moon_custafer: Me with purple hair and heart-shaped sunglasses (Heart sunglasses)
Enjoyed this week’s Doctor Who, "The Story and the Engine," and its dive into Afro-Fantasy—is that the right term? I usually encounter Afro-Futurism, but this was set more or less in the present (2019 according to the Wikipedia entry), and the premise was definitely more on the fantasy end of SFF.

I did think it wrapped up a bit too quickly and neatly, but that was the fault of Nu-Who episode-format constraints, not writer Inua Ellams. *reads rest of Wikipedia entry* oh that mysterious kid they lampshaded was Capt. Poppy from the Space Babies episode? Which was also about storytelling. I hope they get back to that and that it wasn’t just a thematic shoutout.

Watched The Green Man (1990) on YouTube, which had three episodes to tell its M.R.James/sex-comedy/Fawlty Towers tale, and revelled in every minute of them. I still would’ve liked a final scene with the protagonist’s new-age-y daughter-in-law—since she’d been his confidante since Episode Two, I can’t imagine her not asking how his meeting with the ghost went, especially since the injuries to his young daughter must be known to the rest of the household.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
It’s an anthology of local ghost stories (also one loosely based on a personal experience, which imo is the best one).

Shivers, 2023
moon_custafer: matching nail varnish and rubber tentacle (Tentacle)
The world continues to be in a shambles, but I’ve got a long weekend. Here are a few lighter things to read/look at:

Project Gutenberg has at least two anthologies of ghost-stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930). I say ghost-stories, but some of them depict clearly supernatural events, some imply a psychological explanation, while others ambiguous and don’t lean either way. All of them can be described as “New England Domestic Realism, and also there are/might be ghosts involved.”

Vivaldi on marimbas.

For those who’ve never seen it, as well as those who haven’t in a long time: Wayne and Shuster’s “Rinse the Blood Off My Toga” (1950s CBC version, with intro).

And while we’re talking about Big Julie: The Molossian & the Vertragus (non-explicit) Asterix/Julius Caesar slashfic by ansketil.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
Trying to recall who it was posted a link, back before Christmas, to a Project Gutenberg collection of E. F. Benson spook stories, but I've been reading through them the past few days, so thanks.

I'd read at least one ("And the Dead Spake") as a child, and one or two others felt vaguely familiar. I'm positive I've read a different story, possibly by Roald Dahl, with a similar theme to "The Man Who Went Too Far;" I can't recall a thing about what happens in it, just that somebody tries to create their own Eden through meditation and things inevitably go violently bad with no obvious trigger because humans can't have nice things.

I looked up Benson's Wikipedia entry and facepalmed to read that he'd been a champion figure-skater, along with his other talents. More disturbingly, his death from throat cancer loads even more body horror into "How Fear Departed form the Long Gallery" and "Caterpillars."

Other stray thoughts:

The endings are awfully abrupt, and sometimes a bit anticlimactic. I was disappointed that something like "The Gardener" didn't end in a showdown, after the amazing build-up, but I guess Benson doesn't roll that way.

You'd think Hugh Grainger in "The Gardener" and "The China Bowl" is the same Hugh Grainger from "The Bus-Conductor," but I can't tell since he never mentions, when a haunting comes up, that he's encountered such things before; of course if it's the same narrator he wouldn't need to.

Cats in Benson stories appear to be invariably (a) sinister, and (b) large and gray. If they were solely the former I'd assume Benson just didn't like cats, but the recurring physical description makes me wonder if he had a large gray cat himself and liked to wryly Tuckerize it into the stories.

I really want to know more about the people of Achnaleish.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (acme)
Sapphire and Steel is on Youtube, the episodes edited together into complete stories, and for some reason today I found myself watching "Assignment 4" and "Assignment 5" (Sapphire and Steel gives no spoilers when it comes to titles.) I liked both of these better than "Assignment 1" -- the pace is less glacial, the show isn't trying to pretend it's for children, and the humans are more convincingly confused by the time paradoxes as opposed to just really stupid. I looked the series up and its creator, Peter J. Hammond, also wrote "Small Worlds" and "Out of the Rain" for Torchwood, and it shows in "Assignment 4" with its spooky!children escaping from old photos at the whim of a man with no face, or sometimes a different face depending on who's looking.

