My Theories about Silent Hill

Ever wondered where the streets in Silent Hill got their names? Wonder no more!
I played through the first Silent Hill on the Playstation, and being a book reader, I recognized some of the street names... Bachman and Koontz? I know those names!

For the uninitiated, Bachman came from Richard Bachman, the pseudonym of that famous horror novelist, Stephen King. Koontz came from another writer in the same vein as King, Dean Koontz. Now, so why is this special? You might say, "Maybe the developers are fans of those writers...", or something like that. But what is actually interesting is that Silent Hill borrows quite heavily from the works of those authors. Let me walk you through this.

First, Stephen King. The work in question here is none other than the novella entitled "The Mist". Now, if you still can't seem to figure out the relationship with Silent Hill and this literary work, you did not play Silent Hill at all.

Still confused? Okay. Its THE FOG! THE FOG!!!!!!!!!! Oh, you might say, fog is different from mist, but the main idea here is that the whole place is enveloped by something, and there are creatures out there that are of unexplained origin, and they all want the same thing. You. Dead. "The Mist" also has themes that are dark... such as *SPOILER* when the protagonist chose to not find his wife, why is this dark? He found a new girlfriend. Oh, and did I mention that they made out on their first night together? And he was with his kid that day!

Anyway, that wraps off the King part. Now lets go to the other K.

Dean Koontz, as far as I know, has so far written only one book of collections of his work, whats its title? "Strange Highways". Actually, the work that we are gonna discuss is of the same name. What can I say about this story? Oh, the resemblance with Silent Hill is like this, the town in Koontzs work is an abandoned coal mining town, there is a "strange highway"(Silent Hills have a tendency to open up in a highway, after that things go strange..), the storyline is Silent Hill-ish.

About the storyline, it tells the story of a middle-aged man(I can't exactly remember how old he is) then he returns to his old town, only to get himself inside a strange town via the strange highway, and whats more, he suddenly became young! He meets a young girl there, and they work together against time in what I can only say one of the most exciting stories Koontz has ever penned. Believe me, once you read it, you might actually think this one is a Silent Hill game, but it's not.

Now it's all up to you to agree or disagree with me, but please, just make sure that you meet these requirements... First, you must know and have played Silent Hill, and the last requirement is you should have read at least one of these works (or both, the better).

There are other authors out on Silent Hill (Crichton comes to mind) but I haven't figured out their part in the Silent Hill equation yet. Read the stories. Become more informed. Actually, the two works here are entertaining and fascinating at their own right, you are doing yourself a favor by reading them. And, they are short compared to novels.

That is all, thank you for reading through this whole thing.

^_^