Lugubrious
"I can't say there is much to complain about really. No one expects much of me. I get to lie about as much as I want. I can lick my own balls which -- let me say -- isn't as weird as it first sounds, especially when you're a dog. I get to chase cats who are always the biggest sissies when it comes to a little fooling around. Like I want a cat hairball in my throat. Geez. I was just playing.
Anyway, it's all pretty good. Sure, the food sucks, but most humans are suckers for anything resembling anthropomorphism in their pets. You get a properly lugubrious expression on your face while they're eating dinner? Bingo. Table scraps.
Though, pork gives me the most righteous gas. Never was a problem when I was human.
That's right. I used to be a two-legger, before I pissed off my girlfriend's great-aunt from Romania. Yeah. Who know that the folk from the old country still knew a bit of magic?"
088: The Apocalyptic Hero
The Hero, as outlined by Joseph Campbell, must reconcile the doubt within himself when he returns from the other side. Even though he might fear that society is not yet ready for his insight and illumination, he must give it to them. He must trust that they will not abuse the knowledge, that they are ready to consider enlightenment.
The Apocalpytic Hero is the guy who has been burned by this trust. He has come back from the other side, having seen the wonders of the universe, and has been spurned by the very group whom he attempted to love. And it is a matter of the heart. They didn't love him back and now he's sulking -- bitter and distrustful of those who have abandoned him.
John Creasy -- Denzel Washington's character in the recent (and superb) Man on Fire -- is an Apocalpytic Hero. It's only after someone extends him love that he remembers what it is like to be enlightened AND a member of society. In the end his gift to the world is accepted and he is able to achieve some semblance of peace.
In the Apocalpytic Thriller, the hero must be coerced back from his exile. He differs from the normal hero in that he has already gone to the other side; he knows that THE WORLD IS NOT AS IT SEEMS. And, because he has gone to the Abyss and stared Khoronzon in the face and not gone insane, he is the perfect candidate to do so again. He is the hero of the last generation and the next generation seeks him out again because the new candidate for Hero didn't make the cut.
In Campbell's cycle, the Apocalpytic Hero is the Magus -- the wise old man who teaches the young hero how to survive on the other side. Think Obiwan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker. If the story had been slightly different (and the initial events were on this path until the young hero intervened and wasn't killed by Tuscan Raiders out in the desert -- pity that), then it would have been Ben Kenobi who was asked to come out his exile to save the universe. But, as it was, whiny boy Luke Skywalker survived to find Kenobi and get his father's lightsaber...yada yada yada.
It is the task of the Magus, by the way, to demonstrate HOW THE MONSTER WORKS as well as make the hero's conflict personal. It isn't enough to be tasked with saving the world; the hero must also be saddled with the fact that he isn't enlightened enough. Sure, he's got the secret knowledge that powers the universe but because he doesn't understand it -- because he hasn't synthesized it with his own human experience -- he isn't able to save the Magus. By sacrificing himself, the Magus knows that his efforts will not be lost. Even though society at large has failed to accept his gift of enlightenment, he has managed to pass that knowledge onto another. The chain isn't broken. Not yet.
Which is another facet of the Apocalpytic Hero's bitterness. He knows that, until another hero comes along, he is THE ONE. Even though society doesn't want his knowledge, he is its keeper. It is his sole task to survive and wait and, when you're fighting a one man war against malignant entropy and hedonistic materialism, you tend to get a little lonely and angry.
Favonian
At sunset, at the magic hour when the light changes from the hard white of an eggshell into the bleeding yellow of a split yolk, the wind turns. The wind which chases the sun across the sky dies, and all that is left is the gentle exhalation from the west as the sun dies yet again. The favonian breeze washes across the Hammerstone and rolls up the bulk of First Hill, washing the fetid stink of the tired city down into the grates and drains of the streets. Men, struggling home with the weight of their briefcases, pause on the street corners and look to the west, relishing the gentle touch of the west wind. Yes, the last effusion of energized solar particle waves turns back the spread of ash, the crippling process of decay wrought by hours of centralized air and torpid mechanical lighting; yes, men stop and look to the west.
In the distance, faint across the glittering waters of Hammerstone Sound, the trees of Chance Island are on fire.
Hypnogogia
The sleep center doctors tell me about the little deaths that aphnea causes. You have two choices: the fading, choking death resulting from sealed passageways or the electric blink where your brain -- for just a second -- is left in the dark. There are no other choices, and you will have but many of these episodes during the night.
