Author Topic: Pseudopod 204: Her Collection of Intimacy  (Read 16275 times)

Bdoomed

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on: July 31, 2010, 10:41:51 PM
Pseudopod 204: Her Collection of Intimacy

By Paul Haines
Read by Graeme Dunlop

I wanted her to say she’d had a few long-term boyfriends, a couple of one-night-stands. The fewer lovers the better. I wanted her to make me feel superior in my sexual conquest of the world.

I wanted her to say that, but I knew she wouldn’t.

She recorded our lovemaking sessions to watch later. I knew what that meant in terms of experience. I wanted to be cool about it. I wanted to be able to handle it. Whatever went before didn’t matter.




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« Last Edit: October 15, 2010, 06:04:17 AM by Heradel »

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Kaa

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Reply #1 on: August 01, 2010, 06:36:46 PM
Oh, joy. I get to be first. :-/

Where I thought this was going--and I think it did, actually, go there...kind of--is that anyone she said "I love you" to died. And then I thought maybe she was actually killing them: sabotaged her dad's parachute, "helped" her mom's suicide (I mean, you don't just stand there and film a parent dying of CO poisoning, right?), did something to her brother's car.

I listened to the end three times. I'm still not sure. But since this was on Pseudopod, I'm leaning toward the latter. :)

I liked it quite a bit, but I'm hoping later commenters will have some more insight into which of those ideas--if either of them--was more correct. :)

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Millenium_King

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Reply #2 on: August 01, 2010, 09:32:23 PM
This one gets a strong negative reaction from me.  It read like erotica or dime store romance (ie. heavier on the sex than the romance).  If I had randomly picked this story up (ie. I hadn't known it was on pseudopod and supposed to be horror) I would have switched it off at the 10 minute mark.  As it was, I slogged through the whole thing to see whether any horror would manifest.  Perhaps that's my biggest critique here: I never ever got a sense of mounting dread.  It was just a description of a weird relationship.  I never felt anything close to fear or horror.

The ending was quite a let-down.  I get what it was going for, but for me, it came across as "broken woman needs a man to fix her up" romance.  Pretty standard stuff.  For me, it did not qualify as horror in the least.

The language was okay, never weak, but never really strong either.  That is, except for some of the lines, (such as "I pushed my cock into her moist walls") which were positively groan-worthy. 

The reading was alright.

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heyes

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Reply #3 on: August 02, 2010, 02:06:43 PM
This story wasn't my cup of tea.  I know, I'm sounding like a broken record. I think that the wait for the end was too long. If it had been about ten minutes shorter with less of the "OMG I said I love you to her, does she love me" and less boring graphic sex writing, I would have liked it much better.

That being said:

I very much liked the delicate horror of this story at the end.  I also listened to the end a couple of times to make sure I hadn't missed it, and hell, maybe I did.  But the subtle touch of the personal horror mixed in with the intimacy not of touch, but of the connection that one has to one's parents and one's past one when becomes a parent.  That I liked.  I'm just a listener, but if I had to make a final suggestion as though this weren't a finished story I'd say:  Cut down the "getting to know you" and the "F*cking your brains out", and develop the horror a little more.  I still have no idea why the main character loves the, um, supporting character.  I want to know why she is different for him, and what is changed in the main character by being exposed to her "red discs". 


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eytanz

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Reply #4 on: August 03, 2010, 03:04:02 AM
Well, let me give the first enthusiastic review - I really liked this one. This brand of psychological horror, which is both believable and highly disturbing, is my favorite brand of horror.

I did have a lot of the same questions at the end that Kaa did - especially regarding the brother. There seemed to be a progression with the recordings, in that the father's death was almost certainly an accident, and then, while I thought the mother was genuinely attempting suicide, it was clear the girl (whose name I forgot, dang) could have helped her but didn't (and, since the mother was shocked, maybe she was really hoping to be saved, as many suicide attempters are). But the brother - why record him when he's just going to enter a car, if you know nothing is going to happen?

