Somewhere, deep deep down in my heart, there is an opening. A tear. A lesion. Something deliciously foul is down there, and it beckons to me, by its existence I am pulled. Peering into the abyss, I don't see anything. But I can feel it, whatever it is. It calls. I crawl down, not sure what to expect. And no, I'm not sure I ever could have explained it. But what I've found down there has always terrified, intrigued, and enamored me, in equal rotating twisting parts, flapping in the slight breeze like skin on a clothesline of intestine. I never once thought these places could be described.
And then I held Mr. Stuart's book in my hands. I stared into the blackness, once more.
A shudder came over me. I could feel the figure on the cover, I could hear his scream in my mind. I knew why he was screaming. He wasn't screaming because he was falling. Falling is nice. Falling is fun. I was jumping off of high dives when I was four, if not younger. I was jumping off of porches at two, over and over and over and over and over. I'm surprised my poor mother still has a beating heart, now that I think on it. But, even now, it's still fun! I still jump from stairways when I think no one is watching, just to feel the sensation.
It's the landing that's awful.
My bones, older than they were then, hurt, even if it's just a little bit, when I land now.
And I'm not falling anymore. I find that I miss it.
It's tragic.
He knows he's going to hit the ground and hurt.
I opened the book and my pulse stopped, for just a millisecond. Patrick Stuart had crawled through the hole too. He's seen it. He knows. For years, decades, I assumed, in my flaming arrogance, that I was the only one who had found it and managed to keep anything resembling sanity. But that was done by trying to pretend that it didn't exist, by throwing up defenses that never worked but I wanted them to work so why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't it work? If I don't look at it it isn't real. The rest of the world can get away with it, so why not me?
I think he stared straight in, and wrote down what he saw. I'm not sure how. I'm in awe of it.
Perhaps the strangest thing was seeing the Aelf-Adal, his take on dark elves. I'd seen them. I'd met them. Somehow. Don't ask me how that works, but they're real in a way that you and I are not. I know that sounds crazy, but they're something way deep down in our consciousness. For all these years that I've run games I've hinted at their existence, to myself and others. But that was all I could stand. It was all I could do. I knew the deRO, the gnonmen, all the others in this tome. I looked at them and realized that all he'd done was name what he'd found, down where the soul leaks rivers of ash and gaseous bile. They weren't my names for these entities or concepts or archetypes or what-have-you. But they were the same things, whatever they are.
I think he put down a flag in the darkness and sat there until he could write it all down.
I cannot recommend this book enough to others. There's a lot that's useful here, even if it makes the skin crawl, which can be quite good for one's soul. It's good to be reminded of the madhouse we're in at times. I don't innately see this as a horror work and would not recommend it as such. Horror is too banal for what this book does, by and large. No, this is properly a part of fantasy, which is the older genre, from which horror takes its roots. It's a danse macabre, and that's good for people, in the proper doses.
I think a healthy dose of danse macabre is more than what most people think it is.
At some point I'll write an actual review on the book. Y'know, go through its mechanical bits and why they're awesome, talk about his veins generating toolkit and why it's amazing, and talk more about these monsters that cause nostalgia in parts of me that I never thought could feel such an emotion. It's a shame I don't really connect with the OSR movement all that much, cause I'd go for Lamentations of the Flame Princess hardcore, but those are not my mechanical and philosphical leanings. Fortunately most folks don't say no to money. This book will definitely get mine.
I'm not sure one should run from what's down in the lesion.
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