I feel like an idiot.

[kaboom172]

A rant while I'm still mad about it:

I went to Barnes and Noble this week looking for some HP Lovecraft, hoping to dislodge the literary blood clot that has been stuck in one of my major arteries ever since I had to face the profound disappointment that was Pnin (which, when combined with Ada, or Ardor makes two blows in a row to the sacred name

Comments

[red_mitten]

I don't know what you're talking about man. I love King. Incidentally, I'm reading a book of his now that was co-authored, but I wouldn't be able to tell if the cover didn't say so.

[tnt_yow]

If you still desire to see creatures from beyond jumping out at you from sickening angles and awakening you to the mindscaldingly unimaginable horror that is Truth, I can lend you an undiluted and Delerth-free collection with at least three worthwhile stories in it. (It's edited by Joyce Carol Oates!)

Unrelatedly, my perhaps overbearing thoughts on Pan's Labyrinth.

[kaboom172]

I did have exactly that aching desire, but it resolved itself by having me order a new collection a few days ago -- though, lacking Ms. Oate's magic touch, it's already less cool than yours. I might take a rain check on the offer.

I definitely share your gratitude that the fantasy storyline was neither explicitly proven nor disproven by the end; it's those kinds of amiguities that gave the movie its sense of beautiful mystique. With the two plots parallel and intertwined in so many ways, any conclusion that tried to come up with a definite "this story is true and that one isn't" resolution would have ended up killing half of the movie. The meaning only remains intact so long as the two worlds can lean on each other. Maybe that's just the kind of escapism that appeals the most to me: not so much the thought that there's some fantasy universe out there that's completely different from here, but rather that there may be ways for seemingly contradictory realities to somehow intersect.