2024 – Stuff I loved

It’s inevitable, I guess, to get retrospective at this time of year. I’ve more or less stopped keeping careful track of things like media consumption—no Goodreads lists for me, thank you—but it’s still sometimes interesting to review. And so, here is a non-comprehensive list of things that I remember enjoying very much in 2024. Travel, books, TV, whatever, I’m not going to be strict. These are all things that made my 2024 a better year than it would otherwise have been.

First up, I visited Inbe in Bizen, Okayama several times this year. It was wonderful. I met potters, enjoyed the scenery, and learned about its history and culture in a way that was vibrant and exciting.

A concrete torii gate stands across a bricked path. To each side are reddish brown ceramic koma-inu dog statues.

A small ceramic flask with a rounded shape and a sharp indentation along one side.

A rounded lump of clay kneaded into a folded, almost floral pattern

Another thing that made my 2024 better was engaging more actively and thoughtfully in photography. I’ve written about it before, but even apart from whatever high-minded ideas about “art” or “creativity” people want to layer onto it, the very fact of engaging in a new expressive medium has been great. I have been a “word guy” all my life. Trying to be an “image guy” now is really something special for me.

A smiling older man with a mustache. He is wearing a towel on his head, a large watch, and a black tanktop and is flexing his muscular arms. — Macho man

In the world of books, there have been a few standouts. The one that stands largest in my memory is The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera, which I reviewed on this blog. There’s not much else to say about it, except that its weight in my memory has only grown with time. Read it.

I also read and loved Premee Mohamed‘s The Siege of Burning Grass. It is a fantasy story set in a world at war, but the central protagonist is a true pacifist despite the brutal social pressures on being a good, patriotic subject of empire. It is a story about the irrationality of war and the true courage that is pacifism, and the pain that occurs when those are placed in irredeemable conflict. I should have reviewed it more thoroughly. It deserves much thought and rereading.

Another standout is the Japanese-language only (so far) horror book Kinkichiho no aru basho ni tsuite (About a certain place in the Kinki region) by Sesuji. It’s a “mocumentary” horror book that presents itself as a collection of research materials for a magazine, but ends up telling a story of generational evil, the terrors of the Japanese countryside, and creepy stuff in general. I loved it. I think the translation rights have been sold, but that is so far unconfirmed.

In related media, I still think about Fake Documentary Q a lot. I wish the book had been better.

Apart from all the old music I mostly listen to (shout out to Eric Satie’s Gymnopédies), the new album I listened to most is Daudi Matsiko’s The King of Misery. It seems perhaps inappropriate to talk about “enjoyment” regarding such an emotionally shredding/shredded work of art, but it is beautiful and alive and well worth listening to.

And, lest anyone get the idea that I went all high-brow and Big-C Cultural in 2024, I also watched the hell out of the Reacher series on Amazon Prime because there’s something unironically appealing about watching a very big man murder the fuck out of the Bad Guys.

What were some things that made your 2024 less terrible?

Fake Documentary Q and Weaponized Pareidolia

Pareidolia
noun
par·ei·do·lia ˌper-ˌī-ˈdō-lē-ə
-ˈdōl-yə
: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern
Merriam-Webster Dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pareidolia

People who follow me on Mastodon might have seen me mention my recent experiences with the YouTube series Fake Documentary Q (Japanese with English subtitles) and the sleeping trouble it has given me.

In short, FDQ is a “mockumentary” series, though more in the Blair Witch vein than the Spinal Tap one. It poses itself as a product of real research, found footage, and interviews with real people (except, not, because it is, after all, “fake”) and presents many items without editorial comment or even much context.

There may be comments along the lines of “This video was found in the archives of a local television station. We do not know why it was never broadcast.” or “A viewer sent us a request to investigate this website.” There may be narrative discussing how the footage appeared. Or, there may not. Some videos (like the terrifying SANCTUARY) start in medias res. Some are framed as actual documentary footage with a film crew and interviews. Some aren’t even videos, only audio.

