Just a Bunch of Links, and Evil Deer
More stops on this month’s Locksmith’s War Virtual Blog Tour:
September 12: Splashes of Joy
September 13: Gina Rae Mitchell
September 13: The Faerie Review
September 14: Hope. Dreams. LIfe... Love
September 15: The Avid Reader
September 15: Sandra's Book Club
September 16: Fabulous and Brunette
If you follow the link for The Avid Reader, you may see a warning sign of sensitive comment. Ignore it. There’s no porn or anything there. I checked. I missed the first season of whatever drama this is, but it seems that somehow this particular blogger has acquired an enemy who among other things tags every single image on her Twitter posts as “potentially sensitive” and has convinced Facebook that her blog is a spam site, which meant I had to get kinda creative when linking to it from my own Facebook page. Imagine knowing that the only mark you would ever make in this world would be as a book blogger’s arch-nemesis. Even I think that’s depressing, and I’m the guy who was ticked pink when one of his Twitter posts got over 80 likes.
Speaking of which, here are some more weeks when my Twitter microfiction made it into the Aethereal Engineer blog:
“Just”
“Fall”
“Quarter”
“Ash”
“Intrigue”
“Widget”
“Engage”
“Number"
"Short"
"Object”
“Leave”
“Transfer”
"Suspect"
“Record”
I was going to talk about the latest updates to The Dead Skunk, but I think I’ve already given you much more reading material than you want. I’ll save it for next week.
Okay, one weird thought before I end this post: If you were to make a list of all the animals normally associated with horror—spiders, snakes, sharks, bats, wolves, bears, rats, centipedes—deer would be pretty far down on that list. And yet the SCP Foundation and the horror podcasts Welcome to Night Vale and Old Gods of Appalachia (yes, I’ve become a fan) have all brought us powerful, scary, and sometimes evil deer-themed gods.
I suppose this makes sense. Ammit the Devourer of Souls, the most terrifying monster in Egyptian mythology, was an amalgam of lion (or leopard), crocodile, and hippopotamus—the three most dangerous animals the Egyptians knew of. On average, about 200 Americans die every year from deer/vehicle collisions. Sharks, bears, spiders, and poisonous snakes put together don’t come close to that body count. And on a personal note, when you drive down rural backroads at night and see them lurking by the side of the road with their eyes shining in your headlights and you slow down and wait to see if they’ll rush out in front of your car or just charge it head-on (again)… yeah, definitely a fear factor there. The fact that they aren't predators stalking you with deliberate intent, just large prey animals with wires crossed in their little deer brains (maybe they mistake the light and noise of a moving vehicle for lightning and thunder, which would temporarily blind and deafen any predator and make it safe to move? IDK) makes it worse. Predators are like the Devil in Christianity, actively seeking out victims. Deer are more of a Lovecraftian horror, crashing into you and self-destructing with all the blind indifference of the cosmos.
