I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THOM YORKE-“Volk” (2018).

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.

I knew that Thom Yorke had scored the soundtrack to the film Suspirira.  I didn’t know that the film was a remake, or that the band Goblin scored the original or even what the film is about.

Esquire said that Yorke’s “Suspirium” was the creepy Halloween song from the record, but I don’t find it any more creepy than any Radiohead song–his vocals are so unmistakable that it’s all Radiohead to me.  However, this instrumental later in the soundtrack is definitely a creepy piece of music.

It opens with synthy twinkling that sounds more like scraping metal. Then a thin echoing synth melody takes off.  The sound of that melody morphs and shifts, growing louder and quieter and changing shape before returning to that original sound again.  After two minutes splashes of discordant keyboard sounds pop in and turn into various other sounds.

The song continues to move forward with a slow bass and atmospheric sounds.  It starts to get more tense around the four minute mark as more jagged sounds stab the air.  At nearly five minutes, drums come out of nowhere.  They lend a beat to the sounds, but the beat is frenetic and as unsettling as anything else and it just adds to the cacophony.

Then at around 5:45 everything abruptly gets turned off and sharply fades out except for some echoing sounds.

It seems over but for the last 30 seconds a pulsing wall of loud grunting seems to slowly creep out of the silence.

Shudder.

[READ: October 18, 2019] “Bayou de la Mère”

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.

I am familiar with Poppy Z. Brite, although I’m not sure exactly how.  Perhaps I am just familiar with the name because it is so unusual.  (It’s a pseudonym of course).

I always assumed Poppy was a woman, but indeed, Poppy is a man.

This story is also not particularly scary.  It is more of a story about the relentless hands of religion–which can indeed be scary.

Rickey and G-man are restaurant owners in New Orleans.  They haven’t had a vacation in, well, forever.  So they decide to take two weeks off during the quiet summer.  Their bartender suggested they go to the bayou (although she went to Colorado).

Even though they were from New Orleans and they found the Bayou incredibly hot.  As they were eating, a local heard them complaining about the heat and said “Y’all from New Orleans?..Y’all don’t even know what real heat is way up there.”

Rickey and G-man looked at each other in half-drunken amazement at having suddenly become Northern aggressors.

After dinner they returned to the hotel for some romance.  And although they got out all their gear, they were both so quiet that they fell asleep before anything could happen.

They woke up many hours later, refreshed and famished.  The sex could wait, they needed food.

They walked around the city in the evening and were amazed at the number of churches–“it’s so Catholic out here.”

G-man is a little freaked out about the Catholic churches.  It just all seems so intense.  He comments about himself, “You’re a lapsed Catholic out here, they’re gonna make you think about it every damn day of your life.”

Rickey tries to lighten the mood by tickling him, but G-man is really uncomfortable.  Rickey is offended:

“I didn’t now you were ashamed of me when the goddamn Catholic Church was watching.”

G-man says its been thirteen years since he cared about what the Church thought.

They were angry with each other, but they had been through worse than this.  So when they got back to the room, they were both happy to resume what they started earlier.

As they had sex, G-man couldn’t help but have God on his mind.  And yet he believed that:

God wasn’t watching them, and if He was it didn’t matter.  G-man had not stopped believing in God when he left the Church, he’d left because he did not believe that God wanted him to have a loveless life, and he’d never once felt that being with Rickey was wrong.  He didn’t feel it now.  He just felt more self-conscious out here, somehow.”

The next day, they decided top go into one of the churches.  As they approached one, they saw an unusual statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  She was seated rather than standing.  When they entered the church the priest greeted them and talked about the statue.  It was carved in the style of the Pietà.  It represents her sorrow after Jesus was taken from her.

Then the priest tells them the legend

It’s said that the Virgin will stand if a sinner comes before her.

The story ends shortly after that with an effective final line.

Read Patton Oswalt’s take here.