Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book is a 1994 fantasy book by Terry Jones parodying the historical Cottingley fairy photographs of 1917 which caused a sensation when they seemed to depict realistic fairies with children.
The story of the book begins when Lady Cottington is a young child and she manages to smash a fairy in her diary, preserving it there. As she examines the fairies she starts to pick out different types and she starts to make a habit of it, pressing more and more of them. As her life progresses and her interest ebbs and flows, this keeps a historical record of her growing into womanhood and as her interests become more adults and the fairies play their tricks on her in turn. The words in the book are interspersed with illustrations of squashed fairies, some nude and contorted into painful death poses.
The illustrations are bizarre and morbid and sometimes funny, and of an excellent quality, and the book itself (the one that I got anyway) had a cool design making it seem like an old diary.
A content warning for those who do pick up the book, drawn by the premise and illustrations, that the storyline does involve some situations that, though described some opaquely, seem to suggest sexual abuse. That wasn’t something I was expecting and it does make the book harder to recommend as a result, since the book as a whole doesn’t give the impression it involves that topic.
133 Poisonwood Avenue would be stronger if it was a killer house. There is an estate at 35 Silver Street that annihilated a family back in the 1800s and its roof has never sprung a leak since. In 2007 it still had the power to trap a bickering couple in an endless hedge maze that was physically only three hundred square feet. 35 Silver Street is a show-off.
133 Poisonwood only ever had one person ever die under
its roof. Back in 1989, Dorottya Blasko had refused hospice, and spent two and
a half months enjoying the sound of the wind on 133 Poisonwood’s shingles. 133
Poisonwood played its heart out for her every day.
The house misses 1989. It has spent so much of the time
since vacant.
Today it is going to change that. It is on its best
behavior as the realtor, Mrs. Weiss, sweeps up. She puts out trays of store-bought
cookies and hides scent dispensers, while 133 Poisonwood summons a gentle
breeze and uses its aura to spook any groundhogs off the property. Both the
realtor and the real estate need this open house to work.
Stragglers trickle in. They are bored people more
interested in snacks than the restored plumbing. The house straightens its
aching floorboards, like a human sucking in their belly. Stragglers track mud everywhere.
The house would love nothing more than any of them to spend the rest of their
lives tracking mud into it.
A heavyset man with sagging shoulders lets himself in.
He has a bit of brownie smudged against the back of his parakeet green hoodie,
and doesn’t seem aware of it. Mrs. Weiss gives him a little wave while
continuing to hold up a ten-minute conversation with an affluent couple. The
couple made the mistake of saying they were “thinking of thinking of
conceiving,” and Mrs. Weiss wields statistics about the school district like a
cowboy wields a lasso. The couple’s shoes likely cost more than a down payment
on the house, but from how often they check their phones, they clearly are
headed back to their Mercedes.
The man with the brownie-stained hoodie prowls through
133 Poisonwood’s halls, and it pulls its floorboards so straight that its
foundations tremble.
The man doesn’t look at 133 Poisonwood’s floor. He looks
at the couple of ripples in the green floral wallpaper, with the expression of
someone looking at his own armpit.
The house feels ashamed of the loose wallpaper. It’s
vintage painted silk, which Mrs. Weiss says could be a big value-add. Now the
house ponders if it can haunt its own glue and help strip the wallpaper away to
please him. It’s especially important since he is spending more time here than
anyone has yet without Mrs. Weiss wrangling them. It’s like he doesn’t feel the
vibes other visitors do, or he doesn’t care about them.
From his behavior, what he cares about is wallpaper, the
natural lighting through the windows in the master bedroom and the kitchen.
A child stomps in through the front door, her frizzy hair
in three oblong pigtails she probably did herself. A silver keepsake locket
clashes with her bright green Incredible Hulk t-shirt. Her elbows are tucked
into her chest, hands out like claws, stained with brownie bits.
Every step she takes is deliberate and channels all her
tiny body weight to be as heavy as possible. If the house had to guess, the
girl is probably pretending to be a dinosaur on the hunt.
The man in the brownie-stained hoodie glances at her. He
asks, “Ana. Where’s your coat?”
Ana bellows, “I hate clothes!”
Ana apparently hates clothes so much she immediately
grabs the bottom of her Hulk t-shirt and yanks it up over her head. She is
careful to keep her locket in place, but chucks the shirt at the man. He grabs
for her, and she ducks between his arms, bolting past Mrs. Weiss and the
affluent couple, pigtails and locket bouncing.
In their chase, they leave the front door open. The
house knows heating oil is expensive. It summons a spectral breeze to shut it
for them.
The sound makes Ana pinwheel around, and she points at
the door. She says, “Daddy! It’s ghosts!”
Daddy says, “Ana, we talked about this. There’s no such
thing as ghosts.”
“You didn’t look.”
“You don’t have to look for things that aren’t there.”
Ana looks at her locket and huffs. “What if it’s Mommy’s
ghost?”
Daddy closes his eyes for a moment. “Please just put
your shirt back on.”
Ana immediately attacks her own pants. “Clothes are for
the weak!”
