Grimoire of Horror, Volume 1

series of episodes based on different creepypastas. Then Joe and I turned to TV horror anthology episodes for a number of years, and this year we're starting what I'm hoping we'll be a new tradition, one that sticks to shorter horror works, but also gets back into the written word, which I know many of our listeners missed from the days when we did summer reading episodes, so kind of meeting me halfway on that as well. Written horror fiction often does come up on the show anyway, so it

seems like a solid direction to go in. Though this may be in part because this is our first time out of the gate with this particular series. It was kind of a mad dash to put this episode together, and it's going to be a mad dash as well for JJ to get it edited and out there, but hopefully it'll be worth it. I don't know about you, Joe, but I had a number of trials and tribulations finding

my selection. I had like a list of stories I was considering, and then I ended up not really using any of those, and I had one that I thought was perfect, and then it really took a turn halfway through the story and went in a direction that I wasn't crazy about, and only then I had to start from ground from just ground zero on the whole thing. But I do think I finally picked out a story that is going to be fun to chat about here.

I spent probably more time trying to find a story to talk about than I did actually getting ready for the episode.

my selection here. I ended up going with a story titled The Maker of Gargoyles by Clark Ashton Smith, who lived eighteen ninety three through nineteen sixty one. Clark Ashton Smith remains probably my favorite writer of weird fiction from the pulp era, mainly for his exceedingly rich and textured dark fantasy tales, often stories in which doomed wizards delve deep into forbidden knowledge and brings some sort of disastrous curse down upon their own heads. Sometimes there's a little

twist of gallows humor to the whole affair. Along these lines, I highly recommend the Tales The Double Shadow, The Seven Geeses, and The Empire of the Necromancers. Those are three of the finest dark fantasy short stories you could possibly hope to read. In my opinion.

rise up against them and tear them to pieces. Of course, now I have to stress I've never been a Clark Ashton Smith completist, though you know, he wrote a number of tales set in a very contemporary twentieth century weird tales setting. Even though one of them, Return of the Magician, is often considered one of his best works and was actually adapted into a Night Gallery episode feature featuring Vincent Price, but I've never read it. I tend to steer more

towards his dark fantasy. There's a great deal of his work along these lines that I've never read, so his work is largely centered in a few different settings, mostly within the fantastic realms of Hyperborea, Poseidonus, Avarn, and Zophoqua. Today's tale takes us to Avaron. This is a fictional French province, and it depends on the story. The stories may be said anywhere between the years four seventy five CE and seventeen eighty nine see depending on the story

in question. I haven't read all of these, but I do remember the Beast of Averron being quite good.

thirty eight. If you want to read it for yourself, you can find it on the Clark Ashton Smith website Eldrick Dark dot com, and it is also featured in the collection The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. A Ventage from Atlantis the Collected Fantasies, Volume three. Its long title,

but worth it. This is one of those authors whose work is in the public domain, as I understand it, So there are a lot of less than satisfying publications of his workout there if you're looking for an actual, high quality digital or a physical collection, so I recommend this. I also recommend there's a Penguin edition that also features some of his stories. But if you're looking to do it on the cheap, yeah, it's all apparently in the public domain, and you can find it all at that

website I just referenced. All right, So in the story, Clark Ashton Smith establishes Avaron is a medieval city on the edge of dangerous and evil wilds. A province quote a world where the devil and his works were always more or less rampant. Here the walled city of Villonne has suffered more than its share of demonic cars. But everyone's pretty confident that this newly constructed cathedral is going to really shore things up. It's going to bring greater

protection against the darkness. Everything's going to be all right. But unfortunately, this is a Gothic world where supernatural evil is absolutely real, but who can say for sure about supernatural good. It's kind of a gambol on the latter. So it's definitely a demon haunted world.

a coffin Joe character, you know. He's he's hated and feared by the townspeople. He has a lot of like obvious inner turmoil. Most people tend to just sort of put up with him and ignore him the same way that they put up with and ignore all of the supernatural evil that is writhing in the world around them. All Right, I'm going to read the description that Clark Ashton Smith gives us of these gargoyles.

