Ice Cream Man

PRINCE | MORAZZO | O’HALLORAN

You’re not supposed to learn from the stories you have to force yourself to read. At least, that’s how high school worked for me. But, this one has made be ponder.

I can spend hours in book stores. Choosing is a huge part of the fun but what I’m just realizing now is how much that internal debate becomes a part of the story of the book. Perhaps it’s just because I’m incredibly sentimental and attach a lot of feelings onto inanimate objects, but I can’t help it.

I know one doesn’t read in a vacuum; my current me feeds into my enjoyment of a particular story. I didn’t realize that it’s not just the story itself but the physical object outside which contributes. Looking for just the right book for the right time and bringing it home. If that precious chain is broken, something else is lost. That’s why it was so difficult these past two weeks. It’s not that I was in some kind of emotional cocoon (although yes), it’s that I had lost the thread of my connection with these books and it is irretrievable. It’s hard to think about how such things can truly and fully be lost; mortality is supposed to be something for the living, not the dead.

I have particularly high standards for horror as a genre, because I hate it. I think that getting scared at the fictional just lowers your threshold for being scared by reality and that leads to early death, in my opinion. If I’m going to indulge, you need to make it worth my time.

It didn’t matter that neither the illustration nor the dialogue were particularly fantastic, I didn’t need them anyway. The ideas were spectacular and it was like they were instantaneously communicated into my brain. There were some clumsy moments, but in terms of wasting my time, this book certainly didn’t.

The themes were what got me. The horror comes partially from the creepy or the deranged but, mostly, the themes were the real horrors in life: addiction, fading into insignificance, and those creeping thoughts in the back of your mind that tell you to run when you’re scared. I liked it and I appreciated it.

The sensation of irretrievably losing something oddly strengthened my appreciation of this book. I’m still traumatized, but sometimes that helps.