So here is another post on the "All that Lives" novel I have read. So as I said in the last post, at a certain point in the novel the story line gets to be really boring and as a reader I am no longer chilled by the prospect of picking it up at night. So what i want to look at is why this happened, I mean after all the first half of this book was really chilling, it caught me up and made me dig deep under the covers, so what happened that by the end all i wanted to do was finish it?!
Well the first thing is that it no longer had that feeling of surprise i talked about earlier in my last blog. It was like every character in the book simply just settled into their role. At night the spirit would come to the house, the family would get scared, they would crowd together, wait out the night, wake up it'd all be over, and then go on with their lives, to start it up all over again the next night. My issue with this, is not about her writing, or the circumstances, because her style and method were all chilling, just as in the beginning, she knew how to capture a reader into the moment all right. The problem arose when it became regular, there was no longer anything to look forward to, as a reader I knew that the spirit would come and torture them. Not Scary. But as much as i didn't like it, looking on it now, I'm happy it happened, because it helped to show me what can make books not scary-therefore emphasizing what does make a story scary for me. The jumpy ahh! moments come from us not knowing what to expect. And even in our daily lives, that's one of the things that really scares most people, because the moment where they can't control what is going on around them anymore is the moment where they become scared that they have lost control of their own lives, and they will wither away into some lost part of themselves. So all horror writers do it take this everyday worry of losing control of your mind/situation and twist it around and pump some adrenaline into you.
And also,there is the fact, that this "spirit" thing comes to life. She allows for it to learn human speech, in fact, because it is a spirit, in the book its actually all knowing kind of. it's like the idea that once we 'move on' the world is opened up to eternally. But anyway, it comes to life and can now fully interact with the family whenever it wants...okay getting good right? No. The author completely takes advantage of it, and abuses her creative authority. The ghost pretty much becomes part of the family. It helps the family, but hates the father, and tortures them for it, but really it
loves this family. What happened here? Scary much? No! There is nothing unknown about it anymore, it's become commonplace, as in like, well if we can't get rid of the spirit we might as well be nice to it, sort of idea, and at this point, the novel totally went downhill for me. Okay, that was a little biased, sorry for my smashing of the book. anyway, looking at it objectively again, What happened here? What the author did was take a scary situation and in attempt to increase it and kind of make it envelop their everyday lives, in a you can't escape me kind of way, she tries to work with the idea of still losing control over something and being a t the mercy of another.
So, through all of it's faults--what did i learn from this book? A good scary book, not only catches the reader up and has all those scary elements to it, but it takes what we know and throws it out the window, even the reader can't control the situation, I want to put down the book and come up with my own ending-but i still keep reading. It's an everyday fear of loss of control or the unknown and magnify it to a point where this seems as if it will never end, as if it could happen to you just that moment! What makes a lame scary novel? When the scariness of the situation is replaced with a feeling of honestly? yeah right this could never happen.
So for authors everywhere, the everyday is where you start but by making it too disbelievingly, you can lose a reader as they begin to see the reality and logic behind the situation. :(
2 comments:
Oh, sorry Christina that bolg was a little long, i'll cut it down next time.
Haha It's okay Gen. still had fun reading it. Well, again, you made some good points and analysis while reading your book. It is true that once the same thing that once scared you in the beginning keeps happening, you'll no longer get scared because you're used to the routine by now. To connect that to a more general statement, we've all heard about those "UFO spottings" somewhere out in middle-America and every single time, it freaks the hell out of us, but let's be honest; if we started seeing those UFOs fly over us day in day out, we'd get used to it after a while. What is unknownn to people and even what's different, is the human being's worst fear. To sum my point up, people like to have power and to be in control, and if they happen to lose some of that power and control, then they curl up in a corner like a scared dog with its tail between its legs.
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