its prey. Its companion was a horned sadder with the vans of some great bats, such as might roam the nether caverns, with sharp clenching talons and a look of satanically brooding lust, as if it were gloating above the helpless object of its unclean desire. Both figures were complete even to the hind quarters, and were not mere conventional adjuncts of the roof. One would have expected them to start at any moment from the stone in which they

were mortised. So some terrifying looking gargoyles here, Yes, like very detailed, like fine works of art, but really hard to take in. We learned that, quite unknown to Renard himself, he has just poured all of his hatred for his hometown into one gargoyle, and all of his lust for the tavern owner's daughter, Nicolette in the other one. Naturally, you know it's gonna happen. Hord soon descends on the city once more as a swooping demonic monster begins to

slay people in the night. The body count intensifies. Everyone's afraid, but the best anyone can do is against sin for that special holy water. Meanwhile, another demonic form, the lusty one, is creeping on women all around the city, but leaving them untouched and unattacked as if it's not seeking any woman, but one woman in particular. All of this comes to a head at the tavern one night, deep in his cups and himself traumatized by the horror in the streets.

Like it's important to note that he's not like, oh, the agents of my hatred and lust are running rampant, Like he doesn't really put one and two together here, But he's drinking in the pub, he's watching a rival court fair Nicolette, and eventually he just loses it. He causes this big embarrassing scene, and that's when the window

implode with the arrival of the two animate gargoyles. The first of the two begins massacring everyone in sight, spilling blood, ripping open throats, and the second one grabs Nicolette, and a heavy stone wing of one of the two gargoyles catches Reynard in the head and knocks him unconscious. The next morning, he awakens in this blood drenched tavern, surrounded by dead men and the lacerated but still living body

of Nicolette. Horrified and suddenly understanding more of the connection he has to these monsters, he forces his way through the angry crowd. He collects his hammer from his workshop, he heads up to the cathedral roof. He finds his creations there, and he notices their mouths and their claws are bloodied, and so he begins to strike at them

with the hammer. But then the gargoyle that he strikes, the wrathful one, knocks him to the edge of the of the roof, and then like sinks one of its towels into his shoulder, and I believe takes to the air with him, and he's striking at the talent foot that holds him. Eventually shatters that foot, but he falls

to his death in the street. And then we end with the archbishop finding his corpse and noting the talent limb now relaxed quote as if like the paw of a living limb, it had reached for something or had dragged a heavy burden with its fearine talents.

solid little horror tale in its own way. It delivers both a sinister physical monster as well as a tale of twisted inner torment, you know, so you know, those are great things to have in a horror tale. And I think we can all imagine some version of the story which the gargoyles are his intentional creations and like

conscious minions of his wrath and lust. But instead he only really glimpses his connection to them at the very end, finally realizing that he has poured all of his own darkness into these works and that he has to destroy them. And I think there's a lot to potentially dig into

their regarding a horror writer and his work. And it's worth noting that Clark Ashton Smith himself largely abandoned writing in favor of painting and sculpture in the second half of his life, So you know, I think it's fair to assume a lot of those ideas were on his mind when he wrote this tale, and I think this one would. I don't think this has ever been adapted, but I think it would make a pretty great horror anthology adaption, because who doesn't love a great animate gargoyle story? Right?

That's the one that stars James Ramar and Raydon Chong. Yeah, and more recently, there is a twenty fourteen film titled I Frankenstein in which Frankenstein's monster battles gargoyles like CGI gargoyles. And I have not seen that, but there's a part of me that really wants to watch that. On an airplane one day.

only Pygmalion, but also the Golom of Prague and so forth. Still, according to the Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, there are two key works, both from nineteen thirty two, that seem to influence gargoyle fiction

to come. One is this story by Clark Ashton Smith, and the other is a Lewis Spence tale titled The Horn of Vapula or Vapula I'm not sure which, in which a gargoyle is not an evil construct but a vessel that a demon is bound to by a corrupt bishop. He also cites the nineteen seventy two Gargoyles TV movie as the first work to establish a gargoyle as a species.

those styles. But the basic are that a gargoyle is an architectural flourish, is a decorative water spout to drain water away from the building, and the origins of the word itself are often linked to the Old French word gargoui, as well as the Greek gargarazine. If these words remind you of the word gargyle, then right on, because that's essentially what we're talking about here, a word used to

describe the clearing or washing of the throat. Again, these were animal and or humanoid creatures depicted in stonework with rain water draining out of their spout mouths. The basic concept here apparently dates back to the ancient world, with examples found even in ancient Egypt in ancient Greek architecture as well, often taking the form of a lion. And it's kind of a no brainer, right, We can't help but anthropomorphize the world around us, so a drainage spout

essentially becomes a barfing mouth. You know, many of us did the same thing during the height of the pandem with their Halloween candy shoots, like can I get candy to a child fifteen feet away from me? And should I make it a vomiting monster mouth? Of course I should make it a vomiting monster mouth.

various little goblinoid creatures and you know, and whatnot. On the outside or even the interiors of churches, these are generally described as grotesques or grow teskeeries, generally apotropaic statues to ward off evil, you know, getting down to the basic Corgonian impulse that we see throughout human history, like let me make a monster face to drive away the evil vibes. The Catholic Church also sought to use these statues at times as illustrative aids to reach illiterate masses.