“Put it on or we are leaving, Ana,” he says, trying to
wrestle clothing onto his daughter. She pushes at him, leaving more brownie
residue on his hoodie. As they battle, the affluent couple slips out the front
door without closing it.
The house closes it for them. Heating oil isn’t cheap.
*
The triangular roof means the second floor only has the
space for one bedroom. Mrs. Weiss reads the expression on Daddy’s face, and she
attacks with, “The basement is very spacious with generous lighting. It’s cool
in the summer, and toasty in the winter.”
Ana says, “Heights are bad luck anyway.”
The four-year-old scarcely looks at the bedroom before
backing out. She holds the handrail with both hands as she climbs down the
stairs on quivering legs. On the third stair, she freezes entirely.
Daddy is in the middle of surveying the room and misses
Ana quivering in place.
Some houses give their residents visions of slaughters
or trauma. 133 Poisonwood gives Daddy a swift vision of his daughter’s vertigo.
He doesn’t know it’s anyone else’s insight, and wouldn’t believe it, but he’s
at the stairs in seconds. Ana holds onto his pants leg until she feels safe.
All 133 Poisonwood has is a light touch, but it knows
how to use it. Haunting is an art.
The basement is only half-underground, so the windows
are level with the freshly mowed front lawn. Ana spends a moment giggling at
the view. Then she whizzes around the basement, from the combination furnace
and laundry room, to a storage closet, and to a pair of vacant rooms. They
would make a perfect child’s bedroom and playroom.
Ana goes to the west room, announcing, “Daddy. You can
keep all the ghosts you bust in here.”
Mrs. Weiss offers, “One of these could be a home office.
You said you telecommute? Google Fiber is coming to the area next year.”
Daddy says, “I want to work from home more. I’m a
software engineer, and I host a skeptic podcast. You might have heard us.”
The house isn’t offended. It doesn’t believe in ghosts
either.
Ana hops back and forth between the two rooms, scrutinizing
over and over as though they’ll grow. That is a trick the house doesn’t have.
Daddy says, “We could sleep next door to each other.
What do you think?”
Ana says, “But I want a big dino room.”
“You’re getting to be a big dinosaur. How about the room
on the top floor?”
Ana’s bottom lip shoots upward like she’s going to run.
She clearly won’t settle for the room on the top floor, and there’s only a
master bedroom on the first floor. A tantrum is close, and it could ruin
everything.
So 133 Poisonwood plays its ace. Every decent haunted
house has at least one secret room. Dorottya Blasko used to sew down here when
she didn’t want to be pestered, in a room her family couldn’t find. It would be
a perfect place for Ana to grow up in. Perhaps she’ll learn to sew.
With the sound of an affectionate kitten, the door opens.
Shock hits the adults, who definitely don’t remember there being a room there.
Ana doesn’t care, and runs to explore it.
“Uh, we aren’t showing that room,” Mrs. Weiss says,
scrambling to cover for herself. She’s panicking, imagining hazards and lawsuits.
She doesn’t understand. 133 Poisonwood is going to
clinch the sale for them.
The room runs deep, with an expansive window that hasn’t been seen from the outside in over twenty years. A sewing box with a scarlet and royal blue quilted exterior sits next to a rocking chair, and beneath the window is a broad spinning wheel that still smells like hobbies. Many great dresses were supposed to come out of this room. There are a few cracks on the concrete floor. Nothing a loving father can’t fill in to perfect his daughter’s big dino room.
“Ana,” Daddy calls. “Stay near me.”
Ana ignores the call and runs straight up to the spinning wheel. Her little hands grab onto spokes in the drive wheel, and she turns to the door. “It’s like Mommy’s.”
Daddy says, “Careful, that’s not ours—”
Ana yanks the wheel around to show it off to the adults. She pulls before the house can resist, and the entire device creaks and wobbles. It topples straight down on top of Ana, throwing her to the floor.
Daddy grabs her shoulders and pulls her from between the
cracked wheel and treadle. Ana’s too distracted bawling to feel her necklace
snag the spindle. The thin chain snaps, and the locket slips from her neck and down
a crack in the floor. Without intending to, the house sucks the chain down like
a strand of spaghetti. The house tries to spit it out.
Daddy squeezes Ana to his chest so hard she could pop,
and keeps repeating, “Are you alright? Are you alright?”
Mrs. Weiss gestures and says, “Her hand.”
“Are you alright?”
Ana says, “Let me fix it!” She stretches her hands to
the broken spinning wheel. One of her hands is bleeding and she still wants to
use them to clean up her mess. She says, “Daddy, let go, I’ll fix it. Don’t
make the ghosts sad.”
That breaks Daddy’s concerned trance, and he lifts her
under one arm, ignoring the kicking of her feet. He marches for the stairs.
“No. I warned you, and we are leaving.”
“Daddy, no!”
“No more. Say goodbye. You see the ghosts aren’t saying
goodbye? Do you know why?”
An urge falls over the house to slam the door shut and
trap them all inside. Daddy, Ana, and even Mrs. Weiss, force them all to spend
eternity in its hidden room, where they can make dresses, and stay cool in the
summer, and warm in the winter. It will shelter them from all the hurricanes
the world can create. It needs them.
