More Good, Bad, and Ugly

I'm battling a massive headache. Holiday stress sucks. There are too many commitments and lists and plans. There isn't enough time to do everything, and here I am blogging. I need to get more sleep.

I must have eaten something weird or bad yesterday (Jim's hot artichoke dip, perhaps?) because I had a dream that, long into the future, somehow the Bible and the complete works of J.R.R. Tolkein swap spots, and what was fiction becomes fact, and what was speculation becomes myth. Lord of the Rings as the basis of future religion? Wow. Although there is a documentary on the fancy DVD that explores the parallels between the fiction of LOTR and historical facts and figures. They tossed in a comparison of greasy Grima Wormtongue (think about that name for a second- gross!) and Russia's Czarina Alexandra's witchdoctor Rasputin, which was totally fascinating to me. There were other such parallels; LOTR is jam-packed with literary stereotypes, but so superiorly rendered they're easily believable: the reluctant hero (several of those), the oppressed female, the schizophrenic who could be a good guy but then again maybe not, a rotten turncoat, the vengeful proud, the stalwart buddy, etc. So well done. Love it.

Two more good reasons to love LOTR are David Wenham's extraordinarily-lovely-when-tortured blue eyes. If I knew him personally, I would cause him constant pain just to see him don that gorgeous glassy-eyed look of soul-deep suffering. Not that I'm as much insane as Dean Koontz's fictional Steven Ackblom: "they were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died." An established artist, he methodically tortured and killed people so he could paint them in that twilight moment before death when he perceived them to be at their most spiritually pure, to capture the resulting perceived ethereal beauty. What's weirder was that people who viewed the paintings before his method was (fictionally!) known appeared to sense that beauty, share in his admiration of it. Zowie. If I could create villains like that, I'd already be a celebrated author. Makes me wonder what kind of life that Koontz has had, though, to pop them out so consistently. His bad guys aren't like Stephen King's Halloween haunts and his predictable vengeful abused. They're just the guy next door, but with something terribly wrong upstairs. To read him create the thoughts they have that justify their psychotic behavior to themselves is like, dang. I just can't put my finger on it. Freakin' spooky. It's like you suddenly worry that they might be right, even if you know they're crazy. Just so you know, I'll never be a horror novelist. I just can't bring myself to create more bad in the world. But I like reading good bad. It's neat.