Many of them, though, terrify me. They gave me real, hair-on-end chills as I watched, and some continue to do so as I recall their imagery. Not because of anything so direct as blood or ghosts or monsters. No, it is their vague hinting and intentionally raw nature that is so effective. They use the unreliable nature of video—particularly outdated video media like VHS—to add such a thick layer of confusion and distortion that the mind seeks to fill in the gaps. And the only way we can do that is to posit a world that does not work the way we believe it does.

This is a key tenet of what I might call “classic horror.” The modern genre is scattered and meandering, with splatterpunk and slashers and various in-your-face monsters with clear identities and origins. But the roots lay in tales told around campfires by people who did not know what was in the dark around them. They deal in the horror that comes when the world you see and grasp is revealed to be a thin veneer over a gaping, bottomless chasm of the unknowable. This is the horror of Machen’s The Great God Pan, for example, which has no ghosts or goblins, only a brush with the truly unknowable reality behind the world we know.

When faced with that, we at very best feel humbled. At the very worst, as Lovecraft seems dead set on insisting, we are driven mad by the knowledge of our unbearable tininess in the face of all that is beyond us.

The chill we get from a deep scare, the “frisson of horror” as King puts it in Danse Macabre, comes from the merest glimpse of this. And that is what fills Fake Documentary Q.

All the videos are different. None of them offer any overt connection to the others. But as you watch, some shared threads start to appear that seem to lead to certain conclusions about what might be going on. None of them are comforting.

NOTE: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. If you ever plan to watch FDQ, go no further. Go in blind. Enjoy the mystery. You have been warned.

Take, for example, distorted faces. The video OBSCURE/オレンジロビンソンの奇妙なブログ reports on a strange blog left by a photo studio employee. He mentions how a certain customer keeps sending requests to overlay the photo of a woman whose face has been blurred and distorted over various family pictures. The requests continue until, finally, an email arrives that simply reads “Thank you” with a picture of the family, whose faces are now all distorted in the same way.

In the video House of Mirrors/鏡の家, a team member is asked to film all the mirrors in a person’s deceased relative’s house to allay his mother’s delusions that the relative is actually trapped in the mirrors. However, on later review, the video shows the figures of various people reflected behind him, all with faces obscured and distorted.

Another thread is the (possible) doorway to hell. In Film Inferno/フィルムインフェルノ, a young couple have disappeared. Their video camera is discovered miles away from where they had last been seen, in a filthy beach bag. The camera is broken and charred, but some of the video is restored. The recording shows the couple having a picnic at the beach, swimming and then—inexplicably—exploring a cave. They get lost. The video shows them growing increasingly panicked and disoriented, as they discover disturbing dolls and disfigured pictures (another common thread), even music coming from an unknown source. The final clip is simply a distorted, flickering red glow and the horrifying sound of screams.

This echoes Plan C/プラン C, which is possibly one of the most viscerally disturbing of the videos. It is an audio recording only, with images laid over to offer a visual aid. It records the final trip of a group of young people who seem to have made a suicide pact. They drive into the mountains, seal their car, and light a charcoal burner to suffocate themselves. The recording goes to the last minute, through their tortured breathing and coughs, until one member begins screaming in horror. The sound of screams amplifies until it becomes a chorus of the damned, then ends. The video concludes with a comment that, when the car was found, it was still sealed from the inside, but no bodies were inside.

In the video BASEMENT, we watch an elevator security video of a woman boarding on the tenth floor of a residential building. As she descends, the video begins to distort, showing other people getting on while she remains alone. The elevator shakes. It moves in odd ways. And, finally, it begins descending endlessly, far beyond the first floor or even any basement. The woman grows increasingly frantic, unable to interact with the outside world beyond a pleading look into the security camera—the eyes of the viewer—until the elevator stops. It opens onto darkness, and the woman, with no other choice apparent, steps hesitantly out into it and vanishes from sight. The elevator immediately closes its doors and returns to regular function.

