| Author | Message | ||
     Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 |
Ok, I think I'm up next. Here are my initial thoughts on a re-reading of "The Scar": "The Scar" has always been one of my favourite Campbell stories. It shows the author tackling early on the themes of urban and social horror, and making them his own. The first Campbell stories I ever read were those involving social realism; I didn't even know he'd written Lovecraftian fiction until I was already under the spell of his prose. "The Scar", to me, is pure Campbell, particularly in the way it shifts the characters' environment inside, making it a part of their psychological make-up. Patterns of urban decay become modes of thought; ruined buildings are dead dreams and ambitions; dark, litter-strewn streets become the alleyways of the mind. Social decay also leads to the erosion of identity and of the spirit; the denizens of this urban landscaope are being reclaimed by whatever lies beneath the seemingly ordered streets and highways. Some of the imagery here is as powerful as horror fiction gets: the figure with the sock pulled over his face; the omnipresent sharp tin sheeting; the red bodies in the basement near the end of the tale. The plot is almost an urban, working-class variation on Jack Finney's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", but it goes deeper, and probes issues of social disintegration, the failure of law and order, man's fear of the environment he has built around him. Even though this story was first published in the 1960s, it has never been more relevant. | ||
| Richard_gavin (Richard_gavin) Username: Richard_gavin Registered: 03-2008 |
Hi Gary, Hmmm...well, we *can* discuss "The Scar." I have no problems with that. But "Boiled Alive" was announced as April's tale. What does the group want to do: "The Scar" or "Boiled Alive"? If it's the former, I'll post my thoughts once I've re-read it; the latter, I'll start the thread tomorrow. Let the people speak... Best, Richard | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 |
Was it? Oh, I went off the list on the old board... never mind. I think we need a list of some sort on here to avoid confusion. | ||
| John_l_probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 |
It says 'The Scar' on the list I found. And I think I'm doing 'The Depths' in August. Is there another list somewhere? | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 |
Well I read THE SCAR and BOILED ALIVE. The Scar, I think, was the first story written outside of the Lovecraft pantheon. Apt then that the story deals with taking someone's identity. Yep, I see this story as Ramsey taking off the fake HPL jaw. | ||
| Richard_gavin (Richard_gavin) Username: Richard_gavin Registered: 03-2008 |
"The Scar" it is then. That's just peachy with me; I love this tale. I apologize for the confusion about the reading dates, Gary. I shall post a new list in the next few days on this message board to avoid this. Carry on, and I shall post my thoughts on "The Scar" shortly. Best, Richard | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 |
Doh! I just read "Boiled Alive". But hell, it's hardly a chore to read another Ramsey tale. "Boiled Alive" next month, okay. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 |
Right. I reread "The Scar" this afternoon. Intriguing piece. It's clearly early Ramsey, and not everything hangs together as well as it does in the later work he'd perfect. Yet it still holds a lot of power. I found the first couple of pages a little confusing, as if Ramsey himself was reaching to grasp something he wasn't entirely sure was there: the shifting character POV made it hard to hang your sympathy on any one person, and after being referred to as Lindsay for the first page of the Headline hardcover edition -- admittadely through other characters' dialogue and thought attribuitons -- he's then called Rice, which made me look back to see who we were talking about. But the confusion did add to the painting of a household in upheaval at kids' bedtime. But things are soon steadier, and the anxiety and seediness of Ramsey's urban settings come into their own. The fog dampens our spirits, the urban clutter and alleyways narrow our horizons. There's a claustaphobic air to things reflected in the characters and their settings. The figure in the sock hood is splendidly horrible, and the scene with the ravaged can to the face predicts the haunting and immensly moving death scene early on in ONE SAFE PLACE. Stylistically, there's the odd fumble -- the dialogue between husband and wife seems almost mannered from another time here and there -- but on the whole, Ramsey's use of language in the piece is astonishingly impressive. This is literature, burning with the flame of youth, that incandescant urge to tell a story and not spare the listener; in fact, I'd say the plot is almost inconsequential compared to the techniques employed to tell it. A joy in that respect. He was the real deal from the start, wasn't he? | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 |
I can't add a lot to these comments. 'The Scar' is a brilliant and ground-breaking story. So much urban horror fiction has been written since then that its originality has been masked – its only real antecedents are Leiber's 'Smoke Ghost' and Bradbury's 'The Crowd'. Mark's right that some of the linkages and bits of dialogue are a bit clumsy – as if Campbell were adding captions to the pictures in his mind – but there's a real depth of perspective in this story that shows Campbell learning from both genre and non-genre classics. The prose is as lean and cold as the parasitic entity at the story's heart – an entity that has learned all it needs to know about lying, abusing and destroying from the people it has fed on. Reading this story is like listening to UNKNOWN PLEASURES: there's the same sense of a city that still hasn't recovered, physically or psychically, from the Blitz. And the same sense that the real horror is neither inside people nor out there in the landscape: it's in how the two come together. The scar itself is the most disturbing thing, I think. The vicious act of marking Lindsay in order to use the scar as a false identification... ancient evil could never be that jive. It takes a human intelligence to be like that. The story clouds our distinctions between what is human and what isn't. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 |
I always wondered about the opening section with its meandering character point of view: was this deliberate in the sense that the narrator is leaping from mind to mind just as the doubling entity does? | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 |
The word "egg" to denote the doppleganger's head is aptly nascent. Also, the chavs on the broken wall could easily be from today. Also, check out whenever he uses the word "whole". | ||
| Richard_gavin (Richard_gavin) Username: Richard_gavin Registered: 03-2008 |
I regard "The Scar" as a kind of interstitial tale within Ramsey's canon; it seems to hover between the purely cosmic tales of his early days and the realistic depictions of social and familial horrors for which he later became renowned. What's interesting about the legacy of "The Scar" is that it is lauded by contemporary horror writers as a real world tale of child abuse, yet Thomas Ligotti places it alongside the weird tales of Smith and Lovecraft in his essay "In the Night, In the Dark". Often readers (and authors) like to lump a horror story into one of two "camps"; the realistic or the otherworldly. "The Scar" manages to incapsulate both styles. Upon revisiting this one, I found myself agreeing with Joel's point about the dialogue being a bit rickety, but given the author's age it's amazing that he managed to create a group of such convincing characters. The climax still packs a chill, and the father-as-monster theme was powerfully introduced into Ramsey's work with this tale. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 |
"Headlights blazed down a side-street, billowing with mist and motorcycle fumes. They spotlighted a broken wall across the street from Rossiter; a group of girls huddled on the shattered bricks, laughing forth fog as the motorcycle gang fondled them roughly with words." Magnificent! I can live with the dialogue, though I can see what Mark means. My only qualm would be that initially it's a bit difficult to tell all the characters apart. This happens in other stories and novels as well. After three or four pages I sometimes get confused--do I already know this one or not? |