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Monday 1 October 2012

Headcases (4)

As you go on, a soft low beating drifts across the barren moors. You listen to the sound and it seems to form words – slay, slay slay… 

You look up to see four dark shapes swooping down through the mist towards you. The creatures attacking you are chonchons. These disembodied heads fly using their large veined ears as wings and attack by biting with their chisel-like teeth. 

If the flying heads of the Orient belong to the province of Dream, being either nightmarish (penanggalan) or surreal (nukekubi), those of South America are the creatures of Delirium. What else are we of make of an entity that flies by flapping its ears, the only warning of its approach being the soft beat of “tue, tue, tue” on the hot evening breeze?

Chonchons made an appearance in The Castle of Lost Souls (illustrated by Leo Hartas) and I could have sworn I originally came across them in the West Indian horror stories of the Reverend Henry S Whitehead. I even had an explanation of their origins, in a story that an African slave might tell his children of seeing an elephant’s head peering over the treetops in the dusk. The snag is, I can’t find anything about chonchons in Whitehead’s work now, nor any evidence that they originated outside the New World. And it was such a beautiful theory, too.

By one account, chonchons are sorcerers who treat their neck with a magic ointment so as to be able to detach their heads. Alternatively, they could be a sort of Chilean vampire, arising from the graves of suicides and flitting off in search of blood. In classical myth, vampires frequently took the form of owls (striges) to screech out omens of death, and most versions of the chonchon have them feathered and/or taloned, so possibly there’s a connection there.

Anyway, as I’ve said before, the beauty of folklore is precisely that it is an incoherent jumble of sources. You want taxonomy, go to a zoo. Fantasy is far stranger than that.

8 comments:

  1. All this talk of vampires and folklore makes me think of the years that Bram Stoker spent researching eastern European vampire legends before writing 'Dracula'. As lovely as the book is, it's in a way a shame that it's become so iconic as to homogenise the vampire - now pretty much every vampire story, from Buffy to The Lost Boys to your own Heroquest book, 'The Fellowship of Four', returns to the vampire as described by Stoker.

    That said, I suppose those original legends are all still out there if we, as readers, are inclined to go looking for them. And if they've been in any way digitised, we'll have a much easier time finding them than Stoker ever did.

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  2. Writers are going to have to start digging deeper now that the vampire trope has been so deracinated by things like Twilight and True Blood, which effectively turn them into faerie folk. Fortunately the roots of real nightmare go very, very far down, and we're sure to find something there that still has the power to give us a shudder.

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  3. I have to say that the combination of good writing and freedom of choice, with a touch of the macabre is what makes Fabled Lands so much spookier than Fighting Fantasy, if you investigate barrow at dusk you know you may be biting off more than you can chew, but not more than whatever lurks there can! I have a pet theory that Fabled Lands would be a great setting for a Killer Dungeon like the Tomb of Horrors or Grimtooth's Dungeon of Doom! But it would just be there for those foolhardy enough to try their luck.. Whilst I may not espouse their design philosophy in general it would be cool if there was something as unpleasant as that for the (fool)hardiest adventurers. Andy B

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    1. I think that's what the whole of Book 12 would have been, Andy.

      But wait - "spookier than Fighting Fantasy"??? Why didn't you just say "spookier than Alton Towers"?

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  4. Dave, I was talking about book twelve the other day, and my wife said that you know your character isn't going to survive there! Re FF .. :-) Folklore is a goldmine I saw a book on Japanese mythology yesterday! Andy B

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  5. Not many wives would score high enough on the nerdometer to know that. Mine couldn't even list the titles of the existing six FL books :-)

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    1. More geeky-by-proxy, we had a brief sojourn in each of the books as they came.. But my better half found it works better in electronic versions with the bookkeeping done for you! Andy B

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    2. I couldn't agree more, Andy. Gamebooks have surely been waiting all these years for ebooks to come along.

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