Quote of the Day

"A book is not supposed to be a mirror. A book is supposed to be a door."

--Fran Lebowitz

Distinction Without Difference

Recent phone call:

Caller: "HP, are you depressed? You sound depressed."

Me: "No, I'm not depressed . . . . I'm writing."

Monsters We Love

Your deep thought for the day, from one of the great monster movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon:

"It is impossible. But I, Lucas, will do it."

Allrighty then! You, Lucas, should go for it.

It's the lipstick that really makes this picture work, no?

How do y'all like me now??

you and your pussycat claws

So I'm writing about crawfish right now. Not just any crawfish but undead crawfish. Definitely stay tuned for that one.

But anyway I happened to come across possibly the greatest crawfish picture ever. Not this, although it's good in an everybody-was-kung-fu-fighting kind of way.

No, the greatest crawfish picture ever is surely this.

What I really wonder is what the cat in the back is thinking. He looks embarrassed, like, "OMIGOD, there he goes again . . . ."

(Photo courtesy of a quite interesting article on crawfish poaching. Not crawfish poaching by cats, alas.)

Quote of the Day

"Unintentionally screwing up is what storytelling’s all about."

--Victorian Mixon

Zed's Dead

So I’ve got zombies on my masthead, I’ve got one zombie post up already and a few more in the pipeline . . . what’s so great about these beasties (“zed’s” as the Brits call them). Well, thanks for asking. I have some notions.

1) Zombies are the people’s monster.

Contemporary vampires are pretty damn glamorous. Be they tanned sexy (George Hamilton), broody sexy (Angel), punky sexy (Spike), goth sexy (Brad Pitt), Studio-54-ish-ly sexy (Catherine Denueve and David Bowie), or just plain horny (First Blood) . . . . They are the popular kids--the kings and queens of the Undead Prom.

Let’s face facts: Modern vamps are everything you are not--buff, well-dressed, self-confident, quip-tastic, and laid frequently.

Vampires are the ones who get waved through the rope line and straight into the VIP section of the club. Zombies don’t even get near the doorman, and if they do, they eat him.

Werewolves are not quite as sexxxy as vamps but they do have that sort of primal hellbeast thing going for them. And even if you don’t thrill to the idea of running naked through the woods and chasing down your dinner, if you’re a werewolf you only have to work one night a month. How bad is that?

Zombies get no days off. They look like hell and they smell worse; nobody wants to be hangin with the Zeds. They shamble ever-forward whether they like it or not (my suspicion is they don’t). No cool clothes, no hot chicks, no sassy comeback lines, and absolutely no rest for the weary. Even when they go to the mall, they can’t buy anything.

Any of that sound familiar? Zombies are the poster-beasts of the economic downturn.

2. Zombies are color-blind; they are people-blind, period.

There is a long-standing cliche in horror films that anytime you see a person of color, s/he is not only doomed but indeed will be the first to go down. This trope is so universally acknowledged that sarcastic movies like Scream even mock it.

And if you aren’t the wrong color in horror movies, then you’re wrong in some other way. Sluts are punished for their naughty ways, jocks are punished for their physical superiority. This one’s greedy, that one’s stupid, those people over there are snobs: die, die, die. The movie 7even rendered this concept agonizingly literal, but the monster-as-punisher meme dates back to Psycho and even earlier, all the way back to the original horror stories of the US colonial period.

Zombies don’t grok any of this Puritanical bullshit. They “punish” their victims for one reason and one reason only: their perfect victim is the one who is closest.

3. Zombies know their Thomas Hobbes.

Like all puppetmasters, horror writers and filmmakers like to create universes that make sense. If a monster gets you, it’s because you did something wrong, or you just are wrong on some fundamental level. It’s a comfort to the audience because we know we certainly would never make those mistakes.

Magical thinking isn’t limited to horror, of course. I've recently had it explained to me that the reason kids are dying of H1N1 is because their parents don’t know how to properly care for the flu. Yeah, and if only the cheerleader hadn’t had unprotected sex with the quarterback, Freddie Krueger wouldn’t have sliced her to ribbons.

In Leviathan (1661), Thomas Hobbes described "the life of man" as being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Zombies are scary precisely because they teach us that magical thinking means nothing; because they know life is brutish and short, and if you get too close, they'll demonstrate as much.

Why did you get cancer? Why did that drunk guy run a red light and smash into your car? Why did you get bitten by a zombie?

Because. That’s why. Just because.

Damn scary, indeed.

A Writer's Companion

Thoughts on the writer's greatest frenemy. If you don't know why this relates to writing, you've never tried to write anything. It took me two days to get around to posting this.