On a seemingly normal night and without explanation, the world turns into a nightmare. The story of Fathers centers around a transformed and unnamed metropolis and the three normal people trapped in it. The enormous variation between quadrants in a city gets enhanced by a layer of modern horror. In some office buildings, the drone workers have become so bland that their faces have melted away, and they unresponsively follow the patterns that they know every day. The malls are full of howling shapes and angry juggernauts who will injure and kill and satisfy their needs. And some places, like the carnival, are barely recognizable through the veil of charnal strangeness. The three main characters must navigate the city to find their missing piece and plumb the depths of their own fear and anxiety.
Paul Moeller, a compulsive womanizer tortured by his guilt over his loving but clueless wife, thinks at first that the transformation is because of a drug overdose. Wandering through the city, he follows the specter of a boy who claims to be his son, he at first reacts to the nightmare as if it's some kind of joke, but after an agonizing withdrawal passes, he realizes that he's in over his head. When Paul finds one of his bitter ex-girlfriends, almost a weightless, mindless husk, she tells him that she never gave his son up for adoption; she aborted the baby after he abandoned her. Pursued by monsters and visions of his wife tormented by chains and demons, Paul chases after the ghost of redemption by following his son into the heart of the city.
Madeleine “Lenny” Kennington is an army brat whose father died in combat. She keeps a picture of him by her bedside, while her busy mom scrapes together a minimalistic suburban existence. Left mostly to her own devices, Lenny goes to bars and sleeps with servicemen, until one day she finds a man she swears could be her beloved father, in the flesh. After he politely refuses her advances, she follows him into the city—as she sees the way the metropolis is changing, she becomes convinced that the man actually is her father. Her goodness and gentleness become tested as she finds each of her brothers, who have become violent victims of the city's transformation.
Dinah King found out that she was pregnant on her 40th birthday. A career cop who has never married, she has no idea who the father is, but she resolves to keep the child. Her friends begin to worry when she tells them her unborn child wants her to go into the city to save the world. It gets worse when the baby tests positive for Downs syndrome. After walking through her stationhouse and witnessing a massacre that doesn't seem to harm her, she decides to follow her instincts and go into the city to give birth to her prophetic child and hopefully find out what his origins have to do with the changing of the world.
At first a kind of horror interpretation of the Wizard of Oz, the three meet and journey together at intervals until they reach the heart of the city. There is a literal pulling-back of a curtain, only to find nothing. No explanation for why the world is different and no higher voice to give them direction. Discovering suddenly that they're masters of their own destinies, they have no choice but to make their own decisions. Paul stays in the nightmare to raise his child, enduring the relentless assault of his vengeful wife who he neglected. Lenny sacrifices the memories of her father and returns to the real world to watch her brothers buried as heroes, even though they died as villainous reflections of their real selves. Dinah gives birth to a demon and has to choose: raise a monstrous baby who could be normal among the nightmares or go back home where her child could potentially destroy the world. She decides to risk apocalypse.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Things Khanem the Everhungry Refuses to Eat, Loosely Organized According to Why
Inconvenience: Heads of state. Jewish mothers. Asian grandmothers. Grass. Whole pomegranates. Whole mountain ranges. Tollbooth operators. Too much cabbage. Everything. Another of his master's (Edgrit, Commander of the Legions of Sorrow, bringer of heat and villainy to man, wolf, and certain shellfish, hero of the Culling, most generous master)'s henchmen. The climate. Russia. Himself. A huge hippopotamus, which if a hippopotamus had grown huge enough could probably inconvenience him a lot if he tried to eat one, but he'd never found or tried to find one so huge, it just probably would not be worth the effort, hassle, or time because hippopotami are generally kind of dicks. Nebulae. Very stubborn pistachios. Corn on the cob (unless dipped in melted butter, in which case the taste outweighs the awkwardness.) Mops. Her memories, which she had stored deep in the back of her mind, which he longed to eat, but were hidden like secret messages written in the fissures of a broken vase which had long been glued over and could not be seen again, but the writer and perhaps those she told knew they were there, but not what they said or even if what she said they said was true. Old coins. Above average fast insects.
Possible (but so far untested) retribution: Angels. Non-orphaned, non-hated, non-step- children. People driving cars he rode in. Chorizo. Dogs with woolly winter coats, because mother always said that the fur would grow in his stomach and he would become a dog himself and never turn back and being a dog for eternity may sound fun now what with an unlimited supply of frisbee throwers and kibble, but thousands of years down the line he would regret not being able to be bipedal for when the end of times comes, dogs would certainly be low on the list of creatures to inherit the earth. Relics and reliquaries of St. Theodore the Stratelate, especially the funny bits. Bodhisattvas. Nothing, for the rest of eternity. Her smile, because he told her once that it was possible, and she whispered so her breath was in his ear, “If you eat this last thing of mine, I'll make it so you can eat nothing else afterwards.” Volcanos. Leprechauns. Cats with patterns in their fur of the insignia of Chzal, his master's great enemy, whose armies once rose to challenge Lucifer and who was defeated by his master, but Lucifer rewarded his bravery and free will, of which his own master was violently jealous. Koi in ponds of holy water. Knights templar. Redheads with pale skin and freckles. Fruit bats with pale skin and freckles. China.
