Pauli's Fallacy

No two objects can occupy the same place at the same time. So I thought until yesterday.

I was driving, a standard pizza-delivering college dropout. Meanwhile, across the multiverse Lord Eaglesham McGrane-Enrich XLVII folded time and space without proper charting, accidentally merging with me at the corner of Federal and Commercial.

I still schlepp Papa Johns around. But I know things. Eaglesham's esteemed family tree. His dire fiscal straits. The forbidden dimensional geometries he plumbed.

Why flee so recklessly? I have glimpses. Something vast, hungry, eternally patient. He knew it wouldn't stop until it found him.

Or now, rather, me.

Pauli's Fallacy by I Saw Lightning Fall

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28 Days Later Is the Best Sort of Horror

At first blush, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later would seem less than ideal viewing immediately after the birth of a child. After all, the splattery, post-apocalyptic film earned Boyle kudos for breathing new life into a subgenre largely thought moribund, namely the zombie movie. Babies and the living dead -- the two don't really seem to mix, do they? But Boyle does so much right with 28 Days Later that it becomes both excellent horror and great storytelling in general.

Just where does the movie excel? Well, it starts with a concept as focused as it is bleak. Bike courier Jim awakes after twenty-eight days in a coma to discover that London -- and presumably the world -- has become a depopulated wasteland. Former inhabitants have turned feral due to some sort of genetically engineered hemorrhagic fever that fills them with mindless rage. Grim stuff, and Boyle knows just how to stick viewers with unexpected shocks. While surveying a church sanctuary littered with bodies, Jim utters a tentative, "Hello?" at which two Infected heave up, mouths gaping with hideous, homicidal curiosity. Not all such scary moments are as subtle. A scene wherein a survivor named Selena kills a raging pair of Infected with a machete leaves the interior of a suburban home looking quite literally like a slaughterhouse.

Yet Boyle doesn't stay fixated on the horrible stuff. For every desiccated corpse and ravening monster, he inserts shots of aching beauty. A wind farm's propellers steadily slicing air. An orderly line of light posts punctuating a highway with a single car crawling on it. Jet contrails scoring an otherwise empty sky. Such images call to mind the beauty of an orderly civilization, and lest viewers miss the theme, Boyle includes telling bits of dialogue. "I was full of plans," Selene intones. "Have you got any plans, Jim? Do you want us to find a cure and save the world or just fall in love and [expletive]? Plans are pointless. Staying alive's as good as it gets." It's as hopeless a sentiment as any honest nihilist could express -- and utterly incorrect from Boyle's view. Later when Selena, Jim and a father and daughter escape to the countryside, they watch a pack of wild horses running free in the fields. "Like a family," the father says, and Selena privately admits to Jim, "I was thinking I was wrong. All the death. ... It doesn't really mean anything to Frank and Hannah because she's got a dad and he's got his daughter. I was wrong when I said that staying alive is as good as it gets."

This is, of course, what makes 28 Days Later the best sort of horror: It turns terrible stuff to serve a worthy theme. New life in a properly run society is a beautiful thing, and showing what results when it's lost only breeds appreciation for it.

(Picture: CC 2008 by _Ricky)

"Respawn"

It was just a hill covered with grass -- and corpses.

Timothy's squad was dead. He fired at blue-suited silhouettes until a grenade landed at his feet. A flash. Pain. Then darkness.

Sounds -- explosive pop of a hermetic seal splitting, wet splatter of suspension gel, flesh slapping concrete.

Timothy struggled up, naked, dripping.

"Blue has captured the point," the announcer's disembodied voice boomed.

Timothy reached for a fresh red uniform. His squadmates were already sprinting from the bunker.

"I liked it better when we played this online," he muttered.

The encapsulated clones clustered behind him answered not a word.

Respawn by I Saw Lightning Fall

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Music To Write By: Switchfoot's "The War Inside"

Why Listen? For vivid imagery; a noirish take on human nature; to see how artists succeed while doing something different.



