PC152: The Hortlak

[Gamercow]

That was definitely a Kelly Link story. 

I liked the characters, I liked the setting, I liked everything about the story, but I'm not quite sure what it all meant.  If there was some sort of deep meaning to this story, I missed it, but as is, I just enjoyed it as a slice of life story.  A weird life, yes, but I liked looking in on this scene in the allnighter, and on AuSable chasm, and on Charley and her car of doomed dogs that nearly made me cry.

[Liminal]

Just to be clear - Virginia Woolf is, in no way shape or form, "post-modern."

I am partial to Kelly Link for the same reasons I like Borges - I get to experience the world through a totally unique perspective that manages to combine elements of humor, depth, fun, fear, desire and confusion in a way that is nearly unpredictable and so always surprising and challenging.

However, I do have to admit to reading both the ones we've run before hearing them and I can understand how, if listening is your first experience, they might not work all that well. Still, Link's stories work for me because they are unique and heartbreakingly human.

[eytanz]

Just to be clear - Virginia Woolf is, in no way shape or form, "post-modern."

Just to be clear as well - I know that, I was quoting the earlier post somewhat sarcastically (though I don't think it's easy to see that from my post).

This story, that (in some sense) idealises the retail experience while at the same time rejecting its values, on the other hand, can well be argued to be post-modern.

[Wilson Fowlie]

I think my favorite bit was this:

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you. But when you looked closer, you saw they were from some other place, where things were different: where even the same things, the things that went on everywhere, were just a little bit different.

There were a couple of places where I was all, like, "Hey!" about the treatment of Canadians. I wasn't in high dudgeon or anything; just, y'know, "Hey!"

[Grouchy Gnome]

Am I the only one who got this story? APRIL FOOLS! The Castle jesters just didn't want to be too obvious and do it last week.

[Anarquistador]

Ack! Canadian zombies! I can just feel them feasting upon my brains, with a strange blend of politeness and smug self-satisfaction!

I was not a fan of this one. Once again, I just don't care for zombie stories. Zombies appear to be the go-to monsters for authors trying to make a statement about modern society, and once again we have a "They're US, Get it?!" type story. Read one, read them all.

Though I can't help but wonder if this was one of those mind-screw stories where it turns out there never WERE any zombies to begin with; it was all in the minds of two very disturbed individuals, working long tedious hours in an unhealthy environment...

[danooli]

once again we have a "They're US, Get it?!" type story. Read one, read them all.

I hate zombies.  I mean I actively dislike and am terrified of them.  I couldn't even watch Shaun of the Dead 'cause it scared me.

These zombies didn't scare me, though.  And I don't think these were metaphorical zombies.  I think these were real, dead yet animated people.  It's 100% probable that I am wrong, that Kelly Link intended them to be metaphors for modern society as we know it, but that's not how I grokked it.

[Grouchy Gnome]

Although Occam’s razor would suggest my previous explanation of this story is the most plausible, I will offer a second interpretation: this story is not a story at all; it’s the text equivalent of a Rorschach ink-blot test. There are just enough patterns and structure present that you brain struggles to recognize and categorize them. But there is just no way in <insert overheated environment of you choosing> that a zombie who has barfed up experimental CIA pajamas that are covered with the text of a teenager’s secret diary and are worn by the clerk of a 24-hour convenience store who is intent on revolutionizing retail while mentoring a subordinate who is in love with a female who is surrounded by dog ghosts that you can smell but can’t see  can be metaphorically mapped into anything in the real world – but since we know about zombies and the CIA and pajamas and secret teenage diaries and convenience stores, etc., our brains struggle heroically to somehow arrange this conglomeration into a meaningful cognitive structure. Unfortunately, somewhere towards the end of the story, the grey matter struggling between my ears hit a flipping point and just did a wholesale rejection of this fantasy in its entirety. So for those of you who just “didn’t get it”, don’t worry, you are probably have a firm grip on the real world and your brain just correctly refused to assign any significance to this exercise in metaphorical dissonance.

[Liminal]

But there is just no way in <insert overheated environment of you choosing> that a zombie who has barfed up experimental CIA pajamas that are covered with the text of a teenager’s secret diary and are worn by the clerk of a 24-hour convenience store who is intent on revolutionizing retail while mentoring a subordinate who is in love with a female who is surrounded by dog ghosts that you can smell but can’t see  can be metaphorically mapped into anything in the real world . . .

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Grouchy Gnome,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

[Scattercat]

"He who cannot dance places the blame upon the floor."

