#alan garner

[thewindowofthesummerhouse]

Alan Garner

[filmesbrazil]

[petermorwood]

Words have power

In dreams, as in life, and this dream woke me up this morning a lot harder than I liked, hard and fast enough that I actually remember most of the details, so I'm getting them down now before they fade.

CC: @su-whisterfield - you'll know the chapter I mean. :->

*****

In the dream I was at a convention, in the bar, chatting about how well or badly media represents certain situations.

Someone said the coffin scene in "Kill Bill" was one of the best representations of claustrophobia they'd ever seen, and there was nothing in print to match it.

I said, "Ever read the Earldelving chapter in Garner's 'Weirdstone of Brisingamen'?"

I got blank looks so reached into my shoulder-bag, pulled out a copy (evidently in this dream I had a Bag of Holding, whatever book I'd have needed was in there) and started reading.

Next thing, I was wide awake, covered in sweat, and when I looked at my Fitbit pulse-rate readout it had gone from a tagged low of 43 bpm to 85-90 in a single tick.

In retrospect I should have grabbed my phone and captured that image for the record, but I had other things on my mind, such as re-establishing awareness that I was just in bed, a bit tangled in the duvet.

Not underground in a crevice so small it was snug against shoulders, chest and back, upside-down in the dark with nowhere to go but forward and down into an unknown depth of water.

Believe me, being awake was GOOD.

*****

Garner has dismissed his early books as juvenile, and his "Bonelands" (the long-awaited sequel to "Weirdstone" and ITS immediate sequel "The Moon of Gomrath") isn't a fantasy but a modern, adult psychological novel.

I read several reviews praising it, and others which condemned it as a deliberate "oh, don't be so childish!" slap in the face to all the faithful fans who waited 50 years for a conclusion to that story.

YMMV. I haven't read it. That's also deliberate.

Yes, "Weirdstone" and "Gomrath" were written for a juvenile readership, but their writing is sometimes more adult than even their own author seems aware.

Words. Have. Power.

[ravendgie]

sketches of movies i watched recently

i liked them a lot

[vintagerpg]

Alan Garner’s debut novel, The Weirdstone of Brisigamen (1960) is set mostly in Alderley Edge, in Cheshire, and features a version of the Sleeping King legend, where the wizard of the Edge watches over a sleeping troop of knights who would one day save the world from an untold evil. To do so, though, requires the titular weirdstone, which was lost, but conveniently comes back to the Edge on the wrist of a visiting girl. She and her brother get embroiled in the machinations of a coven of witches, led by Selina Place (actually the Morrigan) and an evil sorcerer Grimnir, who both wish to possess the stone. The siblings wind up lost in the caves and mines of the Edge, are saved by two dwarves and eventually traverse the Cheshire countryside to deliver the stone to the wizard and provoke a final confrontation between the forces of good and evil.

The underground portions of claustrophobic and terrible — any dungeoneer would think twice about spelunking after reading Gardner’s descriptions of stumbling through perfect darkness, squeezing through narrow openings and, worst of all, getting stuck. Nightmarish. The later portion in the Cheshire countryside is deeply strange — mundane fields and woodland becomes overlaid with a fantastic world, populated by witches and terrible creatures — this comes across in Jack Gaughan’s bizarre cover art. The focus on landscape, and its dual nature, is something just about all of Garner’s novels ponder.

The Moon of Gomrath (1963, cover by Jeffrey Catherine Jones) sees the siblings again embroiled in a supernatural conflict with the vengeful Morrigan, an evil spirit called the Brollachan and the Wild Hunt. As an adventure yarn, Moon is probably superior, but it lacks the raw strangeness of Weirdstone. A third novels was meant to wrap things up, but Garner decided he didn’t like the protagonists, so the sequence remained incomplete until Boneland came out in 2012 (which is weird in completely different ways).

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[popclture]

The Hangover (2009)

[notasapleasure]

It is this blend of history and fantasy that makes the traditions so haunting. Fairies were never harmless eaters of jelly and cream buns in toadstool houses. They were called the Good Neighbours, or the People of Peace. And they were called by these names because they were the opposite - for the same reason that we say "Good dog" when we're going to be bitten.

Alan Garner, 'The Secret Commonwealth', Collected Folk Tales

[earhartsease]

[dental pain squick post]

two weeks ago we went to the dentist with big tooth trouble (we clove one of our upper molars asunder on stray pistachio shell shrapnel because fuck us) and she did a temporary filling but said "come in tomorrow and our tech will yeet the tooth, the only thing it's going to bite now is the dust" (okay she didn't say that bit, that was our own joke just now, irresistible) which fine, but

the next morning they called ilya to tell us tech had looked at our x-rays and said "we're going to need a bigger boat" so now when we get it done it'll be four weeks since they said it needed doing next day - and nobody's fault who isn't the tory government for fucking the nhs, damn them

and today in desperation we bought some numbing gel specifically for the tooth and guess what, guess fucking what - thanks to our mutant neurology the bloody gel makes the pain worse

so we just ordered some clove oil instead, and as we did so we caught ourselves murmuring "for the Old Evil, the Old Magic is needed"* and tbh that's why we're posting this - well and also we like that it began and ended with the different meanings of "clove"

*from The Moon Of Gomrath

[the-perilous-chapel]

"She wants to be flowers and you make her owls. You must not complain then when she goes hunting."

[contremineur]

Red shift. The further they go, the faster they leave. The sky's emptying.

Alan Garner, from Red shift (Collins 1973)

image from here

[firestark-addict]

Hangover III is my dumb comfort movie

[filmesbrazil]

[dgorringeart]

Bodachs, from Alan Garner's YA fantasy book The Moon of Gomrath. They were smaller than Susan, a young adolescent; bald, pointy-eared, covered in flat locks of hair like scales, had the legs of birds and bounded along with an unpleasant pecking motion. They served Morrigan, living only for the scream of blades.

The dwarf Uthecar described them as much like Goblins, but, loath as he was to admit it, braver, more aggressive. They stuck with me from reading that book a long time ago. I remembered their spears and odd legs, but falsely recalled horns and scaled armour, because these things are tricky.

I've settled on some raven or crow forms in their kit, and let them have the lamprey as a favourite animal motif. In the story, they can be eerily still and hard to detect; I decided their fur should accumulate algae and leaf litter like a loth to help them along with this.

I had a lot of fun with these nasty little men, and got to horse around with some new digital tricks. Like them!

[sturniluvr]

list 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the ask box for the last 10 people who liked or reblogged something from you! get to know your moots or followers<3

> my followers

> the triplets

> watching the hangover trilogy (best films ever imo)

> sleeping

> friends and family🫶🏻

[bibliophilecats]

Read this month: May 2024

I finally picked up some physical books again:

M. Lo: A Scatter of Light

T. Bell: Sepia und das Erwachen der Tintenmagie (audiobook, eARC)

D. Sayer: Whose Body (ebook)

A. Garner: Treacle Walker (ebook, library)

F. Marske: A Marvellous Light (ebook, library)

B. Albertalli: Imogen, Obviously (ebook, library)

M. Lafferty: Station Eternity

May was quite the rollercoaster regarding the books I read - I even read a 1* book (which I only finished because, by the time I realised it would not get better, I was already over 40 pages in this 80 page novella). At least it ended on a high. After loving Six Wakes, I am happy to say that Station Eternity is another great SciFi murder mystery by Mur Lafferty. I want more!