Subject: Having skimmed it...
Author:
Posted on: 2018-07-21 19:10:00 UTC
There's a good amount of Body Horror. But also a general inarticulateness to it. It's just... really hard to know what's going on.
I mean, look at when the seaman injected god fluid into him (... okay, that sounds... very wrong). You'd think the immrdiate response or sensation gets described but... nope.
A book called 'Arms From the Sea". The summary (on the book's website - which is a trip in and of itself that I shall not link here) goes: "Lyle is a young man who hates his life in the State of Salt, a cultural and literal desert. He vandalizes a State icon, then swallows a poison pill that transports him not to death, but to a liminal realm—blue, aquatic, and wholly alien.
He’s rescued and shepherded by henchmen of the Polyp, god of the watery realm they call “heaven.” A series of encounters unfolds between Lyle and the monstrous, seductive god, who gradually reveals his grandeur and mysterious purpose.
Lyle is horrified at first but soon finds himself falling for the Polyp, and the potent and bizarre creative potential he represents . . ."
A friend of mine over on the Young Wizards Slack, due to already having the book for free (since apparently the author was passing it out on college campuses?), went ahead and did a liveblog, which I've transcribed (with permission) in two parts.
Not Work Safe, Not Brain Safe. Quotes are at a minimum, but the bizarrness persists... Biggest CW tags I can think of are body horror, possession, and dystopias.
I too live in a perpetual state of salt.
Bleeprin, anyone?
...it could've had potential to be good if it weren't basically a stupid "you-violated-me-now-I-love-you" fic with Fanthulhu beings. The water theme could've been good, and so could the plot. In fact, I could totally imagine the good version of this, based on changes one could make to the plot described in the summary.
-Twistey
Relatively harmless, but still nuts. Better than the other way around, I suppose...
Okay, now we've gone from "what are you on that extended Your Mileage to include Cthulhu" to simply "excuse me but that's not how to do horror properly, and my advice may or may not include that sensitive subjects should not be placed in a horror story willy-nilly, but I don't want to read the story so I don't know if the Polyp forcefully does what I think he forcefully does." *sigh* Slightly better than expected. Slightly. So we have that.
-Twistey
Not sure if he was aiming for horror or "this is how I'd bring about my ideal world".
Since the author also seems to be a Believer in what he's writing about, going off the info in his site.
Thank God that man doesn't have any follo- oh who am I kidding.
-Twistey
That is, if anyone here can get their hands on the original text.
I haven't read through the liveblog, but even halfway through part one, the weird names, bizarre concepts, and unfortunate word choices tell me this would be loads of fun to read out loud. I can't get over the god-thing being called "the Polyp." Seriously, Polyp? That's a thing you don't want your doctor to find in your colon because it might be cancer.
Or, to be fair, "a sedentary type of animal form characterized by a more or less fixed base, columnar body, and free end with mouth and tentacles, especially as applied to coelenterates" or "an individual zooid of a compound or colonial organism."
But STILL. That's about as far from "sexy ocean god" as you can possibly get. {X D
~Neshomeh
...Provided you have a smartphone.
If you do, go to the book's website (yes, it has a website), and download the author's app. From there, you can download the whole book free of charge. Along with the "multimedia experience" that goes with it. For you see, the book is associated with a music album also made by the author, one song per chapter. And you can have it play the music as you read, I think.
The fact that this got this kind of treatment and Masterharper of Pern didn't is certifiable proof that there is no justice in this cruel world.
Also, having read the liveblog, I can say that the ending of this books reminds me of another, more NSFW, terrible erotically charged story involving an elder god that's ambiguously M/M but it's hard to say because elder god, and is also ambiguously anti-capitalist. Yes, I've read another one. Don't ask me how that's possible, I do not know. I think it might be better than this one. And also worse. I mean, we're really just measuring different levels of precipitously bad here. Given, the Other One is actually pornographic, so the genre standards are lower on average. But that's no excuse, and it's still really bad.
~Thoth doesn't know what he's doing.
Used to do it for fun. This, however, seems like something I might want to pass on. Or maybe not. I'll have a look at the thing after work tonight and see. If I'm up for its craziness I'll start working on a PDF (unless someone else finds a faster way to do it, of course).
I don't have a smartphone which I'm glad about for once, so unless there's a better workaround I'll have to go without.
... And I kinda wanna know what the Other One you found reads like, now. 8'D
I've gotten through chapter 1 tonight. So far, it's mediocre, overly passive prose punctuated with moments of "wait, what?" when the author forgets to tell us something that would have helped things make sense. It's not a hillaribad laugh-riot like, say, Eye of Argon. But it IS only the first chapter. And the main character is clearly insane, and what he's experiencing might be partly or wholly the delusions of a diseased mind. So we'll see.
I have to say, I like the accompanying art, though. It's all a bit samey, but still, I like the style. Haven't tried the music, but I suppose I'll give that a shot at some point, too.
