K is for—Kill Your Darlings
The great part about making a horror
movie, director Bernard Rose (Candyman, Paperhouse) used to
say, is that you can kill off your entire cast, if you want/need to.
To that observation I would add a paraphrasing of Stephen King's
explanation of The Ghost Trick, as used in the supernatural soap Dark
Shadows: Yes, but the problem is—especially when you're dealing
with magicians, in a universe already full of both resurrected gods
and simple human ghosts—killing people off doesn't always take. So
the lure is knowing that you can exploit at will the narrative
emotional outpouring which accompanies the “death” of any given
character, without ever actually having to permanently shift them off
the board at all. Do that too many times, however, and you end up
being Marvel (or DC); nobody believes the stakes anymore, because
you've bent them so many times in order to bring your
darlings/franchises literally back to life. Nothing matters.
I told myself many times that if I
pushed the Hexslinger series to where it should logically go, I
really would have to kill a lot of people. Which is why it didn't
surprise me when the characters I knew I knew in my gut were probably
going to survive did, but I must admit, it did surprise me how much
the other ones not doing so actually hurt. Which is good, I guess...
L is for—Love's A Curse
Or so Chess Pargeter's Ma always used
to say, and she'd certainly know. It continues to interest me how
much of my idea of epic love seems to have been inextricably
influenced by listening to way too many Joan Baez albums as a kid, in
that I just can't reconcile myself with the concept that a love big
enough to kill or die for is ever a good thing, exactly.
Instead, it strikes me as a sort of wound, a two-person trauma which
inevitably hurts as much as it heals. Within the context of the
Hexslinger series, for example, I don't think it's debatable that
Chess has learned a lot from loving Reverend Rook, and that the
people around him have benefited from that same sorrowful tuition in
self-knowledge. And once upon a time, Chess's automatic reply to that
observation would've been a simple: Oh yeah? Well, fuck 'em
all, anyhow...but the fact that he isn't quite as inclined to do
so anymore (or rather not as inclined to act on it, because he'd
probably still say it, if only to be a bitch) is another
consequence of the same scar tissue. Ash Rook has changed him,
irreparably, making him a different person. Yet in much the same way
Chess has already benefited from the damage he took in loving Rook,
by the beginning of A Tree of Bones, Rook—who still
justifies the worst of his betrayals by saying he only did what he
did in order to “save” Chess from future harm—has already begun
to accept that his baseline ideal of love may be exactly as hollow as
his hypocrite preacher's faith ever was...and that if he wants to
redeem himself at all, if not his choices, he has to give up on the
idea of getting any sort of return on his investments, to serve
without expectation—or even hope—of gain, like the “true”
Christian he's never really felt himself to be. Which really can't
help but get messy, as a strategy.
Tomorrow: M and N!
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