Author Topic: Pseudopod 070: Rapunzel’s Room  (Read 10586 times)

Bdoomed

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on: December 28, 2007, 05:30:59 PM
Pseudopod 070: Rapunzel’s Room

By John Dodds

Read by MAinPA

In the showers later, she raised her right arm and examined her armpit minutely. Even after having shaved it yesterday with the LadyShave it still seemed hairier than it should. Normally, at worst, it was like the chin of a cartoon character like Desperate Dan or Fred Flintstone, a constellation of black dots. Now it was almost full length again. The hair had grown long enough to curl into a matted bush beaded with droplets of perspiration. It simply wasn’t possible. Unless it was caused by those vitamin supplements she had been taking. Those, and the performance enhancers so she could work out longer and harder.



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Bdoomed

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Reply #1 on: December 29, 2007, 09:31:33 PM
...eew.
hair.

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


Listener

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Reply #2 on: January 02, 2008, 09:43:05 PM
Seriously, what bad things HAVEN'T happened to this woman?  She's stuck in a cycle of abusive relationships, she's got body-image problems, she does nude and lingerie modeling and is made to feel dirty about it, and she's a trichitillomaniac?  (I'm certain I misspelled that.)

I think she was far too depressing and put-upon as a narrator, and it took away from the story.  The details were good, but the problem with picking a good horror story and picking a good horror story to read aloud (and this stretches across all types of reading vs acting) is that you have to beware of the length of dialogue tags and weird splits.  Like, for example:

"Look, I don't think," Sarah said, her voice low and serious, "that you know what you're talking about."

This story, for whatever reasons it was selected, I think it wasn't picked because it would be a good one to read aloud.

Also, the room was introduced WAY too late.  It was almost an afterthought.  There was no foreshadowing at all, and I think that would've made the story more suspenseful.  Instead, we're left being dragged along (by the hair, if you like) and seeing what's going to fall on this woman's head next.

The hair reminded me of the alien inside the tooth story on PP about 15 episodes ago ("Toothache", was it called?) in that it was causing pain of some kind but was ultimately benevolent.  Pamela's hair was trying to save her, and as she realized, she had been fighting it.

All the really good plot stuff came way too late, is basically what I'm saying.

The reading was all right.  A narrator with a non-American accent (British, Australian, even West Indies) probably would've been better, but I didn't have any problems with it.

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eytanz

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Reply #3 on: January 02, 2008, 10:12:26 PM
I agree with Listener. The story started out as a relatively realistic depressing tale of a woman who has a lot of bad stuff going on. Then, it suddenly gets weird and surreal, and then it is suddenly over.



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Reply #4 on: January 03, 2008, 08:08:23 PM
How curious that I found this http://wormbrain.com/?p=167

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Reply #5 on: January 11, 2008, 03:32:55 PM
I've never been especially moved by stories of people finding their own bodies doing weird things, either from some odd genetic malady or some alien infestation. It seems like kind of an obvious way to creep people out, even for horror icons like Stephen King, who used the premise in his story I Am the Doorway. (That's the one where the astronaut finds tiny eyes growing on his hands.)

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Reply #6 on: January 13, 2008, 06:36:48 PM
I found it difficult to empathise with the woman for a long time because of the series of unpleasant thoughts she had about the overweight woman at the health club at the start. So in terms of the body hair stuff I didn't have any sympathy for her as her situation gets worse. I agree with the previous comments that when we get to the room at the end the sudden change in style and lack of explanation for why things are this way (Xena: It's a wizard doing it!) jars, although I did enjoy the narration.



wakela

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Reply #7 on: January 14, 2008, 11:34:52 AM
The main character seemed to be a 2 dimensional narcissist.  I pitied her because of the crappy life she has had, but she gave us no reason to like her.

"Finally she understood the problem.  The problem was that she was invisible."
Actually, the problem was that she just pulled a giant hairball through her bellybutton.

Also, I thought there were a lot of redundancies.  "She feared that he would beat her. Again.  He had done it before..."  Like they say in A River Run Through it.  "Write it again but half as long."

The ending was such a surreal departure that I think it may be a hallucination.  I think the hair stuff was in her head all along, which is why she never seems to react as if it's unusual.  And at the very end she hung herself and fantasized about the men who did her wrong dying horrible deaths. 



