One of my fav horror films is Experiment IV (1986) because it’s nice and short and not really a film at all, it’s a Kate Bush song and music video, and my attention span for movies diminishes more with each day of my life, which is honestly whatever. Kate Bush’s meta-apocalypse has the decency to be under five minutes, allowing me to down it quick so I can move on to another long, busy night of literally sitting on my futon and thinking about feelings. 

Experiment IV opens on an unnamed scientist slouching through the rain. With his white moustache and pouting demeanor, he evokes a weary Einstein. Unlike everyone else around him, he doesn’t carry an umbrella, but instead he clutches his briefcase like some kind of desperate asshole. He’s immediately portrayed as a defeatist, a man convinced he doesn’t have the power to improve the bad conditions around him. Love that speedy characterization! 

Our guy walks into a music store, where he’s directed through a curtained doorway into a massive, bright lab hallway, while Bush sings “we were working secretly for the military.” She will go on to detail a government experiment meant to harness sound into a lethal weapon, but that’s a spoiler alert. At this point in the film, we don’t know this intel.

“Our experiment in sound is nearly ready to begin,” Bush sings next, and I like this description because it’s so neutral. Experiment in sound could describe her own work with pop music. Who knows, maybe Kate Bush is confessing something in this song? Maybe the British military actually tapped her to make a murder sound? And this song is her way of telling us about it? I think this is a real conspiracy now. Did you also know Kate Bush did the soundtrack for the moon landing? 

But going back to her mini horror movie, our guy meets a colleague in the secret, guarded hallway. She’s a woman with a Billy Idol haircut and a confident stride to match it. Her nametag reads 969, which is both an anonymous designation and a kind-of inverted 666. 

In a dizzying dolly shot, they fly down the hallway. The background rapidly recedes, while the scientists remain in the foreground. They move like they’re calmly strolling, jarringly out of sync with their speed. I like this effect, the measured stride against a frantically diminishing background, it’s what militaristic progress feels like to me.  969 manages to smile at passing cohorts, classic emotional labor, but she regards her weary colleague with concern and anxiety. 

At this part Bush sings, “we only know in theory what we are doing.” This succinctly summarizes the actual attitudes of nuclear bomb experiments, which, I believe, inspire this song (Bush has another song called “Breathing” memorably about fears associated with atomic bomb testing).  

Some history i happen to know: in 1958, the u.s. president’s chief science advisor oversaw the detonation of two thermonuclear bombs inside the ozone layer, you know just to see what would happen. They could not fully know if this would blow a hole into our planet’s atmosphere, but they theorized that if it did, no worries, the hole would be closed by “bomb-produced turbulence and ambient motions.” So yeah these experiments were fucked. After the first atmospheric detonation test, Nazi rocket scientist Werner Von Braun was so terrified he silently fled the scene before the second test could take place. And i feel like i need to mention they locked monkeys and rabbits in Clockwork-Orange-style gadgets that forced them to stare head-on at the explosion. Their retinas burned away in seconds.    

I think this is the sort of history Bush references with her song, and the music video is a character study reflecting its more unwilling perpetrators. We learn that the scientists began their careers innocently enough, with experiments producing “music for pleasure.” They were apparently hippies recruited by the military into the creation of a truly killer sound.

In a flashback scene, a general seems to bully the weary old scientist, who, by the way, is revealed by a document to be named Jerry Coe (bravissima). While the general badgers him, Jerry slumps and hides his face. 969 helps hold him up, facing the sneering general like a protective knight. I look at this scene like it’s that straight girl who is always wasting her protective energies on some old, self-pitying doofus caving into all of society’s worst impulses. Instead of fighting to stop this gnarly project, 969 exerts her efforts on soothing Jerry throughout the process.  

In the movie’s funniest moment of grim humor, 969 serves tea and biscuits while Jerry records “the painful cries of mothers.” Other terrible noises are collected and somehow compounded into a fantastical machine that resembles a radio but produces, as it turns out, a hot demon thing. 

They test their sonic weapon on some rando guy they bondaged to a chair, which is pretty brutal. The lighting is highly stylized and Goth Blue. A ghost lady floats out of their invention, and this is how Kate Bush makes her appearance, as the ghost lady. She wears tacky lipstick, a long blonde wig, and has the perfect glowing skin of a television. It’s way more doll than the usual Bush look. She blows kisses and seems all cutesy flirty, singing “it could feel like falling in love.” 

