Posts tagged Cthulhu
‘When The Stars Are Right’ TOC Announced
013 years ago
Our author S R Jones has finalized the Table of Contents for his upcoming non-fiction work, When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality, and so this morning we present it to you, our discerning and classy Migraineers, in all its perplexing and evocative tease. With a Foreword by Jordan Stratford and interior illos by Michael Lee Macdonald, this book (which we’re producing in our usual e-formats AND the hoary old medium of *gasp* PRINT!) will offer to the reader an interpretation of Lovecraft’s Mythos not yet seen. Serious gnostic text? Crank fundamentalist screed? Psychedelic auto-ethnography? YOU DECIDE. Whatever it is, we hope and plan to have it ready by Christmas time, so you can get your festival on right!
Please pepper us with questions and/or concerns in the comments, and if you’d like to tweet about When The Stars Are Right we encourage you to use the hashtag #keepinitrlyeh And, as long as you’re on Twitter, follow @Cthulhusattva, where Jones is posting excerpts from the work as it is completed. Alright! Enough with the promotional hoo-ha! Here’s the TOC…
WHEN THE STARS ARE RIGHT:
Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality
Foreword (by Jordan Stratford)
Sunken Bells in the Deep: An Introduction
H P Lovecraft: An Acknowledgement, A Dismissal
The Deadly Light: Examining the Great Old Ones
The Prolonged of Life: Meditations on Yog-Sothoth
Telling the Audient Void: the Voice of Nyarlathotep
The Conqueror Womb: Parsing Shub-Niggurath
A Certain Sort of Men: Dagon & the Deep One Aesthetic
On Cthulhu
The Cthulhusattva Vow
A Tour of R’lyeh
The Black Gnosis
Beating Nietzsche’s Horse: Notes on the Black Gnosis and Mental Illness
Beyond the Strange Angles
Chilling in the Ghetto with the Deep Down Homies
My Own Private Necronomicon
The Wisdom in the Clay
The Unbearable Strangeness of Being: Sex and the R’lyehian
Through Sunset’s Gate: Death and the R’lyehian
Afterword: Yes, Meridian, There Is A Great Cthulhu
The Voyeur at the Threshold: Shimizu Takashi’s “MAREBITO”
013 years ago
by Scott R Jones
in Reviews
(this review appeared originally on the Lovecraft eZine, May 23, 2013)
Marebito (2004)
Directed by: Shimizu Takashi
Starring: Shinya Tsukamoto, Tomomi Miyashita
J-horror films rarely tread beyond their traditional revengeful ghost-children territory (or at least, the films that see release beyond Japan don’t) so it’s refreshing to come across Marebito, (loosely translates to The Stranger From Afar, apparently) which is undeniably weird, disturbingly perverse, and, though its treatment of the themes is heavy-handed and clumsy at times, definitely a Lovecraftian film.
This is a film set against a backdrop of holes, abysses, caverns: all the hollow places in the earth and in the human mind. Appropriately enough, it was filmed in the 8-day hole between director Shimizu Takashi’s two Juon (aka The Grudge) films. It’s a film about emptiness and the madness that results from contemplation of that emptiness: the things we do to distance ourselves from it or encounter it more deeply. Marebito’s protagonist Masuoka (a freelance professional cameraman), does both, often at the same time, using his always-to-hand video equipment as combination filter and microscope. He is a fully urbanized human, sheltered and fed (and feeding upon others) through the media that cocoons him.
As a story, it’s also full of holes: hard-to-parse gaps in the narrative that make it difficult to follow, character motivations that seem to come out of nowhere and are barely resolved before disappearing. Dropped hints. Suggestions of tunnels that could be travelled down but fade from the film’s memory in only minutes. This could be deliberate on Takashi’s part, an attempt to induce a paranoid dream-state in the audience, or it could be the result of the speed of filming. Chances are also good that this narrative disorientation is entirely a cultural thing: I admit I haven’t watched a lot of J-horror (outside of The Ring) so I am perhaps unfamiliar with some of the subtleties.
Our pill-popping and voyeuristic cameraman becomes obsessed with the look of horror that he captured in the face of a man who killed himself (in what we’re to understand is a sudden and gruesome fashion) in a subway tunnel. Why Masuoka was filming a suicide we’re left to guess, but it’s clear he’s not entirely well, mentally. In any case, his obsession with learning the fearful thing that drove the dead man to suicide leads Masuoka deep below Tokyo, down endless Escher-staircases, to a place he begins to call the netherworld. Along the way he encounters the ghost of the suicide and they engage in a philosophical discussion on such occult subjects as the Hollow Earth and crank favourite Richard Shaver’s DEROs (or Detrimental Robots). Masuoka shows the ghost the video of its own death, causing it to vanish.