The phantom door’s hinges and knob tremble as 133
Poisonwood fights itself. In that moment it knows what makes other homes go
evil. The killer houses can’t bear to be alone.
133 Poisonwood Avenue would be stronger if it was a
killer house. But it isn’t one.
It leaves its rooms open as Daddy carries his bawling
daughter out of the basement, her incoherent sounds resonating through the
house’s crawl spaces. He carries her up the stairs and out the front door
without a backward glance. This time, he remembers to close the door.
*
133 Poisonwood leaves the secret room open in the hopes
that someone will come back. It squeezes the cracks in its floor closed,
popping the locket out without scratching it. Inside is the picture of a woman with
a thick nose and proud eyes. She would have made an excellent ghost. The house
would take a phantom for an inhabitant at this point.
The afternoon is sluggish. There are four more visitors,
none of whom stay long enough to check the basement for treasure. The hours
chug by, and Mrs. Weiss spends most of the time on her phone.
With half an hour of daylight left, a red sedan pulls
up. The driver lingers outside for two minutes before knocking. It’s Daddy.
Mrs. Weiss answers and forces a smile, “Ulisses. Is Ana
okay?”
Daddy says, “It was a scratch. Thanks for being
understanding before.”
She says, “I’m so sorry about that. I told the team this
place was supposed to be empty.”
He says, “Have you seen a locket? Ana wears it
everywhere and it’s gone missing.”
Mrs. Weiss holds the door open for him, “We can check
around. What does it look like?”
“It has a picture of Ana’s mother inside. It’s one of
few gifts she still has from her.”
“She was your wife?”
“She was going to be,” he says, and looks around the master
bedroom with an expression even emptier than the space. “There was an accident
on our apartment’s fire escape. She had a fall.”
“Oh, that’s terrible.”
“Right now, Ana needs all the comfort she can get. So if
we can find that locket, it’d save our lives.”
They look around, the man so tired every step looks
heavy. It’s amazing he could stagger into a motel bed, let alone go hunting for
a locket. The house hasn’t seen someone as in need of a home in years.
Mrs. Weiss says, “I had something like that after my father passed away. Makes her feel like her mother’s spirit is still with her?”
“Superstitions aren’t comforting to me,” he says,
fatigue giving way to scorn, as though daring the house’s walls to do
something. “And Ana’s mother was an atheist.”
The house is tempted to give Daddy the shock of his life
and toss the locket to him. Give him back the image of his lover and proof of
its power.
But he doesn’t need to believe in hauntings. With his
slumped shoulders, and his clothes stained with his daughter’s food, and the
pieces of their lives he is trying to put together?
What he needs is a win.
So the house uses what little strength it has to
levitate the locket onto the top basement stair. It twists it so the light
catches it, and shines into the upstairs living room.
Daddy finds the precious locket on his own. He bends
over it, brushing a thumb over his lover’s image. He heaves a sigh through his
nose like he wishes he could fit inside the locket.
The house lets him be proud of himself. It will hold
onto this memory for the cold years ahead until it is bulldozed.
Daddy stands up without the locket, leaving it behind.
The house tries to send him a vision warning that he’s forgotten what he came
here for.
The mental image doesn’t change what he’s doing.
He goes right outside, to his sedan where Ana sits,
rubbing at her puffy eyes and runny nose. Daddy says, “It might be here. Do you
want to help me look?”
The house cannot cry. There is just a little air in its
pipes.
Ana flops out of the car and trudges into 133
Poisonwood. She spends too long poking around the kitchen, a room she was
barely in earlier. Daddy plays an even worse sleuth, deliberately checking
around empty hallways that give him a view of when Ana finally checks the
basement door.
“Mommy!” she cheers. She sits right down on the stair
and hugs the locket to her throat, voice trembling with emotions too big for
her body. “Mommy came back!”
Daddy asks, “So you found it?”
“I told you she’d be here. Mommy wanted me to find it.”
“Your mother didn’t do that, Ana.”
She scrunches her nose and mimics his voice to say, “You
don’t know that.”
Daddy puts a hand over the locket. “You found this. Not
anybody else. You don’t need ghosts,” and he taps her on the temple, “because
you have the best parts of your mother inside you.”
Ana gazes up at her father with glossy eyes.
133 Poisonwood has never so understood what it wants to
do for people as when it watches this parent. It tries to hold onto the
vibrations of his voice in its walls.
Then Ana says, “Nah. The ghosts left it here.”
She hauls off to the living room, hopping in late
afternoon sunbeams, and holding the locket in the light.
Reason is defeated for the moment. Daddy doesn’t fight
her on it. He rests against the wall, against the wallpaper he hates, taking
the house for granted. The house plays a tune on its shingles, the same one
that calmed Dorottya Blasko in 1989.
Daddy calls, “Mrs. Weiss?”
“Please, call me Carol,” she says. She’s been pretending
she wasn’t lurking ten feet away this whole time. “You’re very sweet with Ana. You
can just tell some people were born with the knack.”
