NIGHTMARES ILLUMINATED. The column for horror evangelists. 053 The Song Remains Defamed

I am starting to worry that I am developing some sort of organic mental disorder. I do not know what it is but I find that I am confused a lot of the time. When people speak, I have no idea what they are talking about. It all sounds like gibberish. I have been spending a lot time in airports lately. Maybe that is it. Is the flight on time or not? I do not see a plane out there but the board still reads the next flight is on time. The gate agent says the most recent information indicates that no change to the schedule is imminent. But there is no plane. Hmm. This confusion led me to seek medical attention. I ask the service provider at the medical facility if they are in my insurance network. They said they would not know until they submitted the claim. So I reminded them that if I wait until they submit the claim that would mean I had already received treatment and that it would, at that point, be too late to choose not to receive treatment because they were not in my network. They said, “Yeah, that’s true.” So are you in my network or not? Maybe. There are more, but that is enough. As a way of emotionally healing myself, I am thinking of writing a quest novel where the group of vagabonds is seeking a declarative sentence.

It has been a weird couple of months. I am glad I had books to read.

Dark Circle Comics (an Archie Comics imprint) is publishing a new version of an old favorite, The Black Hood. A police officer gets shot in the face and ends up being horribly scarred. To avoid the recognition of his scars, by others and himself, he starts wearing a black hood part of the time. One thing leads to another and before you know it the downward spiral starts to speed up. Written by Duane Swierczynski and drawn by Michael Gaydos, this book holds great promise. The gloomy prose is perfectly decorated by the dark shades and bold lines of the artwork. Archie Comics has been expanding with the undead version of the titular character but that book is teetering on the goofy. The Black Hood is deadly serious. You should all take a look.

The four issues of Silent Hill Downpour: Anne’s Story have been collected by IDW into a slim, beautiful volume. I can never decide whether I like Silent Hill material or if I think it’s played. This book, however, is one of the creepiest I have seen in a longtime and it gets my hearty recommendation. The panels are equally as misty as they are dark and the plot runs hard on mutated imagination. In some ways it is a twisted cross between the Hellraiser world and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is a thinking person’s bloody nightmare.

And, while we are talking about comics, do not forget about Realm War: Age of Darkness, up to issue eight on the way to twelve, at this writing. This Zenescope event is the crossover of the company’s four main worlds (realms) giving the authors a metric ton of lore to work with. The dark fantasy is an excellent way to acquaint yourself with the Zenescope mythology and you get a fun story at the same time.

On the non-illustrated front, I have been reading a lot of old books lately. Tarzan of the Apes, for example. Released in 1914 and I am just reading it now. Pulp fiction, you say? Bullshit. Burroughs’ book is a fantastic adventure story loaded with hyperviolence. It’s been a hundred years. Time to catch up. Another oldie but goodie is Niven’s science fiction classic Ringworld. While this book is not nearly as old as Tarzan, it is still amazing that I have somehow avoided reading it for several decades. To me, the story is more social commentary than science speculation, so go ahead and read it then get back to me on what you think. I did read one new book in the past couple weeks, Midian Unmade, which is a collection of stories based on Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (Night Breed) creation, edited by Joseph Nassise and Del Howison. The stories, of course, concern the Nightbreed but they vary enormously in tone, ranging from the beautiful and languid “The Moon Inside” by Seanan McGuire to the brutally violent and irreverent “Collector” by the indefatigable David J. Schow. My favorite – not an arbitrary choice but a personal one – is Lilith Saintcrow’s “Bait and Switch” because the author seems to remember (and perhaps had experienced) Barker’s original work the way I did, as the prose to me of this story is the most vivid and real. Your favorite might be a different one but I do not think you will find the quality of the collection lacking, whether you are a fan of Cabal or not.

On my way out I want to mention the new Björk album, Vulnicura. Don’t think this material could be horror-related at all? You must be new to Björk. Forget the singles from the past and dig in to the howl of pain that screeches from these songs. The plastic slipover sleeve for the CD depicts a woman bent backward over a low rock, her mouth open wide in (I’m going to say) pain. Her purple chest is cleaved open in the shape of a gaping vagina, bright red in the center. Björk has said a number of different things about this work, that it is about the ending of a relationship, the things that come to you in those sorts of moments (of loss, say), and also that the title refers to healing. Yeah, OK, I am sure it was exactly that for her. She did create it. But after the work becomes art, it is a living thing that people experience in a multitude of ways. For me, the music, which is a combination of stringed instruments and electronica, is somehow somber and violent together, ultimately painful. Björk’s music is an acquired taste and if you jump into her world with Vulnicura you might very well wonder what in the bloody hell is going forward there. Having listened several times to everything she has released, the new album is a powerful addition to her body of work. Highly recommended.