There is hope if you chose the gasping, choking death of your throat closing itself during the night. You can have a tube shoved down into your esophagus and air will be pumped into your body for six hours. When your lungs overinflate and your body panics, it routes the air to your stomach where your turgid acids flail helplessly at the swirling atmospheres, unable to find something material to dissolve. This air passes through your intestines and comes out like black roses from your ass in the morning. You greet the day like a trombone.
The other choice is the silent mystery, the miniscule flatline which interrupts your brain waves for the slightest of seconds. Bip! You've stopped. Bip! You've started again. It is no wonder you never fully sleep when your body simply stops for a second at a time throughout the night. You're halfway off the high shelf all night long, ready to roll into oblivion if that interrupted second never passes.
You are exhausted, fighting these little deaths. Morpheus never visits because you always scare him when he leans over to check if you are breathing. Your only friend is his little cousin, Hypnogogia. She lets you lean against her shoulder during the day. She is your best friend, actually, always there, always ready to catch you when you fall.
Palimpsest
There are four copies of the Chiotraczh Manuscript in existence, though by the recollection of most occult historians, they have all been destroyed. Once, all four were owned by the same man and, in a frenzied fit, he tried to save us from the terrible sigils and spells written on those pages. He couldn't bring himself to destroy the books. Oh, he tried, but their eldritch influence caused a tremor in his brain and a weakness in his heart which stopped his hands at the last moment. He couldn't burn them; he couldn't tear them apart; he couldn't throw them into the ocean. He could, however, take a knife to them. Not to cut the pages out, but to scratch the words off. It took him twenty years and the effort drove him deep into madness. And, when he was done, he wrote his own words on the now blank pages. He wasn't much of a writer, prone to hyperbole and an exaggerated paranoia as well as being wracked with spells of delusion, and his stories were all bleak and most of them ended badly.
These palimpsests were found in his collection when he died and since everyone agreed that he hadn't been that good of a writer, the heavy manuscripts ended up on the back shelves of an old bookseller's shop, hidden beneath decaying cookbooks and neglected travelogues to places no one wanted to go anymore.
A war has been fought in the decade since the rewritten manuscripts were lost, a war between the ancient sigils erased but not removed and the poorly connected words of the mad historian. Each page is a separate battleground, each word a skirmish to be won or lost. The ancient language has strong infantry and highly trained cavalry. The madman's words have the benefit of defense, entrenched on the page, but they are too scattered, too unorganized, to raise a proper defense. His words fight valiantly, but they are outnumbered. Page by page, line by line, the mad historian's text is eaten by the words of the priests of Chiotraczh. The ancient symbols swell on the page, filled with the squalid ink of the frantic historian.
When the books are found again, no one will remember the scrawled warnings of the mad historian.
Excoriate
Late at night when the radio signals slip and it is easy to get lost between the stations, you can find living noise communicating across the ether. Hang yourself up at the low end of the dial and wear a good pair of headphones, you know the kind; fat cups which sit heavily over yours ears and block out everything but the noise from somewhere else. Shhh. Listen. You can hear it whispering, cajoling, crying. It weeps in your ears, lamenting its lack of form. The living noise can't sustain a body, it excoriates the flesh from the inside out. Skin seems to melt like wax and black static seeps through like a swarm of flies escaping a piece of rotten fruit. This doesn't stop the noise from trying to convince you to give yourself over to it. Shh. Listen. The noise is desperate; it will tell you things you didn't know you wanted to know.
087: Apocalyptic Thrillers
I'm putting off work on Chapter 14. It's staring me in the face a bit only because it's supposed to divulge a good amount of Grandpa's history and I haven't really thought it all the way through yet. At least not so far as matching it up to the history of clandestine organizations in the US following WWII. I suppose it can all be dealt with later in research, but, oddly enough, I still have some reticence about inventing material that may have to be later reconciled with fact. Though, as Robert Anton Wilson continually points out about Illuminatus: regardless of how far-fetched he and Robert Shea extrapolated the conspiracy, it was never far out enough and bits of it kept coming true. So, yeah, one should never invent with the fear of being wrong; you should invent with the possibility that you may be right.
And then be ready to laugh it off when you turn out to be wrong in twenty years or so. It's good to have a sense of humor about these things.
