Category Archives: Philosophizin'
The Horror of the Mundane
Much horror fiction involves some sort of supernatural agency visiting despair, terror, and suffering on the living. Most of the rest features depraved mortals whose love of torture and sadism borders on the fantastic. It’s cathartic for the reader and writer both, letting the fear and worry and stress that builds up during the course of everyday humdrum human existence relieve the pressure. Stephen King’s Danse Macabre does an excellent job exploring horror in this light – if you like horror at all, you should read it; it’s fun, funny, and informative – and talks about some of the everyday anxiety that ends up being expressed through popular movies and books. For example, he posits that the reason The Amityville Horror was such a success when it was first released is that it hit a nerve among people going through the financial instability of the inflation-crazy 1970’s (what if your house was haunted and you couldn’t sell it? The horror!). He also talks about the 1950’s era of giant bug movies (fear of living in the Nuclear Age) and alien invasions (fear of the Soviet Union). Basically, it forms a road map of national anxiety as expressed in horror films and books up to the early 1980’s. The book came to mind after this morning. Read the rest of this entry
Homages – Friends as Novel Characters
The impetus that finally pushed me to write a novel consisted of a combination of two things. The first was the incredibly vivid Zombie Dreams I’ve had over the years. These dreams are full Technicolor and Stereoscope dreams, with jump cuts and multiple camera angles, where I might be a spectator, actor, or disembodied witness, but always vaguely aware that I’m watching a dream and ready to fill my role as either zombie killer or victim or hard-running candyass. I love these dreams, and have never thought it right to call them nightmares – I may get creeped out, but I don’t necessarily want to wake up from them.
The Zombie Dreams laid the foundation. The second push came from a daydream I had, where my friends and family were villagers in a medieval town that was overrun by zombies and eaten in a very gory and glorious fashion.
I’m a swell friend, eh? Read the rest of this entry
Weapon of Choice: Zombie Apocalypse Style Part Tres
In my last two posts, I’ve been the exploring the concept of what weapons I would want with me during a zombie apocalypse. My assumptions are that I can only use weapons that are commonly available to civilians and can reasonably be obtained fairly easily, and also that I’m in the Worst Case Scenario: on foot, traveling by myself. First I dealt with shotguns, then I dealt with other firearms. Along the way I discussed Unitaskers, objects that are good for just one thing and for nothing else, and which I want to avoid.
Today: hand weapons. Read the rest of this entry
Weapon of Choice: Zombie Apocalypse Style Part Duo
In my first post, I started a conversation about what my weapon choices would be during a zombie apocalypse. It’s gotten other people to post their thoughts too, which is cool. I’m restricting my thoughts to weapons I already own, or could realistically acquire with little trouble in today’s world, so any civilian-accessible weapon that could reasonably be acquired. I’m not going to worry about being ultra-specific, since I’m assuming this would be a long-term loadout, and things will break and need to be replaced with similar objects, so specifying a particular type of scope or stock will not be part of the plan. Part 1 dealt with shotguns, due to their near-synonymous nature with zombie-fighting, and today I will go a little further, spending much of this post dealing with two things, one of them being firearms.
But first, the Most Important Thing: addressing Unitaskers. Read the rest of this entry
Winter in Derenemyn 