Week 4: The Old and the New (reading from China Miéville and H. P. Lovecraft)

This week I read The Unamable and What the Moon Brings by H. P. Lovecraft and both Jack and portions of Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville. I also watched Freaks (1932).

The reading that I was most captivated by and engaged with was the writing in Three moments of an Explosion. A couple of the stories, especially the short titled “The Condition of New Death”, inspired a true sense of unease. It was the first time while I was reading for this course that I felt truly disturbed. While I was reading it, I was anticipating what was going to come next. I halfway mockingly thought “I bet even if there are multiple people everyone still sees the dead’s feet facing them.” Yet it was still unsettling when it was actually described. I’m not sure how it managed to still catch me off guard.

In the short, the fine line between normal and “weird” is danced on. Miéville often plays with this by building such a normalcy into every element of the story but one. And then he simply slightly distorts something.

In film, there’s this idea of leaving a cabinet door open. This gives the audience a visual cue that something is off, but it’s only the slightest adjustment to the setting. The idea that is behind this is used in Miéville’s stories. But what I think makes it truly disturbing is that everything is treated as normal. As something that just happens, that’s been fully accepted by the society.

The stories often feel unfinished. There are questions raised by the story that seem like set up for longer stories. While I don’t think this is necessarily a positive, I do feel that this aspect increased feelings of anxiety or tenseness while I was reading the stories. It added something to the experience.

Often times, Miéville chose interesting structures to put his stories in. One example of this is the story he wrote as a school syllabus. Another is “The Crawl” which was written as a script for a film. Being a film major, this caught my attention.

The short got to me through the description of how the “crawl” crawled. I had vivid images in my head of the unnatural contorted movement. The language and specificity of how they move about on their fingers and toes got to me. In some ways when I think about it, this seems almost funny and inconvenient. Yet I was so disturbed when I read it. I was even more disturbed by the crawling than someone ripping their chest open to fly. The zombies are so far beyond natural, “like humans raised by spiders.” (p. 70) The oddity of their distortions captivated my interest more than the gore aspects of the story. The author realized precisely what part of the story was most disturbing and used different techniques to focus on it, such as the title of the short and the ending line.

While reading “The Crawl”, I had a haunting feeling that I had heard of it before but I still can’t figure out where I would know it from.

I also looked at LA Weekly’s article on mumblegore. It was exciting to learn about new smaller film teams and how they’re making films in modern times. It’s inspiring. They struggled and fought to make what they love. Even when people questioned if they would have an audience for their movies, they continued to use a formula that goes against much of what Hollywood is currently producing.

            I believe the new weird is relying on/ will rely on distortion. I mean this in a couple ways. These films and stories build off of the overused tropes and ideas of older horror but with modifications. I really think there’s going to be an emphasis on slight alteration to the normal. This is seen a lot in China Miéville’s work. The topics will be almost familiar. Almost or totally plausible. But just slightly off in a way that causes discomfort. I think there will be an emphasis on psychological discomfort rather than jumpy gory scares.