Potent words and visceral dreams

A story at its most basic entertains with fiction woven from the English language.  A good story opens the mind to untold possibilities and stunning visions.  A great story pierces you with its words, stimulating the mind, the heart and the very pit of your stomach.  It is the great stories that every aspiring writer aims to create.  Tales that get under the skin, fill you with a sense that is unexplained and cannot be ignored.

There are many authors out there consistently putting out good stories, enrapturing us with their well crafted narratives.  Yet as enjoyable as the journey was, it doesn’t stick.  Fragments might wander in the brain for a couple of days afterward, but nothing more than you would expect from an equivalently good movie.  Entertainment that is consumed, processed and then put aside for the next shiny new thing.

With a truly great story once you’re finished it can’t be shaken.  It lingers in your thoughts, whispering, reminding, transforming itself as it penetrates deeper into your conscious.  We feel its touch in our daydreams, our idle musings guided by its influence.  Sometimes we have to run back to the tale, reading it again just to scratch the itch.  Other times it adds a fuel to our fire that colors the flame in quicksilver hues.

For me, it invades my dreams, acting them from a script I never penned, swirling with themes and images tainted by the story.  I also find myself struck by odd bouts of inspiration, idea kernels spliced with the author’s words growing into strange and wondrous fruit.  Two books I can always count on to affect me in this manner, one which I’ve read many times over the years and another I finally got around to reading are Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis & Other Tales (being the former) and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, Vol 1-3 (being the latter).

Kafka’s writing is incredibly surreal while still trying to ground itself in mundane situations.  The most famous of course is The Metamorphosis in which a man, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one day to find himself changed into a giant insect.  As if this wasn’t strange enough, the way his family reacts to this and then treats Gergor epitomizes the themes of isolation and loneliness throughout the piece.  The other tale that picks at my mind is In The Penal Colony, where a traveler from another country is shown an incredibly intricate device used in their executions by an obsessed officer in charge of its operation.  The officer’s paranoia and madness coupled with his fervent worship of the device are perfectly portrayed in his rambling dialogue.  You could almost feel yourself going a little sideways as you read his impassioned description of the execution and the absurd manner in which justice is determined.  Similar to Albert Camus’ The Stranger in its absurdity, but far more surreal in its actions. Kafka’s stories were guaranteed to inflict the most bizarre dreams when I read them before going to sleep.  I even tested this later on, having put the book down for months, by just reading one of the shorter stories in it.  Boom, instant wacko dreams that night.

Barker’s stories are the ones that get me in my guts.  Like a splinter in the brain, they infect me with unease, amazement and surprise.  Not all the stories have this flavor, some are just good, but enough of them do to have me coming back to the book frequently.  The first one to hit me like that was In The Hills,The Cities.  Two lovers driving through Eastern Europe encounter something not found on any tourist map.  What happens to the characters and the circumstances they were in, amused me greatly on an intellectual level, but emotionally left me with an intangible disquiet.  Perhaps it was the ending or the concept itself.  Pigs Blood Blues is another in that vein.  An ex-police officer comes to work at a rehabilitation center for juvenile criminals.  The oppressive nature of the grounds permeate the narrative, making you feel as imprisoned as they are.  Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament starts off one way and then quickly goes off the rails, but by that time you’re hooked and are compelled to see the trip until its end.

Clive Barker sums up why I think these shorts are so disturbing on a baser level in his introduction:

“Here, the monsters triumph, sometimes transforming those they touch in ways that might be deemed obliquely optimistic, but nevertheless surviving to do harm another day.  If, by chance, the evil is overcome, then it more often than not takes its witnesses and endurers down with it.”

I’d love to hear if these books do the same to you or what other juicy morsels you might be chewing on with this same taste and feel.

_______________________

Images courtesy of Google

Related posts: (Auto Generated)

1. The Last Words I Ever Thought I Would Hear 2012 began for me in the same way I believe...
2. The first step is always the hardest I just submitted my first short story to a pro...

Tagged as: Absurd, Clive Barker, Consumption, Franz Kafka, Insanity, Madness, Paranoia, Visceral Dreams