noalarms

There Is No Antimemetics Division (2025) by QNTM. It's hard to research stuff that resists being remembered. Who knows what it might be getting up to that you've forgotten?

This is the pro-published version of what was originally an SCP serial story published online. I could definitely feel the SCP influence, but I didn't mind it, although it's still wild to me that SCP has narrative now. Back in my day it was only the wiki! *shakes cane*

Anyway, this is a series of chapters that build on each other but connect a little more loosely than a conventional novel. Many chapters are about the UK branch of a worldwide organization researching all sorts of Weird Shit (tm) and specifically the woman in charge of the division on stuff that resists remembering, ie the Antimemetics Division. Some chapters are about her husband. Some are about other random people in the organization. The first chapter is one of those and is a great introduction to the universe and the whole concept; if you're on the fence about the novel as a whole, give that first chapter a try. That segment would make a fantastic standalone short film.

Due to the Weird Memory Shit (tm), many of the characters are totally ignorant of the events from one chapter to the next, even if they were involved in all of them, which makes for some great dramatic irony, especially as we get deeper into the novel and the true threat becomes more apparent. ( spoilers )

Overwall, a quick read and a good time. I look forward to rereading it more slowly now that I know what's coming.

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Harvest Home (1973) by Thomas Tryon. A man and his family escape soul-crushing NYC to an idyllic New England hamlet that still keeps to the old ways--which are, it turns out, not so idyllic after all.

Yes, this is folk horror. In fact it might be the folk horror novel. All the basic stuff you think of is here: outsider fleeing the evil city for the wholesome countryside, idealized rural setting, quaint but then toxic cultural traditions, eventual murder. This is not a case where a genre grew and expanded on the kernel of an idea, or if it did, this is the expansion and not the kernel. The classic tropes and themes of the genre are all fully realized here, described in exhaustive detail. The setting is Connecticut, but the traditions are originally Greek by way of Cornwall, so you do get the British element of folk horror. There's also a developmentally disabled child who acts as oracle, and now I wonder if that aspect of Midsommar was referencing this novel specifically, or if it became a thing in folk horror, and I just haven't encountered it in other things yet.

It's fascinating to me that this came out the same year as The Wicker Man and has some of the same themes, and I wonder what was in the water that led to their parallel evolution. It's also really interesting to me that The Wicker Man was very difficult to access for decades and gained cult classic status via illegal copies, but is now acknowledged as an all-time classic, while Harvest Home was a bestseller but has now, I think, sunk into relative obscurity.

(There's an amazing quote from Stephen King on wikipedia from a 1976 review he wrote for the NYT:

It isn't a great book, not a great horror novel, not even a great suspense novel ... Never mind the best seller list. Mind this, instead: Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it is a true book; it is an honest book in the sense that it says exactly what Tryon wanted to say. And if what he wanted to say wasn't exactly Miltonian, it does have this going for it: in forty years, when most of us are underground, there will still be a routine rebinding once a year for the library copies of Harvest Home".

Now he's a household name who will blurb pretty much any horror novel under the sun, and meanwhile the only copies of this novel in my library system were ebooks.)

Anyway, I enjoyed this quite a bit. As implied by the King review, this is a leisurely book that takes its sweet time introducing us to the entire village and all its quaint ways, most importantly its seasonal festivals that culminate in Harvest Home, which involves the Harvest Lord (elected every seven years) and the Corn Maiden whom he selects. Along the way we spend time with important figures such as the homespun yet venerable Widow Fortune and Worthy Pettinger, a youth with big ideas about modernizing the local agriculture.

We see all this from the first person perspective of family man and aspiring artist Ned Constantine, who has moved his impressionable wife and severely asthmatic daughter to the village. Ned is the kind of guy who meets his wife by overhearing her talking to her friend in the Louvre and butting in to correct her pronuciation. Beth is, I guess, the kind of woman who falls in love with the kind of guy who does that. The book opens with Ned lustfully appreciating how his wife looks in her nightgown, which is exactly as awkward and offputting as you would expect from a male author writing a male character in the 70s. Ned also continually declines to share any of his growing concerns about the village with Beth out of concern that her delicate sensibilities can't handle them. His and the book's attitude towards women gets even worse when he starts inching towards unfaithfulness with the village ~hussy. Basically Ned is kind of the worst, especially as the book goes on. I frankly can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book this much while growing to loath the main character this much, apparently against the intent of the author.

Ned is also dumb as a bag of hammers. His driving motive through most of the book is to discover what happened thirteen years earlier to unfortunate young suicide Grace Everdeen, and yet he is hilariously incurious about anything else happening in the village that he doesn't see as directly tied to this. Furthermore, confusingly, this mystery is not really part of the main plot except as the reader's way into the village's darker underbelly, and the final reveal of what happened to her is frankly baffling as a narrative choice. (It turns out she ( Read more... )

Anyway, ( big spoilers )

Overall a fascinating piece of horror history that I genuinely enjoyed. Now I want to read more early folk horror.