Generalized grossness: Woolly mammoths, hair on. Icelandic dwarves, with their sinister smiles and miners' lungs, singing their throats raw about the fruits of the earth. Raw octopus. Sashimi, unless he closes his eyes and pretends it's bits of white whale, which it almost never is, but girls on dates tend to like sushi a lot, although it is disgusting to eat and even worse to watch someone else eat; he was thankful she never asked, as if she knew already the face he'd make, and he loved her for that, too. Polaroids. Whole boxes of kleenex. Coffee that had been turned into crystals. A lot of plastic. Overripe dumpsters. Bleu cheese has mold built right into it, did you know? Embalming fluid and specialized embalmers.
Gross texture, specifically: Tomatoes.
Indescribable: The feeling she felt when she saw him, crafted before her, and the warm glow in her eyes, even though he warned her that he had shaped himself out of his imagination, and she told him that she did not care, that she could see his inner self despite the fact that he and his master (Edgrit, the never faithful, honored torturer of adultresses and political traitors, father to three thousand sons who would scourge the earth's creatures with their sharp ice breath, but who loved none save those enslaved to him) had for millennia concealed his original being in layers of moldable flesh and bone until he was a creature of nightmares, but that one night in white Antioch, he made himself a man for her dark hands and dark hair, and found that he could not consume the feeling she felt when she saw him bare.
On Principle: Good mathematicians. Grenades (that's just silly.) His mother. Glass. The singing stones of Brazil. The last of anything. Archaeopteryces. His master, Edgrit the everlonely, who rules his domain under the great Lucifer, burning bright of his own will but ever shadowed by greater powers ruling his destiny, who molded Khanem out of brick and blood and harvested his blood from 97 virgins and kept the last three as his brides so that they would be bound together and he would have a servant who could never betray, never deceive, for although those three former virgins left him for Lucifer the great, Lucifer the bold, the 97 in Khanem himself never would. Fundamentalist latter day saints. Fairy tale villains. Out-of-season squash. Trees over three centuries old. Small things born before their eyes have a chance to open, also tadpoles. Her, unless his master Edgrit the merciful ordered him to, which he did only once, and never again. Peas.
Possible (but so far untested) retribution: Angels. Non-orphaned, non-hated, non-step- children. People driving cars he rode in. Chorizo. Dogs with woolly winter coats, because mother always said that the fur would grow in his stomach and he would become a dog himself and never turn back and being a dog for eternity may sound fun now what with an unlimited supply of frisbee throwers and kibble, but thousands of years down the line he would regret not being able to be bipedal for when the end of times comes, dogs would certainly be low on the list of creatures to inherit the earth. Relics and reliquaries of St. Theodore the Stratelate, especially the funny bits. Bodhisattvas. Nothing, for the rest of eternity. Her smile, because he told her once that it was possible, and she whispered so her breath was in his ear, “If you eat this last thing of mine, I'll make it so you can eat nothing else afterwards.” Volcanos. Leprechauns. Cats with patterns in their fur of the insignia of Chzal, his master's great enemy, whose armies once rose to challenge Lucifer and who was defeated by his master, but Lucifer rewarded his bravery and free will, of which his own master was violently jealous. Koi in ponds of holy water. Knights templar. Redheads with pale skin and freckles. Fruit bats with pale skin and freckles. China.
Generalized grossness: Woolly mammoths, hair on. Icelandic dwarves, with their sinister smiles and miners' lungs, singing their throats raw about the fruits of the earth. Raw octopus. Sashimi, unless he closes his eyes and pretends it's bits of white whale, which it almost never is, but girls on dates tend to like sushi a lot, although it is disgusting to eat and even worse to watch someone else eat; he was thankful she never asked, as if she knew already the face he'd make, and he loved her for that, too. Polaroids. Whole boxes of kleenex. Coffee that had been turned into crystals. A lot of plastic. Overripe dumpsters. Bleu cheese has mold built right into it, did you know? Embalming fluid and specialized embalmers.
Gross texture, specifically: Tomatoes.
Indescribable: The feeling she felt when she saw him, crafted before her, and the warm glow in her eyes, even though he warned her that he had shaped himself out of his imagination, and she told him that she did not care, that she could see his inner self despite the fact that he and his master (Edgrit, the never faithful, honored torturer of adultresses and political traitors, father to three thousand sons who would scourge the earth's creatures with their sharp ice breath, but who loved none save those enslaved to him) had for millennia concealed his original being in layers of moldable flesh and bone until he was a creature of nightmares, but that one night in white Antioch, he made himself a man for her dark hands and dark hair, and found that he could not consume the feeling she felt when she saw him bare.
On Principle: Good mathematicians. Grenades (that's just silly.) His mother. Glass. The singing stones of Brazil. The last of anything. Archaeopteryces. His master, Edgrit the everlonely, who rules his domain under the great Lucifer, burning bright of his own will but ever shadowed by greater powers ruling his destiny, who molded Khanem out of brick and blood and harvested his blood from 97 virgins and kept the last three as his brides so that they would be bound together and he would have a servant who could never betray, never deceive, for although those three former virgins left him for Lucifer the great, Lucifer the bold, the 97 in Khanem himself never would. Fundamentalist latter day saints. Fairy tale villains. Out-of-season squash. Trees over three centuries old. Small things born before their eyes have a chance to open, also tadpoles. Her, unless his master Edgrit the merciful ordered him to, which he did only once, and never again. Peas.
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