I'd like to personally thank Podcastle for making sure that I feel absolutely no doubt about my decision to move house from the cold, wet, dark confines of San Francisco to the relatively warm environment of Oakland. Seriously - I spent most of yesterday evening staring suspiciously at the patch of black mold on our ceiling, daring it to do something shifty. I have Simple Green and I'm not afraid to use it! I got it for stripping minis, but I'm not afraid to go all fungicide on your fuzzy black ass!
I never have trusted fungus. Creepy, parasitic, scavenging, spore-growing little bastards. I mean, it's no picnic being an animal - we eat death, too; only plants are innocent - but at least most animals I know have the decency to make at least a desultory effort to kill their food first.
Ok, sure, except for parasitic animals. But screw them, anyway. I have my biases and fungi are creepy!
Anyway, I loved this story. I loved the atmosphere of Ambergris and the growing madness of the main character. I did not object to the list at the beginning - or the generally meandering style of this story - because I thought that it was actually very tightly written. The obsessive specificity, combined with the horrific and deeply wrong nature of what was being described, was the edge of the knife that pried me off of the real world and set me loose in Ambergris. Every word of The Cage was precisely the word that it needed to be; it was the world those stories described that was wrong, unnatural, off-kilter, and dangerous.
The pacing was, likewise, perfect. The way The Cage unfolded was almost Grecian in its tragedy. All Hoegbottom needed to do was realize that he had gone too far, too deep, and turn away... but we all knew that he wasn't going to do that. And by the end, he knew it, too. It's that moment that I find most delicious in a story - the moment that you realize that your worst enemy was always yourself.
And yet, like my favorite horrors, this was a story that believed in heroes. Hoegbottom couldn't save himself - he was damned from the moment he laid hand on The Cage - but he could save his wife. And damn it, he did!
On the other hand, I can't argue that this story didn't have one flaw. It's beginning to bug me when authors write things that at first glance seem terrible and atmospheric and creepy, but on further consideration don't actually mean anything. Words are supposed to mean something. I mean, seriously - "a dark light?" "Bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe?" What is that supposed to mean? The point is that it takes me out of the story when I realize that the narrator is describing something in a way inconsistent with the way people actually think of things.
Neil Gaiman is a great example of an author who almost never does this - The Cage's opening list is a good example of a story that dips into it.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that fungi have now replaced tentacled horror as my go to "something is wrong here." And my wife and are pulling up stakes and moving to Morrow, and there will be no more conversation about it.