Demo #1-6 by Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan, available from AiT Planet Lar.
So what do you think--is every passport out of hell a mnemonic forgery? And are the people we knew back in the "old country" the only customs officers we can count on to catch us for our own good? I guess it's pretty clear from the way I've phrased this where I stand.
In Demo #6, we meet a man who seems to have gotten off scot-free. He slaughters his entire neighborhood and somehow manages to look back on the incident as if it were a triumph of personal restraint! This is what Hawthorne would call "turning the affair into a ballad". How does he manage that? Well, he's "starting a new life" with a woman who doesn't know anything about his past, and he aims to keep things that way. It's easy to build a paradise upon even the most hellish foundations, if you don't share the groundplan with anyone. But the thing is--"paradise" is always a place of solitary confinement. You just build the walls high against "the structure"/"fate"/"evil"/whatever and you rejoice in your own sainthood. Of course, I'm not sure how much good it does anyone to be a landlocked Swaziland of love surrounded by a sickening world of hate. You haven't really "come to terms" with the world's imperfection until you've declared yourself a citizen of hell by accepting the fact that you are just as responsible for its horrors as anyone else. Darkling I Listen is (partly) about a guy who takes an inordinately long time to realize that, when you make a person you love cry, it's not "society's" fault, it's yours. I would assume that goes at least double for mass-murder! And man, if you aren't willing to look your past victims in the eye--just don't bother looking at all, because the objects back there are much farther away than they seem, unless you have the benefit of another person's perspective to help you find the range.
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