Category Archives: Art and Literature

Nightmares

Posted by Dorian Dawes on

I’ve come to believe lately that I have no true enemies in the world, at least none with the power to harm me that my own mind can not match in spades. Even in dreams I know how to torture myself better than anyone around me. I know all the wounds across my spirit, every place I can pick at the scars and open them up, pour salt across them, etc.

People usually ask me if my horror stories and love of the genre ever gives me nightmares. It doesn’t. Nothing I write is ever as scary as what it’s like inside my own head. The nightmare I had last night is proof of that. There are no monsters chasing me in my dreams, not anymore. In my dreams, the monster is me.

I’m 23 years-old and I’ve not graduated school, because I’ve been out of school for the past three years. The current stress of my living situation at the time caused me to want to take a break and re-examine my life and get things started again. Then my life went through several major changes. Now, I’m back home and the prospect keeps coming up. There were a few close calls, but unfortunately the state of Florida insists that it still needs my parents tax information and when a few papers arrived too late, that was it.

I’m actually glad I couldn’t get the financial aid I needed though. With the current state of affairs, I couldn’t concentrate on my studies. Not when I spend literal hours staring into space because of how much pain I’m in. With everything that’s going on and my inability to get treatment for my condition due to funds my GPA would plummet and that would be that. I don’t need another prospective failure so there’s no sense in putting myself in a situation where I know I would flounder around.

My terror of this every time it’s brought up by those around me turned itself into one of the most vicious and cruel nightmares I’ve ever had. My family and I, taking a tour of a campus, and every time I asked, “What about students with mental illnesses?” People just laughed. I don’t know why I kept asking.

There were all these activities for students. Plays, track-team, some weird thing where everyone held hands and ran around in a circle that I didn’t even understand. It was a bizarre amalgamation of school activities I’ve seen throughout my life, but all presented in a way that was alien, incomprehensible. It was all so that everyone looked happy and normal, and I was the outsider watching people live their lives and being utterly unable to function.

My parents were there, and Mom wanted me to sign up immediately. Because it’d be good for me, she said. That was when I lost it. I started screaming about how it felt to be raped, how someone had terrified me into acquiescing to their every will, how my mind and soul is in pieces still two years after the fact.

And her response, though it was only a dream is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, “I liked you so much better when you were a kid. You were more open to things. More fun.”

I was crushed by that. Everything fell into despair and agony. I woke up and had to wipe my tears as my mother actually had come to wake me up then. She wants me to watch the kids when they get out of school today. I told her I would.

That’s it, that’s the nightmare. The nightmare that I am dysfunctional, hated, alien; where everyone has moved on with their lives but me. School is no longer just a scary institution where I will see myself fail, it’s a place where all of my broken pieces will be put on display for the whole world to watch and laugh at.

If I could channel all of that into a story, I’d be the greatest horror writer there ever was.

The power of a good story

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I don’t read as much as I should, or even as much as I like to. It’s easy to get out of the habit of reading. We trick ourselves into thinking we don’t have the time, or the proper mindset to become emotionally invested into a good book. Reading requires a lot of concentration, you need to be free of certain distractions in order to savor something as it should be savored. In an increasingly bite-sized culture; a culture that thrives on quick digestible, easily-processed information; sitting down with a book in your lap becomes a luxury you imagine that you want but find difficult to attain.

Now more than ever, that’s what makes it more rewarding. For the past several months I’ve been slowly boiling my way through Peter Straub’s Ghost Story an epic horror novel centered around four old lawyers and the terrible stories they tell each other as something darker works its way into their lives. From the moment I picked it up, I knew it was going to be brilliant. Every time I forced myself to shut everything off and just dig myself into the book, to let myself be absorbed by the power of its narrative and be engaged by the characters it was worth it.

After having finished it, I have a feeling that I don’t get very often, but whenever I do, it’s incredible. It’s the feeling of having been on an adventure, of having an experience you’re not likely to forget. Very few bits of media have accomplished this for me, a few videogames here and there, a comic book or two, and possibly one film in my entire life, but most of these experiences have come from books. When I finished Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, for example, or the first time I ever read The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice, and there are so many more. Countless titles, countless adventures to be had.

