Friday Quotations: Swallow You Whole

To get the full experience of this one, or at least, to experience it like I did, scroll through the lyrics while the video's playing. I won't post them here, but, well, you know how to use the Internet. Go to, brave wanderer.

So this is Jonathan Coulton's "Creepy Doll." I've been on a Coulton kick lately--I can't get his (not Glee's) arrangement of "Baby Got Back" out of my head, as politically incorrect as the song is--and I've been going through his discography. And then I stumbled on this. Like I said, I was scrolling through the lyrics while I was listening, and it freaked me out.  Italics necessary. I had to actually stop the song right there, and I still haven't listened to it all the way through.  And this got me thinking: exactly what is it about this song that bothers me so much?  It walks a fine line between horror and almost comedy; not many ghost stories contain the lines "you want to go antiquing," nor do they have a horror from beyond that tells you you should lay off the sugar.  And yet... freaked out I was.  I considered, then, the stories throughout my life that have bothered me the most, my own private nightmare fuel, to borrow TVTropes' phrase The list, in case you were wondering, includes that video with the giant babies I stumbled on a year or two back, Christopher Pike's "Whisper of Death," and "The Drum," from More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. (And check out the illustrations from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. I asked my parents for multiple books in this bunch; I must have been insane.) So what do all of these things have in common? I've narrowed it down to two criteria:

 1) A sense of inevitability. In all four of these artifacts, there's almost immediately a feeling that things are going to go wrong.  "The Drum" uses the rule of three to escalate the little girls' acts, and you just know that something terrible is going to happen the third time.  In "Whisper of Death," a short story describes the death of each character in allegorical fashion, just before it happens. Drakengard's ending works through foreboding music, and a sense of apocalypse. And Creepy Doll--there, it was the lyrics, and the chorus.  Each one of these works to establish dread for what's going to happen; it's less about surprise, and more about the the feeling that you can't stop what's happening.

2) A swerve from reality.  Each of these also contains something entirely inexplicable. It's something that not only couldn't happen in the real world, but, from the protagonists' point of view, it shouldn't be possible within their world either.   It's a dismantling of reality as we know it, the revelation at the end that it was not only inevitable, but entirely beyond your understanding; somebody was playing with a different rule set, and you didn't know until the game was over, and you'd lost.

(As a corollary, you'd think, by these qualifications, that I'd rank Lovecraft's stories pretty highly, but to be honest, they've never really bothered me.  Yes, there's a sense of inevitability, but the swerve isn't the same, especially after your first Lovecraft story; you know the punchline's going to be "and it couldn't be comprehended by mortal minds" and as long as that's the assumed premise, it's not a swerve anymore. )

So now that I've identified what I fear, I take away its power, right?  I should be able to face that song no problem, now.  *tries to watch*  Nope, still terrifying.  And worse now, because I know why. 

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Deferred Gratification

This post is part of a weekly series wherein I look at the new books acquired by my university library.  It's an opportunity to view and discuss the latest works in the field of philosophy, fiction, pop culture, digital media, and literature, among others.  And it begins with three simple words:

This is Bibliophile.

At least, that's how it usually goes.  Today, however, and until Tuesday evening, my local university library's database is down for maintenance.  It's like they don't even know or care about Bibliophile.  It's disheartening, I know.  See you Tuesday, folks.

Later Days.

High Octane Nightmare Fuel

At least, I think that's the technical term for it according to TVTropes.org. I was perusing a list of the weirdest videogame endings today, and one of the five endings of the videogame Drakengard made the list. I watched it, and, well, I can't unwatch it. It's not that it's scary, per se, it's just so... disturbing. It's creepy. Really creepy. I think it's the constant gurgling that pushes it over the edge. I'll post it below, but don't watch it unless you're really sure you want to.



You were warned.

I think that I want to track down the game now, just to check whether it's as disturbing in context as it in isolation.

As for what I found disturbing, I think that's pretty obvious. And for once, I think we can turn to Freud as for why: we've got the oral stage gone wrong, mixed with a heavy, heavy dose of the uncanny, because of their proportions if nothing else.

I was so momentarily disturbed by this that I skipped out on going to see Allen's Midnight in Paris; it wasn't until I read a few chapters of the graphic novel Phonogram that I started to feel normal again. So to sum up, I was so disturbed by one type of media that I avoided another type of media, then recuperated with a third type of media and summarized the whole thing on a fourth type of media. That doesn't mean anything, but at least when you're focusing on that sentence, you're not thinking about those things' giant teeth.

Yech.

Later Days.