I recently read that book reviews are obsolete, that in this age of social media, anything longer than one sentence and a hashtag is a waste. That may be true in the world of book marketing. But not in the world of writing.
A young writer who I admire very much recently said that he wished people would spend more time talking about what they love. I agree.
With that in mind, I’m starting a new feature on this website, ‘One Good Story’. It’s not a book review site––there are still plenty of those out there. Instead, I’ll be writing about one story at a time, stories that have inspired, instructed, or otherwise blown me away. I’ll try to keep it short––longer than one sentence and a hashtag, but still short.
As you will see, these are not purely traditional "reviews", but also personal essays, personal stories about the times and places where these stories and their themes have intersected with the events of my life. This is my attempt to be honest, and to share my own experience of how one good story often leads to another.
I’ll be focusing not only on stories that identify as genre fiction (horror, weird, mystery, etc.), but also stories from the world of “literary fiction”, as well as stories that straddle that line or break right through it.
My hope is that writers and readers who may be unfamiliar with writers on one side or the other of that imaginary divide will discover voices that are new to them––and, ultimately, feel inspired to cross that line themselves.
And if some of you decide to seek out and support the writers you read about here, that’s great––they deserve it. Others (the dead ones) don’t need our support––instead, think of them as being here to support us––to make us glad that we’re writers, to give us courage and inspiration to stay in the game, so that maybe one day we can do the same for someone else.
REASSURANCE
by ALLAN GURGANUS
"Something holy now stands directly before you."
My father died nine years ago. But he came back at least once since then.
When I was driving my eighteen-year-old son around to look at different colleges, we decided to visit SUNY Buffalo, one of the State University of New York’s northernmost outposts on a thin neck of land between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. We arrived for our tour of the campus at the beginning of a sleet storm. The sleet wasn’t falling––it was flying horizontally into our faces, and it stung like bits of burning brimstone. I kept expecting my face to go numb, but it didn’t––the burning pain grew worse and worse until it felt like my skull was on fire. When we finally made it back to our car and got inside, I yelled as loud and long as I could, trying to get the pain out that way. My son looked at me like I was crazy, and for that moment, I think I might have been.
Later, after we’d dried off and warmed up, we decided to go have dinner at a restaurant next to our hotel. We were walking across the parking lot, my son and I, when I suddenly felt my father walking by my side. I had not been thinking about him, nothing we’d seen or heard or done had reminded me of him. It’s safe to say that until that moment, he was one of the farthest things from my mind. But suddenly and without warning, he was there. It was and still is one of the most real things I’ve ever felt. By the time we made it across the parking lot to the door of the restaurant, the feeling had faded, and it was just my son and I again.
So what was it that I experienced walking across that cold parking lot that day? Was it a visitation? Or a hallucination? I prefer to think of it as an experience. Because whatever else it may or may not have been, it was something that happened to me, and left its mark.
In his powerful and beautiful story Reassurance, Gurganus holds that same sort of experience up to the light, illuminating it without destroying it. That he does it from a fresh angle and in an entirely unexpected way is what give the story its unique and lasting power.
Reassurance is, first of all, a kind of “posthumous collaboration”. For the first part of the story, Gurganus uses the text of an actual letter written by the poet Walt Whitman. Whitman served as a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War, tending to the wounded and the dying, listening to soldiers’ stories, and writing letters to their families. In the letter that Gurganus choses to begin his story, Whitman is writing to the family of a young soldier named Frank Irwin who was wounded in battle and later died of sepsis in a Washington hospital. Whitman begins his letter with a factual review of the circumstances leading up to Frank’s death, then begins to describe and celebrate Frank’s good qualities.
I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying of circumstances, with a painful wound and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpassed.
Whitman also touches on Frank’s behavior during the feverish delirium he endured, moments in which he appeared to be speaking with people only he could see.
By his talk (it) sometimes seemed as if his feelings were being hurt by his officers by being blamed for something he was entirely innocent of…At other times he would fancy himself talking as it seemed to children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and giving them good advice, would talk to them a long while.
That Whitman grew to love Frank is both obvious and something he freely and gratefully admits.
I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while––for I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him
Whitman’s letter is beautiful and immensely moving––this is Walt Whitman, after all––so to attempt to follow up on it or add to it might seem foolhardy or impossible.
In orbital mechanics and aerospace engineering, there is a technique known as a “gravitational slingshot” or “gravitational assist maneuver” in which the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object is used to propel or accelerate a spacecraft or change its path––that is very much what Gurganus has done in the second half of Reassurance, using the gravity of Whitman’s real letter to propel the story even farther.
The second half of the story is in the voice of Frank Irwin, the young man who has died, and is a message from beyond to his mother.
I want to put your mind to rest about it all, Momma. That is why I am working hard to slip this through.
Frank begins, as many letters from homesick young soldiers do, by conjuring the familiar pleasures and people from the home that he misses and longs for; in so doing, he uncovers, perhaps inadvertently, the little hurts and conflicts hidden there, including the deep mutual love between himself and his cousin Emily, frustrated by his passionless betrothal to another girl. He expresses his regret and worry for Emily in a request to his mother:
I never even kissed her. Momma? Treat her right. Accord my cousin Emily such tender respects as befit the young widow of a man my age, for she is that to me…and encourage her to look around at other boys, for there’s not much sense in wasting two lives, mine and hers, for my own cowardly mistakes. That is one thing needs saying out.
Gurganus also allows Frank to revisit his time in hospital, including the horrors of his amputation, as well as his affection and gratitude for “the old man that wrote to you of my end (who) had the finest gray-white beard and the finest speaking-voice I ever met with.” Gurganus details the growth of the powerful bond between the two of them, and in one remarkable passage, describes how Whitman helps Frank face the reality of his amputation for the first time:
…he taught me I must learn to look at it now. But I couldn’t bear to yet. They’d tried but I had wept when asked to stare below at the lonely left knee. Walt said we would do it together. He’d held my hand and counted then––one, two, three…I did so with him at it was like looking at what was there and what was not at once, just as my lost voice is finding you during this real dawn, m’am.
It’s in that phrase that Gurganus begins to lay bare the machinery of what is really happening here.
Reassurance is a work of multi-level channeling. The real question, ultimately, is who is channeling who? Gurganus, as the author, is channeling the voice of the dead boy, and of Whitman. But what of the characters? Who are they channeling, and why? Finally, what of the mother who is receiving this loving message from beyond the grave?
Like Frank’s fear of looking directly at his lost leg, it’s a realization that must be approached slowly and bravely. And it’s also best faced when not alone. And the role that Whitman plays for Frank in helping him come to his personal realization is the role that Frank now plays for his Mother, holding her hand as she comes to realize who it is whose voice she is really hearing.
I will count to three and we will open on it, please. Then we’ll go directly in, like, hand-in-hand, we’re plunging. What waits is what’s still yours, ma’m, which is ours.
Is Reassurance a ghost story? That depends, as it always does, on what you think a ghost is. When we believe that the dead have returned to visit us, even for a moment, we have a choice. We can either give all our energy to deciding what’s really happening here––or we can listen. Listen and learn. In the end, that might be the best choice we can make.
by ALLAN GURGANUS
"Something holy now stands directly before you."
My father died nine years ago. But he came back at least once since then.
When I was driving my eighteen-year-old son around to look at different colleges, we decided to visit SUNY Buffalo, one of the State University of New York’s northernmost outposts on a thin neck of land between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. We arrived for our tour of the campus at the beginning of a sleet storm. The sleet wasn’t falling––it was flying horizontally into our faces, and it stung like bits of burning brimstone. I kept expecting my face to go numb, but it didn’t––the burning pain grew worse and worse until it felt like my skull was on fire. When we finally made it back to our car and got inside, I yelled as loud and long as I could, trying to get the pain out that way. My son looked at me like I was crazy, and for that moment, I think I might have been.
Later, after we’d dried off and warmed up, we decided to go have dinner at a restaurant next to our hotel. We were walking across the parking lot, my son and I, when I suddenly felt my father walking by my side. I had not been thinking about him, nothing we’d seen or heard or done had reminded me of him. It’s safe to say that until that moment, he was one of the farthest things from my mind. But suddenly and without warning, he was there. It was and still is one of the most real things I’ve ever felt. By the time we made it across the parking lot to the door of the restaurant, the feeling had faded, and it was just my son and I again.
So what was it that I experienced walking across that cold parking lot that day? Was it a visitation? Or a hallucination? I prefer to think of it as an experience. Because whatever else it may or may not have been, it was something that happened to me, and left its mark.
In his powerful and beautiful story Reassurance, Gurganus holds that same sort of experience up to the light, illuminating it without destroying it. That he does it from a fresh angle and in an entirely unexpected way is what give the story its unique and lasting power.
Reassurance is, first of all, a kind of “posthumous collaboration”. For the first part of the story, Gurganus uses the text of an actual letter written by the poet Walt Whitman. Whitman served as a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War, tending to the wounded and the dying, listening to soldiers’ stories, and writing letters to their families. In the letter that Gurganus choses to begin his story, Whitman is writing to the family of a young soldier named Frank Irwin who was wounded in battle and later died of sepsis in a Washington hospital. Whitman begins his letter with a factual review of the circumstances leading up to Frank’s death, then begins to describe and celebrate Frank’s good qualities.
I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying of circumstances, with a painful wound and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpassed.
Whitman also touches on Frank’s behavior during the feverish delirium he endured, moments in which he appeared to be speaking with people only he could see.
By his talk (it) sometimes seemed as if his feelings were being hurt by his officers by being blamed for something he was entirely innocent of…At other times he would fancy himself talking as it seemed to children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and giving them good advice, would talk to them a long while.
That Whitman grew to love Frank is both obvious and something he freely and gratefully admits.
I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while––for I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him
Whitman’s letter is beautiful and immensely moving––this is Walt Whitman, after all––so to attempt to follow up on it or add to it might seem foolhardy or impossible.
In orbital mechanics and aerospace engineering, there is a technique known as a “gravitational slingshot” or “gravitational assist maneuver” in which the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object is used to propel or accelerate a spacecraft or change its path––that is very much what Gurganus has done in the second half of Reassurance, using the gravity of Whitman’s real letter to propel the story even farther.
The second half of the story is in the voice of Frank Irwin, the young man who has died, and is a message from beyond to his mother.
I want to put your mind to rest about it all, Momma. That is why I am working hard to slip this through.
Frank begins, as many letters from homesick young soldiers do, by conjuring the familiar pleasures and people from the home that he misses and longs for; in so doing, he uncovers, perhaps inadvertently, the little hurts and conflicts hidden there, including the deep mutual love between himself and his cousin Emily, frustrated by his passionless betrothal to another girl. He expresses his regret and worry for Emily in a request to his mother:
I never even kissed her. Momma? Treat her right. Accord my cousin Emily such tender respects as befit the young widow of a man my age, for she is that to me…and encourage her to look around at other boys, for there’s not much sense in wasting two lives, mine and hers, for my own cowardly mistakes. That is one thing needs saying out.
Gurganus also allows Frank to revisit his time in hospital, including the horrors of his amputation, as well as his affection and gratitude for “the old man that wrote to you of my end (who) had the finest gray-white beard and the finest speaking-voice I ever met with.” Gurganus details the growth of the powerful bond between the two of them, and in one remarkable passage, describes how Whitman helps Frank face the reality of his amputation for the first time:
…he taught me I must learn to look at it now. But I couldn’t bear to yet. They’d tried but I had wept when asked to stare below at the lonely left knee. Walt said we would do it together. He’d held my hand and counted then––one, two, three…I did so with him at it was like looking at what was there and what was not at once, just as my lost voice is finding you during this real dawn, m’am.
It’s in that phrase that Gurganus begins to lay bare the machinery of what is really happening here.
Reassurance is a work of multi-level channeling. The real question, ultimately, is who is channeling who? Gurganus, as the author, is channeling the voice of the dead boy, and of Whitman. But what of the characters? Who are they channeling, and why? Finally, what of the mother who is receiving this loving message from beyond the grave?
Like Frank’s fear of looking directly at his lost leg, it’s a realization that must be approached slowly and bravely. And it’s also best faced when not alone. And the role that Whitman plays for Frank in helping him come to his personal realization is the role that Frank now plays for his Mother, holding her hand as she comes to realize who it is whose voice she is really hearing.
I will count to three and we will open on it, please. Then we’ll go directly in, like, hand-in-hand, we’re plunging. What waits is what’s still yours, ma’m, which is ours.
Is Reassurance a ghost story? That depends, as it always does, on what you think a ghost is. When we believe that the dead have returned to visit us, even for a moment, we have a choice. We can either give all our energy to deciding what’s really happening here––or we can listen. Listen and learn. In the end, that might be the best choice we can make.
SLMIKINS
by CHARLES WILKINSON
By returning to (the memory), again and again, asking every question, he would finally drain the tragedy of significance, deprive it of that buoyancy that made it rise, white and terrible to the surface, time after time.
The very first poems were not written for publication or for literary prizes. The first poems were prayers, hymns of praise, incantations and curses. They were created to communicate with the gods, make crops grow, and bring death to one’s enemies. And although contemporary writers don’t usually claim to pull lightning down from the skies or raise the dead, a few of them still give us little glimpses into that world of dreams where the dead still speak to us, where visions of the past and future collide and blur into one another.
I was not surprised to read (in John Howard’s beautiful introduction to Charles Wilkinson’s collection Splendid In Ash from Egeaus Press) that Wilkinson has previously written and published two volumes of poetry. His stories have a poet’s touch. Not just in the beauty of the language, line by line (which is considerable) but in the mental flow and internal logic that guides the events. Wilkinson’s stories are not, strictly speaking, “surrealism”––they are narratives that, at one level, can be followed by the rational mind. But at another level, they are also powered by a poet’s faith in the subconscious.
The best poems contain a surprise––sometimes, if the poet and the reader are lucky, more than one. Things that feel unexpected and yet inevitable, images and events that make almost no sense to the rational mind, but possess a kind of rightness that cannot be denied or resisted. The stories of Charles Wilkinson are full of these deep, disturbing surprises. They stir something within us, like the flicker of a memory of a dream that appears to us out of context in broad daylight.
The narrative of Slimikins is fractured from the very beginning. We follow events in the life of a man named Giles Shooter in two different timelines––in his current life administering intelligence tests to children with a variety of cognitive impairments, and in his life of thirty years ago as a teacher at a boys’ school.
Shooter is visited in his office by a mother and her boy, who Shooter believes is suffering from Marfan Syndrome. He is unnerved by the boy, not simply because of his unusual appearance, but because he reminds Shooter of another boy from his past.
Giles Shooter stifled a gasp of astonishment when he saw Noel Hillup’s hands, which were utterly out of proportion with the rest of the boy’s body. The elongated thumbs and forefinger tapered toward the end…the pale color and sheen of the skin was at odds with the yellowish flesh of the forearms exposed beneath the cuffs. The nails had s dull white gleam. A nickname he’d given another child, so many years before, came back to him.
Shooter is impatient and dismissive of the suffering of others––his wife’s, for instance. Her encroaching dementia, which takes the form of delusional visits by male intruders, must surely have once been a cause for alarm, but is now little more to him than an annoying inconvenience.
We also see traces of his dismissive attitude toward the children who he examines for a living now. Even the snow falling outside of his office window, although he admits to its beauty, is ultimately only an inconvenience to him, a disruption of his plans––although we will see soon enough that he has other reasons to be discomfited by the sight of falling snow, which makes several appearances throughout the story, before finally returning in full force at the end.
We learn of Shooter’s unhappy days (has he ever had happy days?) as a teacher at a boy’s school, where he knew a student named Andrew Ollaby, an eerily thin boy with a serious heart defect.
Wilkinson conjures evocative set-pieces that set off tremors that resonate to the heart of the story. For instance, the football match that Shooter referees, “the worst he has ever refereed” in which the spirit of violence seems to rise up from the frozen ground and into the bodies of the boys, animating them into acts of increasing aggression. It feels like the kind of game in which someone might get killed, and although no one is, it sets the tone for the tragedy to come. Wilkinson also sets the boys’ struggles on the frozen pitch against the background of a harsh and uncaring winter landscape that almost feels animate in its cruelty.
They play on a sloping tract of land, the part of the fields most exposed to the lacerating east winds…The upper goal still blackened by November’s bonfire, the bottom of the pitch where drainage is at its poorest, is sodden and slimy with worm casts…The battle by the bottom goalmouth had been fought with fearful intensity; sliding tackles gashed the mud and ripped out the few blades of grass on the wings; players surrounding the ball lashed out without regard to the laws of the game. A center back hopped away, clutching his knee. Pushing and shoving. Vile imprecations.
After the game, an angry Shooter orders his boys to go on a long run, forgetting that the delicate boy Ollaby is among them. Although he has one brief exchange with Ollaby, pale and exhausted after the run, he loses track of him again.
In one of the most amazing passages in the story, Shooter obstinately insists on remaining alone in his office to grade his students’ papers, while outside, the school staff are carrying on a desperate search for the missing student in the snow. Wilkinson cross-cuts these two perspectives, tighter and tighter, until they reach a terrible and inevitable climax.
As Shooter reads, pausing to underline spelling mistakes…the deputy headmaster, most of the boarding staff, and several senior boys are scouring the playing fields, the copse, the front gardens, as well as the rough ground behind the science laboratories and tennis courts. As Shooter finishes writing his comment, which is longer and more encouraging than usual, at the foot of the essay, the deputy headmaster and two monitors, armed with torches, reach the spot in the woods where Andrew Ollaby lies face down and breathless at last, his long delicate legs awry, the back of his head already covered by a layer of snow.
Wilkinson also has an expert way of letting words an images from another timeline explode into the present like flashes of heat lightning. These flashes are all the stronger for being unexpected and unexplained. They are almost never convenient transitions into a standard flashback, although sometimes they do serve that purpose. Instead, they are more like signals from another reality, sparks thrown off by a brain under stress.
‘A duty of care, that’s what we have.’ Shooter had left his car in a side street not far from his office. One of he early symptoms of his wife’s condition was being unable to recall which level of the multi-story car-park she’d parked the Honda only to discover she’d left it outside the hotel where they were staying. ‘In the circumstances, it would be best if you leave at once…’
It’s in the story’s remarkable final passage where Wilkinson brings all the different threads together. It’s a near-perfect crystallization of different elements that shadow and support each other, finally coming together in the final paragraph in a way that’s beautiful and devastatingly right.
