Delcat Delcat (delcat) wrote in spork_squad, @ 2010-04-22 03:59:00 |
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Current mood: | uncomfortable |
Current music: | Barenaked Ladies--Spider in My Room |
Entry tags: | cirque du freak, delcat, fetish overtones, pedobear approved, review-style snark, solo snark, someone got paid for this shit, text snark, the darren shan snark saga, the idiot ball, worksafe for once |
THE DARREN SHAN SNARK SAGA: PART 1-2
EDIT 4/23/2010: Images should now be working--thanks to yorokobi for pointing out my dumbassery!
ORIGINAL POST BY DELCAT (on her personal journal), 8/20/2009.
Hey, this song is like a theme for our hero or something.
A whisper drizzled down from the ice in its eyes
It said: "Try pickin' on your own damn size"
But the Hoover was quick, termination complete
In its bedroom home, not a chance to eat
Anyway.
When we last saw our heroes, they were about to enter the theatre and...actually, that's about it, really. Hasn't been exactly action-packed so far. WILL THAT CHANGE???
We started to walk. There was a light down by the other end, so the farther in we got, the brighter it
became. I was glad for that. I don't think I could have made it otherwise: it would have been too scary!
The walls were scratched and scribbled on, and bits of the ceiling were flaky. It was a creepy place. It
would have been bad enough in the middle of the day, but this was ten o'clock, only two hours away
from midnight!
"There's a door here," Steve said and stopped. He pushed it ajar and it creaked loudly. I almost turned
and ran. It sounded like the lid of a coffin being tugged open!
No, they're just going to end every paragraph with an exclamation point to create that illusion. Great.
"Can I help you boys?" somebody said behind us, and we nearly jumped out of our skins!
We turned around quickly and the tallest man in the world was standing there, glaring down on us as if
we were a couple of rats. He was so tall, his head almost touched the ceiling. He had huge bony hands
and eyes that were so dark, they looked like two black coals stuck in the middle of his face.
Ah, youth. I remember the days when I would read a paragraph like that, and instead of thinking, "Jeez, that's bad biology, he must have terrible heart problems if he's as big as all that," I'd just think, "Really, book? The tallest man in the world? Eyes like two black coals? I bet you were coolest dude at the Weebalos bonfire with prose like that."
...yeah, I never really had days when I would read a paragraph like that and think, "OH MY GOD THAT'S THE CREEPIEST THING EVER". It was kind of telling of my future here.
Turns out that Mr. Tall (no, really, that's actually his name) is the ringleader (no, really, that's actually his job) of this little operation. He also--omfg!--knows Darren's name. Because we've NEVER seen that ominous plot device before. In reality, he's not psychic, he was just informed beforehand that the protagonist was going to be dropping by and to take what chances he could to mess with the little bastard.
Finally, the promised freak show gets underway.
Somewhere high up in the theater, someone switched on a green light and the stage lit up. It looked
eerie! For about a minute nothing else happened. Then two men came out, pulling a cage. It was on
wheels and covered with what looked like a huge bearskin rug. When they got to the middle of the stage
they stopped, dropped the ropes, and ran back into the wings.
For a few seconds more silence. Then the trumpets blew again, three short blasts. The rug came flying
off the cage and the first freak was revealed.
That was when the screaming began.
Mr. Tall: Ladies and gentlemen, David Gonterman...NAKED!
Darren: OH SWEET BABY JEEBUS MAKE IT STOP
Gonterman: C...Clinton jobs? :<
Actually, the first freak is just a wolf-man in a cage, undoubtedly caught on his way to Anthrocon '09. Mr. Tall tells the crowd that screaming is how bitches get stitches around freaks and to cut that shit out, yo, then gives a rousing introduction. If introducing the acts in a whisper because they're frightening enough without yelling seems kind of cool, it is. It's also entirely not in the book. Japan, you are trying so hard to redeem this and you are going to be nothing but hurt in the end.