~Neshomeh, morbidly curious.
There's a good amount of Body Horror. But also a general inarticulateness to it. It's just... really hard to know what's going on.
I mean, look at when the seaman injected god fluid into him (... okay, that sounds... very wrong). You'd think the immrdiate response or sensation gets described but... nope.
Or the parts that wouldn't be conductive to his argument. "See? This guy getting injected with his god's essence is a good thing! There's no worry about the needles or any non-godly fire-y pain in his veins at all! 8D"
Pleh. =P
This makes sense for when the tentacle monster uses his god essence/DEADLY ACID to burn holes in both the back of his throat and his skull. The book tries to romanticize that, by the way.
But... for the injection? Pleasurable and/or addictive bodily fluids is a downright traditional trope for this sorr of story, at least in badfic. It's an odd omission, as are several others.
If this were a fanfic and it got missioned, the agents would find themselves in a muted landscape, devoid of all color. Everything would feel numb. Because that's how this story feels: numb. Detached. Unreal.
Also, they'd want to avoid the salt caverns...
Fire might be the best method in this hypothetical mission.
Lots and lots of fire.
Or would be, if the white world Lyle starts from made any more sense than the blue world he envisions in his death throes.
The trouble is, the author doesn't understand people at all. When all our base needs are met, when we're secure and healthy, we don't lose all motivation and cease to do anything. We create. Heck, some people create even when they can't afford to feed themselves, because they can't help it. Creating and engaging each other in games, and dance, and song, and stories, and all arts and crafts, is a base human drive. You can't just ignore it.
I mean, sure, some folks will lose themselves in front of the TV or the computer, but that's the exception, not the rule. Most of us here on the ol' Interwebz are using the medium for... you guessed it... creation. Sharing ideas. Communication and engagement.
It's not all positive, of course, but for the purposes of dismantling the logic behind the State of Salt, it doesn't matter. If every person on the planet had Internet access directly implanted in our brains, it wouldn't change the fundamental drive of humans to use their minds to DO stuff. Even dumb stuff. Even horrible stuff.
Brave New World did the socialist-hedonist dystopia better.
Though, granted, it sounds like the dystopia in this book is just an excuse for weird tentacle-monster sex later. Point is, I utterly fail to care. The starting scenario makes no sense, and our protagonist cannot be sympathetic, because the situation he's raging against is unclear and baffles more than it horrifies. His escape from it has no power to move me.
I could almost get into it as a fascinating trip through the wild fancies of a deranged mind, though. Maybe he's a paranoid schizophrenic or something, the State of Salt is white because that's the color of clinic coats and padded walls, and that's the world he sees when he's taking his meds, and he's one of those people who convinces himself that he's not his "real self" when medicated and chooses the familiar delusion over facing up to stark, frightening reality with its confusing rules and expectations. I dunno. It makes more sense than taking the book at its word.
~Neshomeh
But the odd thing about Salt is that (and I did skim this, so I may have missed something) to my recollection, the descriptions are equally muted and unreal there. And I guess that's the point, in your parse.
But if that was the mark the author was trying to hit, it would make far more sense to portray the scenario very differently. The ocean scenes would be comforting and muted, and Salt would be a more painful delusion than it was. As it stands... everything feels dull, and the ocean portions are tinged with Body Horror. With no contrast save that, it's hard to see why Lyle would ever prefer the ocean to Salt.
Can't say I've ever heard of a schizophrenic whose head-voices told them nice things.
And, having just taken a brief poke around Google to see if I could quickly turn up anything to refute that perception, here is an article by an actual schizophrenic that also turns the idea of Salt on its head. Not sure if that supports or dismantles my take on the book, but I'm not suggesting that it's serious interpretation of the text anyway. {= )
~Neshomeh
And... yeah. At the very least, I think your analysis is better than the author's seemingly-serious take. It very much seems like they're taking the Descent Into Madness as something positive in the book.
...If I could actually stomach reading this in-depth, I might try my hand at writing a fixfic.
But please don't break your mind in the process! |D
What sort of fix should I do? There are multiple valid options.
But that's just my opinion.
... when you see it. >.>
(It's in part two of the liveblog. For some reason associating/comparing/contrasting Young Wizards with works like this makes me hyperfixate.)
Both on 'the Polyp' and on a live readthrough being fun.
(Though, I wouldn't stare at the cover art too long; apparently it is just as disturbing as the text.)
I could ask Bryton ("punrisenebula") where there's spares? Not sure how much mailing them would cost, though. >.>
(And just wait until you get to part 2...)
It's free on smartphones/tablets. The real problem is getting it on computers. If I could work out where it gets its datafiles from, I'd make a raw text version. As it stands...
I don't have a response to this. No words can explain.
I got all I needed from the description, yeah, that's just painful already. And when your core concept is painful... yeah, I don't want to know about everything else.
Also, you dropped an E from your "bizarr(e)ness" in the last line of your post.