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A post that is ultimately about Limetown

Inevitably, in the fall, I turn once again to horror. Desperate to find horror that scares me, that appeals to me, that gets me. In the back of my mind I suspect that I’m either incapable of being scared by fiction or I’m fundamentally misunderstanding what people man when they talk about the effect horror has on them.

I’ll keep you posted.

I keep trying books, sometimes movies. Movies are tougher. Jump scares are cheating, and not scary. That’s surprise. That’s not fear. That’s sticking out your foot to trip me and saying you beat me in a fight because I’m on the ground now. Movies are also tougher because ugh, who has time to sit down for two hours in a row? Unless it’s marathoning Sense8 or catching up on The Toast or Twitter okay I see the problem lies with me. Strike that second objection to movies.

The point is podcasts. This year I got really interested in podcasts as a medium for horror, because

  • shorter than movies!
  • I can listen at work!
  • indie!
  • there really is something about the additional emotional pull of a story when it engages even one sense, which, let’s be honest, I love books, but they don’t typically engage your senses in the story. Yes, tactile feel of paper, smell, whatever. But that’s universal to books, and has nothing to do with the specific story it’s trying to tell you.

I have a list. I always have a list. Because so many things won’t work for me, for arcane and mysterious reasons that a therapist could best explicate, but: I’ll do my best.

Here are some podcasts in an arcane and mysterious order:

Lore. Not fiction. But I really like it! Some of the episodes benefit from the short length, and some feel really abridged. Sometimes after an episode I’ll go look up more on the topic, and sometimes at the beginning I’ll realize I already know the story, and I’ll squee a little at my desk.

Wolf 358. Caveat that I’m still not sure if anyone would categorize this as horror, rather than scifi, but I’m curious about fictional podcasts in general. The reason I can’t promise the genre is that I was only able to get through one episode before bailing. Life is short, my friends. Too short to spend on a story with yet another snarky male protagonist.

Shadowvane. I just listened to the first few episodes of this today, and while I think I’ll probably keep going, it is the most hokey of all of them. It feels very acted, and I swear if they throw one more terrible and hammy accent at me, I’m out. But maybe if I think of it as an old fashioned throwback, I can get past that, because the premise of a powerful medical company appearing altruistic and possibly controlled secretly by a beast that requires something is kind of intriguing.

The Black Tapes. Aaagh. I want to like this one. Maybe I do! One day I was feeling a nonspecific anxiety, for no reason I could fathom, until it dawned on me that I’d been listening to The Black Tapes all morning. But as I continued, I never experienced that again. I finished the first season, but the weaknesses in the writing and acting really got to me. They don’t quite nail the necessary verisimilitude to keep me in the story enough to creep me out. There’s some unnatural, stiff or unnecessary, dialogue, not helped by the occasional flat (or overly affected) delivery. And the ending to the season was disappointing as horror usually is, abrupt and unfinished as serials often are. So.

What bothers me most, because its such a small stupud thing to repeat, is that no one in the Black Tapes world knows what a podcast is. The reporter has to explain every time, noting that “it’s not radio” like it’s the year 2000. Is that supposed to be a running joke? If so, it’s terrible and they should learn what a joke is.

Limetown. Limetown is the one that started me on all the podcasts. There were three episodes available when I discovered it, and I was pretty into them. A little unsettled, even. One might say I was creeped out. It’s more focused, each episode centering on one interview, which helps it avoid a lot of the small issues of The Black Tapes. The reporter seems less stupid than the reporter for The Black Tapes. It’s not about demons and ghosts and the paranormal, which I suspect also helps me like it more. It’s science gone wrong and shadowy figures out to get you and sharing thoughts (with pigs) and so on. It’s extremely well done, so I am waiting eagerly for the next episode and wishing/hoping/praying that it’s not actually going to be only 7.

NEXT TIME: I just listened to the first episode of Tanis, new from the same people as The Black Tapes, and I am way, way more into it. Time will tell if the same problems crop up, but the reporter is different, and the subject matter too. There are no demons or evil monks yet. Only a mysterious mythology.

Obsession

One day recently, I was sitting at my desk, innocently doing some actual work, when out of nowhere I was struck by a thought.

“I wonder if I beat my previous on-sub length at [market redacted]?”

Oh no. Oh, honey, no. Don’t think about it! You submit, set a reminder to query according to the market’s guidelines, and you stop thinking about it. You don’t look at your stats. You don’t check the queue on Submittable. You don’t.

Reader, I have been obsessing. For the past few days I have looked at Submissions Grinder and watched the numbers go up, as expected, one day at a time. Looking at the Grinder doesn’t do anything! It’s not where I’m notified about decisions! It isn’t anything but a glorified spreadsheet, except it turns colors. Colors are so dangerous. I’m staring at two oranges and a red, which means those stories have been with the markets longer than average. Which means almost nothing.

I am veering into rejectomancy, which is my favorite mystical dark art, but oh it is eating me alive.

I’m three days past my previous best at [market redacted] so I’m foolishly hopeful. I’m on a second tier elsewhere, so I’m waiting with bated breath. Oh, never do this. Drink from the Lethe after you submit, and move on with your lives. Don’t start editing a novel, get antsy because it’s hard, and start obsessing over your short story submissions.

*checks [market redacted]’s Twitter for updates*

TWIR: Okay, more than a week.

