Welcome back, creepy
peeps. Yes, you’re creepy. We’re all
creepy. Know why? Because we all are host to a cloud of bacteria and microbes
which surrounds us, precedes us, and announces our very identity to anything
withy a sniffer. Think of it as your aura…just much less romantic than the
Kirlian variety.
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| Kilroy was here. |
I’ve been co-editing an
upcoming science fiction anthology with Sue London, Dark Clouds, themed around this microbial miasma we all carry with
us, and its tropes have crawled into my nightmares and set up a thriving
bazaar.
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| Probably this hospital. (Image: denofgeek) |
Last night I dreamt I was trapped in an elevator in a hospital,
struggling to hold shut the door or get up to a less populated level where I
could kill myself, as this was preferable to allowing the cheerful swarms of
infected people bless me with their virus.
All the infected were irrationally happy as their insides turned to
guacamole. This was not a dinner party I wished to join, but social pressure
proved overwhelming; I woke up still trying to brace the elevator door shut.
People, as any germophobe
will tell you, are the cause of all the world’s problems, what with always bleeding out their ears
or being used as alien hosts. People have microbes. Microbes are trouble.
An SF anthology capable of giving this editor
nightmares about those microbes ought to be worth reading, no? Do check it out so you’ll be prepared
for the next outbreak; you’ll need reading material in your sealed bunker.
Advance supporters get cool rewards, some of which may even protect you from
your cubicle colleague’s insistent sneezes!
There are, of course, a
really quite ridiculous number of sick people in hospitals (you’d think they’d
do something about that). The sickest hospital of all, however, was Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.
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| Marenghi also wrote as John Saul or Dean Koontz. |
Anyone who came through
the 80s mostly unscathed will rejoice at the hairstyles, the awful lighting,
the misogynistically wooden acting and panoply of parodies that linger in
Darkplace Hospital.
Of course all of us have read at least one Garth Marenghi
book, though it may have gone under one of his noms de plume…
If 80s horror hospital
tales from several of The IT Crowd’sbest brains don’t frighten you, you need to take a long hard look at your life
choices. The classic but fortunately short series has been resurrected online,
to inject a little terror into your midday doldrums. Set aside your Jell-O (you
never know who’s already touched it) and consider this tale of telekinesis
amplified by PMS: HELL HATH FURY!
I guarantee either
the anthology or the TV series contained in this blog, like active cultures in a
too-small petri dish, will leave you shuddering and pulling your hair.
Of
course, if it’s coming out in great chunks, with little dangly blobs at the
end, you have more to worry about than superb writing and phenomenally bad acting.
