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Horror Reading Wednesday
Oct. 28th, 2020 03:30 pmMotherless Child by Glen Hirshberg. A vampire novel set in modern-day small town North Carolina. Sophie and Natalie are lifelong best friends, both single mothers to infants, both doing nothing much with their lives: in their early twenties, working at Waffle House and living in a trailer park. Until one night they cross paths with a vampire named The Whistler and wake up dead. Natalie, the more steely-willed of the pair, figures out what's going on and immediately abandons both their babies to her own mother out of fear of what she might do to them, and forces Sophie to join her on an endless road trip that's more about losing themselves than going anywhere in particular. Meanwhile, The Whistler becomes increasingly obsessed with Natalie and how to shape her into the perfect eternal partner, which sets off problems with his previous eternal partner, a woman known only as Mother.
Here in the year of our lord 2020 it's more or less impossible to do anything new with vampires. Every possible permutation of the myth has already been done and redone. But having said all that, I really enjoyed the spin Motherless Child gives to the old story. It takes the route of emphasizing that vampires are dead – not sexy immortals, but cold corpses somehow still inhabited – and underlines it with gorgeous prose:
As she pushed out into the night, she realized she even knew what the whistling in her ears was. Not cicadas. Not power lines. Not the echo of the Whistler's breath in her ears. Just the sound the world makes rushing through a pipe or pooling in a cistern. Whipping through a dead place, with neither heartbeart nor blood rush to impede it.
***
"Does it still feel good to you? The guys, I mean."
Now Sophie looked startled, almost guilty. After a moment, she shrugged. "It feels warm."
"Yeah," Natalie said.
"Especially their mouths."
Which was exactly right. Mostly, these last few nights, Natalie found herself hovering around their lips, in the same way she'd once crouched beside the tiny space heater her mother used, on surprisingly frigid Charlotte winter nights, to heat the trailer. That, apparently, was what sex would be about from now on. The ghost of tingling. Mostly heat.
***
And in the meantime, through the agony and the haze of her own tears, she'd stare, like Sophie, at the way the world looked when it was lit. How could I possibly have forgotten so quickly? But she knew the answer to that. She hadn't forgotten, really. This sight – this impossible green, this radiant orange, the daily blossoming of the whole planet – couldn't be forgotten, because it couldn't be remembered. Could not be held in a human brain. That's what made it such a daily revelation. All her life, she'd been told that death was unimaginable, unknowable. When it truth, it was life that could never be imagined. Life was just too big.
There's blood and gory death and hypnosis and all the other things that go along with vampires as well, but it's Hirshberg's invocation of death that has stuck with me. And the ending. That ending! Goddamn. It's a cliche to talk about 'strong female characters', but the final choices of Natalie and especially her mother are some cold-ass, steel-spine strength to remember.
Remina by Junji Ito. (Sometimes also titled Hellstar Remina, but my copy just had Remina) A sci-fi horror manga set in Japan in the near future. An astrophysicist discovers a new planet, whose existence seems to prove the reality of wormholes to other dimensions. A pretty significant discovery! And one that wins the scientist both the Nobel Prize and naming rights to the new planet, which he calls after his teenage daughter, Remina. Remina herself is soon a media sensation, becoming a pop star and advertising celebrity. Of course, this is a horror story, so things begin to go wrong: the planet Remina turns and somehow heads towards Earth at nearly the speed of light, and other planets and stars in its path disappear. As Remina comes closer, it becomes clear that it's not quite a planet, given that it has a massive eye and tongue; that it's eating everything it passes; and that Earth is its target. People unsurprisingly panic, and a cult suddenly arises, playing on these new fears to put the blame on Remina and her father. The cult argues that the Oguros have somehow summoned the planet, and the only way to save humanity is to sacrifice them.
The middle and late section of the book get a bit repetitive as the same plot plays out over and over again: the cult finds Remina, attempts to kill and/or torture her, a man saves her, she escapes. The only change from one round to another is that Remina's clothing becomes ever more tattered and scanty. That said, there are some fantastically creepy images throughout: Remina tied to a cross as a massive eye opens in the sky behind her; a nuclear-blasted corpse, its skull grinning through heat-tightened skin; a body melting into goo when exposed to the toxic atmosphere on the planet Remina; the constant mob of screaming mouths and reaching hands, shouting "Kill Remina!" and "Remina the witch!".
