Love, please don't bloom

Chapter 22

He didn't look back until he finally turned a corner and was hidden by the forsythia.

Strangely, just as A-Dong disappeared from Hua-Mei's sight, Hua-Mei suddenly felt everything go black and fell into darkness once again.

Child, don't wait anymore.

She rubbed her eyes, but it was still pitch black!

The sun, shining brightly, vanished in an instant; the blue sky vanished in an instant; the forsythia in full bloom vanished in an instant; the shimmering river in the distance vanished in an instant…

The night gave her black eyes, and her black eyes gave her the night.

This joke played by fate is too cruel.

She had experienced darkness, and this time, she appeared very calm.

Hua Meizi slowly stood up and walked towards her aunt's house.

The flame of hope in her heart had not been extinguished. She believed that since her eyesight had been restored for a brief moment today, it was very likely that she would be completely cured.

She's going to Beijing to get her eyes treated!

Even if she could never be cured, she was still filled with gratitude to God—after all, He had given her a sliver of light, allowing her to see her beloved one one last time!

Back at her aunt's house, Hua Meizi recounted what had happened.

My aunt's eyes widened suddenly!

Are you hallucinating?

“No, absolutely not,” Hua Meizi said.

Her aunt held her hand tightly and remained silent for a long time.

"Auntie, what's wrong?"

Auntie sighed and finally said, "Hua Meizi, it's a cloudy day today, the sky is full of dark clouds, and the sun hasn't shown its face since this morning!"

What? Hua Meizi was stunned.

"Moreover, the place you went to was a meadow, without a single forsythia flower. Also, the village was surrounded by farmland, and there wasn't a single river."

Raindrops were already hitting the window, making a "pitter-patter" sound.

Hua Meizi's heart curled up in the rain, like a homeless chick by the roadside.

The weather forecast says this rain will last for who knows how many days.

The sky has leaked again.

In the boundless darkness and desolation, Hua Meizi seemed to see the old shoemaker again. He pushed his little car to a stop in front of her and said, "Child, don't wait anymore, go home. He won't come back."

Zhou Dedong's terrorist career (1)

○ Fair

1. Let me think about what has ever scared me. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I read Sherlock Holmes and was terrified going upstairs in the dark at night. I always felt like someone was digging at me with a stove hook, or a claw would suddenly reach out from the wall and pull me in. But now I think it's hard to say what I was afraid of back then; maybe I was just afraid of the dark. After that, I don't have any memories of being scared. I'm the kind of person who's pretty brave; I often ask myself if I'm ready to die right now. These kinds of questions really test your courage.

In other words, I hadn't actually been prepared to be startled by anything for a long time, until someone told me that Zhou Dedong was writing a horror novel—I was terrified; I never imagined that Mr. Dongguo would eat the wolf.

2. I met Zhou Dedong around 1994. Initially, I didn't plan to be friends with him because I thought he was timid—I was a troublemaker, so I always preferred to hang out with those seemingly imposing, rough people. Also, I didn't like the essays he wrote back then, which were all about romance and nature. I heard that young girls admired him, which annoyed me, and maybe I was just jealous of him.

However, I found his later editorship of *Wenyou* (Literary Friends) quite impressive. I considered him a clever and creative writer; his editorials and commentaries were much better than his essays. I suppose he had his merits and a knack for getting back at people. Then I heard something else: Zhou Dedong "advocated" early romance in a magazine—or at least he seemed to be advocating it. I immediately saw him as one of my kind. I thought this guy had guts; anyone who makes hypocrites uneasy must have guts.

3. As mentioned earlier, I was initially frightened by Zhou Dedong's story about writing horror novels. We were having dinner near Ditan Park that day, and he told me he had originally planned to go to Beijing to work on another magazine, but that fell through. He'd already sold his home in Xi'an, so he simply decided to find a new path and become a novelist. To me, that was a terrifying story; I didn't have the guts to do what he did. So I realized a truth: if Mr. Dongguo (a character from Journey to the West) had a do-or-die attitude, he could have defeated the wolf.

