Pseudopod 176: The Blessed Days

[Ocicat]

That was some fucked up shit right there.

Great story.

[Millenium_King]

I just listened to this one.

I found myself chuckling to myself at the end: I found the whole concept really stupid.

Consider: the entirety of the tension in this story is based upon the fact that the reader (listener?) does not know the source of the blood.  Thus, the ending revelation carries upon it the entire burden of breaking the tension and leaving us in awe.  I really felt this one fell utterly flat.

The worms (or whatever) fed upon violence.  Specifically, human violence.  They urged it on, they encouraged it etc.  This is to imply 2 things:

(1) Humans are somehow special.  Violence on colossal scale occurs every single second of every single day in every single place amongst every single organism.  Even in your own body, as you read this, untold legions of microscopic organisms wage wars of mind-boggling scale.  Humans are just organisms like anything else - why should their violence be unique?

(2) Human violence is unnatural.  The worms, it seems to imply, provided the impetus for slaughters untold.  This is to somehow imply that the human organism is not violent by nature, but is compelled somehow from the outside.  This is a deistic, moralistic point of view that is incompatable with Nature.  To assume humans are peaceful by nature, unlike other organisms, and only some bizarre deity with an unexplainable interest in our insignificant existence can compel us to be violent is so ignorant of the Natural World that it made me laugh.  All organisms fight.  All organisms compete.  Observe the brutality in gorillas or other of our closest relatives if you don't believe me.

Anyway, the horror of Lovecraft was that the universe was a vast, uncaring place where your greatest hopes and dreams were less than dust in the grand scheme of eternity.  This story validated them, made them look valuable.  The worms were essentially Satan - the evil entity that provokes evil in mankind, that cares about the actions of every soul.  That's stupid - but almost funny.

[Ben Phillips]

See separate thread about humans being special.

[Fenrix]

This story effectively used gore. It wasn't just gore for the gross-out value.

I thought this story was pretty cool. What kept my interest up was the cause of the phenomena. A strange and interesting idea. Unfortunately, the end didn’t entirely convince me. Having dreams or nightmare come through into reality seemed a tad…trite? Anyway I was hoping for something more but maybe I’m just sick of the whole Myan. That said, I still would have like to see more of the aftermath.

I played a lot of Shadowrun, who used the Mayan calendar premise of 2012 and the shift to a new world, so I've had more than average exposure to Mayan apocalyptic concepts. Outside of the apocalypse-porn film 2012 and the History Channel shows moved to prime time to coattail off that movie, where has the overexposure of the Mayans come from?

Anyway, the horror of Lovecraft was that the universe was a vast, uncaring place where your greatest hopes and dreams were less than dust in the grand scheme of eternity.  This story validated them, made them look valuable.

Dreams are powerful locations in the Lovecraft mythos. In the hands of the proper practicioner, dreams can be used to travel between dimensions or through space. Are you meaning "humanity" instead of "dreams"? I think the clarity is important, as the protagonist is someone who would have been one of those dream travellers in Lovecraft's world.

The worms were essentially Satan - the evil entity that provokes evil in mankind, that cares about the actions of every soul. That's stupid - but almost funny.

See, I took this entirely differently. I found the blood realm to be easily a place out of space and time full of things that want to eat us. The protagonist applied his perspective of why everything was happening. I jumped again to Shadowrun, where the blood magic finally allowed the gap to close between our world and that of the horrors. Now they can come through and run rampant. I felt the ending was nice and open. Maybe there will be the establishment of a new religion to worship and serve and feed the new masters outside time and space. Maybe others will rise up to oppose them.

Any story that inspires other stories in my head is a winner in my book.