The worst Twilight Zone episode that doesn't involve glasses breaking is that one with the wheelchair lady and the telephone call with a stupidly mean ending where it was her dead husband all along calling her and now he won't talk to her because she told him to stop calling her.
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I wonder if Stephen King's "The New York Times At Bargain Rates" wasn't inspired by this. It's significantly less bleak in some respects but about as sad.
Incidentally, Stephen King is much better at writing short, quietly unsettling magical realist stories than he is at long, unabashedly sentimental horror stories. That one and "Harvey's Dream" are masterworks. But I think that might also be age.
Just working off my memory, quite a few of his novels involve the surviving protagonists triumphing over supernatural evil through The Power of Love or the Magic of Friendship, even if he didn't explicitly call it that.
Also, as he got older, a lot of his novels have this undercurrent of sadness and nostalgia.
The worst Twilight Zone episode that doesn't involve glasses breaking is that one with the wheelchair lady and the telephone call with a stupidly mean ending where it was her dead husband all along calling her and now he won't talk to her because she told him to stop calling her.
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I wonder if Stephen King's "The New York Times At Bargain Rates" wasn't inspired by this. It's significantly less bleak in some respects but about as sad.
Incidentally, Stephen King is much better at writing short, quietly unsettling magical realist stories than he is at long, unabashedly sentimental horror stories. That one and "Harvey's Dream" are masterworks. But I think that might also be age.
What do you think about The Dark Tower, considering that's one long, quietly unsettling magical realist story (at least from my understanding of it)?
It's best experienced through reading one of his works, but it can be boiled down to this: In most of King's works, good and evil are antithetical forces even if they are mixed within individual people, and goodness tends to be associated with nostalgic and comfy emotions in a very sentimental manner, whereas evil is represented as that which corrupts the safe world of the sentimental or as depravity in opposition to this innocent state. His short fiction tends to buck this more often, occasionally introducing the horrific not as something evil but as something inexplicable, or draws on both human cruelty and the absurdity of life as sources of unease—as in "Chattery Teeth", with its contrast between the vicious psychopath who hijacks the protagonist's car, the looming vastness of the desert storm that overtakes them, and the sinister enigma of the titular item.
I prefer writers where the implicit moral framework is more complex, less obvious, or at least more interestingly integrated (or more sufficiently divorced from the scary bits) than that. My favourites are Thomas Ligotti, Joel Lane, Elizabeth Hand and, in a different way, Angela Carter. Clive Barker might be the exemplar of flipping the script in some ways, but that's another matter.
Related: many readers were disappointed that the final book of the epic Dark Tower series involved so many of the villains dying like chumps. Yet this was a completely intentional development on Stephen King's part. Because he believed that evil sows the seeds of its own destruction.
I have nothing against that philosophy, but it seems at odds with writing, you know, horror.
The worst Twilight Zone episode that doesn't involve glasses breaking is that one with the wheelchair lady and the telephone call with a stupidly mean ending where it was her dead husband all along calling her and now he won't talk to her because she told him to stop calling her.
An
I wonder if Stephen King's "The New York Times At Bargain Rates" wasn't inspired by this. It's significantly less bleak in some respects but about as sad.
Incidentally, Stephen King is much better at writing short, quietly unsettling magical realist stories than he is at long, unabashedly sentimental horror stories. That one and "Harvey's Dream" are masterworks. But I think that might also be age.
What do you think about The Dark Tower, considering that's one long, quietly unsettling magical realist story (at least from my understanding of it)?
His fantasy stuff is less subject to this issue because it's less scare-oriented and, for that, less formulaic. I've also heard that From a Buick 8 is pretty unabashedly Lovecraftian in themes, so maybe it avoids those problems as well.
His most successfully scary story, for me, is "1408". The film sabotages it with a conventional ending with a blatantly supernatural ending; the story's ending is far more ambiguous and quietly horrible.
Related: many readers were disappointed that the final book of the epic Dark Tower series involved so many of the villains dying like chumps. Yet this was a completely intentional development on Stephen King's part. Because he believed that evil sows the seeds of its own destruction.
I have nothing against that philosophy, but it seems at odds with writing, you know, horror.
Exactly.
Although I'd say it can still work if you acknowledge that evil men are just small fish in a very big, scary pond. I'd quote the mystic's spiel about true, Capital-E Evil from Machen's "The White People", but you're probably already familiar with it.
I am, if you can't tell, more a fan of "the weird" in horror fiction. Fatalism, absurdism, cosmicism, those sorts of schools of thought. Existential and pessimistic ideas about morality and life make for better horror than reassuring or conventionally karmic ones.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Poor Anonus. I ordered him a regular Coke but the Domino's only had Diet Coke
I am, if you can't tell, more a fan of "the weird" in horror fiction. Fatalism, absurdism, cosmicism, those sorts of schools of thought. Existential and pessimistic ideas about morality and life make for better horror than reassuring or conventionally karmic ones.
