by carson.winter | May 1, 2022 | Uncategorized
What creepypasta lends to its readers is a sense of the uncanny encroaching on reality. At its best, this distortion straddles the line between the unimaginable and the tactile. They work as constructed urban legends, where maybe it didn’t happen to you, but it did happen. In the age of the internet, where life has been thoroughly demystified, the creepypasta offers testimonial proof to the otherworldly. That it still exists, because something happened—to a friend of a friend of a friend.
The Rules of the Road by C.B. Jones understands the mechanics that make creepypasta work, and it successfully utilizes them while expanding on their constraints and combining them with a sharp sense of emotional resonance. You could just as easily call Rules a novel as you could a short story collection, though I guess the most insightful of us would call it a mosaic novel. It manages to take the best of both worlds—flashes of instant familiarity torn from common experience and an obsessive wrap-around that grounds it all. The Rules of the Road does this without the usual negative trappings of the genre, feeling well-crafted under sure-hands throughout. The end result is a laudable ride down the schism between the known and the unknowable.
The idea at the center of Jones’ novel is a self-propagating engine: a folksy voice on the radio, detailing the titular rules. If you follow the instructions, you have nothing to worry about. If you don’t? Well, Buck Hensley will let you know. The rules themselves are a highlight of the book—each of them mirroring the American Road Trip Experience. Everyone has seen the “For a good time call…” graffiti. Everyone has seen the lone shoe on the side of the highway. Everyone has held their breath while passing a graveyard. These images that make up the American roadscape, combined with automobile superstitions, form a new mythology under Jones’ expert hands. The acuteness of their observations are the perfect pathway to creating a sense of tension amidst our familiarity.
The stories here are uniformly excellent, if sometimes a little overlong. Although Jones does an excellent job of using his formula without beating it into the ground. While each story is framed as a tale from the road, they’re all very distinct with unique characters, rules, and outcomes. It’d be easy to write a book where every character breaks a rule and dies (and that’d be a very boring book), but The Rules of the Road features a lot of diversity despite using the same set-up for a large portion of the book. There’s stories about touring musicians, survivor’s guilt, urban prejudice, and more. The Rule acts sometimes as a comeuppance, sometimes as a savior—but it affects each character differently. Which is why it’s hard to say Rules only takes its cues from creepypasta, as while the concept is a powerful driving force here, Jones never loses sight of his characters.
These rules, delivered by eldritch radio DJ Buck Hensley become a familiar delight throughout the book, as well as sort of a running joke. By the end of the novel, where Jones takes us to a surprising emotional place, Buck’s voice is stuck in our heads. He’s the country-fried coyote of the airwaves, gluing together disparate tales with his folksy warnings. In my mind, he has the muscle to be every bit of the modern spook as Slenderman, something people joke about on the open road, when the radio turns to static.
The Rules of the Road is a fantastic piece of horror storytelling that feels like a grand accumulation of influences—a meeting point between the modern literary horror short and the populist urban legend. C.B. Jones has written a book that melds these influences into something uniquely tuned into the horror zeitgeist, a call and answer to the unknowable—a yearning for blank spaces, tall tales, and rogue signals.
by carson.winter | Mar 31, 2022 | Uncategorized
I first discovered Kurt Fawver in the pages of Vastarien, where his story/play “The Gods in Their Seats, Unblinking,” left me feeling like I was in the presence of weird horror’s latest master. Here was a story that was Ligottian in all the most delicious ways—flexing its format to the breaking point while delivering legitimate existentialist chills. From there, it was no surprise that The Dissolution of Small Worlds became my new must-read. I had joined the cult of Fawver, and in my new devotion I proselytized his mastery to all of my weirdest friends.
Fawver’s work, for better or worse, is almost designed to resonate with me. It’s absurdist, dark, sometimes funny, and oftentimes unrelentingly bleak. It’s the sort of fiction that reminds me why horror became a lifelong passion. And now, with the release of We are Happy, We are Doomed, I am once again in awe of what Fawver brings to the Weird.
While We are Happy, We are Doomed is a short story collection, it feels unfair to directly compare it to The Dissolution of Small Worlds, because Fawver’s latest release is not quite as traditional of a short story collection. We are Happy… is hyper-focused on Fawver working in a particular mode—that of sociological horror. The stories here often focus on communities and are written almost as if they were non-fiction essays or snippets from a history book. If I were to describe this collection to anyone, I’d say it’s something like a meeting of Franz Kafka and Ken Burns. Many of the stories are told through a knowing eye-in-the-sky, describing the evolution of a community after coming in contact with some strange aberration. Absurdity lies at the heart of We are Happy, We are Doomed, and it’s this dissonant sense of oddity that teases out its horror.
Opener, “The Bleeding Maze: A Visitor’s Guide,” guides the reader through its titular distortion, but doesn’t merely linger on it as an oddity. In Fawver’s fiction, there’s always a progression of strangeness that goes further than one can imagine. The way Fawver introduces these scenarios, then spins them out naturally toward unnatural conclusions, makes for compelling fiction. While these stories could be newspaper clippings from another dimension, they never feel dull or dry. If there’s one lesson to be taken from We are Happy, We are Doomed, it’s that strangeness begets more strangeness.
While sometimes Fawver’s penchant for absurdity veers into the heavy-handed (see: “The Man in the Highchair”), oftentimes the stories straddle their sense of the uncanny with legitimate horror. “The Richview Massacre” is one that comes to mind, where despite the story unraveling from something as banal as pizza, there is still a real sense of the Weird at play. For me, Fawver’s writing is most impressive when it takes on silly topics and reshapes them into bleak visions of fractured communities. As many of us feel more and more divided and defined by our beliefs and locales, We are Happy, We are Doomed holds a mirror to our own connections, and forces us to consider not just the ones we have made, but the ones that may be demanded of us.
