More Characterizations
Of my other horror novellas (SUMMERVILLE and THE DAY OF THE NIGHTFISH), there are perhaps curious evolutions of my approach to characters in it.
SUMMERVILLE serves up characters who are willfully slasher-movie type fodder, in that they're a group of goofus characters who have engineered a southern road trip that goes, well, south on them. I enjoyed those characters, but my sympathy was always with Talulah, the hitchhiker who the other characters pick up and then ditch. I just liked her character.
I appreciated this podcast review of the book, where I think one of the reviewers didn't initially like the book, but came around.
In the face of all-conquering nature, yeah, the human characters are diminished, which was the point of the story.
Maybe I was vibing it when I wrote THE DAY OF THE NIGHTFISH, too, in that the protagonist of that one is a nameless dude (he's mockingly nicknamed "Isca" by some fishermen later in the story).
His relative anonymity was deliberate on my part, as I was writing a kind of eco-cosmic horror with that novella, and inherent in that kind of story is a diminishment of the human within it. And you get that in that story (even though "Isca" survives [spoiler, sorry/not-sorry]), in that he's traumatized by what he experienced.
That story was in the running for an Aeon Award (it was shortlisted, but didn't move past that phase), so I made it into a novella.
In the goofy characters of SUMMERVILLE and the bro-bravado protagonist of NIGHTFISH, I think I was playing with an aesthetic for my characters to make a narrative point.
Kind of like the ocean doesn't care who you are as you're floating in it -- you're just a bit of flotsam (or, perhaps worse, jetsam) on a churning sea. It's not a reassuring thought, so maybe that's why people didn't dig those books, although I think they're strong stories.
There are larger-than-life characters, and there are smaller-than-life characters, too (I resist calling them caricatures, although some might be). But some people rise to the occasions they face, and others simply don't -- I think I was exploring that with both of these books, as the characters in those stories get consumed (literally and figuratively) by forces larger than them.
And for me, at least, that's horrifying.
SUMMERVILLE serves up characters who are willfully slasher-movie type fodder, in that they're a group of goofus characters who have engineered a southern road trip that goes, well, south on them. I enjoyed those characters, but my sympathy was always with Talulah, the hitchhiker who the other characters pick up and then ditch. I just liked her character.
I appreciated this podcast review of the book, where I think one of the reviewers didn't initially like the book, but came around.
In the face of all-conquering nature, yeah, the human characters are diminished, which was the point of the story.
Maybe I was vibing it when I wrote THE DAY OF THE NIGHTFISH, too, in that the protagonist of that one is a nameless dude (he's mockingly nicknamed "Isca" by some fishermen later in the story).
His relative anonymity was deliberate on my part, as I was writing a kind of eco-cosmic horror with that novella, and inherent in that kind of story is a diminishment of the human within it. And you get that in that story (even though "Isca" survives [spoiler, sorry/not-sorry]), in that he's traumatized by what he experienced.
That story was in the running for an Aeon Award (it was shortlisted, but didn't move past that phase), so I made it into a novella.
In the goofy characters of SUMMERVILLE and the bro-bravado protagonist of NIGHTFISH, I think I was playing with an aesthetic for my characters to make a narrative point.
Kind of like the ocean doesn't care who you are as you're floating in it -- you're just a bit of flotsam (or, perhaps worse, jetsam) on a churning sea. It's not a reassuring thought, so maybe that's why people didn't dig those books, although I think they're strong stories.
There are larger-than-life characters, and there are smaller-than-life characters, too (I resist calling them caricatures, although some might be). But some people rise to the occasions they face, and others simply don't -- I think I was exploring that with both of these books, as the characters in those stories get consumed (literally and figuratively) by forces larger than them.
And for me, at least, that's horrifying.
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