Unwinnable Monthly – October 2024
This is a reprint of the letter from the editor in Unwinnable Monthly Issue 180. You can buy Issue 180 now, or purchase a monthly subscription to make sure you never miss an issue!
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A dirty little secret of mine is that I wasn’t born in Chicago. Nope. If you ever meet me in real life, I’ll say I’m from Chicago but if you ask me what high school I went to I’ll fold like a cheap suit. I was a little kid in the city, sure, but I grew up well outside the city limits. The kind of place that got the IKEA. The kind of place that had the big mall by the highway. The kind of place where massive corporations moved to and then tried to ruin when they moved out.
In truth, I am a creature raised by the suburbs.
“The Suburbs” seems like a weird theme for our spoopy month theme issue but let me assure you, while weird, it’s definitely worth it. Aside from the fact that so many of the new classic horror movies take place in the sprawl between farmland and cityscape, the suburbs are an insidious thing. Anchored largely by the specific kind of parasitism that cheap land and tax incentives brings, the suburbs aren’t just the extension of the city. They’re a lesser, more devious being.
I used to joke about being from a place with a lot of parking. It’s true. It’s easy to park out in the burbs. But it means so many places are a sea of asphalt. On average, I see fewer trees in the city but so much of what I do see is vertical. Not so in the burbs. All that cheap land drove massively inefficient building codes and massive parcels. So many more houses could have been built were it not for the desire to see your neighbor but also to keep them at arm’s length. Of course, all of that space necessitated cars. And the cars drove the parking. Well, all that space and the fact that you probably live pretty far from where you work. But even if you don’t you definitely don’t live close to the grocery store or any store. And the stores you do have are big box stores. And don’t forget that those big box stores killed all the small businesses. Heck, the big box grocers did that.
It’s easy to image that the suburbs are the thing that grew out of the city. Historically, that’s true. But they’re also a place that is fully fending for themselves. They’re insistent on their own existence for their own sake in increasingly circular ways. Everything is far so you need a car. Because you need a car everything has to have a massive parking lot. Because you have the car you buy way more stuff than you need. It’s a virus. The kind that gets into your head and convinces you of its own necessity.
They’re meant to be safer, cheaper and, of course, whiter than the cities.
I spent a lot of time as a novelty. We were the only family of color that a lot of my oldest friends knew. If not that, I was definitely the only person with a mixed racial and ethnic background. Chicago is a hugely racially diverse city, despite the best efforts of city fathers going back generations. But just a few miles away that diversity drops away, fast. So, for a lot of people, despite how much we might be from the suburbs, they remind us that they were not built for people like us.
But I grew up long after John Carpenter’s Halloween and Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street. In some ways these are the ur-texts of the theme. Movies about the horrible things under the awning of the big city. Named but sleepy towns where you know everyone is commuting for work except the sheriff. I lament that there’s rarely big monster or alien movies with Chicago (don’t worry Transformers, I saw you) in the background but there are plenty of stories about the horrors of “where I’m from” if I’m honest enough to think about my suburb.
And I’ll be honest. I had a great time. I did well. But I left. Which means whenever I go back, I get a creeping, uncanny feeling. I notice how easy it is to park. How wide the streets are. How new and also how eternally trapped in the ’60s and ’70s everything feels. I used to live down the street from a school named after an astronaut when it was fashionable to name things after astronauts. That kind of a town.
But, like all great ideas of mine, I left it to the writers to best interpret the theme. And they ran with this one.
This is an almost all-in effort. A big, beefy, post roast Sunday dinner of an issue. Perfectly timed to the fall.
The two people I want to highlight first are Oluwatayo Adewole and Phil Russell. Tayo helped me conspire up this theme wanting to write about I Saw the TV Glow. Easy enough to make this suburban nightmare happen around that. But let’s welcome back Phil Russell on Stranger Things. Phil is back from parts abroad and this piece is a monster.
And a special welcome to our newest columnist Natasha Oschorn. Some of you may remember Natasha from issue 174. I sure do! Natasha Ochshorn rolls in with The Fog. No, the other one. No that’s The Mist. The other The Fog. No, not the remake!
The regular ghouls and goblins also really showed up. Jay Castello wears a pointy hat in a grim depiction of the university town. Maddi Chilton drives a nice, normal car on nice normal roads. Deirdre Coyle sent me a weird article about a murder and then proceeded to write about the most bubblegum village imaginable. Orrin Grey got free dessert topping, which is the most suburban thing anyone wrote about this month. Emma Kostopolus peers through the blinds to say Hello, Neighbor. Matt Marrone likes to dream big. Emily Price goes to a baby shower. Justin Reeve becomes a wolverine. Rob Rich strikes it rich and moves into a mansion. Levi Rubeck looks for dirty pictures in the woods. Ben Sailer writes about that musician your parents hated. Turns out they weren’t wrong, too, just for different reasons. Phoenix Simms writes about a horrible stalker. Noah Springer’s writes about the greatest horror of all, homeownership. And Autumn Wright goes Over the Garden Wall.
Plenty to love in this one. See you all in the next Exploits.
If you live in the United States, please go vote! Even and especially for school board!
David Shimomura
October 11, 2024
Chicago, IL