It’s been a while! I have read quite a few books recently. For example, my first Charlie Parker* mystery, but not my last. Also a book by a blogger I have long read. And I read Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill, just before going to see him talk to Lauren Beukes about her new book, Broken Monsters, which I have not read and am looking forward to.

Plus: A YA fantasy book for book club, which I did not love as much as the rest of my book club, and a YA fantasy book not for book club, which I did love. (Unspoken did not hit enough of my Beloved Tropes to overcome the pacing issues, and I am less won over than others by the Everyone Is Clever And Funny Here sort of world-building. The Diviners, on the other hand, did hit some Beloved Tropes so I was blind to many of its faults.)

There are always things that, when present in a work, will make me forgive a certain number of other things. Is a movie really, incredibly pretty? Then who cares about that “plot” thing? Is the book set in 1920s New York with speakeasies and hints of the labor movement and class unease? Well, I guess I can ignore the overuse of slang. It would be an unending project to try to list out all of my tropes, and it wouldn’t even be accurate because ever trope would probably have a caveat. But The Diviners had tropes for me, and Unspoken didn’t.

Currently: Re-reading We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson as my bedtime reading (it’s soothing to me). Plus a handful of other things, as always.

*Not the KC jazz great, though I’d read the heck out of that mystery series.

You may be eaten by a grue.

Cover of a random Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book from the 1980s.
You have died.

Choose Your Own Adventure books were big when I was a kid. I don’t remember anything about them, except the tension as you stuck your finger between the pages and peeked ahead to see if your choice meant life or death. Or pirates, possibly aliens.

In high school I discovered Hamlet: The Text Adventure. Later, the Hitchhiker’s Guide game, and when I had my hands on an iPad for a while, I discovered an app for interactive fiction, and Emily Short, and the difference between parser and link-based interactive fiction (IF), and a book about it and– you see.

Starting with Hamlet, I was into parser IF for a while — Parser is the interactive fiction that presents you with a short passage, and then a cursor. And you type. You type until you figure out what the valid commands are, what verbs the game understands. You type until you start to get your bearings within the game, understanding what your goal might be — get out of a room, find the treasure, explore.

What is the benefit of parser-based IF? The illusion of agency? The mystery to be solved? It is more like a game than it is a story. You wake up in this world, whether that’s how the narrative starts or not. You wake up in a strange world and are only told about it in snippets. You are walking toward a castle where a beast resides. You are in a landscape, and in the distance is a tower. You have stumbled into a dark area, and may be eaten by a grue. The discovery of things and solving of puzzles are, by and large, the most compelling draws for parser IF. You want a mystery. You want something to unfold as you type your way through it, half-blind.

I say illusion of agency because it is. (If you want to get really weird, let’s start talking about how all agency is an illusion. Your brain is a computer running a program! Your free will is just a complicated subroutine! Or is it predestined by a god, and only revealed to you as you live it? OH NO–) The general view is that there’s more agency in parser IF than there is in hypertext, where you’re stuck clicking links, and unable to make up your own choices. And of course, in traditional narrative there is no agency at all. As the player in parser IF, you might think, “I can do anything! I type a command, the game responds, and things happen! I have such agency, such control over the story.”

Okay, sure. Yeah, I guess so. Except you only have agency insofar as it’s programmed in. You can choose to TAKE, USE, LOOK, THROW, or any number of verbs, but only the ones that the game understands. And not even all of those — a command depends on the object, the situation.

And your action may not affect the story at all. The path of the story is wide enough to account for your slight wanderings to the left or right, your persistent investigations into the history of an object, but the path is still there. It’s large enough to make you think you’ve taken a left turn, when really all you’ve done is veered to the left side of the narrative path. You’re still marching inevitably toward the ending that the game author has set in front of you.

If there is any agency, it is simply in how deeply you engage the story, not the story itself. I could make an argument for that being present in traditional narrative, too, but it would be a very Lit Major-y thing to do and who has the time for that? Not me, not when I could be pretending to have agency in some parser IF.

TWIR: Small bites

A few articles I have enjoyed this week, as I try to make my Instapaper backlog less atrocious (it’s still atrocious):

Black Girls Hunger for Heroes, Too: A Black Feminist Conversation on Fantasy Fiction for Teens: This interview is short and great. There were moments that were a bit of a wake-up call for me, in that these two ladies noticed issues in The Hunger Games that completely passed me by. I suppose I was caught up in the thrill of it, and the thrill of seeing explicit class issues in a YA book.

IBI: Reading [The Hunger Games], I had to wonder why the hero didn’t come from District 11 if they’re the most oppressed. I remember thinking Rue’s role in the whole novel is what this comic book writer calls “fridging.” Women in comic books serve to bring out the male hero’s deep humanity. The woman dies and then the hero taps into—

ZETTA: His sense of justice.

A Tentacled, Flexible Breakthrough: Robot octopi! Tell me so much more. Can I have one as a pet?

They aim to replicate the key features of an octopus: eight arms to provide an almost infinite range of motion; the ability to squeeze through any opening larger than its chitinous beak; and an unusual nervous system in which the arms are semiautonomous and the central brain is thought to do little more than issue general commands (“Arms, let’s go catch that crab!”).

Monsters at the Door: Yes, I’m still reading about Emily Carroll. I love her. In a completely appropriate way.

My day with Emily Carroll passes in the presence of the moth; I’ve never seen a bigger one. “It’s so meaty,” she says, sounding gleefully disgusted.