The mood rapidly shifts when she sings, “It could sing you to sleep, but that dream is your enemy,” beginning a super creepy backwards lullaby. The ghost proceeds to take off her lady mask, revealing her head is actually a shriveled demon with protrusive, pointy fish teeth. Amazing! Flexing her horrible bat-like wings, she explodes the observation booth window. This depiction of sexualized death feels satirical and more humorous than frightening. After evoking our lived-in militaristic nightmare, Bush camps it up. It’s cool. 

Jerry tries to end the madness, but his resolve to act comes far too late. The demon flies over to face him, so close they’re nose-to-nose, and we see the monstrosity as his reflection (deep!). The guy just dies right there on the spot. Broken heart probably. 969, meanwhile, is buried to death in film, which is potentially a commentary on us, the viewer, overly saturated in visual music and musical movies, just think of Kate Bush stuffing reels of sharp film in your face and shouting, “You want more media? Here’s your media! Eat it!” And if that turns you on e-mail me, i have plenty more Kate Bush dominatrix fic. 

The monster annihilates everyone at the testing lab. For her rampage, Bush borrows the hyper-demonic POV dolly from the Evil Dead movies. Don’t you see, by using the POV, it’s like WE, the VIEWER, are the DEMON. So the demon (us) kills everyone in its path as it flies down the hallway (which is lit a lot darker than when we last saw it, which is symbolism for spooky). In their white lab coats, panicked scientists are indistinct from their experimental subjects, who flee in white straightjackets.  Oh, and Hugh Laurie dies.     

The monster even shows up as Kate Bush again, this time in a military uniform and serving tea to the nasty general that bullied the poor hippie scientists into doing all this destruction. After she serves the tea, the hellish bat demon is superimposed over her face, and for this shot Kate Bush whips out her iconic crazed-eye-bulge (see her “Babooshka” video for another great example of this). Then in the last few shots, we bear somber witness to a decimated bureaucracy, papers floating over a trail of wide-eyed corpses.

Kate Bush deserves more credit as a crafter of terror. Her catalog references more horror movies than the wretched canon of Glen Danzig and she has the spookiest, weirdest stories in her songs. She has songs about snowman sex, a mom who helps her daughter cover up a murder, and a person who wastes away while enraptured with a loving computer program. Very relatable.

horny spit venom

I read Fledgling by Octavia Butler a few weeks ago. This was the last novel she wrote before her death. It’s more about deathlessness than death.

So, yeah, i’ve been thinking about death. I always saturate myself with death during October, also the other months, but especially this one. I would even see a show about death. My birthday happens this month, and who doesn’t ponder mortality around their birthday? If i could i would celebrate my death day. The dates that pin us down. Always gives me the chills to think about. In a good way i think?  

For some reason, i just checked if Joyce Carol Oates is still alive. Lately i’ve been indulging in that type of morbid check-up. I’ve also been looking up the ways some writers died and what age they were. Octavia Butler was 58 when she died of a stroke, head injuries, or both. She would be 73 if still alive today.

Fledgling is about vampires basically, but, as multiple characters emphasize throughout, these vampires are crucially different from the nocturnal creatures of folklore and fiction. They’re way more interested in dry court procedures than your garden variety Dracula. Something like a fourth of the book is relatively lowkey court drama, where the court is a modest meeting room in a library or something. They even struggle with a few banal av issues. 

These vamps are big fans of consent. For starters, they don’t kill the people they feed upon. It’s an honest, open seduction. Spit venom allows the feedings to feel good and horny to their meals. Usually feedings bleed into sex, or sex into feedings, so yeah it’s a sex thing, and that part tracks for typical blooksuckers. Cocksucking vampires is a real idea i have, by the by, like they suck blood out of cocks obviously. Just thought i would mention it because i think that hasn’t been done yet (?). Trying to manifest what i want to see in the world. 

Important to note: instead of dying, those who are lucky enough to join a vampire’s food supply are treated to a life expectancy well over a hundo years, in exchange for an existence within their feeder’s thrall (it’s impossible to disobey one’s vampire), but since everyone’s having a sexy time living a long extra-healthy life, and the vampires treat their people lovingly enough, seems like nobody really complains. This trade-off is central to the consent, as the vampires can basically propose their benevolent partnership to whatever human they like. It gets pointed out that this symbiotic method makes more evolutionary sense than the kill-someone-everytime-you-eat approach favored by vampires of lore. These responsibility kink vampires don’t waste blood and they place some meaningful value on human life. 