Was it snowing in here because his wife had left a window open? Certainly some strange luminosity was flowing in the curtains. The must from old books and box files had been replaced by the tang of ice and the scent of wet black leaves. Perhaps an intruder had forced an entry. He had never believed in his wife’s visitors. Yet there was a shape in the corner…
The structural perfection of the final passage might run the risk of feeling merely impressive, a craftsman’s admirable slight-of-hand, if it were not for the emotional inevitability of that final image, and for how deeply and genuinely terrifying it is. And the final line, which is a question that Shooter has been avoiding asking himself for thirty years, is one of the most heartbreaking I’ve ever read.
I won’t say that Slimikins is a perfect story, because I’m not sure what a perfect story would look like, or if I’d even recognize it if I ever saw one. In the meantime, Slimikins by Charles Wikinson is the closest thing to a perfect story that we’re likely to get for a long, long time. An unexpected glimpse into the world of visions and dreams. Read it and rejoice.
by CHARLES WILKINSON
By returning to (the memory), again and again, asking every question, he would finally drain the tragedy of significance, deprive it of that buoyancy that made it rise, white and terrible to the surface, time after time.
The very first poems were not written for publication or for literary prizes. The first poems were prayers, hymns of praise, incantations and curses. They were created to communicate with the gods, make crops grow, and bring death to one’s enemies. And although contemporary writers don’t usually claim to pull lightning down from the skies or raise the dead, a few of them still give us little glimpses into that world of dreams where the dead still speak to us, where visions of the past and future collide and blur into one another.
I was not surprised to read (in John Howard’s beautiful introduction to Charles Wilkinson’s collection Splendid In Ash from Egeaus Press) that Wilkinson has previously written and published two volumes of poetry. His stories have a poet’s touch. Not just in the beauty of the language, line by line (which is considerable) but in the mental flow and internal logic that guides the events. Wilkinson’s stories are not, strictly speaking, “surrealism”––they are narratives that, at one level, can be followed by the rational mind. But at another level, they are also powered by a poet’s faith in the subconscious.
The best poems contain a surprise––sometimes, if the poet and the reader are lucky, more than one. Things that feel unexpected and yet inevitable, images and events that make almost no sense to the rational mind, but possess a kind of rightness that cannot be denied or resisted. The stories of Charles Wilkinson are full of these deep, disturbing surprises. They stir something within us, like the flicker of a memory of a dream that appears to us out of context in broad daylight.
The narrative of Slimikins is fractured from the very beginning. We follow events in the life of a man named Giles Shooter in two different timelines––in his current life administering intelligence tests to children with a variety of cognitive impairments, and in his life of thirty years ago as a teacher at a boys’ school.
Shooter is visited in his office by a mother and her boy, who Shooter believes is suffering from Marfan Syndrome. He is unnerved by the boy, not simply because of his unusual appearance, but because he reminds Shooter of another boy from his past.
Giles Shooter stifled a gasp of astonishment when he saw Noel Hillup’s hands, which were utterly out of proportion with the rest of the boy’s body. The elongated thumbs and forefinger tapered toward the end…the pale color and sheen of the skin was at odds with the yellowish flesh of the forearms exposed beneath the cuffs. The nails had s dull white gleam. A nickname he’d given another child, so many years before, came back to him.
Shooter is impatient and dismissive of the suffering of others––his wife’s, for instance. Her encroaching dementia, which takes the form of delusional visits by male intruders, must surely have once been a cause for alarm, but is now little more to him than an annoying inconvenience.
We also see traces of his dismissive attitude toward the children who he examines for a living now. Even the snow falling outside of his office window, although he admits to its beauty, is ultimately only an inconvenience to him, a disruption of his plans––although we will see soon enough that he has other reasons to be discomfited by the sight of falling snow, which makes several appearances throughout the story, before finally returning in full force at the end.
We learn of Shooter’s unhappy days (has he ever had happy days?) as a teacher at a boy’s school, where he knew a student named Andrew Ollaby, an eerily thin boy with a serious heart defect.
Wilkinson conjures evocative set-pieces that set off tremors that resonate to the heart of the story. For instance, the football match that Shooter referees, “the worst he has ever refereed” in which the spirit of violence seems to rise up from the frozen ground and into the bodies of the boys, animating them into acts of increasing aggression. It feels like the kind of game in which someone might get killed, and although no one is, it sets the tone for the tragedy to come. Wilkinson also sets the boys’ struggles on the frozen pitch against the background of a harsh and uncaring winter landscape that almost feels animate in its cruelty.
They play on a sloping tract of land, the part of the fields most exposed to the lacerating east winds…The upper goal still blackened by November’s bonfire, the bottom of the pitch where drainage is at its poorest, is sodden and slimy with worm casts…The battle by the bottom goalmouth had been fought with fearful intensity; sliding tackles gashed the mud and ripped out the few blades of grass on the wings; players surrounding the ball lashed out without regard to the laws of the game. A center back hopped away, clutching his knee. Pushing and shoving. Vile imprecations.
After the game, an angry Shooter orders his boys to go on a long run, forgetting that the delicate boy Ollaby is among them. Although he has one brief exchange with Ollaby, pale and exhausted after the run, he loses track of him again.
In one of the most amazing passages in the story, Shooter obstinately insists on remaining alone in his office to grade his students’ papers, while outside, the school staff are carrying on a desperate search for the missing student in the snow. Wilkinson cross-cuts these two perspectives, tighter and tighter, until they reach a terrible and inevitable climax.
As Shooter reads, pausing to underline spelling mistakes…the deputy headmaster, most of the boarding staff, and several senior boys are scouring the playing fields, the copse, the front gardens, as well as the rough ground behind the science laboratories and tennis courts. As Shooter finishes writing his comment, which is longer and more encouraging than usual, at the foot of the essay, the deputy headmaster and two monitors, armed with torches, reach the spot in the woods where Andrew Ollaby lies face down and breathless at last, his long delicate legs awry, the back of his head already covered by a layer of snow.
Wilkinson also has an expert way of letting words an images from another timeline explode into the present like flashes of heat lightning. These flashes are all the stronger for being unexpected and unexplained. They are almost never convenient transitions into a standard flashback, although sometimes they do serve that purpose. Instead, they are more like signals from another reality, sparks thrown off by a brain under stress.
‘A duty of care, that’s what we have.’ Shooter had left his car in a side street not far from his office. One of he early symptoms of his wife’s condition was being unable to recall which level of the multi-story car-park she’d parked the Honda only to discover she’d left it outside the hotel where they were staying. ‘In the circumstances, it would be best if you leave at once…’
It’s in the story’s remarkable final passage where Wilkinson brings all the different threads together. It’s a near-perfect crystallization of different elements that shadow and support each other, finally coming together in the final paragraph in a way that’s beautiful and devastatingly right.
Was it snowing in here because his wife had left a window open? Certainly some strange luminosity was flowing in the curtains. The must from old books and box files had been replaced by the tang of ice and the scent of wet black leaves. Perhaps an intruder had forced an entry. He had never believed in his wife’s visitors. Yet there was a shape in the corner…
The structural perfection of the final passage might run the risk of feeling merely impressive, a craftsman’s admirable slight-of-hand, if it were not for the emotional inevitability of that final image, and for how deeply and genuinely terrifying it is. And the final line, which is a question that Shooter has been avoiding asking himself for thirty years, is one of the most heartbreaking I’ve ever read.
I won’t say that Slimikins is a perfect story, because I’m not sure what a perfect story would look like, or if I’d even recognize it if I ever saw one. In the meantime, Slimikins by Charles Wikinson is the closest thing to a perfect story that we’re likely to get for a long, long time. An unexpected glimpse into the world of visions and dreams. Read it and rejoice.
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SURVIVAL BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE APOCALYPSE
by CHRISTOPHER BARZAK
First, remember what it means to be human.
When I was much younger and not afraid to take a risk, I accepted a residency at an artists colony in the Sierra Temescal Mountains of California. Because it was on Nature Conservancy property, there was no electricity, and we were forbidden to harm the tarantulas and rattlesnakes who liked to sun themselves on the paths we walked on.
In a place that was already remote, they put me in the most remote cabin, perched at the apex of Lupin Canyon. While the five of us who were in residency at the time were welcome to gather for group meals and socializing, I found myself preferring to stay alone in my cabin. As the weeks slipped by, I wrote and ate and slept and read by kerosene light, and grew accustomed to my isolation.
One day, I realized it had been nearly a month since I’d seen another human being. I thought then about walking back down into the compound where the others were, but something stopped me. I remember thinking, what if they’re not there? I imagined their cabins empty, their woodstoves cold, their cars all gone. I then imagined hiking down to the nearest town and finding it completely deserted as well, traffic lights all stuck on green and swaying in the hot desert wind.
When I saw someone walking toward me on one of the paths––a staff member coming to check up on me––I suppose I should have felt elated, or at least relieved. Instead, I felt afraid. For that first split-second when I saw that figure walking up the path toward me, it was almost like I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, like I’d forgotten what other human beings looked like.
In his story ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Survival Before, During, and After the Apocalypse’, Christopher Barzak takes the fear that I felt to its furthest extreme.
Presented as what it’s title clearly states––a handbook of survival instructions––Barzak’s story takes advantage of that structural device to reflect the psychological deterioration of the narrator as his instructions become more and more desperate and strange.
Sit in your cave, in one of the hills that used to belong to your family, and grieve for the loss of so many lives. Lives you never knew personally. Imagine their faces. Imagine the faces of those you knew and loved. Imagine the mushroom clouds and clouds of viruses…
More than anything, the nameless narrator of Barzak’s story advises isolation. Complete and utter isolation. Loneliness, in other words, is better than death.
Stay where you are. Keep silent. When you hear others pass by your carefully obscured cave entrance, bite your bottom lip and pray. Pray, even if you don’t believe in a god. It may help you to keep silent if you are speaking the language of angels, which can never be heard by human ears.
The emotional highpoint of the story, for me at least, comes near the end when the instructor imparts the instruction, remember.
When the world grows quiet, remember what it used to be like before the apocalypse, remember what it felt like to live in a town with streets on a grid, a tree growing strong and proud in front of each house. Remember the scent of your mother’s rosebushes, and how she called them her babies. Remember how your father picked you up when you fell off your bicycle and the asphalt of the street ate a chunk of the palm of your hand. Remember how he said, “Shh, shh, it’s okay, baby,” and try not to make any noise when you feel the tears falling down your cheeks.”
Barzak’s story maintains a strong emotional shape, beginning as it does with the narrator offering the listener his prescription for how to stay human during any apocalyptic event. Remember that you can retain your humanity if you continue to be humane. He then almost immediately contradicts this advice: Do not hesitate to degrade your fellow man if it means your life or his is at stake. By the end of the story, the same narrator fails to deliver on the promise to remain humane, by waiting for his neighbor to die and then taking over her home, like a hermit crab crawling into another’s shell. The final blow––a subtle and powerful one, which I won’t reveal here––comes when the narrator realizes that like the old woman whose possessions he’s claimed for himself, he too is replaceable.
I will confess that I’ve thought of Barzak’s story more than once in these recent weeks––during weekly trips to the grocery when I wonder how much I dare take for myself and my wife, and how much I should leave for others. While I’m out for a walk and see another human being walking toward me and feel that small tug of fear and guilt when I cross to the other side of the road to avoid them.
It would be easy, of course, to talk about how prescient Barzak’s story seems during this current time of pandemic and quarantine, but that, I believe, would sell it short. Despite all its compelling survival instructions (some of which I feel sure I’ve seen on Facebook recently), Barzak’s story isn’t really about the mechanics of any particular apocalyptic scenario––instead, it’s an unflinching look at the human cost of isolation, imposed both from outside forces, and from within.
As bleak as Barzak’s story is, the reason I love it and the reason it’s important is that it still signals a strong desire to comfort––to comfort itself as well as others.
There is such a thing as survivor’s guilt, even at the end of the world, even after the end of the world is over. But don’t worry. Like everything else, this too shall pass.
Those are words we’d all like to believe right now. But first, like Barzak’s narrator, we have to learn how to live with what we’ve been given. After all, we have no choice.
Christopher Barzak’s ‘Before and Afterlives’ is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BWBEY2G/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
by CHRISTOPHER BARZAK
First, remember what it means to be human.
When I was much younger and not afraid to take a risk, I accepted a residency at an artists colony in the Sierra Temescal Mountains of California. Because it was on Nature Conservancy property, there was no electricity, and we were forbidden to harm the tarantulas and rattlesnakes who liked to sun themselves on the paths we walked on.
In a place that was already remote, they put me in the most remote cabin, perched at the apex of Lupin Canyon. While the five of us who were in residency at the time were welcome to gather for group meals and socializing, I found myself preferring to stay alone in my cabin. As the weeks slipped by, I wrote and ate and slept and read by kerosene light, and grew accustomed to my isolation.
One day, I realized it had been nearly a month since I’d seen another human being. I thought then about walking back down into the compound where the others were, but something stopped me. I remember thinking, what if they’re not there? I imagined their cabins empty, their woodstoves cold, their cars all gone. I then imagined hiking down to the nearest town and finding it completely deserted as well, traffic lights all stuck on green and swaying in the hot desert wind.
When I saw someone walking toward me on one of the paths––a staff member coming to check up on me––I suppose I should have felt elated, or at least relieved. Instead, I felt afraid. For that first split-second when I saw that figure walking up the path toward me, it was almost like I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, like I’d forgotten what other human beings looked like.
In his story ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Survival Before, During, and After the Apocalypse’, Christopher Barzak takes the fear that I felt to its furthest extreme.
Presented as what it’s title clearly states––a handbook of survival instructions––Barzak’s story takes advantage of that structural device to reflect the psychological deterioration of the narrator as his instructions become more and more desperate and strange.
Sit in your cave, in one of the hills that used to belong to your family, and grieve for the loss of so many lives. Lives you never knew personally. Imagine their faces. Imagine the faces of those you knew and loved. Imagine the mushroom clouds and clouds of viruses…
More than anything, the nameless narrator of Barzak’s story advises isolation. Complete and utter isolation. Loneliness, in other words, is better than death.
Stay where you are. Keep silent. When you hear others pass by your carefully obscured cave entrance, bite your bottom lip and pray. Pray, even if you don’t believe in a god. It may help you to keep silent if you are speaking the language of angels, which can never be heard by human ears.
The emotional highpoint of the story, for me at least, comes near the end when the instructor imparts the instruction, remember.
When the world grows quiet, remember what it used to be like before the apocalypse, remember what it felt like to live in a town with streets on a grid, a tree growing strong and proud in front of each house. Remember the scent of your mother’s rosebushes, and how she called them her babies. Remember how your father picked you up when you fell off your bicycle and the asphalt of the street ate a chunk of the palm of your hand. Remember how he said, “Shh, shh, it’s okay, baby,” and try not to make any noise when you feel the tears falling down your cheeks.”
Barzak’s story maintains a strong emotional shape, beginning as it does with the narrator offering the listener his prescription for how to stay human during any apocalyptic event. Remember that you can retain your humanity if you continue to be humane. He then almost immediately contradicts this advice: Do not hesitate to degrade your fellow man if it means your life or his is at stake. By the end of the story, the same narrator fails to deliver on the promise to remain humane, by waiting for his neighbor to die and then taking over her home, like a hermit crab crawling into another’s shell. The final blow––a subtle and powerful one, which I won’t reveal here––comes when the narrator realizes that like the old woman whose possessions he’s claimed for himself, he too is replaceable.
I will confess that I’ve thought of Barzak’s story more than once in these recent weeks––during weekly trips to the grocery when I wonder how much I dare take for myself and my wife, and how much I should leave for others. While I’m out for a walk and see another human being walking toward me and feel that small tug of fear and guilt when I cross to the other side of the road to avoid them.
It would be easy, of course, to talk about how prescient Barzak’s story seems during this current time of pandemic and quarantine, but that, I believe, would sell it short. Despite all its compelling survival instructions (some of which I feel sure I’ve seen on Facebook recently), Barzak’s story isn’t really about the mechanics of any particular apocalyptic scenario––instead, it’s an unflinching look at the human cost of isolation, imposed both from outside forces, and from within.
As bleak as Barzak’s story is, the reason I love it and the reason it’s important is that it still signals a strong desire to comfort––to comfort itself as well as others.
There is such a thing as survivor’s guilt, even at the end of the world, even after the end of the world is over. But don’t worry. Like everything else, this too shall pass.
Those are words we’d all like to believe right now. But first, like Barzak’s narrator, we have to learn how to live with what we’ve been given. After all, we have no choice.
Christopher Barzak’s ‘Before and Afterlives’ is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BWBEY2G/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
POLICE DREAMS
by RICHARD BAUSCH
So he lay there and watching the light come, trying to understand everything…
––Richard Bausch, Police Dreams
The worst nightmare I ever had was when I was almost forty years old. I had gone with my first wife to a remote island off the coast of Michigan, because we wanted to get away from the stress and confinement of New York City, which we thought was killing us. After a six hour drive and a nearly two hour ferry-ride across very rough waters of Lake Superior, we finally arrived at the island.
We had come hoping to catch a glimpse of the island’s famous wolf population. Many years ago, a pack of wolves had crossed over from the mainland on a bridge of ice which then melted and sealed them off on this island forever. I’d heard that scientists had been coming here for over sixty years to study the descendants of that original wolf pack, as well as a large population of moose that they wolves preyed upon, the two animals caught in an endless dance of death.
We were taken to a small log cabin in a grove of tall trees that bent and trembled in the wind. When we went to sleep that first night, I felt keenly aware of how far we were from everything and everyone else. I knew that there were twenty-two miles of surging, ocean-like waves between us and the mainland, and I felt every inch of that distance deep in my bones. My first wife and I didn’t talk much that night. We were tired from our long journey and went to bed without a word.