“Three rooms in the basement. This is a lot of house for
the money, isn’t it?”
“It’s just a family short of a home.”
133 Poisonwood would be more charmed by the line if it
hadn’t heard her say that eight other times today.
Daddy says, “I like the space this place has for her.
There’s plenty of room to run. And she loves to run. Going to be a track and
field star.”
“I said to myself that this place looks happier when
you’re in it. It suits you.”
The house can tell he wants to say he doesn’t believe
that.
He says, “What we need is somewhere to start fresh.”
Mrs. Weiss offers him a folio of data on the house and
gestures to the basement. “Care for another look around?”
“Yeah. Thank you.” He takes the folio. “While Ana is
playing upstairs, can we check how insulated from sound that sewing room is?
It’s funny, but I thought it might make a good podcast studio.”
If houses could laugh. He sounds so unguarded and
sincere.
This tired skeptic doesn’t need to know that his podcast room doesn’t technically exist. If he finds the blueprints for 133 Poisonwood, he’ll shave away what he doesn’t understand with Occam’s razor. The house doesn’t need him to believe in anything but himself and his daughter. It isn’t here for the gratitude. It can try to support him as well as he supports Ana. If anything is as patient as a parent, it’s a haunting.
Editor’s Note: The original posting of this story included a terminology error where a spindle was confused with a spinning wheel. This has been corrected. Thank you to “Janice in GA” who first pointed out the error.
Author’s Note: At the World Fantasy Convention in 2018, I went to dinner with some lovely people who let me babble about Horror. I read, watch, and play Horror every week, but I barely ever write it. Instead I tend to put Horror-y things back out as humorous stories or heartwarming stories. Off the top of my head I gave them the example that if I wrote a haunted house story, it wouldn’t be like Haunting of Hill House – it would be about a haunted house that was lonely and desperately wanted someone to live in it. One of my fellow authors reached across the table, grabbed me by the hand, and said, “Please write this.” On the train ride home, I did. So this story is dedicated to Natalia Theodoridou, who demanded I help 133 Poisonwood find its family and its audience – all of you.
John (@wiswell) is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. His work has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nature Futures, and Fireside Magazine. He wishes all readers the comfort that their settings wish they could provide.
Readers of Diabolical Plots may or may not know of its sister website also run by Diabolical Plots, LLC, called The Submission Grinder. The Submission Grinder is a donation-supported website to help writers find publications for their work–it hosts thousands of listings of fiction and poetry publications which are searchable by attributes such as genre, word count, pay rate, and other factors. Writers can track their submissions to these publications, and submission response time statistics and graphs are produced from these submission records for each publication to help writers know what to expect.
Since the site was a few weeks old, way back in the launch year of 2013, it has had the same banner on the top of the site, with the large title text “The Grinder” and subtitle text “milling your submissions into something useful”, with a picture of a meat grinder with written pages sticking out of it and pieces of loose paper blowing away over the title. The image and the title are conceptually tied to Diabolical Plots‘s mad scientist logo–when we were thinking up the name for the site we imagined the mad scientist from the logo stuffing his rejection slips into a meat grinder and cackling while he turned the crank. M.S. Corley was the artist who made the original art.
The Grinder: Milling your submissions into something useful…
We’ve never done an April Fool’s joke before, but this year with all the added stress of social isolation and worries about health and employment, we thought that people would appreciate something that gave them a little laugh, so we scheduled a bit of a light joke in the hopes of brightening someone’s day. On April 1st we announced a rebranding and asked for people’s feedback. On that day and that day only, instead of loading the classic banner it would load one of nine alternate banners. M.S. Corley reprised his role, doing the typography for all nine, and the illustrations for seven of the nine.
The Joke Banners
The Blender
The Blender: Juicing your submissions into something useful…
This one is probably the closest to The Grinder conceptually, since both are ways to process things that people eat–though someone really should have kept the lid on!
The Colander
The Colander: Draining your submissions into something useful…
The flying spaghetti noodles make me laugh every time.
The Flounder
The Flounder: Fishing your submissions into something useful…
This was the first joke idea that came to mind!
The Gander
The Gander: HONKing your submissions into something useful…
It’s a lovely morning at the writing desk, and you are a horrible goose.
The Griper
The Griper: Whingeing your submissions into something useful…
I am the artist for this grumpy pixelated face, M.S. Corley added the angry cartoon squiggles. 🙂
The Kinder
The Kinder: sledding your submissions into something useful…
In case you don’t know, “Kinder” is the German word for “children” (as in “Kindergarten”). This is another artwork courtesy of myself–in case you can’t tell this is supposed to be a line of children sledding down a pile of manuscripts (or rejection slips).
The Salamander
The Salamander: Sliming your submissions into something useful…
I had to Google to make sure salamanders are actually slimy and have long tongues, I wouldn’t want my April Fool’s joke to be factually inaccurate!
The Salander
The Salander: Inking your submissions into something useful
I was asking for some ideas for the jokes from my writing group The Dire Turtles, and someone suggested “The Salander”, when meaning to type “The Salamander”. “The Salander” made me think of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I liked the idea of the dragon. And “Inking” also seemed appropriate since it applies to both tattoos and writing.