The wolf is walked around the theatre by a pair of hypnotists who again warn that loud noises could have dire consequences, because we haven't had any foreshadowing in at least two pages. Darren shows a rare bit of intelligence by not wanting to get near the befanged, muscular, and terminally unstable monster, but Steve can't resist the urge to pet teh woofie:
The ladies stayed by his side and warned people to be quiet. They let you stroke him if you wanted, but
you had to do it gently. Steve rubbed him when he went by but I was afraid he might wake up and bite
me, so I didn't.
"What did it feel like?" I asked, as quietly as I could.
"It was spiky," Steve replied, "like a hedgehog." He lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed. "It smells
strange, too, like burning rubber."
Oh, fuck me, it really is a furry. A furry left on the stove too long.
Of course, someone inevitably fucks it up--I mean, uh, shockingly, someone violates the rules and dire consequences occur!
The wolf-man and ladies were about halfway down the rows of seats when there was a big BANG! I
don't know what made the noise, but suddenly the wolf-man began roaring and he shoved the ladies
away from him.
People screamed and those nearest him leaped from their seats and ran. One woman wasn't quick
enough, and the wolf-man leaped on her and dragged her to the ground. She was screaming at the top of
her lungs, but nobody tried to help her. He rolled her over onto her back and bared his teeth. She stuck a
hand up to push him away, but he got his teeth on it and bit it off!
Wolf-Man: RAAAARGH, WOLF-MAN CREATIONIST! THEORY OF SPONTANEOUS CREATION OF UNIVERSE BAAAAAAD!
Miss Stumpy: Gawd, you just cannot reason with these people.
Naturally, the manga amps up the violence a bit, although I can't help but wish they had commissioned the mangaka from Gantz or Battle Royale for maximum dismemberment potential. You know, for kids! Mr. Tall goes and ruins the fun, though, having his midget troupe magically stitch the limb back on as good as new. I realize the entire thing was probably a set-up for teh lulz, but really, this is what we're teaching our kids? It's okay to disobey rules that'll get your limbs hacked off, because adults will fix everything once you've learned your lesson? This series seems hell-bent on raising the next generation of Darwin Award winners. And when the lady's husband protests, he's reprimanded for showing survival instincts:
"You will be okay," Mr. Tall told her. "The stitches will fall out after a couple of days. It will be fine after
that."
"Maybe that's not good enough!" someone shouted, and a big red-faced man stepped forward. "I'm her
husband," he said, "and I say we should go to a doctor and then the police! You can't let a wild animal like that out into a crowd! What if he'd bitten her head off?"
"Then she would be dead," Mr. Tall said calmly.
"Listen, buster," the husband began, but Mr. Tall interrupted.
"Tell me, sir," Mr. Tall said, "where were you when the wolf-man was attacking?"
"Me?" the man asked.
"Yes," Mr. Tall said. "You are her husband. You were sitting beside her when the beast escaped. Why
did you not leap to her rescue?"
"Well, I … There was no time … I couldn't … I wasn't …"
No matter what he said, the husband couldn't win, because there was only one true answer: he had been
running away, looking after himself.
Because, y'know, it's the husband's job to look after the weak, mewling womenfolk, and because trying to attack an insane furry thing three times his size wouldn't have potentially made things worse.
Mr. Tall yells at everyone to keep quiet again, reiterating that he can't guarantee anyone's safety and that this is why they have to perform in abandoned theatres in the middle of the night. Poor guy, toured without a problem for five hundred years and then the lawsuit was invented. Meanwhile, Steve is rolling around in the blood and pleasuring himself furiously, screaming rhapsodious hymns to his dark lord Satan...okay, maybe not, but cripes, he might as well be.
"Do you want to go?" I asked Steve, half-hoping he'd say yes. I was excited but scared as well.
"Are you crazy?" he said. "This is great! You don't want to go, do you?"
"No way," I lied, and slapped on a shaky little smile.
If only I hadn't been so scared of looking like a coward! I could have left and everything would have
been fine. But no, I had to act like a big man and sit it out to the end. If you only knew how many times
I've wished since then that I'd fled with all the speed in my body and never looked back…
As a side note, I'd like you to note down all these little asides that suggest the shit that's going to happen to Darren happens by chance and fate and all that fun stuff. Don't ask why, just do it, mmkay? Thanks.