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Reply #8 on: January 14, 2008, 07:27:35 PM
Also, the room was introduced WAY too late.  It was almost an afterthought.  There was no foreshadowing at all, and I think that would've made the story more suspenseful.  Instead, we're left being dragged along (by the hair, if you like) and seeing what's going to fall on this woman's head next.

I'd say the same thing about the term "fuck bunny."  For something that outraged her so much, it came into the story surprisingly late. 


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Reply #9 on: January 16, 2008, 10:00:11 PM
I agree with the other comments. The story was very heavy on the back end, and it was difficult to tell where any of the crux of the story had come from.

I kept being jerked out of the story by repetitive language--and now I know what people mean when they say they were "jerked out of the story." Things like "Thomas must have taken a scalding shower. His skin was always scalded when he came out." That kind of repetition reeeeallly bugs me unless it serves a purpose, but it didn't seem to happen at significant points or often enough to be a character trait or intentional writing style--which can still be annoying but at least looks like the author had a plan, regardless of whether I dislike the results.

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Reply #10 on: January 20, 2008, 11:22:53 AM
The ending was such a surreal departure that I think it may be a hallucination.  I think the hair stuff was in her head all along, which is why she never seems to react as if it's unusual.  And at the very end she hung herself and fantasized about the men who did her wrong dying horrible deaths. 

I'm so glad I read this.  Maybe I was distracted, but the ended sort of slid past me.  I took the ending very literally.  After reading this, I have an entirely different idea of what happened.  She got drunk, hung herself, changed her mind to late, in death she found peace.

Thank you, Wakela.  This is why I come to the forums, and why I help out here.



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Reply #11 on: January 20, 2008, 06:20:26 PM
The ending was such a surreal departure that I think it may be a hallucination.  I think the hair stuff was in her head all along, which is why she never seems to react as if it's unusual.  And at the very end she hung herself and fantasized about the men who did her wrong dying horrible deaths. 

If the hair stuff was just in her head, what was the deal with the scenes in which the makeup artist asks her why she doesn't tweeze her eyebrows anymore, and the photographer telling her she can't take her pictures because she's not shaved?  I like your interpretation, and find it more interesting than the actual story, but it doesn't seem consistent with earlier scenes in the story, and thus doesn't resolve the zuwha? at the end to my satisfaction.

I'm sad about this story, because I loved what it was treating thematically.  The idea of a Rapunzel whose lush fast-growing hair is everywhere, not just on her head, has potential to explore the strangely different way in which we mark head hair and body hair in our ideals of beauty.  Did you know that humans are the only species that supports two types of lice?  Head lice and pubic lice are speciated in humans.  So I could really have been interested in this story, except that it doesn't make sense (the ending feels like it belongs to a different story, as has been pointed out, and she behaves sometimes with revulsion and shock but sometimes without surprise at her hair issue, which is confusing...maybe it was supposed to indicate the exponential rate of the problem, but it was handled so clumsily it's hard to tell).  At the word by word level, it wasn't very well-written, and seemed to waver in tone, further creating confusion.  Are we supposed to sympathize or laugh?  Are we supposed to care about this person?  The fact that she murdered (or thought she murdered) her oppressors felt artificial and tacked on, like the author was scared of where the story was going and decided to take it elsewhere...somewhere cheap and unconvincing and wtf?  It's been a long time since I've loved a PseudoPod story (though some of the flash has been great...I loved Garbage Man and Rite of Atonement), but lately there's been a rash of real groaners and this was no exception.

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Reply #12 on: January 20, 2008, 10:10:34 PM
Quote from: Anarkey
I'm sad about this story, because I loved what it was treating thematically.  The idea of a Rapunzel whose lush fast-growing hair is everywhere, not just on her head, has potential to explore the strangely different way in which we mark head hair and body hair in our ideals of beauty.
It seems like a lot of the PseudoPod stories recently have had one really good idea about the story (the theme, the setting, a character) and then thrown the actual story off a cliff into WTF-land. The flashes work because at least I don't go into the story with the expectation that it's going to make sense, so it's not a shock when there is fantastic imagery or a really disturbing idea that doesn't get fully explored.

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Listener

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Reply #13 on: January 21, 2008, 07:42:42 PM
I agree with the other comments. The story was very heavy on the back end, and it was difficult to tell where any of the crux of the story had come from.

I kept being jerked out of the story by repetitive language--and now I know what people mean when they say they were "jerked out of the story." Things like "Thomas must have taken a scalding shower. His skin was always scalded when he came out." That kind of repetition reeeeallly bugs me unless it serves a purpose, but it didn't seem to happen at significant points or often enough to be a character trait or intentional writing style--which can still be annoying but at least looks like the author had a plan, regardless of whether I dislike the results.

