#is there not horror in an obsession that makes one psychologically rend a child from their own identity???

[fiendishartist2]

"petscop isnt horror" guys when webhorror doesn't have distorted faces:

[auron570]

2018 Readlist

FAQ

Why do you read so many old books?

Because most of them belong to the public domain, and are thus freely available online. Also it is fun to see how much the past influences and creates the foundation for the present. And how much or how little has changed, and what this says about humanity.

 Orwell - Animal Farm (1945)

A satire on the Russian Revolution and the failure of communism. Among other things, Animal Farm underlines the importance of learning to read properly and think for oneself, in a way that tickles with dark humor.

 Orwell - 1984 (1949)

Similar to Animal Farm, 1984 is an even more systematic and total examination of a society where all history and information is tightly controlled and constantly being rewritten. Being published after WW2, 1984 trades some of Animal Farm’s humor for more serious and tragic imagery of concentration camps. In a sense, 1984 is an exploration of the possibility of mind control or brainwashing through societal-level propaganda.

 Huxley - Brave New World (1932)

Absolutely fantastic. If 1984 was about what would happen if everything we read was false, then Brave New World is what would happen if no one had the desire to read at all. Brave New World shows a futuristic society that runs like clockwork with the help of genetic engineering and a miracle drug called Soma. COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. BNW examines the costs of a society that is mass-produced off assembly lines.

 Fitzgerald - Great Gatsby (1925)

A criticism of conspicuous consumption and the Roaring 20s. You can’t bring your mansion with you when you die. Mortality sucks that way. Throughout the novel we are invited to ask ‘what makes Gatsby (the character) so great?’ From rags to riches to death, Gatsby’s lonely existence is pitiable, tragic and relatable as ever.

 Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Steinbeck’s illustration of the 1930s Dust Bowl and the resulting migration of impoverished families west across the United States, is a poetic masterpiece. ‘You want to work for 15cents an hour?! Well I got a thousan’ fellas willing to work 10cents an hour.’ Also featuring two of the strongest female characters in modern literature, Grapes of Wrath is a powerful lesson on human dignity.

 Shakespeare - Hamlet (1599)

The more I read Hamlet, the more I come to the conclusion that Hamlet is about delay of action. In a way, Hamlet forces himself to be penitent for something he doesn’t do. The more time he spends contemplating whether or not to kill Claudius, the more time he has to beat himself up and call himself a coward, and for accidents to pile up. ‘But put your courage to the sticking place!’ Hamlet is what happens when you ask a philosopher to commit murder.

 Shakespeare - King Lear (1605)

A lesson in parenting. If you want people (especially your children) to respect you, do not spoil them. Lear learns this lesson far too late, and gives up his inheritance far too early. Another possible lesson is to not trust liars, and instead divine a person’s character by their actions. The trouble is, with so much action going on behind the scenes, the opportunities for dramatic irony and treachery are twofold!

 Wilde - Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

An example of 19th century Gothic Romanticism. And also, similar to Great Gatsby, another cautionary tale against conspicuous consumption. Dorian Gray, forever beautiful, forever young, is by all appearances the outward ideal of a dandy. As the novel develops, his cruelty and vanity plunge to increasing depths.

 Wilde - Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

The comedic side of being a dandy. If the suit makes the man, surely if I wear a different suit I become a different man? In a play of double-identities, love polygons and other trivialities, Earnest is a raucous upset of 19th century decorum.

 Ibsen - Hedda Gabler (1891)

A complex and cruel character, Hedda’s penchant for destroying the lives of others, seems to stem from bitterness and boredom toward her own life.

 Williams - Glass Menagerie (1944)

Theater is a box through which we view the lives of our fellow homo sapiens. Like passing by an exhibit at the museum, or peeking in on pandas at the zoo, Glass Menagerie presents a slice of life.

 McCourt - Angela’s Ashes (1996)

A coming-of-age memoir about an Irish boy growing up in an impoverished family. From the day he’s born to the day he becomes a man, memorable moments include: father always coming home drunk, scavenging for coal to get the fire going, stealing loaves of bread, shoes made of tire rubber, having an affair with a terminally ill girl, having pig’s head for Christmas, and wearing Grandma’s old dress to stay warm at night.

 Salinger - Catcher in the Rye (1951)

A tightly written story of teenage angst, about the few days after an unmotivated student drops out of a New York prep school. Unable to face his family, he wanders around the bustling city, growing increasingly depressed. Holden’s conversations with different characters throughout the novel, underline a simple moral that sometimes we just want someone to listen. (Preferably someone who isn’t a phony!)

