May. 14, 2007 - 21:52 MDT

SOMETIMES MORE

Becoming a fan of gore, and such, reading authors like Edgar Allen Poe and others, I was fascinated by old empty houses, especially if there was neighborhood gossip concerning them.

There weren't too many around our town and neighborhood, but there was one or two that fascinated me.

We kids on the way to and from the Creamery or Drugstore at night would pass by one of those eerie places and look for ghost lights coming from behind the windows. It was especially scary on a dark, windy night when the wind would send pieces of white paper across my path.

In my voracious reading I ran into words that caught my fancy, usually dealing or defining some eerie, scary thing or feeling. I would go over those words in my mind while in the area of those places, thus accenting my thrills.

The Pit And The Pendulum, The Fall Of The House Of Usher and many of those stories were my meat and potatoes.

Then one day in the neighborhood drug store on the magazine rack appeard an issue of Astounding, guess it was the first issue of it. Science fiction added the otherworldly fear factor to an already overloaded mind. Then a bit later came the Weird Stories with authors such as H.P.Lovecraft which added much to the mix.

Having a love of words and their meanings an old Scottish term came into my life, grue . . . as in gruesome . . . . but just grue, denoting "a shudder of fear." Fit my playbook and helped me add to the scare of the crowd as we lingered by the "Haunted House," me and my words and, "What Ifs" often put us in a dead run for home.

Somehow in all the books and magazines which enabled me to wade through oceans of blood and death in imagination and dreamed heroism there was no match for the very realistic activities now being shown on the silver screen.

Have I lost my taste for such things ? I don't think so, it was the picture painted with words that struck deeper than the graphic display in a movie. Heh, my imagination fed by Poe went beyond anything a mere movie could duplicate and in my imaginiation, I was there.

So, in books there was blood, guts, grue and SOMETIMES MORE . . . . . . .

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