My interpretation was that after the accidental death of her father, and the accidental recording thereof, she started in her obsession of recording intimate moments - including the deaths of her loved ones. It was more important to her to record her mother than help her. She may have killed her brother, or she may have recorded everything he does in order to ensure she'll get his last moment, or it may have been a coincidence that she got that moment. I'm leaning towards the first option, but I like that it was left ambiguous. And I like that the ending was left ambiguous too. Was she going to kill the narrator? Or did she finally break out of the pattern? The horror, for me, isn't in either of those possibilities. It is in not knowing. I entirely disagree with heyes here - I think this story ends at the perfect moment. No matter what happens next, if we could see it, this story would not belong in Pseudopod, it would belong in a soap opera. Ending it at this point is what makes this story so chilling.



kibitzer

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Reply #5 on: August 03, 2010, 05:29:19 AM
On the erotica in this story, I see it as part of the whole intimacy theme. I won't say it was necessary but it certainly didn't feel gratuitous to me. Physically, there's nothing more intimate yet that wasn't what Matt strove for -- it's clear sex was a primary and ongoing attraction between them, so no problem there. What isn't clear to him is how to go beyond that and why it seems so difficult.

I've been wondering about the ending for quite some time. I'm very interested to see other interpretations.


Listener

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Reply #6 on: August 03, 2010, 12:29:31 PM
I agree with others who've said there was too much sex and not enough horror going on. I think the author's point was to make us wonder "what's she doing with all these DVDs? What horrific thing is going to happen to him? Is it going to be like The Ring or something?" However, to me the horror was that he has this beautiful, kinky girl who enjoys his company and he's overanalyzing the relationship. See also Holden McNeil.

I think the "two men and one woman" line was intended to foreshadow that she'd killed her family, or that they'd died, or some combination of both (I think she killed her mother and brother, myself). But it was too subtle, and the shelves of DVDs of Carla with other women was meant to draw suspicion away, much in the same way that the new Scooby Doo show (which is really quite good, despite being only half an hour per episode) introduces a character with SOME evil traits to draw your mind away from the REAL villain. See also Red Herring.

Had the horror been stronger, I think the story would've been better.

Good reading, though it felt a bit slow at times.

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Reply #7 on: August 03, 2010, 01:30:30 PM
(I mean, you don't just stand there and film a parent dying of CO poisoning, right?), did something to her brother's car.

Did it say that she filmed the deaths herself?  I thought the movie obsession was a familial thing and her mom and brother filmed themselves.

Anyway, the ending of this story was good, very good emotions there, but it took way too long to get there while the protagonist moped and moped.  "Why doesn't she say she loves me?"--I wanted to shake him and point out that this is the first time HE'S said that before, so some of his previous lovers were probably left wondering the same thing.

Since I didn't think she filmed the deaths herself, I didn't think she murdered her family.  I saw the red discs not as marking future murders, but as a badge of family.  She gives him the disc when she considers him close enough to her to want to marry him, thus making him family, and the "I love you" at the end seemed to reinforce that.



eytanz

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Reply #8 on: August 03, 2010, 01:49:03 PM
(I mean, you don't just stand there and film a parent dying of CO poisoning, right?), did something to her brother's car.

Did it say that she filmed the deaths herself?  I thought the movie obsession was a familial thing and her mom and brother filmed themselves.

The mother's movie was filmed from outside the car, and the movie zoomed in and out, implying it was controlled rather than just an automatic camera. Also, she was looking at something in disbelief, presumably at her daughter filming her rather than helping.



ElectricPaladin

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Reply #9 on: August 03, 2010, 05:10:50 PM
I didn't at all read it as she murdered her family. I saw it as much more a mania for filming the things she loves - people, sex - and then obsessively categorizing them by quality and importance. It's a pretty classic way of externalizing bad feelings via over-intellectualization. She wanted her boyfriend to understand just how crazy she was. Showing him that he was in the same category as the deaths of her family was her way of explaining how much she loved him. The horror was in how damaged she was, how wrapped around her own trauma her mind had become, to the point that love and death, record and reality, have become totally indistinct. And yet, she knows she's crazy, and wants to give him one last chance to man up or run out, so to speak.