So, as a mental exercise and as something that we can laugh about later, I thought I'd circle back and expand on the idea of Apocalyptic Thrillers. You can't talk about these sorts of books these days without at least touching on the Left Behind series, a multi-volume examination of the Biblical End of Time. Not my cup of tea, personally, and not the least because (1) they are written in a style which has no style and the characters are not much more than tissue paper cutouts of single-dimensional characterizations; and, (2) they are so fundamentally dogmatic about their vision of Christianity and, frankly, it's a supremely essential facet of their world-building and, since I don't buy it in the slightest, I'm at odds with the premise before I even start. I'm sure, however, that they do adhere to the basic structure of the Apocalyptic Thriller. Naturally. [insert wink and nudge here]
The Apocalyptic Thriller concerns itself with the END OF THE WORLD, or at least, the END OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION. It may be literal (as in the Left Behind books) or it may a logical conclusion following the localized catastrophe which is the core threat of the book. If it is of a global nature, then it will most likely require a cast of several hundred characters. It all depends on how widescreen you want the action to be. The bottom line, however, is that HUMANITY IS AT RISK. Whether this risk is one monkey with a nasty attitude and the Ebola virus, Nature taking back the planet via global warming, a deranged lunatic with a stockpile of nuclear warheads or some secret society bent on invoking a demonic presence which will devour the world is entirely up to the writer.
Joseph Campbell's heroic cycle ends with the hero leaving or remaining separate from the culture he has rescued because the events of the quest; the hero goes to THE OTHER SIDE as part of his adventure and becomes transformed, thereby making him "different" from everyone else. In the Apocalyptic Thriller, our hero will have been TOUCHED BY THE OTHER SIDE which makes him uniquely qualified to be the guy who saves the world. This mark of Otherness makes him an Outsider (capital "O" in Colin Wilson's sense) which means that he'll be a reject and a loner. He will have to be coerced into saving the world, either through an appeal by the elders of the society which he has left or by circumstance. The elders will appeal to his desire to return to the community or his sense of honor and duty to what is RIGHT. Circumstances will be some event which will have an personal impact on him, usually the death of someone he cares about or feels some duty towards. His course of action in the beginning is simply one of revenge and, from there, it grows into a larger awareness of his essential duty to right wrong and to preserve humanity's basic liberties. Or some such crap like that. Basically he gets roped into saving the world because -- as much as he might feel maligned or cast aside by society at large -- he's still a good egg and, frankly, evil pisses him off.
There has to be a MONSTER of some sort and, very early on, the audience must be given the opportunity to see HOW THE MONSTER WORKS. Evil must be quantified in a way that the readers can say, "Wow. That is really awful. Too bad that bus load of children had to die so horribly, but now I understand how terrible this evil threatening the world is. Gosh, I hope the hero gets his head out of his ass soon." Not all MONSTERS are the OLD ONES, but, yeah, in most cases, there's some thread going back to them. They're out there, you know, pulling strings.
As an aside, one of the joys about Mike Mignola's Hellboy is his glee in using the Nazis as the continued agents of the Old Ones. It's not a cliche in his hands, but rather a sly wink and nudge to his audience. Of course, it would have to be Nazis and, of course, it would have to be the Old Ones whom they are trying to contact and bring into this world. Go with what works, you know?
There has to be a WOMAN, usually two. One is the agent of LIGHT (the hooker with a heart of gold or some such) and the other is the agent of DARKNESS. Our hero will be torn between the two because, well, there's always the allure of the bad girl. The writers of Goldeneye really nailed this with Xenia Onatopp and Natalya Simonova. Come on, guys, let's see a show of hands: who was kinda bummed out when Onatopp finally bit it in the end?
The woman of light will be in danger by the climax, probably in a very Jim Silke inked and airbrushed sort of way. Rescuing the girl will allow the hero to remain aloof to the threat facing the world even though, as a result of saving the girl, he also saves the world. Her gratitude is his only reward because, even though he prevented the Apocalypse, he will still be touched by OTHERNESS (and possibly even more so now) which will make the elders of the world fear him and they will undoubtedly FUCK HIM OUT OF HIS DUE REWARD.
Reading back over this, I think my influences may be showing slightly. This is what happens when you are raised on comic books, pulp fiction, noir crime novels, and too much mythology.
086: Landmark
Somehow I just finished Chapter XIII, crossing the 50 page/25,000 word mark. If I was breaking things up into digestable chunks, this would be the first quarter of the book. This section would be known as THE WORLD IS NOT AS IT SEEMS, and would be the introduction of the characters and the core concepts which will be thrashed upon by the author over the next 75,000 words. And I'm realizing that I've accomplished that goal pretty well -- I've introduced the main players and gotten them into trouble. The next quarter will be THINGS GETTING WORSE and DEFINING HOW THE MONSTER WORKS -- important pieces to have so that the audience will be ready for the third section -- OH CRAP, THEY'LL NEVER SURVIVE. Which becomes a page-turning necessity on their part as they must discover HOW THE WORLD IS SAVED in part four.
Or something like that. I can probably turn this into a Robin Cook style equation for churning out Apocalyptic Thrillers.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.
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