The freaks begin their parade, and the midgets hand out Vicodin to diligent worldbuilders in the crowd to soothe their aching biologies. There's a skeleton man/contortionist with "bones like rubber that can bend every which way" and twist his body around itself five times "like a curly-wurly straw!", which is nice because you'd think someone with rubber bones would be unable to stand upright, much less do tricks, especially given the likelihood of their sustaining terminal head injuries without a solid skull. There's a fat man/geek named Rhamus Twobellies who was born with two stomachs, which allow him to eat two full carts of food in five minutes and eat glass instead of dangerously compressing his other internal organs and causing severe complications to the rest of his digestive system, which is odd because not even the cows he cites as being like him can do that. Look, I'm honestly sorry, I know it's supposed to be whimsical, but you could at least pretend to give a tin shit about how your story actually works.
There's a break for the midgets to hawk candy and toys, and Steve tries to figure out if they're human, probably as confused as the rest of us are as to whether the author is playing the freak schtick straight or crying A Wizard Did It. Darren buys some wolf hair and notices it smells like Cheetos, yiff, dark basements, and shame (protip: yiff and shame smell exactly alike). Once they've milked the crowd enough, the show resumes with a bearded lady with a gimmick--instead of starting with a beard, she can grow a beard at will.
The beard continued growing as she walked, until finally it reached down to her feet! When she arrived
at the rear of the theater, she turned and walked back to the stage. Even though there was no breeze, her
hair blew about wildly, tickling people's faces as she passed.
When she was back on the stage, Mr. Tall asked if anybody had a pair of scissors. Lots of women did.
Mr. Tall invited a few up.
"The Cirque Du Freak will give one solid bar of gold to anyone who can slice off Truska's beard," he
said, and held up a small yellow piece of metal to show he wasn't joking.
That got a lot of people excited and for ten minutes nearly everybody in the theater tried cutting off her
beard. But they couldn't! Nothing could cut through the bearded lady's hair, not even a pair of garden
shears that Mr. Tall handed out. The funny thing was, it still felt soft, just like ordinary hair!
*sigh* I give up. I give up to the whimsy. OH THAT IS SO COOL AND MAGICAL DUDE, AWESOMESAUCE. Also, why the hell do "lots" of women have pairs of scissors? I've never heard of a woman randomly carrying around scissors in my life. I guess maybe he's talking about those crappy little flimsy pairs they have in miniature sewing kits, but maybe one woman in fifty carries those, and that's old women at that. I know I'm about as ungirly as you can get, so maybe I'm missing something, but THIS IS BUGGING THE SHIT OUT OF ME. Lady readers, can you confirm?
The next act is Hans Hands, who can move faster walking on his hands than his feet (finally, an act I have no qualms with), and then, with a sigh and a quick fumble for the ashtray, the plot returns from its smoke break.
When it was quiet enough, Mr. Tall walked off the stage. He shouted out the name of the next freak as
he went, but it was a soft shout: "Mr. Crepsley and Madam Octa!"
The lights went down low and a creepy-looking man walked onto the stage. He was tall and thin, with
very white skin and only a small crop of orange hair on the top of his head. He had a large scar running
down his left cheek. It reached to his lips and made it look like his mouth was stretching up the side of his
face.
He was dressed in dark-red clothes and carried a small wooden cage, which he put on a table. When he
was set, he turned and faced us. He bowed and smiled. He looked even scarier when he smiled, like a
crazy clown in a horror movie I once saw! Then he started to explain about the act.
Y'know, in the last update, I said there was only one character I liked, and it's not him, but I'll admit I'm kind of fond of Crepsley. This is because he is an absolute douche to Darren. Also, the manga bishing him up doesn't hurt. And "Crepsley" is a fun word to say. But my desperate grasping-at-straws enjoyment more or less ends there. Oh, and Steve is freaking out in the book as well as in that picture, with Darren noting that "He looks like he's seen a ghost!" because we're running out of cliches for the chapters to end on. In reality, he probably just owes him money.
"IT IS NOT TRUE that all tarantulas are poisonous," Mr. Crepsley said. He had a deep voice. I managed
to tear my eyes away from Steve and trained them on the stage. "Most are as harmless as the spiders you
find anywhere in the world. And those which are poisonous normally only have enough poison in them to
kill very small creatures.
