Recently I satisfied a long craving for subtle horror and played F.E.A.R, a self-described John Woo style action shooter mixed with elements of Asian horror. It’s interesting how the human mind can trick itself into believing in perceptions that are so self-evidently synthetic, especially given the bias of it being aware of this artificiality in the first place. To wit, I know F.E.A.R is a game, and I know the creepy little girl in it is a product of some game designer’s imagination, but tell me to play it alone at night with the lights off, and I will refuse. The same is demonstrably true for other genres – but I do not begrudge our ability to fool our own brains into a paradoxical state of knowing credulity. Our ability to respond to fictive untruth in a way that both entertains and educates us is one of the great assets of humankind.
Also, my latest literary conquest is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is a strange, unconventionally plotted book. It is almost entirely focused on the recollections of the protagonist, and brings the reader into his psychological interior in a way that doesn’t give away the whole story. The protagonist narrates his thoughts and perceptions seemingly without being aware of the fallacy that his past mistakes present to the readers, a true display of craftsmanship by the way of the unseen storyteller – especially when we see that the book is essentially a long, involved attempt at storytelling – it is presented in the form of a diary. It is compact, to the point and rarely meanders, even if the protagonist does, physically traveling through the English countryside.
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