Moving through the ashen ways of eons past, realms of fire and smoke and emptiness rising up and twisting around its path the beast walked on, burning all it perceived. A toaster isn’t a thing that bleeds, and hair isn’t something you spank, so putting those words together tends to slightly mess with people and throw off our reading. They make us build associations that we didn’t have previously. It’s why things like “SPANK HAIR - LICK EYES - WHISPER INTO ASS” are so funny.
If I start a sentence with “The toaster,” you’re probably going to expect something like, “the toasted fell off the counter,” or “the toasted exploded,” not “the toasted laughed” or “the toaster bled.” There are words we associate with animate things and words we associate with inanimate things, and mixing them up can lead to weird mental reactions. “The”+ constructions are a favorite, as are “the one(s).” “The laughing ones steal away the dreams of the hopeful and feast on the teeth of the indolent,” “There are no innocent in this place, for to gaze on the Ancient Ones is to know that innocence is a lie, that blood and fear and corruption are the engines of all that breathes.”īreak word associations. The latter sounds more planned out, more official, more normal. So “They laughed and writhed and screamed and died in the gaze of a smiling god,” but not *”They laughed, writhed, screamed, and died in the gaze of a smiling god.” This one’s variable, but I see the former more than the latter and to me it feels like it has more impact and is more visceral. If this makes them shorter than their modern counterparts, all the more effective.ĭon’t use commas with conjunctions, just string conjunctions together. “For” instead of “because,” “kin” for “family,” etc. Say “the blood of the fallen,” not “the fallen’s blood ” “the intestines of dawn” not “dawn’s intestines.” This is a less solid rule, and it’s still possible to have a powerfully creepy effect with the ‘s-construction, particularly if the construction comes sentence-finally: “They beat them with sticks around which were wrapped dawn’s intestines,” but “They wrapped the intestines of dawn around thick oaken sticks.” So using purple prose to describe your indescribable horrors can make them feel less real, where using everyday language helps connect the audience and make them feel more like there’s some grotesque violation of normalcy going on Purple prose has a serious abstracting effect, in that it draws the audience away from the action and makes it sound more like they’re listening to a story. Empurpling the narrative with gratuitous polysyllabisms and grandiose prose is actually wholly deleterious to the desired effect. One of the most important rules, and I think the one that might be the most surprising to a lot of people, is to use simple, mundane language. These are the rules I’ve sussed out, though: There are some very obvious patterns, as well as some subtle ones I’m not sure how to put into words.
What interests me though is that’s there’s a very distinct pattern and sort of grammar to how this Internet Horror-Speak (hereafter IHS) works, one I’ve been trying to work out for a while now. Heat from below and above, but all is cold betwixt. A heart not having what it needs to throb. A heart throbbing for what it cannot have.
Mayor Pamela Winchell The fences in the caves.
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