SOUNDTRACK: BILLIE EILISH-“Bury a Friend” (2019).
A lot of the music I listen to is weird and probably creepy to other people, but I don’t necessarily think of songs as appropriate for Halloween or not. So for this year’s Ghost Box stories, I consulted an “expert”: The Esquire list of Halloween songs you’ll play all year long. The list has 45 songs–most of which I do not like. So I picked 11 of them to post about.
There’s a ton of reasons why Billie is an unlikely pop sensation. I won’t bother going through the myriad reasons, I’ll just talk about the music of this song–a suitably creepy song to kick off a series of Spooky Stories.
The song starts with a muted, almost musical drumbeat and clicks. Then Billie’s processed voice sings with what I assumed is a slowed down version of her voice singing parallel with her.
After a muttered “come here,” and a screech, the verse starts. It’s no less creepy and possibly more hypnotic. It leads to a bridge in which at the end of each features a voice that cries quietly (and then reverses n the next line).
The repeated refrain of “I wanna end me” is probably the least creepy section of the song.
There’s one more part, a quickly spoken line ending with three thumps that lead to the next line.
Then it all repeats.
There’s no prettiness, no poppiness. It’s like a slightly more dancey version of Portishead. It’s pretty darn cool.
I have no idea why it/she is so popular. But good for her.
And the video is really freaking creepy too.
[READ: October 17, 2019] “The Foghorn”
Just in time for Halloween, from the people who brought me The Short Story Advent Calendar and The Ghost Box. and Ghost Box II. comes Ghost Box III.
This is once again a nifty little box (with a magnetic opening and a ribbon) which contains 11 stories for Halloween. It is lovingly described thusly:
Oh god, it’s right behind me, isn’t it? There’s no use trying to run from Ghost Box III, the terrifying conclusion to our series of limited-edition horror box sets edited and introduced by Patton Oswalt.
There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, I’m going to read in the order they were stacked.
Gertrude Atherton had a story in the previous Ghost Box. I was pretty impressed by it.
This story is also pretty twisted–fans of the macabre should really check her out.
The story starts in a not at all scary way with a discussion of pillows and the merits of sleeping on a hard or soft pile of them. But we quickly see that the narrator is drowsy and is concerned that Ellen, good creature, put a tablet in her broth last night to help her sleep.
She suffered from insomnia but didn’t mind lying awake as she thought about the wonders of her body. She was tall enough to carry of the newest fashions and she considered herself a beauty. Her hair was singular neither blonde nor brunette and yet not cut since her second birthday.
She remembers her wedding day and her mother’s wedding dress. How disappointed they all were when the engagement was broken. How strange that she should have fallen in love with a married man. She regretted being like her father–who left them for another woman when she was little.
The man was an impressive Bostonian: six feet, said to be a first-rate tennis player. He had inherited a piece of proper in San Francisco, but he was in no haste to leave.
The foghorn comes in a few pages in. The story is set in San Francisco and she loved hearing the “long-drawn out, almost-human moan of the foghorn.”
They met at a party when she had fled to the bow window to escape everyone. He followed her and talked about the beautiful fog on the bay. The wound up talking for hours.
But they never said love to each other-not for months. They continued to meet for months until they declared their love for each other.
The sound of the foghorn reminds her of that night on the boat–a foggy night with millions of stars in the sky. Then suddenly a huge swell–even an old fisherman would have lost his bearings. They could hear foghorns, but what were they saying? Were they alerting everyone to what they were doing? “No girl goes rowing at night with a married man unless there is something between them.”
Then she remembers/realizes she is in a hospital bed. But things are nightmarish here–she never would have been left in a room such as this.
The last page pulls the rug right out from under you.
Read Patton Oswalt’s take here.
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