Horror Is Quiet (A Hijacking)

Horror has its own vocabulary, its own set of standardized conventions. We all know that, of course. When we go to horror movies, we expect jump scares galore as abominations hove into the frame, misshapen men menacingly wave sharp implements, and arterial spray soaks the surroundings. Horror novels have their own terrifying techniques, what with lovingly written descriptions of stiff wires thrust through ocular cavities and the color of intestines as they spill from a slit abdomen. Do you get what I'm saying? Horror is visceral, in your face, transgressive, and typically about a subtle as a sledgehammer. Put more simply, horror is loud. Or rather most of it is, because every once in a while along comes a piece like Tobias Lindholm's 2012 Danish film A Hijacking that reminds us how the best horror is very, very quiet.

A Hijacking centers on two men -- Mikkel Hartmann, a cook on the cargo ship MV Rozen, and Peter Ludvigsen, CEO of the vessel's parent company. Days away from making port, the ship gets hijacked by Somali pirates, sparking a months-long negotiation as the crew's life hanging in the balance. So far so standard, but the film doesn't unfold in the cliched manner you might expect. Make no mistake, this isn't Captain Phillips or Executive Decision or any number of Hollywood potboilers where all that stands between a group of innocents and death is a cadre of well-armed military types. There are no soldiers, no cavalry, no choreographed fight scenes, and no high-tension mock executions. The only thing keeping Mikkel and the rest of the crew alive is his boss' voice at the other end of an unreliable satellite-phone.

The whole thing proves absolutely petrifying.

How? Besides the obvious fear of death, Lindholm taps into the disorientation of culture shock, of having your everyday expectations entirely erased. The audience doesn't actually see the titular hijacking. Instead, viewers watch Mikkel and the crew cowering on the Rozen's bridge as malnourished Africans wave AK-47s and scream at them. In a film that features at least three languages, it's noteworthy that Lindholm never subtitles the bits in Somali. Viewers find themselves thrust into Mikkel's perspective, trying to placate unintelligible captors and earning a smile when successful or an assault rifle waved at one's face when not. Human filth piles up in the corner of the cabin to which the crew finds itself confined, often discussed but never seen. The pirates grant Mikkel a phone call with his wife, only to interrupt it halfway through by pressing his head to the table with a gun barrel, his audible terror a mere negotiating tactic. The galley grows increasingly wretched as it gets stripped bare, but most horrifying part happens when the food runs out entirely. At that point, the pirates bring Mikkel up onto the deck, force a knife into his hands, and make him knee before a bound goat. He's the cook, and as such he has to slaughter their next meal. We don't actually watch the grisly work, the camera staying focused on Mikkel's anguished face. But we do hear the dying animal's desperate attempts to breathe. Those rasping, liquid gurgles prove more affecting than a whole sorority's worth of screaming coeds. Let me say it again: The best horror is quiet.

(Picture: CC 2012 by Constantine Savvides)

Phraselet No. 139

I should probably promise to stop harping on about the length issue -- except I won't. I'm going to harp like an angel with Parkinson's Disease.

- Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, "'Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeros' - $40 Demo," Zero Punctuation (4/16/14)

"Dried Up All the Rain"

While studying for her European Lit final, Lucy fell asleep on the quad. Upon awaking, she was no larger than a quarter.

Clouds had gathered, harbingers of seasonal storms. Some strange compulsion made Lucy skitter toward a nearby dorm and up a gutter drain. The roof. She had to reach the roof.

Halfway up, the skies opened and flushed her back out onto the lawn.

Dazed, she found herself thinking of Gregor Samsa's senseless suffering. But I'm different, she said. I'll make it. Still, as the sun dried her eight legs, she wished she wasn't so small -- so itsy bitsy.

Old Man's War Restores My Faith in SF

I like reading all kinds of books. I like reading books about bad with guns and malleable ethics. I like reading books about spell-slinging sorcerers caught up in epic, world-spanning struggles. I read reading books about eldritch evils that prefer to warp your mind before they strip the flesh from your bones. But lately I haven't much liked reading science fiction. I used to, but somewhere along my rocky road to adulthood, SF decided it wanted to be about something bigger than laser battles in outer space. It wanted to be about theories and formulas, concepts and conundrums, the things stories sometimes contain rather than stories themselves. SF became fiction for an academy rather than for fun -- or most of it did. Fortunately, at least one SF author knows how to navigate the genre's extremes. In John Scalzi's Hugo-nominated first novel Old Man's War, the esoteric and enjoyable join hands.

John Perry is a grieving, seventy-five-year-old widower with nothing on earth to live for. That's isn't to say he plans over shuffling off his mortal coil any time soon. Far from it. Rather than fall into dotage, John plans to enlist. Yes, you read that right: A geriatric will join the army. See, few wars are fought on the earth anymore, but amongst the stars it's a different story entirely. Earth's extraterrestrial settlements have to struggle against alien aggressors, and only the Colonial Defense Forces stand between them and destruction. The CDF recruits the elderly with a simple promise: Join and we'll make you young again. The catch is that John and others like him don't know how the CDF will restore their youth -- or the incomprehensible foes they'll have to face.

