The Daemon Lover

So, I am discussing "The Daemon Lover" by Shirley Jackson. I did a little research on the author and found out that she put a character named James Harris in several of her stories. He appears in "Of Course," "Like Mother Used to Make" and "Elizabeth." However, I don't think these characters are the same character; they only share a name. Jackson also included the traditional British ballad called "The Daemon Lover" in her short story collection. The ballad is about a man named James Harris who persuades his old girlfriend to leaver her husband and children for him. Here's the link to the Wikipedia article on the ballad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daemon_Lover

Prey

So, I've read the story "Prey". I found it to be a fascinating little story with quite a good ending. It seems in movies or stories such as this that when an object such as a doll is possessed that the victims struggling against the object never stop to consider that the spirit stuck in the doll wouldn't be permanently gby destroying the carrier. If anything the spirit would be allowed to roam completely free at that point, and that's where the ending of this story went. The protagonist destroys the spirit's prison in a sense, and the spirit then decides to take up residence in the victim's body. That's what pretty much what I found interesting about this story is that it seems more "realistic" in a sense the spiritual entity wouldn't be destroyed just because its physical carrier has been.

This is a reproduction of the Zuni fetish doll from the TV movie, Trilogy of Terror starring Karen Black produced in 1975.

Also, you can find the entire Trilogy of Terror on youtube if you do a surface level search.

When the Robot Revolution Comes...

I'll probably be the first against the wall.

So, I read Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" last night and one of the things that struck me is that, in fiction, when computers gain sentience, they almost always use it to nefarious ends. Like the Machines in The Matrix or ...what was the computer's name in 2001 A Space Odyssey? They always seem to hate humanity. Then I got to thinking, how is that any different from folk tales of trees that harbor a deep and abiding hatred for humans because we can move around and they cannot? Is this just the latest incarnation of that trope? Or have stories like this become popular because somewhere within us we fear that we really are building our machines a bit too smart? I don't know about y'all but I think I'm going to be a little nicer to my laptop after reading this.

I don't really know what to do with this one...

I'm supposed to present "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio," but I'm still trying to wrap my head around what exactly was going on, so I'll just say some things about the author for now. Tennessee Williams was best known for his plays. Probably his most famous plays were The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Needless to say, he was a pretty big deal in the 40's and 50's. I did some reading and found that Williams was believed to be a homosexual, which really puts this story into context. While he never openly confessed it, it was a somewhat well-known fact. This is reflected a lot in his poems, and some in his short stories. It seems that when it pops up in his short stories, however, homosexuality is usually met with disease and death. For example, both Kroger and Pablo get colon cancer after a life of homosexuality. I'll go into further detail about that tomorrow.

Real or Not Real

After reading Shirley Jackson's The Daemon Lover, I have to ask.. is Jamie Harris even a real person?? The girl cannot seem to picture his face, but claims that is because of love, which I thought odd. Her only descriptions were tall, handsome and that he often wears a blue suit. These details could describe a number of people. I am just confused about rather or not this guy exists or not and what was going on in that weird room at the end. That just came out of nowhere. I don't know who was covering this story for this week, but let me know your thoughts.

The Sexist Doctor

With all the sexist stories we've read, it's interesting that the David H. Keller story we read wasn't sexist. He is actually known for being very anti-feminist. Two of his other short stories are "Feminine Metamorphosis" and "The Little Husbands." "Feminine Metamorphosis" is about a group of women who take male hormones and try to take over the world. "The Little Husbands" is about 70 ft tall Amazon women who keep normal-sized men as their slaves.

Mr. Fiddlehead

Mr. Fiddlehead was quite a change from the stories in the first book (maybe not so much from the previous stories in Volume II, but I always read my story first) in that it is set in fairly modern times (i.e., the year of my birth). I thought it was interesting because, as with most of our stories so far, they start out seeming fairly benign and then you begin to see something is wrong (first really seen with the earrings in the shop). I thought it was a good story about how things in our imagination can truly come to life. Again, I find myself pinpointing the ending before it has arrived, but maybe I am just thinking of the obvious stories.