Except they’re not really called vampires most of the novel. The real term for them is Ina. And their living blood suppliers are symbionts.

That court business I earlier mentioned concerns an attack on an Ina, Shori, that left her without home, family, or any specific memories. 

I was gonna go into more plot, but i’m stuck on that venom. So the spit arouses the symbionts and yet there aren’t any hot saliva-centric scenes. There are some sex scenes kinda, but those are straight-laced and very uncomfortable for as long as they last. Shori has the body of a ten or eleven year old. Her first symbiont is a Very Annoying Man (he gets petty and jealous real fast) who is all, “gee i’m not sure if we should do this you seem young” but he ultimately can’t resist the venom in Shori’s spit. See what i mean this isn’t hot at all. So rather than a cool moment where an Ina slowly licks up someone’s throat, we get borderline pedophila. Wow that’s an alarming use of borderline.

But i say borderline because Shori isn’t truly ten years old, she’s like fifty. So all this is fine? Ehhhh. I can see why this didn’t catch on like, say, Twlight did, published the same year (2005…early on in Fledgling an apartment is described as flaunting a combination dvd/vhs collection, which amused me, because i feel like that was a common thing for three brief years in the early oughts). Twilight also has problematic shit going on with a vampire’s body age vs. actual age, but in that book it was a centuranian teen dating a normal teen with no boning, while in this book the sex gets brought up a fair amount, it’s with multiple partners, and there’s a body involved that’s younger than a teen’s. 

Some of my favorite parts of Fledgling deal with the drama and dynamics between symbionts. It’s basically poly. A symbiont polycule literally held together with horny spit venom, this would be a total romance if the protagonist wasn’t a corporeal ten year old, albeit with an adult’s mind.

I guess Octavia Butler didn’t want to write a good-times sexy vampire novel, even though many of her concepts lean in that direction. It’s all presented with a focus on biological necessity. Although there’s about equal opportunity for it, there’s none of Twilight’s vore humor, which is to say, of course, pas de romance. Shori, like the other Butler protagonists i’ve read, is protective and compassionate, but she doesn’t think sentimentally, because she’s too busy thinking survivalist stuff like who’s trying to kill me and why.

But this novel seriously could have been crowded with swoons. In a different universe maybe. I haven’t even mentioned Shori’s relationship with an older librarian woman. If she didn’t have a child’s body, it would be a dreamy lesbo fantasy.

       If an Ina offered me the chance to be their symbiont, i’m pretty sure i wouldn’t accept. Sure, an extra century of life sounds nice, but it would also feel like putting off an inevitable date, maybe the hottest date of my life. Would i gain anything from a second lifetime, or would i just be disorientated, increasingly soul lonely, and overwhelmed with existential tedium? It would be surreal and sad to experience the total death of literally everyone I know outside the polycule: i would be essentially stuck with my Ina dom and their other symbionts no matter what. Super health sounds nice too, but i think i would cling to my ability to fully think as an independent organism. Writing about it like this, the Ina-symbiont bond feels like a marriage but worse.  

And the more i think about it, the more the trade-off seems like a bad deal: a symbiont becomes totally dependent on an Ina’s blood to live, so the entire setup can even be viewed as extreme codependency. It would be like ruining the rest of my life to have more of my ruined life. 

salt shaker finger

When i think faires, i don’t think ethereal qts and pixie dust, i think incest and colonialism, that classic couple, which is probably because of Under the Pendulum Sun, a horror fantasy novel i’m re-reading because it kills me, i love it. With this drip drop water torture election going on, and another black trans woman murdered in my country, of course i don’t really want to be here, as in, in reality. Under the Pendulum Sun is written by Jeanette Ng, who has also written, and delivered, my favorite two-middle-fingers-up acceptance speech for an award (the one she gave at the 2019 Hugos).   

I’m a fan of scary fairies in general, and the fae folk of Under the Pendulum Sun are the scariest. They’re all about the galaxy-brain mind games. Even at their most approachable they talk in a tricksy sinister way, as if they’re dropping all these hints they’re about to murder you and they find it most amusing their innuendos are totally over your head. They casually mention devastating comments like “you should know by now I hear more than just your spoken words.” They do stuff like scorch words into parchment instead of using ink. They talk encouragingly to plants, which, combined with everything else, is an unsettling activity. There’s a top-tier fairy who goes by the Pale Queen, which is a very frightening moniker. Her real name is Mab, but most folk don’t fuck around with her real name. 

