““Pretty Nynaeve,” Mat spat. “A Wisdom isn’t supposed
to think of herself as a woman, is she?
Not a pretty woman. But you do, don’t
you? Now. You can’t make yourself forget that you’re a pretty woman now and it
frightens you. Everybody changes.”…Mat
gave a sly laugh and, his fevereish eyes slid to Egwene “Pretty Egwene…Pretty
as Nynaeve. And you share other things
now, don’t you? Other dreams. What do you dream about now?”…”We are safe
from the Dark One’s eyes for the time being.” Moiraine announced as she walked
into the room with Lan at her heels. Her
eyes fell on Mat as she stepped through the doorway and she hissed as if she
had touched a hot stove, “Get away from him!”” – The Eye of the World, p.
629-630.
The Eye of the World
may be marketed as an epic high fantasy novel, but as genre is limited to
essentially marketing, there is a case to be made that it follows the tropes of
a horror novel. The opening chapter, “An
Empty Road”, follows the trope of two people being pursued by a figure
representing death (though that death in this case is evil chasing good and not
some karmic justice). The flight from the
Two Rivers follows the tropes of a horror film as the characters are going into
the unknown and being pursued by some evil, not being able to rest, relying
also on thriller tropes. The Shadar
Logoth sequence becomes almost a matter of cosmic horror, with Mordeth and
Mashadar being an entity inhabiting a place.
This stretch of the book continues with the cosmic horror theme by
having the corruption of Mat coming to a head here in Caemlyn, just as the
party reunites. The above quote is what
Egwene and Nynaeve find Mat to have become something unrecognizable. The ruby hilted dagger which he took from the
treasure room has been the cause here and Moiraine, laying her own eyes on him,
is repulsed. Yet this repulsion is not something
which stops her from helping him, she’s the one who at least buys him enough
time so they can eventually get to Tar Valon to heal him completely from the
dagger’s influence. Jordan’s writing,
exemplified above, is something which crawls under the skin from Mat, hitting Nynaeve
and Egwene in their own insecurities.
Earlier I mentioned Egwene having the point of flipping her interests immediately
and that insecurity is something that clearly bothers her, it’s what Mat uses
against her, here. The change is also
seen in Perrin, whose eyes have become a golden hue, and he is noted at points
to look more wolf-life, playing on an existential horror of the world around Rand
being changed.
The horror here causes a shift in the story, steering the
characters towards a place called Fal Dara and the Eye of the World, something
that the nightmares of Rand, Mat, and Perrin have all beein trying to point
them to. The cosmic horror continues
here, as the party has Loial lead them through an area called the Ways, which are
essentially fast travel. It feels like something
out of a video game, but Jordan sets it ups as something truly horrific: “About
a hundred years ago, during what you humans call the War of the Hundred Years,
the Ways began to change. So slowly in
the beginning that none really noticed, they grew dark and dim. Then darkness fell along the bridges. Some who went in were never seen again. Travelers spoke of being watched from the
dark. The numbers who vanished grew, and
some who came out had gone mad, raving about Machin Shin, the Black Wind.” – The
Eye of the World, p. 648. It is this
harrowing place, a place that Moiraine gives the boys a choice to enter, or be
sent on to Tar Valon, as there is something at the Eye of the World involving
the Green Man. This is moving towards
the climax of the book and to get there, the party journeys essentially into
the underworld of horror, after a few hours in the Ways finding the Black Wind,
and that nearly kills them. They get out
by the skin of their teeth. Jordan is moving
things into the endgame here and he’s doing that by using horror. The Eye of the World is a horror
novel. It may not be the scariest horror
novel, but it is one that wraps itself in the fear of the unknown outside
world, taking five people away from their home under threat of destruction with
two guides who know more than what they are letting on.
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