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kibitzer

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Reply #10 on: August 04, 2010, 08:13:16 AM
And yet, she knows she's crazy, and wants to give him one last chance to man up or run out, so to speak.

Bleak. But very plausible.

So, I think:

* she didn't kill her father -- that was caught on film accidentally and was the original thing that broke her mind.

* she probably killed her mother -- through inaction at least, rather than deliberate intent.

* on her brother I am completely undecided. All we know is, the video showed him climbing into a car. Did it show the crash? We don't know. And so we can't tell how complicit she was in his death.

Net result: spooky uncertainty about a very broken lady.


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Reply #11 on: August 04, 2010, 11:30:14 AM
Oh I really like this story. I'm surprised people feel the need to dissect it all logically. Let the feelings and thoughts it evokes wash over you and you'll probably enjoy it more.

The rising tension was good, the little hints, the realisations. The story initially grabs with its unabashed erotic moments, then builds with the sheer number (and variety) of lovers represented by those discs. Then comes the special red pen, and the perfect horror of those discs.

He's already trapped by intimacy at the start, locked in by his love. By the end, when he realises his projected fate, he's already lost, whatever he does.



Millenium_King

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Reply #12 on: August 04, 2010, 04:53:33 PM
I'm surprised people feel the need to dissect it all logically.

Huh...?

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kibitzer

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Reply #13 on: August 05, 2010, 08:57:15 AM
I'm surprised people feel the need to dissect it all logically.

Huh...?

Makes sense to me. I think they're saying... experience the story, don't explain it.


Millenium_King

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Reply #14 on: August 05, 2010, 04:27:19 PM
I'm surprised people feel the need to dissect it all logically.

Huh...?

Makes sense to me. I think they're saying... experience the story, don't explain it.

I was just reacting to how nutty I think that suggestion is.  The way it was stated made it sound like "Just don't think too hard about it and you'll like it more."  I don't think there's anything wrong with demanding one's art appeals to both emotion and intellect.  Look, I'm all about Dionysian ecstasy too, but critically, logically examining a story is half the fun.

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eytanz

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Reply #15 on: August 05, 2010, 06:56:15 PM
I'm mostly amused by the fact that anyone would be surprised that people here are (over-)analyzing stories... I guess they just haven't visited too many other threads here.



Kaa

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Reply #16 on: August 05, 2010, 07:21:06 PM
I'm mostly amused by the fact that anyone would be surprised that people here are (over-)analyzing stories... I guess they just haven't visited too many other threads here.

Ha! Ben could read Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill and we'd have four pages of analysis over the meaning of "broke his crown" and why JACK got to climb the hill FIRST.

It's what we do. :)

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kibitzer

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Reply #17 on: August 06, 2010, 01:55:26 PM
Ha! Ben could read Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill and we'd have four pages of analysis over the meaning of "broke his crown" and why JACK got to climb the hill FIRST.

It's what we do. :)

Well now. Why do you assume Jack reached the top first? All we know is that "Jack and Jill went up the hill". I think you'll find the narrative makes no mention of hilltop primacy.

However, that does raise an interesting question. Of course, they "went up the hill". But... did they go equally up the hill? Did they ascend hand-in-hand or one after the other? Were they in concert, in harmony? Or did they go up grudgingly? Out of a sense of duty? Each one, together alone?

If the former, it's reasonable to assume they reached the top together. If the latter, well, who can say? In which case, we could posit that Jill reached the top first -- and possibly waited in hiding for Jack, clocked him on the head, thus giving us "Jack fell down and broke his crown."  Which leaves us with the problem of why "Jill came tumbling after." Guilt? Perhaps she swooned clean away after her cowardly deed?