The Winder
The Winder: Spooling your submissions into something useful
This one is extremely appropriate because needlework is probably the majority of the Diabolical Plots Twitter feed by volume!
Onward is a March 2020 CG-animated fantasy action/comedy film from Disney/Pixar. It had a brief theatrical release, but its lower ticket shows were attributed to shelter-in-place orders from COVID-19, and as a result it was published on digital streaming services much earlier than usual (we watched it on Disney+).
Ian (Tom Holland)and Barley Lightfoot (Chris Pratt) are brothers. Ian is a shy, self-conscious high-schooler, trying to build a life for himself but finding that his fear of everything holds him back. Barley is his older brother, graduated from high school and still living at home, full of confidence but not a lot of ambition for doing anything in the real world, focused almost exclusively on his role-playing games which are historically accurate from the time before the magic faded from disuse, displaced by technology. They live in a world with many elements that we would recognized as fantastical–they have a pet dragon that has the size and behaviors of a dog, their mom’s boyfriend Colt Bronco (Mel Rodriguez) is a centaur police officer. But magic itself is absent, until their mom (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) gives them a package from their father (Kyle Bornheimer) who passed away when he was young, who had asked that it be given to them when they were both sixteen.
It’s a magic staff and the instructions for a spell to bring their dad back for just one day to meet his sons. But the spell goes wrong and only half works, and their dad is reincarnated with only the bottom half of his body, from the waist down. They only have 24 hours to find a way to finish the spell if they want to be able to look him in the eye and have a conversation. With a book of spells and lots of determination, they set out on a quest to do whatever they can to reunite briefly with their father.
Onward is very much up to the high Pixar standard, full of fun and funny moments and feeling very much like the RPG story it’s meant to parallel but with a modern angle: pixie biker gangs, centaur police officers, my favorite character: an ex-adventurer Manticore (Octavia Spencer) now running a children’s restaurant. There are tearjerker moments too, of course, this being a Pixar movie and being about trying to magically reconnect with a deceased father.
This is one of a series of articles wherein I examine a music video as a short film, focusing on the story rather than the music, trying to identify the story arcs and characters motivations, and consider the larger implication of events.
The film this week is People Like Us by Kelly Clarkson, a fantasy/SF thriller about a little girl imprisoned in a research facility.
As the film begins we see our protagonist, a young girl in a rainbow-colored dress, sitting on a metal examination table and looking scared and worried while men and women holding clipboards study her. She is remarkable in this initial image because everything else is black-and-white, completely without any other colors, and she has the rainbow dress and what we would consider ordinary skin and hair tones. As the scenes go on we continue to see her in enclosed spaces being asked questions, being watched from windows while she looks at an abacus while she is stared at by monochrome children who sit apart from her.
One of the researchers (Kelly Clarkson) acts differently from the others. Of course, since she has the same face as the non-monochrome singer in the refrain who sings “People like us, we gotta stick together”, so we already have the dramatic irony that this woman is like the girl, even before she pulls out her bright yellow phone to take full color pictures of the girl. This action is, admittedly, rather baffling. That she wants a picture might make sense, but why wouldn’t she be a little more discreet about it, and why would she pull out that phone in front of the other researchers–even if they weren’t paying attention at that moment, that bright yellow is eye-catching even in our chromatic world let alone in a world with no color.
Later when the girl is by herself, the yellow-phoned researcher visits her room alone. She takes off her glasses, and takes the girl’s hand to brush across her face, the first friendly moment or contact the girl has experienced in the film (and who knows how long she has been here!). Where the girl’s hand touches, the researcher’s skin returns to a healthy flesh color instead of the monochrome makeup she had apparently been wearing. They share a smile as the girl realizes she finally has an ally.
Again with this moment, it leads to the question of “why?”. For the second time the girl’s would-be-rescuer, the woman with the yellow phone, has made an extremely risky choice without clear benefit. I mean, it’s a clear benefit to let the girl know she is like her, to gain her trust for her participation in the escape. But why the face? Why not roll up her sleeve and show her there where the skin can be covered up again before they leave the room. Perhaps the woman with the yellow phone knows that whatever cover story she has given will be blown as soon as the girl is out of the room, so there’s no point in covering it up anymore? Or maybe the woman with the yellow phone is more moved by a flare for the dramatic rather than being a strategist.
In any case, soon alarms are blaring and men in suits are chasing, but they escape to their bright red BMW, with men in suits in hot pursuit. (For the third time, again, why didn’t they get a black car or a white car, what is the point of the risk of a red car where anyone would be able to spot them such a long way away as an anomaly in a monochrome landscape!). In the car, the woman with the yellow phone is now in full color again, perhaps there is some aura of color trapped within the car, like the air in a submersible.
They travel through a tunnel and emerge on the other side into a normal chromatic world, where they stop the car and are joined by a crowd of other people in full color.