I do use a fair bit of repetition (that word always looks spelled wrong to me) in my writing, but only of single words... like, "she got in her car, the same car she'd been driving for 10 years, that she bought from her parents for $3000", but only when it's useful to the story.  Repetition for the sake of repetition?  Blarg.

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DDog

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Reply #14 on: January 21, 2008, 08:03:57 PM
I do use a fair bit of repetition (that word always looks spelled wrong to me) in my writing, but only of single words... like, "she got in her car, the same car she'd been driving for 10 years, that she bought from her parents for $3000", but only when it's useful to the story.  Repetition for the sake of repetition?  Blarg.
Sometimes in cases like that, pulling out the thesaurus drops you off the other cliff at Pretension. "She got in her car, the same car..." sounds natural, unlike something like "She got in her car, the same automobile she'd been driving..." unless that is just the sort of narrator you've got. But it's one of those things that usually turns out badly.

Reusing words that scream "imagery" in rapid succession is also more jarring than a similar frequency of ordinary words. Choose which image is more important, "scalding water" or "scalded skin," and then try to reword the less important or less evocative phrase.

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eytanz

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Reply #15 on: January 22, 2008, 12:30:23 AM
I do use a fair bit of repetition (that word always looks spelled wrong to me) in my writing, but only of single words... like, "she got in her car, the same car she'd been driving for 10 years, that she bought from her parents for $3000", but only when it's useful to the story.  Repetition for the sake of repetition?  Blarg.
Sometimes in cases like that, pulling out the thesaurus drops you off the other cliff at Pretension. "She got in her car, the same car..." sounds natural, unlike something like "She got in her car, the same automobile she'd been driving..." unless that is just the sort of narrator you've got. But it's one of those things that usually turns out badly.


I'm now reading a book called "The Speed of Light" by Javier Cercas. It's translated from Spanish so I don't know if the problem is in the original or the fault of the translation, but there is a ton of really bad repetition going on there. I just saw a really bad example which reminded me of your post so I felt like I should share: (the quote below is verbatim):

"But what I remeber about those evenings in Treno's is that we talked almost exclusively about books. Naturally, I might be exaggerating, it might not be true and it might be that the future alters the past and that subsequent events may have distorted my memory and that in Treno's Rodeny and I didn't talk almost exclusively about books, but what I remeber is that we talked almost exclusively about books".



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Reply #16 on: January 22, 2008, 12:56:32 AM
I'm now reading a book called "The Speed of Light" by Javier Cercas. It's translated from Spanish so I don't know if the problem is in the original or the fault of the translation, but there is a ton of really bad repetition going on there. I just saw a really bad example which reminded me of your post so I felt like I should share: (the quote below is verbatim):

"But what I remeber about those evenings in Treno's is that we talked almost exclusively about books. Naturally, I might be exaggerating, it might not be true and it might be that the future alters the past and that subsequent events may have distorted my memory and that in Treno's Rodeny and I didn't talk almost exclusively about books, but what I remeber is that we talked almost exclusively about books".

Obviously without seeing the Spanish text I can't promise I'm accurate, but that repetition is probably in the original, and it's probably wouldn't be considered a "problem" in the original.  Repetition is much more common and acceptable in Spanish.  The idea is to convey a rhythm with the repeated phrases in a way that rarely works in English (anymore?  I think it was more common in, say, Poe's time).  In fact, I can hear the Spanish "rhythm" in the text above, even in translation.  Whether the translator should have tried to change the syntax into  something that would better work in English rather than suggest the flow of the original is a whole other can of worms. 

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Reply #17 on: January 22, 2008, 12:48:54 PM
I think Wolfe and Joyce did it as well, along with some of the other "lost generation" writers.  The term was "insistance."  It's one of those literary devices that, when used well, it can have a real positive effect, but is usually used poorly and screws up the read.



wakela

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Reply #18 on: January 22, 2008, 11:35:48 PM
I'm now reading a book called "The Speed of Light" by Javier Cercas. It's translated from Spanish so I don't know if the problem is in the original or the fault of the translation, but there is a ton of really bad repetition going on there. I just saw a really bad example which reminded me of your post so I felt like I should share: (the quote below is verbatim):

"But what I remeber about those evenings in Treno's is that we talked almost exclusively about books. Naturally, I might be exaggerating, it might not be true and it might be that the future alters the past and that subsequent events may have distorted my memory and that in Treno's Rodeny and I didn't talk almost exclusively about books, but what I remeber is that we talked almost exclusively about books".

