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ashintheairlikesnow · 10 months

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Hello there!

I haven‘t heard of my favourite vampire for a long time. Let‘s see some Erich ultimately giving into his new nature. Pls 🥺👉👈

"Erich was slowly but surely starting to enjoy himself, feeling his humanity slipping away from him."

Dresden, East Germany, 1947

With every passing day, Erich Eeten was slowly - but surely - starting to... enjoy it.

The feeling of skin torn apart by his teeth, the rush of hot blood on his tongue and down his throat, warm skin that went cold as he drank and took another life, and another, and another... It had gone from a horror to an ecstasy, each time the idea that he was doing harm seemed further and further from his mind.

It felt like his humanity was slipping away from him.

More and more often, he found he did not care. He lived, after all, in the ruins of the greatest inhumanity he could ever have imagined.

Tonight, he walked with his hands buried in the pockets of a great overcoat, a cap pulled down low to shield the vaguely feline, inhuman pupils of his gleaming eyes. The ruins of the bombed-out city felt like observers all their own, piles of brick and rubble that seemed to sway towards him and then away.

The darkness slid around him like liquid, and the person he was following did not see him at all.

Why he had even wanted to return to Germany, he wasn't sure. To see his homeland desecrated and wrecked, the land of his father broken by the bombs that it had carelessly egged on again and again... Then split in two.

In the First War, they had taught he and the other soldiers, too young to know better, that there was glory in fighting for your country. Thousands had wandered home with shellshock and nightmares to show for their grand ideals and the ambitions of old rich men who sent the young and poor to die in the fields of France.

If he were going to weep for what Germany lost, he would have done so in 1918.

Here - now - all he could feel was the hunger that was never quite satisfied.

He sidestepped a fallen stone as he moved past the ruins of a grand church. Two walls were all that stood now, the curve on one side and straight lines on the other. A statue of Martin Luther still held court, looming with solemn dignity over the death of worship.

Someone had laid flowers beneath Luther's stone feet. They had gone gray, brown, and dried.

The man Erich followed had paused to light a cigarette, his matches a bright flicker of flame in the ever-present darkness.

Erich felt the ache in his fangs that longed to be buried in soft living skin. He swallowed, shifting slightly to the side. He let the shadows hide him.

It mattered so much less, now, if he knew someone had done harm or not.

Only the old rich men ever truly won the wars. The young and poor only went home to wait until they were forced to fight another.

And was it any worse to take life from a need to survive, than it was to order men like chess pieces to fall and be lost for nothing but vanity and ambition?

At least Erich kills clean.

#whump #vampire whumper #vampire whumpee #too #tbh #just a little #microfiction #vampire fiction #erich eeten #he is so fucked up #and also WILDLY traumatized from WWI #but who needs therapy when you can be an undead sexyman right

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darchildre · 8 months

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Sara Reads an Infuriating Book, part 1

As mentioned yesterday, I am hate-reading W Scott Poole's Wasteland. Since it turns out it's difficult to have a proper ranting conversation with people about a book that is wrong about early horror film because the people around me don't know enough about early horror film, I will be posting about it instead. (But under a cut, because people here don't need to care.)

Chapter 1!

We start off with a section about Nosferatu which is actually pretty good. Poole is weirdly insistent that a) horror is always at its root about fear of bodily death and the disturbance that comes from seeing a corpse and b) that any body that isn't under its own control (sleepwalkers, dolls, puppets, etc) is symbolically a corpse, which I don't agree with at all, but since this is a valid interpretation of Nosferatu, it's okay here.

Then we open up to discuss the death toll of WWI. This is, of course, wildly horrific, but after discussing deaths elsewhere, the section ends with a discussion of the death toll on Americans which, while still a big number, is significantly less than basically anywhere else. Poole then points out that the American horror film boom came much later than elsewhere (in the 1930s) but still insists that those films were a response to WWI. And just, I don't know man - some of them may have been but that's a pretty long gap and we were making movies in the 1920s. I also think there may have been some other terrible things in the 1930s that American film might have been reacting to sometimes.

The structure of this chapter after this is just a mess - it's like little mini essays that don't gel into a coherent whole. One of them starts off talking about Fritz Lang (not about any of his films, just about his experience during WWI) and then in the next paragraph veers off to talk about Surrealist artists and ends up with T S Eliot. There is a section about Wegener and the Golem films which is actually interesting but too short. There is a little mini section about Kafka. Basically, after the Nosferatu bit, what this chapter is mainly saying is "A lot of people had a Bad Time during WWI and then later went on to make art with disturbing themes" which is true but so broad as to be useless.

There's a brief discussion of Lovecraft - we spend some time talking about an unpublished piece of his, but none discussing any of his more well-known work presumably because it doesn't fit Poole's thesis at all. And you don't have to talk about everything but if your whole point is "all modern horror is about WWI because everyone was traumatized by the images of the battledead" and then you're going to skip over arguably the most influential horror writer of the early 20th century because the vast majority of his work is not about that, maybe you should workshop your thesis a little longer.

This is such a stupid thing to be mad about but: so there's a part of the chapter where he talks about Arthur Machen and it involves explaining who Arthur Machen was and what he wrote. That's fine. There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who have never heard of Arthur Machen and the ones who are offended that you think they haven't read Arthur Machen. (I am the latter; we are a small minority.) But then! Poole goes on to mention that Arthur Machen wrote an extremely influential and wildly popular story during WWI that basically created a battlefield legend and that Machen later very much regretted but Poole doesn't at any time name the story! He just makes these oblique references to it! Sir, I know you're talking about "The Bowmen" and the Angel of Mons but you just told me who Arthur Machen was like I wouldn't know, so you clearly can't expect your audience to know that! Just name the damned story! I can't think why you wouldn't - you wrote a whole long paragraph about it without naming it.

Ugh. Also there's no index, which is extremely irritating to me.

The next chapter is called "Waxworks", so I'm sure we're going to talk more about things that are definitely symbolic corpses, there's no room for alternative interpretations.

#don't worry #i'm enjoying being angry at this book #also i'm making a fun list of other reading from the works cited #he makes several references to a book called shell shock cinema about german film in the 20s that i'm very excited to track down #sara reads an infuriating book

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