Overall, it doesn't reach the heights of terror Ito is capable of in stories like 'The Enigma of Amigara Fault' or 'Uzumaki', but it's nicely scary little story about cosmic horrors and why the brutality of man is scarier than anything out of space.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Here in the year of our lord 2020 it's more or less impossible to do anything new with vampires. Every possible permutation of the myth has already been done and redone. But having said all that, I really enjoyed the spin Motherless Child gives to the old story. It takes the route of emphasizing that vampires are dead – not sexy immortals, but cold corpses somehow still inhabited – and underlines it with gorgeous prose:
As she pushed out into the night, she realized she even knew what the whistling in her ears was. Not cicadas. Not power lines. Not the echo of the Whistler's breath in her ears. Just the sound the world makes rushing through a pipe or pooling in a cistern. Whipping through a dead place, with neither heartbeart nor blood rush to impede it.
***
"Does it still feel good to you? The guys, I mean."
Now Sophie looked startled, almost guilty. After a moment, she shrugged. "It feels warm."
"Yeah," Natalie said.
"Especially their mouths."
Which was exactly right. Mostly, these last few nights, Natalie found herself hovering around their lips, in the same way she'd once crouched beside the tiny space heater her mother used, on surprisingly frigid Charlotte winter nights, to heat the trailer. That, apparently, was what sex would be about from now on. The ghost of tingling. Mostly heat.
***
And in the meantime, through the agony and the haze of her own tears, she'd stare, like Sophie, at the way the world looked when it was lit. How could I possibly have forgotten so quickly? But she knew the answer to that. She hadn't forgotten, really. This sight – this impossible green, this radiant orange, the daily blossoming of the whole planet – couldn't be forgotten, because it couldn't be remembered. Could not be held in a human brain. That's what made it such a daily revelation. All her life, she'd been told that death was unimaginable, unknowable. When it truth, it was life that could never be imagined. Life was just too big.
There's blood and gory death and hypnosis and all the other things that go along with vampires as well, but it's Hirshberg's invocation of death that has stuck with me. And the ending. That ending! Goddamn. It's a cliche to talk about 'strong female characters', but the final choices of Natalie and especially her mother are some cold-ass, steel-spine strength to remember.
Remina by Junji Ito. (Sometimes also titled Hellstar Remina, but my copy just had Remina) A sci-fi horror manga set in Japan in the near future. An astrophysicist discovers a new planet, whose existence seems to prove the reality of wormholes to other dimensions. A pretty significant discovery! And one that wins the scientist both the Nobel Prize and naming rights to the new planet, which he calls after his teenage daughter, Remina. Remina herself is soon a media sensation, becoming a pop star and advertising celebrity. Of course, this is a horror story, so things begin to go wrong: the planet Remina turns and somehow heads towards Earth at nearly the speed of light, and other planets and stars in its path disappear. As Remina comes closer, it becomes clear that it's not quite a planet, given that it has a massive eye and tongue; that it's eating everything it passes; and that Earth is its target. People unsurprisingly panic, and a cult suddenly arises, playing on these new fears to put the blame on Remina and her father. The cult argues that the Oguros have somehow summoned the planet, and the only way to save humanity is to sacrifice them.
The middle and late section of the book get a bit repetitive as the same plot plays out over and over again: the cult finds Remina, attempts to kill and/or torture her, a man saves her, she escapes. The only change from one round to another is that Remina's clothing becomes ever more tattered and scanty. That said, there are some fantastically creepy images throughout: Remina tied to a cross as a massive eye opens in the sky behind her; a nuclear-blasted corpse, its skull grinning through heat-tightened skin; a body melting into goo when exposed to the toxic atmosphere on the planet Remina; the constant mob of screaming mouths and reaching hands, shouting "Kill Remina!" and "Remina the witch!".
Overall, it doesn't reach the heights of terror Ito is capable of in stories like 'The Enigma of Amigara Fault' or 'Uzumaki', but it's nicely scary little story about cosmic horrors and why the brutality of man is scarier than anything out of space.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
