setsuled

To-day I read "Dark Adapted Eyes", the new Caitlin R. Kiernan story in the Sirenia Digest. It's a treat for anyone obsessed with film and film history. It presents a story, told with one conventional narrative scene, one article, and one interview, about a lost film called Dark Adapted Eyes. The first part, the third person part with dialogue, is set in a diner in L.A. and has a nice old L.A. feel to it. One of the characters mentions going to Tower Records so it must be set many years ago, I'm guessing the '80s.

Caitlin works in a lot of Hollywood trivia knowledge. This lost film is supposedly a 1952 Hammer movie directed by Jacques Tourneur that resembles Alien so much that people talk about it as an influence. 1952 would've been years before Hammer became famous as a horror studio and Tourneur was working in Hollywood at the time (Hammer is a British studio). In fact, in 1952, Tourneur was making Way of the Gaucho in Argentina (or possibly his 1953 film Appointment in Honduras). But it's part of the story that it would have been impossible for Tourneur to have directed the movie and it's stated that Tourneur even denied directing it. All these little problems, though, help give it the quality of some incredible, obscure movie. It sort of reminds of learning about Luis Bunuel's Robinson Crusoe. The story sure gave be some California nostalgia.

I read the new Sirenia Digest while eating lunch to-day. The new Caitlin R. Kiernan story, "The Moment Under the Moment", is a deliberately Lovecraftian tale, another nice exploration of the tangled psychological space, a portrait of human mental functioning fractured and frustrated by dreams and bizarre trauma.

The first person narrator recalls a lover who spoke of the Bering strait land bridge and William Beebe. an American scientist and explorer. The narrator also describes the plastic pollution of the ocean in strikingly vivid and horrifying language, convincingly arguing the horror of this byproduct of scientific progress my equal or surpass that of the atomic bomb. It's a good story.

Lunch was a sandwich with lettuce, Spam, and mayonnaise on bread I made yesterday. I've discovered I really like Spam. Another strange product of science.

I read the new Sirenia Digest on the train to-day, a new story from Caitlin R. Kiernan called "Discord in Anthracite". It's exciting to see Caitlin combine her love of HP Lovecraft with her palaeontology expertise.

The point of view character discusses childhood memories with a figure who shifts between a psychiatrist and a dead girl. It has the quality of an internal dialogue, the sort of thing we do when we try to explain things to ourselves by imagining a friend, family member, or authority figure to whom we're delivering the explanation. In those cases, we may well switch out the identity of the listener/interrogator mid-explanation. The people we choose can be indicative of our priorities and perspectives, as it is for the narrator of Caitlin's story.

This all, like the personalities of Lovecraft's narrators, helps establish an emotional reality for the fantastically horrific. It's a nice piece of work, it gets under your skin, or your scalp.

It's spider season here again in Kashihara.

This morning I finally had time to read the latest Sirenia Digest, number 200. For this issue, Caitlin R. Kiernan created a story about stories. Not an unusual matter for her but it's particularly appropriate for a commemorative issue of a monthly digest of stories.

One scene of the protagonist dreamer glimpsing a variety of fish reminded me of Salman Rushdie, in one of his own famous postmodernist commentaries. Other parts of the new story from Caitlin, "A Travelogue for Oneironautics", reinforce the impression of a story commenting on stories. The dreamer and another character, a naked woman in a sailcloth, traverse a sea of red water, and both are unable to access their identities or motivations. The dreamer seems more interested in making the attempt than the woman, who seems content or resigned to her own ambiguity. This dynamic is repeated as the scene shifts to different locations and time periods, with the woman being replaced in separate occasions by a sort of werewolf and then a talking dog. And always, as is so often the case in Caitlin's fiction, the protagonist seeks answers from a conversation partner unwilling and/or uninterested in providing them. That in one case this is symbolically portrayed as a kind of violence to the dreamer, in the case of the werewolf, has an intriguing implication of how the refusal to divulge information may be a kind of harm. It brings to mind the lyrics to The Beatles' "I'm So Tired".