I've also heard that From a Buick 8 is pretty unabashedly Lovecraftian in themes, so maybe it avoids those problems as well.
Yes and no. Taken in isolation, From a Buick 8 is definitely Lovecraftian, and the protagonists never really figure out what that car's deal is.
But From a Buick 8 isn't in isolation. It's connected to the Dark Tower Cycle (it even says so in the later Dark Tower books), and with that additional context, it's very clear exactly what's going on with the car. So, the question is, how well does a novel about the unknowable and inexplicable work, if the characters can never figure out what's going on, but the reader can?
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
As someone who read From a Buick 8 but never the Dark Tower series, it certainly worked as Lovecraftian for me
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
In Colorado, ambulances and fire trucks have red and blue lights and that was really confusing to me for a bit
I've also heard that From a Buick 8 is pretty unabashedly Lovecraftian in themes, so maybe it avoids those problems as well.
Yes and no. Taken in isolation, From a Buick 8 is definitely Lovecraftian, and the protagonists never really figure out what that car's deal is.
But From a Buick 8 isn't in isolation. It's connected to the Dark Tower Cycle (it even says so in the later Dark Tower books), and with that additional context, it's very clear exactly what's going on with the car. So, the question is, how well does a novel about the unknowable and inexplicable work, if the characters can never figure out what's going on, but the reader can?
I don't exactly have the answer for that.
This is an interesting conundrum. Perhaps the key here is the reaction within the story and the understanding that the characters are unprepared to deal with this thing which, even if it has an explanation in a greater story, is utterly alien to them. Which changes the kind of horror from purely enigmatic to nastily ironic.
In any case, I feel like horror works best if it conveys the sense that even if there are rules and reasons for things to happen, the one breaking the rules does not know or understand them, and perhaps could not understand their implications or logic even if they were told them. You find a strange coin and take it home: You have broken the rules, and you will be punished. You walk down an unfamiliar street in a familiar neighbourhood: You have broken the rules, and you will be punished. You sleep in by half an hour, and take a later bus than usual: You have broken the rules, and you will be punished. And so on.
the symmetry thing is that if you have fivefold symmetry or sevenfold or more symmetry then you can't have translation symmetry too because you can imagine the plane as the complex numbers and rotation as multiplying by a root of unity; then add the root and its inverse and you get like 1+sqrt(5)/2 or someshit that isn't rational and then you can show it has to have arbitrarily small translation symmetry which lol
I'm genuinely unsure if there is any alternative to Rivers's "look at me and my nerdiness" vibe at this point.
I'd argue that Weezer is probably still around because it resonated so well with that crowd of young dorks that were into power pop in the 90's, and even though most of the fans ended up growing out of it the band still clung to the style for fear of alienating their audience.
Their most reviled album, released in 2009, is a perfectly fine pop album, with decently written hooks and slick production values, but it's so far from the boys that sung about having X-Men and Kiss posters in their garage that the public couldn't make left or right of the thing.
More recently they've done a better job of replicating the old feel and it's led to the best critical reception they've had in a decade if not more.
(They're one of my favorite bands, if it wasn't obvious. I still haven't heard The White Album but I've always appreciated the majority of their work, fan reception thereof be damned.)
Pinkerton is still my favorite tho. You listen to it and you wince at how damn awkward the lyrics are, but that awkwardness and how it makes growing up a pain in the ass -- feeling old even when you're still young, unrequited love, falling in lust with a Japanese schoolgirl (okay maybe not that one) -- is what makes it relatable and what really defines it as a work, moreso than any other release of theirs.
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I think it was mentioned in that video about turning spheres inside out that I didn't watch in its entirety
...is an observation I made independently, but has likely been made many times before
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I'd argue that Weezer is probably still around because it resonated so well with that crowd of young dorks that were into power pop in the 90's, and even though most of the fans ended up growing out of it the band still clung to the style for fear of alienating their audience.
Their most reviled album, released in 2009, is a perfectly fine pop album, with decently written hooks and slick production values, but it's so far from the boys that sung about having X-Men and Kiss posters in their garage that the public couldn't make left or right of the thing.
More recently they've done a better job of replicating the old feel and it's led to the best critical reception they've had in a decade if not more.
Pinkerton is still my favorite tho. You listen to it and you wince at how damn awkward the lyrics are, but that awkwardness and how it makes growing up a pain in the ass -- feeling old even when you're still young, unrequited love, falling in lust with a Japanese schoolgirl (okay maybe not that one) -- is what makes it relatable and what really defines it as a work, moreso than any other release of theirs.
Until you take them out and can't hear anything because your ears are plugged up.