Hey, all. I wrote "The Blood Garden," and since it seems like discussion has wound down a bit, I thought I would put in.
First of all, I just wanted to mention that Chris' narration was just amazing. I know it's only polite for an author to compliment the narrator, but in this case, I was so impressed with his measured pacing and genuine feeling. I feel like I won the narrator lottery.
I'm glad people appreciated the symbolic/literal games that were going on in the story. Maybe I put too much of an emphasis on that. I wasn't actually trying to poke fun at people who analyze literature and art in detail, because I myself do that a lot and really enjoy it. I think I was more trying to use it to create a sense of mystery. When you put your mind in that space, you open yourself up to other people's thoughts and opinions, as well as their dreams and fantasies--both the people who wrote the things you're discussing and the people you're discussing them with. There have been plenty of times in my life where I haven't been able to open myself up like that because I was too preoccupied with my own personal problems. That's what I was trying to show (in an extreme case) with Matthew, the irony being that the poem catches up with him whether he wants to think about it or not.
The Hellraiser and Candyman comparisons are really flattering because I love both those movies. Thinking about it, I probably took a lot of ideas from the movie Pumpkinhead--my favorite creature flick / revenge fantasy, where the price of revenge is to become the demon yourself. Also, I totally stole the ending from Ray Bradbury's "The Scythe," a story which made an impression on me at a young age.
I'm glad that people picked up on the fact that the college kid characters were way more sympathetic than Matthew gave them credit for. They were definitely pretentious, but then again, they're college-age literature students, so it kind of comes with the territory. Essentially, it was Matthew's fault for judging them instead of getting to know them better. They could easily have given him some solace from his grief if he'd been willing to do that. He was really the most pretentious and self-absorbed of all, thinking that his pain mattered more than anyone else's.
Speaking of being self-absorbed, I'm going to stop talking about my own story now.
Jesse