But a lot of what we think think about regarding gargoyles today are really more properly these grotesques and grothesqueries as opposed to something that is actually spitting water away from the church. You know, we tend to think more of just sort of like corner of the building, monsters leering out overlooking the empty space between the church and the next building. And you know, and then we also again we have these different periods of like Gothic Revival

and even Art Deco. The Art Deco period ends up utilizing gargoyles of one form or another, depending how stringently you want to use that term. Like I've seen the the iconic like bird heads on the Chrysler building described as gargoyles for example.

And you know, I think Clark Ashton Smith's story kind of like toys with this sentiment a little bit like, how do how does the church feel about evil monster sculptures on or in the church? Right?

would target fishermen. And there's apparently a legend that a seventh century saint by the name of Saint Romain finally baited the creature with two condemned criminals, transfixed it with the cross, and then marched the monster into town, where it was executed. Thus, the taming of the water beast leads to a tradition of tame beasts that redirect water away from our churches.

think it's a it's a juicy little story to bite into. Again, maybe not on the same level, certainly in my opinion, not on the same level as some of his more almost darkly psychedelic works, but still a solid little monster story.

I think I talked about one of his horror fiction collections on a summer reading episode we did years ago, and Rob, I think you actually might have recommended one of his novels. Was it Mongrels? The werewolf novel from twenty sixteen.

Like a Stephen Graham Jones story can be sweet and thoughtful and even sentimental, but also brutal, grizzly and cruel. It can kind of plow straight into very familiar horror tropes in a way that does not feel too you know, meta or screamy, you know, not overly self conscious, but it can also be like fresh and full of new ideas and bring a lot of intellectual curiosity, scary but also funny, et cetera. So I really like that variety

you get within his writing. And I also really like that while some of his horror stories do have a very explicit monster or villain, like a you know, a cursed item or just a straight up vampire, in the same collection that this story is in, there is a pretty awesome messed up vampire story called Welcome to the Reptile House.

Oh but anyway, coming back to my point. So, while some of the stories have a more explicit or classical monster, you know, he writes were wolf tales and stuff, I also really like his stories that have ambiguous, strange, unexplained situations that just create this thematically loaded atmosphere of dread without a specific monster, or at least not one that we ever meet directly. I'm a big fan of that

kind of story, you know. I like ambiguous horror, the kind that does not tell you the full solution to the puzzle, that gives you some tantalizing details but leave some of the mystery alive.

and another slasher, God Willing. I do know several of his recent novels have been described as slashers, and I haven't gotten to those yet, but I would like to Anyway, all that aside, the story that I wanted to talk about today is called thirteen, and it's the first piece in the twenty fourteen collection, After the People Lights Have Gone Off. I have a print copy of this book.

I was looking around and it seems like maybe the physically it is out of print, I think because I was only finding used to buy, but maybe I wasn't looking in the right place. I don't know, but I think you can get a digital edition, right.

of a piece of literature by summarizing it. But I after I tried to summarize it, I found, in particular with this story, it is hard to give a sense of the feeling and the way that it works as horror with a synopsis. So a lot of it just kind of depends on little phrasings and the way a kind of pyramid of details is built piece by p So you'll be missing some of the effect just through a synopsis. But I will do my best.

grade or around the age of thirteen. The title of the story, the narrator remembers in his hometown, there was a movie theater called the Big Chief. Kind of a low effort movie theater because it had only two screens, and they were in fact right next to each other. And in fact, originally the two theaters were just one big room, now separated only by a heavy curtain, so that sound from one movie would always bleed through and

become audible to the audience for the other movie. So there's kind of a loudness war the soundtrack from a war movie with machine guns and mortar shells encroaches on the quieter movie next door.

with fire like mouths to hell. And it's a lot of details like this in the story that just kind of add up to create the full effect of the thing. Again, I can't communicate all of these details in my synopsis, but I love that kind of stuff.