"But some are deadly!" he went on. "Some can kill a man with one bite. They are rare, and only found in
extremely remote areas, but they do exist.
"I have one such spider," he said and opened the door of the cage. For a few seconds nothing
happened, but then the largest spider I had ever seen crawled out. It was green and purple and red, with
long hairy legs and a big fat body. I wasn't afraid of spiders, but this one looked terrifying.
Actually, all tarantulas are poisonous, as well as all spiders. Without poison, they would have no way to digest their food and quickly die out. Presumably he means poisonous to humans, which is true of almost all spiders--even brown recluse bites are only deadly over the course of several days and if untreated, although black widow bites are decidedly more dire. Moreover, these renowned one-bite killers are generally found in populated areas, which is what earns them their reputation as killers, as deadly spiders in remote areas are more likely to live peaceful, undiscovered lives except for a few brief and exciting moments with the odd explorer. And tarantulas in particular aren't that dangerous, having less potent venom than their smaller cousins such as the brown recluse and black widow; they're simply very large, which means they're scarier, but can get the job done just as efficiently with a large dose of less deadly poison. Of course, presumably this is an as-of-yet undiscovered spider, and given that she's covered in bright warning colors, I'm willing to cede that she may be a new strain of extremely evolved and efficient spider, a spider ubermensch, if you will.
...at which point everyone else in the audience is staring at me and the gay magician midgets are hinting that the wolf-man particularly likes the arms of overly helpful biologists.
Oh yeah, I did say "she". This is that character I was talking about. Madam Octa rules all of your asses on virtue of being a crawly-bug. Arachnid. Thing. Bey-otch. She's also more competently drawn than most of the people in the manga. Aw, look, she's smiling!
Anyway, a goat is brought out and, at a few notes from Crepsley's flute, Madam Octa does do the voodoo that she do so well on it.
The goat froze and its eyes went wide. It stopped bleating and, a few seconds later, toppled over. I
thought it was dead, but then realized it was still breathing.
"This flute is how I control Madam Octa," Mr. Crepsley said, and I looked away from the fallen goat.
He waved the flute slowly above his head. "Though we have been together such a long time, she is not a
pet, and would surely kill me if I ever lost it.
"The goat is paralyzed," he said. "I have trained Madam Octa not to kill outright with her first bite. The
goat would die in the end, if we left it there is no cure for Madam Octa's bite but we shall finish it
quickly." He blew on the flute and Madam Octa moved up the goat's neck until she was standing on its
ear. She bared her fangs again and bit. The goat shivered, then went totally still.
Crepsley: Excuse, me, sir?
Plot: Yeah, whaddyawant?
Crepsley: We have an order of foreshadowing here. Shall we put it in the back?
Plot: Yeah, back up the truck, we've got a troupe of midgets with pitchforks to unload.
Midget: But it smells so bad!
The act goes on, with some lovely arachnid acrobatics.
Then, as she made an upward swing, Mr. Crepsley threw his head back and she went flying straight up
into the air. The thread snapped and she tumbled around and around. I watched her go up, then come
down. I thought she'd land on the floor or the table, but she didn't. Instead, she landed in Mr. Crepsley's
mouth!
I nearly got sick when I thought of Madam Octa sliding down his throat and into his belly. I was sure
she'd bite him and kill him. But the spider was a lot smarter than I knew. As she was falling, she'd stuck
her legs out and they had caught on his lips.
He brought his head forward, so we could see his face. His mouth was wide open and Madam Octa
was hanging between his lips. Her body throbbed in and out of his mouth and she looked like a balloon
that he was blowing up and letting the air out of.
I wondered where the flute was and how he was going to control the spider now. Then Mr. Tall
appeared with another flute. He couldn't play as well as Mr. Crepsley, but he was good enough to make
Madam Octa take notice. She listened, then moved from one side of Mr. Crepsley's mouth to the other.
I didn't know what she was doing at first, so I craned my neck to see. When I saw the bits of white on
Mr. Crepsley's lips I understood: she was spinning a web!