Some time in the night, I became aware of a bright light in the room. I realized it was coming from the open bathroom door, but it seemed unnaturally bright, and I opened my eyes to see it better. That was when I knew. Something was coming through that door. Something gigantic and powerful, something horribly evil. I couldn’t see it yet, but I knew it was there, inside the light; I knew it was coming, and that it was going to kill us. To this day, I cannot remember ever being so terrified in my entire life. I tried to scream, but the scream was choked off in my throat by the crushing weight of terror and the terrible blinding light.
Fifteen years later when my first wife and I separated and divorced, I sometimes thought back to that first night on the island, to that nightmare, and the terrible feeling that something was being ripped from my heart by a thing that I couldn’t see but knew was there.
In ‘Police Dreams’ by Richard Bausch, it’s one man’s inability to reconcile the world as he sees it with the world that actually exists that creates a terrible rupture in his mind. Casey, the protagonist of Bausch’s story, suffers from horrific recurring dreams in which strange men appear and kill his family.
It was quite dark, quite late. The street they were on shimmered with rain. A light was blinking at an intersection, making a haze through which someone or something moved. Things shifted, and all the warm feeling was gone. Casey tried to press the gas pedal, and couldn’t, and it seemed quite logical that he couldn’t. And men were opening the doors of the car. They came in on both sides. It was clear that they were going to start killing; they were just going to go ahead and kill everyone.
That Casey’s wife Jean has lost every trace of love for him is made painfully obvious, not in scenes of hostile confrontation, but in every tiny spark of irritation that she responds to him with. She’s clearly absent from the relationship, already gone, although Casey seems not to notice how serious their situation is––like many men (and women) in a dying marriage, he’s simply accepted this low-level hostility as his daily reality, just “the way she is” or “the way things are”.
In the moments when Casey allows himself some awareness that a shadow has fallen over his marriage and his family, part of him still wants to look elsewhere and blame it on his horrible dreams.
Then they were all quiet. Outside, an already gray sky seemed to grow darker. The light above the kitchen table looked meager; it might even have flickered, and for a bad minute Casey felt the nightmare along his spine, as if the whole morning were something presented to him in the helplessness of sleep.
Bausch forces his protagonist and reader to ask which is more horrible––that a man can be blind to the reasons for his entire life being torn apart, or that there ultimately is no reason for such things. When his marriage ends with his wife walking out, there are no warning signals––none that registered with him, at least––and he’s completely blindsided. When most writers depict a man becoming unmoored from reality, they tend to do it in the most extreme and garish colors, with liberal doses of hallucinations and psychotic behavior. For Bausch’s protagonist, it’s the very ordinariness of the daily life around him, and its refusal to acknowledge his own personal tragedy, that undoes him.
In one harrowing passage, the rage and violence that Casey has been suppressing threatens to explode.
He can’t say anything. He’s left with the weight of himself, standing there before her. “You know what you sound like?” he says. “You sound ridiculous, that’s what you sound like.” And the ineptitude of what he has just said, the stupid, helpless rage of it, presents him with a tottering moment of wanting to put his hands around her neck. The idea comes to him so clearly that his throat constricts, and a fan of heat opens across the back of his head. He holds on to the back of a chair and seems to hear her say that she’ll be in touch…
Later that same night, there’s an echo of that same rage when Casey goes home and finds the babysitter asleep in a chair.
She hasn’t heard him come in, and so he has to try and wake her without frightening her. He has this thought clear in his mind as he watches his hand roughly grasp her shoulder, and hears himself say, loud, “Get up!”
The girl opens her eyes and looks blankly at him, and then she screams.
It’s not Casey’s roughness, or the girl’s scream that’s the most terrifying thing in this passage––it’s the complete disconnect between his conscious intention to not frighten the young girl, and what he actually does, the other intention that his doesn’t even recognize as his own. It’s Casey’s warning signal––brilliantly drawn by Bausch––that the other world, the dream world, is closer than he thinks.
It’s in his dreams, of course, horrible as they are, that the forces of malevolence and destruction come out of hiding and make themselves visible to him. And it’s there that he makes one desperate last stand against them.
He hears sounds. There are intruders in the house. There are many intruders. He’s in the darkest corner and he can hear them moving toward him…only now, something has changed…it comes to him with a rush of power that he’s dreaming, and can do anything now, anything he wants to do…He takes one step, then another. He’s in control now. He’s quiet as the sound after death. He knows he can begin, and so he begins.
I will not ruin the final few sentences of this story for readers who have not yet experienced them––I will say, though, that they are among the most powerful final lines I have ever read in any work of fiction.
Bausch’s story tends to push a lot of buttons for some people. Some readers seem to feel that the protagonist turning the tables on his dream-attackers at the end is a kind of heroic act, while others see it as an act of deluded immaturity, not an escape from his mental prison, but simply running deeper into the dark. I’d say your interpretation depends, as always, on what you have lived through yourself. And maybe on your dreams. Because our private and public worlds are fractured already, and it’s possible that we need our dreams to show us just how wide that rift is, and what it might take to for us to bring the broken parts back together again.
by RICHARD BAUSCH
So he lay there and watching the light come, trying to understand everything…
––Richard Bausch, Police Dreams
The worst nightmare I ever had was when I was almost forty years old. I had gone with my first wife to a remote island off the coast of Michigan, because we wanted to get away from the stress and confinement of New York City, which we thought was killing us. After a six hour drive and a nearly two hour ferry-ride across very rough waters of Lake Superior, we finally arrived at the island.
We had come hoping to catch a glimpse of the island’s famous wolf population. Many years ago, a pack of wolves had crossed over from the mainland on a bridge of ice which then melted and sealed them off on this island forever. I’d heard that scientists had been coming here for over sixty years to study the descendants of that original wolf pack, as well as a large population of moose that they wolves preyed upon, the two animals caught in an endless dance of death.
We were taken to a small log cabin in a grove of tall trees that bent and trembled in the wind. When we went to sleep that first night, I felt keenly aware of how far we were from everything and everyone else. I knew that there were twenty-two miles of surging, ocean-like waves between us and the mainland, and I felt every inch of that distance deep in my bones. My first wife and I didn’t talk much that night. We were tired from our long journey and went to bed without a word.
Some time in the night, I became aware of a bright light in the room. I realized it was coming from the open bathroom door, but it seemed unnaturally bright, and I opened my eyes to see it better. That was when I knew. Something was coming through that door. Something gigantic and powerful, something horribly evil. I couldn’t see it yet, but I knew it was there, inside the light; I knew it was coming, and that it was going to kill us. To this day, I cannot remember ever being so terrified in my entire life. I tried to scream, but the scream was choked off in my throat by the crushing weight of terror and the terrible blinding light.
Fifteen years later when my first wife and I separated and divorced, I sometimes thought back to that first night on the island, to that nightmare, and the terrible feeling that something was being ripped from my heart by a thing that I couldn’t see but knew was there.
In ‘Police Dreams’ by Richard Bausch, it’s one man’s inability to reconcile the world as he sees it with the world that actually exists that creates a terrible rupture in his mind. Casey, the protagonist of Bausch’s story, suffers from horrific recurring dreams in which strange men appear and kill his family.
It was quite dark, quite late. The street they were on shimmered with rain. A light was blinking at an intersection, making a haze through which someone or something moved. Things shifted, and all the warm feeling was gone. Casey tried to press the gas pedal, and couldn’t, and it seemed quite logical that he couldn’t. And men were opening the doors of the car. They came in on both sides. It was clear that they were going to start killing; they were just going to go ahead and kill everyone.
That Casey’s wife Jean has lost every trace of love for him is made painfully obvious, not in scenes of hostile confrontation, but in every tiny spark of irritation that she responds to him with. She’s clearly absent from the relationship, already gone, although Casey seems not to notice how serious their situation is––like many men (and women) in a dying marriage, he’s simply accepted this low-level hostility as his daily reality, just “the way she is” or “the way things are”.
In the moments when Casey allows himself some awareness that a shadow has fallen over his marriage and his family, part of him still wants to look elsewhere and blame it on his horrible dreams.
Then they were all quiet. Outside, an already gray sky seemed to grow darker. The light above the kitchen table looked meager; it might even have flickered, and for a bad minute Casey felt the nightmare along his spine, as if the whole morning were something presented to him in the helplessness of sleep.
Bausch forces his protagonist and reader to ask which is more horrible––that a man can be blind to the reasons for his entire life being torn apart, or that there ultimately is no reason for such things. When his marriage ends with his wife walking out, there are no warning signals––none that registered with him, at least––and he’s completely blindsided. When most writers depict a man becoming unmoored from reality, they tend to do it in the most extreme and garish colors, with liberal doses of hallucinations and psychotic behavior. For Bausch’s protagonist, it’s the very ordinariness of the daily life around him, and its refusal to acknowledge his own personal tragedy, that undoes him.
In one harrowing passage, the rage and violence that Casey has been suppressing threatens to explode.
He can’t say anything. He’s left with the weight of himself, standing there before her. “You know what you sound like?” he says. “You sound ridiculous, that’s what you sound like.” And the ineptitude of what he has just said, the stupid, helpless rage of it, presents him with a tottering moment of wanting to put his hands around her neck. The idea comes to him so clearly that his throat constricts, and a fan of heat opens across the back of his head. He holds on to the back of a chair and seems to hear her say that she’ll be in touch…
Later that same night, there’s an echo of that same rage when Casey goes home and finds the babysitter asleep in a chair.
She hasn’t heard him come in, and so he has to try and wake her without frightening her. He has this thought clear in his mind as he watches his hand roughly grasp her shoulder, and hears himself say, loud, “Get up!”
The girl opens her eyes and looks blankly at him, and then she screams.
It’s not Casey’s roughness, or the girl’s scream that’s the most terrifying thing in this passage––it’s the complete disconnect between his conscious intention to not frighten the young girl, and what he actually does, the other intention that his doesn’t even recognize as his own. It’s Casey’s warning signal––brilliantly drawn by Bausch––that the other world, the dream world, is closer than he thinks.
It’s in his dreams, of course, horrible as they are, that the forces of malevolence and destruction come out of hiding and make themselves visible to him. And it’s there that he makes one desperate last stand against them.
He hears sounds. There are intruders in the house. There are many intruders. He’s in the darkest corner and he can hear them moving toward him…only now, something has changed…it comes to him with a rush of power that he’s dreaming, and can do anything now, anything he wants to do…He takes one step, then another. He’s in control now. He’s quiet as the sound after death. He knows he can begin, and so he begins.
I will not ruin the final few sentences of this story for readers who have not yet experienced them––I will say, though, that they are among the most powerful final lines I have ever read in any work of fiction.
Bausch’s story tends to push a lot of buttons for some people. Some readers seem to feel that the protagonist turning the tables on his dream-attackers at the end is a kind of heroic act, while others see it as an act of deluded immaturity, not an escape from his mental prison, but simply running deeper into the dark. I’d say your interpretation depends, as always, on what you have lived through yourself. And maybe on your dreams. Because our private and public worlds are fractured already, and it’s possible that we need our dreams to show us just how wide that rift is, and what it might take to for us to bring the broken parts back together again.
THE JUDAS TREE
by DENTON WELCH
“Don’t you know now that Judas had red hair?”
Denton Welch, The Judas Tree
When I was fourteen years old, my parents sent me away to church camp. The camp was a cluster of old cinder-block cabins that clung to the side of a steep hill and seemed constantly in danger of sliding down into the river, especially when it rained, which was often.
There were four boys to each cabin. In my cabin, there was a boy who no one would talk to. Let’s say that his name was Carlton. He was not small or weak, and was in fact too big for the older boys to beat up, but not too big to ignore. I thought that the other boys were just being cruel. They were, but they also saw something in Carlton that I didn’t see yet, something they wanted no part of.
Carlton must have seen that I wasn’t capable of ignoring him, so he started talking to me. At first we talked about normal things that fourteen year old boys talk about; music, movies, TV shows, but not sports. We were united in our hatred of sports, which was one reason why the other boys ignored us both, although their ignoring of Carlton seemed tinged with a deep revulsion that I sensed but didn’t understand.
Carlton, I discovered, also liked to talk about holy communion. We were at a church camp after all, so this alone was not unusual. He was particularly interested in the doctrine of transubstantiation. We were Episcopalian, not Catholic, so the idea of the bread and wine turning into the actual blood and flesh of Christ in our mouths was familiar, but not something we were supposed to believe. Carlton, however, could not stop talking about it. “When do you think it’s supposed to happen?” he asked. “As soon as it’s in your mouth? Or after you swallow it?” These were not questions I knew how to answer, and I started to feel uncomfortable whenever he brought up the subject, which was more and more often. Soon it seemed like all he could talk about. I began to avoid him, which was hard to do, since we were living in the same cabin.
One night Carlton held out his right hand and asked me to bite the soft pad of flesh below his thumb. At first I thought he was kidding, until I heard him speak in a solemn and tremulous voice, “This is my flesh which is given for you…” After that, I never spoke to Carlton again. I had become one of the cruel boys, although I knew that the looks of betrayal I saw in his eyes were only for me.
There’s a fine line between pity and horror. Pity, for one thing, is not the same as compassion, which requires a strong identification with another person. Pity, on the other hand, only requires us to look aghast at something terrible that has happened or is in the process of happening to someone else. In that sense, in the same moment that one feels pity, horror has already begun.
In his story ‘The Judas Tree’, Denton Welch paints a compelling picture of that fine line between pity and horror, and of two people temporarily caught up in each other’s orbit.
The narrator, a young man who is an art student, has a chance encounter on the street with an older man who is carrying a small bunch of spring flowers. After a few moments of casual conversation, the man, whose name is Clinton, asks the boy if he knows what a Judas Tree is, then proceeds to tell the story of the tree from which Judas hanged himself, after which the tree burst into reddish blossoms, the same color (the man insists) as Judas’ hair. During this brief conversation, the narrator catches glimpses of Clinton’s authoritarian schoolmaster attitude, as well as shocking flashes of anger.
Then Clinton astonishes the narrator by asking him to paint for him a picture of Judas hanging dead from the tree, surrounded by the beautiful red flowers. He goes on in great detail to describe precisely how he wants the painting done.
“You could do the flowers very large, and I want Judas really dead. His tongue must be hanging out, black and swollen. It would make a wonderful picture…”
In a particularly disturbing moment, Clinton demonstrates precisely how he wants the dead figure of Judas to appear.
Here he stopped abruptly and, drooping his head to one side, showed the whites of his eyes and the whole length of his tongue in a hideous imitation of death.
“I could sit like this for you, if you liked,” he said…
The narrator demurs, claiming that such a detailed subject is beyond his powers as an artist. Clinton then invites the narrator to his home so he can show him his collection of paintings, which turns out to be picture after picture in which Judas appears.
I looked again and again at evil, twisted, avaricious features, at hyacinth-curling hair…There was simulated love, the lips kissing while the eyes were glittering, almost radiant with treachery. Then the torture of remorse, the last agony of realization.
When the narrator senses that all is not quite right and prepares to leave, Clinton delays him by compelling him to sing while accompanying the narrator on the piano. He then forces the narrator to agree to take singing lessons from him, then asks him repeatedly, almost desperately, to paint the picture of dead Judas for him. Finally the narrator makes his getaway.
We were through the dark hall and I was walking down the steps and saying goodbye over my shoulder in my haste. I smiled at him and tried to look pleased, but it was easy to see that I was escaping
.
A month later, while out with a group of school friends, the narrator encounters Clinton again on the street. It does not go well. Clinton asks about the painting and the narrator admits to doing nothing. When the narrator begs off to rejoin his friends, Clinton’s response is scathing.
“Well––hadn’t you better go after your friends?” he said somewhat threateningly. “Hadn’t you better leave me and catch them up?”
And in this last sentence Mr. Clinton seemed to put all the waste and emptiness of his life.
While Clinton seems a pathetic figure at the last, it’s the narrator who admits to feeling hurt.
Inexplicably wounded and humbled, I ran on to join my friends.
Denton Welch did not write horror stories, but there is horror to be found in them; the horror of human misunderstanding and thoughtless cruelty, of missed connections and wounding blunders. For some of us, this is all the horror we need.
by DENTON WELCH
“Don’t you know now that Judas had red hair?”
Denton Welch, The Judas Tree
When I was fourteen years old, my parents sent me away to church camp. The camp was a cluster of old cinder-block cabins that clung to the side of a steep hill and seemed constantly in danger of sliding down into the river, especially when it rained, which was often.
There were four boys to each cabin. In my cabin, there was a boy who no one would talk to. Let’s say that his name was Carlton. He was not small or weak, and was in fact too big for the older boys to beat up, but not too big to ignore. I thought that the other boys were just being cruel. They were, but they also saw something in Carlton that I didn’t see yet, something they wanted no part of.
Carlton must have seen that I wasn’t capable of ignoring him, so he started talking to me. At first we talked about normal things that fourteen year old boys talk about; music, movies, TV shows, but not sports. We were united in our hatred of sports, which was one reason why the other boys ignored us both, although their ignoring of Carlton seemed tinged with a deep revulsion that I sensed but didn’t understand.
Carlton, I discovered, also liked to talk about holy communion. We were at a church camp after all, so this alone was not unusual. He was particularly interested in the doctrine of transubstantiation. We were Episcopalian, not Catholic, so the idea of the bread and wine turning into the actual blood and flesh of Christ in our mouths was familiar, but not something we were supposed to believe. Carlton, however, could not stop talking about it. “When do you think it’s supposed to happen?” he asked. “As soon as it’s in your mouth? Or after you swallow it?” These were not questions I knew how to answer, and I started to feel uncomfortable whenever he brought up the subject, which was more and more often. Soon it seemed like all he could talk about. I began to avoid him, which was hard to do, since we were living in the same cabin.
One night Carlton held out his right hand and asked me to bite the soft pad of flesh below his thumb. At first I thought he was kidding, until I heard him speak in a solemn and tremulous voice, “This is my flesh which is given for you…” After that, I never spoke to Carlton again. I had become one of the cruel boys, although I knew that the looks of betrayal I saw in his eyes were only for me.
There’s a fine line between pity and horror. Pity, for one thing, is not the same as compassion, which requires a strong identification with another person. Pity, on the other hand, only requires us to look aghast at something terrible that has happened or is in the process of happening to someone else. In that sense, in the same moment that one feels pity, horror has already begun.
In his story ‘The Judas Tree’, Denton Welch paints a compelling picture of that fine line between pity and horror, and of two people temporarily caught up in each other’s orbit.