The narrator's friend's uncle heard all about it. There's no further detail on this story. It's just that kind of weird detail you'd hear about when you're a kid. It'd be like.

You give in, and you do close your eyes, but you don't stop there. You also plug your ears and hum so that you can't hear what's happening. And then, finally, and this is crucial, you suck in your breath and you hold it, and you count to one hundred and twenty. So you've got to hold it for two straight minutes. And if you can keep your eyes shut and keep the sound out and hold your breath for the two

full minutes, something happens, something dangerous. Now apparently, in the world of this story, kids are trying this all the time. Everybody tells the story and they all practice it, and they do it, but basically nobody ever makes it the full two minutes. They let their breath out early. You know,

they start laughing or something. They look back up at the screen, and when they do look back at the screen, they find themselves relieved, giddy in fact, to see nothing but the same movie they were so scared to look at a moment before. And the narrator says that your friends sitting next to you will be looking at you, wanting to know if it worked. So how is it supposed to work? Well, you get the feeling that nobody really knows. It's just a ritual. We don't know why

we do it. It just gets passed on. But there is an attempt to explain it that feels kind of back engineered from the minds of kids trying this out. The narrator says, quote, how it works is that when you're not looking or listening or breathing. It's like how you're supposed to hold your breath when your parents are driving by the cemetery. If you don't, then you can

accidentally breathe in a ghost. That's sort of how it works at the Big Chief, with you not breathing, playing dead like you are, it makes like a road or a door, and the movie seeps in and then a little later it goes on quote it's there because you and vice, because you left a crack it could come through because you made a sound like a wish, and the darkness just washed up in that direction to cover it up. Oh, and I love the ambiguity of the lore here, Like, how does it connect to the guy

who supposedly got castrated in the bathroom stall? Unclear, but it suggested he must have done this game. Something from the movie came out and got him.

horror movie with this writhing, horrible, tentacled monster. They don't say what the movie is, but I was imagining like some kind of Cronenberg thing. And then it seems that nothing has happened to him. He's fine at first, until a few months later when Marcus suddenly gets sick and dies from the growth of an aggressive tumor, and the

kids who know what happened. They're in a life sciences class and they see images of tumors and the shapes look familiar to them, and the ones who were there that night agreed they think somehow the monster from the movie got inside his body. Next, we learn about a character named Grace, and this is a character the narrator cares about a lot. They've been friends since they were young, and now they're in middle school and it seems like they're in that awkward phase where they're trying to figure

out if their boyfriend girlfriend or not. But the narrator he is in love with her, and Grace's family has been through troubles. Her father recently moved away and her parents separated, and her mother seems to be from clues we get suffering from depression, and the narrator plans to take Grace to a homecoming game at school, but he ends up sick and unable to go, and so he stays home by himself. In having fear related to what

happened to Marcus. He's obsessed with the idea that he has a monster tumor inside him as well because he was sitting close to Marcus the night of the game. Could it be contagious, But nothing happens there. So to make up for the failed homecoming date, the narrator and Grace decide to go see a movie at the theater.

Not a horror movie this time. They're done with the horror. Instead, they go see a romantic comedy about a young woman who gets her heart broken and then her well meaning but bumbling father tries to set her up with the perfect guy. And it's a comedy of errors. By the way, there's a detail that while they're watching this movie they hear screams and clanking metal bleeding over from the theater

next door. And the movie date is going well, but at one point during the film, the narrator leaves to get some more snacks from the lobby and sneaks a look into the theater next door, and Jones writes, quote, it was in there chainsaws and were wolves. It looked like no were wolves with chainsaws. The chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. Very good line.

discussing what happened. Then the final setting of the story comes a couple of weeks later, on Halloween night. So here's the Halloween tie in. The narrator has plans to sneak off and smoke cigarettes with the bad kids in the graveyard behind a condemned convent building perfect and there are more urban legends. I mean they're urban legends throughout the story. One is the story that the kids tell

about the abandoned convent. They say it's haunted by a zombie nun who wanders at night carrying a candle in front of her, and when she sees you, she comes closer and closer, and just when she draws right up to you, the candle goes out. The narrator and his middle school friends are out in the cemetery behind the you know, the haunted graveyard, and they are engaging in a performance of courage. You know, they're breaking rules, doing what they're not supposed to. They are treading where the

ghost thread is high. And at one point the narrator steps aside from the group, I think to be sick because he smoked a cigarette and you shouldn't have and he's going to be sick. And he goes to the edge of a small cliff looking out over a neighborhood where kids are trick or treating below. He knows that Grace is out there because she apparently volunteered to chaperone elementary school kids for the evening while they're trick or treating.

