Channeling a Horror Story

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 28 October 2015.

A Tale from The Decameron by John William Waterhouse

I agree with everything you've said.

I'm just channeling a horror story right now. Is Arthur White like the The Decameron or Canterbury Tales or One Thousand and One Nights, just a flimsy frame story within which to tell cool stories? Is this Alyosha saying, "Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!"

I know the context is different, and I don't think we'll be talking about all of our favorite horror movie ideas in Heaven (it is a troublesome line nonetheless!). And I don't think our story has a lot in common with a frame story. But we have come up with a basic idea as to why all these unrelated stories can be subsumed and integrated, namely, the effect the lodestone and the turbulent reversals seems to have on characters and plot lines.

We also have the idea of legends, stories that flourish around a character, especially ones of dubious historicity. Only at a much later date do individual writers try to impose coherence.

Also, the nefarious process of disintegration that sets itself up against God as All-in-All.

But is does that last one also show God's action in that He is able to integrate even disintegration? Something like "captive led captivity."

It's therapeutic to revisit these stories and hopes and dreams from the past through the magic lens of this story. It's like I'm reclaiming all the mundane moments and locations of my life. I'm not even sure this is an attempt at literature; more like an attempt to retake all the ground conquered by the forces of evil, which, as some have pointed out, is characterized most by its banality.

Lately, I've been tromping around my college and post-college days in Ann Arbor, accompanying those Tokyo International College of Business exchange students to Sleeping Bear Dunes, heading out of Las Vegas into the desert darkness west of Nellis Air Force Range. No need to explain how all this is finding its way into the story.

Because I'm making these journeys not through a spirit of nostalgia, but through an all-out effort to shatter the ice that has encased and obscured them, half expecting—like Philip K. Dick—to find first-century Palestine beneath their stale surfaces.

And is the story obscure because we are being deliberately obscurantist?

Or is it because we are trying to "make dark things plain"?