It sounds so old hat to say that books are an adventure, like you’re suddenly a PBS commercial, but maybe in this day and age when people digest popcorn books like The Hunger Games or Fifty Shades of Grey  because they heard the new movie was coming out, but never venture beyond the safety zone of an acceptable word count or page limit, only delving into that which can be devoured quickly and safely. There’s nothing wrong with popcorn literature, and it is every bit and valid as those more difficult to grasp pieces of so-called “high literature” but it needs to be said that there are other stories out there that are just waiting to be explored. They want to enrapture you. The writers want to captivate you, to draw you into their worlds. They’ve bled and sweat over these creations, and all you have to do is to shut off your phones, close your laptops, lock the kids in the basement if you need to, and read.

On the word “faggot.”

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If you are not LGBT, you do not get to say “faggot”. You do not get to change its definition. You are not the one who has had it hurled like a barbed wire of poison into your flesh as you, walk down the street. You’ve not had it written on your arms when you’re sleeping by people you thought were your friends. Changing the definition invalidates those experiences, it invalidates who we are as LGBT people, and the prejudices that we have suffered, and the triumphs we have made in overcoming the ignorance and hate of a society that misunderstands, belittles, and oppresses us at every turn. Don’t you DARE tell me that it means what you want it to mean.

Posted by Dorian Dawes on

It is December 25th, 2012

For the second year in a row everyone thought the world was going to end. Well, we joked about the world ending because there were a few sad people (some of them friends) who were convinced that the end of an ancient calendar meant the end of all life as we knew it despite scientific evidence pointing to the contrary. Guess superstition will always be around, huh?

A lot has happened this year. I know it’s a few days early to start thinking on how everything can change and how tumultuous a single year of existence can be, but here I am, waiting in the dark for my boyfriend to get home so I can pounce on him via skype and listening to Death in June’s The Wall of Sacrifice. The cacophony and sickness of bells is oddly comforting. It feels like someone knows what the inside of my head sounds like, or at least what it sounds like when things are happening. Sometimes it feels like a gaping vacuous space, a place of hollow and horrible emptiness. If it’s not one it’s the other, caught forever between the grating noise and the terrifying silence. I couldn’t just pick somewhere in the happy middle, could I?

What has not changed is that the future still looms before me as bleak and as unwanted a specter as ever could be. It is even a more daunting creature as I seemed to have lost nearly all confidence in the one thing I was sure in. My own writing. It comes slow when it comes at all and even then I hardly like it. I feel trapped in a terrible rut and yet it’s not because I’m lacking ideas or the ability to express myself.

Here, listen to this one: a necromancer in a modern day derelict urban community falls in love with a young white lighter and has to come to grips with the fact that the powers of death he’s worked so hard to master still hold sway over all. I want to write things, terrible pretty things with men shoving their cocks into each other’s holes and maggots swimming over a lush mahogany floor of an elegant hotel building. I want to seduce people and then laugh as I bring them to the brink of climax before repulsing them with some new form of grotesquerie. I want to be shocking and bad, so very bad.

But can I? That’s the problem, I’m facing. I feel as if the dream of myself is much larger than the person I am. The works I want to create are more beautiful than what my abilities will ever become. If I am to ever produce anything worthwhile it will have to be because some divine essence out there in the universe willed it into life.

If I were to put a theme onto this year it would be the second-guessing of the self. It’s a postmodern sense of ego, where the self-obsession remains but this time it is laced with a toxic and crippling self-doubt. I think that hopefully it is another step in my evolution, to be able to suffer as I hate and criticize everything I’ve ever touched as I sink to a new humility, but there is this terror that it is a permanent death of my own work.

I’ve switched over to Rose Clouds of Holocaust. It suits my mood much better. The acoustic guitar and the droning melancholic baritone are a pretty comfort. It’s like closing one’s self off to the world and no more pressures exist within or out. There is only the flickering candlelight and the pretty, pretty music.

I sit before you a man still very much a boy, vulnerable and naked as the day I was born with no answers to provide anyone, not even myself. All I know is that if I didn’t have my boyfriend to talk to every night, someone to laugh with, play videogames and watch Star Trek, I’d be in much worse shape than I am now. I’m surrounded by incredible people who love me. We’re all suffering our own torment and inner demons and guilt and despair but we have each other. It’s a broken family we’ve made, but it’s a family and without it I’d be dead.

I can’t tell you how fucking grateful I am to have these beautiful people in my life.

So while the theme of the year has been self-doubt, the lesson I’ve learned is to never take your loved ones for granted. Love them all and hold onto them as long as they are there. There are horrors that are waiting outside and even worse horrors lurking in the corners of your mind. The world is changing and getting more confusing every day. The people you love are all that you have to look forwards to sometimes. Let the joy you have in sharing their existence carry you through the darkness.

This isn’t advice I offer to anyone but myself, because to those that I love, I need them desperately.

