The Red Tree..chop it down! Chop it down, so that I can sleep!
Saw lost of discussion about "House of Leaves" all over the interwebs recently. Which means I will have to retry to read it. Invariably as important works of horror got mentioned, "The Red Tree" by Caitlin Kiernan came u, and I remembered that I bought it awhile ago...omg, I have to finish this soon because it is creeping me out at night when I am by my lonesome and I cannot sleep.
Kiernan has detailed examples of various folklore traditions throughout the novel, which is essentially three different tales going on all at once....and anyways, one of the things that the "manuscript" of a dead, dead Professor from URI discusses are wolf-like monsters, some of the stories I am familiar with, particularly the one about the French "bete" in the late 1700s, and uh, one of the things I DID NOT know about these critters is that they had a penchant for staring into windows at night. I do not need to know these things! They upset me and keep me from sleeping.
This is one of those THINGS that will always get me. Faces in windows/glass/water. I am always a little uneasy around reflective surfaces, most of the time I'm fine, but there is always this fear that one day I will look out the window, in the mirror, under the water and see something there that I do not want. This is silly, because I am an atheist and a materialist and I have very little room in my worldview for the supernatural...but my brain still likes to gnaw on itself in the wee hours and so sometimes if you come into my house particularly my bedroom, you will see the mirrors covered in a towel. I am a silly goose.
I suspect that this has something to do with the hallucinations I suffer when I fall asleep. I often think there are things in the room with me watching me/coming through the walls or windows/hovering directly over my bed. This is a very specific sort of sleep disorder, and I used to remember what it is called (I THINK maybe hypnopompic or hypnogogic hallucinations?), but have now forgotten, and I read up a whole bunch about it after I saw a description of it in a book on the science of sleep and realized that was what I'd been experiencing since I was a child. Phantoms in the synapses. Very fascinating stuff...just not until about a minute after I've fully awakened and calmed myself the fuck down and processed what I'd just experienced. Sometimes I shout, and it was sweet how Ryan reacted the first time it happened in the apartment. Came charging in with a baseball bat ready to throw down on whatever I had screamed at. Which then led to the fact that I'd never mentioned my night time hallucinations to him.
So anyways long autobiographical digression is to show that horror of the sort that Kiernan is weaving is not for the likes of me. And yet I love it. A books has not has not deliciously creeped me out like this since Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House." I just need to finish so that "The Red Tree" will stop haunting me, and I can get some shut eye.
Kiernan has detailed examples of various folklore traditions throughout the novel, which is essentially three different tales going on all at once....and anyways, one of the things that the "manuscript" of a dead, dead Professor from URI discusses are wolf-like monsters, some of the stories I am familiar with, particularly the one about the French "bete" in the late 1700s, and uh, one of the things I DID NOT know about these critters is that they had a penchant for staring into windows at night. I do not need to know these things! They upset me and keep me from sleeping.
This is one of those THINGS that will always get me. Faces in windows/glass/water. I am always a little uneasy around reflective surfaces, most of the time I'm fine, but there is always this fear that one day I will look out the window, in the mirror, under the water and see something there that I do not want. This is silly, because I am an atheist and a materialist and I have very little room in my worldview for the supernatural...but my brain still likes to gnaw on itself in the wee hours and so sometimes if you come into my house particularly my bedroom, you will see the mirrors covered in a towel. I am a silly goose.
I suspect that this has something to do with the hallucinations I suffer when I fall asleep. I often think there are things in the room with me watching me/coming through the walls or windows/hovering directly over my bed. This is a very specific sort of sleep disorder, and I used to remember what it is called (I THINK maybe hypnopompic or hypnogogic hallucinations?), but have now forgotten, and I read up a whole bunch about it after I saw a description of it in a book on the science of sleep and realized that was what I'd been experiencing since I was a child. Phantoms in the synapses. Very fascinating stuff...just not until about a minute after I've fully awakened and calmed myself the fuck down and processed what I'd just experienced. Sometimes I shout, and it was sweet how Ryan reacted the first time it happened in the apartment. Came charging in with a baseball bat ready to throw down on whatever I had screamed at. Which then led to the fact that I'd never mentioned my night time hallucinations to him.
So anyways long autobiographical digression is to show that horror of the sort that Kiernan is weaving is not for the likes of me. And yet I love it. A books has not has not deliciously creeped me out like this since Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House." I just need to finish so that "The Red Tree" will stop haunting me, and I can get some shut eye.