To start, let's list all the delightful things you'll find in Old Man's War. Scratch that, because it's almost an impossibility. There are just too many. Still, with its military focus you can expect terrific battle scenes, humorous exchanges with a basic-training instructor who makes Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket look friendly, and detailed descriptions of a bullet-firing, grenade-launching, microwave-zapping nanorifle that are so lovingly written they can only be called gun porn. There are crab-like aliens who treat battle like some sort of high-church liturgy. There's a sentient slime mold that digests its enemies from the inside out. There are inch-high humanoids who fly teeny tiny space fighters. Yet for all the enjoyable bits, Scalzi doesn't skimp on scientific details or ethical conundrums, devoting lots of dialogue to quantum entanglement in multiverse travel and the relative merits of negotiating rather than fighting. (The later subject avoids easy answers while still serving delicious comeuppance to an overly idealistic pacifist senator.) Not everything in the book is perfect. I think I found at least one large plot hole, and Scalzi skims over the issue of the brain/mind dichotomy when further exploration would've made the ending much more satisfying. Still, I hardly cared. Old Man's War has restored my faith in science fiction, and that's saying something.

(Picture: CC 2011 by Toruk Macto)

Introducing The Commonplace Book

"And what," you may be asking yourself upon seeing the title of this post, "is a commonplace book?" Good question, dear reader. Some definitions dub it a reference book for logical arguments or philosophical assertions. Others prefer a more generalized designation, terming it a repository of all sorts of interesting bits of knowledge. Several years ago, I learned that H.P. Lovecraft jotted down largely unrealized story ideas in one, and you can read it over at Wired. For a while now, I've filled with fiction ideas a little gray Moleskine with an elastic band that keeps it from flapping open at inconvenient times.

Unfortunately, to me "inconvenient" seems the right word for just such a book. Lacking any semblance of an index or organization, its early entries end up ignored by me more often than not. So I'm migrating all future fictional woolgathering to my own little corner of the Internet. The Commonplace Book is a Tumblr blog, meaning it contains minimal formatting fuss and hopefully an ever-increasing amount of grist for the narrative mill. Photos, news articles, philosophical tidbits, economic adages, musings on genre conventions -- all of it's game. Feel free to stop by. Who knows? Maybe it'll help prompt some story ideas of your own.

(Picture: CC 2007 by vlasta2)

"And Their Days Consumed in Futility"

Sam swiped the brush across the battered cordovan laceups. Back and forth. "Once these are perfectly shined, I'll be able to leave."

Claudius moaned as a python-sized worm slid down his throat, out his sundered chest cavity, and back up to his mouth.

"Laws? Morality? I never let them get between me and excellence. Damn 'em all." Back and forth.

Claudius groaned.

"Sorry. Figure of speech. But who cares? I'll be out soon." Back and forth.

The worm's tail cleared Claudius' teeth, and before its head slithered in, he rasped, "Missed a spot. Again."

Sam could've sworn he was smiling.

Very Bad Men Stumbles Over Its Own Story

Ah, popular thrillers! Can you think of better books to kick back with on the beach? True, over the years so-called beach reads have earned a reputation as the nadir of genre fiction, and that's not entirely unwarranted. With broad characterizations, sensational plots, visceral violence, and salacious sex, they don't so much camp on the lowest common denominator as erect a McMansion and invite you to the housewarming party. But beach reads have one thing going for them: They always seek to entertain, which is something one critic called the first rule of good writing. Such is the case with Harry Dolan's straightforwardly named Very Bad Men. This sequel to his debut novel Bad Things Happen contains more complexity than you might expect.

David Loogan has almost become respectable. As the new editor of Gray Streets (a short-fiction mystery magazine clinging to life in the age of the novel) and husband in all but name to Ann Arbor police detective Elizabeth Waishkey, he has changed from an enigmatic wanderer to a part of the community. Then one day an odd manuscript turns up at his office. It isn't strange because it dishes up details about multiple murders; that sort of stuff is Loogan's stock in trade nowadays. No, what makes it weird is that the story contains no adverbs, mentions details that fit perfectly with a recent pair of killings in the state, affirms the author's intention to strike again -- and came not in the mail, but deposited on his doorstep. Soon Loogan finds himself tracking a synthesia-stricken serial killer named Anthony Lark who's tied to a fast-rising political star, a decades-old bank robbery, and the posse of very bad men who tried to pull it off.

Dolan gets the craft of the thriller, so much so that it's sometimes hard to believe that Very Bad Men is only his second novel. He strings together scenes taut with tension and rarely fails to end a chapter with a cliffhanger. Yet he also subverts a number of genre-related expectations. The Senate candidate proves neither a morally conflicted white knight nor a wolf in sheep's clothing. When Loogan asks the candidate why she's running, she states, "Someone's going to be the next senator from Michigan. I think I could do a passable job. There are other people who could do it -- but they wouldn't do better than I would, and some of them would do much worse." An interesting perspective on politics. Something similar could be said about the portrayal of the serial killer, who proves almost sympathetic when not bludgeoning or strangling people and who plays a surprisingly small part in the overarching plot. In fact, the plot itself is the only real problem point in Very Bad Men. "The story was a tangled one, and as I sat watching ... I tried to work through it myself," Loogan muses near the finale. "If I'd had a notebook like Lark, I might have written it down." I suspect most will find said notebook necessary to sort the proceedings into a semblance of order. What a shame an otherwise entertaining book stumbles over its own story.

(Picture: CC 2007 by david boudjenah)