Other threads touch on folk horror and curses, the terror of being alone in the mountains, the ominous power of photography, and the unease attached to video that doesn’t act like it should.

But all of these threads rely on only hints. There are things shown that seem meaningful, like countless bamboo spikes driven into the ground or crudely twisted twig figures, piles of clothing in the dark woods or a vaguely human shaped lump under a stained blanket, spreading clots of darkness that could be a face or just a shadow. And this is where pareidolia comes in. Because taken on their own, none of these things have meaning. The voice on the radio repeating “8673” in Sanctuary is simply repeating meaningless numbers, but when we see that they match the birthdate of a character in another video, we feel it must signify. We seek patterns to make sense of the senseless. Just look at the Subreddit or YouTube comments to see countless people desperate to understand more about things that are, inherently, beyond understanding.

The videos are so heavily layered with hints and ambiguity that we are desperate to attach meaning. We need to know if the woman in BASEMENT went to hell or if it was all just an elevator bug. But of course, there is no knowing. Setting aside the fact of these stories’ fictionality, they deal entirely with encounters with a realm which goes beyond mere fact. They offer awe inspiring/awful glimpses behind the curtain of knowing, and therein they find power.

The makers of FDQ seem well aware of this need for meaning and encourage viewers to keep trying. They not only engage by retweeting and liking every single explanation theory that comes at them, without comment or verification, their latest video MOTHER is built around the very idea. It is about a man whose mother disappeared from his house when he was a child. Now, as an adult, he has started receiving mysterious packages—old CDs, rocks, pictures of various places around Japan and, most powerfully, a video of a woman’s face in unclear closeup, who seems to be writhing in pain or fear in a dark, firelit space. This last, he is convinced, is his mother, and he begins to investigate all the other items for related meaning.

The piece of sedimentary rock must be connected to the pictures of Sakai city, which was once a coal port, and the city where he lived with his mother once had a coal mine. Does this mean his mother is buried, being turned into part of the earth like coal? Or does the picture of a pile of household items including a tennis racket indicate that she is living somewhere else, because she once played tennis?

What on examination is merely a random collection of items becomes, to him, a palimpsest layered with significance and depth, and he is convinced that if he continues to dig, he will find the answers he so desperately needs.

The video ends with no answers found.

The creators know very well what their viewers are digging for for, and are in no mood to give it to them. So, the search continues.

A tricky term – オカルト

Today’s conundrum: Is オカルト a false friend for “occult,” or not?

In Japan, for example, writers who dabble in horror, mystery, and stories with a weird, dark edge are often labeled オカルト (okaruto, a direct transliteration of “occult), and there are things like オカルトサークル (okaruto sa-kuru – occult circles), which are clubs that discuss and share information about things like urban legends (a very common theme on オカルト websites, it appears), strange true crime stuff, and related fiction.

But calling those “occult writers” or “occult clubs” seems, to me, to have entirely different connotations. I feel like the label “occult” is strongly associated with witchcraft and mystical secrets, rather than “eerie stuff in general.” The dictionary definition tends to point that way, too, but of course dictionaries always lag behind popular usage.

A look at the massive Wikipedia list of “occult writers” in English clearly shows a leaning that way: people like Anton LaVey, Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, and Simon Magus. More popular writers listed include Lovecraft, Robert Anton Wilson, Carlos Castaneda, and W. B. Yeats. Clearly, these writer seem connected by a focus on mysticism and the secret layers of reality, rather than “could-be-true scary stuff.” Again, this is not any kind of definitive list, but I do think it reflects the popular perception of the word.

The upshot of all this is, if I wanted to write about a Japanese オカルト writer, what would I call them? An eerie writer? A dark writer? A writer of the hidden world?

I wonder if anyone else thinks about this stuff?

Review – Revival

Revival by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a long, strange trip it has been. I have been reading Stephen King for probably 30 years. When I was in Jr. High I used to sneak away from my mom at Wal-Mart to buy paperbacks, and hide them in my pockets until I could get to the privacy of my room. My mother was not a fan, you could say.

