{"id":625,"date":"2011-11-02T06:00:06","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T13:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=625"},"modified":"2011-10-26T15:50:12","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T22:50:12","slug":"mark-reads-the-hobbit-chapter-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2011\/11\/mark-reads-the-hobbit-chapter-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads ‘The Hobbit’: Chapter 8"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the eighth chapter of The Hobbit<\/em>, Tolkien gives us nightmare fuel that will last a couple thousand centuries. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read The Hobbit<\/em>.<\/p>\n

CHAPTER EIGHT: FLIES AND SPIDERS<\/strong><\/p>\n

THE LORD IS TESTING ME WITH THIS CHAPTER. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been drawn to the horror genre, both the written word and film. I’m sure there are a lot of studies or theses or papers about why humanity loves to seek out this stuff, but I don’t really analyze it all that much, which is surprising when you think about how much I over-analyze everything in my life.<\/p>\n

I actually didn’t start with movies; those came later, when I was about eight or nine years old, because it was much easier to sneak away and read books than to find a way to watch something clandestinely on the television. Living in a strict Christian household meant that whatever I consumed in terms of media was highly regulated. I was only allowed to watch a small handful of shows, all approved by my mother. The same with any books I read, though sometimes my mom ignored me because she was more pleased by the fact that I was reading than causing trouble. Still, she was always openly involved in any reading choices I made.<\/p>\n

At least that is what she thought. An older sibling had left behind a lot of books in a box in the garage, and that box came with us when we moved from Boise to Idaho. But when I was seven, I picked up an Edgar Allen Poe anthology, one with these horrifying black and white line drawings in them. Before I even devoted time to reading the stories, I’d spend hours flipping through the book to look at the illustrations; then I moved on to investigating the table of contents, intrigued by the titles, some which seemed to tell an entire story, others which made no sense to me.<\/p>\n

When I did muster the courage to start reading, I didn’t understand a lot of what Poe wrote about, but I understood things like the visceral ending to “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I read the entire anthology, latching on to stories like “Berenice” or “The Oblong Box,” feeling terrified by “The Pit and the Pendulum,” or “The Fall of the House of Usher.” And it took me years to fully understand any of these stories! Sure, I understood the basic idea behind them, but they were so much more complex and layered than I realized at the time.<\/p>\n

From there, I tried my hand at a few Lovecraft stories, which I loved and also had no real clue what I was reading. When I was nine, however, I read Stephen King’s It<\/em>. I was nine. NINE YEARS OLD<\/strong>. ARE YOU AT ALL SURPRISED THAT A BOOK ABOUT A MALEVOLENT ENTITY THAT FEEDS ON PHOBIA SCARED THE SHIT OUT OF ME?<\/em> But even then, I just went with it. I didn’t think about why<\/em> I liked the sensation very much. Even now, I’m not sure I know why either. I started to move on to horror films, sneaking peaks at some of them on TNT or TBS. (To this day, I’ve only seen about a third of a horror film about mutant cockroaches that I’m sure is terrible, but I can’t remember the name of it and I would love to see it again, mostly because it gave me nightmares just from watching the last half hour.) I would take advantage of any opportunity when my mom wasn’t home to see if there were any scary movies or shows on, and it’s how I discovered The Twilight Zone<\/em> and The Outer Limits<\/em>. In the same year I started It<\/em>, my mom allowed me to stay up and start watching The X-Files,<\/em> and up until I started living on my own when season 8 started, I watched the entire show in real time.<\/p>\n

My obsession was set in stone in that point. I wanted to be creeped out. I wanted to read and watch stories that dealt with the paranormal, with alien invasions, with monsters and ghosts and demons. And honestly, this hasn’t gone away over twenty years later. I still love all of this! I still get excited when there’s a new horror movie coming out that might look like it’s going to terrify me. I still watch<\/em> those movies and am generally disappointed by most of them BUT I NEVER GET UP. I read books like House of Leaves<\/em> because I want to be frightened. I’ll spend hours at night reading Wikipedia entries on urban legends and ghost stories, getting lost on the web as I click from one page to another because I CAN’T STOP.<\/p>\n

I suppose that might be a little weird in some cases because I’m an atheist. Why would I be so obsessed with ghosts or demonic possession if they might disprove my belief that there is no god or gods in the world? I think that simplifies the issue, and also ignores the power of fiction to make us feel things. I suppose that I don’t<\/em> think about how certain things I am entertained by might clash with my atheism because\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6well, who cares? I’m entertained! Ghost stories rule! And if there is a god and I get to become a ghost after I die, I am not going to complain. I’m just going to haunt the shit out of all of the people who bullied me. OR EVEN BETTER: I could go haunt people like Donald Trump or Rick Perry. HOLY SHIT. CAN THIS ACTUALLY HAPPEN?<\/p>\n

