Friday open thread: returning to stories and finding them changed

[dolorosa_12]

Happy Friday, everyone! This week's prompt is inspired by conversations I've been having with various people in the comments of one of my recent posts, about revisiting personally beloved or critically acclaimed stories years later, and being surprised by past perceptions. The specific story is an epic fantasy doorstopper from the 2000s which I adored when I first read it in my early twenties (I have distinct memories of sharing my copies with catpuccino when we were housemates, and spending hours feverishly speculating about potential plot developments; I think I also still have one of the pairings from the series listed as an 'interest' on Dreamwidth, a holdover from importing my profile from Livejournal close to fifteen years ago without much alteration). Rereading the whole thing after my mum shipped my book collection over from Australia, I was horrified by the numerous unfortunate implications in the book.

So my prompt is: tell me about similar experiences, in which you returned to a story after some time (it can be any work of fiction, not just a book), and experienced it very differently to the first time around.

The other big one for me recently (again sparked by rereading my old books) is the numerous 1980s and 1990s collections of eerie short stories for children/teenagers that felt mildly creepy when I read them at the intended age, and I found downright terrifying when rereading them as a thirtysomething adult. Their authors had an absolute gift for evoking an atmosphere that was uncanny and weird and quirky to a child, overlayed across truly unsettling and horrifying implications that are much more visible to an adult. And that particular experience is really making me want to track down a secondhand copy of Victor Kelleher's Del-Del, one of the most terrifying books I have ever read, which frightened me so much when I read it at fifteen or so that I was afraid to be alone in the house or go to sleep at night — and which I haven't read since. I'm curious if I would still find it as scary!

In any case, what about you?

Comments

[lirazel]

The first thing that comes to mind is my teenage love for the first three Dune books and how I tried to reread the first one when the movie adaptation came out a few years ago and I was like, "Wow, Herbert thinks this book is so deep and it's really just not." The pretentious and self-satisfied aura of it went right over my head as a kid but was enough to make me set it down after a few chapters as an adult.

The flip side of this is books that I didn't enjoy in my early teen years that I think I would appreciate a lot as an adult. I need to reread The Scarlet Letter and see if I still hate it--I bet I wouldn't!

(I'm super fascinated by your experience with finding books more scary as an adult. The written word doesn't scare me--it can hold me in suspense or appall me, but I just...don't get scared reading books.)

[dolorosa_12]

Those kinds of shifting tastes are really interesting, aren't they — in both directions. As you say, it takes having a deeper understanding of literature, knowledge of the world, and life experience, and then your response to a story is very, very different.

I saw you saying in another post that you've never been scared by the written word, and that's very understandable. For me (and this goes for visual horror as well), what is explicitly depicted is never, ever as terrifying as my own mind filling in the blanks and imagining things, so I'm quite capable of being made terrified by the written word, or by visual horror which takes place mostly off-screen.

[lirazel]

Oh, I am often scared of visual horror that's mostly suggestion and not actually depicted! Maybe it's the music or the silence onscreen that does it? For some reason, it just doesn't work in a written medium!