h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: They Come - A39348264
Author: Tibley Bobley - U170471

Back to the spooky stuff.

If you read it, thank you

Whew. Needs a bit of proofreading ('locusts' should be plural, I think), but the writing stands up well. Story flows right along, and you got the hook right in there.

It reminds me of MR James in its use of the English landscape and cultural matrix to foster a growing sense of paranoia.

I find the underlying message quite disturbing, though.

M R James is a favourite of mine. Thank you dmitri

I've changed locust to locusts. It wasn't a typo but a mistake. For some reason (ignorance) I thought it was the plural too

It's about the quickest story I've written. It popped into my head, I turned on the computer and I started typing and it was finished in about an hour. I didn't have a message in mind but as it unfolded, I could see things emerging. As the film disclaimers often say, any resemblance...etc. It was just meant to be a spooky story but it's also sort of contaminated with the attitudes you see in real life. Not sure if that ruins it or just makes it more spooky

Well this has 'A sting in the tail' as they say, (sorry couldn't resisit it).
Don't know quite what to make of it to be truthful, at first I thought it was a bit of a rant against the those damned latte sipping liberals and then i thought it might be the start of a good old fashioned gothic horror story and then you closed it out with the final sentence.

As dmitri said it has a hook and it hooked me in and for a thing scribbled down in a hour it aint half bad, you could go anywhere with an expanded version of this.

I'd say the contempory moralising does let the story down somewhat as you do kind of bang on about it a bit but apart from that I enjoyed it.
I'd be interested to read it again if you ever decided to enlarge it.

Cheers.

This is definitely scary, worrying, thought provoking.

The danger is that the demons are too much like ordinary refugees/immigrants. Perhaps you need to give them some characteristic that makes them different from ordinary humans.

I'm not sure about the last line. Do we want the narrator to be so obviously one of 'them'? You could certainly leave this ambiguous and develop the story further.

Thank you Keith and mVpoet

I'm giving your suggestions some thought. Some thoughts currently developing, that may change by Wednesday (the day I hope to find the time to do some more writing), are:

1) I have a seed of an idea to add to this tale but I'm also keen to keep it short. There's a little homunculus sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear (planted there by Pinniped I suspect) and warning me not to over do (overwrite) it.

2) If the seed germinates, I might make it a separate, stand alone story, that might also be either a sequel or a prequel to this tale.

3) I'm not sure how to respond to the charge of contemporary moralising, and banging on about it. It's just the story. The man's a priest confronted with an inflowing tide of demons. He might have a few ideas about causes and consequences. I can only speculate about the sort of things that might occur to him. Or do you mean that I, personally, am moralising?

4) The demons have disguised themselves to look like ordinary human people. If I gave them some characteristic to make them obviously different from the rest of us, it would make it too simple. They'd be like orcs. There'd be no chance of mixing them up with ordinary folk. They'd find it hard to fool or seduce us. We'd feel no guilt about destroying demons so it would lose the uneasy sense of ambiguity.

5) I fancied writing it from the point of view of one of the demons. The last line seemed to be the best place to reveal it

I mean to submit my progress report between now and Wednesday

I like the fact that they are not obviously demonic in appearance(I love that word demonic) and so if your having a fiddle with this then you'd need to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys by actions alone I guess. or deed in thought.
Now that could be fun couldn't it: Lady with pram stands frustrated at intersection trying to get across it. Enter demon, pushes pram into on coming traffic and whispers to the mother.."Problem solved, now you can just cross at your leisure

Well maybe not, but...

Actually, Tib, moralising was not what I thought you were doing...

I thought from the story you were doing the opposite, being against the, er, 'lesser breeds', in Kipling's terms.

But, then, although I never drink latte, I'm somewhere to the left of the Dalai Lama (according to an editor friend of mine)...

Personally, I would wonder how you *would* distinguish a daemon from a human?

It's just supposed to be a spooky story about demons. It wasn't meant to carry a message, but I could see the impression of a message as I wrote it and it made me feel uncomfortable. It made me hesitate and think about it. Should that be avoided? For the record, if there's doubt, I don't believe in the existence of 'lesser breeds' or superior breeds and I don't think of myself as left or right of anything - just an every-day armchair anarchist. And a paid-up member of the Green Party.

You'd only know the demons by their deeds when they look human. "'Andsome is as 'andsome does", as they say over here. But they might drop their disguises from time to time.

Aha. In that case, it's a technical problem, and I can help...

I think.

In science fiction (and, I much suspect, in horror), it is important to realise that the reader WILL make these connections...'Pet Sematerz' is not about monsters, it's about the problem of mourning and loss.

There are whole journals full of analysis of 'Star Trek' solely in terms of the social message. And then there's Soviet science fiction, in which there are no real problems because Communism is perfect...

Don't get me started on the reason Americans keep remaking 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers', while (allegedly) looking forward to the Rapture...

In other words, one's view of the 'other' becomes significant.

And this story *seems* to have an anti-immigrant undertone.

My suggestion would be to either a)get your daemons to do something overt that *everybody* (even me) disapproves of......

...or change the frame of reference. Make the vicar the bad guy.

Apologies for nattering on.