The men in suits emerge from the tunnel and as they exit their car they stare in wonder at the world of color all around them. Again, I have questions–are they not concerned that these guys in suits won’t panic or continue on with their tasks to try to take the girl by force, perhaps using guns. Unless their continued monochromatic state implies that they are powerless in this world that is not their own–perhaps their guns won’t fire, perhaps they are as ghosts. Or perhaps the woman with the yellow phone is not alone in her flare for needlessly risky dramatic gestures, and maybe that’s inherent in this world of colors.
Next up in the Music Video Drilldown series will be Radioactive by Imagine Dragons.
Insurgent is a 2012 dystopic science fiction novel by Veronica Roth, the sequel to Divergent (reviewed here) and the second in the Divergent trilogy.
These stories take place in a future Chicago which is walled-off from the rest of the world and has been split into five factions: Candor (who value truth, Abnegation (who value selflessness), Amity (who value harmony), Dauntless (who value courage), and Erudite (who value intelligence). This order has existed for a long time, relatively undisturbed, but now the world is reeling from coordinated attack masterminded by Erudite that involved turning much of the deadly and well-trained Dauntless into mindless killing drones. Now the remnants of Dauntless are scattered and trying to figure out how they’re going to fit in in the new shaken order.
Tris Prior was born Abnegation but chose to switch to Dauntless when she turned sixteen, the one opportunity anyone has to switch. Although she is officially Dauntless, she has shown tendencies that seem to say she is actually “Divergent”, which means she has aptitudes for more than one of the factions. This is considered very rare, and very dangerous–others have died for even being suspected of being Divergent. This unusual trait may have saved many lives because she was able to resist the conditioning that turned much of the rest of Dauntless into mindless killing machines.
She and many of Dauntless are now hiding out in Amity, trying to find their next plans. It is a troubled truce with Amity, who value harmony and thus do not get along well with the violent and impulsive Dauntless. But their refuge isn’t going to last very long anyway, because the other members of Dauntless, the ones who sided with Erudite after the original conflict, are coming.
Another quite good book, Tris is an interesting and compelling protagonist, though she is very hard on herself for some of the things she did when she was trying to save Dauntless in the first book and it is hard to see her tear herself down that way when her decisions were understandable in the circumstances. She makes a good pair with Four, also from Dauntless, who is now her boyfriend. Solid book, well worth reading.
Divergent is a 2011 dystopic science fiction novel by Veronica Roth, the first of a trilogy of books. The story takes place in an isolated city-state that used to be Chicago in the future, where it is walled off from the rest of the world where no one seems to know what is happening outside of it. Almost all of society is split into five factions, each of which values certain human traits above all others. At the age of sixteen, every person must decide which faction they will belong to for the rest of their lives or risk falling into the huddled masses of the factionless who are barely acknowledged by the society.
The Abnegation values selflessness, and expect its members to never think of themselves. Dauntless values courage, its members are like a trained military force, expected to take on dangerous challenges without hesitation. Candor values honesty, and its members are expected to always tell the truth in all situations. Amity values harmony, and wants everyone to get along peacefully. Erudite value intelligence, they’re the inventors of the society. Every person is expected to be a clear fit for one of the factions or they are an outcast, but there are whispers that some people are “divergent” who have tendencies toward several factions at once, these people are considered dangerous to their social order.
Beatrice Prior is born and raised as Abnegation, but although she sees the worth in Abnegation’s values, she feels like an impostor because she can’t seem to hold to those values. On her Choosing Day she has to choose between staying with her family in Abnegation or leaving them behind to join one of the other factions.
The basis of this society is ludicrous (but of course it is a dystopia, not a proposal for a new social order, so I’m not saying it’s a bad idea for a book!). The people in this society have been raised with these ideals since birth so they take them for granted. It can be a difficult task for an author to build this world in a way that the reader can understand it without killing the pacing with an infodump, but this book does a very nice job of it, letting us see what it’s like to live in Abnegation day to day, then meet members of other factions and see how their behavior is different, Beatrice goes through the testing to see her faction leanings and etc.
If there is value in such a segregated society, the worst part of it is that you have to choose for life at the age of sixteen with very little information. People change! What if someone is very like Erudite as a teenager, but tends more toward Amity as they age? Well, too bad, you can either stick with your faction or you can go starve in the factionless.
Beatrice is in her head a lot, examining each angle of the situation, so I related to that a lot, as I am always examining every angle of situation before I make a choice about it, whenever I can. There are a lot of strong conflicts between Beatrice and the other initiates who have just chosen their new faction as they compete with each for entry. The book is full of action and worldbuilding and well written, a great start to a trilogy.
Rango is a 2011 computer-animated western comedy film distributed by Paramount Pictures. The protagonist (Johnny Depp) is a chameleon living a solitary life in a family’s terrarium acting out fantasy scenarios he invents in his ample spare time, and the family is driving with the terrarium in the back, when an accident throws the terrarium from the car, stranding the poor animal in the middle of a desert highway.
Given this opportunity to reinvent himself, he dubs himself “Rango” and takes on the role of a tough-as-nails drifter, enacting an elaborate persona that is completely unlike any personality he has ever actually had to take control and intervene in any problems he thinks the town has. Often as not, since he is concocting complex structures of lies, these lies tend to have unintended consequences and frequently make things worse more often than they make things better, and seem to be more motivated by trying to impress others than about trying to make anything actually better.
