Fiction Stuff

[caraig]

Remember "Hiwon," that kind of creepy story that came from a dream I had? A few days ago I had "Hiwon's" brother. And I tried to write it down and expand on it, but unfortunately I got out of the writing mood later that day and didn't get it finished. And so this one has a pretty lame ending, kind of not knowing where to go. So please feel free to critique it, and be as brutal as you need to be. I added a title/logo to it as practice for graphics design and to see what I could make a computer-generated image do. Here is the story itself. Enjoy. Pax.

Comments

[collie13.livejournal.com]

So... do you actually know what the night brings? What curious stories. Is there truly no hope?

[caraig.livejournal.com]

I only have a few disparate ideas of what happens when the sun goes down in that world. I know that 'they' are some kind of predators or at least exhibit what we would call predatory behavior. Maybe they feed off of fear, a sort of cliche, admittedly. But I've never really thought of 'them' as having a real true sapience. They seem possessed of a malicious cunning, a sort of vicious sense of strategy, but not sapient in the way we are. (Another thought I had, which was kind of disturbing... what if the world 'fell asleep' and that they really are nightmares? Do people taken by them wake up? And if so what kind of world do they wake up into? Is it a blessing or a curse to be woken up by these things?)

I'm not realy sure on any of these points. The dreams were just that: dreams. If anything this kind of underlines the problems of translating a dream directly into a story: our subconscious will make up things that seem totally reasonable but our conscious mind needs a reason for things.

I have some reasons for what they do. Why did that 'thing' try to ambush the narrator in the form of a birch tree, for example? Part of what "they" do is to suborn our symbols and turn them into symbols for themselves. Thus they leave an indelible mark on humans even through the daylight hours. The narrator won't ever look at a birch tree ever the same way again, in fact every time he sees one he'll be reminded of this incident, and every birch tree will stand out in his mind. Why do this, though? To remind him of his close brush with the 'haunter?' To keep fear of the 'haunters' always in his mind? To be better able to track him? To file away at his sanity so he becomes easier to catch?

When I had the original idea long long ago, it was a sort of pseudo-religious setting with demons and the like. And there was to be, eventually, some way to help the world and it's peoples overcome and pass on through that incident, and to be the stronger for it. For this, I'm not sure. I've almost painted the protagonists into a corner since there's no real way to communicate with 'them' or to deal or understand them. 'They' hold all the cards, since they know how to frighten the hell out of us in certain ways. While for us... maybe there are some scientists holed up in a safe place who are working on this problem. (Though for that matter I never really defined what a 'safe place' was except to liken it to curling up in bed with the sheets pulled up over one's head.)

[collie13.livejournal.com]

Your thoughts on them being nightmares are interesting but a bit confusing -- could I ask you to clarify a bit more? Also, there are two things which puzzle me. One is how can a solid, locked house be less secure than what is (in effect) no more than a shallow burrow out in the woods?

The second is an impression I've gotten while reading, which may or may not be correct, of course. In effect, your narrator gives the feeling he's figured out (but is terrifiedly suppressing) that it's simply intense fear which brings them -- nothing more or less. Is that right?

If that's the case, it would explain why a burrow is safer, though. The fears of one lone individual are usually nowhere as intense as the fear of a room full of folks sharing and augmenting each other's fear. However, this implies two rather unpleasant things.

First, that the monsters, sapient or not, are choosing who and when they eat, as there's no stopping them. In effect, they're like the human picking only the most perfect fruit off a tree, and leaving the less perfect fruit time to ripen. Their way of "perfecting" a human would appear to be building on and growing the human's fears, just as you describe with the birch tree incident.

Secondly... it means humans are a dead race, unless they figure out how to manage their fear, or defeat the monsters. Ick. Reminds me a bit of the Earthdawn role-playing game's background.

[caraig.livejournal.com]

Your thoughts on them being nightmares are interesting but a bit confusing -- could I ask you to clarify a bit more?

I'll try, sure.

It seems to me that one way to interpret what the things are, is that they're actual nightmares brought to some sort of life. And from that thesis, I could see the situation being one of two things:

1. Either the nightmares somehow escaped our subconscious mind, and have taken some kind of physical presence in the waking world; or
2. humanity as a whole, or at least most of humanity, is asleep and in some kind of communal dream, and the nightmares that stalk us at night are just that: nightmares, and nothing more. When they 'take' someone, that person presumably 'wakes up.' it'd be kind of left up in the air as to what the world that they wake up to is like, if it's just like ours or if it's something completely different.