The narrator, a young man who is an art student, has a chance encounter on the street with an older man who is carrying a small bunch of spring flowers. After a few moments of casual conversation, the man, whose name is Clinton, asks the boy if he knows what a Judas Tree is, then proceeds to tell the story of the tree from which Judas hanged himself, after which the tree burst into reddish blossoms, the same color (the man insists) as Judas’ hair. During this brief conversation, the narrator catches glimpses of Clinton’s authoritarian schoolmaster attitude, as well as shocking flashes of anger.
Then Clinton astonishes the narrator by asking him to paint for him a picture of Judas hanging dead from the tree, surrounded by the beautiful red flowers. He goes on in great detail to describe precisely how he wants the painting done.
“You could do the flowers very large, and I want Judas really dead. His tongue must be hanging out, black and swollen. It would make a wonderful picture…”
In a particularly disturbing moment, Clinton demonstrates precisely how he wants the dead figure of Judas to appear.
Here he stopped abruptly and, drooping his head to one side, showed the whites of his eyes and the whole length of his tongue in a hideous imitation of death.
“I could sit like this for you, if you liked,” he said…
The narrator demurs, claiming that such a detailed subject is beyond his powers as an artist. Clinton then invites the narrator to his home so he can show him his collection of paintings, which turns out to be picture after picture in which Judas appears.
I looked again and again at evil, twisted, avaricious features, at hyacinth-curling hair…There was simulated love, the lips kissing while the eyes were glittering, almost radiant with treachery. Then the torture of remorse, the last agony of realization.
When the narrator senses that all is not quite right and prepares to leave, Clinton delays him by compelling him to sing while accompanying the narrator on the piano. He then forces the narrator to agree to take singing lessons from him, then asks him repeatedly, almost desperately, to paint the picture of dead Judas for him. Finally the narrator makes his getaway.
We were through the dark hall and I was walking down the steps and saying goodbye over my shoulder in my haste. I smiled at him and tried to look pleased, but it was easy to see that I was escaping
.
A month later, while out with a group of school friends, the narrator encounters Clinton again on the street. It does not go well. Clinton asks about the painting and the narrator admits to doing nothing. When the narrator begs off to rejoin his friends, Clinton’s response is scathing.
“Well––hadn’t you better go after your friends?” he said somewhat threateningly. “Hadn’t you better leave me and catch them up?”
And in this last sentence Mr. Clinton seemed to put all the waste and emptiness of his life.
While Clinton seems a pathetic figure at the last, it’s the narrator who admits to feeling hurt.
Inexplicably wounded and humbled, I ran on to join my friends.
Denton Welch did not write horror stories, but there is horror to be found in them; the horror of human misunderstanding and thoughtless cruelty, of missed connections and wounding blunders. For some of us, this is all the horror we need.
THE LITTLE MERMAID
by DOUGLAS CLEGG
“Do you know that when a man becomes old, he begins to remember what he believed in as a child and it all comes back to him?”
Douglas Clegg, The Little Mermaid
When I was in fourth grade, a boy named Dick Davis came to school one day with a lizard. This was not so unusual, since boys––especially boys in the rural South––were supposed to be lovers of reptiles, and carry a supply of snakes, frogs, and lizards in their pockets. What made this particular pet unusual was the means by which Dick kept the lizard close to him. Dick had inserted a large safety pin through the animal’s tail. I remember I had to look closely to make sure of what I was seeing. Dick was a tall, thin boy with a long nose and sleepy eyes and a boney chest. I remember watching him fish the struggling lizard up from the neck of his white T-shirt by pulling on a long string. When I saw how the string was attached to a safety pin impaling the lizard’s tail, I was horrified and fascinated. I watched the animal scramble across Dick’s collarbone and wondered if it felt any pain. I felt sure that this was a question that did not trouble him half as much as it troubled me. The longer I looked into Dick’s dull, dark eyes, I realized that he did not really see the lizard. What he saw was what he wanted the lizard to be; an object of his own making, a thing that belonged to him and had no other reality or meaning outside of his own need of it.
In his story, ‘The Little Mermaid’, Douglas Clegg provides us with a particularly horrific vision of that same sense of ownership and the terrible places it can lead.
The action of the story is simple. A woman running alone on a beach injures her ankle and has an encounter with an older man collecting shells. The man, who is a doctor, offers to help treat her ankle. The woman, who is recovering from a painful divorce, is hesitant to open up to the man, but he freely tells her of his own childhood dreams and longings, a confession that undoes her.
Alice began weeping upon hearing this. She could not control it, and it was not just about the pathetic little four-year-old who sang to the non existent mermaids; it was about everything she’d wished for as a child, all within her grasp, gone now, like sand, like sea-water, the way memory always left her bereft and longing for innocence. He slid his hands from her feet and placed them on either side of her face. They were comfortingly cold.
“A beautiful woman should never cry,” he said.
They make love and she falls asleep…
When she awoke, the pain was excruciating. The room, shrouded in darkness. The curtains were drawn shut. She gasped; a light came on…
He said, “I had to operate, Alice.” He knew her name now, even though she didn’t know his.
It’s difficult to say more without ruining the impact of Clegg’s story. Let’s just say that when the woman awakes, she discovers that the man has done things to her, that he has altered her physically to conform to his own strange and monstrous idea of beauty.
There was dried blood on the sheets. Several hypodermic needles lay carelessly beside her. Fish scales, too, spread out in a vermillion and blue desert, piled high, as if every fish in the ocean had been skinned and thrown about. The smell was intolerable: oily and fishy, and the flies! Everywhere, the blue and green flies.
More than almost any other horror author, Douglas Clegg’s stories are upsetting in profoundly painful ways. Not horrifying or even disturbing––although they are often both––but upsetting in the way that they touch on the raw sense of betrayal human beings feel when the unthinkable occurs and we are horrible naked and bereft of the safety we thought was ours. It’s a terror that feels very close to heartbreak. (Clegg’s story ‘The Joss House’ is another example, one that I wanted to write about, but literally could not bring myself to read again.)
What is most upsetting in ‘The Little Mermaid’ is not the horrible things that the man does to the woman, or the cruel way in which she dies, but her own feeling of being betrayed by life or God or the universe in her final moments as she still clings to the final shreds of hope and denial.
If I just hang on for another minute, she thought, just another ten seconds, I’ll be fine. God will rescue me. Or someone will see me. Will see what he’s done to me, this madman. I haven’t lived all my life to come to this. I know something will happen. Something will pull me out of this.
At he story’s end, Clegg abandons the woman without sentiment and slips fully into the point of view of the man who has done this terrible thing and does not understand that it is terrible. Here, after all, is the real horror, not the mutilations or the killing, but the man’s complete and unquestioning allegiance to his mad vision, and his complete blindness to the evil he has done. It’s the kind of blindness that is rampant in the world today, and Clegg’s story crystalizes it into a thing of heartbreaking and merciless beauty.
As for Dick Davis and his lizard, I would like to think that the poor creature he’d mutilated and tortured all those years ago was the only one, but I know better. There had probably been others before the one I saw, and there were likely many more afterward. In Dick’s mind, however, there was probably only one, the one he imagined every time he saw a flicker of pale green in the grass and plunged his hand in after it, every time he held it down with one hand and pushed the sharp safety pin through its tail with the other; the one that would not run away, the one that would stay with him, an extension of himself. That was what Dick wanted, and it’s what a lot of men still want. Douglas Clegg knows that. We should all know it too.
by DOUGLAS CLEGG
“Do you know that when a man becomes old, he begins to remember what he believed in as a child and it all comes back to him?”
Douglas Clegg, The Little Mermaid
When I was in fourth grade, a boy named Dick Davis came to school one day with a lizard. This was not so unusual, since boys––especially boys in the rural South––were supposed to be lovers of reptiles, and carry a supply of snakes, frogs, and lizards in their pockets. What made this particular pet unusual was the means by which Dick kept the lizard close to him. Dick had inserted a large safety pin through the animal’s tail. I remember I had to look closely to make sure of what I was seeing. Dick was a tall, thin boy with a long nose and sleepy eyes and a boney chest. I remember watching him fish the struggling lizard up from the neck of his white T-shirt by pulling on a long string. When I saw how the string was attached to a safety pin impaling the lizard’s tail, I was horrified and fascinated. I watched the animal scramble across Dick’s collarbone and wondered if it felt any pain. I felt sure that this was a question that did not trouble him half as much as it troubled me. The longer I looked into Dick’s dull, dark eyes, I realized that he did not really see the lizard. What he saw was what he wanted the lizard to be; an object of his own making, a thing that belonged to him and had no other reality or meaning outside of his own need of it.
In his story, ‘The Little Mermaid’, Douglas Clegg provides us with a particularly horrific vision of that same sense of ownership and the terrible places it can lead.
The action of the story is simple. A woman running alone on a beach injures her ankle and has an encounter with an older man collecting shells. The man, who is a doctor, offers to help treat her ankle. The woman, who is recovering from a painful divorce, is hesitant to open up to the man, but he freely tells her of his own childhood dreams and longings, a confession that undoes her.
Alice began weeping upon hearing this. She could not control it, and it was not just about the pathetic little four-year-old who sang to the non existent mermaids; it was about everything she’d wished for as a child, all within her grasp, gone now, like sand, like sea-water, the way memory always left her bereft and longing for innocence. He slid his hands from her feet and placed them on either side of her face. They were comfortingly cold.
“A beautiful woman should never cry,” he said.
They make love and she falls asleep…
When she awoke, the pain was excruciating. The room, shrouded in darkness. The curtains were drawn shut. She gasped; a light came on…
He said, “I had to operate, Alice.” He knew her name now, even though she didn’t know his.
It’s difficult to say more without ruining the impact of Clegg’s story. Let’s just say that when the woman awakes, she discovers that the man has done things to her, that he has altered her physically to conform to his own strange and monstrous idea of beauty.
There was dried blood on the sheets. Several hypodermic needles lay carelessly beside her. Fish scales, too, spread out in a vermillion and blue desert, piled high, as if every fish in the ocean had been skinned and thrown about. The smell was intolerable: oily and fishy, and the flies! Everywhere, the blue and green flies.
More than almost any other horror author, Douglas Clegg’s stories are upsetting in profoundly painful ways. Not horrifying or even disturbing––although they are often both––but upsetting in the way that they touch on the raw sense of betrayal human beings feel when the unthinkable occurs and we are horrible naked and bereft of the safety we thought was ours. It’s a terror that feels very close to heartbreak. (Clegg’s story ‘The Joss House’ is another example, one that I wanted to write about, but literally could not bring myself to read again.)
What is most upsetting in ‘The Little Mermaid’ is not the horrible things that the man does to the woman, or the cruel way in which she dies, but her own feeling of being betrayed by life or God or the universe in her final moments as she still clings to the final shreds of hope and denial.
If I just hang on for another minute, she thought, just another ten seconds, I’ll be fine. God will rescue me. Or someone will see me. Will see what he’s done to me, this madman. I haven’t lived all my life to come to this. I know something will happen. Something will pull me out of this.
At he story’s end, Clegg abandons the woman without sentiment and slips fully into the point of view of the man who has done this terrible thing and does not understand that it is terrible. Here, after all, is the real horror, not the mutilations or the killing, but the man’s complete and unquestioning allegiance to his mad vision, and his complete blindness to the evil he has done. It’s the kind of blindness that is rampant in the world today, and Clegg’s story crystalizes it into a thing of heartbreaking and merciless beauty.
As for Dick Davis and his lizard, I would like to think that the poor creature he’d mutilated and tortured all those years ago was the only one, but I know better. There had probably been others before the one I saw, and there were likely many more afterward. In Dick’s mind, however, there was probably only one, the one he imagined every time he saw a flicker of pale green in the grass and plunged his hand in after it, every time he held it down with one hand and pushed the sharp safety pin through its tail with the other; the one that would not run away, the one that would stay with him, an extension of himself. That was what Dick wanted, and it’s what a lot of men still want. Douglas Clegg knows that. We should all know it too.
THE GOOD HUSBAND
by NATHAN BALLINGRUD
“You just stay here. You’re safe here. We’ll keep things dark, like you like it.”
Nathan Ballingrud, The Good Husband
Horror fiction, at its best, digs deeply into the darkest and most disturbing corners of our human experience and brings back truths that it molds into strange new shapes. Some of those shapes that were once shocking, like the death or threatened death of children, have become familiar, and what was once unspeakable is now part of our popular entertainment. But occasionally, a writer will turn the prism in just such a way that the light catches a hidden facet and throws terrifying new colors on the wall, colors that appear completely new, but were there all along.
In ‘The Good Husband’, the final story in his groundbreaking collection North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud presents us with not only an unforgettable horror story, but an invaluable lesson in where true horror comes from.
A brief, factual summary of ‘The Good Husband’ may sound at first like a standard revenge-haunting tale––a man who is responsible for his wife’s death must deal with her unexpected return from the dead. But in Ballingrud’s hands, this familiar set-up is transformed and becomes a whole different type of story altogether. We discover, with brutal swiftness and honesty, that the real monster in this story is not the undead wife, but the husband.
The protagonist of Ballingrud’s story has long dealt with his wife’s depression, and has rescued her from multiple suicide attempts. While he remains devoted to her, we hear the resentment and anger that has built up inside of him because of her inability to accept the comfort and emotional support he offers, and from having to bring her back from the edge so many times. So when he finds her bleeding-out in the bathtub after yet another attempt, he decides to let nature take its course to end her suffering––and his own.
But when his wife returns from the dead, confused, fragile, and unaware of what has happened, her shocked husband takes this as his chance to atone for his act of selfishness by becoming a hundred times more attentive and solicitous than before, protecting his wife and tending to her every need, even while she’s literally falling apart right before his eyes.
It would be easy to say that this story is about a terrible punishment the husband receives for allowing his wife to die. But by the story’s end, what becomes horribly clear is that the real crime is the husband’s obsessive crusade to hold on to his wife, against all evidence that this is monstrously wrong.
Ballingrud also charts with terrible honesty and precision the mysterious and treacherous terrain of sexual love between partners who have lived a long time together, and the unexpected effects that his wife’s dreadful change has on his desire for her.
Her body had stopped behaving the way it was meant to and conformed to a new logic, a biology he did not recognize and could not understand, and which made a mystery of her again. It had been so long since she’d been a mystery to him….Every nerve ending in his body was turned in her direction, like flowers bending to the sun.
Eventually, the wife, who can no longer bear sunlight, moves into the basement, where her husband continues to cater to her needs, first by dragging their mattress downstairs, finally, knowing her love of small dead things, by providing her with roadkill and the carcass of the neighbors’ cat that he has poisoned for her.
The husband becomes more and more demented in his denial of the horror of what he’s doing, so that when their daughter announces she wants to come home from college for the weekend, his only response is a distracted kind of worry. He wondered what the hell he was going to tell her. She was going to have a hard time with this. As if this new reality is something his daughter will just simply have to adjust to, like a trial separation or a move to a new town.
There’s a Buddhist analogy that compares the self-cherishing mind to insects hidden under a log––if you turn the log over, you’ll glimpse them for a few seconds before they dig deeper and hide. For the husband in Ballingrud’s story, his self-cherishing mind is buried so deeply, he can’t recognize it, even when it’s in complete control of his actions.
Ballingrud shines a bright light on the essential self-centeredness at the heart of almost everything the man says or does. What’s happening to me? This is what the husband says as he lays his wife down to sleep immediately after her horrible, impossible return from the dead. What’s happening to me––not what’s happening to her.
When their daughter arrives, still unaware of what is happening, the husband is struck by how much she looks like her mother.
It was as though a young Katie had slipped sideways through a hole in the world and come here to see him again, to see what kind of man he had become. What manner of man she had married.
He lowered his eyes.
‘I’m a good man,’ he thought.
In the entire story, there is no more horrifying and heartbreaking line than this. The only line in all horror fiction that comes close is in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ where the narrator explains why he hung his pet cat, saying, I killed it because I loved it. In both lines, there’s a level of delusion so extreme, it’s almost ecstatic.
And in the extraordinary final passage in which the husband forces the daughter down the basement stairs to see her mother, the most devastating lines are not about the barely human thing the wife has become––they are the heartfelt, deluded things the husband is telling himself in order to keep pushing forward.
Our family has weathered great upheaval. Our family is bound together by love.
They heard something shift in the darkness beyond the reach of light.
‘The Good Husband’ is the final story in the collection––a wise decision by Ballingrud and editors Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. Like Jerry Lee Lewis kicking over the stool and setting his piano on fire, there’s no following this story.
I’ll refrain from saying that Nathan Ballingrud’s ‘The Good Husband’ is the most powerful horror story ever written. Let’s just say that ‘The Good Husband’ is the most powerful horror story I’ve ever read. I may read a more powerful story one day––but right now, that’s very hard to imagine.
by NATHAN BALLINGRUD
“You just stay here. You’re safe here. We’ll keep things dark, like you like it.”
Nathan Ballingrud, The Good Husband
Horror fiction, at its best, digs deeply into the darkest and most disturbing corners of our human experience and brings back truths that it molds into strange new shapes. Some of those shapes that were once shocking, like the death or threatened death of children, have become familiar, and what was once unspeakable is now part of our popular entertainment. But occasionally, a writer will turn the prism in just such a way that the light catches a hidden facet and throws terrifying new colors on the wall, colors that appear completely new, but were there all along.
In ‘The Good Husband’, the final story in his groundbreaking collection North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud presents us with not only an unforgettable horror story, but an invaluable lesson in where true horror comes from.
A brief, factual summary of ‘The Good Husband’ may sound at first like a standard revenge-haunting tale––a man who is responsible for his wife’s death must deal with her unexpected return from the dead. But in Ballingrud’s hands, this familiar set-up is transformed and becomes a whole different type of story altogether. We discover, with brutal swiftness and honesty, that the real monster in this story is not the undead wife, but the husband.
The protagonist of Ballingrud’s story has long dealt with his wife’s depression, and has rescued her from multiple suicide attempts. While he remains devoted to her, we hear the resentment and anger that has built up inside of him because of her inability to accept the comfort and emotional support he offers, and from having to bring her back from the edge so many times. So when he finds her bleeding-out in the bathtub after yet another attempt, he decides to let nature take its course to end her suffering––and his own.