I really liked "Assignment 5" though it's by different writers than the rest of the series. Usually the show's budget, which makes Dr. Who look like a Cecil B. DeMille production, restricts cast size as well as setting, but this one has about ten characters in a sort of deconstructed Agatha Christie plot. A wealthy industrialist decides to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of his company by redecorating his mansion as it was in 1930 and throwing a weekend theme party with everyone in period dress. In the world of Sapphire and Steel, where time incursions are triggered by things like reading old nursery rhymes, or keeping too many antiques in one place, this is like throwing a bucket of chum into shark-heavy waters and then taking a dip; but on top of this, it's also the anniversary of the mysterious death of the industrialist's business partner, and something's trying to actually set the clock back to 1930 so events can be rerouted. Interestingly, none of the actors are rejuvenated to match the time period, which adds to the creepiness as their memories are rewound. I'm surprised they aren't saved by the mens' anachronistic haircuts, though.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (acme)
While looking for something else in a google image search, I came across the cover of The Last Bouquet: Twilight Tales by Marjorie Bowen. The name rang a bell, and looking her up, I recognized "The Crown Derby Plate," a ghost story that has always stayed with me. Project Gutenburg has (most of) the book, and the stories are amazing, and for the most part, amazingly bleak(1). The standouts include "The Hidden Ape," which is horrible without being necessarily supernatural; "Florence Flannery — An Ornament in Regency Paste," which starts as a Regency Gothic and unexpectedly acquires a Lovecraftian taint; and "The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes," which is... some kind of fragment of a fairy-tale where we have to fill in the first two acts; we only see the third act, which in the style of the Victorian pantomimes has transfigured the situation into some kind of Harlequinade because reality would never permit a happy ending.

(1) The last story in the collection, "Raw Material," is an exception to this: a tale of murder and haunting which doesn't go where you think it will.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (acme)
Andrew’s been listening to audiobooks of Howard stories lately, and therefore so have I – hearing the texts is a different experience, somehow, than reading them – they seem slower and more detailed. The racist ones are even more uncomfortable when read out loud (there was a Conan one where I finally started making snarky comments, “oh gee, are the villains still black – I’d forgotten it since he mentioned it two sentences ago.” The frustrating thing is that Howard could write stuff that was much more sympathetic and nuanced towards PoC; maybe it’s a case of earlier stories vs. later stories. Anyway, I enjoyed the one last night -- a weird boxing story called “The Apparition in the Prize Ring.”

So in this story, "Mistah John," a white boxing manager recounts how African-American boxer Ace Jessel faced the toughest opponent of his career, Senegalese boxer "Mankiller Gomez" (his professional name), with inspiration (and last-minute supernatural assistance) from the ghost of early 19th-century black prizefighter Tom Molineaux (who was a real person). So for the count, we’ve got two good-guy boxers vs one bad-guy, all three of them black, and a white narrator telling the story to a (presumably?) white audience. Now to an extent I think Howard is able to sidestep skin colour in this story because it’s still basically a “heroic American vs. sinister foreigner” yarn; Jessel is a fast, skilled boxer whose only flaw, so far as his manager is concerned, is a lack of ruthlessness (see “flaws only a protagonist could have”); by contrast the brutal Gomez has won all his fights, up until the time he meets Jessel, through sheer strength and bloodthirstiness.

I think it would be interesting to translate the story to a comic or short film – a 3rd-person PoV would put Jessel and his manager on a more equal footing for character development (frex, although the manager attribute’s Jessel’s unwillingness to go for the kill to his ‘happy-go-lucky” nature, there’s a brief mention of “the wars’ if the story takes place in the 1920s that could indicate Jessel is a veteran – in which case he may personally want to keep a clear division between having killed men on the battlefield and boxing for sport) while allowing them to demonstrate despite the racialized setting, a convincing bond, demonstrated in the story by them being the only two able to perceive Molineaux’s ghost.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (acme)
I followed a link to to what turned out to be a review of The Quiet Ones with the headline Aren't You Sick of Possession Movies That Always Look Like This? While it seemed an even-handed review of the movie, so far as I can tell without having seen it, I'm more interested in thinking about how possession movies might be done differently; but find myself mostly recalling ghost stories.

Fullcircle, by John Buchan, and A Wicked Voice, by Vernon Lee -- do treat possession in a more subtle way -- perhaps because ghosts are different from demons. Both have stories in which someone's personal tastes are insidiously manipulated from what they were; both have the problem that the change does not necessarily seem all that bad -- in Fullcircle, the people who move into the old house first become more sociable and less hippy-granola-ish, and then, o horror, they convert to Catholicism. In A Wicked Voice, the narrator is compelled the spirit of a castrato to compose Italianate neo-Baroque operas instead of the grim Wagnerian-inspired stuff that he wants to do; and is even more appalled that audiences are fool enough to like them (if he were living in our century, he'd probably use the term "sheeple.") Subtle possession is a good trope that can easily be done in by values dissonance.

Lately I've come across the reverse -- a cache of transformation-themed fetish stories that can mostly be summed up as "in which I become the man of my dreams." I call these the reverse because they're clearly meant as wish-fulfillment even though the situations would be horror to anyone who didn't have that specific kink (admittedly, that's pretty much the definition of kink). The one that I rather liked, The Top Hat, was also the closest to the type of possession stories described above: a man buys a pre-WWI hat and finds himself, over the following weeks and months, physically coming to resemble the Teddy-Roosevelt-esque gent who originally owned it (imagine The Case of Charles Dexter Ward if it were gay bear kink with a happy time-paradox ending).

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