As long as we're quoting, y'know.

[kibitzer]

Dunno quite why but I feel a little bad for my reaction to this story. I understand that not all stories have a "meaning" or a "goal" as such -- sometimes the journey is as important, or more so, than the goal. In fact I've enjoyed many stories where stuff just seems to happen and the journet rolls along and that's absolutely fine. I guess I felt this one was making some point I missed.

[Grouchy Gnome]

To Liminal and Scattercat:

Ok, since I my philosopy can't dance, please enlighten me by posting how your gray matter managed to metaphorically map a zombie who has barfed up experimental CIA pajamas that are covered with the text of a teenager’s secret diary and are worn by the clerk of a 24-hour convenience store who is intent on revolutionizing retail while mentoring a subordinate who is in love with a female who is surrounded by dog ghosts that you can smell but can’t see into the real world.

I don't have anything a priori against story-form Rorschach ink-blot tests. Just for me, personally, the author pushed the envelope a litte too far for my congnitive reference system to be able to lock on and track this mellage. OTOH, the philosophy embedded in my grey matter had no problem dancing along with the Ant King (which, for the sake of this discussion, I will consider to be another ink-blot). And in the interest of full disclosure, I can't really metaphorically map the Ant King into the real world either. But that story did not drive my brain to a total-rejection flipping point as did the Hortlak. So, for me personally, the Ant King's author succeeded in this genre while Link did not. We could do a 2x2 matrix of people who followed/were lost by the Ant King and who followed/were lost by the Horlak and be able to find people who fall into all four cells - although I would bet that the number of people in the "lost by the Ant King, followed the Horlak" would be proportionally much smaller that the numbers in the other cells.

[eytanz]

Fantasy - and, indeed, literature as a whole - would be a very poor artform if it only aimed to give us stuff that can be mapped - directly or metaphorically - to the real world. This is by no means a surrealist story, but it is a story of very human people existing in a reality which is in many ways ours and in other ways not. I'm not saying it should appeal to anyone or that it's easy to understand - far from it - but just that I feel anyone who gives up on it just because they can't directly map it onto their experience is doing themselves a disservice.

[eytanz]

you posted as I was writing the above, so it's not written in direct response to your latest post though I think it addresses it partially. I should first say that the Ant King is a story I found a lot harder to understand; it *was* at least partially surreal, rather than just unreal. I think I would definitely fit most comfortably in the "lost by the Ant King, followed the Horlak" cell.

For me, this story is about a set of very realistically written people existing in a world which is unrealistic, where the afterlife is located a gorge near the Canadian border and the CIA developed mind-reading/altering pyjamas. In such a world, just like the real one, all night convenience stores need to be staffed. This is a story of a pretty aimless but otherwise normal young man, who inadvertently works in a store that happens to be the focus of an experiment by the CIA on how to interact with the dead, and has a crush on a woman that he doesn't really understand. Everything else that happens follows from these premises pretty naturally, I think.

[Scattercat]

I don't metaphorically map it.  It's not a one-to-one correspondence ratio to reality.  I grok both "Ant King" and "Hortlak," but "Hortlak" is a lot more enjoyable to me.  (Mostly because it takes a more holistic view than "Ant King."  "Ant King" ends up uncomfortable with itself and the world, where "Hortlak" finds a sort of equilibrium among the senselessness.)

If you're trying to connect everything in a direct metaphor with reality, then yeah, I can see where you'd struggle with this story.  But then you just don't like this story or this style of storytelling; if the story isn't trying to model reality directly, then it's not a flaw in the story if it doesn't accomplish that.

My sarcasm was because your initial two posts were not explanations of what you did or did not like in the story, but rather a mocking sideswipe one-liner followed by a condemnation of the story as a collection of weirdness for weirdness' sake without an underlying structure, i.e. the work of a lazy or prank-prone author.  I feel this is an insulting position to take at best, and the way it was phrased (with absolute certainty that no one could possibly understand this story and that the story was therefore not worth engaging with) struck me as problematic at best. 

[Grouchy Gnome]

Scattercat said:

...but rather a mocking sideswipe one-liner followed by a condemnation of the story as a collection of weirdness for weirdness' sake without an underlying structure, i.e. the work of a lazy or prank-prone author.  I feel this is an insulting position to take at best, and the way it was phrased (with absolute certainty that no one could possibly understand this story and that the story was therefore not worth engaging with) struck me as problematic at best.   