The narrator called her mother earlier to try to call her house to try to make plans, but her mother answered the phone, said where she was going to be,

and just said look for bo Peep. So looking out over the children wandering the neighborhoods in the dark, he does see her in the bo Peep costume with a shepherd's crook, escorting a second grader in a robot costume, and they're just coming up to a house that the narrator knows it's his former English teacher, who would always write out verses of poetry on little strips of paper and tie them to the candy she handed out on Halloween, and the narrator remembers once getting a candy bar from

her that told him the fields are white, the fields are long, the fields are waiting. He never knew what that meant. And frankly, I tried to look this up, and I'm not sure I might have just missed the reference somewhere, but it could be referring to a verse in the Gospel of John where Jesus talks about the fields being white, meaning essentially, you think that they're not ready for harvest, but they are. It is time for the harvest and now anyway, what happens next in the

story is so strange. The narrator sees Grace he's looking down from the cliff, and he tries to wave and get her attention, but she doesn't see him. Instead, he watches as she begins to talk to someone in a car that's been driving around the neighborhood. Then, for some reason, she just abandons the kid that she's been chaperoning and gets into the car, and it starts to drive away, and the narrator is very confused. He runs along the cliff until he finds a place he can climb down.

He chases through the neighborhood looking for the car, and finally he sees it just before it it leaves the town and pulls out onto the highway. When he sees it, he sees the driver and he is sure he recognizes the face. It's the face of a movie character, the father from the romantic comedy movie they saw in the theater, with what the narrator characterizes as a wide, sharp and trustworthy smile. He sees them in a flash, and the car drives away, and then nobody ever sees Grace again.

So the implication is that Grace played the summoning game two In the interval when the narrator was out looking in on the werewolves and Chainsaws movie, she must have closed her eyes and held her breath. But it wasn't a horror movie. There was no monster, so what did she summon? Later, having swirling emotions about this whole series of events, the narrator sneaks out one night and he sets fire to the movie theater. He burns it down.

He never gets caught for the arson. His friends come and meet him there and they sort of give him an alibi, and they never tell on him, so he gets away with it. But in the fire that night, he sees shapes moving around in the flames, including a boy covered in blood and Marcus and his swim goggles. And then finally it says quote, and I saw a pale white shepherd's crook ahead of them, leading them through, leading them on, And he ends the story saying that

he's waiting to meet her again. So, as I said earlier, I love this story, but I think it's kind of hard to convey the force of the story in summary, because so much of it comes from this careful stacking up of these only vaguely related details, but you can't tell all of them without just reading the text in full. But this is my favorite kind of horror story, one that's both evocative and full of all these little observations, but also with an original mythology and also just ambiguous

enough about what it all means. I was thinking, like, how are we supposed to interpret the way the summoning game works, especially since it's presented as just one of many silly urban legends that the kids in the story make up and repeat. Where does the power come from? Also, how are we supposed to interpret what happens to Grace when she tries it? Is it more benign or more sinister? I feel like that's kind of left open. Has Grace transcended the mundane world and become a kind of shepherding

angel for the lost? Or has she been like murdered by a demon that she invited onto our plane and become a ghost ready to reap a harvest of souls? And the shepherd's crook is such a wonderful image because it adds to the ambiguity there. If you're the sheep, the crook could be seen either as your protection, keeping you in the flock and away from predators, or it could be your doom pulling you in for the mutton slaughter.

works of art, yes, in this case cinema. So it's a nice to a certain degree, this story meditates on the power of cinema and the importance of cinema in our life, and then it has this wonderful coming of age energy to it, like young a young character trying to sort of figure out how he works as a as a human and how he fits into the world,

how the world works. It's just so beautifully put together, and again, to your point, almost completely defies any kind of an elevator pitch, because you can't make a statement like, oh, this is a movie about a monster that's X, or about a haunting that's why. No, it's You've got to take in all the pieces in order to get the full mosaic.

kind of legend that has an enacted ritual. So with this kind of urban legend, you you can go through the steps of a specified behavioral algorithm, and in doing so, you can experience the subject of the legend directly in some kind of paranormal encounter. I was trying to figure out if there is a standard term for this type of ritual summoning game in the anthropology, in folklore literature.

