At least the kid and I do. Or will. Anyway.. First it started with the wife knitting Az a baby Cthulhu which peaked The Kid’s interest. A monster? What kind of monster, from what book, H.P. who? And so it began, the subtle and purposefully slow education of my son regarding the harrowing tales of Lovecraft. The topic resurfaced when the wife finished a giant version of the baby Cthulhu she’s made for me (it is about the size of a toddler, but twice as tasty *smacks greasy lips*). This time around I added some of the fun stories from my role playing days, a few Deep One tales, and introduced the concept of insanity and things too vast and too horrible for the mind to understand. Then fortune smiled its crooked toothy grin down on us when I purchased a Popular Science mag for The Kid at the airport before we headed off to North Carolina. The theme of the mag was colors and optical illusions and how the mind processes information. The Kid ate it up. And then he comes across this one article on the strangeness of colors and the article mentions the story, ‘The Colour Out of Space’. The Kid went round and round with the concept of a color you have never seen and couldn’t describe. How could such a thing exist? What would it look like? Why would it be horrible (considering that it is a horror story)? Off and on over the course of the next 4 days we probably talked about it for an hour or so. The hook, having been tantalizing close, even gnawed on a smidge was now firmly stuck in my son’s curious gob.
And now there might be a visual to go with all this reading fun. Del Toro (of ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ Fame)has supposedly signed on with Cameron to bring the ‘Mountains of Madness’ Lovecraft tale to life. In 3-D no less, then again what isn’t in 3-D now (look for ‘The Vagina Monologues’ to come to Imax early next year!)? I’m hoping this can be the first horror flick The Kid and I go to together.
As a father I have found that I don’t get many of these type of moments. I can’t tell you how happy I am that the kid is a reader, of his own volition, driven by his own newly minted manic need to find the next best story. That I can also steer his interest a bit towards various fictional oasis’s that hide amongst the staggering piles of pablum is icing on the cake. Good stuff.