2024-07-05 | Horror, Reading
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.
I’ll keep reading Lovecraft things, I think.
2024-06-13 | Horror, Reading
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.
An update cometh.