Maybe there is. If so, I couldn't identify what that term is, but a well known example from American culture would be the Bloody Mary game. Where you stand in front of a mirror in a dark room, perhaps on Halloween night in some versions, and you recite an incantation. Often it's just the name Bloody Mary a specified number of times, maybe you say three times or thirteen times, and according to the legend, you will have a supernatural encounter.

Maybe you will see a witch standing behind you in the mirror, or maybe you'll see a woman covered in blood who screams at you, or maybe a ghost that reaches out of the mirror and tries to harm you, tries to attack your eye or something. And though I'm less familiar with these, apparently ritual ghost summoning games are very popular in multiple East Asian cultures as well. For example, there's something known as the I think the Corner game in Korea or the Square game in Japan, which involved

four participants, and it's a similar kind of thing. You do a sequence of activities and it's supposed to summon a ghost.

not a person who believes in ghosts. I don't literally believe in ghosts, but I think it would take some real bravery for me to play a ghost summoning game, because like there's a difference between what you consciously assent to believing and what kind of scares you in theory.

totally not supposed to do. It was witchcraft. Stay away from it. But at the same time, you could buy it at Walmart.

And other versions of this don't rely on a staircase, just a dark room and a mirror, some kind of ritual Rabbi attached here for you to look at. Some just like one hundred year old Halloween postcards that are like again to come back to, like the Parker Brothers thing. These are just like mass produced postcards that are like, here's how you look in the mirror and see the ghost.

But I guess it's a little more benign because it's giving you this supposedly happy information about like ooh, look at the handsome face of your future husband.

to test one's bravery. That's something I would be really interested in finding evidence of going farther back in history, but I couldn't. I wasn't able to turn up anything explicitly of that sort. It seems like the most ancient references to catoptromancy are about sincere attempts at divination, genuine desires to get hidden information from the gods or from the spirit world, or to commune with the souls of

the dead. So that obviously the lack of evidence doesn't rule out that there were games of this sort going back hundreds or thousands of years. I just haven't come across that documentation of that anyway, whether it's for sincere attempts to get hidden information or just as a game you play to scare yourself for fun. It's interesting to

think about the phenomenon of seeing faces in mirrors. I don't have space to rehash everything here, but in our series on the Invention of the mirror, we extensively got into research on something known as the strange face in the mirror effect, which is a documented psychological phenomenon where people with typical psychological histories will often report hallucinating strange faces if they simply stare into a mirror for a

long period of time in low light conditions. I think the rough numbers were that if you just like darken a room look in a mirror for ten minutes, roughly two thirds of people reported seeing weird stuff. This was largely explored in some papers by a researcher whose name is Giovanni Caputo, and there are a number of interesting

perceptual and neurological explanations that might contribute to it. But the strange face in a mirror effect has been postulated as contributing to the pop popularity of catoptromancy games and things like Bloody Mary. Due to this common quirk in our brains, it's apparently just not unusual to actually see weird stuff if you stare into a mirror in a darkened room. And it doesn't take drugs, it doesn't take a history of hallucinations. It's just a normal thing that happens.

So if you want to hear all the details about that research, go look up our episodes on the invention

of the mirror. We go in depth there. But to bring it back to the Stephen Graham Jones story, I'm interested that this invented ritual, this invented summoning game, involves it, like there are a lot of parallels with the Bloody Mary thing, but it involves not a mirror, but a movie screen, and not prolonged staring, not prolonged stimulus relating to the surface, but actually the opposite, completely cutting yourself off from the stimulus while everyone around you is still watching.

So by playing dead and not watching the scariest part of the movie, this is actually what quote lets the movie in. It conjures the most terrifying or powerful aspect of it into our world. I love this variation and I love how it interacts with the standard lore. And again, I don't know exactly what to say about what it means, but it feels so potent.

without actually watching them. And yeah, it kind of turns that on its head. What if by not watching you're allowing it to seep into you in other ways. But again, it's very ambiguous here, and that's kind of the beauty of the Stephen Graham Jones. You know what actually is going on here? Am I? What am I doing or doing wrong that allows the darkness to seep in at least at this one theater, you know, wherever it is and whatever its dark history may be.

that Stephen King did a lot. I mean, Stephen King wrote a lot about author about professional writers dealing with you know, darkness, but also a lot of like working class blue collars sort of characters encountering a very you know, unpaved road level version of horror. And I get that in these two authors as well.

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