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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8809192" data-attributes="member: 85555">Keep in mind, the two things I am saying he may be coming to terms with internally are the possibility that he has inherited mental illness from his mother and his father, and perhaps a growing realization that he isn't physically well. I don't know that a writer writing a story like this and using that as fuel to make the sort of ending this story has is giving him a lot of credit. That is pretty much how writers function in my view. I'm also not saying this is fully conscious. I think there are other things going on the story, which again I don't think we can really get into. Well, I can see what you are saying, but I don't think that moment of beauty at all undermines the horror for the reader because there is still something very uneasy about that too. When I first read it when I was in highschool the beauty of it was something I completely missed for example, and it wasn't until later that it became more clear that there was beauty there and a kind of religious language. But even then, that is still an odd thing to feel after all the horrors leading up to that. To me that is a very Clive Barker thing, and I think he is very good at making horror that is both beautiful, even morally a lot more cloudy and unclear, while still frightening me as a reader. I suppose everyone is going to have different tastes though in terms of what they find scary. There is a point where you can go too far with things like beauty, comedy, romance, in a horror story and it stops being scary (but there is also a sweet spot where those things can enhance the horror).Also I am not saying one should take all alien horror and make it beautiful or misunderstood. I don't think that would add anything to the Xenomorphs for example (it might be an interesting political or social commentary but it wouldn't be especially scary I think). So I do take your point. Here though, this is more like a puzzling final passage in the story that makes me question everything I've read to that point.</blockquote>

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