Further descent brings him to a place he calls “Mountains of Madness” (using some clever but very low-budget matte photography effects, the actor appears to wander across unreal landscapes) where he encounters a thoroughly creepy, pale girl, chained by her ankles to the wall of a small grotto or oubliette. As singular, horrific images go, this is pretty unsettling stuff, which I assume is why it’s used in many of the promotional materials. Mute, catatonic, and more beast than human, Masuoka nevertheless decides to free the girl and return with her to the surface world, where he deposits her in his closet-apartment, a space jammed to the ceiling with surveillance and video equipment. The girl (who he calls F) folds herself into the smallest space she can find (under a futon) and falls asleep. Through the rest of the film, Masuoka monitors her via various linked cameras and his cell phone. Naturally, odd things begin to happen, both in the collected footage and in the increasingly fractured perception of Masuoka.
F begins to deteriorate, and her captor receives calls on his phone from artificial voices who advise that she is dying, that she should not have been brought to the surface. By accident, Masuoka learns that F can only tolerate blood as nourishment, and though animal blood will do, she really enjoys the human variety. If this listless, autistic creature is a vampire, then she is one of the weirdest ever in film. Masuoka, no less a monster, and already far removed from the normal human social spheres by his work and voyeuristic fetish, has little trouble taking the next logical steps in keeping his bizarre pet healthy.
One thing leads to another (even as the straight-ahead narrative gives way to greater and greater porosity) and by the end Masuoka becomes a classic Lovecraftian protagonist, consumed by his obsession and destroyed by the very knowledge he sought.
Visually, Marebito is ugly and flat looking, a fault due mostly to the cameras used. Flat, but also real as a result, and the home-made, voyeuristic feel of the film gives it a very disturbing vibe. I could imagine coming across this footage and being instantly alarmed by some of the contents.
Shinya Tsukamoto (as Masuoka) is sometimes clumsy in his emoting (there is a scene where F drinks blood from a cut on his finger and he is either trying hard not to laugh or is actually aroused; who can tell?) but overall he manages to depict a depressed, fetish-burdened man descending into horror and insanity fairly well. However, the over-use of internal monologue narration by Masuoka, although effective in the first quarter of the film, tends to become droning, soporific, and fails to capture the emotional tension as his madness descends upon him. Again, this might be a deliberate choice, but it was an off-note for me.
Tomomi Miyashita’s performance can only be described as intense. Her portrayal of the catatonic underworld vampire F has the severity and simplicity of Noh theatre: her postures and expressions, her bestial vocalizations, everything about her is thoroughly unpleasant and creepy. Whenever she was on-screen, a line from Lovecraft’s The Festival kept going through my mind…
Great holes are dug where earth’s pores ought to suffice,
and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl
And that was Marebito for me: an uneven, extremely porous and shifty narrative film experience that was at the same time (and perhaps for the same reasons) effectively dreamy and nightmarish. I’m not sure it would stand a second viewing (due to its cheapness and hole-y plot) but as a late-night venture into a part of horror culture I’m not over-exposed to, it was pretty good.
When The Spooks Come Out – MMP Interview with S R Jones…
014 years ago
On March 15, Martian Migraine Press will be releasing SOFT FROM ALL THE BLOOD: 7 Surreal Tales of Terror by S R Jones. This is a strange and unsettling collection of fiction, so the Face sat down with Jones for a little chat about writer’s shame, writer’s block, and the curse of H P Lovecraft. The results were strange. And unsettling…
MMP: So, we’re fairly excited and proud to be bringing out SOFT FROM ALL THE BLOOD in a couple of weeks! It’s a weird little book and we think folks are going to dig it. Are you a weird little man?
Jones: I’m 6 feet 2 inches, so I’m gonna say no. As for weird, well, I can never hear that word without flashing on the original definition. It’s Celtic or some such thing, and basically, it means “that which actually happens”, like the actions of the gods, as opposed to all the everyday stuff. So you’re asking me if I’ve happened, or am happening, and I’m going to have to go with no on that one too. I’m not weird, because I don’t feel real, or actual, at all, most days. Which can be a handy mode of being… but I want to be weird. Someday. I would like to actually happen.
MMP: You sound like Pinnochio. And pretty weird.
Jones: Ha ha! Yeah, a real boy. I think we’ve all got this problem, only writers are perhaps a little more honest about it. More comfortable with saying hey, I’m not really here, I’m just a vehicle for these other people, these characters, who are even less real, but more entertaining. I dunno.
