RIG Monsters Online Reading Journal Spring 2021

  Timothy S á enz Cycle of the Werewolf Notes RIG Monsters MFA in Writing Popular Fiction – Spring 2021 Due Friday, Feb. 26, 2021 To my surprise, I enjoyed Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf . Previously, I had never completed a Stephen King novel. Everyone I had begun numbed me with a narcotizing tedium, and I soon realized I could skip 25, 30, 35 pages, resume the novel, and still feel like I was picking up where I had left off. It was not so with Cycle of the Werewolf . King gets right into the action and moves on to the next kill, blaming Earth’s lady of the night for the lycan lunacy bestowed by her full moon beams. The first several chapters had the feel of vignettes, a series of self-contained killings that exemplified the weaknesses of the victims or their bad luck. A blizzard traps Arnie Westrum in a railroad tool shack nine miles out of town; love craver Stella Randolph sees romance where there isn’t any; Brady Kincaid loses track of time flying his new kite. ...

 Well, I have learned something about contemporary English horror after having read "Rawhead Rex" and Breeding Ground: the English are fascinated with piss and pissing as a motif. I suppose there had to be a reason for their expressions like "piss off" and "are you taking a piss on me". What exactly that is, I don't know, but between Clive Barker's vulgar sprinkling of Declan Ewan and Sarah Pinborough's characters flooding their pants they at the least represent human degradation and fear. I shall christen the subgenre urinary horror. That said, Breeding Ground had much more in common with I Am Legend than "Rawhead Rex". The sudden, inexplicable apocalypse that decimates society and the world, the monsters created by the apocalypse, the isolation of the protagonist, and a kind of mitigated hope, the one that tells you a lot of people are going to die, and while a few may survive, the kind of "human" world left behind will ne...

  “Rawhead Rex” stinks like the urine and shite prevalent in Clive Barker’s story. It is the bowel movement of the depraved author’s sewery imagination in which Barker gets to torture the reader with all his resentment, hatred, and bitter iconoclasm pursued with a vengeance. It can be argued that Rawhead Rex serves as an embodiment of Barker, although it is not the only instrument of his expression. Thus, Rawhead’s hatred of children is Barker’s. The desecrations performed lustily at the pointedly eponymous St. Peter’s are Barkers desecrations. Declan Ewan’s declarations of worship are Barker’s, and Ron Milton’s blasphemy about what God has done to him are Barker’s – even though the way to destroy Rawhead comes via a priest. The prevalence of industrial strength depravity, blasphemy, murder, betrayal, and stupidity strongly suggest Barker views mankind in a dark light. Nobody, regardless of his or her personality, is cast in a morally good light; an instinctually good ligh...

  Timothy Saenz Blog Post Essay: “The Funeral” by Richard Matheson Readings in Genre: Monsters MFA in Writing Popular Fiction: Term I Due 12 February 2021 My guess is that Richard Matheson’s “The Funeral” parodies the gothic horror writing style of that genre’s late 19 th Century writers. He also pokes fun at what some consider the absurd monster bashes that were Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein , which came out seven years before “The Funeral” was published, and other monster assemblages by Universal Pictures. It should be noted that in I Am Legend Matheson savages Bram Stoker’s writing in Dracula through the musings of Neville. To accomplish his vilification of old gothic horror writing in this story, Matheson creates silly monsters whose egomaniacal mischief leads to the utter collapse of the grieving assembly. They are a loose confederation assembled by necessity whose nature does not allow for a lasting bind. The tall man, a vampire, seeks to enjoy the ceremon...

 Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is a novella that mixes elements of horror and science fiction. The story begins in media res and relates the evolution of the protagonist, Robert Neville, as he strives to survive in a world permanently altered by a plague that has turned almost all mankind into vampires and has brought civilization to a screeching halt. The setting is Compton, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, in the mid to late 1970s, though Matheson wrote the book in the early 1950s (the first copyright shows as 1954). Matheson employs third person, protagonist oriented, single angle, objective narration as defined by Lewis Turco in The Book of Literary Terms, 2 nd Edition . Structurally, the author divides the novella into three parts of roughly 50 pages each, though Part III is much longer. Survival is always an issue throughout the story because of the ever-present dangers, but its the main course in Part I, which expands on the continuing shock Neville feels at his sit...