I found the movie more frustrating than funny or entertaining largely because Rango is often acting destructively in this elaborate guise of pretending to be a hero and he does not even seem to recognize that he might be the biggest villain of the piece. The more visibly villainous villains may be more dastardly but they are also more comprehensible in that one can understand the source of their actions, but Rango is just acting like what he pictures as the hero because that’s what he’s decided to do, no matter how many die in the process. This is… not admirable, and it’s only a matter of chance that these actions don’t end up killing every person he claims to help.
The movie has some interesting effects and kids will probably like it, but for me the plot was too “let’s congratulate this person who is destroying the lives of everyone around him on the premise of a journey of self-discovery”.
Tales From the Loop is a science fiction series with a montage cast that premiered on Amazon Prime in April 2020, based on illustrations from the narrative art book of the same name by Simon Stalenhag.
Underneath a small coastal town scientists have built The Loop, an experimental facility intended to unlike scientific secrets of all of the world’s mysteries. Everyone knows The Loop is there, but very few people know much about it at all. But there are a lot of things that are odd about this small town, lots of little residues, side effects of the experiments.
While many of the cast members recur from episode to episode, each episode focuses on a different person or people encountering a different mystery, often some unforeseen side effect of some forgotten relic of technology cast off by the experimental facility. The first episode follows a young girl as she tries to find out more about what her mother who works at The Loop does for a living, and she is pulled into the strangeness for herself. Quite a few of the episodes deal with the subject of time in one way or another, from manipulating time, to the passage of time as we age.
This is a really beautiful and well built series. There are so many striking images, so many great moments. In many ways it feels like the best parts of The Twilight Zone, where someone encounters something strange episodically and you never quite know how it’s going to turn out, but here all of these characters become familiar because even though each encounter their own strangeness their lives all interlock with each other, and the consequences from previous episodes still matter and affect the outcome.
One of the episodes in particular I found extremely powerful, episode five: “Control” where a man does the best he can to protect his family from the unknown. It’s a powerful story about the sometimes foolish things we can do when we are afraid for our family.
It’s hard to say very much about the series since each episode is mostly pretty well contained within itself, without spoiling something. But we very much enjoyed it, and if they make a season 2 we will definitely be watching!
Most Horror stories are built on contrivance. In Jaws, a shark that absolutely isn’t native to that region attacks swimmers. How did it get there and why is it behaving this way? Neither Benchley’s novel nor Spielberg’s film cares. Little more effort is put into justifying the mayor and business owners forcing beaches to stay open. Those contrivances are compelling because characters are suddenly in peril they’ve never prepared for and are so vulnerable to.
You can find integral contrivance in stories from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Ari Aster’s Hereditary. It can create an eerie sense that things are wrong because characters suddenly lack agency on some important level, or that a pattern of plot events is being broken. It can be your premise, or it can push the plot out of wherever it’s stuck. It’s the thing coming from nowhere – the unjustified jump scare, or needlessly antagonistic bully, and coincidental run-in with a witch.
The problem comes from overuse. Even audiences that don’t know about plot mechanics sense when it happens. There’s an irritation that the story isn’t moving right because event after event isn’t the result of anything they’re invested in.
A great example of this is 2019’s The Lodge, which recently hit streaming platforms including Hulu. The movie’s premise is that a pair of kids and their dad’s new girlfriend get stranded in a lodge and spooky events start happening to them. It’s a perfectly decent premise, right?
The movie begins with the two children’s birth mother committing suicide. The little sister is shattered. The older brother tries to comfort her. It feels like the start of a painful journey for the kids. If you have any parental instincts, you’re ready to care about them.
Then the contrivances hit.
Contrivance 1: There is a six-month time skip.
Time skips usually pull the audience out of a story, but if you haven’t done anything else weird and get the plot moving right away, the audience will adjust. We all adjusted to the beginning of Avengers Endgame, right?
The time skip means we miss the kids’ grieving, coping, and growth. The movie has reset them to not be fully healed, and now they’re mostly anxious and resentful towards their dad. The story is hedging that we have enough residual care for where the kids were before the time skip to still care now.
Contrivance 2: Within one minute of the skip, the dad tells his kids that his girlfriend is coming with them on a ski trip. The kids are hurt by this idea and are in ready-made conflict with the dad.
The movie’s time skip elided all the conflicts in the decision-making. The ski trip isn’t the result of past choices; it’s from nowhere. What the movie has done is skip to a point of conflict without building it up. It’s cheating on narrative. Especially when a story like this has a functional opening, a move like this breaks flow. The hope is that what comes next will justify it.
Next in The Lodge, the kids have to meet the girlfriend. They wait in the car to avoid the social cues of having to greet her. She gets into the car and doesn’t say hi at first. She’s nervous, too, which feels valid. The dad will have to break the ice for them.
Contrivance 3: The dad gets a phone call and leaves them in the car.
Who called? It’s barely mentioned and doesn’t reflect anything else in the plot. He was basically called by the screenplay.
