Am I missing out?

It is well documented that I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to being scared. I don’t like horror generally, and sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on some great stuff. Well, let me rephrase. I know I’m missing out on some great stuff, but sometimes I wonder if I should care more about it.

There are some things I give not one shit about – the Saw franchise, for example. It can be as ingenious in its gory traps as it wants, but I’m someone it just isn’t going to be appealing to anytime soon. However, there are some things that perhaps I should make more of an effort to try, despite my fears.

I can get behind horror in a sci-fi setting a little more easily – I love Alien for example, and I might be one of only a few people that looks back on Event Horizon with fondness. I was scared watching those films, but still enjoyed them – in fact watching Alien for the first time all alone on ITV one Saturday night while my parents were out, eyes wide and heart hammering almost out of my chest as Ripley, Jones in hand, raced for the dubious safety of the Nostromo’s escape pod while lights flashed and smoke poured will always be one of my fondest film-related memories. But more standard horror is something I have tended to avoid, and continue to do so. Watching the Japanese language Ring trilogy left me feeling really quite traumatised (I swear I could see Sadako in every fucking shadow for months afterward) and while I can say they are decent films (the first one is genuinely excellent), I have no desire to watch them again anytime soon.

So I guess what it boils down to is that I need to find the good stuff and avoid the crap. Easier said than done when I’ve generally avoided the genre for so long. I think I’ve found two places I might be able to start, though. Being married to a librarian is a truly brilliant thing – I’ve found China Miéville and Anne Leckie, kept up with Brandon Sanderson’s latest releases and picked up classics from H. G. Wells, J. G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut. Thanks to Rach, I recently read Weaveworld, a fairly old novel written by Clive Barker – he of Hellraiser fame. Hellraiser and its sequels is probably a prime example of the kind of thing I tend to avoid. Weaveworld is one of those books that just boggles the mind – not only the imagination and the story, but the prose. Barely a page went by in that book that I didn’t find a passage, or a line, or a few words that made me take a breath and just admire the craft of an absolute master of words. The only other two authors I’ve found to be comparable in terms of that gobsmacking use of language are the aforementioned China Miéville and Stephen King. What is striking is that there are many moments of horror in Weaveworld and in Miéville’s work, and I’ve heard tell that King might dabble in horror from time to time as well. I couldn’t tell you for sure because the only books of his I’ve read so far is the Dark Tower series.

There’s got to be something in that, right? The three most gifted authors I’ve read have strong horror threads in much of their writing, with Barker and King famous for specialising in it? I’m clearly more comfortable when my horror is mixed with other genres – the sci-fi of Alien, Weaveworld is fantasy, The Dark Tower is also fantasy, with a large dose of western and Miéville is, frankly, beyond categorisation. Maybe I can use Barker and King to cross over into more straight horror?

Games are the same. I have tried to get through Bioshock a number of times – the premise is wonderful and the game is clearly quality – generally thought of as pretty much the best of the last generation. But when I play it before long I find myself a little too creeped out and I move on to something else. I want to play it. I want to finish it. I want to move on to Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite, but I want to get through Bioshock first.

So maybe that’s where I’ll start. Pick up another Clive Barker or Stephen King book. Finish Bioshock. Maybe then I’ll find the guts to keep going and see what I’ve been missing out on. Maybe.

The city is alive.

I recently had the good fortune to spend a night in London. Living in the Midlands, London is distant enough to me to feel like it may as well be another country. I know it’s down there, and I know as far as most of the world is concerned, it’s the only part of this country that counts. Sometimes I feel like I’m the equivalent of an inbred farmer in the sticks, considering himself almost a different species to these fancy city folk. The sensible part of me knows that cities are full of people not that different to me; the difference being that there are more of them; something you’d think would put me off, but for some reason doesn’t.

We got there by train – first to London Euston, then Underground, then another short train journey into Croydon. The thing that strikes me about London, is the sheer numbers of people, all different and no doubt complex, yet all specks besides the city as a whole, like stars in a galaxy. We got to our platform in the Underground, only to find our train was jam-packed. As I was preparing to force myself into this mass of bodies, my travelling companion, with the benefit of more experience in this, placed a hand on my shoulder and motioned me to wait and let the train go. I then learned that there was another train coming along in a mere 90 seconds. And another 2 minutes after that. On and on, day and night. The number of people constantly moving in, out, through and under the city is mind boggling. The roads are almost never free of buses – usually there are 2 or 3. To use a car to get around London seems ludicrously inefficient.

Endless movement, endless offices, endless new buildings going up, endless restaurants, apartments, banks and hotels, endless people. It adds up to something that while made up of these separate parts, feels somehow beautifully alive in its own right, and I love that about it.

It makes me want to tour cities everywhere, to see how each melting pot of humanity feels, to see if they are different. It’s why I’m drawn to fiction where a city becomes a character in its own right, like Ankh-Morpork in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, or New Crobuzon in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.

Cities are alive, and, while certainly bad for the environment, the wealth of positive inspiration I get from them manages to quiet the concerned ecologist in me.