The Hobbit

Tolkien and I have a slightly rocky history. I first read The Hobbit when I was around nine years old, and as I recall I enjoyed it. So then I thought, 'I'll try reading The Lord of the Rings now!' This did not turn out to be my best plan. On my first attempted read through I believe I got to Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin escaping the Nazgûl by ferrying across a river in the Shire. There was just something about the writing style that I could not get past. So I put the book down (I was reading the compendium of all three novels) and I just settled for watching the movies when they came out.

In high school I gave Lord of the Rings another shot and managed to make it up to the fight with the Balrog in Moria, but I simply could not hurdle the density to Tolkien's writing style. I am hugely impressed by his world-building skills, they are almost unparalleled, but he writes as though he's writing a travel-guide that happens to have a plot that goes with it, which is just not a writing style that I can really enjoy, so I think I'll just enjoy the films and leave it at that.

With that in mind I am still constantly amazed by the depth of his creation. There are so many levels to the lore and society of Middle Earth that it's almost impossible to believe that one man create all of it. He invented not one but several languages and cultures, taking fantasy races that were already known and manipulating them in his own fashion as well as creating races of creatures that were entirely his own. The great appeal of Tolkien is that attention to detail, he can spend several pages explaining the appearance of a door for Heaven's sake, but that same amazing quality of his thinking is the reason I cannot read his works. The Hobbit is a novel I can read and enjoy exactly because it doesn't have that same level of detail. It's considerably more plot driven as a story, not really taking as much time to explain cultural histories and the like, although in The Lord of the Ring's defense the Hobbit doesn't cover nearly as much ground in Middle Earth, nor do the characters encounter near as many different cultures.

So I guess my thinking is this, Tolkien is a visionary world builder, but his writing style is just not my cup of tea.

A Wild Sheep Chase

J-Horror is not a genre with which I am going to claim any sort of familiarity. I actually hate being scared, so horror novels in general are something I tend to avoid. I've been fortunate thus far I this course in that none of the novels I've read have been anything I've found particularly frightening, but I was legitimately apprehensive this week because I know that the Japanese are very good at horror.

Luckily Murakami's “A Wild Sheep Chase” is not that frightening of a novel either, but that's not to say it isn't a good one. I went into the reading completely unaware of anything that the story might be, which is actually, to my mind, the best way to read or experience anything. With my blank slate of expectations I was able to absorb and appreciate each turn the story took for itself with no preconceived notions, and I found myself greatly enjoying the story because I didn't know where it was going.

Murakami sets up an average man, with an average life. A divorcée who works at an advertising firm living alone but for his grouchy cat. But then things start to get odd. First he begins dating a girl with apparently magical ears, then he is carted off by mysterious men in suits because of an image of sheep that an estranged friend had sent him. Thus unfolds what is essentially a supernatural mystery novel about finding out about a mysterious sheep with a star on its back that seems to have some sort of plan its been hatching, using human hosts to further its goals. What exactly that plan is we never discover, but it's clear it isn't good.

I'm not going to summarize the novel as I don't want to spoil it, and Steiling has already read it multiple times I am sure. But it does follow a very Japanese horror format sort of a thing. From the few J-Horror films I have seen I can gather that the usual plot is an average middle class person is drawn into unusual circumstances via their job or other average daily activity. Perhaps that is what makes J-Horror so particularly frightening, that idea that supernatural things could happen to anyone at any time. In most Western horror's the victims are sexy co-eds, or eccentric millionaires, not just average-joe's going about their day to day lives. Lately Western movies have been sort of adopting a bit of a J-Horror vibe, even going so far as to make American versions of classic J-Horror films like The Ring, but we never seem to quite manage to match that absolute creepiness that the Japanese have boiled down to an art.

Interview with the Vampire

Now I read my fair share of vampiric romance novels in my youth, largely written by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes who published her first novel at 15, which is a pretty good indication of the quality of those books. Anne Rice's work was always known to me, and I greatly wanted to read it, but I never got around to reading any of Rice's novels, nor even seeing more than a few minutes worth of any films based on her writing. And so this week I am familiar with the genre, the general vibe of the supernatural romance, but I am new to the novel, probably the novel that inspired everything Atwater-Rhodes wrote and thus inspired a lot of what I read as a pre-teen.

Interview with the Vampire. Arguably the definitive spiritual-romance novel, this is the one that started it all, sparked the idea of the brooding handsome monster who really just wants to be loved. Louis is that brooding creature, beautiful and deadly, struggling to retain his humanity in an inhuman wolrd. Lestat is the seduction, he is this apparently irresistable creature to whome Louis is constantly drawn, he can never truly escape him so long as his human emotions are retained. And Claudia is that bizarre observation of sexual maturation without the appearance of age, she is eternally youthful in the way she looks but an incredibly adept seductress and vixen who beckons her prey with her vulnerability and then destroys them with a childlike glee. This core trio makes up the novel. There is no real and true plot, it is just a recitation of the tale of Louis' life up to the time of the interview, and so the story is all about the characters. There is no quest on which they embark, the reader is simply invested in the emotional stories of the trio and their personal struggles.

And the investment in the struggles of the characters leads to that attraction, women tend to be suckers for the sensitive guy who's in touch with his feelings. That or they lean to the polar opposite and go for that violent and reckless “bad boy” character. Luckily Rice provides fodder for both of these styles of women in the form of Louis as the intellectual and Lestat as that unknowable loose cannon. In order to keep these two together so that they may play off of eachother Claudia is introduced, and she is that strongly female presence that keeps the two libido's in check, that controlling feminine influence that most female readers imagine they would be if put into that situation. Rice has allowed the reader to insert themselves into the world of the story and imagine themselves romancing with the characters, which they have done in spades through fanfiction and other fan outlets, creating a subculture centered around the world of these novels in which people deeply want to be involved.

Anne Rice has basically created the cast of perfect romantic heroes, and so the readers latch on to the one to whom they are most personally attracted and absorb themselves with that characters life story, thus inserting themselves into that world in their own mind.

Monster Island

Zombies.

Probably considered to be the monster of my generation. I've met very few people who don't enjoy a good zombie story.

But why do modern youth's seem to love zombie's so much? Is it that us against them mentality, the few against the many? Do we see prior generations as that mindless shambling hoarde, waiting to eat us whole?

This weeks text, Monster Island, is a great starting point for thinking about these questions. Even just it's format as a blog novel speaks volumes about how young people today think. For us books don't have to be bound in a paper form, they can be digital, never tanglibly existing, only ever displayed as points on a computer screen, and yet they carry just as much weight and viability as the heavier tomes of the past.

Now I'm pretty old fashioned, I much prefer print books to digital ones, but I can see the practicality of them.

I'm getting terribly off track from the discussion of zombies aren't I?

You'd think so, but not really. Our generation doesn't have any sort of a great real conflict with which to focus themselves so we create them in fiction. We've taken our perception of previous generations and exagerrated them into the archetype of the wave of zombies coming to eat our brains. The focus on brains as a food source is also indicative of the idea of the paranoia the youth has about becoming their parents, having their inidviduality, their brains, consumed by the daily grind of average life. Our greatest fear is sitting in a cubicle day to day, just getting by. The zombies are adult society and the youth are that rag-tag group of gritty survivors from all walks of life. And when the next generations come, they'll create their own parallel for that great fear of growing up.