Une Saison en Enfer
T-7 days and counting till Vellum hits the shelves.
It's the calm before the storm. Well, actually, it's the mind-numbingly bleak, grey and miserable before the storm. I'm down here in Kilwinning -- Hellwinning as I like to call it -- looking after my parents' dog Che (Yes, he's named after that Che; just like the first dog we had was named Nye, after Nye Bevan... nil paserand, brothers and sisters, nil paserand) while they're away for the weekend. It could mean peace and quiet and a chance to work like a Trojan on Ink, but sadly it's more likely to mean Guiness and crisps and a chance to settle down and watch DVDs on my Dad's widescreen surround-sound home cinema system. Hurrah! In a house that I can't smoke in. Boo!
Man, I hate Hellwinning. Most of it is made up of 60s / 70s housing estates built as part of the New Town projects that gave Scotland such wonderful places as Cumbernauld and Livingstone. Decentralisation, ye see, some bright spark thought. What we do is we take everybody out of run-down inner city Glasgow and ship them out en masse to a new life in the rural colonies (or as Bladerunner would have it: "a chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!") Yes, let's hybridise Glasgow's inner city razor gang culture with the small town mentality of Nowheresville, Ayrshire. It'll be swell.
On the road sign as you're entering Kilwinning, vandals once painted Welcome To Hell in red paint, like something straight out of High Plains Drifter. It wasn't me. I did the life-size scarlet demon on the bridge between the Catholic secondary school and the Protestant primary school with the words "I AM YOUR GOD" above it.
Ahhhhh. The happy days of my adolescent sociopathy. How I dreamt of electrified tripwires and chickenwire garottes. It'll be such fun to relive that blissful psychosis over the next few days. You know, I'd love to go back to my old high school for one of those end of term assemblies where they bring back a local-boy-made-good to spiel some shite about the best days of your life and all the great opportunities there are to look forward to -- where there's at least one, maybe two, maybe three, maybe a lot more freaky, meek geekboys in the audience, sitting there thinking "DIE, MOTHERFUCKER, DIE!"
"Go." I'd tell them. "Get the fuck out as soon as possible. I know you want to blow their fucking brains out, rip their heads off and piss down the bloody shreds of their gullet, but all you gotta do is go. Fuck them all; just walk away. You don't have to stay anywhere forever."
I was watching The Haunting the other week, the classic black and white version as opposed to the shitey, schlocky remake. At the end of it, one of the characters turns to the other and says "They should burn this house down and sow the ground with salt".
That's how I feel about Hellwinning.
But hey!
T-7 days and counting till Vellum hits the shelves.
It's the calm before the storm. Well, actually, it's the mind-numbingly bleak, grey and miserable before the storm. I'm down here in Kilwinning -- Hellwinning as I like to call it -- looking after my parents' dog Che (Yes, he's named after that Che; just like the first dog we had was named Nye, after Nye Bevan... nil paserand, brothers and sisters, nil paserand) while they're away for the weekend. It could mean peace and quiet and a chance to work like a Trojan on Ink, but sadly it's more likely to mean Guiness and crisps and a chance to settle down and watch DVDs on my Dad's widescreen surround-sound home cinema system. Hurrah! In a house that I can't smoke in. Boo!
Man, I hate Hellwinning. Most of it is made up of 60s / 70s housing estates built as part of the New Town projects that gave Scotland such wonderful places as Cumbernauld and Livingstone. Decentralisation, ye see, some bright spark thought. What we do is we take everybody out of run-down inner city Glasgow and ship them out en masse to a new life in the rural colonies (or as Bladerunner would have it: "a chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!") Yes, let's hybridise Glasgow's inner city razor gang culture with the small town mentality of Nowheresville, Ayrshire. It'll be swell.
On the road sign as you're entering Kilwinning, vandals once painted Welcome To Hell in red paint, like something straight out of High Plains Drifter. It wasn't me. I did the life-size scarlet demon on the bridge between the Catholic secondary school and the Protestant primary school with the words "I AM YOUR GOD" above it.
Ahhhhh. The happy days of my adolescent sociopathy. How I dreamt of electrified tripwires and chickenwire garottes. It'll be such fun to relive that blissful psychosis over the next few days. You know, I'd love to go back to my old high school for one of those end of term assemblies where they bring back a local-boy-made-good to spiel some shite about the best days of your life and all the great opportunities there are to look forward to -- where there's at least one, maybe two, maybe three, maybe a lot more freaky, meek geekboys in the audience, sitting there thinking "DIE, MOTHERFUCKER, DIE!"
"Go." I'd tell them. "Get the fuck out as soon as possible. I know you want to blow their fucking brains out, rip their heads off and piss down the bloody shreds of their gullet, but all you gotta do is go. Fuck them all; just walk away. You don't have to stay anywhere forever."
I was watching The Haunting the other week, the classic black and white version as opposed to the shitey, schlocky remake. At the end of it, one of the characters turns to the other and says "They should burn this house down and sow the ground with salt".
That's how I feel about Hellwinning.
But hey!
T-7 days and counting till Vellum hits the shelves.
posted by Hal Duncan | 5:40 pm
1 Comments:
I know I am a little late picking up Vellum... but to tell you the truth, I am quite new to literature. I felt my brain being eaten away by the lack of reading... so I trekked down to a local book store to find some stimulation. I saw your book on the "Staff Picks" rack and decided to take a look at it. I was in a hurry so I glanced over a few sentences and said "this will do" and purchased the book promptly. Well, when I got home, I started right away. Now I must say, I am hooked. I must run out to the book store to find Ink so I can continue with the story. So thank you for this great piece of literature. You have quite simply become my favorite author.
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