San Diego-based Switchfoot has built a career by serving fans slick Top 40 hits and gritty rock anthems, so “The War Inside” off of Vice Verses must have come as something of a surprise to many. Leader singer Jon Foreman’s personally conflicted, stream-of-consciousness lyrics ride staccato rhythms and synthy harmonics. (“I am the rising tide. / I am the war I fight. / Eyes open, open wide, / I can feel it like a crack in my spine. / I can feel it like the back of my mind. / I am the war inside.”) The song sounds like something a battered and bruised Phil Collins might’ve written after waking up the morning after in a bar’s back alley. Perfect background music for that hardboiled or noir piece you’ve been wanting to write.

This Entertaining Reply Has An Identity Crisis

I was a bit skeptical when a friend handed me a copy of Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, a literary novel about identity theft. While literary types know their way around elegant prose and the innermost thoughts of well-rounded characters, they tend to stumble on action and plot. Still, the book's back-cover bore blurbs from long-time genre scribe Peter Straub and recent horror convert Justin Cronin. "Try it," my friend said. "It's weird. You'll probably like it."

Fair enough, then.

At first, the lives of Ryan Schuyler, Lucy Lattimore and Miles Cheshire seem to share little in common. A college-age slacker, Ryan has reunited with his birth father, taking advantage of a wrongful pronouncement of death after he ran away from campus. Lucy has skipped town after high school graduation with her history teacher, determined to start a new life with someone who actually cares about her. And Miles, well, he's doing what he's always done, namely search for his schizophrenic twin Hayden, a brilliant sociopath who uses others' identities as though they're Kleenex. Sure, they seem a disparate bunch. But when issues of individuality and identity are at stake, peoples' narratives can entwine in unexpected ways.

Chaon certainly throws genre fans a bone in Reply's opening, with Ryan's father racing him to a hospital, his severed hand stuck in an ice-packed cooler. Soon enough, we learn that he lost the appendage due to a nasty man with a very personal grudge against his dad. Intense stuff. But Reply soon shifts into literary mode, musing at length over issues of personal character. Lucy mulls over the meaning instilled by household chattles and Miles considers how childhood imaginings can steer later life -- for pages and pages. For some reason, literary authors love tackling such abstract subjects in story form, even when a personal essay might prove more apropos. Fortunately, Chaon snaps the book back to genre by the end, and even though that makes the action uneven, he still manages a corker of an ending. I won't give anything away except to say that Reply's conclusion might remind readers of the Academy Award-winning film The Usual Suspects. Just prepare yourself to venture through a well-written book that doesn't quite know what it wants to be in order to get there.

(Picture: CC 2009 by the urban mermaid; Hat Tip: Bill Gozansky Photography)

Myoclonus

When Kevin glanced up, the woman was in the crosswalk. His F-150's brakes screamed, then the truck jolted sickeningly. Staggering out, he saw the woman lying at an impossible angle.

"Oh, no. Please, no, I --"

Her hand snapped up, snared his wrist, a jolt shivering up his arm. Her heard her say, clearly, "Spasm -- endlessly." Then she smiled and died. Horror covered him like a curtain shrouds a window, a profound fear of the body's manifold misfirings.

"Mister," someone called from the gathering crowd, "the ambulance is coming."

Kevin opened his mouth to answer.

And then began to hiccup.

To Rend the Caul of Their Heart / Myoclonus by I Saw Lightning Fall

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To Rend the Caul of Their Heart

On the final push, you felt it, the otherness of the baby. Then the overhead fluorescents splintered at her first cry. The scissors glowed red-hot when your husband cut the cord. He cursed, dropping them.

Your dear, stupid husband. He didn't notice how the doctor whisked her away for "evaluation" or the official-looking man skulking in the hallway, hand clutched inside his coat. But you did. You also realized that your torn egress had already knit, your legs grown strong again.

They can't have her. She was yours for nine months. She'll be yours now.

Then you noticed the scissors.

To Rend the Caul of Their Heart / Myoclonus by I Saw Lightning Fall

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