It's another nice and haunting story for the Digest. May there be many more.

Twitter Sonnet #1634

A case was tossed beside the road for beer.
Some extra paint would never catch the eye.
A park contained a bloody mob of deer.
The offered cookie fell beneath the sky.
The cans of ships were fresh as evening grapes.
A morning stew was fit to shave a beard.
Remembered treks could fill the ancient tapes.
There's something strange to see but never weird.
The peaks of Peck were dark above the glare.
A devil boy detained the sternest man.
A Doctor told the captain, take the stare.
The empty words combined to feed from Pan.
A faceless man has stumbled 'pon a mug.
The tangled brain was used to weave a rug.

Another two issues of Caitlin R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest were in my inbox yesterday, issues 185 and 191. They're both good but 191 is by far the superior.

191 features a story called "Metamorphosis D (Imago)" and it's about a couple who have conflicting memories about a possibly extraterrestrial encounter in the woods. The interesting thing is how this leads to an argument between the two and it becomes a nice illustration of how two people can be misled down paths of reasoning by invoking knowledge and experience that aren't precisely appropriate. But they may be imprecisely appropriate, or related on some fundamental level of human conception. Which makes misunderstanding more likely--because they're compelling rabbit holes.

One character says something in her sleep which the other misinterprets. The first interprets anger in the other as the prelude to physical violence. It may not be, or maybe she's picking up on a frequency in itself that is as irrational as physical violence. This is part of a story that also includes the narrator's perception of physical transformation and two distinct recollections for the same period of time. It's great--it's one thing to have a story about conflicting perceptions, it's another thing to have one that makes it so intimate.

185 featured another of Caitlin's stories with a narrator using futuristic dialect, another nice, poetic experiment in language craft. The story about sinister mannequins is not bad, though maybe not the most interesting one I've ever seen in the Digest.

To-day I read the Sirenia Digests 176 and 181 by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Both are very good but I liked 181 much more.

176 features a story called L'homme et la femme terribles which is an unnamed narrator's intriguing observations of a strange couple they saw regularly in a bar. The couple is described in detail, both having a quality of middle America, 80s goths. A man and a woman, the woman in particular, described as an albino wearing big black sweaters, black leggings, and ballet slippers, sounds like she comes from an alternate, weirder version of Flashdance. Both of them have distinctive, interesting style.

181 is a nice thing to read after watching the new Evangelion movie yesterday. It, too, features many dreamlike juxtapositions, and I really like the American gangsters discussing 16th century literature and 17th century wars. This story seems to have more of a heart, too--despite being called "HEART-SHAPED HOLE"--and ends with a sad and lovely image supporting that title.

The Sirenia Digest returned to-day with a visceral new story from Caitlin R. Kiernan, "The Great Bloody & Bruised Veil of the World".

Juxtaposing a very personal experience of the first person narrator's with a very strange supernatural occurrence, there's a sense of coiled violence, of fevered flight. There's more movement in the story than Sirenia Digest stories tend to have. The protagonist, an unnamed woman, begins the story speeding through the woods, distraught over a conflict with her girlfriend. Caitlin does a nice job in establishing how the narrator feels a kind of separation from herself, in establishing the strangeness in her own violent reaction. The motion of the speeding car comes to a sudden stop with a scene of death, of abundant evidence of recent fire but with a singularly abnormal thing at the centre.

An exceptionally good story and a bit of a new direction for the Sirenia Digest. It's well worth a read.

A new Sirenia Digest a few days ago brought the beginning of a new alphabet from Caitlin R. Kiernan, "The Cerulean Alphabet". This is a series of vignettes, one for each letter of the English alphabet. Caitlin has used this format before to good result and the latest is no exception.

Covering letters A through M, vignettes like "G is for Gephyrophobia" and "L is for Listen" feature Caitlin's familiar second person dialogue format in which the narrator speaks to a "you" and discussion involves an argument about perception of the strange. I like how these stories aren't about the elusiveness of a shared reality but the dread of confronting the undeniable, whether it's merely a strange sound in "Listen" or a bridge in "Gephyrophobia".

