Hello fellow Entropians!
I’m writing–rapping, rapping at your chamber door?–to let you know of an opportunity this month of Halloween over here at Entropy Reviews: on October 31, we’ll be publishing some of the scariest moments in BOOks. We’d like you to contribute yours!
This can be scary in any sense: shocking, repulsive, indelible, unforgettable, inimitable, horrifying, mortifying, petrifying, provocative…the list could go on and include much more alliteration and half-rhyme. (Perhaps half-rhyme is in itself scary? Perhaps Edgar Allan Poe? Perhaps The Simpsons therein?)
You can interpret this politically (eek, easy enough), metaphysically, epistemologically, ontologically, illogically, absurdly, tragically, comically, tragicomically…you get the idea: You get to choose what scary means to you.
Only stipulation is that it’s got to come from a book and be a single moment. Give us that moment, best you can in summary, or go full-out and recreate it, and then: review the scare. Why’s it so scary? Just what makes it so? Is that what’s stuck with you? Is that a good thing?
Ultimately we’re trying to get at what of books sticks with us in a way we just can’t shake.
For instance, I’ll forever remember Molloy going mad sucking stones by the sea, transferring them from one hand to the other, passing through his mouth, to try to suck them all down evenly, like some weird weather erosion of the gaping maw; or Don Quixote going mad doing cartwheels, pantsless, alone in the woods, while his sidekick watches in horror from a distance; or the titular yellow wallpaper peeling madly back (shout to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who so does not get enough credit for writing this eternal scare, to say nothing of its historical significance to feminism)…and such, to name a few.
Come to think of it, my scary seems madness. (And then there was that one time I took Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways with me to Chanctonbury Ring, a haunted beech tree copse on the south-east coast of England, and at night alone in my tent heard what he heard in the wind-whipped treetops.)
Now you think on it, have some fun with it–until you don’t, and the lights go out, and there’s nothing but the glow of your computer screen in the dark. Oh wait, that’s just what we call writing.
