has anyone answered that question? what are the hyenas? reason i ask, started reading peter straub's the hellfire club and he uses that word, too, hyenas. or maybe the answer is so simple and clear that asking is foolish. hyenas. yeah, those people. laughers. what is your take on the hyenas?
Is it possible he means the ugly animals that eat dead creatures? You know - the ones that howwwwl at nights? These are the only hyenas I know about, but of course, any person who is referred to as "hyena" needs to be both pretty ugly and a dead-flesh eater.
dunno, michal, but he used the same word, hyena, in the dark tower books. don't recall exactly where, maybe whilst the ka-tet is on the train, or maybe when susannah is on the something w/mia. hyenas.
long foretold year of the hyena? john? kess-ka say?
Well, in my mind/imagination, the laughers were crazy, freaky people who didn't have the sense to sit or be still. They roamed picking up the scraps of the long boy. Like I said, that's all in my imagination.
Wolves and/or coyotes tend to sound like hyenas or women screaming...hmm...food for thought.
I'm gonna agree with Perse. I think the hyenas/laughers were just like a different kind of crazy than others.
Oh, here's a good idea! So, like scott's dad said, there's the "gomers" (catatonics), and the "bad-gunky" (homicidal maniacs). Maybe on Boo'ya Moon, the gomers = people at pool and bench, and the bad-gunky people = the laughers, since they are like crazy "hyena-like" people.
i dunno, outsider, i'm thinkin they're like the weather, always there, whether you want them to be there, or not. guess we don't have to worry whether or not they got a kiss or not, beings how's they are fringe-like...and that's not a good thought...as being on the fringe is what it's all about, at times. but the laughers/hyenas define the fringe, no? or that is their desire, to define what is and isn't? whereas the long boy gotta mind its own. the hyenas mind what's fashionable, at least, to them. hence, they're laughers. i dunno. troublesome.
My first instinct re Boo'ya Moon was it was sort of a metaphor for the human mind...there are the 'safe' places, like the pool (which Scott himself hints at as a metaphor for the imagination, if you like) and the churchyard,which could represent the normal everyday things...the people who come there to 'watch' have left the realms of normality, such as the lady who killed her child, there are irrational things (like not eating fruit after dark) which represent little superstitions we all have, and maybe the laughers are the 'dark thoughts' people have, the part of you which finds other people's troubles amusing.
Or maybe not!
I also like The Outsider's theory....prehaps the Laughers were once human but have generated into half-animal like creatures??
what are the hyenas?
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