The point being\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.I can’t figure out why I like this stuff. I genuinely don’t know! I’ve thought that perhaps it’s tied to my sense of individuality, since I had to sneak around and enjoy this sort of stuff because my mom wouldn’t let me have it. Perhaps I’m biased in this regard. But how would that explain the fact that I spent four hours online last week reading about Area 51? (I DID NOT KNOW THAT THE GOOGLE SATELLITE IS ALLOWED TO PHOTOGRAPH THE BASE NOW!!! DID YOU KNOW THAT? DO YOU KNOW WHAT A HUGE MOMENT THIS IS IN MY GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY LIFETIME????<\/em>)<\/p>\n

So, in this quest to be frightened constantly<\/em>, I’ll seek out shitty horror films on Netflix. I’ll believe all the hype for a film online. I’ll go to any amusement park humanly possible, and I will ride every single ride there. (With one exception: rides that only spin. Fuck those. I can’t do those.) I’ll read almost anything that people say is creepy. Once, in 1998, I read every Dean Koontz novel that had been released up to that point in time<\/em>. They weren’t very good, for the record, and I think I finished that project just to say I did it. I think the best example of my unbearably obsession with being scared and uncomfortable happened in 2008: I got Netflix for the first time. Before I added a single movie to my queue, I Googled, “creepiest movies ever,” and found my way onto a message board I had never seen, full of HUNDREDS OF PAGES OF SUGGESTIONS of movies that had very creepy scenes or creepy ideas in them.<\/p>\n

I put them all in my queue.<\/p>\n

Okay, not every<\/em> single on in the whole thread, but I made it about halfway through. Any movie I had not seen when into my queue. I lasted about two months on that queue, getting three movies at a time, before I became EXHAUSTED. Not just by watching movies with NO JOY IN THEM (which was a big part of it), but by the very process of having to sit through a lot of the same tropes and techniques night after night. I don’t regret this, by the way, as there were some gems amidst the crap. It was also like a giant lecture on the different sub-genres of horror and thrillers as well! (Funny story: I re-arranged my queue after my two-month binge and added PLEASANT FILMS all near the top, but six months later, forgot to remove<\/em> some of the things I’d added first, and I’d keep getting the WEIRDEST SHIT in the mail, movies with titles like Boner Bloodbath<\/em> or Demons and Guts<\/em> and I would never be able to recall why<\/em> I had added these atrocities to my queue.)<\/p>\n

Now, I don’t know that I would call chapter eight of The Hobbit<\/em> “horror,” but many years before some of these techniques and images would appear in film and literature, J.R.R. Tolkien was scary the pants off children. I will straight up admit that I was taken completely by surprise. I did not expect The Hobbit<\/em> to be anything but dense and whimsical, and now the group is lost in a goddamn forest that’s pitch black, where they must suffer at the hands of magical Wood-elves and gigantic, poisonous, and talking<\/em> spiders. In short: WHAT THE HOLY FUCK DID I JUST READ<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Tolkien wrote this nearly seventy-five years ago. Children and teenagers and adults have been reading this since then. And not anyone I ever came into contact with who enjoyed this book ever mentioned anything about the never-ending nightmare that is a black forest full of monster spiders. I’m not even particularly frightened<\/em> by spiders; they sometimes creep me out, but they aren’t a fear<\/em> of mine, per se. But there are a lot of things in this chapter that are now familiar tropes to me: the use of disorientation to frighten; the use of every day creatures, but magnified to a horrifying size; the use of light and dark to build suspense; the fear that comes from feeling just as overwhelmed and overstimulated as the main character; and the very real threat of death hanging over anything.<\/p>\n

And while I did want to make this all about how terrifying this chapter is, I can’t end this without acknowledging that Tolkien also<\/em> gives us character growth. If you had told me after chapter one that Bilbo was hacking the legs off giant spiders and stabbing them to death seven chapters later, I would have made a passive-aggressive tweet about how silly you were being. The pattern continues: we get new creatures every chapter, and Bilbo discovers a new aspect to himself that he never knew was that.<\/p>\n

I would not be surprised if this ended with Gandalf telling Bilbo and the group, “I told you so. Bilbo Baggins is valuable.”<\/p>\n

In the meantime, here’s to hoping I don’t dream about getting caught in a venomous web tonight. DAMN IT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the eighth chapter of The Hobbit, Tolkien gives us nightmare fuel that will last a couple thousand centuries. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read The Hobbit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115],"tags":[119,118,23,116],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-hobbit","tag-horror","tag-jrr-tolkien","tag-mark-reads","tag-mark-reads-the-hobbit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}