But when his wife returns from the dead, confused, fragile, and unaware of what has happened, her shocked husband takes this as his chance to atone for his act of selfishness by becoming a hundred times more attentive and solicitous than before, protecting his wife and tending to her every need, even while she’s literally falling apart right before his eyes.
It would be easy to say that this story is about a terrible punishment the husband receives for allowing his wife to die. But by the story’s end, what becomes horribly clear is that the real crime is the husband’s obsessive crusade to hold on to his wife, against all evidence that this is monstrously wrong.
Ballingrud also charts with terrible honesty and precision the mysterious and treacherous terrain of sexual love between partners who have lived a long time together, and the unexpected effects that his wife’s dreadful change has on his desire for her.
Her body had stopped behaving the way it was meant to and conformed to a new logic, a biology he did not recognize and could not understand, and which made a mystery of her again. It had been so long since she’d been a mystery to him….Every nerve ending in his body was turned in her direction, like flowers bending to the sun.
Eventually, the wife, who can no longer bear sunlight, moves into the basement, where her husband continues to cater to her needs, first by dragging their mattress downstairs, finally, knowing her love of small dead things, by providing her with roadkill and the carcass of the neighbors’ cat that he has poisoned for her.
The husband becomes more and more demented in his denial of the horror of what he’s doing, so that when their daughter announces she wants to come home from college for the weekend, his only response is a distracted kind of worry. He wondered what the hell he was going to tell her. She was going to have a hard time with this. As if this new reality is something his daughter will just simply have to adjust to, like a trial separation or a move to a new town.
There’s a Buddhist analogy that compares the self-cherishing mind to insects hidden under a log––if you turn the log over, you’ll glimpse them for a few seconds before they dig deeper and hide. For the husband in Ballingrud’s story, his self-cherishing mind is buried so deeply, he can’t recognize it, even when it’s in complete control of his actions.
Ballingrud shines a bright light on the essential self-centeredness at the heart of almost everything the man says or does. What’s happening to me? This is what the husband says as he lays his wife down to sleep immediately after her horrible, impossible return from the dead. What’s happening to me––not what’s happening to her.
When their daughter arrives, still unaware of what is happening, the husband is struck by how much she looks like her mother.
It was as though a young Katie had slipped sideways through a hole in the world and come here to see him again, to see what kind of man he had become. What manner of man she had married.
He lowered his eyes.
‘I’m a good man,’ he thought.
In the entire story, there is no more horrifying and heartbreaking line than this. The only line in all horror fiction that comes close is in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ where the narrator explains why he hung his pet cat, saying, I killed it because I loved it. In both lines, there’s a level of delusion so extreme, it’s almost ecstatic.
And in the extraordinary final passage in which the husband forces the daughter down the basement stairs to see her mother, the most devastating lines are not about the barely human thing the wife has become––they are the heartfelt, deluded things the husband is telling himself in order to keep pushing forward.
Our family has weathered great upheaval. Our family is bound together by love.
They heard something shift in the darkness beyond the reach of light.
‘The Good Husband’ is the final story in the collection––a wise decision by Ballingrud and editors Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. Like Jerry Lee Lewis kicking over the stool and setting his piano on fire, there’s no following this story.
I’ll refrain from saying that Nathan Ballingrud’s ‘The Good Husband’ is the most powerful horror story ever written. Let’s just say that ‘The Good Husband’ is the most powerful horror story I’ve ever read. I may read a more powerful story one day––but right now, that’s very hard to imagine.
HOW CAN I GET IN TOUCH WITH PERSIA
by JANET FRAME
from The Reservoir and Other Stories
“All dreams lead back to the nightmare garden.”
-––Janet Frame, Intensive Care
When you are first discovering how the world works, everything seems possible. That big white rock half-buried at the back of your school playground is a dinosaur skull. If you climb a tree and jump from the highest limb, if you kick and flap your arms hard enough, the air will hold you up like water and you will float to the ground, unhurt. All of these things and many others make perfect sense, until they are tested.
As children, we live in a world where adults make the rules. We become keenly aware of our own ignorance because we are reminded of it again and again. At some point, the humiliation becomes too much, and we decide to start making our own rules. Not only rules about behavior, but about how the world works.
According to one theory, most forms of mental illness are the human mind’s natural response to an intolerable environment, and therefore it is not the person, but the world that is insane. This is an idea that writer Janet Frame understood very well.
Frame’s life-story is fairly well-known by now––her extreme shyness early in life and her later reclusiveness, her crippling panic attacks, her suicide attempt and subsequent eight years in a psychiatric hospital, her last-minute reprieve from a lobotomy when a doctor discovered that she had just won a prestigious literary prize, her later-in-life success and canonization as one of the 20th century’s greatest writers. All these things are the stuff of legend and have become the ultimate success story of every artist who ever struggled with their sanity––a sort of Van Gogh-with-a-happy-ending.
There’s only one thing wrong with this scenario––Janet Frame was never insane.
While in London, Frame was examined by a panel of doctors at a renowned psychiatric institution. They pronounced that not only was she not schizophrenic (her original diagnosis)––she was not mentally ill. While she was glad about this news later in life, at the time it confused and unsettled her deeply. As she wrote in her autobiography, “Oh why had they robbed me of my schizophrenia, which had been the answer to all my misgivings about myself?”
Our identity, our sense of self, can be quite fragile, and our instinct is to cling to it. Even when we know it isn’t true.
In Frame’s story, How Can I Get In Touch With Persia, insanity (as in so much of her writing) is a creative act.
The nameless main character of Frame’s story is an outsider, a young man who still lives with his parents and can’t cope with the real adult world. Shutting himself off in his upstairs room, he develops and cultivates an obsession with electricity, surrounding himself with a variety of electrical gadgets, caught up in endless contemplation of this strange invisible power.
He became preoccupied even in sleep and dreaming with its mystery. He longed to seek out the reality of it, to put his hand out in the dark and touch it.
Of his many electrical devices, its his first transmitting and receiving set that fascinates and occupies him the most. It provides him with a means of connecting with the outside world while also disconnecting himself from it. The parallels with online culture and social media addiction are vivid and compelling. Finally, the messages he sends and receives are not so much about communication as they are about exerting a kind of control over a world that is otherwise too big and terrifying.
Often he would stay until the early hours of the morning, tapping in code and talking to people in the distant countries which could only be located on the map by searching the index and then carefully trapping the area between latitude and longitude. Every country was trapped in this way. No one could hide or fake death in order to escape notice, such was the ruthlessness of the map of the world.
But the world likes to send its brutal little reminders that we are not the ones in control. The main character receives one of these reminders when, during a job interview, he’s told that he must agree to be physically searched as a condition of employment. He’s outraged and horrified, not so much by the physical experience of being searched, but by the abject surrender it represents, the admission that others have ultimate power over him, and that in the end he has no power over them.
This same crushing realization returns in its most monstrous form when his mother dies after a sudden illness. Her death makes no sense to him, because it isn’t part of his view of how the world works. He can’t believe that his mother is dead––therefore, she cannot be dead. He brings these two experiences together in a desperate outcry of defiance:
He kissed his mother. He began to cry. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve never believed it. Even when they wanted to search me and take my life away from me, I’ve never believed it.”
How Can I Get In Touch With Persia has many of the traditional elements of a horror story––an obsessive and mentally unhinged main character, grave-robbing, even an unholy semi-scientific experimenting with the dead. But for me, the most disturbing parts of Frame’s story are not these grisly scenes. Instead, the most powerfully unsettling moments occur when the main character’s world-view begins to unravel, and we witness him trying to rewire reality,
.
“When I count to twenty,” he said to himself, “She will come alive.”
He counted twenty: she was not breathing.
“If I hear a motorbike while I am counting to fifteen, and if the edge of the curtain moves during the following fifteen and the light from the streetlamp outside shines in a slit on the wallpaper, then she will be alive.” He counted fifteen, listening anxiously for the motorbike, and opening his eyes to observe the patch of wallpaper where the streetlamp would shine…
In these few words, Frame gives us a powerful and heartbreaking depiction of the breakdown of magical thinking, a devastatingly real glimpse of a besieged mind trying to barter with reality. Never realizing that reality is not listening.
by JANET FRAME
from The Reservoir and Other Stories
“All dreams lead back to the nightmare garden.”
-––Janet Frame, Intensive Care
When you are first discovering how the world works, everything seems possible. That big white rock half-buried at the back of your school playground is a dinosaur skull. If you climb a tree and jump from the highest limb, if you kick and flap your arms hard enough, the air will hold you up like water and you will float to the ground, unhurt. All of these things and many others make perfect sense, until they are tested.
As children, we live in a world where adults make the rules. We become keenly aware of our own ignorance because we are reminded of it again and again. At some point, the humiliation becomes too much, and we decide to start making our own rules. Not only rules about behavior, but about how the world works.
According to one theory, most forms of mental illness are the human mind’s natural response to an intolerable environment, and therefore it is not the person, but the world that is insane. This is an idea that writer Janet Frame understood very well.
Frame’s life-story is fairly well-known by now––her extreme shyness early in life and her later reclusiveness, her crippling panic attacks, her suicide attempt and subsequent eight years in a psychiatric hospital, her last-minute reprieve from a lobotomy when a doctor discovered that she had just won a prestigious literary prize, her later-in-life success and canonization as one of the 20th century’s greatest writers. All these things are the stuff of legend and have become the ultimate success story of every artist who ever struggled with their sanity––a sort of Van Gogh-with-a-happy-ending.
There’s only one thing wrong with this scenario––Janet Frame was never insane.
While in London, Frame was examined by a panel of doctors at a renowned psychiatric institution. They pronounced that not only was she not schizophrenic (her original diagnosis)––she was not mentally ill. While she was glad about this news later in life, at the time it confused and unsettled her deeply. As she wrote in her autobiography, “Oh why had they robbed me of my schizophrenia, which had been the answer to all my misgivings about myself?”
Our identity, our sense of self, can be quite fragile, and our instinct is to cling to it. Even when we know it isn’t true.
In Frame’s story, How Can I Get In Touch With Persia, insanity (as in so much of her writing) is a creative act.
The nameless main character of Frame’s story is an outsider, a young man who still lives with his parents and can’t cope with the real adult world. Shutting himself off in his upstairs room, he develops and cultivates an obsession with electricity, surrounding himself with a variety of electrical gadgets, caught up in endless contemplation of this strange invisible power.
He became preoccupied even in sleep and dreaming with its mystery. He longed to seek out the reality of it, to put his hand out in the dark and touch it.
Of his many electrical devices, its his first transmitting and receiving set that fascinates and occupies him the most. It provides him with a means of connecting with the outside world while also disconnecting himself from it. The parallels with online culture and social media addiction are vivid and compelling. Finally, the messages he sends and receives are not so much about communication as they are about exerting a kind of control over a world that is otherwise too big and terrifying.
Often he would stay until the early hours of the morning, tapping in code and talking to people in the distant countries which could only be located on the map by searching the index and then carefully trapping the area between latitude and longitude. Every country was trapped in this way. No one could hide or fake death in order to escape notice, such was the ruthlessness of the map of the world.
But the world likes to send its brutal little reminders that we are not the ones in control. The main character receives one of these reminders when, during a job interview, he’s told that he must agree to be physically searched as a condition of employment. He’s outraged and horrified, not so much by the physical experience of being searched, but by the abject surrender it represents, the admission that others have ultimate power over him, and that in the end he has no power over them.
This same crushing realization returns in its most monstrous form when his mother dies after a sudden illness. Her death makes no sense to him, because it isn’t part of his view of how the world works. He can’t believe that his mother is dead––therefore, she cannot be dead. He brings these two experiences together in a desperate outcry of defiance:
He kissed his mother. He began to cry. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve never believed it. Even when they wanted to search me and take my life away from me, I’ve never believed it.”
How Can I Get In Touch With Persia has many of the traditional elements of a horror story––an obsessive and mentally unhinged main character, grave-robbing, even an unholy semi-scientific experimenting with the dead. But for me, the most disturbing parts of Frame’s story are not these grisly scenes. Instead, the most powerfully unsettling moments occur when the main character’s world-view begins to unravel, and we witness him trying to rewire reality,
.
“When I count to twenty,” he said to himself, “She will come alive.”
He counted twenty: she was not breathing.
“If I hear a motorbike while I am counting to fifteen, and if the edge of the curtain moves during the following fifteen and the light from the streetlamp outside shines in a slit on the wallpaper, then she will be alive.” He counted fifteen, listening anxiously for the motorbike, and opening his eyes to observe the patch of wallpaper where the streetlamp would shine…
In these few words, Frame gives us a powerful and heartbreaking depiction of the breakdown of magical thinking, a devastatingly real glimpse of a besieged mind trying to barter with reality. Never realizing that reality is not listening.
WHAT NATURE ABHORS
by MARK MORRIS
“I’m sorry, he whispered. “I’m so sorry. Please. Have mercy.”
My first dream––as I suspect many people’s first dreams are––was a nightmare. I was probably around four or five years old. Every morning my mother asked me what I’d dreamt about the night before. The problem was that I could not recall having any dreams––in fact, I wasn’t even sure what a dream was supposed to be like. I suspected this meant there was something seriously wrong with me. I didn’t want my mother to find out, so every morning when she asked what kind of dreams I’d had, I made them up. From bits and pieces of storybooks and cartoons and TV shows, I created my first fictions and kept my mother entertained––until one morning when I woke up and remembered…
I was inside a cage with some other children, hanging from the roof of a huge cave, suspended by a giant chain. We were being held prisoner by a giant who was not there, but was out there in the world somewhere, going about his giant-business, possibly hunting for more children. The mouth of the cave was wide and open, and through it I could see the ocean and a beautiful beach. The sand was golden yellow, the sky was a pure blue, the perfect picture of a beautiful day. And despite all that warmth and beauty that lay outside, just beyond my reach, I knew that the giant was going to return to the cave to kill and eat us, one by one. And there was nothing that I or any of us could do about it. I knew that as surely as I knew anything. And although the giant never showed his face in that dream, it was that feeling of inevitability that was more terrifying to me than any monster could be.
The first time I read the Mark Morris story, ‘What Nature Abhors’, in Stephen Jones’ Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Volume 18, I very quickly felt that same nightmarish sense of being dragged toward something horrific beyond words, slowly but inevitably.
We start out knowing nothing about the protagonist of Morris’ story, other than his name, Meacher. In fact, he knows almost nothing about himself. Awakening on a train in a strange town, he finds himself alone.
As far as Meacher could see, it was not only the train that was deserted but the platform too—and so profoundly, it seemed to him, that he suppressed the urge to call out, oddly fearful of how intrusive, or worse, insignificant, his voice might sound in the enveloping silence.
Meacher explores the deserted town, imagining a variety of catastrophes that might have emptied the streets of people––a nuclear bomb, chemical warfare. Slowly, he begins to understand that even these terrible scenarios are nothing compared to the truth that awaits him. As he moves deeper and deeper into the empty town, he encounters an unsettling sight that is the story’s central and disturbing image—mannequins with their heads wrapped in black plastic.
There was one standing at the back of the shop, and like all the others had a plastic bag draped over its head. In this case, however, not only did the bag appear to be clinging tightly to the mannequin’s face, but there seemed to be an oval-shaped indentation in the plastic that to Meacher resembled a gaping mouth, desperate for air.
Meacher has no memories, no purpose. Only a vague sense that something is terribly wrong. To find out what it is, he must find out who he is.
Home. Where was that? The renewed surge of panic that accompanied his dawning realization that he knew almost nothing about himself was so overwhelming that he stumbled and almost fell as the strength drained out of him.
We follow Meacher as he’s pursued through a landscape that becomes more and more nightmarish until the full horror of who he is, what he has done, and why he is here are revealed to him. And to us.
Like the best of Poe’s stories, Morris’ story occurs right at that point where the harm that we’re capable of (and the guilt and fear it creates) makes us unrecognizable to ourselves. It’s the place where ghosts and monsters are born. But while Poe’s unreliable narrators often go to their dooms never realizing how monstrous they truly are, Morris, by his story’s end, doesn’t shield his protagonist from the truth.
It was the sight of the bag—black plastic wrapped round with masking tape—that triggered the memories in Meacher’s mind. Now, finally, he was beginning to realize why he was here. He held out his hands in supplication…
The final realization is so devastating that, in the story’s final sentence, Morris does at least spare Meacher, and us, a direct look into its face––it’s the one mercy that Morris shows to his protagonist. At one level, it’s a story of damnation so final and absolute that the only response ought to be to curl up in a ball or throw yourself off the nearest bridge. But instead, there’s an unaccountable feeling of clarity and release that comes at the end of Morris’ story, a feeling of appreciative awe at how all these dream-like elements finally come together and make terrible, perfect sense.
What Morris’ story exemplifies, particularly in the way it ends—is what fiction writer and editor William Maxwell called “the joy of getting it right”. The protagonist of Morris’ story takes the type of journey that no person in their right mind would ever think of calling “joyful”. But there is, I’ll argue, a strange kind of joy in it, one that’s hard to recognize at first, but just as deep and real. That joy is doubled by the way the precision and momentum of the writing mirrors the inevitability of the protagonists’ fate. It’s a beautiful inevitability, one that we humans are only given to glimpse and understand for a fleeting moment. In that moment there is transcendence, the transcendence of accepting what was unthinkable or invisible to us just a moment before. It’s the freedom and release of finally knowing the truth. Even if we never get to see its face.
by MARK MORRIS
“I’m sorry, he whispered. “I’m so sorry. Please. Have mercy.”