MMP: You write in the afterword for SOFT that you find writing embarrassing. Most writers we’ve met tend to let you know right away that they write, but not you. Can you explain why?
Jones: Well, horror writing is embarrassing, for sure. I don’t know why. I think it’s basically admitting, in a really kind of intimate but also public way, that you’ve thought about these things. Just to get them onto the page, you have to think about them. Cannibalism, knife play, mutations, demons…
MMP: Mutant demons.
Jones: With knives! I remember when I was writing Coronation, which is the second story in SOFT, when I was writing that I was also reading, for the first and last time, thank god, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. And a passage in that, y’know, a passage describing a murder or murders, just something really appalling and horrific, coming right after an entire chapter on the merits of different brands of mineral water or something… this passage comes out of nowhere and hits me right upside the head and I get physically ill. And part of that, that sickness, y’know, running to the toilet to puke and everything, part of that was due to the realization that Ellis, well, he had to go there, to that place, in order to put it down on paper. There was no distance, in that moment, between the writer and the reader and I felt too close to that guy, too in his head. The paper was too flimsy a barrier between his reality and mine.
Which is great, because it means the writing worked the way it’s supposed to, but also kind of embarrassing, because that’s his head, or my head, spilled out. In public. It’s a shame, a shame that I guess the good writers have to bear. But we do it, usually in a compulsive way, and hopefully it’s entertaining.
MMP: Some would say that writing like Ellis’ is courageous, since he “goes there” and these days you hear a lot of writing coaches and inspirational speakers talk about how writers are brave. Do you agree? Does writing take courage?
Jones: Can’t speak for others, can I? But no, I don’t think we are. No writer is out there saving the world, and I don’t necessarily trust the ones who say they are. I mean, there are probably brave writers out there? And maybe lots who need to feel brave to do what they do. But I’ve never felt that. You know, you can’t escape addiction, so choose yours carefully, right? There’s worse things you can do to yourself than write, it doesn’t hurt you or anyone else all that much. Okay, maybe a little. But it’s still an addiction. The language virus working itself out in an interesting way.
MMP: Sounds like Burroughs…
Jones: I love Burroughs. He’s my cure for writer’s block.
MMP: How does that work?
Jones: It’s just his ability to see beyond the ego that writers develop. Can’t recall how he said it exactly, but there’s an interview with him out there that has him saying something like “look, the book is already there and the good writer takes dictation” or finds them, in the ontic sphere or the Platonic realm or whatever. Checks them out of the astral Library. Finds them and copies them out. The poet Jack Spicer used to say the same thing, that the poet needs to rid themselves of all the ego-fictions, clear all the cheap furniture from his head and then just, y’know, just listen. Listen to the Outside, to the spooks and the Martians.
That’s what I try to do, mostly unsuccessfully, when I get blocked. Realize that the block is, somehow, me: my identity and my needs and personal crap. And then just stop and listen. Late at night, usually.
MMP: When the spooks come out? So Spicer and Burroughs are obviously big influences on you.
Jones: Oh yeah.
MMP: But there’s no indication of that in SOFT. If anything, the writer who seems to influence you most in these stories is H P Lovecraft.
Jones: Aaggh. That name…
MMP: A holy name, in some circles!
Jones: Oh, absolutely. In my circles, too. No, I got hit by Lovecraft early on, what, late teens, early 20s? And I’m still working him out of my system. Worse, when I found HPL I found Brian Lumley at the same time… Lovecraft in one of those old Ballantine paperbacks with the surreal art on a black cover, The Lurking Fear, I think it was, and Lumley’s Return of the Deep Ones at the shop. Bought them both. So there’s Lovecraft, the original, and then an example of a decades-later interpretive, and some would say derivative, writer riffing on Lovecraft.
MMP: Not even riffing. Pastiche. There’s many who hate Lumley…
Jones: So glorious, though! I’m not one of them, I love Lumley’s brand of muscular, almost gleeful horror. You just know, as you’re reading, that he’s totally enjoying himself! No shame there, and I guess I admire that. Just tapping away there in England, grinning. I mean, come on, Necroscope? That series? That man was having a balls-out crazy good time and the reader could tell! It’s infectious. Which is perhaps what appeals to so many about HPL, too. Not that he was having a good time, if the biographies speak truly, but, y’know, the man was invested. We read HPL not so much because the stories are good (although in many ways they are) but because the man is in there, inside his stories. And he’s interesting.
But yeah, those were my early influences and I made all the usual newbie mistakes with my efforts round that period. In fact, I’m working right now on re-tooling my first novel, The Waiting Deeps, which is… I mean, talk about embarrassment, this thing is a mutant child best left in the attic…
MMP: How do you mean, re-tooling?