To say that the dominant voice of We are Happy… is that of a history book isn’t quite true though, as Fawver also plays with form to get at his finest results. Two of my favorite stories in this collection deviate in delicious ways from Fawver’s bird’s-eye view of communities grappling with the strange. In “Extinction in Green,” the story is told through a series of sparse diary entries, providing a peculiar escalation of one distortion on a small group of people. This story, juxtaposed with the others in the collection, feels acutely claustrophobic. It’s a reminder that the scope of Fawver’s interest isn’t only towns and cities, but people joined by circumstances—no matter how minute. Another story that utilizes a meta format to great aplomb, is “Rule and Regulations of White Pines, Vermont.” This is one of the best stories in the collection, and it’s a great reminder that there’s no better narrative device than a ticking clock—which this list of peculiar rules and lore provides. We are Happy, We are Doomed has enough diversity in storytelling, that even with a collection that’s this cohesive, it never suffers the effects of feeling samey. Each distortive event is so specific and strange, that even next to so many similarly themed stories, they each manage to stand on their own.
When we’re talking about modern weird horror, we can’t not talk about Kurt Fawver. His fiction is distinctive. It carries the torch of folks like Kafka, Ligotti, and Padgett, while expressing a singular obsession and perspective unique to the author. Fawver’s brand of absurdist horror is as bizarre as it is unsettling. It plumbs the depths of what makes us human, exploring the one thing about humanity that seems to define us—our relationships to each other. We are Happy, We are Doomed, in that respect, feels like an evolution of both Lovecraft’s and Ligotti’s cypher-like protagonists—the first person automatons that represent the individual as a speck in an infinite blackness. Fawver works in a similar manner, except the “I” becomes a “We.” In We are Happy, We are Doomed our collectivity is not enough to fight off the madness, it’s just more fuel for the fire.
by carson.winter | Feb 26, 2022 | Uncategorized
Nogle’s Beulah is about people as much as it’s about ghosts
Horror, ultimately, is about people. The knife is meaningless unless it’s got a body to cut to ribbons. The monster isn’t scary without someone to chase. The universe isn’t cold and uncaring without someone who desperately wants it to be the opposite. When talking about horror—where it’s gone and where it’s going—it’s important to remember the lens through which we view it. Because, after all, we are the lens.
Christi Nogle’s Beulah understands this better than most. Here we have a debut novel as steeped in people as it is in ghosts (although it has plenty of both). It’s a quiet book of big emotions, disenchantment, and mental illness—but most of all, it’s a story about people. People fighting, loving, excusing, and of course, coming of age. Some will say this is not a horror novel at all, or give it a blue-ribbon genre title like “elevated horror” or “post horror.” Whatever you want to call it, Beulah is an engaging tale filled with vividly drawn characters and heart-wrenching sadness.
Beulah takes place in the small town of Beulah, Idaho, where Georgie, her mother, and two sisters have come to help an old friend renovate a house. While this may sound like a typical set-up, and could send the dominoes falling toward a familiar outcome (house is haunted, family is scared, horror ensues), Nogle centers the novel’s journey on Georgie and her internal perspective. Told in sharply written first-person, Georgie isn’t just the main character, she’s truly the heart of the novel—even more so than the titular Beulah.
In getting to know Georgie, who is blessed/cursed with the ability to see ghosts (another horror trope that doesn’t go quite where you expect), I was reminded me of SP Miskowski’s immediate and voicey I Wish I Was Like You—another novel that featured a difficult young woman coming to grips with a setting-as-character.
And while it may not sound like a selling point, Georgie’s frustrating nature is really one of Beulah’s greatest strengths. In many ways, the character is all the more poignantly depicted for her own flaws. There’s no getting around it—Georgie is a piece of work. She’s detached, depressed, sometimes oblivious to others emotions, sometimes precisely empathic; she’s self-centered, lazy, and at other times demonstrably kind and caring to her family. Frankly, she’s a mess. But, this mess at the center of the story is what makes for such a lucid coming of age tale. Georgie is a fuck-up, but we’re rooting for her the whole time to finally figure it out.
It bears mentioning though that Georgie isn’t the only character here. Her mother, sisters, and sort-of love interests are depicted with an eye for detail and truth. Still, it is Beulah—the town—that stays with me. Nogle expertly captures the feel of small town Idaho as a place stuck out of time. As a former Idahoan, there’s a sense of remoteness and disconnect living in the Gem State that lends itself well to a novel about ghosts. In many ways, Georgie and her family, in coming to Beulah, mirror the specters that toil in oblivion beneath their noses.
Beulah has a lot of masterful character work, but it is still important to remember that this is a novel of supernatural horror. And just as it delivers on selling us its cast and setting, so too does it create an interesting and unsettling depiction of the afterlife. The ghosts in Beulah are strange. They flit at the corners of your vision, they appear as shadows, they get locked into the labor of their lives. They sometimes interact with people, but when they do, it’s an absent-minded parody of human connection. In Beulah, ghosts are vaguely sentient patterns. It seems fitting then, that Georgie, as she comes of age, must decide which of her patterns are most important to break for her to grow.
Beulah is a confident debut novel from a powerhouse of a writer. Nogle creates a world for us to live in and populates it with people torn from the periphery of our own lives. The people are not perfect, but they feel real. And when horror comes for them—as it comes for us all, eventually—their shudders and shakes might as well be our own.