 

The Dead Walk Again Vol. 1

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Everyone, be sure to head over to Amazon to check out The Dead Walk Again Vol. 1, featuring my short LGBT-themed story Hero alongside ten other chilling stories of a broken world in the midst of a terrible plague of undead. Hero tells the story of a young gay man in a small Florida town who has teamed with a band of other survivors, though this temporary shelter is far from safe as the issues of those he’s taken residence with are rather hostile towards homosexuals. He has every much to fear from the living as he does from the dead.

Check out the book in the link provided below:

The Dead Walk Again Vol. 1

 

Author/Artist Ego

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It’s not uncommon for creative people to have an unhealthy distortion of perception when it comes to their own self-importance, this is reflected in either our staggering insecurities our pompous self-love. I’ve rarely seen a case of moderation between the two (that’s not say that they don’t exist, and you lucky bastards are probably out there who never have days where you go from feeling like Zeus atop Olympus to the lowliest wretch on the face of the earth and to you all I say SUCK IT). Personally, I can go to feeling like an unmitigated genius to lying awake at night staring at the ceiling wondering what way I’m going to screw my life up next, always paranoid and fearful for the future.

I’m surrounded by a few close people who usually help me walk the balance, but there are some big names out there, and I won’t mention any of them here, who’s every work is tainted with this grandiose perception. I’ve seen this more often with horror writers mind you (even myself at times as mentioned, just look at the bio on my amazon page). Every one of us are always the kings and queens of darkness, the imaginative tortured soul, so special in our own dark little ways. For some of us it’s just the desired image that we want to maintain, the brooding, reflective genius, selflessly bringing to us their tortured, nightmarish visions. We have burning desires to create and paint the world with our imaginations.

Someone really should sit down and point out once in a while that this is really all just a bunch of humbug. We’re no special breed of persons, we just want to make a living where we get to make stuff up.  We’re more like overgrown children still caught up in that childish moment of imagination…oh wait, there I go again, waxing eloquent about how wonderful and special us brooding artists are.

See how difficult of a trap it is to fall into? It’s easier to get in it than it is to get out. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, mind you, getting to pretend to be the Byronic hero, sitting atop our thrones of skulls and bones, a chalice of blood resting comfortably in our gnarled hands. It’s a fun escape, and sometimes helps us get through the next story, gives us that extra spurt of confidence needed to finish editing that piece, or horror of horrors, actually sending one out.

The problem comes when that little lie becomes a drug and we use it to sustain our very existence. We become slaves to the dream instead of it being the other way around. In our silly pretending we actually begin to believe the lies we tell everyone else and the creature we pretended to be becomes just a pathetic self-important pretender. We can’t just use simple words to describe ourselves, like “writer” or “person who makes things up” we start throwing out grandiose descriptors such as “MASTER OF THE MACABRE” “MASTER OF HORROR” “LORD OF DARKNESS/SHADOWS!” I think that’s where things just start to get a little silly.

I think having this fun, imaginative imagery (there I go again) is important, and it helps us when it can, but it’s also important to realize that all of it is just humbug, and there is no pressure to uphold such great pretends. It’s only pretend after all. We decide when to raise the curtain, and we decide when it should fall.

The stage is ours to command, and we are the playwrights of dreams-…

Oh, for heaven’s sake!

-Dorian

Review for “Fading Light”

Posted by Dorian Dawes on

This may be my favorite review of a short story I’ve written yet, from Liam over at Troubled Scribe:

Angela’s Garden – Dorian Dawes

Surprisingly, I enjoyed this one even with its couple of oddities that make me curse with repulsion as to why the author would even consider writing some of the disgusting scenes. An elderly lady sees the shadow creatures around everyone and occasionally she has the power to fight them off, but her strength is waning. I like Angela as the main character, a fresh face as compared to your normal youthful hero or heroine. (4 out of 5 stars)

I’m delighted that ‘repulsion’ was the word used here, as I can see some of its moments had the desired effect.

Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous is now available to purchase through amazon.

You can read Liam’s entire review Here

Fading Light Now Available

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For those interested, I’ve recently been published in the Angelic Knight Press Horror Anthology, Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous.

