Sadly, I have no interesting thoughts or musings to share with you today, world. I’m busy working, recovering from a rather eventful weekend and haven’t had anything noteworthy happen in the last few days to write some comment on.

I suppose I’ll wax on about my current work.

Sleep and his Half-Brother Death by John William Waterhouse (1874).

I’m picking away at a short story that was, ultimately, inspired by a dream. It’s a little trite, but every now and then I’ll have a narratively interesting and coherent midnight imagining that could actually be turned into a decent story. I think if we looked over the long history of the human race, we’d find that dreams are a common source of inspiration. There’s just something about the completely unhinged and unhindered way our minds work while in the throes of Hypnos and his three children that produces some wonderfully strange and bizarre ideas.

This particular idea seems appropriately spawned by a dream as well. I’ve commented before on my experimentations into the horror genre. As a classification of fiction, it has a rather curious relationship with science fiction and fantasy. It’s like that awkward half-brother that everyone isn’t entirely certain belongs but recognizes that he can’t be put anywhere else. One of my favourite horror authors is the much celebrated Lovecraft who, purportedly, got much of his Elder Mythos from nightmarish inspiration. My story revolves around similar elements of Lovecraftian horror. In particular, I always enjoyed Lovecraft’s masterful use of uncertainty and the disquieting effect the unknown can have on an individual.

There are short falls to his fiction, however, and part of that crops up in the aftermath of his exciting tales. While it’s a running trope in Lovecraftian fiction that relatives and like will usually take the the charge of a prior individual in the fight against the Elder Gods, this usually extended until the troubles facing the protagonists were solved. The colour out of space is banished. Unspeakable things are sealed away. Individuals are driven mad and locked away, the terrible artifacts or locations which became their undoing are confiscated or destroyed.

And the story ends and the world moves on. For all of the Cthulu Mythos’ intervening of concepts and beings, rarely do the personal mysteries or intrigues are ever examined further.

Ultimately, I was left with the curious idea of what it would be like to be one of these relatives waiting in the wings for their turn to be drawn forth by destiny to deal with the supernatural horrors pressing in from elsewhere. Only, their chance never comes because their kin did succeed in tying up those unsettling little plots on their own. Thus, the family is left with only so many questions and not a single answer in the desolate ruins of the dark battlegrounds on which an unknowable war was raged. They could feel something was certainly wrong, the disappearance of their relatives prime amongst this. There would be the ever present touch of things just being a little off. But, ultimately, there would be nothing to discover. For how could we hope to make sense of a Lovecraftian horror when even those that see them can not.

I’m not entirely certain if this story will succeed. Primarily, it has an unsatisfactory conclusion–something which shouldn’t hold a horror story back but… we’ll see. There’s no grand revelation. There’s no turning point for the protagonist where they learn of the fate that almost befell the world had their kin not given the most noble of sacrifices. There’s really… well… nothing. Nothing but a sense, a feeling. It’s that ephemeral sensation of the last disappearing gossamer threads of a dream which we dreamt so wild and vividly but is chased away by the searing light of the morning’s rays. We wake, having only the barest gasp of what was or could have been and by the time we can find someone to share these feelings with, we have already forgotten.