I loved those books. I loved the goriness, the crafty little turns of phrase, and the depiction of rurality that I recognized (being from rural Kansas, I guess there’s not that much difference between little prairie towns and little New England towns). Over the years, I came to see what King himself called his “salami-making.” These were fine, creepy yarns, sometimes even gutwrenchingly sad (Oh, Henry…). But they weren’t “Litrachure.” King had no pretensions of deep exploration of the human condition, he wrote scary stories to read in the dark.

But now, as I approach middle age, I’m starting to question that truism. Because there are stories like Hearts in Atlantis, or The Body, or this one, Revival, that seem to transcend the rough-ground spiciness of, say, Christine. It might just be the decades of life that have come to inform the writer’s thinking. Or it might be the decades of life that have come to inform this reader. But somehow, I think King is tapping into a deeper vein these days.

Revival is at the same time a memoir of a life not wholly unlike Kings, a love letter to the origins of a certain brand of horror, and a look at what makes the first so good, and the last so bad.

For roughly the first half of the book, we read the story of Jamie’s life as something not entirely unusual. There are the purely human pains of tragedy and disillusionment. There are also the more mundane growing pains of rough big brothers, feeling your way through first love, and addiction. There is little that could be called supernatural or ominous, apart from what Jamie himself alludes to in hindsight.

This is a slow burn. It builds a living character, a life of complexity and reality that other writers would rush through. But King does not rush here. He takes his time, because this weaving is what makes the latter half punch so hard.

In the latter half, the ominous shadow of Charles Daniel Jacobs (Charlie Daniels and the Devil in Georgia, huh?) grows heavy, and the threads of the weave begin to darken with the taint of Lovecraft, Derleth, and Machen (three names mentioned right at the top of the book…). For this book is as pure an expression of cosmic horror as any you’ll find. Jacobs, the reverend of Jamie’s youth, is desperate to tap into the powers that run the world behind the world, no matter the cost…

And the cost is great. Because this ending gathers up those threads of youth woven so slowly in the beginning of the book and brings them back to the end to come full circle. The joys of youth become the pain of age, now tainted with darkness from beyond the veil.

It’s masterful.

And yet, there is still some salami here. Because King does what other cosmic horrors often avoided: he made the implicit explicit. He describes in detail what lays behind the veil, and in so doing removes much of its more lingering power. There is still dread here, but I can’t help but think its was blunted by that choice.

I still think that this is one of the best expressions of King’s strength, his characters, and leverages that strength to make a genuinely unsettling horror story. Revival is maybe the best of King, and a transcendence of the limits he placed on himself so long ago.

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Review – 邪神決闘伝

邪神決闘伝 by Hideyuki Kikuchi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This self-described Cthulhu Western is a very traditional western hammered into a very traditional Cthulhu mythos mold to make something uniquely fun. The writer wears his tastes on his sleeve, writing a western based deeply in the Hollywood 1950s movie tradition: famous gunslingers, nefarious train companies running honest farmers off their land, and deadly natives. Add to that Deep Ones, Cthulhu magic, and seemingly deathless villains, and you get quite an adventure.

This does mean, of course, that many of the more nuanced views that have started to shape the American view of the west, particularly recognition of the terrible treatment of Native Americans and Black people, are absent. The Native Americans in this story are enemies, if ones on perhaps more equal terms with the protagonists than was common in the old western tradition, and the only black characters are nameless servants.

One rather interesting element is the addition of the Japanese character Shinobi, and the recurring equation of his Japanese-ness with the Native Americans by malevolent white characters–it adds a wrinkle to the treatment of race in this one that is worth thinking about.

Overall, there is little original ground tread here, but the author makes no bones about it: This is a product of his love of old western movies, and his interest in Lovecraft’s malevolent world building. If you go into it looking for that, you won’t be disappointed.

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