stranglehold

A youthful lark across the states takes a man into the heart of an awful anomaly.

Music: “Outside Your Grace” by Denhollander, all rights reserved.

Released everywhere else on Friday.

P.S. The latest version of the ongoing Knifepoint Horror transcript archive has been split into two PDFs to keep the file sizes manageable. Download this ghastly torrent of words, including the text of stranglehold, here and here.

Notes ‘n’ nuggets, continued:

rory – The idea for this one came after yet another knee-slapper of a discussion I had with a former co-worker, going over a topic we’d pounded on many times before: the terrifying smallness and meaningless of human existence in a bleak, uncaring universe. Yay! When we talk about the subject, usually while hiking merrily in bright sunlight, we tend to approach it in a rather comedic way… but it’s tough to confront the Big Vast again and again without becoming a little haunted by how tiny we ourselves are. All I did, just for a moment as I drove home from that last hike, was extend the concept of the brevity of our time in the cosmos to its most extreme degree, and a story started to form.

(I’ve found that extending familiar concepts to their most extreme degree is a helpful tool to kickstart ideas. For example, what if a vampire was not just 500 years old… but 50,000 years old? What if transforming into a werewolf was not just physically painful… but distorted your limbs in a permanent way every time it happened? What if instead of a Seven Eleven being open 24/7… the employees were never even allowed to ever go home? "How Bad Could It REALLY Get?" is an interesting mind game to play when I ponder familiar horror tropes.)

Anyway, I got thoroughly depressed thinking about a three-second lifetime, and figured what everyone really needed was for me to pass that right on. You’re welcome!

I do try, from the earliest drafts of most of these stories, to find some kind of redemptive ending for the suffering folks trapped inside them. If I can get that slight “up note” to make sense given the ghastliness of what comes before, I’ll resolve things that way, and sometimes it feels easy and honest to let that break through. Such an ending was prepared for rory; In it, we hear the narrator reflect on an encouraging note he receives from the woman he helped to kidnap long ago. But I found that the story was just too compact to suddenly pivot at the last minute and make that gentler ending feel earned.

So instead, rory remained in full dark mode throughout. I hope that I’m never haunted one day by the ghosts of characters who were coldly denied the (slightly) happier endings I once clearly visualized for them, and in the case of rory’s narrator, actually wrote, recorded, and dropped into the editing timeline… then made disappear with a single mouse-click. The universe is cruel.

Carried by Beasts – Lucky me, sometimes the ideas just drop on my head from the sky, totally gift-wrapped. I heard the concept of an anchoress for the first time while listening to a history podcast (In Our Time by the BBC), and I immediately pounded on my steering wheel shouting “Yes, please!”, nearly dropping my Impossible Whopper in excitement. The image of an anchoress doing her thing in a lonely cabin in wintertime was instantly powerful to me.

What did not drop from the sky was the notion to present the story through the opening arguments of a trial. This was a case of responding to creative anxiety, of feeling the maddening itch to try something different even at the cost of maybe not quite serving the story properly. When I think of the awesome suspense possibilities of telling this tale from John Lilly’s point of view, going long into his whole experience from beginning to end, I definitely get the sense that it should have been done that way... but I’m drawn in by unusual formats and adventurous ways to approach storytelling, and the true-crimey goodness of courtroom presentations was too powerful to resist. There’s a theatricality to some of the real ones that’s kind of riveting to listen to, and of course I like the minimalist approach they demand. Plus, there's the fun challenge of trying to accurately mimic the ambient sounds of that particular setting; in Carried by Beasts, you're hearing an overcomplicated mix of staged ambience and brief snippets from actual courtroom recordings.

Part of the inspiration for this 'stage play' format was a recent French movie called Red Rooms, which begins with a creepy real-time opening arguments scene that’s allowed to breathe and move at a really hypnotic pace. Disturbing flick!

stranglehold (minor spoiler) – When the ideas aren’t flowing for whatever reason, I sometimes retreat to thinking about classic horror setups—you know, I-Inherited-a-Spooky-House, or I-Went-into-the-Woods-and-Oopsie!-There-Was-an-Ancient-Legend-I-Forgot-to-Google-First, that kind of thing. I like to sort through the tried and true options and think how to twist one a little—or, if I can’t come up with a twist, to build a story from one that can at least come to life through atmosphere, suspense, and fun sensory details.

Last year I decided I’d like to go tripping again through the ‘I-Got-Stuck-in-the-Wrong-Place-Wrong-Time-Wrong-Detour’ trope. It’s such an enduring setup: A character minding their own business steps accidentally into a disturbing pocket of reality within a pocket of geography that seemed familiar until that moment.

After cycling through many possible villainous elements that a character might encounter out there on the cruel road and not coming up with anything compelling, I began to think, Hell, what if the villain was just a regular human being who really, really, really sucked? What I started to like about that idea was not so much the villain himself, who I kept a little mundane here, but the notion that his real power lies in draining the will of those he corrupts. There’s a psychological phenomenon that captives can suffer even when they vastly outnumber their captors: Though the clear survival strategy is to fight back in one great surge, they’ve been so beaten down over time by a sense of helplessness that when the moment comes to strike, they’re too mentally paralyzed to rise up. Keeping that in mind, the core idea of stranglehold started to seem eerily plausible to me—as long as enough details were left out to keep the situation conveniently mysterious. 😊

- S