I started playing Spelunky
– the ‘enhanced edition’, not the lo-fi original – in March 2014, during
the last Oxford vacation I ever spent at my childhood home in Birmingham. I
don’t know why I bought it. It was cheap in a sale on GOG, but even so, it’s a
famously hard platformer and I am famously bad at platformers. I never honed
those nerves and thews on Mario. I miss jumps; I get stressed. I think I lasted
half a level in Meat Boy. I ought to
have bounced off Spelunky after my
first handful of deaths.
Instead, I got hooked. I’d play it a few times (which
doesn’t take very long; early in one’s Spelunky
career surviving for five minutes is a significant achievement) and then
decide it was too hard and not for me. The next day I’d fire it up again,
wondering if I’d somehow magically got better at it overnight. This lasted for
the rest of the vacation, until I went back to work and lost all my free time
again.
The platformer where I threw all our bombs to get out of all our problems and pT used all our ropes to get us out of poverty, culminating, every time, in a dead gold god squashing us to death
Hey! I have a story out this month in Apex Magazine! I’m really proud of this one, which I actually had the chance to workshop with my favourite author, Samuel R. Delany, while I was at Clarion.
If you like my work, please check this out and consider leaving a comment, buying the issue or simply re-blogging this post to support my work. Thanks~ <3
My skin was still charred when I first woke up. I raised my hands above my head and watched as it bubbled and leaked, as it grew pink — then brown — between the charcoal scabs. By nightfall I was covered in an armor of abscess. I spent six hours popping yellowed sacks of pus to reveal my new skin, baby-soft and unmarked.
“What do you remember?” the Old Man asked me when I could speak. My tongue was still numb from blistering, my eyes hazy and cheeks raw from where the skin had sloughed off in rubbery sheets. I didn’t remember, I tried to say. It wasn’t true — I saw glimpses of it in short, painful bursts. Tiny, knife-shaped headaches that ground through my skull like diamond. I remembered some ugly words and the grate of a lighter being clicked to life over and over again. I remembered tripping over my shoelaces and hearing a song somewhere in the distance, a hard grind of sax and bass. Funk was a false promise of kindness. Will it go ‘round in circles? Billy Preston was asking me. Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?
“I burned,” I told him. “They freaking burned me. I died burning.”
“A lot of things die burning,” Old Man Gasper said. “But not you.”
I know that if you’re following me, you probably know Jennifer for her fannish work, and I reiterate that her original work is jolly bloody good. So glad to see this in Apex.
Here I am again, interminably blogging about the intersection between horror, games and narrative! In my defense, there’s fewer people who speak more eloquently about this stuff than prunescholar, and because the ability of a game to provide horror with static art that changes very, very slowly or suddenly – well, that slipstream point of something being off is, in my mind, the heart of all horror. I do think that this underpins the scariest part of Stephen King’s novella The Langoliers, in which I argue that the scariest stuff is in the first ten pages and I am 100% right. Do give this a read.
Hi...haven't yet read "The Deepwater Bride" (I'll probably tackle the issue this weekend), but did read your F&SF interview. I was amused by your mention of stories where shoggoths are killed by bullets, and I was wondering: did you have any particular piece in mind? I ask because I actually published a story last year in which two people do indeed kill a shoggoth with firearms. I've no problem with the criticism; in fact, I'd be tickled if my work was reaching that wide an audience. Thoughts?
Hello! I did have a particular piece in mind when I talked about win-loss narratives and Lovecraft, but it wasn’t actually a piece of written fiction: it’s Lovecraft narratives as we’ve had to apply them in the world of video games and board games. Arkham Horror was the first one that sprang to mind, and I say this as someone who loves Arkham Horror a lot. If you’re not familiar, in Arkham Horror the entire point is to shoot increasing waves of Lovecraftian monsters and take down the Big Bad before the time runs out. It’s excellent. It’s also not scary, simply because it does predicate itself on the idea that the way to take down the Old Ones is through a boss battle. Arkham Horror is not scary in all the ways that, say, The Shadow Of The Comet or the glorious Anchorhead is; both games cleave to a more truly Lovecraftian idea of outrunning and slowing down evil, rather than a finality through bullets. (And having now read “The Only Game In Town”, I won’t say much about it, but I feel it gives much more narrative weight to prayers than firepower and thus escapes all of my criticism!)
I’d wanted to talk in-depth about weaponry in Lovecraft, text adventures and the red herring of the fight, but I realised that what everyone could be doing, right at this moment, is playing Michael S. Gentry’s “Anchorhead” which has a female protagonist and a huge reversal of the “save your wife” narrative, so the words have been blessedly taken out of my cake hole.
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tazmuir Said: