Close Reading: Torturer Chapter I

Tony Ellis · 06 Sep 2006, 21:58 · from 2006-September.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com (Tony Ellis)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 22:58:47 +0100
Subject: (urth) Close Reading: Torturer Chapter I
Message-ID: <000101c6d1ff$a14be890$6401a8c0@cthulhu>

Dan'l wrote:
>But when
>he deliberately evokes Frankenstein, I'm forcefully reminded of the
>most chilling line in Shelley's book: "You are my creator, but I am
>your master. Obey!"

There's definitely an air of that about the relationship of Talos and
Baldanders, isn't there? Who could imagine Baldanders creating Dr
Talos's wonderful play, and yet Baldanders created Dr Talos. In
Frankenstein, a recurring theme is that of 'who is victim, who is
victor?' - monster and maker take turns pursuing each other for most of
the book, as far as I can recall.

As for chilling lines, personally speaking, the monster's promise "I
will be with you on your wedding night!" is the most unsettling for me.
There's a whole world of horror there, both overt and psychological.
Brrr!

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net