As originally posted on Dark, But Shining

Greetings, programs!

Yes, I’ve dared to show my face again after letting another deadline not only woosh past, but actually break the sound barrier in the process. There’s no excuse. But there is a harsh reality. That being that I’m not in possession of the time or energy required to get this done in a regular manner. I’d every intention (and they were such good intentions) of taking things in a new direction, just that direction happens to be in a completely different one altogether.

Part of it was the fact that here I’m sitting around trying to dissect horror in a rational manner. Which is kinda crazy when you get down to it. Horror is all about what happens when the mundane and the irrational collide. Pick apart horror too much and you end up with dark fantasy (maybe) or science fiction (maybe again). One of my favorite examples of this is THE THIRTEENTH WARRIOR, which was a movie that came out a few years ago, based on Michael Crichton’s EATERS OF THE DEAD. It’s the story of an arab who’s exiled to the land of the Vikings, where he and his adopted people are confronted by an alien tribe of killers who have harnessed the powers of darkness and are spreading like a black tide across the land. They kill, they eat what they kill and then move on, apparently unstoppable. Serpents of fire twist down entire mountainsides in advance of this damned army.

I was into it. This was some good stuff, sort of Howardesque sword and sorcery. These guys were badass and nobody was going to be holding them down.

And then something happened. It just turned out that they were a tribe of cannibals who fought as berserkers and worshipped an ancient stone statue that they carried around. Take away the mystique and they were just another band of marauders. What a letdown. All that awesome buildup and then POP, the balloon is in tatters and what you have left is escaping empty air.

Not a lot of horror there. Thus, my admonition that if you poke too much at your horror favorites, you may find that the center really isn’t there. Rationality eats horror. You get to the heart of darkness and all you find is an overweight, bald and washed-up actor. That’s a metaphor, but not a bad one.

Love your horror, fear it, be consumed by it, just don’t flay it with your scalpels too deeply. No matter how much it begs.

As for me, don’t worry so much. I’ll be spending my meager resources on getting some actual work done instead of anguishing over the fact that I never reviewed ODE TO KIROHITO or that I should have had another entry up weeks ago. STRANGEWAYS looks to be happening this year. EATERS will likely be written this year, and I might even be convinced to keep it as a comic presentation should I be able to find a reliable artist.

My thanks to Rick Geerling for putting up with my breakdown of discipline, Ken Lowery for putting me on this path in the first place, and to you folks for continuing to read along my meanderings through this chunk of the psychic landscape. I may indeed be back here, but certainly not on anything like a regular basis.