 Shakespeare - Macbeth (1606)

A bloody and ambitious soldier descends into madness after the murders the King! It can be difficult interpreting and staging the supernatural elements of the play (e.g. do you show the ghosts on stage? what about the Witches? When, why). But remember Shakespeare is writing in a time hundreds of years before modern psychology, where memory and cognition was still immaterial and mysterious. Similar to Dorian Gray (1890), Macbeth is a moral on how one’s actions affect one’s mind.

 Albom - Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)

Succumbing to ALS near the end of his life, sociology professor Morrie Schwartz welcomes death with open arms. Hosting many visitors and having many conversations with family, friends, past students, the media, Morrie’s affable outlook on life and mortality shines.

 Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)

An allegory on the state of nature. One wonders if/how the story may have been different (and possibly more horrifying and prone to censorship debates) if female characters were involved. I suppose that would be a separate inquiry. Unable to see beyond the horizon, and unwilling to look at themselves, Jack and his follows almost doom them all.

 Lowry - The Giver (1993)

Another science fiction dystopia in a similar vein as Brave New World or 1984, but less difficult and more relatable for teenagers. Those who enjoy The Giver, should check out the film Pleasantville (1998) featuring Tobey Macguire getting stuck in a black-and-white world. Naturally the lesson being that life is never so simple.

 Naipaul - Miguel Street (1959)

A collection of short stories centered around unique characters in a slum in Port of Spain. Featuring arson, domestic violence and plenty of eccentric amateurs, Miguel Street illustrates a colorful community.

 Thiong’O - Weep Not Child (1964)

Set during the Mau Mau Uprising against British colonial rule, Weep Not Child follows one boy’s goal of education. Meanwhile his family falls apart around him, and is cut off from his best friend.

 Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables (1908)

Having recently been adapted by CBC/Netflix into a series (which is very good), the original novel is full of comedy, quaint coming-of-age lessons centered around school, tea parties, accidents and adventures. But despite this levity, Anne ends with a tragic turn which places it well within the realm of reality.

 Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)

Another example of 19th century Gothic Romanticism (like Dorian Gray). Doctor Victor Frankenstein becomes obsessed with the idea of creating life from inanimate material, only to spurn his own creation just after giving life to it. The monster, filled with rage and envy, murders Frankenstein’s dearest friends. A sort of cautionary tale in the same vein as Doctor Faustus by Marlowe, Frankenstein is a counter-weight to the enthusiasm around science at the time. That science can not only produce miracles, but also horrors in its own way if one is not careful.

 Anderson - Winesburg Ohio (1919)

A collection of short stories revolving around a small community (similar to Miguel Street). Themes of religion, old age, loneliness, love, feeling stuck in a small town, Winesburg is full of some of the most heart-rending stories in all literature. Also Winesburg manages to accomplish a unity of themes in very short space. The whole of Winesburg is much more than the sum of its parts, such that it can stand just as well against other great novels.

 Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre (1847)

One could argue that Jane Eyre is the predecessor to Anne of Green Gables. The latter frequently references the former, both are about orphan girls who grow up successfully in the face of many adverse challenges. While Anne ends with the protagonist becoming a young adult, Jane Eyre ends with a more traditional romantic happy ending, but like Anne is not without its tragedy.

 Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights (1847)

Fun fact, Wuthering Heights was a novel I considered doing an independent study essay on, but didn’t since I didn’t know anything about literature back then. Although technically of the gothic genre, Bronte primarily uses cruelty and domestic violence to evoke scenes of horror, as opposed to ghosts and monsters, while at the same time using these as tools to explore very down-to-earth themes of social class and gender inequality.

 Joyce - Dubliners (1914)

Very similar to Winesburg Ohio, but without the same unity. For example, one story is difficult to read without first reading about the history of Ireland. There are some tear-jerkers and lovely metaphors. For example the final metaphor of “snow falling faintly through the universe”, is a variation of the oft-used metaphor of flowers. How they bloom for a short period then die. What is new with this metaphor is that each snowflake is unique, thanks to the chaotic tumbling of water droplets through the atmosphere, just like how every live is unique. But all snowflakes much reach the ground some time and then melt away into nothingness.

[deathnoting]

abecedarian (6/26)

some more wammy’s gen 1 nonsense :~)

previous parts: a b c d e

f. fire (c. 1989)

—

This is a game: B picks the lock on the door, or climbs in through the window, or prowls in the shadows of the attic staircase until L emerges to accommodate some unavoidable bodily need, and then he goes into the room and he hides. The closet is roomy and the soft cotton of the shirts that hang or lie in crumpled piles makes him feel swaddled. In there he becomes a smaller child with fewer manias. Beneath the desk is cozy and rank, and within the stifling bulk of the curtains is an opportunity for inciting ghoulish phenomena, but B’s favorite spot will always be under the bed. The sound of L breathing above him makes it easier for him to sleep. The sound of L asking, with long-suffering exhaustion, for him to, “Please, just get out,” makes him feel present on the earth, unable to suddenly lose sync with the planet’s orbit and float away.