That's a bit of a complicated explaination, so i'm not really going for it. Still, it has some interest as a seed of something else. ^^

Also, there are two things which puzzle me. One is how can a solid, locked house be less secure than what is (in effect) no more than a shallow burrow out in the woods?

I reasoned it thusly: the burrow is close, snug, and has no 'void spaces' around the 'walls.' There's only the one entrance, which can be watched and walled over. In contrast, a house can have all sorts of odd corners, little nooks and ill-lighted places, closets and places beneath the beds. Basically, if you can imagine anything about a kid's room, when the kid is imagining monsters in the closet and foot-grabbers under the bed, that's pretty much the mentality of picking out a safe place. I've also implied that there's some kind of 'sense' about if a place is safe or not on the part of at least the narrator, though I'm not sure if it's just a gut feeling, or an actual sixth sense.

The second is an impression I've gotten while reading, which may or may not be correct, of course. In effect, your narrator gives the feeling he's figured out (but is terrifiedly suppressing) that it's simply intense fear which brings them -- nothing more or less. Is that right?

This is a part of the whole story-universe that I'm still not entirely sure about. It's possible that the things feed off of fear or are attracted to it, in fact form what we've seen it's likely. The narrator seems to believe that on some level. He did note that cities went fast at the beginning.

But that implies an insane level of patience and planning, even for things such as these. Thinking about it, I would agree with you that humanity is pretty much doomed if things go on as they are. Fortunately, the narrator and his misery can't be the only viewpoint of the world, no matter what my nightmares might insist upon. ^^ If I ever did more with this story-universe, I'd be racking my brains trying to figure out what the stalwart of humanity would be doing to oppose these things.

Now that you mention it I remember Earthdawn, FASA's competetor to D&D. It didn't do so well, as I recal, but I do remember that it was a kind of medieval/pseudo-post-apocalyptic world. And I guess there are some similarities.

[tamahori]

Very well written ... and very very disturbing, I ... I don't think 'liked it' is the right term, but it was a good read. :)


Brett, who does not think he'd do well in that world.

[caraig.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I'd not do too well there, either. But as above, it's not a terribly interesting world if there's no hope at all.

[tigerfae.livejournal.com]

That was very well written. It kept me enthralled until the end, which is really rare for me.

I only have one suggestion for you, which concerns the paragraph below.

"We hesitated, half-expecting the girl to explode into some beast from the nethermost part of our nightmares. Instead, eyes open but not seeing us, she sang the lyric again, as she held herself."

When you mention that you are half-expecting the girl to turn into a beast, you are voicing the fear of the reader as well, but you are also letting the reader know that it's not going to happen. Why not draw out the suspense a littler longer? There's nothing wrong with five extra seconds of anticipation. =)

[caraig.livejournal.com]

Hmm, a good idea. Thanks! I'll see what I can do to re-write that part and make it seamless. that was about the point where I had first started to loose steam writing it, so it probably shows! ^^

[sodon.livejournal.com]

Very disturbing. Reminds me of "The Village", only without the weird ending. Of course, I have some debate in my mind as to whether or not the "monster" in said movie was really a farce at all, but you certainly make no bones about it in yours, or at least, you don't say it's a farce yet. So it's definitely disturbing. Why I read crap like this and make myself depressed is beyond me, but you did a good job =P

[caraig.livejournal.com]

M. Night Shyamalan does some very, very good things with his cinematography, at least for about two-thirds to three quarters of his films. After that he just can't hold it in anymore and simply MUST show the audience what the monster is. However, there's probably a lot of Shyamalan's influence in those stories of mine, since I found Signs to be quite scary for about half the movie, and even The Village was scary for the large majority of the film. I think another influence was The Ring but thinking too much of that movie still makes me jumpy at this time of night, so I'm not even going to go there!

The monsters definitely aren't farces, though as I've said above I'm not enitrely sure just what they are, yet. They're quite real for the story-world and very much a threat. What their natures are, though, is still yet to be determined. I'm probably going to wait for another dream that involves something like them before I write of them again. Who knows? Maybe there'll be some hint as to what they are next time. Though admittedly I'm not enitrely looking forward to another dream with them.

[sodon.livejournal.com]

Of course, that would imply you already know the answer, somewhere in that disturbed mind of yours =P