| Author | Message | ||
     Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
There's a chap called Steven Lockley. To increase traffic to his blog via the old economic principle of "trickle down" he is running guest blogs by various writers. Tim Lebbon has done one, so has Stephen Volk, Paul Finch, Gary McMahon, etc. My own guest blog has just appeared and it's about metafiction. Here it is... http://stevelockley.blogspot.com/2011/07/open-house-day-33-rhys-hughes.html Anyone out there have any thoughts on metafiction? Do you like it, dislike it, etc? Do you use metafictional techniques yourself? Do you have any recommendations of books or films that are metafictional? Do you wash with a loofah? | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.27.14.15 |
Martin Amis's Money, which I bet you still haven't read, you naughty boy! | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
No, I haven't. Sorry. And I still didn't buy that book of yours I promised to. Sorry again! | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.27.14.15 |
You're useless, you are. We should burn you. | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
I'm burning already, Gary. A 30 mile bicycle ride yesterday on rough paths with a hard narrow saddle and no suspension on my forks... I swear to god that my arse was burning so badly last night that I couldn't even bear to scratch it! | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
Postscript to the above: A really fucking sore bum and I've been nowhere near Brighton. That's how I spent my Sunday! | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.30.22 |
In my case I suppose "The Franklyn Paragraphs" and "The Interloper" could be regarded as a metafictional pair. As for favourites, Pale Fire for sure, and there's a good metafictional joke in Edmund Crispin's Moving Toyshop, as I recall. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow is a very fine example of that kind of thing, with its embedded quotes from an imaginary text that has changed the lives of its characters. It also allows for ambiguities its author may not have intended: the narrator of 'The Repairer of Reputations' is, like Chambers himself, a reactionary and anti-Semitic Roman Catholic, but he is also eventually revealed to be a delusional psychopath as a result of being corrupted by The King in Yellow. Those stories took Chambers away from the moral and political certainties of his novels into a twilight world where all bets were off. I'm currently working on a story in which an author's narrative about the causes of bruises on his bottom is challenged through a counter-narrative of an erotic journey. Working title The Taff Delegate, or The Bridge of Size. Which reminds me that horror fandom ought to have its own version of the TAFF delegation (Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund, if you're not familiar with it). But it would probably stretch only to a return train ticket between Manchester and Liverpool.  | ||
| Kate (Kathleen) Username: Kathleen Registered: 09-2009 Posted From: 81.158.78.71 |
I like it when the metafictionality isn't so gimmicky that it distracts/detracts from my enjoyment of the story. The Athenian Murders is the second-best of its kind that I've read (Ramsey already mentioned the best). And does the film eXistenZ count? | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.27.14.15 |
I'm afraid Graham Chapman thought metafictional asides in Python were funny. They weren't. | ||
| Kate (Kathleen) Username: Kathleen Registered: 09-2009 Posted From: 81.158.78.71 |
Sometimes they were. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.27.14.15 |
I'm rather fond of the simultaneous hallucination experienced during an eclipse by Jessie Burlingame and Delores Claiborne in the two King books of that period. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Probably the ultimate metafictional film around is Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonz's Adaptation (all Kafuman's scripts often play with the metafictional). But the ultimate metafictional horror film is of course Wes Craven's New Nightmare. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 92.232.184.206 |
I wanted to make a joke pretending you said metalfiction and hence recommending The Adventures of Lord Iffy Boatrace, but I couldn't phrase it elegantly enough. | ||
| Chris_morris (Chris_morris) Username: Chris_morris Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 71.228.39.43 |
Paul Auster's City of Ghosts in The New York Trilogy is my favorite piece of metafiction. |