L will drag him out by his hair. L will shove a hand over his mouth and wrestle him across the floorboards, trying to avoid a scene but making one anyway, clattering at the apex of the west wing so that anyone asleep below them will not be asleep much longer. L will sometimes just ignore him, hold his eyes closed, kick away his creeping fingertips with the resigned inattention of someone batting away a fly, and do his best to sleep. If he manages to, B will crawl out and stare at his face, the downward slope of his nose, the distinct bulge of his eyes, jut of his chin. B will think of how to reform his features into those features. He will think of how to make one thing from two. L will breath quietly for him, and he will breathe for L.

He doesn’t wonder why L doesn’t tell Q or R about this game. He doesn’t wonder about anything L does, he just accepts it as a facet of reality as immovable as the names that are stuck to souls like fly-paper, and the deaths that are stuck to those names.

L Lawliet is going to die in sixteen years. Beyond Birthday is going to die (?) in — years.

He leaves that space blank. He has nothing to put there.

—

L goes to and returns from Bangalore.

B wakes him on his first night back, just after one AM, while the dark is still beginning to open. The mice are seeking answers and the owls are giving them. He takes L’s hand in his and squeezes until he is batted off, then squeezes again. Half-asleep, L is unstudied and strangely sweet, hair especially clumped, drooling onto his pillow. He looks like a child instead of an independent investigative entity. He looks like he could snap in half. B grabs him by his nose and plugs his nostrils until he wheezes himself awake.

“What,”—

“I want to show you something,” B says.

L’s pupils dilate, then shrink. He blinks until his eyes focus. “And you thought this would be a good time?”

“Yes.”

L sighs, sits up. He’s still bleary, though he tries not to be. The circles beneath his eyes have deepened since B started haunting his bedroom, but he has become less afraid. That’s what happens with ghosts: you get used to them.

“What is it, then?”

“It’s a mystery.”

L blinks. “You think you can get me to go along with it if you just use that word?”

“I think I can get you to go along with it no matter what words I use.” B smiles with all his baby teeth. “I’m a clue. You’re a detective.”

“I’m not,”—

“This is the only chance. I’ll tell you a secret tonight, or I’ll never tell you, but we have to go now.”

“Go where?”

B flares his nostrils emphatically.

L opens his mouth, then closes it. He doesn’t ask anymore questions. He doesn’t like B, but he likes knowing things that other people don’t. He stands and begins to dress, shedding the blanket to pull on a tattered pair of denims that waits by the foot of the bed. B’s pulse flutters at the severe immaculateness of his skin.

“I did some research,” L mumbles, as he fastens the button. “Combining the incident with the dog, the information on file after your interview with that psychiatrist, and my own testimony, I would have more than enough evidence to have you transferred out of the care of Wammy’s House and into a children’s psychological hospital.” He gives B a false and unnecessary smile. “If I ever felt the need.”

B sucks on his teeth. A fear of his lives within that threat, but it is not the one L thinks it is.

“Come on,” he says. “Come on come on come on.”

L comes on.

—

The field behind the abandoned barn is yellowing and bare, pocked with stumps and crushed beer cans. Teenagers from town drive out here to fumble over the center consoles of their parents’ middle class cars, or sit on the hoods and tap ash off the ends of their cigarettes, hollering and laughing and seeing none of the things that move in the dark. It is empty tonight. B made sure.

The walk from Wammy’s isn’t long but it is full of brambles and sharp stones, and neither he nor L wears shoes. The matchbook is so light in his pocket that he has to keep reaching in to make sure it’s there. Something shudders in the bushes beside them, and L stiffens.

“I want to say up front that if you’re taking me out here to kill me, you better uphold the sanctity of our organization and not do a hack job of it.”

B tugs him by his sleeve, leading him down a footpath that he knows by sensation and not sight. “You wouldn’t want me caught?”

“I won’t really care if I’m dead, will I?”

“You don’t believe that anything of the soul survives?”

“I don’t believe in the soul.”

B laughs, skittering and high-pitched.

“Is that funny to you? Excuse me if I don’t get it.”

B glances backwards and sees him crowned by the waxing moon: silhouette crooked, disgust unconcealed.

He says, “You will.”

When they arrive at the barn, L crosses his arms over his chest and glances around, feigned impassivity overshadowing his nerves. “Well. Glad I woke up in the middle of the night for this.”

B doesn’t respond, just gets out the canister of petrol from where he’d tucked it beneath the old haystack and unscrews the cap. There were many steps to this plan before the one they’re on. There was theft and deception and skullduggery. There were kids in a Ford Fiesta that had their windshield smashed with a brick on their way to this field. There were crickets in the tall grasses that warned him not to, but B had and B does.