Jones: It’s everything you shouldn’t do in Lovecraftian fiction, a real object lesson. It is the worst kind of pastiche, which is to say it copies all the tropes and typical flourishes of HPL without an authentic appreciation of what makes HPL work. So, I’m making the object lesson obvious, re-tooling it as a guide, and re-titling it The Waiting Deeps: How Not To Write A Lovecraftian Novel.
MMP: Sounds educational and fun!
Jones: So fun. And embarrassing for me, but I get to go back and horribly abuse the Jones from 1996, and maybe help new writers not make the same mistakes.
MMP: Maybe three of the seven stories in SOFT could be called Lovecraftian…
Jones: Well, Greetings from Sunny R’lyeh, yes, definitely, and Notebook Found In A Deserted Houseboat, that’s a nod to Bloch and HPL. Coronation is a speck of Bierce filtered, magnified through HPL. The Frozen is another nod, but to Derleth, really, more than anyone else…
MMP: That’s four.
Jones: Oh. Yeah, there’s four. That’s four out of seven. Alright, it’s a big old Lovecraft-fest, I guess!
MMP: I was going to say that your protaganists are not of the usual type. Mostly they just seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Jones: Yeah. I got tired of writing about men of learning learning too much, right? That’s the pastiche trap. “Now that I know what I know, I wish I didn’t know it, oh god, the hand at the window, etc.” So in Greetings, which I’m not especially proud of, because it’s a clumsy attempt at cyberpunk with a little Cthulhu thrown in…
MMP: A lot.
Jones: Okay, a lot. In it you’ve got these media punks who just consume everything, that’s their way, their mode of being, and should we feel sorry for them that they consume a little cosmic madness along the way? No. I wanted to say something about sanity as a commodity, I guess, which I think we as a society might be just giving away without knowing it, but I don’t think I said it all that well.
And in Notebook, I wanted to just explore the idea that it’s a harsh, weird world, and sometimes when harsh things happen to decent people, it just opens a door and invites more of the same into their lives. I wanted to take that as far as it could go, so we have a protaganist in Notebook who thinks he’s lost everything, but he’s wrong. And the Universe, cold bitch that she is, educates him as to her nastiness and brutishness and shortness. Though not so much with the latter. He’s a victim, totally.
MMP: But a deserving one?
Jones: No, not at all. With him, it’s literally a case of turning left when you should have gone right. That’s what eventually feels so arch and false about HPLs protaganists: they could stop researching anytime! Don’t read that horrible old book, dude. You know it’s horrible, you’ve read the insane journal of the guy who read it before you and he died in the asylum, put it away! Jesus. We feel no sympathy for the Danforths and the Armitages and their colleagues because they’re idiots on one level, they walk right into their fates with eyes wide. Same thing with some of Steven King’s characters. You always know which ones are going to get it in the end. Which is not how the world works.
So my characters are victims, mostly, and sometimes they walk right into it, but in the same way you or I would turn a corner, or make one bad decision. Eyes to the ground, or turned inwards. So there’s some sympathy for them, because we all do that to a greater or lesser degree. It’s the horror of the shoulda-woulda-coulda…
MMP: Earlier you mentioned media consumption and it’s made me think of hype and spin. Would you say that there’s fear of a future event, the hype, and then the event itself, and then after the event the spin, or regret? I mean in the case of these stories, specifically.
Jones: And regret is the worse portion? Interesting, I hadn’t thought of that. Living to regret something is perhaps worse than the actual thing or action. Yeah, I can see that applying. This could be a book about regret.
MMP: As a writer, do you regret being influenced by Lovecraft?
Jones: Ha! No. Sure, he’s a curse, and maybe you never really get over him. But he’s fun. Fun on one level and actually pretty profound on other levels, and if you can get over the aping of his style, I think he does some decent things for your world view and your art. He’s a curse, but in the same way that getting bit by a werewolf is a curse.
MMP: Pretty sure that is a curse!
Jones: Yeah, but let’s face it, at the end of the day, or night, I guess, after all the pain and weirdness and blood, guess what, you still got to turn into a wolf! You’ve always got that. And that’s pretty cool, that’s a decent trade off, to my mind. HPL is like that for me.
MMP: Alright! One last question: your initials. Care to enlighten us?
Jones: The R is for Rabid.
MMP: And S?
Jones: Somewhat!
SOFT FROM ALL THE BLOOD: 7 Surreal Tales of Terror by S R Jones will be released as a Kindle e-book on March 15.
