Thursday, March 10, 2022

The Haunter in the Dark


I finally picked up The Devil's Blood's 2012 MASTERPIECE The Thousandfold Epicentre on vinyl. Ever since my friend Tori turned me on to this album later that same year, it has occupied a pretty prominent place in my inner jukebox. I can't go very long without cranking this album, so it's nice to be able to do so on vinyl now.
 



Watch:

With Mickey Keating's new film Offseason dropping this week and some of my cohorts from The Horror Vision and I planning to get together for a viewing/reaction episode, I figured it was time I finally watched the Keating flicks I'd had on my list for some time now. Two nights ago I began with 2016's Carnage Park.

 

Great flick. This feels like Keating doing his own take on Rob Zombie-like material, and it works. A lot of that is the casting - Ashely Bell is a fantastic final girl. Her wardrobe in the film plays up her petite size and creates a glorious misnomer for a character that ends up a staunch survivor without the film ever having to go over the top and take her full-on Ripley. This helps keep the film's realistic tone, and makes the final sequences of the movie breathtaking in the tension they create. Rarely does a film use lack of light this well. Also, Pat Healy is really just one of my favorite actors. The guy never disappoints in his performances.




Read:

I checked a few more Lovecraft stories off the list:

    • Celephais
    • The Unnamable
    • The Haunter in the Dark


I will tell you, there is a HUGE advantage to reading Lovecraft's works on Kindle. You won't get an awesome, old-school paperback cover like the one I've posted above, however, the Kindle's X-Ray feature allows you to axis all kinds of information you would not otherwise have at your disposal. For instance, reading The Haunter in the Dark was especially enjoyable due to the information I learned by highlighting elements of the text and either reading the X-Ray or built-in links to Wikipedia. I'm certain I'd read this one before, however, I never would have known that the story is essentially a sequel to a young Robert Bloch's story The Shambler from the Stars, or that the main character, Robert Blake (not that Robert Blake), was Bloch's creation. There are also elements in the story drawn from Clarke Ashton Smith, and it's this element of Lovecraft's work - that it has always essentially been an 'open source' material, that I find so fascinating.  




Playlist:

Deftones - Ohms
Deftones - Gore
Godflesh - Pure
Iress - Prey
My Bloody Valentine - MBV
Poni Hoax - Eponymous
Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer




Card:


Note: I generally don't recognize inverted cards.



Past = Knight of Discs. The Fire Element of Earth. Will applied to Malkuth, the Earthly concerns. This was my idea before yesterday that I was going to force my doctor to see things my way, to open me up and take the 1cmm 'shadow' my last CT scan showed out.

Present = 3 of Disks: Work. Staying in the Earthly realm. This is the reality of the situation.

Future = 7 of Swords: Futility. This is turning out to be a pretty poignant pull because as it turns out, the doctor 100% convinced me I was overreacting. 

It's pretty easy to have someone in the medical field you trust say to you, "It's probably nothing but we'd like to do a biopsy just to be sure" and then assume this is a half measure - especially when it doesn't work and your lung collapses - and that the actual the best possible way to proceed is to have them cut you open. I'm past that. I can't keep my life on hold for this. The new plan is a CT every four months (or so) to make sure the shadow isn't growing. I should state what my doc reminded me of yesterday: the fact that because of being stabbed in the lung when I was in High School, and because of the inflammation - which they originally mistook for lymphoma back in 2017 - my lungs are filled with shadows when it comes to CT scans. The tricky bit with my physiology as it is, lies in determining if new aberrations are just the inflammation growing/changing, or something more nefarious. For now, I'm content waiting this out because the odds are it is inflammation. And really, I want to move ASAP, not just because I'm sick of LA, but because I want to be far away in case we get in over our heads and Putin decides to turn LaLaLand into a smoking crater. 

Paranoia. It's what's for dinner in 2022. Deal with it.

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