Category: books

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There is always magic in the worlds of epic fantasies, but in the world of the Starks and the Lannisters and whatever is left of the broken House of the Targaryens, magic brings with it a sense of doom, and the smell of spilled blood. The dragons have fallen, the king has turned into a fat drunk who likes hunting more than figuring out how to save a kingdom deep in debt, and the gods are mere silent faces carved in the bark of trees. You can pray to them, but they do not answer.

This world, like most magical worlds, has a forest, but the forest is kept behind a Wall like the wild creature that it is. The phrase “to take up the black” means to be one of the men who guards the Wall. These men do not take wives nor sire children. The punishment for desertion is death. Not surprisingly they’re having serious budget and manpower problems.

All of the Houses have honor, and follies; all of the Houses have pain. They’ve all fought in a war where they’ve lost parents and siblings and children. Every House yearns for revenge, yet every House has also sinned.

In A Game of Thrones, the summer has lasted for years, and now everyone is fearing the bitter cold. The longer the summer, the longer the winter, they say.

The Stark words are, Winter is coming. To paraphrase: We are all going to be seriously fucked.

Oh, yes. And soon.

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You may remember Shirley Jackson from her excellent, excellent short story, “The Lottery”.

You may remember this book as the source of that rather disappointing CGI-feast of a film starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Owen Wilson. (That’s a remake; they say the original film adaptation is better.)

There is a haunted house. They call it Hill House. A scientist wants to write a paper about psychic phenomena. Three young people come with him: Eleanor, Theodora, and Luke. Mrs. Dudley, who cooks for them and cleans the house for them, insists that she be out of Hill House before the dark descends. The doctor’s party stays inside the mansion for roughly a week.

Consider the novel’s first paragraph:

Chapter 1

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

In the story is Iris, who tells the story of her dead sister Laura, who through a novel tells the story of a young man and a young woman in love, who tell the story of a blind assassin and a girl who cannot speak.

Here: take a mirror and place it in front of another mirror. Which reflection of the mirror are you looking at? What story are you listening to, and who is telling it?

Are you sure?

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