The book can be purchased through Amazon Here

“Fading Light is a perfect example of a well constructed anthology. A great unifying theme, talented authors, and more than two dozen short stories to sink your teeth into. Reading this reminded me of boyhood nights spent curled up in front of the television watching The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, or The Outer Limits, which I’m sure was exactly the point. Enjoy it on a stormy night…but be sure to leave the lights on and the doors locked.” ~ Michael Sullivan, author of the Riyria Revelations

“Tim Marquitz has collected an extraordinary array of bleak and thrilling stories from some of the best writers in the game and a crop of marvelous newcomers with Fading Light. Read it before the darkness arrives and the world ends!” ~ Ed Kurtz, author of Bleed and Control

“With its Stellar lineup of authors and the great premise that gives them room to weave their magic, Fading Light accomplishes what far too many fail to: it stands out from the pack as something unique, terrifying, and wholly readable from first pages to last.” ~ Bryan Hall, author of The Southern Hauntings Saga and Containment Room 7

Why I generally hate modern movies

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I think there are many entertainment mediums enjoying a renaissance right now, albeit mainly through the independent channels such as comics and videogames, pushing boundaries and telling new exciting stories while being innovative in their collective mediums. While mainstream gaming as a whole seems sadly lacking, that doesn’t mean that the indie titles aren’t turning out enough great pieces to keep you distracted while the mainstream gaming industry as a whole continues to fall to pieces. I think horror comics are better than ever with titles like Locke and Key keeping me hooked until the release of the next book and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser being a fresh touch of gothic in the medium–the same can’t really be said of movies, American movies anyway (the French seem to be doing some incredible stuff in the horror genre, but I’m a dumb American and going to focus on how American movies are pretty much crap).

It’s difficult to sometimes put into words just what it is about every movie trailer getting shoved down your throat via youtube ads and Spotify. I mean there are a lot of things that could be easily delved into, such as the remakes of remakes, the endless churning of sequels and the laughable attempts of superhero movies at being dark/gritty; but I didn’t find out what it really was until I watched Lucio Fulci’s Zombie the other day. Sometimes it takes watching really great movies to make you realize just what it is about certain bad movies you hate so much.

In the film, there’s a scene where a zombie is wrestling a shark. I watched the scene repeatedly, because the music and the filming of it all was breathtaking (and it was a fucking zombie wrestling a fucking shark) and I realized there was no puppet here. They sat this man down in the water with a shark and they wrestled each other. While the shark was probably trained, it was still pretty incredible to witness, even without the haunting score by Fabio Frizzi it still would have been quite the spectacle.

This made me realize two things about many modern movies that I can’t stand: the first being that the spectacle of modern films is entirely uninteresting. We’ve seen everything. We’ve looked at everything we’re willing to look at (mainstream cinema, and even some indie films haven’t really taken the steps forwards they should be taking) and CGI can give it all to us cheaply. There’s no risk involved. Nobody is willing to go the extra mile to actually film the darkness, we can just add the darkness later in post. While the chaos magician in me loves the idea of digital darkness, I think it’d be more economical to just turn the lights off for a few seconds and film it, face the darkness yourself.

Now, the second thing to bother me about modern films is the complete lack of any memorable moments whatsoever. Yeah, think about the last film you watched. Will you still be thinking about that film years later? Is it going to stick with you like an old friend? Are you going to go back and watch it a year from now and enjoy it every bit as much as you did today? Are there new nuances and subtleties you’re going to find that you missed the first time around?

The kinds of movies that do that are my favorite films. They keep me comforted in the horrible moments at night before I fall asleep and dreams become the movies of my head. Dario Argento’s Phenomena, Hellraiser, The Beyond, movies who’s visual power and storytelling continue to inspire long after the first time they captured my attention and refused to let go. Modern films don’t do that. I can’t tell you in the last ten years any film that came out that has made it into my list of favorite movies. At best they’re entertaining, but they fall short of being anything more than a simple time-waster.

They’re not innovative. They’re flat, badly-written, overblown, cliche’ and by all means you really should stop paying to go see them. Stop forgiving mediocre directors for entertaining you. That’s their job, but frankly I think we should hold our cinema to a higher standard. Unfortunately, whenever a good movie comes out, you’re all too busy paying to see the latest Tim Burton crapfest to ignore films that are well-written and acted, and then lauding everything Christopher Nolan touches like it was gold instead of the mediocre, gimmicky, plot-hole infested drivel it actually is.

So, I’m not sure what I hate more? Modern American movies, or the modern American movie audience that these movies are being made for.

Fading Light: Multi-Author Interview

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Exciting news, Dawesians.

The publisher of the latest anthology I’ll be appearing in, Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous, set up a multi-author interview to promote the release of the book. This is my first interview, and I was extremely excited to take part in it.

Check it out in the links provided below:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Fading Light hits bookshelves September 1st, 2012

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More information about Angelic Knight Press Here