“To the past” – Ch. Link, Wolf Creek

“If you hang on to the past, you die a little every day… and for myself I know I’d rather live.”
Cape Fear

It was not the Ch. Link audiobook I mentioned earlier but ‘The Echo Of Guilt’ that I’ve listened to today and it’s cool. I’ve enjoyed quite a few audio versions of her stories and all were quite good. Thrilling, with a certain depth and little surprises that give the storyline a new twist every now and then, and Link has a solid hand for the psychological development of her characters. And the choice of voices who read those books are fine too, usually female voices with a hint of roughness. Slightly breathy but strong.

My favourite situation for audiobooks are long lonely drives, especially by car. As I’m at least a halfway ecologically responsible person and as gas gets more and more expensive too this pleasure gets ever rarer. Walking while listening isn’t the same but okaaay…
Today my walk took me along an old half-forgotten canal with lots of water lillies. Quite nice. To my surprise no insect bit me, even the wasp I saw gave me a wide berth. I might check out that nature thing again sometime.

Writing this brought to my mind when I last listened to one of those audiobooks. It was when I drove home from the indie festival at the E-Werk in Erlangen two weeks ago. I had a really nice afternoon there. I had the pleasure of watching WHY? play an excellent show (although they get more and more indie-indie and I miss the Anticon-style traces of experimental hiphop. That’s why I was looking forward to SUBTLE coming on tour again this autumn but they have cancelled it. I don’t know why.) Well, it was nice to listen to bands and hang around with friends, chatting, and I drank Radler for the first time this summer. Is shandy the English word for it? Beer and lemonade?
When it slowly got dark I drove home alone. It was just a half an hour drive but somehow the sudden impression of darkness and being lonely and reduced to listening to that part of the story – it was a total kick in the guts. I haven’t had such a sudden change of mood in quite a while.
The chapter of the story was about a woman who tried to hide from a man from her past who had beaten her up and on whom she had been submissively dependend before she managed to get away, take on a new personality and live on her own in another part of the country for a couple of years. At that point in the story you, the reader, are made to think she’s a bit hysterical and overanxious to think that guy might still be after her. That’s why it hits you even harder when you realize it’s really that guy again and he’s after her with uncompromising nothing-left-to-lose anger and aggression.
I can’t say if it the story was really written that good or if it was just me being touchy but its description of a blindness of fury that can’t be breached by gestures nor words, and also the woman’s helplessness and immobility – it really got to me.
It was like a big wave of sadness and anger rushing through me cause it sounded so familiar. I hate getting it rubbed in my face again and again and again over the years that I’m not really done with my past. It’s sick how deep family problems from your childhood can be stuck somewhere inside you. No matter how deep down your throat you shove them you never know when they will come strolling around the corner again with a mean sneer on their face that reminds you who’s the boss and suddenly you feel like you’re right there again, all small and curled up in a corner. It seems weird to write about things like that because I don’t want to sound like some constantly complaining victim cliche cause there are too many people who went through much worse stuff than me and still manage to handle it.

Anyway, that night my way of dealing with it was watching gloomy horror movies on TV, Dark Water and The Descent, so I at least got a here-and-now-reason to be filled with fear. It kind of helped.

The weekend after I also watched one of those films and that was quality! I’d like to recommend: WOLF CREEK by Greg McLean. Scared the shit out of me. It’s rather brutal but not half as obsessed with showing torture as for example Hostel. Hostel just made me angry at the movie, not scared. Wolf Creek is not about the sadism. If I remember it correctly it never gives you the point of view of the attacker. It’s more about fear and it’s good in playing with fear by taking you very close to the perspectives of the victims as long as they run desorientedly into the remote Australian Outback or as they fight or hide breathing heavily. Only when they get killed that perspective shifts a few more steps away. This somehow makes it more a story about the fear and the effort to escape than a story about the torturing and the killing. At least it seemed so to me.
I have to say that movie really killed any kind of rough charm the wide open Australian landscape ever had for me. No way that anything ever will get me there.

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