Sometime it’s worth journaling random things you feel because like stolen spoonfuls of sugar, they become yesterdays mischief melting away into a dull mix of memories, indistinct and nothing special.

Yesterday it was re-reading The God of Small Things after reading the two of the most awful Stephen King novels I’ve ever come across. The first was Joyland and the second was Dr. Sleep. Joyland had everything it needed to be great on paper but by the time I got around to Dr. Sleep I realized that both books were draining any desire to read right out of me.

A thriller and a squeal horror that bores and numbs the senses, how could books do these things to me?

They felt too white, too far, too alien and the language speaking to people I didn’t know or didn’t want to be. No I don’t want any more sappy feel good relationships hounded by some personal milquetoast tragedy that thinks itself a bitter sweet ending. It’s to cliche, it’s too mediocre in the challenge it offers it’s readers. It plays itself in small stories, never daring to go beyond the little troupe of actors who exist for this story.

Real horror is seeing the villains, the heroes the victims and tragedies as something you remember, something next door, something playing out while a neighbor’s house is filled with thuds.

Impending doom, the weight of history and a sense of impotent helplessness, as you watch some tragedy you know is real, bear down mercilessly, leaving empty shells where there were people- now that’s scary, a good story because it’s macabre in a real intangible way.

I was never any one of Roy’s characters either, but there’s something in the echo’s of familiarity, the language and fears that resonate.

By the end of the God of Small Things I felt, I really felt, like I’d received a literary punch, a screaming vortex of emotions that kept me hooked and running just like the first time I read it. Some primordial urge to scream, some function of the Freudian Super Ego urging me to discuss it at length. I thought it was nice to have a book make me feel this way and tracked the hours, seeing how long this feeling would last me.

It took about 4 hours and an argument with some idiot on the internet to send the feelings away, but it ripples. And some times it can crash into you with a force you thought old things can’t have.