October 4 - An Antidote For Strychnine

I mean, all of this is fiction. Even songs about real life are fictional in order to fit with the format of being a song. But this especially. It's a small odd fantasy pulp gem, someone in trouble who is trying all their usual sleuthing tricks to get out of it, and just not able to surmount the impossible, so trying new and odder things.

The re are bits at the start of this song that read just as easily as desperate attempted chemistry (which you can't get a Nobel prize for) or attempted magic (which i think gives you the literature Nobel), and it's in this tension and ambiguity that the song lives.

I always enjoy the just-fantasy and its cousin the just-real. Most fiction has a world outside our own, we just use different words for it. In spy fiction it's the security services (who are usually written like wizards). In romance it's The One True Love. In fantasy and science fiction and horror it's more obvious. But it's the edge cases I fins especially interesting. When you can see your bedroom from the wider world, or see a trace of the magical in your own mundane.

Or where you're desperately attempting a spell because something really bad happen and you know it's not going to work.

I should run more urban fantasy. Liminal would be fun. But when would I have the time?