About time I dusted this thing off. A lot has been going on. I have stories upcoming in the magazines Emerald City and Monstrous Femme in the near future. I’ve heard word that Fiction On the Web will be recording an audiobook version of my story “Set, Sand, and Finish,” first as promotional material but then later available on a compilation available on Audible. As you can see, I’m all about short fiction at the moment. And, interestingly, all the stuff I have been doing falls under the banner genre of horror.
I engage with horror because there is just something about the menacing, the unknown, the subconscious. All the things that you deeply absorbed in your life. The ripeness of the transgressive.
Horror goes back to the earliest storytelling, ghost stories, spooky campfire stories, “it happened to a friend of a friend…” But with the internet, stories can spread faster than ever before, and evolve very quickly as the online community puts their own spin on them, creating their own urban legends. All that is old is new again.
For instance, there is the horror fiction “classic,” The Noise Coming From Inside Children. It has been described as both a short story and a novel, written in the 1970’s, or the 1980’s, or the 1990’s…It is said to be the most disturbing horror story ever written. Anyone who did read it was driven insane. Horror’s greatest and rarest piece of work! Only, it is an internet hoax. The author, Ed Karan, doesn’t exist.
It isn’t a new thing. The story of an old, forbidden, arcane text that doesn’t exist is as old as the hills. It’s an old tradition that has been given new life. The backstory, the idea of the thing is more powerful than the thing itself ever could be.
Both writing and music have become exercises in cosplaying, playacting. Back in the Gen-X heyday, it was all about realness and “street cred.” These days, it seems that it’s less about authenticity and more about mystique, self-reference and world-building. More about the vibe. My kid is obsessed with Lana Del Ray and her stream-of–consciousness tales of glamour, death and decay. Weaving things together, hop-scotching through different decade’s iconography, it is not literally herself revealed, but a vaporous celluloid heroine. A persona as amalgam.
Maybe that’s okay, the new way of storytelling in which the essence is the truth. Beauty in artifice. What is old is new, again and again.
My Terrible Darlings 