I'm just going to have to give this some more thought. In order to avoid giving out an unintended message, it looks as though this story has to grow. It's a shame. I just like stories to be stories but hey ho... People argue about what Tolkien meant by LotR and he responded with something like, he just meant the story and he hated allegory. It didn't stop the speculation for a moment The real-life attitudes of people, represented by the two (apparent) men, watching the gateway, just seemed natural. It's how I imagine a man of the church and a tourist in that situation, holding opposing views, might talk. When the problem of a message about dangerous foreigners occurred to me, I thought perhaps I should just forget this story. But then I thought that would be a cowardly and dishonest way of writing and if you had worries like that constantly cluttering and interfering with your ideas, you'd end up writing only boring, 'safe' stories. Even in horror and fantasy, you can't avoid real life. Real life is the source and foundation of stories I suppose. (I don't think I'm much good at wrestling with complications.)

Anyway, I'll have a go.

Thanks dmitri

It's inconvenient, but then, that's what it's for. (Stre-e-t-ch those writing muscles.)

You're right - if you don't go out on a limb sometimes, you don't learn.

And getting that story down has already shown you something you wouldn't have seen otherwise. I think that's cool.

Now the trick would be to wrestle with the story until it tells you something that *you* believe is the truth. (Never mind us kibbitzers.)

I think dmitri gives sage advice here.
As for Tolkien, he said " But I cordially dislike allegory in all it's manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect it's presence."
He also goes on to say: "I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."

But, and it's a big but he does later admit to using sights and people from his younger days, his recollections of another world that he was sad to see passing, in his work. The mill at Bywater(I think that's where it was) was based around his childhood memories of a mill he would visit with his brother while his mother was still alive.
and Sandyman the Miller was drawn from those memories.

All this is to say that as much as you may not of wanted to give out an unwanted message, the fact is that it comes across as you giving us a message.
There are dangerous foreigners and then there are dangerous foreigners with dangerous ideas I didn't really detect either in this but I did think it was something of statement on your behalf and perhaps via slight allegory a bit of statement on your thinking.

Gosh, now I'm getting all confused I think!

I'd like to see you do some more with this, I reckon it's got legs TB

Thank you for your helpful comments, suggestions and patience. I'm running late (again). Thunder storms yesterday forced me to abandon work for fear of power-cuts and surges. I've cobbled together a first draft of a story about what happened 4 years earlier, now linked to the bottom of this story. But it's far from ready yet. There's plenty of hacking and changing to do before it'll be fit for your eyes. I'm hoping to make some progress (and get these puny muscles flexing and stretching) at the weekend.

I hate to be over critical, Tibley, but I'm still not sure that taking the pov of a demon works in this case. (I know it's been done to comic effect, eg in 'Old Harry's Game', but you're not writing comedy.)

Either the demons are evil and terrifying, in which case, it is probably best if they're only hinted at to start with. Then the story would start with occasional sightings of sinister figures and unexplained events and build up from there.

Or, the demons are actually wise and beneficial, trying to save mankind from the results of his folly ( a bit like the rebel angels in Philip Pullman's Dark Materials.) That might be an interesting approach...

That's alright mVpoet. We bring the things we write here to get a bit of helpful criticism. I appreciate it

Sorry to have waylaid you though. The 'Preparing the Way' story is quite big and I didn't want anyone to waste their time on it before it was ready. I just popped in yesterday with my excuses because I said I was going to get back to you with a progress report on Wednesday. I shouldn't be so definite - it's just that Wednesdays and Saturdays (sometimes Sundays) are the days I try to get a bit of writing done. I doubt anyone was actually waiting, but I try to be reliable

I'm going to attempt it from a demon pov. It might not work but I won't let that possibility put me off before I've even had a go. It seems to me that if I'm going to try to write stories, I should try to do things that are new and unfamiliar (to me at least). I don't want to just follow the pattern of what's gone before. Since demons are imaginary beings they can really be whatever we make them. They may be or seem evil from our point of view, but then, we would probably seem evil from the point of view of almost every other species on the planet. We don't see ourselves that way and we might be surprised to suddenly see ourselves through the eyes of say, a cow experiencing the horrors of an abattoir.

Anyway, I'll give it a go and see how it comes out. If it's a horrible failure, I'll try something else

I look forward to seeing the result.

There are two different endings now. The second of them can be found here A40915352

Does a demon vicar improve it?

Well, it's getting much funnier. I love the washing liquid.

I think you have managed to remove the 'redeeming social value' entirely, and turn it into a lively fantasy.

What this reminds me of, for all the world, is CS Lewis' 'The Screwtape Letters'...

Only with the moralising taken right out.

This is out of short-story territory entirely. I'd say you have the makings of a television serial here.

Somebody call the BBC...er, wait...

That's an improvement then. I hoped The Wash would come across as funny, but funny is quite hard unless you're trying to be serious.

There are more ideas rattling around in my head for stories to link to the original, than I have time to write. I'm hoping that I won't forget them before I finish all the other things I have to do.

I hadn't heard of "The Screwtape Letters" so had a google for it. It seems popular with its readers on Amazon. I don't know much about the views different religions have of their demons but I was surprised that a Christian's idea of demons would include family - an uncle and nephew. It made me think of demon aunts, mums and sisters - and demon mating and reproduction Sounds dangerous