L’s mouth opens and his posture loses its disdain, gains something comparable to horror, but softer. “You,” he breathes, as B lifts up the canister and pours the contents over his own head.

L steps toward him, expression contorting, fingers crumpling over something that isn’t there to be grabbed. B watches him through the stream of petrol, yellow and stinking bright. His eyes burn, but he won’t look away from the place where fear wars with fascination across L’s face, crumpling his brow and grinding his jaw. He is deformed by pity. By the time he manages to shake himself into action and knock the container from B’s hands, it’s already done. He’s fully doused. Highly flammable. It is a question with a straightforward answer. It is a gift that B is giving to L, and all L has to do is accept it.

“Yo—u’re,”—B’s never heard L’s voice shake like this.

He tucks it away to obsess about later, and reaches into his pocket. The matchbook says Century Automotive on it, with a phone number and address. L doesn’t catch it, just lets it hit him in the chest, and then blinks down at where it falls to the ground, as if he cannot comprehend its arrival. He shakes his head in tiny jerks.

“I—no.”

“Come on,” B goads. “It has to be you. I want to show you what I can do. I want to show you what you can do to me.”

L takes a step backward. “No, there’s no way. You’re insane.”

B picks up the matchbook, and holds it out to him. “No, I’m something else. I think I’m something else. Don’t you want to know what I am?”

L keeps on shaking his head. “No, no, I don’t. I really don’t.”

“Come on,” B says, grappling for his wrist. L jerks away so fast that B trips after him, falling heavily onto his hands and knees and coming away stuck with dirt and stray grass. “You’re not playing right,” he breathes at the ground.

“This isn’t a game,” L snaps down at him, voice rending with a tenor of panic precious in its rarity. “You’re asking me to light you on fire.”

“Yes,” B says. His eyes keep stinging more and more. He wonders if he’ll go blind and for how long. He tries to keep his grip on L, but he’s kicked off easily. He is small and L is large. He is burning and L is cold cold cold. “Please.”

L picks the matchbook up off the ground and runs, turning jerkily and plodding on bare feet, tripping into and around things, incompetent in the night with his daylight eyes, not even heading in quite the right direction, but going so fast. Not looking back.

B’s sinuses burn. When the tears come, he doesn’t argue with them. He sits in the scrubby grass, sniffling and trying not to vomit, but the smell makes his stomach roll, skin irritated, burning and healing, burning and healing. He’s deflated and very cold. The moment he’d planned with such excruciating care flickers out of his future, replaced by a long walk home, reeking of gasoline. His face clogs, nose stinging, phlegmy and impotent. L was supposed to set him alight, and he was supposed to work a miracle. He feels a miracle bottled up within his ribcage, desperate to get out.

He cries until his head throbs and his throat scrapes. He cries until he remembers, with sobering pleasure, that L had taken the matchbook. L had taken the matchbook so that B wouldn’t have it.

So that B wouldn’t—

—

Burn. He doesn’t want him to burn.

—

B drips petrol through the house. Dawn blurs purple behind him, and the floorboards do him no favors. A’s waiting for him at the top of the stairs, a dense Richard Dawkins open in his lap, miniature torch clamped between his teeth. He doesn’t look surprised to see B, but he winces with the smell of him.

“What’s—oh. God. What did he do to you?”

B blinks at him. “Nothing, unfortunately.”

“You’re….” He breathes deeply. “Well. Come on.”

He takes him to the washroom at the end of the hall, turns both the taps so that the pipes clatter within the walls and the steam rises slowly. B sinks into the bath, but the water alone doesn’t get him clean, so A coats in foamy soap and scrubs, shaking his head, chewing his lip, looking ready to make some apology that he doesn’t owe and that B doesn’t deserve. There exist certain misunderstandings between them that B is hesitant to correct. A shampoos his hair with tender hands and he is reborn out of the ashes that he never became.

“You shouldn’t—you should just give up on him. Some people are better off left alone.”

B slumps down in the water, bubbles tickling his chin. “I’m not one of them.”

“I know. But he is.”

“He’s me.”

“He’s not.” A shoves his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Just, factually.”

“I’m him. I’m becoming him. I can feel my fingers getting longer.”

“Normal growing pains.”

“There’s a bump rising in my nose.” He points.

A takes his slippery jaw in his slippery hand and turns his face one way, then the other. “There isn’t.”

B jerks out of his grip. “Maybe you just can’t see it. Maybe only he and I can see it.”

“Do you really think,” A asks, with a depth of sympathy that disgusts him, “that he can see it?”

B turns the hot water up.