Both! Which is part of why it's a mess. The premise as described by John Carpenter in the introduction is, "What if all that weird shit Lovecraft talks about in his stories was real?" So the Necronomicon is a real book that warps li'l Lovecraft, his pets get raped and torn apart by wolf-demons, women turn into toothy octopi from the waist down and eat penises in the middle of sex, that sort of thing, and Arkham, Massachusetts, alternates between being a fantasy setting invented by Lovecraft's grandfather for the horrible stories he tells li'l Lovecraft (further warping him) and a real setting. In the denouement, Lovecraft is trying to rescue his mother, who's been driven insane by the Necronomicon, from an insane asylum, and confronts a demon who looks exactly like Lovecraft and upsets the premise of Lovecraftian nightmares-as-truth by reciting Lovecraft's actual biography (both parents went insane and were institutionalized, Lovecraft also insane, his wife sane enough to divorce him and move to Ohio) in an attempt to unsettle Lovecraft.
It was a dumb move on the part of the authors. It doesn't feel ambiguous about what's supposed to be real, but as if they couldn't actually make up their minds which story they wanted to tell (Lovecraft sane and saving the world from evil demons, or Lovecraft insane and tormented by imaginary demons), so they just kept switching back and forth in different chapters.
I am still fairly sensitive to violence, and it's not the selling point for me, although I think with this genre, it IS supposed to be the selling point, and they don't expect you to read it if you don't enjoy hyper-violence. I had to stop reading Eden: It's an Endless World because of the lovingly rendered depictions of people's spinal cords hanging out of their severed torsos three seconds after they'd stepped on a land mine, but Lady Snow Blood is much less interested in making you feel the shock and horror of violent death, and therefore I can disassociate enough appreciate the art when reading Eden left me shaking and in tears.
Making people feel the shock and horror of violent death with your art is more socially worthwhile than creating stylized revenge fantasies with naked women, but since I already feel a great deal of shock and horror over reading about actual violent death in the news, I'm not inclined to seek it out in my fiction.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2008-05-08 04:13 pm (UTC)It was a dumb move on the part of the authors. It doesn't feel ambiguous about what's supposed to be real, but as if they couldn't actually make up their minds which story they wanted to tell (Lovecraft sane and saving the world from evil demons, or Lovecraft insane and tormented by imaginary demons), so they just kept switching back and forth in different chapters.
I am still fairly sensitive to violence, and it's not the selling point for me, although I think with this genre, it IS supposed to be the selling point, and they don't expect you to read it if you don't enjoy hyper-violence. I had to stop reading Eden: It's an Endless World because of the lovingly rendered depictions of people's spinal cords hanging out of their severed torsos three seconds after they'd stepped on a land mine, but Lady Snow Blood is much less interested in making you feel the shock and horror of violent death, and therefore I can disassociate enough appreciate the art when reading Eden left me shaking and in tears.
Making people feel the shock and horror of violent death with your art is more socially worthwhile than creating stylized revenge fantasies with naked women, but since I already feel a great deal of shock and horror over reading about actual violent death in the news, I'm not inclined to seek it out in my fiction.