If you strip away the Myth from the Man...

[jackofallgeeks]

Two-hundred eighty-eight pages in two days. For me, I devoured that book. I haven't read a book the way I did that one in a while, and it wasn't even a very good book -- not bad, but only two of the eight stories really caught me, maybe three -- but I guess it's just what I wanted to read. Truth Until Paradox, an anthology of eight stories based on Mage:The Ascension, my favored of the World of Darkness games. Alas, there were very few books written for the game (fiction books, I'm discounting the several dozen source books for the game), and the other one I have, Judgment Day, is based in the End of their world. Apocalyptic is nice, but... We'll see.

I did get some inspiration, though. And I think I might get started writing my own version of Gallin the Troll's story -- I have a few ideas I want to play around with, and a couple of them would behave considerably better on the Author's Desk than around the Gaming Table. So I may start writing that one.

I also have ambitions to re-write the events leading up to Dominiaria's Apocalypse -- Wizards of the Coast had some nice ideas in their game and even in the plot outline they had, but their novels were the young adult sort (I'm coming to greatly dislike that range of books), and I think I could do a better job of it.

And because I'm feeling really ambitious and creative-like, I think I may try to dig up my old project of writing a fiction based around Llyod-Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar." I'd started with taking notes and jotting down ideas for that one, getting the song lyrics (since the thing is very much like an opera -- almost nothing is said that isn't a lyric), and stuff and such.

So, yeah, four pretty disparate ideas for writing and such. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up my motivation enough to get anything rolling on these. After Judgment Day, I'm going to start that Lovecraft book, too, in the hopes that he really does have something of the genre I'm looking for. Or something.

Comments

[dikaiosunh.livejournal.com]

If you're interested in err... (restraining elitism)... more sophisticated fiction approaching some of the mystical/fantastical themes in stuff like the WoD novels, in addition to Lovecraft, you might want to check out some of the Magic Realist writers. Jorge Louis-Borges might be a bit more literarily 'meta' than what you're looking for (but I think you'd probably get a kick out of his "Three Versions of Judas," which is in the Collected Fictions) - but I think you'd find reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude pretty interesting.

Also, just in terms of the intersection between Christian myth and fantasy/science-fiction, Philip K. Dick explored a lot of this in his later work (especially in the "Valis Trilogy" - not a true trilogy, but thematically connected - of Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer; plus, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch) - and just so you don't think I'm sending you something too subversive, Dick was a devout Catholic (though perhaps a weird one) and wrote an anti-abortion short story (whose name escapes me at the moment... maybe "The Pre-Persons?").

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

I'll definitely have to check those out -- I've heard of One Hundred Years of Solitude. What do you mean by "Louis-Borges might be a bit more literarily 'meta' than what you're looking for," and how so?

[dikaiosunh.livejournal.com]

A lot of Borges' work is very much concerned with the text as text, playing with the literary medium, etc (e.g., one of my favorites, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", is a faux book review about a guy who is trying to re-write Don Quixote, and plays with the question of how much the meaning of a text is determined by context). But he also writes a lot on more theological themes - off the top of my head (OK, looking at the table of contents on Amazon), I'd probably suggest "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," (deals both with literary thematics and the idea of ritual/repetition), "The Secret Miracle," "Three Versions of Judas," "The Immortal," "Averroes' Search," and "The Zahir." I know there are more...

Also, if you haven't already read them, I think almost all of Umberto Eco's work might be up your alley - especially The Name of the Rose and Baudolino.

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Ah, that kinda meta -- actually, in a way unrelated to mythology of the World of Darkness, I might really like that. Particularly "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero."

The Name of the Rose sounds promising... My line up as of right now is to finish this WoD book I've started, then The Call of Cthulhu, Salem's Lot, and The Divine Comedy, then I'll figure what to tack on afterward.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I really appreciate them!

[dikaiosunh.livejournal.com]

Oh, and, of course, there's always the ur-example of the intersection between Christianity, the occult, and fantasy/myth: Dante's Divine Comedy.

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to read that book for ages now, but whenever I go to pick up books, that one always slips my mind. I'll need to make a concious effort to get it.