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]

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.