The call is a contrivance to make this scene as awkward as possible. It’s a redundant contrivance since the kids and girlfriend were already awkward. Now it’s just super awkward.
Since it comes close to other recent plot contrivances, it’s easy for this moment to feel forced and grating. This is the compound contrivance effect. The more things that feel unearned, the testier your audience will get.
That night the kids poke into their dad’s computer and reveal the girlfriend’s backstory: she is the survivor of a suicide cult. Part of why she’s so awkward is that she has enormous unresolved trauma.
You might call this an infodump and accuse it of contrivance, but it isn’t really contrived. The kids are using their agency to pursue believable curiosity about this woman who is basically a stranger. What they’ve learned complicates the plot. This is utterly different than arbitrarily jumping forward six months.
Further, the girlfriend is now much more interesting because of the revelation. This sets her up as a trauma victim. When the movie shows her unpacking medication, it’s meaningful to us. With its characters set up, it feels like the movie is finally about to start and we’ll get that scary goodness. We’re ready for chills rather than just awkwardness.
Contrivance 4: In a bold choice, the movie switches POV to the girlfriend.
She isn’t a co-POV. The kids are suddenly supporting characters in her story. On the one hand she’s a fish out of water and mentally ill, so she’s supposed to be sympathetic. On the other hand, if the audience has been attached to anyone it is the kids, and it’s a huge writing risk to relegate them behind her after what they’ve already been through. Such a big change after the earlier contrivances makes the story feel janky. It makes you question what story the movie is even trying to tell.
Following the switch, there are a few minutes of scenes building the girlfriend’s tension with the kids. They freeze up when she accidentally wears their mom’s old hat and demand it back.
The dad sees that she’s having a hard time so he decides to do something nice for her. He decides to give her the combination to his safe, shows her his gun, and takes her shooting.
This is neither contrivance nor natural. It’s in-between. His motive makes sense, but why the hell does he think shooting things will make her feel at home? It’s so brazenly a Chekhov’s Gun scenario, except a character is literally pausing the plot and forcing the gun to appear in scene. Thanks to the compound contrivance effect, things that aren’t pure contrivance cause the same irritation.
It underscores that all the contrivances have made the father a plot device rather than a character. Who is this guy? Why does he want these people to go on vacation together? Why isn’t he helping them bond? He’s never unpacked as a character.
Then we find out why.
Contrivance 5: The dad gets a mystery call from whatever job he has and abruptly decides to leave in their only car, leaving his kids and girlfriend with no way to leave the lodge.
So it turns out the story put no thought into the dad character because it planned to get rid of him ASAP.
Inside the fiction, it’s exasperating that this person did so much to make this unwanted situation happen and then ditched them all. He’d be a good antagonist if he wasn’t leaving the movie now.
Outside the fiction, bigger things are wrong. The movie isn’t telling a story; it’s forcing one to happen, which isn’t nearly as engrossing. It doesn’t feel like the movie has gotten to where it wants to be despite messing around with so much stilted plotting.
The girlfriend and kids watch a movie in the lodge and have cocoa. None of them are acknowledging how awkward their situation is. The daughter feels sick and the girlfriend isn’t super-considerate, but checks her temperature and says her she’s fine. This is tolerable.
Contrivance 6: They wake to find the power, heat, and water is all off. Their phones don’t work. Their clothes, toys, and the girlfriend’s medication is gone.
This one thing is no more contrived than any one thing in Us or The Shining. This contrivance is the premise of the movie, and you probably were watching to get to this point. In fact a sudden contrivance can be exciting. If things build up naturally and then something dramatic changes, like the blood falling into the eye of the dad in 28 Days Later, it can be terrifying.
What The Lodge has done is replace character agency with too many contrivances. Nothing that got us to this premise feels earned. A Horror story can easily get more tense (or intense) as a protagonist makes a series of dangerous decisions, or as an antagonist makes choices raising the stakes. Here instead things keep being pushed along by forces from off-screen or by virtual non-characters.
It feels additionally cloying because we have three viable protagonists here who should have been able to carry the movie up to this event. We cared about the kids. We understood that the girlfriend was unwell and in a tough position. When they do the standard fare of freaking out and blaming each other and ignoring the apparent supernaturalism of their circumstances, it feels like just the next weird contrived thing that’s forcing them to dance.
Before you can even ask what interesting ways they’ll respond with after they finish panicking, well…
Contrivance 7: You’ll be shocked to learn that they are soon snowed in. There is absolutely no leaving the lodge.
From here it’s obvious that they will perform standard trope responses to outside stimuli until some big twist or reveal. The characters never got proper opportunities to inhabit or push their own narrative forward. These are three people with heavy pain in their lives and reasons to be strong individual characters, and an hour of runtime into the movie the most interesting thing now is what bumped into their window.
Overuse like this is why “contrived” is a pejorative. When it’s used well, these intrusions can push characters to reveal more of themselves or just scare the crap out of the audience. If they aren’t used carefully, though, the only victim of a Horror story is the story itself.
John (@wiswell) is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. His work has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nature Futures, and Fireside Magazine. He wishes all readers the comfort that their settings wish they could provide.
