David Antrobus's Blog: The Migrant Type, page 27
December 20, 2013
40. to 37. Hellraiser to Snowtown
37. Snowtown, or The Snowtown Murders
This one's completely rooted in our reality, as unpalatable as that can be, and tells the stark story of the 1990s series of based-on-truth killings in South Australia. For me, the horror lies in addressing your reaction to the main antagonist, John Bunting, and how you reconcile your gut level need for him to meet his just deserts, and what you envision those deserts to be. A true sociopath, at heart as mundane as any, yet more persuasively ugly than most...
The Criteria: Horror Stripped of Humour
So, thinking more about the criteria of these films. In order to reduce the near endless possibilities, I immediately excluded any horror movies that leaned too heavily on humour. Not because I believe humour is inappropriate in horror films—in fact, I've often said there's a direct kinship between the two emotions, laughter and terror, both of them allied in the release of tension, both so reliant on mood and timing, and both at heart so utterly serious—but because humour by its nature will...
December 19, 2013
Forty Shades of Terror
A few weeks ago, mainly for idle fun born of a misguided sense that my opinion even matters in an overcrowded world, I began to post a sporadic list of my forty favourite horror movies on my Facebook timeline. And not simply horror movies, but a specific kind of horror movie: one that stays under your skin or burrows inside your psyche and won't leave, one that truly disturbs, unsettles or frightens you... or, more accurately (since it's my list), me. I also wanted these films to burst, blur...
December 7, 2013
The Crow Highway
Thanks again to Dan Mader and his Friday flash fiction challenges. Here is the latest two minutes-worth of strangeness to be dredged from the dank recesses, in which Ted Hughes meets Iain Banks, maybe? Along with something far less savoury.
Exercises like these force you to not think about your writing, to allow the words to emerge largely uneditied and unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness style, which makes them interesting on a psychological and a literary level. Not sure what they reveal. No...
November 30, 2013
My Own Private Cannery Row
© Tracy Prescott MacGregor
Rarely do I write poetry. Even more rarely do I allow it exposure. Not entirely sure why. I revere great poetry, but I find it to be a rare species: elusive and golden, hiding in shadows or, occasionally, in plain sight.
So here's a poem, no more fanfare than that.
My Own Private Cannery Row
Here I endure my own private cannery row.
It crackles and breeds in
the dark parts of
my unruly heart—corrugated sheets layered over
smoky post-afternoons,
heavy enough with loss
and the...
November 24, 2013
Boo! And a Review
Been lax with this blog again; the balance of writing to editing has shifted toward the latter of late. Which is okay, as I love it almost as much as I do writing. However, a couple of writing-related events have gone unacknowledged, so here:
I have a new story out there. It's one of nine tales by independent writersin a new Halloween anthology, entitled Boo! And although its theme is Halloween, it refuses to be typecast as an outright horror anthology, with the stories ranging deftly across m...
September 29, 2013
From Twitter To Storify
My first ever Twitter chat was a wash, as Twitter happened to choose that day—almost that exact time frame, in fact—for one of its warp core meldowns. Which was a shame, since it happened to be on September 12, one day after the anniversary of the event my little book is about. Everything about that book seems serendipitous. So, we rescheduled for Thursday the 26th instead and it went off without a technical hitch. It was an interesting process, one's responses to questions severely limited b...
September 14, 2013
Presence
More three minute flash fiction, and thanks again to Dan Mader and his blog for the inspiration, the motivation and the opportunity to inflict more words on people. For want of a better title, this one is called Presence. Like the Led Zeppelin album, not the things you unwrap at Christmas. Or, actually, whatever you want it to be—now it's left the confines of my skull, it's fair game. These tiny pieces come from somewhere buried; no planning, no editing. Just words bubbling from the subconsci...
September 10, 2013
Join Me For a Bublish/Twitter Chat
What is Bublish? It may sound kind of like a brand of gum, but it's actually a "social book discovery platform" whose president, Kathy Meis, has been tireless in her enthusiasm and support for authors. I feel like I owe her and Bublish a debt, having uploaded two of my books to the site and created four of what they call "book bubbles," all at no cost other than the effort it takes to create them. Anyway, take a look and see what you think. This is what a "bubble" looks like (click to enlarge...
August 28, 2013
The Art of Leaving and Arriving
For a blog entitled The Migrant Type, this article ("All Immigrants are Artists") at The Atlantic has a special resonance.
While contemplating Patricia Engel’s It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, the gloriously-named Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat encounters the idea that "re-creating your entire life is a form of reinvention on par with the greatest works of literature" with the same sense of astonishment I also felt when reading the article itself, let alone the novel that sparked it....