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.

It’s like they knew somehow.

A few of the books I’ve read fairly recently have a few unsettling things in common. First off, not too long ago, I read George Orwell’s 1984. Published in 1949, it tells of a rigidly controlled society where to even think outside the accepted lines is to invite horrifying conditioning until your mind thinks the proper way. The population are told what to think, and the structure of society ensures the population think it, even when it flies in the face of all observable facts. Recorded history changes overnight and yet to call attention to this, to question what those with authority tell you is truth is simply not conceivable. It’s hard not to find echoes of Orwell’s totalitarian vision in the way newspapers will publish blatant untruths again and again because it backs their ideology, driven to recent ludicrous highs in the lead up to the election.

(Loosely related tangent: Russell Brand is a cock; we all know this. There is, however, no denying that the cock has become a bit of a figurehead for the disillusioned non-voting masses. So, appearing on Brand’s web show The Trews as Ed Miliband did, in an effort, however half-arsed, to at least try to engage with these people is surely worthy is it not? It seems not. The official Government line is that Brand, and therefore by extension, the large percentage of the population he is speaking for, is a joke. Way to show contempt for the people whose lives you’re supposed to be working to improve. The papers declared it to be the desperate move of a lunatic. Why is it such a terrible idea to try to talk to the apathetic non voters? I agree that they should vote, but apathy doesn’t justify the contempt the press has shown them, lumping them together as some kind of bad smell it’s impolite to even acknowledge. Of course, judging by the recent election results, the silent majority might well consist of mostly UKIP voters, so now here I am, quite out of character for me, kind of hoping they go back to being silent.)

Anyway, back to the point; prescient novels. It seems Orwell’s future is one increasingly within the realm of possibility with every passing year. I’ve mentioned before how one of my favourite films growing up was the 1960 adaptation of The Time Machine, but I hadn’t, until recently, read H. G. Wells’ original novel. Rach picked it up for me from one of our local libraries (I get a delicious thrill every time I remember I’m lucky enough to live in a place where ‘local library’ is plural, and now that where I live has gone blue for the first time in over a decade, I’m concerned that may not be the case for much longer). Published in 1895 and set in Victorian times, it follows a scientist, known in the narrative only as ‘The Time Traveller’ to the year 802,701 to discover what has become of Earth and humanity in the far future. It turns out the divide between the rich and poor in our society continued to grow and grow and grow. It’s incredible that even pre-1900 there was concern in society about the widening gap between the classes, and that over 100 years later, we’re still having trouble with that issue. Did I say incredible? I meant incredibly depressing. But hey, I suppose I’d better get used to things being incredibly depressing for a while.

Having conquered the need to struggle for anything, the upper classes have evolved into the Eloi; mindless children, spending the days frolicking, eating, fucking and, well, not much else. Certainly not thinking. Their language is hugely simplified and their attention span is practically non-existent. The Time Traveller contends that this shows that struggling and fighting for a better world is what has driven us to achieve so much throughout the years, and when we finally got what we had struggled for for so long, our drive, our intelligence, our will to improve and our creativity withered and died, no longer needed. Meanwhile, the working classes have retreated underground and evolved into pasty, light-fearing Morlocks, living in dark holes full of machinery and manufacturing. The relationship between those above ground and those below is no longer economic, for there is no longer the need for an economy. Nor is it master and slave. The Morlocks continue to manufacture clothes and shoes for the Eloi, but it is not to serve them, nor is it because they are still some beaten down underclass. For the Morlocks have become cattle farmers, and the Eloi their unthinking food source. The gap between rich and poor, between upper and working class, has been widening for some time and is already pretty sickening. Inexplicably, we seem happy for it to get worse. The 19th Century concerns expressed in The Time Machine seem more timely now than ever.

And then, I came to High Rise. I’d read some J. G. Ballard before; The Drowned World, The Wind From Nowhere, The Terminal Beach & The Drought were my first experiences of the British writer, which I picked up after raiding my father-in-law’s book shelf. When news broke that Ben Wheatley was adapting it and that it is widely known as Ballard’s best novel, I reached out to my local libraries again and picked up a copy. High Rise was published in 1975 and is set almost entirely within the concrete walls of a recently opened self-contained living apartment. 1000 apartments on 40 storeys, the building includes shopping malls, swimming pools, schools and anything else the occupants might need. The only reason to leave is to work.

It doesn’t take long for things to start going awry; able to shut themselves off from society completely, those living in the high-rise begin to alter their self-contained society into something more primal – physical class distinctions evolve, literally lower, middle and upper class, reflected in the floors they occupy – and, freed from the restrictions placed upon them by a civilised society, a different rule takes precedence, that of hunter/gatherer, of predator and prey.

The really uncomfortable thing about High Rise is the fact that the inhabitants of the building actually welcome this degeneration, like a long-tamed beast finally throwing off its shackles. There is a sensation of the people actually pushing things further and further deliberately, out of a need just to see how far it can actually go; they embrace the darkness eagerly. The thing about High Rise is that it is so disturbingly plausible, that while the apartment building offered the ideal environment for the events described, sometime it feels there is every possibility of pockets of civilisation going this way as a prelude to the whole of our society plunging purposefully and giddily down this path of de-evolution. The intent of our new Government to re-legalise foxhunting and stop Britain being subject to the Human Rights Act, maybe even to withdraw from Europe altogether, make it feel like our entire country is becoming a self-contained high rise of its own, and the feeling of the balance tipping, gently at first, then quicker and quicker towards oblivion that many of us currently have is evoked so strongly in the early chapters of Ballard’s novel it is dizzying, and not a little disconcerting.

Of course, things on the whole aren’t quite as depressing as all that. While it is really quite depressing that in the decades since these novels were written and published, it seems we’ve failed to progress at all, there is hope in that we don’t yet appear to have slipped any closer to the hellish visions dreamed up in them. We might yet find our way to a future civilisation more positive than those described in 1984, The Time Machine and High Rise. More like The Commonwealth described by Peter F. Hamilton. More Star Trek, less Mad Max. Here’s hoping.