Bloody Parchment 2012: The troll apocalypse

Forget the Zombie Apocalypse. The Troll Apocalypse has come and gone and guess what - no one noticed...

They were all too busy on facebook or twitter...

The first wave of the invasion hit me when I opened a link to some story on blabbermouth dot net.

It sounded like this:
dumbass
retard
slut
douchebag...

My temperature shot up and my breathing became faster. I began to type 'attention whore'...

Then I looked down. Warts were forming on my hands. They leaked green puss onto the keyboard. It was too late. I was infected. My inner troll had taken over.

(This was my 4th year of participating in Bloody Parchment, the literary segment of the S.A Horrorfest - I better call it by that name, as this year for the first time, the event took place in two cities.

The horrorfest is the brainchild of Paul Andre Blom (formerly the drummer of Cape Town's legendary death metal band, Voice of Destruction and currently bass player for the industrial metal band Terminatrix) and his wife Sonja Ruppersberg (also of Terminatrix). It began purely as a film festival, but in 2009, Nerine Dorman, at Paul and Sonja's request, took charge of organizing a litarary component which has seen participation by a number of outstanding South African genre authors including Sarah Lotz, Lauren Beukes, Joan de la Haye, Cat Hellison and Nerine herself. Um, and also me... but as I said when I had to wrack my brainz over some introductory bio with barely a 25 minute warning, I tend to engage in guerrilla writing, rather than anything marketable.

For this year, we did drabbles. Definition of a drabble: a flash fiction that is exactly 100 words long. My story does have a serious side. It is scary how easily a normal rational person can turn into a troll. All it takes is the Internet and a little anonymity to separate you from the consequences of your words and your actions.)

Fairy tales and mind games

Years ago, I read 'The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales' by Bruno Bettelheim, a book that discusses and illustrates at length the necessity of grotesque and violent elements in children's fairy tales, and the role of their psychological truths in understanding emotions. More recently, 'Mirrormask' by Neil Gaiman, brought those theories to mind. Mirrormask, while not being one of those ancient fairy tales, functions in a similar way. It's unsettling, because its scenery is exaggerated and symbolic. As if to make a point about this inner landscape being off the map, there are no page numbers. Its characters behave like archetypes in dreams. They express fears and hopes that don't make sense in the real world, because they don't belong to the world of the senses, but rather to the untouchable theatre where emotions play out their eternal battles for supremacy.

Unconquered Territories - the worlds of Geoff Ryman

My awe for Geoff Ryman is enormous, largely for his ability to capture and distill depths of human emotion in unlooked for places and insert it in its truest form in the traditionally soulless medium of science fiction. If you believe maternal love to belong exclusively within the domain of biological life forms, track down his short story 'Warmth', if only to see if your prejudice will really remain standing against the challenge of a young man seeking to be reunited with the robot nanny that raised him. Any author should attempt to explore his novel created exclusively for the internet, '253', a classic excercise in viewpoint. He takes an 8 carriage underground train and gives you a glimpse inside the mind of every one of its occupants, including the driver. 'Air' turns human consciousness into a battleground, when a small, primitive community comes under the sudden assault of instantaneous and total immersion in the vast world of the virtual, by way of an airborne virus. But I've left my first introduction to this gifted author til last. 'The Unconquered Country', an award-winning novella appears as deceptively simple and short as a children's book, but its backdrop is the stark reality of war in Cambodia and its impact upon the soft targets - women and children. But the message is very powerful. Whatever shackles our bodies, within the boundless freedom of our minds and our souls we can find the inner resources to remain unconquered territory.

Nunc Dimittus...

Sometimes life offers you the opportunity to measure your present self against a younger version. It may be a person, a dream, an attitude, a friendship or a work of art - anything that you re-encounter after a long absence from your life. In my case, it is a short story.

'Nunc Dimittus' by Tanith Lee tells the tale of a vampire's aging servant who sets out in the mean city streets to recruit his own replacement. The title derives from a Biblical quote in Latin: Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine (Now dismiss Thy servant, O Lord), taken from Luke 2; 29. It was my introduction, not only to an author, whom I still admire, but served as a pre-cursor to my later enjoyment of the vampire stories of particularly Anne Rice and Poppy Z Brite, and the exotic experimentation with the concept of gender that characterized Storm Constantine's work.

Specifically, my fascination then and now, lay with the beautiful young predator Snake, who sees quick opportunities for his own insatiable appetites in the house of Princess Draculas, not quite seeing the tightening of a noose in every step he takes, regardless of direction. This character was, and remains typical of an archetype I am fond of including in my stories. In real life they might be termed 'dangerous to know, great fun to watch'.

In today's vampire fiction, of course, a character like Snake would have been the blood-drinker, but in this story, part of the twist is that he is the human.

If you are interested in tracking this story down, if only to measure it against today's flood of vampire literature, it appeared in an anthology entitled 'A gallery of Horror', edited by Charles L. Grant.