Well, I still stand by my two explanations. First, let us assume, just for the sake of civil debate, that the crew in the Castle really DID want to pull an April Fools prank on us gullible souls. Now, just what would such a prank look and feel like given that it had to be pulled off within the contrains of a PodCastle pod cast? Well, a really weird story that was just a random train-wreck of weird stuff that had the appearance of obscure-but-profound metaphorical allusions would suit the bill just fine. Then they could sit back and have a jolly good laugh while the enlightened among us waxed elegant on the post-modern symbolism, etc. This may not be a belated April Fools prank, but it IS a therory that nicely fits the facts. And where did you pick up the notion that I thought the author was lazy? That story must have been a <insert the overheated environment of your choice> lot of work!

(continued in next post)

[Grouchy Gnome]

Second, my second explanation is not a "comdemation", it is a serious analysis of this story - or possibly instead why some people did or didn't get it (and that is also different from whether or not they liked it or not). Its my contention that the "fun" in this type of story is to be able to be able to chase after the piper without ever really being able to catch up to him (except maybe right at the end). But we all have to internally respond to stories like this through our own personal cognitive processes which have been uniquely shaped by our personal life histories (Scattercat is a cat and I am a gnome, for example). For some (myself among them) the piper played too softly and ran too fast and lost them. I guess cats can hear better and run faster than gnomes. 

[Unblinking]

Well, I still stand by my two explanations. First, let us assume, just for the sake of civil debate, that the crew in the Castle really DID want to pull an April Fools prank on us gullible souls. Now, just what would such a prank look and feel like given that it had to be pulled off within the contrains of a PodCastle pod cast? Well, a really weird story that was just a random train-wreck of weird stuff that had the appearance of obscure-but-profound metaphorical allusions would suit the bill just fine. Then they could sit back and have a jolly good laugh while the enlightened among us waxed elegant on the post-modern symbolism, etc. This may not be a belated April Fools prank, but it IS a therory that nicely fits the facts.

It is a theory, yes, but one that that seems rather rude to Podcastle's hardworking staff. 
-Did I like this story?  No.
-Have I liked every story?  Certainly not.
-Do I think the staff deliberately picked a story that they thought was bad?  Hell no.  Why would they do that?  They paid money for the story.  They had someone go through the effort of narrating it and sound-producing it.  And it's their reputation on the line.  I have every confidence that they choose the stories that they think are best of the stories submitted to them, for some definition of "best".  Anything else, and they'd be poor editors indeed.  Their definition of "best" and my definition of "best" do not always coincide, but if everyone liked exactly the same stuff this world would be a very homogenous (and boring) place.

I didn't really dig this story, but I didn't dig it in the same way that I generally don't dig poetry.  It wasn't badly written.  It just didn't really affect me or draw me.  It happens.  No problem.  I'll still be here listening for the next story.

[Gamercow]

For some (myself among them) the piper played too softly and ran too fast and lost them. I guess cats can hear better and run faster than gnomes. 

Or, to extend the analogy(poorly), one can be a cow, simply standing in the field, watching the scenery, not asking what it all means.  I chose to do this when things started getting pear shaped, and ended up enjoying the story quite a bit.  I enjoyed it for what it was, a quirky look at an alternate world where weird stuff happens. 

[Gamercow]

There were a couple of places where I was all, like, "Hey!" about the treatment of Canadians. I wasn't in high dudgeon or anything; just, y'know, "Hey!"

It's okay, Wilson, the Canadians in the story were probably Quebecois, and you know how THEY are...

[Grouchy Gnome]

It is a theory, yes, but one that that seems rather rude to Podcastle's hardworking staff. 

Rude? Certainly not intentionally! Bully for them if they decided to have a little fun!
But if you really think this was terribly insulting, I will send along another donation
in way of penance.

[Loz]

I'm with the big crowd of people that didn't care for this story. I do prefer for my stories to generally have some direction and conflict, either real or metaphorical, and best part of an hour is far too long for a mood piece. Waiting for Godot with zombies? No thanks.

[Scattercat]

Waiting for Godot with zombies? No thanks.

See, whereas that idea makes me go, "Holy crap, I would watch the HELL out of that."

[lisavilisa]

I really liked this story. I have no idea what it was about, but I loved hearing it anyway. I loved being in that strange world with zombies and charged pajamas that had intricate and horrible things.

[Loz]

Waiting for Godot with zombies? No thanks.

See, whereas that idea makes me go, "Holy crap, I would watch the HELL out of that."

Meh, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead on the other hand has possibilities.