When she was finished, she lowered herself from his chin, like she had before. There was a large web
spun across Mr. Crepsley's mouth. He began chewing and licking the web! He ate the whole thing, then
rubbed his belly (being careful not to hit Madam Octa) and said, "Delicious. Nothing tastier than fresh
spiderwebs. They are a treat where I come from."
I try to avoid overly long quotes, but dang. The manga is slightly less fetishistic, and given Japan, that's saying something.
Creepy subtext aside, Darren decides Madam Octa is the ultimate pet and wishes he could have her for his very own, and Steve catches on fire or something. But it's not Crepsley's act getting his obvious evil in a bunch, it's Crepsley himself.
"You don't understand," Steve said angrily. "You don't know who he really is."
"And you do?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, "as a matter of fact I do." He rubbed his chin and started looking worried again. "I just
hope he doesn't know I know. If he does, we might never make it out of here alive…"
I may have been exaggerating about running out of ellipsis-ridden chapter-enders.
The manga wisely ends the freakshow here, sensing a natural place to move the plot along, but the author decides it would be a good idea to keep dragging along. Next is Gertha Teeth who has indestructible, you guessed it, toenails. Darren notes that she shouts and every sentence ends in "an exclamation mark(!)." Because, y'know, if kids are reading this, they're old enough for the violence, but punctuation is a more adult issue and must be carefully explained via parentheses (which is kind of odd because they're also punctuation (see what I did here?).). Then comes another pair of contortionists, then Mr. Tall announces the show is over, because freakshows routinely end on a dull note. SURPRISE THERE'S A SNAKEBOY IN THE RAFTERS. A thirteen-year-old snake-scaled boy "wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else" with a giant snake and...oy, here we go again.
When he was close enough he reached out and tickled the
snake beneath its chin with his weird webbed fingers. Then he bent forward and kissed it on the nose!
The snake wrapped itself around the boy's neck. It coiled about him a couple of times, leaving its tail draped over his shoulder and down his back like a scarf.
The boy stroked the snake and smiled. I thought he was going to walk through the crowd, letting the rest
of us rub it, but he didn't. Instead he walked over to the side of the theater, away from the path to the
door. He unwrapped the snake and put it down on the floor, then tickled it under its chin once more.
The mouth opened wide this time, and I saw its fangs. The snake-boy lay down on his back a short
distance away from the snake, then began wriggling toward it!
"No," I said softly to myself. "Surely he's not going to …"
But yes, he stuck his head in the snake's wide-open mouth!
Look, I...can we just stop with the venomous things in people's mouths already? I wasn't comfortable with it the first time and I'm not comfortable with it now. And the stroking and kissing and wrapping and rubbing and half-naked...and...just stop it. I swear to God. There are kids reading this.
After the vore encore, the show really is over, but Steve doesn't want to go back. Instead, he tells Darren to go home and runs backstage. Darren notes that he sounded like "he'd go crazy if I didn't obey him", that he's seen Steve "get into fierce rages" and that he isn't "someone you want to mess with when he's angry". So, of course, he goes running after him. That's our Hoovering hero! He climbs into the balcony and watches Steve confront Crepsley onstage.
"I saw you watching me," Mr. Crepsley said. "You gasped aloud when you first saw me. Why?"
"B-b-b-because I kn-kn-know who you a-are," Steve stuttered, finding his voice.
"I am Larten Crepsley," the creepy-looking man said.
"No," Steve replied. "I know who you really are."
"Oh?" Mr. Crepsley smiled, but there was no humor in it. "Tell me, little boy," he sneered, "who am I,
really ?"
"Your real name is Vur Horston," Steve said, and Mr. Crepsley's jaw dropped in astonishment. And
then Steve said something else, and my jaw dropped, too.
"You're a vampire," he said, and the silence that followed was as long as it was terrifying.
So...like, two milliseconds, then?
Next time: Steve makes an ultimatum, Crepsley fails to care, and Darren steals the Idiot Ball and runs for the goal.
As a side note, there's a wolf spider the size of a fifty-cent piece on the floor as I'm posting this. Considering swallowing it. I read it in a book, it's GOT to be a good idea, right?