Zhou Dedong chose to write horror novels—rather than romance novels—for two reasons, in my understanding: First, timid people are bound to have more inspiration for horror than daring people; second, Zhou Dedong knows that horror novels are a blank slate in China, and people have an eternal awe and curiosity about things in the dark, so if he does it well, he will surely gain both fame and fortune.

In any case, he has now filled the void, and it seems to be working well.

4. Opening Zhou Dedong's horror novel immediately reveals his style: a witty, quirky, and innocently ghostly atmosphere, with rather sinister ideas. I think Zhou Dedong's distinctive feature is that he's turned his novels into magazines; the stories are short, the language efficient, and easy to read, while maintaining a friendly and approachable tone, seemingly conveying his own experiences and fears. If you get drawn in, you're bound to be terrified.

Of all the horror novels of his that I've read, *Images in the Sky* is the most memorable. Beautiful and simple, it's like a collection of essays, without any contrived plots. The three stories within are particularly exquisite: the first depicts a hole constantly crawling out (producing) baby mice; the second tells of a wolf and a human's karmic retribution across lifetimes; and the third portrays a traveler's shock and contemplation at the crossroads of past and present. All three stories are, in fact, allegorical.

I think this can be used to define the tone of Zhou Dedong's horror works. Obviously, calling it a horror novel is problematic. The term "Night Stories" lacks individuality. I prefer to call it a horror folk song—it has a certain rhythm.

5. Later, he emailed me a piece he had written called "Midnight Program." As I read it, I was genuinely startled in the middle of the day in my office. Zhou Dedong's image transformed into tens of thousands of Chinese characters standing neatly together, giving me a cold laugh.

He amplified the anger of every insect, revealing a fashionable environmental consciousness at its core. For example, chicks can eat insects on their own, but human intervention—catching an insect to feed the chickens—becomes a disaster. The insect's revenge is to crawl all over your body, turning you into an insect yourself, or to burrow into your stomach, leaving you forever indigestible. This story possesses a sharp tension, expanding suspense from the smallest details, ultimately transforming a nightmare into the most ferocious roar of the most insignificant life—after reading it, you'll feel a thorn in your side, as if you've suddenly become a criminal—don't you have insect blood on your hands?

I've read several of Zhou Dedong's upcoming novels, and the horror is escalating; I feel he's starting to emphasize visual atmosphere. But when the horror becomes purely saccharine, that naivety is gone, leaving only imagination. Zhou Dedong is probably in a ghostly state now, able to scare people with anything he can find. For example, there's a "joke" in his upcoming series about a girl who goes to meet a poet she met online. She touches him, who is wearing an animal skin coat and hat, and realizes that the black fur isn't his outer garment, but rather part of his body—she's not touching a person! Reading this gave me a chill down my spine.

6. After thinking about it, I think that the horror in Zhou Dedong's work is actually a kind of packaging. So far, he still talks mostly about folk songs. He uses Gu Long-style language to quickly lead you into a state of mind. Once you succeed, just like Gu Long turns you into a great hero like Chu Liuxiang, he turns you into a child or an "idiot," and then tells you not to catch insects, not to bully others, not to be greedy and dissolute, otherwise everything will turn into a ghost because of you.

7. I don't know if horror novels should be like this. But obviously, this kind of thing cannot be judged solely by whether it is scary. Zhou Dedong's writing subjects are quite broad, and his writing efficiency is also quite high, but he basically has no predecessors to learn from or refer to. He can only explore on his own and make a name for himself.

I'm reminded of a very talented American bestselling author, known as the "King of Horror," Stephen King. His books not only sell incredibly well, but they're also a major resource for Hollywood films—movies adapted from his works have practically become a genre in themselves, such as *Misery*, *The Shining*, *The Green Mile*, and *Carrie*. These films not only contain horror elements but also explore humanistic concerns, psychoanalysis, and religious reflections. King is truly the first person, past and present, to write horror novels with such scale and weight.

Zhou Dedong's terrorist career (2)

Perhaps China needs a figure like that. Let's begin with Zhou Dedong and end with his slogan: "Carry terror through to the end." This might truly be a great undertaking.