My first dream––as I suspect many people’s first dreams are––was a nightmare. I was probably around four or five years old. Every morning my mother asked me what I’d dreamt about the night before. The problem was that I could not recall having any dreams––in fact, I wasn’t even sure what a dream was supposed to be like. I suspected this meant there was something seriously wrong with me. I didn’t want my mother to find out, so every morning when she asked what kind of dreams I’d had, I made them up. From bits and pieces of storybooks and cartoons and TV shows, I created my first fictions and kept my mother entertained––until one morning when I woke up and remembered…
I was inside a cage with some other children, hanging from the roof of a huge cave, suspended by a giant chain. We were being held prisoner by a giant who was not there, but was out there in the world somewhere, going about his giant-business, possibly hunting for more children. The mouth of the cave was wide and open, and through it I could see the ocean and a beautiful beach. The sand was golden yellow, the sky was a pure blue, the perfect picture of a beautiful day. And despite all that warmth and beauty that lay outside, just beyond my reach, I knew that the giant was going to return to the cave to kill and eat us, one by one. And there was nothing that I or any of us could do about it. I knew that as surely as I knew anything. And although the giant never showed his face in that dream, it was that feeling of inevitability that was more terrifying to me than any monster could be.
The first time I read the Mark Morris story, ‘What Nature Abhors’, in Stephen Jones’ Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Volume 18, I very quickly felt that same nightmarish sense of being dragged toward something horrific beyond words, slowly but inevitably.
We start out knowing nothing about the protagonist of Morris’ story, other than his name, Meacher. In fact, he knows almost nothing about himself. Awakening on a train in a strange town, he finds himself alone.
As far as Meacher could see, it was not only the train that was deserted but the platform too—and so profoundly, it seemed to him, that he suppressed the urge to call out, oddly fearful of how intrusive, or worse, insignificant, his voice might sound in the enveloping silence.
Meacher explores the deserted town, imagining a variety of catastrophes that might have emptied the streets of people––a nuclear bomb, chemical warfare. Slowly, he begins to understand that even these terrible scenarios are nothing compared to the truth that awaits him. As he moves deeper and deeper into the empty town, he encounters an unsettling sight that is the story’s central and disturbing image—mannequins with their heads wrapped in black plastic.
There was one standing at the back of the shop, and like all the others had a plastic bag draped over its head. In this case, however, not only did the bag appear to be clinging tightly to the mannequin’s face, but there seemed to be an oval-shaped indentation in the plastic that to Meacher resembled a gaping mouth, desperate for air.
Meacher has no memories, no purpose. Only a vague sense that something is terribly wrong. To find out what it is, he must find out who he is.
Home. Where was that? The renewed surge of panic that accompanied his dawning realization that he knew almost nothing about himself was so overwhelming that he stumbled and almost fell as the strength drained out of him.
We follow Meacher as he’s pursued through a landscape that becomes more and more nightmarish until the full horror of who he is, what he has done, and why he is here are revealed to him. And to us.
Like the best of Poe’s stories, Morris’ story occurs right at that point where the harm that we’re capable of (and the guilt and fear it creates) makes us unrecognizable to ourselves. It’s the place where ghosts and monsters are born. But while Poe’s unreliable narrators often go to their dooms never realizing how monstrous they truly are, Morris, by his story’s end, doesn’t shield his protagonist from the truth.
It was the sight of the bag—black plastic wrapped round with masking tape—that triggered the memories in Meacher’s mind. Now, finally, he was beginning to realize why he was here. He held out his hands in supplication…
The final realization is so devastating that, in the story’s final sentence, Morris does at least spare Meacher, and us, a direct look into its face––it’s the one mercy that Morris shows to his protagonist. At one level, it’s a story of damnation so final and absolute that the only response ought to be to curl up in a ball or throw yourself off the nearest bridge. But instead, there’s an unaccountable feeling of clarity and release that comes at the end of Morris’ story, a feeling of appreciative awe at how all these dream-like elements finally come together and make terrible, perfect sense.
What Morris’ story exemplifies, particularly in the way it ends—is what fiction writer and editor William Maxwell called “the joy of getting it right”. The protagonist of Morris’ story takes the type of journey that no person in their right mind would ever think of calling “joyful”. But there is, I’ll argue, a strange kind of joy in it, one that’s hard to recognize at first, but just as deep and real. That joy is doubled by the way the precision and momentum of the writing mirrors the inevitability of the protagonists’ fate. It’s a beautiful inevitability, one that we humans are only given to glimpse and understand for a fleeting moment. In that moment there is transcendence, the transcendence of accepting what was unthinkable or invisible to us just a moment before. It’s the freedom and release of finally knowing the truth. Even if we never get to see its face.
MISERERE
by ROBERT STONE
That night, driving, with the dark dead creatures at their back, she offered up the suffering in it.
––from Miserere by Robert Stone
There are some pictures you never want to see. But once you’ve seen them, they’re branded into your brain forever. The young man free-falling from the burning World Trade Tower, his white shirt billowing like a broken sail. The blindfolded journalist on his knees in the sand, the terrorist’s blade already halfway through his neck. Most of all, there are the animals––always dogs. They fill your computer screen with their skeletal ribs, their diseased ulcerating skin, their eyeless bloodied faces. They shock and sicken you, and you realize that this is the point, that someone out there means to shock and sicken you. And even though these pictures are supposedly meant to move you to open your heart or your wallet for some good-hearted cause, you know that is not the point, and that the person who took these pictures, the person who is sending them into your home, into your head, wants you to suffer. Wants to hurt you. What is truly unbearable about these pictures is not the suffering they depict, but the rage and hatred behind them. Unreasoning, indiscriminate rage and hatred, directed at the viewer, at you.
There’s a line from Renoir’s film ‘Rules of the Game’ burned itself into my brain when I first read it many years ago. “The most awful thing about life is this: that everyone has their reasons.” It terrified me when I first heard it, because I understood how true it was. Today it feels more relevant than ever.
We’ve heard it said that this is a “post-truth age”. The fact is that there are many truths, many beliefs––too many––and they are all locked in a violent struggle for supremacy. And in this struggle, the deciding factor is not always the strength of the message, but of the messenger.
In Robert Stone’s remarkable story, Miserere, we meet a woman whose relationship with the truth––her own truth––is absolute and unshakable. A devout Catholic and staunch “pro-lifer”, Mary is a woman on a mission. Her mission? To collect aborted fetuses and bring them to a priest to receive the Church’s rites.
There were four. Camille had laid them out on a tarpaulin, under a churchy purple curtain on the floor of an enclosed, unheated back porch, where it was nearly as cold as the night outside…Mary lifted the curtain and looked at the little dead things on the floor. They had lobster-claw, unseparated fingers, and one had a face. It’s face looked like a Florida manatee’s, Mary thought. It was the only living resemblance she could bring to bear…
That Mary’s mission is illegal and must be done in secret only seems to give her a stronger sense of its rightness. Mary is, by all the evidence, a strong woman, and those who attempt to cast doubt on her mission or stand in her way don’t stand a chance.
Whether the stage on which it’s played out is large or small, the weak are often drawn to the strong, and become their tools and enablers. While thousands of people may fall in line behind a charismatic leader, sometimes the followers are few. Sometimes no more than one.
Mary’s assistant in her secret mission, Camille, is portrayed as a weak-willed, even weak-minded individual who is drawn to Mary’s strength like a moth drawn to a flame. Again, one gets the feeling that it’s not so much the “rightness” of Mary’s cause that attracts and captures Camille––it’s Mary’s strength and apparent fearlessness, qualities that have both been drained out of Camille long ago.
Anyone who’s engaged in an argument with someone whose political beliefs they find problematic or abhorrent will tell you, it’s not the beliefs themselves that are the most disturbing; it’s the sureness, the absolute certitude that is most frightening. That kind of absolute certitude can be terrifying or thrilling. Sometimes both. Mary shames her enemies, not by calling them out for being sinners or for not following church doctrine, but for being weak––weaker than she is. It’s her strength of will that they find both irresistible and unbearable.
The centerpiece of the story is an extended dialogue between Mary and Father Frank, the priest who attempts to refuse to assist her. What begins as a sort of debate very quickly turns into a life-or-death battle of words and wills, one in which Father Frank is outmatched and doesn’t stand a chance. Suffering through their conversation is like watching a vivisection.
“What you should do, Father, is this. Take off the vestments you’re afraid to wear. You’re mama’s dead for whom you became a priest. Become the nice little happy homosexual nonentity that you are.”
Mary’s verbal destruction of Father Frank, who was once her friend, is a merciless, scorched-earth act of psychological demolition, impressive, even thrilling in its finality and effectiveness, so deeply cruel, we’re ashamed to feel thrilled by it.
Later we learn that Mary has suffered the death of her husband and children who drowned together in the freezing water of a skating pond. A recovered alcoholic, Mary has survived by relying on the teachings of the Church, and on her mission, which provides a container and an outlet for all her grief and rage.
The taste of it in her mouth was of rage unto madness and the lash of grief and above all of whiskey to die in and to be with them. That night, driving, with the dark dead creatures at their back, she offered up the suffering in it.
Throughout the story, the most powerful presence on the page has been Mary. No one compares to her, no one can stand against her––until the final paragraph when she stands before the altar to consummate the task she has set out to complete.
Finally, she was alone with the ancient Thing before whose will she stood amazed, whose shadow and line and light they all were: the bad priest, the questionable young man, and Camille Innaurato, she herself and the unleavened flesh fouling the floor. Adoring, defiant, in the crack-house flicker of that hideous, consecrated half-darkness, she offered It Its due…
It’s Stone’s choice of a single word, “Thing”, that’s both telling and chilling. It underscores the mystery, the unknowability of the ultimate and its immunity to all our human definitions and agendas. Here we see Mary’s power dim for a moment before the greater power she believes in and serves. We also see what is monstrous and unfathomable inside of herself made manifest, grown large and terrible in the darkness in front of her, the shadow of her own twisted and broken heart.
by ROBERT STONE
That night, driving, with the dark dead creatures at their back, she offered up the suffering in it.
––from Miserere by Robert Stone
There are some pictures you never want to see. But once you’ve seen them, they’re branded into your brain forever. The young man free-falling from the burning World Trade Tower, his white shirt billowing like a broken sail. The blindfolded journalist on his knees in the sand, the terrorist’s blade already halfway through his neck. Most of all, there are the animals––always dogs. They fill your computer screen with their skeletal ribs, their diseased ulcerating skin, their eyeless bloodied faces. They shock and sicken you, and you realize that this is the point, that someone out there means to shock and sicken you. And even though these pictures are supposedly meant to move you to open your heart or your wallet for some good-hearted cause, you know that is not the point, and that the person who took these pictures, the person who is sending them into your home, into your head, wants you to suffer. Wants to hurt you. What is truly unbearable about these pictures is not the suffering they depict, but the rage and hatred behind them. Unreasoning, indiscriminate rage and hatred, directed at the viewer, at you.
There’s a line from Renoir’s film ‘Rules of the Game’ burned itself into my brain when I first read it many years ago. “The most awful thing about life is this: that everyone has their reasons.” It terrified me when I first heard it, because I understood how true it was. Today it feels more relevant than ever.
We’ve heard it said that this is a “post-truth age”. The fact is that there are many truths, many beliefs––too many––and they are all locked in a violent struggle for supremacy. And in this struggle, the deciding factor is not always the strength of the message, but of the messenger.
In Robert Stone’s remarkable story, Miserere, we meet a woman whose relationship with the truth––her own truth––is absolute and unshakable. A devout Catholic and staunch “pro-lifer”, Mary is a woman on a mission. Her mission? To collect aborted fetuses and bring them to a priest to receive the Church’s rites.
There were four. Camille had laid them out on a tarpaulin, under a churchy purple curtain on the floor of an enclosed, unheated back porch, where it was nearly as cold as the night outside…Mary lifted the curtain and looked at the little dead things on the floor. They had lobster-claw, unseparated fingers, and one had a face. It’s face looked like a Florida manatee’s, Mary thought. It was the only living resemblance she could bring to bear…
That Mary’s mission is illegal and must be done in secret only seems to give her a stronger sense of its rightness. Mary is, by all the evidence, a strong woman, and those who attempt to cast doubt on her mission or stand in her way don’t stand a chance.
Whether the stage on which it’s played out is large or small, the weak are often drawn to the strong, and become their tools and enablers. While thousands of people may fall in line behind a charismatic leader, sometimes the followers are few. Sometimes no more than one.
Mary’s assistant in her secret mission, Camille, is portrayed as a weak-willed, even weak-minded individual who is drawn to Mary’s strength like a moth drawn to a flame. Again, one gets the feeling that it’s not so much the “rightness” of Mary’s cause that attracts and captures Camille––it’s Mary’s strength and apparent fearlessness, qualities that have both been drained out of Camille long ago.
Anyone who’s engaged in an argument with someone whose political beliefs they find problematic or abhorrent will tell you, it’s not the beliefs themselves that are the most disturbing; it’s the sureness, the absolute certitude that is most frightening. That kind of absolute certitude can be terrifying or thrilling. Sometimes both. Mary shames her enemies, not by calling them out for being sinners or for not following church doctrine, but for being weak––weaker than she is. It’s her strength of will that they find both irresistible and unbearable.
The centerpiece of the story is an extended dialogue between Mary and Father Frank, the priest who attempts to refuse to assist her. What begins as a sort of debate very quickly turns into a life-or-death battle of words and wills, one in which Father Frank is outmatched and doesn’t stand a chance. Suffering through their conversation is like watching a vivisection.
“What you should do, Father, is this. Take off the vestments you’re afraid to wear. You’re mama’s dead for whom you became a priest. Become the nice little happy homosexual nonentity that you are.”
Mary’s verbal destruction of Father Frank, who was once her friend, is a merciless, scorched-earth act of psychological demolition, impressive, even thrilling in its finality and effectiveness, so deeply cruel, we’re ashamed to feel thrilled by it.
Later we learn that Mary has suffered the death of her husband and children who drowned together in the freezing water of a skating pond. A recovered alcoholic, Mary has survived by relying on the teachings of the Church, and on her mission, which provides a container and an outlet for all her grief and rage.
The taste of it in her mouth was of rage unto madness and the lash of grief and above all of whiskey to die in and to be with them. That night, driving, with the dark dead creatures at their back, she offered up the suffering in it.
Throughout the story, the most powerful presence on the page has been Mary. No one compares to her, no one can stand against her––until the final paragraph when she stands before the altar to consummate the task she has set out to complete.
Finally, she was alone with the ancient Thing before whose will she stood amazed, whose shadow and line and light they all were: the bad priest, the questionable young man, and Camille Innaurato, she herself and the unleavened flesh fouling the floor. Adoring, defiant, in the crack-house flicker of that hideous, consecrated half-darkness, she offered It Its due…
It’s Stone’s choice of a single word, “Thing”, that’s both telling and chilling. It underscores the mystery, the unknowability of the ultimate and its immunity to all our human definitions and agendas. Here we see Mary’s power dim for a moment before the greater power she believes in and serves. We also see what is monstrous and unfathomable inside of herself made manifest, grown large and terrible in the darkness in front of her, the shadow of her own twisted and broken heart.
TRUE CRIME
by M. RICKERT
She prayed. She cursed. She asked why. She never even had time to speak.
––from True Crime by M. Rickert
It started with the voices.
We could hear them coming up through the floor of our hotel room from the room below. My sister, her friend Amy, my friend Mark and I all heard those muffled sounds and turned the TV down to listen. The voices started out low; soon they were all we could hear. A woman’s voice and a man’s voice. The woman’s voice sounded like she was crying and was trying to talk through her tears, her words spilling out in urgent, distraught bursts. It was the man’s voice that had the strongest effect on us. Low and measured, with the slow, sing-song cadences of someone trying to be comforting and conciliatory––too conciliatory. It sounded, Mark said, like someone telling you how pretty you are just before they stab you to death with a butcher knife. We were fourteen years old and thought that was funny. But the longer we listened, the less funny it seemed.
The more we heard, the more uncertain we were about what we were hearing. Was the woman really crying, or was she laughing? Was the man speaking to her the whole time, or was he talking to someone else? One of us asked if it was really only two people. Could there be more? Then, the final question, the scariest one of all––what if it was only one person?
It went on for hours. We listened and did nothing. I don’t know what we were waiting for. For a scream? For the sound of a body hitting the floor? For the man to finally roar like the monster we were all imagining behind that smiling, inhuman voice? Whatever we were waiting for, it never happened.
I didn’t think about that night for almost fifty years, until I read M. Rickert’s story ‘True Crime’––that’s when the voices started to come back.
‘True Crime’, at a brief nine hundred seventy-three words, is not so much a story as a visceral experience. What looks at first like an ambitious experiment in modernist literary technique finally turns out to be as raw and real as childbirth or a murder scene.
The first line of Rickert’s story is about a dismemberment. That line not only serves as an opening gut-punch to get the reader’s attention, it also announces the actual style of composition we’re about to experience on the page, an avalanche of “dismembered” images and moments violently ripped from their original contexts. These pieces start to align themselves and form a pattern, like iron filings being pulled by a magnet, until the many dismembered voices become one voice speaking.
A question arose for me as I read Rickert’s story––how many women, how many individuals are really here? Five? Ten? A hundred?
Rickert seems to signal that there are multiple protagonists by piling on contradictions: She was very popular. No one can remember her name…She was five years old. She was only seventeen….She was a newlywed. An empty nester. Never married. A grandmother. She was beautiful. She was plain. Instead of diffusing the impact of the narrative, the effect of this volley of identities is strangely unifying, as if we’re witnessing different reincarnations of the same person caught up in a cycle of suffering.
‘True Crime’ is likely to frustrate readers who like stories that “look like stories”. Even readers with a high tolerance for a certain amount of authorial tinkering with time still expect some kind of narrative through-line to cling to and help guide them through the dark. Rickert’s story seems to subvert those expectations––until you look closer and are caught up in the powerful emotional undercurrents and rip-tides in Rickert’s prose.
What all real stories share is a relationship with time. In ‘True Crime’, Rickert uses time like a surgeons’s knife, to cut and to heal. The sentences ricochet from the time after the woman’s death to the time before, that distance measured sometimes in years, sometimes in moments. The rapid-fire shifts between flashes of harsh brutality and hopeful tenderness are bruising, as they ought to be, while the multiplicity of voices and situations leads you to wonder if some of these women whose lives you are glimpsing here might still be alive, even as the certainty that this is not true closes in around you.
It’s easy and maybe unnecessary to point out the timeliness of ‘True Crime’, how powerfully it speaks to current events and the ugly political climate of the day. It would also be easy to argue that drawing those “political” connections somehow reduces the power of Rickert’s story. And while I’ll admit to feeling a reflexive impulse to say that Rickert’s story is “more than political”, that’s a statement I’m no longer comfortable with.
