You won't see through my eyes

[sovay]

If you ever wanted to know about my childhood fears, a major answer can be found in Ian McDowell's "Formative Frights: Weird Fiction Writers on What Scared Them as Kids," along with similarly early creep-outs from Gwendolyn Kiste, Gemma Files, LC von Hessen, John Langan, Nadia Bulkin, and Ramsey Campbell, among others. Now, of course, I write endlessly about shape-change and transformation, the interplay of faces and masks. See also that one time I wrote a sex scene with a bog body.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Good accompanying music--will check these out.

[sovay]

Good accompanying music--will check these out.

I thought everybody had really good reasons for being frightened of the things they were frightened of! And the ways that people make stories of what they see, which are often worse than the things themselves.

[asakiyume]

Your explanation for your fear of masks totally resonates.

[moon_custafer]

I was given a book, possibly for Christmas or my birthday, titled something like Mysteries of Archeology. Each section began with a fictional narrative of How It Might Have Happened. One described the death of Tollund Man, envisioning him as an elder who nobly volunteered as a human sacrifice in exchange for his people’s survival. The next page showed a large photo of his bog-mummified corpse. I used to cover the image with my hand, uncovering it a little at a time, until I could bear to look at him, horrified and enthralled.

The National Geographic with the frozen bodies of some of Franklin’s men was harder to deal with – my father assured me that they weren’t all that terrible to look at, indeed one of them was “quite handsome,” but in the end he had to hide the magazine on top of the tall dresser in my parents’ bedroom; and even then, the knowledge that the terrible object was there once drove me into a panic that spread to my little brother and forced our worried babysitter to call my parents home from one of the few parties they let themselves attend. I think our house, the physical building, scared me too, for some reason, at least when other people were absent or asleep. I was always bracing myself for the whispers that I just knew were going to come out of the silence. I was frightened of white-noise, too, and certain kinds of modernist music: the theme from the radio show Quirks & Quarks would put me on edge, despite liking the show itself, and I was uneasy about the mime segments on Mr. Dressup (there were mime, segments, weren’t there? I’m not just imagining that, or conflating it with a different show?), not because of the whiteface of the mime, but because of the impressionistic piano that accompanied him.

I don’t think I was frightened of masks per se, but I was always deeply creeped out by any comedy that involved someone getting a pie in the face, because there would be a moment afterwards when the pie-plate would fall away and reveal the face transformed into a mess of whipped-cream and broken pie-crust, with deep, deep holes marking the location of their eyes and mouth.

I was a really nervous child, is what I guess I’m trying to say here.

[sovay]

I was a really nervous child, is what I guess I’m trying to say here.

I guess? I wonder what you heard in the modernist music. The rest of what you describe, as I was saying to asakiyume about the various anecdotes the article, makes sense to me, especially the phenomenon where the book that contains the upsetting image or words becomes transitively its own awful object. I dropped a book down behind a shelf in my elementary school library for those reasons.

[gwynnega]

There were some delightfully surprising responses.

[sovay]

There were some delightfully surprising responses.

I loved Christa Faust on A Hard Day's Night. The fans in that movie absolutely look like they're about to go full maenad on the Fab Four.

[gwynnega]

That was marvelous. As many times as I've seen that movie, I'd never thought of it that way!