I recently got a piece of flash fiction accepted by a literary magazine called Grim Corps. Specifically, my story was in their online flash fiction series. The story can be read here. (At least, it can be read there throughout the month of October. I'm not sure what will happen to that page when the October issue is no longer the most recent one. I'll find out and fix that link as necessary.)
The story is extremely short, but for those who can't or don't want to read it, it's about a family moving into a house and then noticing that something is rather...off. There's a doorknob that looks exactly like an oak leaf unless you're looking directly at it, there are whispering voices in the bathroom, there's an oven that plays the first few notes of "The Sound of Music" when the food is done. Basically, it's a bunch of small, surreal events that the family at first would like to get rid of but slowly adjusts to, treating them as perfectly normal things because, for them, this is normal. They come to get used to it and even like it, which they can do because, even though some of it is kind of creepy, they understand that it's okay because it is the way it is, and knowing that makes it less weird.
I'm dedicating a whole blog entry to this story because there's a bit of a story behind it, and it involves a podcast called Welcome to Night Vale.
Some of you reading this might know what Welcome to Night Vale is. For those of you who don't, it's a surreal comedy/horror podcast about a town called Night Vale, which is a very surreal place where bizarre, Lovecraftian things happen on a regular basis. Its format is that of an NPR-style radio program whose announcer reads off the daily news (with events like a mysterious glowing cloud appearing out of nowhere and joining the school's PTA or a five-headed dragon running for mayor) with a sense of mundanity that is either creepy or hilarious or both, depending on who you are.
The reason these surreal or horrifying events are treated so normally in Night Vale is because, for the people in Night Vale, things like that are normal. The weird is the everyday, and they never thought it was strange to begin with, or if they did, they quickly adjusted their worldview to match their circumstances.
Welcome to Night Vale was the first piece of fiction I really got into after my mother's death (which was, as of now, six months ago). A lot of strange things had been happening since her death - or, at least, things I considered strange, because my life simply hadn't contained those things before. I had previously been using references to and interest in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a coping tactic, since I interpreted that work of fiction as (intentionally or not) conveying the message, "Sometimes, weird and drastic things happen, and it plunges you into a series of weird events you weren't expecting and that you didn't necessarily want, but it happens, so get over it and embrace the absurdity of the universe."
Whenever I enjoy a piece of fiction and can tell it will become important to me, I say to myself, "Alright, what am I going to learn from this?" Because as soon as something becomes important to me, it can teach me things and I will listen. While my life isn't nearly as weird as life in Night Vale, it's still a series of events that, for rather a while, I considered strange and almost surreal. When I realized that the strange can become a part of one's everyday life and that one can come to consider almost anything as normal if one needs to, I figured out how to cope with my own life.
In some ways, what Welcome to Night Vale taught me was the opposite of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The message I got from Hitchhiker's was that of things suddenly changing and having to cope with it as a matter of adjusting to new things. The message I got from Night Vale was that of strange things being a way of life and not having to think about adjusting to them because maybe life was always like that and maybe it's just a different sort of normal after all.
Now, if you're familiar with Welcome to Night Vale, one would expect that I don't think the people of Night Vale should come to trust their surroundings, as they are unpredictable and frequently actually malevolent. This would be correct. Strangeness and unfamiliar events are perfectly fine, but there comes a point at which one should not naively trust the new developments to be safe.
If one is going to have to live with something, though, one may as well get used to it and accept it as not a strange development but a part of one's life, no different than any part of one's life that existed before and that one was used to. That was a life lesson I learned from a Lovecraftian humor podcast, and I thought I could retell it in a story about a haunted house that turns out to be not so much "haunted" as "just a bit uncommon".
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