Pound’s famous dictum, Literature is news that stays news, implies that while art is eternal, current events are temporary. Fiction writers who attempt to address current political matters are warned that they will create work that is limited or “dated” by attaching themselves to one particular political cause or another. Blind privilege is certainly part of that reaction. But what may also be behind this reluctance is a very American, Puritanical fear of being viewed as prideful––because what could seem more prideful than claiming to want to change the world? Many of us are simply not used to making those kind of claims as writers, or to hearing the writers we read make them. Striving for political or social change through art-making also carries the taint of spirituality for more secular-minded people, with its hints of salvation and transformation. In a remarkable short essay, ‘Letter to a Young Writer’, M. Rickert addresses this kind of reluctance head-on:
Consider the possibility that words are not mere instruments of description but tools of alchemy… Ask yourself if you are writing like a person whose pen keeps the world alive, and if you aren’t, ask yourself why not? What are you doing? What do you believe in? Would you die for your art? Because really, in the end, we all die for the life we’ve chosen.
The degree to which we feel uncomfortable with words like these is the degree to which we feel ourselves fundamentally separate from other people, from each other. In ‘True Crime’, Rickert has managed to erase this troubling dichotomy between the personal and the political by bringing the reader into a place where that division does not exist. And she achieves this by transcending the gap between the individual and the group, between the one and the many.
Rickert’s story makes me think of Kerouac’s phrase, the unspeakable visions of the individual. Again, how many individuals are speaking their truth in Rickert’s story? Two? Four? Ten? A hundred? Thousands? It’s impossible to tell. But no matter how many voices are speaking here, it’s their cumulative individuality that gives this story its power. Their deaths, their suffering, and finally, their courage, are owned by all of them.
Which brings me back to the voices…
What was happening in that hotel room below us all those years ago? I still don’t know. All I know is that I could not stop listening. The four of us actually ended up laying down with our ears pressed to the floor. Waiting…for what, I’m not sure. We were fourteen and can probably be forgiven. We kept listening and fell asleep that way, and those muffled voices found their way upward through the wood and nails and moldy old carpet, through our ears and into our brains.
Forty-eight years later, I can hear the voices, and although I don’t know what they’re saying, I’m still trying to understand.
You can read True Crime by M. Rickert at Nightmare Magazine, here: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/true-crime/
by M. RICKERT
She prayed. She cursed. She asked why. She never even had time to speak.
––from True Crime by M. Rickert
It started with the voices.
We could hear them coming up through the floor of our hotel room from the room below. My sister, her friend Amy, my friend Mark and I all heard those muffled sounds and turned the TV down to listen. The voices started out low; soon they were all we could hear. A woman’s voice and a man’s voice. The woman’s voice sounded like she was crying and was trying to talk through her tears, her words spilling out in urgent, distraught bursts. It was the man’s voice that had the strongest effect on us. Low and measured, with the slow, sing-song cadences of someone trying to be comforting and conciliatory––too conciliatory. It sounded, Mark said, like someone telling you how pretty you are just before they stab you to death with a butcher knife. We were fourteen years old and thought that was funny. But the longer we listened, the less funny it seemed.
The more we heard, the more uncertain we were about what we were hearing. Was the woman really crying, or was she laughing? Was the man speaking to her the whole time, or was he talking to someone else? One of us asked if it was really only two people. Could there be more? Then, the final question, the scariest one of all––what if it was only one person?
It went on for hours. We listened and did nothing. I don’t know what we were waiting for. For a scream? For the sound of a body hitting the floor? For the man to finally roar like the monster we were all imagining behind that smiling, inhuman voice? Whatever we were waiting for, it never happened.
I didn’t think about that night for almost fifty years, until I read M. Rickert’s story ‘True Crime’––that’s when the voices started to come back.
‘True Crime’, at a brief nine hundred seventy-three words, is not so much a story as a visceral experience. What looks at first like an ambitious experiment in modernist literary technique finally turns out to be as raw and real as childbirth or a murder scene.
The first line of Rickert’s story is about a dismemberment. That line not only serves as an opening gut-punch to get the reader’s attention, it also announces the actual style of composition we’re about to experience on the page, an avalanche of “dismembered” images and moments violently ripped from their original contexts. These pieces start to align themselves and form a pattern, like iron filings being pulled by a magnet, until the many dismembered voices become one voice speaking.
A question arose for me as I read Rickert’s story––how many women, how many individuals are really here? Five? Ten? A hundred?
Rickert seems to signal that there are multiple protagonists by piling on contradictions: She was very popular. No one can remember her name…She was five years old. She was only seventeen….She was a newlywed. An empty nester. Never married. A grandmother. She was beautiful. She was plain. Instead of diffusing the impact of the narrative, the effect of this volley of identities is strangely unifying, as if we’re witnessing different reincarnations of the same person caught up in a cycle of suffering.
‘True Crime’ is likely to frustrate readers who like stories that “look like stories”. Even readers with a high tolerance for a certain amount of authorial tinkering with time still expect some kind of narrative through-line to cling to and help guide them through the dark. Rickert’s story seems to subvert those expectations––until you look closer and are caught up in the powerful emotional undercurrents and rip-tides in Rickert’s prose.
What all real stories share is a relationship with time. In ‘True Crime’, Rickert uses time like a surgeons’s knife, to cut and to heal. The sentences ricochet from the time after the woman’s death to the time before, that distance measured sometimes in years, sometimes in moments. The rapid-fire shifts between flashes of harsh brutality and hopeful tenderness are bruising, as they ought to be, while the multiplicity of voices and situations leads you to wonder if some of these women whose lives you are glimpsing here might still be alive, even as the certainty that this is not true closes in around you.
It’s easy and maybe unnecessary to point out the timeliness of ‘True Crime’, how powerfully it speaks to current events and the ugly political climate of the day. It would also be easy to argue that drawing those “political” connections somehow reduces the power of Rickert’s story. And while I’ll admit to feeling a reflexive impulse to say that Rickert’s story is “more than political”, that’s a statement I’m no longer comfortable with.
Pound’s famous dictum, Literature is news that stays news, implies that while art is eternal, current events are temporary. Fiction writers who attempt to address current political matters are warned that they will create work that is limited or “dated” by attaching themselves to one particular political cause or another. Blind privilege is certainly part of that reaction. But what may also be behind this reluctance is a very American, Puritanical fear of being viewed as prideful––because what could seem more prideful than claiming to want to change the world? Many of us are simply not used to making those kind of claims as writers, or to hearing the writers we read make them. Striving for political or social change through art-making also carries the taint of spirituality for more secular-minded people, with its hints of salvation and transformation. In a remarkable short essay, ‘Letter to a Young Writer’, M. Rickert addresses this kind of reluctance head-on:
Consider the possibility that words are not mere instruments of description but tools of alchemy… Ask yourself if you are writing like a person whose pen keeps the world alive, and if you aren’t, ask yourself why not? What are you doing? What do you believe in? Would you die for your art? Because really, in the end, we all die for the life we’ve chosen.
The degree to which we feel uncomfortable with words like these is the degree to which we feel ourselves fundamentally separate from other people, from each other. In ‘True Crime’, Rickert has managed to erase this troubling dichotomy between the personal and the political by bringing the reader into a place where that division does not exist. And she achieves this by transcending the gap between the individual and the group, between the one and the many.
Rickert’s story makes me think of Kerouac’s phrase, the unspeakable visions of the individual. Again, how many individuals are speaking their truth in Rickert’s story? Two? Four? Ten? A hundred? Thousands? It’s impossible to tell. But no matter how many voices are speaking here, it’s their cumulative individuality that gives this story its power. Their deaths, their suffering, and finally, their courage, are owned by all of them.
Which brings me back to the voices…
What was happening in that hotel room below us all those years ago? I still don’t know. All I know is that I could not stop listening. The four of us actually ended up laying down with our ears pressed to the floor. Waiting…for what, I’m not sure. We were fourteen and can probably be forgiven. We kept listening and fell asleep that way, and those muffled voices found their way upward through the wood and nails and moldy old carpet, through our ears and into our brains.
Forty-eight years later, I can hear the voices, and although I don’t know what they’re saying, I’m still trying to understand.
You can read True Crime by M. Rickert at Nightmare Magazine, here: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/true-crime/
THE TWO SAMS
by GLEN HIRSHBERG
I started and knew, just like that, that something else was with me.
––from The Two Sams, by Glen Hirshberg
The scariest story I ever heard was when I was seven or eight years old. My aunt told it to my sister, my cousin and myself to make us shut up and go to sleep. It was a simple story that could be told in one sentence, and was ruthless and brutal in its efficiency: If you don’t be quiet and go to sleep, the Flabbyman will come to your room and suck your eyeballs out. I don’t remember my aunt saying much more than that. She didn’t have to. She’d planted the seed, we filled in the rest.
She did tell us the reason for the Flabbyman’s name––the Flabbyman had no bones. I imagined his wobbly, fluid way of moving, like an octopus or jellyfish on dry land. The formless horror of his body was hidden inside the shabby dark clothes of a tramp, like the alcoholic bums we saw shambling along the roadside in the rain at twilight––they were all him.
My aunt and uncle were entering into a painful and hostile divorce. Every night after I was sent to bed, I could hear them arguing through the walls. Stripped of their meaning, the words were reduced to sounds of raw animal rage and grief. I felt terrified, completely unprotected––while on those dark country roads outside, or in the long hallway that led to my bedroom door, something hungry, blind, and without mercy was coming.
From my aunt’s story about the Flabbyman, and from those long nights in that bedroom, I learned something important about horror stories, even more important than monsters and the things they do:
There is always a wound in the world that lets the monsters in. And in writing, as in life, you ignore that wound at your own peril.
The first writer who showed me that truth on the page was Glen Hirshberg. More than almost any other writer I know, Hirshberg places human beings and their wounds at the center of his art.
The title story in his first collection, The Two Sams, is not so much a story as an extended cry of pain. The narrator, a man whose wife has suffered two miscarriages, is struggling to move forward with his life but can’t because of the searing grief he doesn’t feel entitled to. He cannot fix his wife’s depression and rage any more than he can stop trying. And it’s in this place where there are no more options that a crack begins to form. This is the wound through which the supernatural enters.
The death of a loved one––like every true and worthy human thing––is in danger of becoming a trope of the genre, like spooky old houses or graveyards at midnight. Hirshberg flips that trope by asking, Can you be haunted by someone who was never born?
While some writers are known for coming up with compelling and disturbing apparitions on the page, the ghostly presences in Hirshberg’s story never “appear”, but he succeeds in making them powerfully vivid by capturing the sense of physical presence, of something being in the room.
There was the damp, for one thing, and an extra soundlessness in the room, right beside me. I can’t explain it. The sound of someone listening.
“There’s something here,” I babbled, pushing with both hands at the empty air.
Are the twin spectral presences in Hirshberg’s story ghosts, or figments of the exhausted, grief-ridden narrator’s imagination? In Hirshberg’s world, as in ours, that dichotomy breaks down, and the question is no longer, do ghosts exist, but where do they exist? Most of what we experience every day takes place in our imagination, and to dismiss the supernatural as “imaginary” misses the point. The hauntings in The Two Sams, and in most of Hirshberg’s stories, are not hallucinations; they are not symbols or metaphors––they are, finally, real human experiences, and Hirshberg makes sure that we take them as such.
How to read the final ritual act that the narrator resorts to? Is it a tender memorial, or cold-blooded exorcism? The final question––will it work?––Hirshberg leaves unanswered. And while the story may end on what seems like a note of hope, the things that haunt us are not always easy to get rid of.
When I was sixteen, I went back to my aunt and uncle’s house for the first time in years, to the room where I’d spent so many sleepless nights. The moment I stepped through the door, I felt a presence. Something was in the room with me. The years fell away and I was the same terrified child, defenseless and sick with fear. When I finally got out of bed and walked down the hall to sleep in my uncle’s office, it felt like a sanctuary. I remember the books that lined the walls looking down at me, how they felt like protection. I remember thinking that I wanted to build a room like that for myself one day.
I’ve made a pretty good start. On the shelves just a few feet away from where I’m typing, I keep Glen Hirshberg’s books close to me. They remind me that in writing, like in life, it’s people that matter. And that the monsters we create for ourselves are real.
by GLEN HIRSHBERG
I started and knew, just like that, that something else was with me.
––from The Two Sams, by Glen Hirshberg
The scariest story I ever heard was when I was seven or eight years old. My aunt told it to my sister, my cousin and myself to make us shut up and go to sleep. It was a simple story that could be told in one sentence, and was ruthless and brutal in its efficiency: If you don’t be quiet and go to sleep, the Flabbyman will come to your room and suck your eyeballs out. I don’t remember my aunt saying much more than that. She didn’t have to. She’d planted the seed, we filled in the rest.
She did tell us the reason for the Flabbyman’s name––the Flabbyman had no bones. I imagined his wobbly, fluid way of moving, like an octopus or jellyfish on dry land. The formless horror of his body was hidden inside the shabby dark clothes of a tramp, like the alcoholic bums we saw shambling along the roadside in the rain at twilight––they were all him.
My aunt and uncle were entering into a painful and hostile divorce. Every night after I was sent to bed, I could hear them arguing through the walls. Stripped of their meaning, the words were reduced to sounds of raw animal rage and grief. I felt terrified, completely unprotected––while on those dark country roads outside, or in the long hallway that led to my bedroom door, something hungry, blind, and without mercy was coming.
From my aunt’s story about the Flabbyman, and from those long nights in that bedroom, I learned something important about horror stories, even more important than monsters and the things they do:
There is always a wound in the world that lets the monsters in. And in writing, as in life, you ignore that wound at your own peril.
The first writer who showed me that truth on the page was Glen Hirshberg. More than almost any other writer I know, Hirshberg places human beings and their wounds at the center of his art.
The title story in his first collection, The Two Sams, is not so much a story as an extended cry of pain. The narrator, a man whose wife has suffered two miscarriages, is struggling to move forward with his life but can’t because of the searing grief he doesn’t feel entitled to. He cannot fix his wife’s depression and rage any more than he can stop trying. And it’s in this place where there are no more options that a crack begins to form. This is the wound through which the supernatural enters.
The death of a loved one––like every true and worthy human thing––is in danger of becoming a trope of the genre, like spooky old houses or graveyards at midnight. Hirshberg flips that trope by asking, Can you be haunted by someone who was never born?
While some writers are known for coming up with compelling and disturbing apparitions on the page, the ghostly presences in Hirshberg’s story never “appear”, but he succeeds in making them powerfully vivid by capturing the sense of physical presence, of something being in the room.
There was the damp, for one thing, and an extra soundlessness in the room, right beside me. I can’t explain it. The sound of someone listening.
“There’s something here,” I babbled, pushing with both hands at the empty air.
Are the twin spectral presences in Hirshberg’s story ghosts, or figments of the exhausted, grief-ridden narrator’s imagination? In Hirshberg’s world, as in ours, that dichotomy breaks down, and the question is no longer, do ghosts exist, but where do they exist? Most of what we experience every day takes place in our imagination, and to dismiss the supernatural as “imaginary” misses the point. The hauntings in The Two Sams, and in most of Hirshberg’s stories, are not hallucinations; they are not symbols or metaphors––they are, finally, real human experiences, and Hirshberg makes sure that we take them as such.
How to read the final ritual act that the narrator resorts to? Is it a tender memorial, or cold-blooded exorcism? The final question––will it work?––Hirshberg leaves unanswered. And while the story may end on what seems like a note of hope, the things that haunt us are not always easy to get rid of.
When I was sixteen, I went back to my aunt and uncle’s house for the first time in years, to the room where I’d spent so many sleepless nights. The moment I stepped through the door, I felt a presence. Something was in the room with me. The years fell away and I was the same terrified child, defenseless and sick with fear. When I finally got out of bed and walked down the hall to sleep in my uncle’s office, it felt like a sanctuary. I remember the books that lined the walls looking down at me, how they felt like protection. I remember thinking that I wanted to build a room like that for myself one day.
I’ve made a pretty good start. On the shelves just a few feet away from where I’m typing, I keep Glen Hirshberg’s books close to me. They remind me that in writing, like in life, it’s people that matter. And that the monsters we create for ourselves are real.
WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE DEAD
by GARY MCMAHON
“There were too many questions that could never be answered; there was too much confusion in this world and whatever lay beyond. So she took him in her arms and held him…”
Of all the emotions commonly associated with horror, especially horror fiction, one of the most underrated (and most difficult to execute successfully) is sorrow.
A classic trope in horror fiction is sorrow or grief over the death of a loved one (usually a lover, spouse, or child). In his remarkable story, What We Mean When We Talk About the Dead, Gary McMahon succeeds brilliantly at turning this trope inside-out by presenting us with a story about the kind of grief we might feel for a person who can not die.
McMahon cranks up the emotional tension considerably by making his protagonist, Liz, a social worker. Social workers, of course, are “the helping profession”, and are trained to provide material and emotional support to other human beings, no mater how challenging the situation may seem. But the situation presented in McMahon’s story is so extreme, the gap between the protagonist and the person who needs help is so vast, that the human brain cannot event begin to contemplate it, and shuts down while trying.
The emotional high point of the story comes when Liz has exhausted all possible lines of thought––when she can, literally, no longer think at all, and resorts to the most fundamental, wordless means of human communication and comfort. It’s a powerful moment, but McMahon wisely chooses not to end his story there, but moves on, as Liz herself must move on, back out into the world and, eventually, home “to see who might be waiting for her there.”
The very best horror stories (or weird stories, or sci-fi, or fantasy) have emotional truth at their core. Sometimes the emotional truth may appear after-the-fact during the writing process, like a positive side-effect. But the best stories, I believe, start with that single powerful emotional truth and build on it. The Black Cat by Edgar Alan Poe, A Father’s Story by Andre Dubus, A Good Husband by Nathan Ballingrud, all start with a single white-hot core emotional truth and build on it, so that there is barely a word in the story that does not support this truth.
That’s what Gary McMahon has done with What We Mean When We Talk About the Dead. It’s a story we all can learn from. I know that I have.
by GARY MCMAHON
“There were too many questions that could never be answered; there was too much confusion in this world and whatever lay beyond. So she took him in her arms and held him…”
Of all the emotions commonly associated with horror, especially horror fiction, one of the most underrated (and most difficult to execute successfully) is sorrow.
