I want to be an old theatrically morbid man like Vincent Price." Well, I want to be like the Chowder Society, the four old men who get together and tell ghost stories, starting each one with the same eerie introduction, "What's the worst thing you've ever done?," followed by the response, "I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me.the most dreadful thing." One of the most popular tweets I ever.uh.tweeted ( JoeAverageSF, if you're interested) was "I can't wait to be old. I fully intend to be in the Chowder Society when I grow old. This is ultimately a boy's story about the one that got away, about impotent men cowering in the face of a female power. She's eeeeevil because she makes men love her too much, but refuses to be subjugated by that love. Her acolytes speak of her in reverent tones. The shapeshifter is a seductress kinda monster who uses her wiles to send men to their destruction. The only two women to get any real screen time are the shapeshifter antagonist in her various guises and the wife of one of the protagonists, who is a cheatin' ice queen with a heart like shards of cold broken glass. On a very surface level, it's an accurate observation. Because I am a little shit, and because I have a tendency to soak up and project hyperliberal dogmas of oppression and subjugation, my first thought after completing Peter Straub's seminal Ghost Story was "another goddamned horror novel about poor helpless men besieged by an eeeeevil woman."
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |