Peter Tennant's List

Once again, a story of mine has been listed by Black Static reviewer Peter Tennant as one of his favourite horror stories of 2013 (so far).

Other stories listed are by the brilliant M. John Harrison (whose collection, The Machine in Shaft Ten, was for me a highpoint of the 1970s), along with John Langan, Nina Allan, Anne-Sylvie Salzman, John Howard, Steve Rasnic Tem, Conrad Williams, Daniel Mills, D. P. Watt, Terry Grimwood, Joseph D’Lacey, Jason A. Wyckoff, Anne Michaud, Livia Llewellyn, and Elizabeth Stott.

The Urgency Today

Every day, I write 1200 words to keep myself active. Here's a passage from today's work:

I have read that plateaus are often reached in learning, that periods of achievement are often followed by periods of confusion, frustration, directionless questing. This brings to mind a centipede that I watched earlier this year: marching across the asphalt of the Gatineau Parkway, it seemed unstoppable, mechanical, locked into the programs of insentient purpose. Yet when the centipede arrived on the verge of the grass, it paused, and began to twist its head and upper segments back and forth, back and forth, uncertain of what to do next. In motion, it seemed a mechanism; in doubt, it seemed alive.

 I must remind myself that human beings are often most alive, most aware, when routine breaks down and the passage from day to day becomes a challenge. Here I am on the verge of something new, and if I find myself casting about in confusion, I can at least take heart in being alive with an urgency today that I might not have noticed as keenly yesterday.

The Rage Behind the Mask

Walt Kelly was born today, in 1913.

Because my father was a university professor, I had access to the university library while still in highschool.

In the summer of 1979 -- while I was being astonished by the novels of Mervyn Peake -- I chanced upon a book by Walt Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo (1959). I had read the comic strip as a child, but I had never understood it; compared to the simplistic drawings and dialogue of the strips around it, Pogo had seemed like the relic of an ancient, eccentric world.

I glanced through the book, thought, "What the hell," and took it out.

By the time I had reached the halfway point, I was totally devoted to Kelly's art, his writing, and his world. I became a hunting fanatic: not only did I search through used bookstores for other volumes in the series, but I dreamed of Kelly books that had never existed.

What fascinated me about Kelly (beyond his power as a draughtsman and writer), was the tension in his work between a child-like whimsy and a seething rage at the idiocy of crowds, the mendacity of lunatics in power. Pogo was the mask of an angry man who had found a way to channel his anger for public consumption -- but the rage was there, like barbed wire in a birthday cake.

 

 

The Rhythms of Planting, Harvesting, Aging and Loss

The Ballad of Narayama, directed by Keisuke Kinoshita. 1958.

A great challenge of art is how to deal with troubling topics in a way that sheds light on them without scaring away an audience. One solution is to provide a beautiful background without losing sight of the pain and loss in the foreground; this film does that in the most haunting and magnificent way.

The film is essentially a ballad, presented with song and music, not as you would find in a musical, but as a form of commentary. The action takes place in vast, theatrical sets that are gorgeously detailed yet clearly artificial, and the entire production is bathed in stunning colours. Just when you begin to think that nothing else could top the visual splendour of the previous moment, the film surprises you again -- and again.

This breathtaking visual beauty serves a tale that would otherwise be too raw, too harsh to consider. The story deals with a peasant community that has taken a severe approach to the question of population: whenever the elders reach the age of 70, they are carried off to the peak of a mountain, and left there to die. This procedure is ritualized in every way, right down to the songs that children sing, right down to the rhythms of planting and harvesting and the movement of the seasons. These people accept their way of life, and pass it on from generation to generation without complaint.

Yet all the same, these people are still human beings, with human feelings and human ties. The burden of leaving someone you love to die, alone, in the cold, is more than most of us could bear, and the film is clear about the human costs of this tradition.

In the end, The Ballad of Narayama provides no maps to an exit, no easy answers to an old human challenge. It confronts directly the ways in which we handle aging and death, and if you have any heart at all, this film will break it.

Yet at the same time, in its honesty, in its compassion, in its overwhelming visual beauty, this film will stay with you. I urge you to see it.

Skewed Reality

In the British magazine, Black Static, Peter Tennant has reviewed my collection of nightmare stories:

The stories are more complex and detailed than my précis of each one would suggest. Rather than James, it seems to me that the genius loci of this collection is Aickman, with a similar sense of skewed reality and the unsettling feel of madness and irrationality bubbling away beneath the surface of the text. Mark Fuller Dillon is an original talent, whose precise use of language, obliquely disturbing imagery and meticulous world building single him out as a writer to watch. My advice is to nip over to Smashwords and download this one now....
-- Issue Number 35