A classic trope in horror fiction is sorrow or grief over the death of a loved one (usually a lover, spouse, or child). In his remarkable story, What We Mean When We Talk About the Dead, Gary McMahon succeeds brilliantly at turning this trope inside-out by presenting us with a story about the kind of grief we might feel for a person who can not die.
McMahon cranks up the emotional tension considerably by making his protagonist, Liz, a social worker. Social workers, of course, are “the helping profession”, and are trained to provide material and emotional support to other human beings, no mater how challenging the situation may seem. But the situation presented in McMahon’s story is so extreme, the gap between the protagonist and the person who needs help is so vast, that the human brain cannot event begin to contemplate it, and shuts down while trying.
The emotional high point of the story comes when Liz has exhausted all possible lines of thought––when she can, literally, no longer think at all, and resorts to the most fundamental, wordless means of human communication and comfort. It’s a powerful moment, but McMahon wisely chooses not to end his story there, but moves on, as Liz herself must move on, back out into the world and, eventually, home “to see who might be waiting for her there.”
The very best horror stories (or weird stories, or sci-fi, or fantasy) have emotional truth at their core. Sometimes the emotional truth may appear after-the-fact during the writing process, like a positive side-effect. But the best stories, I believe, start with that single powerful emotional truth and build on it. The Black Cat by Edgar Alan Poe, A Father’s Story by Andre Dubus, A Good Husband by Nathan Ballingrud, all start with a single white-hot core emotional truth and build on it, so that there is barely a word in the story that does not support this truth.
That’s what Gary McMahon has done with What We Mean When We Talk About the Dead. It’s a story we all can learn from. I know that I have.
LETTERS FROM THE SAMANTHA
by MARK HELPRIN
“I confess that I have wished to be completely taken up by such a thing, to be lifted into the clouds, arms and legs pinned in the stream…I have wanted to surrender to the plum-colored seas, to know what one might find there, naked and alone. But I have not, and will not.”
The plot of Letters From the Samantha by Mark Helprin is as simple as it is colorful. The captain and crew of a merchant vessel survive a freak typhoon, find an ape floating on some flotsam, then rescue the creature and bring it aboard. If it sounds like no good can come of this scenario, you’re right––but it’s the telling of the tale, and its powerful conclusion that makes Letters From the Samantha one story I have never forgotten and never will.
The terror experienced by the captain (subtly and masterfully communicated by Helprin as a series of letters from the captain to the ship’s owners) is not so much the terror of being attacked by a wild beast, but the deeper terror of losing control, of losing one’s powers, and being robbed of the ability to decide and to act. The presence of the ape on his ship is an aberration that alters the captain’s world and worldview in ways he can barely bring himself to express, but which he knows are dangerous beyond imagining. And when the captain finally acts to save his ship, we understand that he is acting to save himself, his own sense of identity and purpose in the world.
It’s easy to frame Letters from the Samantha in allegorical terms, a move that threatens to reduce its raw power to a bloodless academic riddle. Helprin seems to foresee that particular danger, and gives the captain the final word on this matter in the powerful final paragraph, a take-no-prisoners rejection of metaphor and symbolism that’s as brief and precise as it is devastating.
That final passage never fails to give me chills every time I read it, although it’s difficult to say exactly why. Maybe it’s because Helprin is insisting that we must meet a story on its own terms, that we not have it ‘explained away’ for us by someone else, but have a personal, physical relationship with it.
Some stories communicate experiences that are too frightening for some of us––and that, I’d argue, is precisely why we try to turn stories into allegories, to tame and distance them from our more vulnerable selves. The attempt to tame that kind of terror is what happens in Letters From the Samantha––although whether the captain succeeds or fails in his attempt is one more question Helprin’s story insists that we answer for ourselves.
Letters From the Samantha can be read in Mark Helprin’s second collection, Ellis Island & Other Stories, available from Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Ellis-Island-Other-Stories-Helprin/dp/0156030608
by MARK HELPRIN
“I confess that I have wished to be completely taken up by such a thing, to be lifted into the clouds, arms and legs pinned in the stream…I have wanted to surrender to the plum-colored seas, to know what one might find there, naked and alone. But I have not, and will not.”
The plot of Letters From the Samantha by Mark Helprin is as simple as it is colorful. The captain and crew of a merchant vessel survive a freak typhoon, find an ape floating on some flotsam, then rescue the creature and bring it aboard. If it sounds like no good can come of this scenario, you’re right––but it’s the telling of the tale, and its powerful conclusion that makes Letters From the Samantha one story I have never forgotten and never will.
The terror experienced by the captain (subtly and masterfully communicated by Helprin as a series of letters from the captain to the ship’s owners) is not so much the terror of being attacked by a wild beast, but the deeper terror of losing control, of losing one’s powers, and being robbed of the ability to decide and to act. The presence of the ape on his ship is an aberration that alters the captain’s world and worldview in ways he can barely bring himself to express, but which he knows are dangerous beyond imagining. And when the captain finally acts to save his ship, we understand that he is acting to save himself, his own sense of identity and purpose in the world.
It’s easy to frame Letters from the Samantha in allegorical terms, a move that threatens to reduce its raw power to a bloodless academic riddle. Helprin seems to foresee that particular danger, and gives the captain the final word on this matter in the powerful final paragraph, a take-no-prisoners rejection of metaphor and symbolism that’s as brief and precise as it is devastating.
That final passage never fails to give me chills every time I read it, although it’s difficult to say exactly why. Maybe it’s because Helprin is insisting that we must meet a story on its own terms, that we not have it ‘explained away’ for us by someone else, but have a personal, physical relationship with it.
Some stories communicate experiences that are too frightening for some of us––and that, I’d argue, is precisely why we try to turn stories into allegories, to tame and distance them from our more vulnerable selves. The attempt to tame that kind of terror is what happens in Letters From the Samantha––although whether the captain succeeds or fails in his attempt is one more question Helprin’s story insists that we answer for ourselves.
Letters From the Samantha can be read in Mark Helprin’s second collection, Ellis Island & Other Stories, available from Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Ellis-Island-Other-Stories-Helprin/dp/0156030608
THESE THINGS WE HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN
by LYNDA RUCKER
“The price of living is dying, Sarah told me, and even when Cold Rest has swallowed up the last of you whole, you know you’ve been in the presence of something divine.”
It’s often said that the line between horror and ecstasy is a permeable one. When the borders of the familiar begin to break down, the resulting sensation can be terrifying or liberating. Or in some instances, both.
One story that, for me, demonstrates that phenomenon in a uniquely powerful way is Lynda Rucker’s These Things We Have Always Known.
The story is set in Cold Rest, a small town in the mountains of Georgia, where (the narrator tells us) “things are different”. Rucker goes on to detail that “difference” at a writerly pace that is both gradual and relentless. The family in Rucker’s story try to carry on with their daily lives while experiencing the certainty that everyone and everything they know will soon be taken from them by forces they can neither escape or understand.
Those of us who grew up in or near “Bible culture” (particularly those of us from the American South) are familiar with the scriptural story of Revelations and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that story tends to permeate people’s psyches. The popular version of Revelations tends to focus on big-budget Hollywood scare-effects (rains of hellfire, avenging angels, Satanic beasts, etc.). But the real terror implanted by that Biblical myth is the kind raised by more personal, existential questions: Am I one of the saved? Will I be separated from the ones I love? Am I strong enough and pure enough to survive what’s coming? These are the deeper terrors evoked in Rucker’s story.
Let’s be clear––These Things We Have Always Known is not a “metaphor” for Revelations. It is not a metaphor for anything––it is it’s own unique and creative response to some fundamental mortal terrors that are ageless.
Am I strong enough to survive in this new and terrible world? This is a question we’ll all inevitably ask ourselves at one point or another. In These Things We Have Always Known, Rucker has asked and answered this question for us. And her answer is terrifying, human, and beautiful.
You can read These Things We Have Always Known in Lynda Rucker’s collection The Moon Will Look Strange which is available through Amazon via the links on her website here.
by LYNDA RUCKER
“The price of living is dying, Sarah told me, and even when Cold Rest has swallowed up the last of you whole, you know you’ve been in the presence of something divine.”
It’s often said that the line between horror and ecstasy is a permeable one. When the borders of the familiar begin to break down, the resulting sensation can be terrifying or liberating. Or in some instances, both.
One story that, for me, demonstrates that phenomenon in a uniquely powerful way is Lynda Rucker’s These Things We Have Always Known.
The story is set in Cold Rest, a small town in the mountains of Georgia, where (the narrator tells us) “things are different”. Rucker goes on to detail that “difference” at a writerly pace that is both gradual and relentless. The family in Rucker’s story try to carry on with their daily lives while experiencing the certainty that everyone and everything they know will soon be taken from them by forces they can neither escape or understand.
Those of us who grew up in or near “Bible culture” (particularly those of us from the American South) are familiar with the scriptural story of Revelations and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that story tends to permeate people’s psyches. The popular version of Revelations tends to focus on big-budget Hollywood scare-effects (rains of hellfire, avenging angels, Satanic beasts, etc.). But the real terror implanted by that Biblical myth is the kind raised by more personal, existential questions: Am I one of the saved? Will I be separated from the ones I love? Am I strong enough and pure enough to survive what’s coming? These are the deeper terrors evoked in Rucker’s story.
Let’s be clear––These Things We Have Always Known is not a “metaphor” for Revelations. It is not a metaphor for anything––it is it’s own unique and creative response to some fundamental mortal terrors that are ageless.
Am I strong enough to survive in this new and terrible world? This is a question we’ll all inevitably ask ourselves at one point or another. In These Things We Have Always Known, Rucker has asked and answered this question for us. And her answer is terrifying, human, and beautiful.
You can read These Things We Have Always Known in Lynda Rucker’s collection The Moon Will Look Strange which is available through Amazon via the links on her website here.
BRIGHT WATER
by ANNA KEESEY
‘You have called us graceless, and we have plucked up that name and wear it.’
‘When the fever is off of you, and you come back to look around, what will be left? The door is closing, the world and its doors.’
One of the most common and effective tropes in horror, mystery, and suspense, as well as in literary fiction, is the disappearance of a child. In such stories, the child is usually taken by an outside force, a criminal or predator.
But what of the child who walks off on his own accord? Who willfully removes himself from the circle of family and stands apart, perhaps only a little ways off, saying, You cannot reach me.
That’s the emotional territory that Anna Keesey explores and illuminates in her remarkable story, Bright Water.
Keesey builds her story as a series of letters from a father to his missing son. Josiah Cole is a respected banker in a small 19th century American community. His son, John Ephraim, has run off to join a religious group who have separated themselves from the rest of society to prepare for the end of the world, which they believe is imminent.
The father’s first letters have the expected authoritarian tone, chiding his son for abandoning his mother who is ill, ridiculing his newfound religious beliefs. But as time passes without a response, Cole’s letters turn from anger and indignation to anxiety and fear, and finally to a kind of wounded reconciliation.
Keesey has gifted her main character with a voice that embodies the 19th century person’s faith in the power of the written word; there are lines in Bright Water that are as close to angelic as human writing can get.
As Cole struggles to understand the choices his son has made, he begins to question his own beliefs, as well as the beliefs of the community he is part of that his son has rejected. What we witness in these letters is a man slowly and painfully stripping away his emotional armor piece by piece in an effort to connect with his lost son, trying to come to terms with a new reality that’s as strange and terrifying to him as any Biblical doomsday.
With all its period-formality of language and dignified pace, what Bright Water leaves us with is a portrait of a human being undergoing a terrible and necessary transformation in order to survive. Outwardly restrained, like its narrator, it’s a voice of almost unbearable intensity and intimacy.
There are a few works of fiction that have made me weep openly. This is one of them. It would be foolish for me to say that you’ll have the same experience with this story. But if you have a son, or if you are a son, I promise you will not forget it.
Bright Water by Anna Keesey is available to read online at the Grand Street website.
by ANNA KEESEY
‘You have called us graceless, and we have plucked up that name and wear it.’
‘When the fever is off of you, and you come back to look around, what will be left? The door is closing, the world and its doors.’
One of the most common and effective tropes in horror, mystery, and suspense, as well as in literary fiction, is the disappearance of a child. In such stories, the child is usually taken by an outside force, a criminal or predator.
But what of the child who walks off on his own accord? Who willfully removes himself from the circle of family and stands apart, perhaps only a little ways off, saying, You cannot reach me.
That’s the emotional territory that Anna Keesey explores and illuminates in her remarkable story, Bright Water.
Keesey builds her story as a series of letters from a father to his missing son. Josiah Cole is a respected banker in a small 19th century American community. His son, John Ephraim, has run off to join a religious group who have separated themselves from the rest of society to prepare for the end of the world, which they believe is imminent.
The father’s first letters have the expected authoritarian tone, chiding his son for abandoning his mother who is ill, ridiculing his newfound religious beliefs. But as time passes without a response, Cole’s letters turn from anger and indignation to anxiety and fear, and finally to a kind of wounded reconciliation.
Keesey has gifted her main character with a voice that embodies the 19th century person’s faith in the power of the written word; there are lines in Bright Water that are as close to angelic as human writing can get.
As Cole struggles to understand the choices his son has made, he begins to question his own beliefs, as well as the beliefs of the community he is part of that his son has rejected. What we witness in these letters is a man slowly and painfully stripping away his emotional armor piece by piece in an effort to connect with his lost son, trying to come to terms with a new reality that’s as strange and terrifying to him as any Biblical doomsday.
With all its period-formality of language and dignified pace, what Bright Water leaves us with is a portrait of a human being undergoing a terrible and necessary transformation in order to survive. Outwardly restrained, like its narrator, it’s a voice of almost unbearable intensity and intimacy.
There are a few works of fiction that have made me weep openly. This is one of them. It would be foolish for me to say that you’ll have the same experience with this story. But if you have a son, or if you are a son, I promise you will not forget it.
Bright Water by Anna Keesey is available to read online at the Grand Street website.
THE 18
by RALPH ROBERT MOORE
“Would you like to see the world as it really is?”
–– from The 18 by Ralph Robert Moore
How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?
–– I – Corinthians xv.20.
A clever idea––by itself––does not always make a good story. Some stories push their cleverness in your face. This happens especially––though not exclusively––in the world of speculative fiction where the pressure to come up with “original ideas” or “new tropes” can be overwhelming.
Maybe it’s time to stop looking for “clever” or “original” ideas and start looking for effective ones.
What makes a story-idea effective is how well it taps into powerful human emotions. The same way microscopic surgical techniques allow surgeons to access the human heart from new and previously unimagined directions, a truly effective story-idea reaches our hearts and minds in surprising and inventive ways.
I can at this moment think of no more brilliant example of this than Ralph Robert Moore’s story, The 18.
The story starts out as a well-written, fairly traditional narrative of bereavement, a husband mourning the loss of his wife of forty years. A reader might expect what follows to be an equally well-written account of some type of haunting This is what the reader gets––but it’s a type of “haunting” that no reader could ever expect or imagine.
One of the most terrifying (and most neglected) questions that a writer can raise in the reader’s mind is What the hell is happening? It’s one thing for a writer to make us believe (temporarily) in ghosts, demons, or vampires, etc.–––but it’s a whole other thing to make the reader call into question the whole fabric of reality.
That’s what Moore does in this story. Best of all, he does it in layers. Layer after layer of progressive revelation. My experience of reading this story for the first time was like having the rug pulled out from under me again and again and again until I wasn’t sure where I was standing anymore (––and I mean that in a good way).
In some ways, The 18 is a love story about the illusion of human individuality, and, by extension, the absurdity of love. But if that was all that it was––if it stopped there––the story would not be as powerful and memorable as it actually is.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this story are its final lines. After radically stripping the main character of his sense of identity and empowerment, Moore hands it back to him in a quiet final turnaround that is subtle, unexpected, and deeply moving. It’s the writer’s parting gift to his character, and to us.
The 18 by Ralph Robert Moore can be found in the anthology Darkest Minds from Dark Minds Press. Available here through Amazon US, or through Amazon UK.
by RALPH ROBERT MOORE
“Would you like to see the world as it really is?”
–– from The 18 by Ralph Robert Moore
How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?
–– I – Corinthians xv.20.
A clever idea––by itself––does not always make a good story. Some stories push their cleverness in your face. This happens especially––though not exclusively––in the world of speculative fiction where the pressure to come up with “original ideas” or “new tropes” can be overwhelming.
Maybe it’s time to stop looking for “clever” or “original” ideas and start looking for effective ones.
What makes a story-idea effective is how well it taps into powerful human emotions. The same way microscopic surgical techniques allow surgeons to access the human heart from new and previously unimagined directions, a truly effective story-idea reaches our hearts and minds in surprising and inventive ways.
I can at this moment think of no more brilliant example of this than Ralph Robert Moore’s story, The 18.
The story starts out as a well-written, fairly traditional narrative of bereavement, a husband mourning the loss of his wife of forty years. A reader might expect what follows to be an equally well-written account of some type of haunting This is what the reader gets––but it’s a type of “haunting” that no reader could ever expect or imagine.
One of the most terrifying (and most neglected) questions that a writer can raise in the reader’s mind is What the hell is happening? It’s one thing for a writer to make us believe (temporarily) in ghosts, demons, or vampires, etc.–––but it’s a whole other thing to make the reader call into question the whole fabric of reality.
That’s what Moore does in this story. Best of all, he does it in layers. Layer after layer of progressive revelation. My experience of reading this story for the first time was like having the rug pulled out from under me again and again and again until I wasn’t sure where I was standing anymore (––and I mean that in a good way).
In some ways, The 18 is a love story about the illusion of human individuality, and, by extension, the absurdity of love. But if that was all that it was––if it stopped there––the story would not be as powerful and memorable as it actually is.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this story are its final lines. After radically stripping the main character of his sense of identity and empowerment, Moore hands it back to him in a quiet final turnaround that is subtle, unexpected, and deeply moving. It’s the writer’s parting gift to his character, and to us.
The 18 by Ralph Robert Moore can be found in the anthology Darkest Minds from Dark Minds Press. Available here through Amazon US, or through Amazon UK.