The grand entrance of the Pale Queen and her court crushes it. Pages 132 and 133. Those might be my favorite two pages in this book, probably my favorite entrance for any character ever. This scene no joke makes me swoon, like hard swoons, which is maybe troubling? Her ladies-in-waiting, for example, wear necklaces of tongues and wield bloody shears and thread. Be still, my heart. 

Arcadia, the faeland, is my kind of place. Drearily surreal. Crowded with hallucinogenic faces and figures in the shadows and mist. Of course there’s a castle, and it’s a nightmare to cherish–mossy, dripping with secrets, and featuring perennial favorites of doom architecture like doors that open out into nothing but a sharp, fatal fall. Obviously this is where i want to be right now. 

Rather than myself, a fool white girl in 2020 america, i want to be the novel’s protagonist, Catherine, a fool Victorian white girl who has traveled to Arcadia  convinced her missionary brother Laon needs her aide. Sure, i’d take the incest. Right now incest in a claustophic gothic house sounds better than living in a country that doesn’t fully believe in the deadly pandemic currently exploding all around us. At least Arcadia has Sea Whales, which are whales that swim through land, confusingly named Sea Whales as a kind of fairy joke. 

Some goodreads reviewers are referring to the incest as a spoiler but i think it’s obvious enough throughout. I knew they had a romantic thing going pretty much from the beginning. They practically make-out when they meet relatively early in the novel. And there’s a funny scene where Laon asks Catherine to read from the bible, and the first sentence she happens to recite is one where a brother orders his sister to lie with him, and Laon pretty much goes “woah woah woah! please, sis, not that part.” Seriously i didn’t think the incest was meant to be a twist (there is a twist in the novel, though, and it did surprise me actually). 

Maybe the incest didn’t surprise me because of Flowers in the Attic, another novel that gives me joy, and really another world that feels like a more pleasant alternative to america right now, a country where something like 40% of the people are into a white supremacist cult.  With this as our reality, who doesn’t want to find romance with a sibling while held captive in a mansion’s attic as the youngest sibling is slowly poisoned to death with toxic powdered doughnuts, courtesy of your homicidal mom? If the options are that, and what got presented to me as life, i would go for the gothic horror existence. At least there’s privacy and some amount of lavishness, whereas america really puts the emphasis on banal in their banality of evil. 

There’s a part in Under the Pendulum Sun where the Pale Queen taunts Laon with the idea that exotic freaks like the fae are required for his sacred world to enjoy a standard of normalcy. This is actually probably her tamest, most academic taunt (she needles him a lot throughout the book and it’s usually much crueler). I like to think the Pale Queen is emphasizing their shared love of capricious brutality disguised with nonsensical logic. Humans and fae both excel at burying wild, selfish whims in quirky rationale and absurd beliefs we manage to insist, with a soulless deadpan, we really truly do believe in and need to uphold. 

I grew up in a sundown town suburb of chicago. I was surrounded by this sort of thing as a kid. It’s hard to think of specific examples of the ways in which rich white people pretend to be a lot less smart than they are, but at the same time they aren’t pretending, it’s like they cultivate ignorance until it becomes almost authentic. To bring up another fairy-centric book, In Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, those who try talking about the fae find they can only speak in riddles and nonsense rhymes. Trying to describe the logic white people insist they believe in sure feels like that. Christianity has a long history with this sort of thing, the riddle logic, it’s how they justify their genocides. 

This is all clearly a mood too, but the thing about the fae is they’re more ourselves than we are, and they’re more aware of what they are. They’ve grown past shame. Similarly, most white people have grown past shame, they’ll just never admit it. They’ll never admit anything.    

Memorable food is famously crucial to the fae. There’s the initiatory blood cake of Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, the LSD-metaphor fruit in Hope Mirrless’ Lud-In-The-Mist, the eucharist in King James’ The Bible, the poison food in Flowers in the Attic a novel which i’m deciding is metaphorically about fairies right now why not i already included jesus christ, and Under the Pendulum Sun memorably includes a finger hidden in a salt shaker, a detail i adore and will never stop thinking about at least subconsciously. I love the salt shaker finger because it inspires me to look at salt shakers with renewed interest.I wanted to bring everything together into some kind of final, cohesive point, but eh. I have no connection between fairy foods and everything else i wrote, even though, to be honest, fairy food was what i originally wanted to write about.