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Reply #18 on: August 06, 2010, 02:04:47 PM
If the former, it's reasonable to assume they reached the top together. If the latter, well, who can say? In which case, we could posit that Jill reached the top first -- and possibly waited in hiding for Jack, clocked him on the head, thus giving us "Jack fell down and broke his crown."  Which leaves us with the problem of why "Jill came tumbling after." Guilt? Perhaps she swooned clean away after her cowardly deed?

To give herself a reasonable cover story.  "Did you hit Jack?"  "Of course not!  Don't you know that I went tumbling after?  We were attacked by a masked stranger!  Jack didn't even see him coming, but I was able to dive down the hill to escape before he could hit me."



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Reply #19 on: August 11, 2010, 03:05:48 AM
This one was really awesome, though my enthusiasm may be colored by my relief that it wasn't some sort of sex-based monster (which is where I thought her massive collection was going.)  Eytanz got here first, so he's basically covered it from my end.

I think the point about not trying to over-analyze was more that it doesn't particularly matter if she did or didn't kill her family; as ElectricPaladin said, she's quite thoroughly broken and damaged either way, and now with a child in their future, there is a whole world of trouble that just opened up in front of our poor, hapless and, yes, rather bland and could-use-a-few-more-character-traits protagonist.  (I really must second the request that we at least learn enough about our MC to know why he's so taken with Craziella McCrazypants.)



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Reply #20 on: August 17, 2010, 12:49:12 AM
I didn't at all read it as she murdered her family. I saw it as much more a mania for filming the things she loves - people, sex - and then obsessively categorizing them by quality and importance. It's a pretty classic way of externalizing bad feelings via over-intellectualization. She wanted her boyfriend to understand just how crazy she was. Showing him that he was in the same category as the deaths of her family was her way of explaining how much she loved him. The horror was in how damaged she was, how wrapped around her own trauma her mind had become, to the point that love and death, record and reality, have become totally indistinct. And yet, she knows she's crazy, and wants to give him one last chance to man up or run out, so to speak.

This pretty much sums it up for me, except to say that the narrator is one of my favorite EA readers.

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csrster

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Reply #21 on: August 19, 2010, 06:41:02 AM
I didn't at all read it as she murdered her family. I saw it as much more a mania for filming the things she loves - people, sex - and then obsessively categorizing them by quality and importance. It's a pretty classic way of externalizing bad feelings via over-intellectualization. She wanted her boyfriend to understand just how crazy she was. Showing him that he was in the same category as the deaths of her family was her way of explaining how much she loved him. The horror was in how damaged she was, how wrapped around her own trauma her mind had become, to the point that love and death, record and reality, have become totally indistinct. And yet, she knows she's crazy, and wants to give him one last chance to man up or run out, so to speak.

This pretty much sums it up for me, except to say that the narrator is one of my favorite EA readers.

An extra dimension of creepiness for me is that she doesn't show him the other "Red-Marker Discs" until after she's thoroughly pregnant, so that he's already trapped in her screwed-up world. That said, I'm with the "this one bored me" and "too much lovey-dovey stuff" crowd.



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Reply #22 on: August 22, 2010, 07:01:51 AM
I wouldn't say I was totally blown away by this story, though I was wondering where the whole 'red discs' thing was going.  This might be a crazy way to look at it, but I initially came away with the impression that the woman considered falling in love (or getting pregnant) to be tantamount in some sense to committing suicide.

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Reply #23 on: August 25, 2010, 08:36:19 PM
I'm with the "this story was great" camp. True, there was a lot of sex. Probably too much.

But the whole experience about her recording her family's deaths was pretty creepy. I liked it.

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Reply #24 on: September 01, 2010, 08:16:59 PM
This was twisted.  She has to be killing these people right?  I love the ambiguity of the ending.  The sense of mystery and foreboding keeps building, however I agree with the previous statement that had I not known this was a horror story I just may have turned it off a few minutes in.

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