimming in the cold water. Hopefully our walk back from the water to the warmth of wherever we are going resembles Nick’s:
As my friends and I make our way back through the woods, borne on the wings of God’s laughing angels, in the grip of some massive dopamine surge, we understand we are better now. This sense of delight, this shivering joy, will remain with us as we go about our day.
I don’t like horror movies. At all. I don’t understand the appeal. I like being challenged, and having an adrenalin rush, but I don’t generally like being afraid. Something I do like, that I’ve discovered recently, is that I like being lightly creeped out. I enjoyed having H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Moon-Bog read to me by Josh of Stuff You Should Know fame. (I can’t find a reliable way to link to the episode, but if you go to the Stuff You Should Know website and search for “Josh N Chuck’s Hallowe’en Spooky Scarefest” you’ll find it. It’s from 29 October 2015.) It not scary. It’s just mildly creepy. I thought it was suitably creepy that I read it to the kids the following year in the lead up to Hallowe’en.
Anyway.
I didn’t read any more mildly creepy stuff for several years, until I decided it was time to dip my toe back into the H.P. Lovecraft bog. I don’t know what made me pick At the Mountains of Madness, but it was appealing. Aliens (maybe?). The Big Dumb Object (BDO) trope. And clearly inaccurate descriptions of Antarctica. Maps of Antarctica at the time of writing (1930-ish) had large swathes of blankness on the maps – perfect if you want to add a BDO somewhere realistic on earth.
I’m part way through at this stage. It’s slow going for me.
I was nervous about the weather. The BOM said that it was going to rain. Then that it wasn’t going to rain. Then it looked like it was going to. But then it didn’t. It was even quite mild – for being winter.
The process the second time was much the same as the first, except that I had all the required bits and pieces, so all I needed was to gather some nice-to-have accoutrements and I was off and running. I brought a string of lights this time to make the park feel a bit more inviting in the wintery darkness.
I should have spent a bit more time selecting better films, I think. It’s not that they weren’t good, but they didn’t feel quite as inspirational (or inspiring) as the previous screening.
The same number of people turned up – probably around 15. But this time there were people there that I’d never met before. It’s a movement! A community! A *thing*.