Obviously without seeing the Spanish text I can't promise I'm accurate, but that repetition is probably in the original, and it's probably wouldn't be considered a "problem" in the original.  Repetition is much more common and acceptable in Spanish.  The idea is to convey a rhythm with the repeated phrases in a way that rarely works in English (anymore?  I think it was more common in, say, Poe's time).  In fact, I can hear the Spanish "rhythm" in the text above, even in translation.  Whether the translator should have tried to change the syntax into  something that would better work in English rather than suggest the flow of the original is a whole other can of worms. 

Sorry for the misogyny (and the off-topicness) but:
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wakela

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Reply #19 on: January 22, 2008, 11:46:51 PM
The ending was such a surreal departure that I think it may be a hallucination.  I think the hair stuff was in her head all along, which is why she never seems to react as if it's unusual.  And at the very end she hung herself and fantasized about the men who did her wrong dying horrible deaths. 

I'm so glad I read this.  Maybe I was distracted, but the ended sort of slid past me.  I took the ending very literally.  After reading this, I have an entirely different idea of what happened.  She got drunk, hung herself, changed her mind to late, in death she found peace.

Thank you, Wakela.  This is why I come to the forums, and why I help out here.
And thank you, Russell.  Several times I've written my Worst Episode Evar post in my head before the story is even finished, and then after reading the forums I think, "Actually that story was pretty good."

Quote from: Anarkey
If the hair stuff was just in her head, what was the deal with the scenes in which the makeup artist asks her why she doesn't tweeze her eyebrows anymore, and the photographer telling her she can't take her pictures because she's not shaved?  I like your interpretation, and find it more interesting than the actual story, but it doesn't seem consistent with earlier scenes in the story, and thus doesn't resolve the zuwha? at the end to my satisfaction.
Well, it's possible that she's not actually shaving anymore but thinks she is.  But I agree that this interpretation is not very well supported in the story.  Though if I were back in college I could have done five pages on it.  ;)   I could have used "oppressive patriarchal society" enough times to give my teacher an orgasm.



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Reply #20 on: October 13, 2009, 04:50:02 PM
I listened to it for 10 minutes but gave up, there's only so much "woe is me" I can take, especially when most of the content is just her complaining about her hair growth.  At that point the hair growth didn't even have a hint of supernatural. 



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Reply #21 on: February 22, 2010, 08:15:18 PM
If you liked this story, there's another John Dodds tale read by our own Alasdair Stuart over at CrimeWAV (story starts 1:45 in): 
http://media.libsyn.com/media/sethharwood/CrimeWAV-35-CrossingtheBorder.mp3

"Crossing the Border", "Rapunzel's Room", and nine others are freshly gathered in an anthology by this author just released in print and several ebook formats.  Sample at
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/10189



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Reply #22 on: July 30, 2010, 10:50:26 PM
I have to say I was disappointed with this one.  A great study in an interesting concept that is somewhat lacking in execution.  My main issue with it is that it meanders about both plot-wise and thematically.  The main character's feeling of being invisible and unnoticed does not seem to quite mesh with her earlier feelings of feeling worthless and abused (which seemed to imply she WAS noticed, but in a bad way).  She also states that people "envied" her hair - ummm, excuse me?  How is she "invisible" if she is being envied??

In Act 1 the story is a morality tale about vanity, by Act 2 it has veered away into a story about self-hatred and abuse and by Act 3 it totally changes course into some bizarre supernatural thing with hair-clogged attics.  All this made the story very, very tough to follow or get invested in.  I particularly think the confusing ending really killed any impact this might have had.

Secondly, the stock characters really failed to impress.  All the men were abusive jerks (except for the TOTALLY-NOT-A-STEREOTYPE gay makeup artist), all the women were either fat or useless etc.

There was also a lot of needless exposition and heavy-handed posturing which could have been done away with if the story found and followed a theme more effectively.

So, anyway, to wrap up:  This read like a bit of a first draft - muddled and confusing.  If I had seen this in a workgroup I would have passed this back and recommended that the author find the main theme and really dig into it so that the story lands with more impact.  I also would have suggested the mevents of the end be more clearly laid out (why does she pass out?  Secret-hair filled rooms?  All this comes out of left field).

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