Misty Water

Author: Li Yi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: The cover features two big-headed, naive dolls—a boy and a girl—holding hands. Their lifeless, fish-like eyes are painted bright red with crayons, resembling spilled blood. Next to them, there's a car-shaped object that challenges your psychological limits, shocking your brain! Ghosts really exist in this world, no scientific verification needed. Because they are hidden in people's hearts! From a psychological perspective, horror refers to a highly anxious mental state experienced when a person faces threats of death, madness, or the like. In the broader sense of literature, any work depicting such a psychological state can be called horror literature. However, as another wave of popular literary reading following martial arts and romance, horror novels clearly refer to a narrow genre. Another source of horror novels, I believe, is detective fiction. The fundamental aesthetic characteristics of detective fiction—suspense, excitement, and entertainment—are undoubtedly also aesthetic traits of horror novels. In fact, some horror novels follow basic plot patterns that borrow from the classic "raising questions" and "answering questions" model of detective fiction.
In today's Chinese popular culture market, the prospects for horror novels are not optimistic, or to say, the contemporary Chinese horror novel reading market is still in a nurturing stage. A simple fact is that it's hard to name influential domestic horror novel writers and works. The three young writers—Li Yi, Mai Jie, and Liao Liao—have the ambition to cultivate and sow in this unfamiliar land and have already reaped initial fruits. With this pioneer-like courage and perseverance, their efforts deeply moved me. Mai Jie and Liao Liao's novels often draw heavily on the prototype of "strange tale stories." Real-life events in society are replaced by some virtual supernatural elements, depicting absurd and bizarre horror experiences while revealing the evil nature of people with pathological traits. For example, Mai Jie's Day and Night, Hair of Insects, and Liao Liao's Ghost Village. In some of their works, imagination and strange tales play a significant role. Of course, how to set up mysterious, suspenseful plots that resonate with the reading psychology of contemporary Chinese people and reach the artistic shore of soul-shattering fear is, in fact, a topic that all aspiring horror novel writers must face.