I think my favourite of this group is probably "I is for Indolent", which sort of reminds me of "The Lazy Sunbathers" by Morrissey, though Caitlin's vignette is not so much a condemnation of idle bystanders as an eerie portrait of immobilising torpidity barely interrupted by a strange vision of subtle horror.

By the way, in yesterday's post I talked about the lack of mood and atmosphere in Sunday's Doctor Who. In the past the show has excelled in these things, often doing much more for effect than any pouncing monster. A good example is the Second Doctor serial The Web of Fear.

There's a new chapter of Dekpa and Deborah online to-day. This is the 21st chapter and the end of Book I. The comic is now grown to a total of 178 pages since I started it in 2015, pretty slow work compared to Venia's Travels, for which I produced over 500 pages in two years, but in the years I've been doing Dekpa and Deborah I've graduated college and held a few jobs, all distractions I didn't have for my previous comics. In addition, I've done a lot more research for Dekpa and Deborah and I'm working on bristol board instead of sketchbook paper now so it's no surprise it's slower going, even when I do have time. I'll be doing more research for Book II and hopefully by the time it comes out I'll have a nice stockpile of chapters so I can update regularly. For now, I hope you'll enjoy reading back over Book I, feel free to look for any clues as to what may lie ahead. I know I will.

To-day I also read the new Sirenia Digest which features a lovely new short little piece by Caitlin R. Kiernan about murder and a body of water sinister for more reasons than for being a dumping ground for a corpse. It's another dialogue piece in which tension is built with wonderful, dreamlike description that may or may not have something to do with the Loch Ness Monster.

Twitter Sonnet #1273

A verdant book demands a dryer eye.
As pages crack for time again to turn.
Behind the stack we hear a shaky sigh.
Another word and something new was learned.
Observers check to see consistent squares.
A tally mark obscures the counted claw.
The cats establish base for fishy wares.
The truth of flannel mice became the law.
Discomfort chose the flaky chair for fame.
A thousand shreds of phony skin abide.
Synthetic snow submits another name.
An arm and leg as limbs at length collide.
In quarter years the clocks divide a pool.
In tests a timid toe decides the rule.

Caitlin R. Kiernan fans got a special treat in to-day's new Sirenia Digest--a previously unpublished story called "Chevy Swamp" from 1987, from well before Kiernan had become an established name in weird fiction. In the introduction to this month's Digest, Kiernan talks about how the story reflects her inexperience at that point in her life as a writer and expresses dislike for the story's obvious resemblance to Stephen King's It, which had been published not long before "Chevy Swamp" was written. This might seem a strange thing to complain about to-day when Stranger Things has garnered so much praise for its obvious modelling on It and other fantasy and horror fiction from the 1980s centred on groups of kids. For anyone looking for more stories like that now, "Chevy Swamp" is certain to satisfy, particularly for anyone looking for such a story told from the perspective of a female character.

A first person narrative told by a character named Mary, the story concerns her and her two friends, Arnie and Rusty, and their relationship with the swamp of the title. All of them are around eleven years old and there's a nice description of a biology class project followed by an encounter with a bully named Ellroy. There's some allusion to the psychological causes of bullying behaviour, of cycles of abuse, but the story takes it in a weird direction as Mary and her two friends form a nicely understated, weird love/hate bond with the swamp and a strange creature that may or may not exist within. In a very effective creative decision, Kiernan avoids bringing the creature explicitly into the story--it manifests in dreams, suspicions, and mutilated bodies. This makes the creature menacing and mysterious while also providing a tortuous ambiguity for the protagonists who are compelled to wonder how much responsibility their bear for the creature's behaviour.

The resemblance to It is certainly clear but Kiernan creates characters who are very much her own, particularly Mary, to inhabit this It pastiche world. It's a nice addition to what is becoming a vibrant genre again.