Through a Darkened Pane (page 42)

snowbird

I don't think CoCo would mind, Zid.

Sylvia

BabaYaga

LOVING it, Dear Sylvie!!!

...and Zagor... that blues piece was delicious.

Oh, Goody! Here goes... I sometimes like to rework [in my mind] stories written by others... The story I'm about to list here is a bit long on the 'spagetti sauce' and short on true suspense, in my opinion... I've synopsized it for brevity... Zid

Here's a piece written by Joe Hill, in his collection of short stories, "20th Century Ghosts"... Titled...

"Best New Horror"

"A month before his deadline, Eddie Carroll ripped open a manila envelope, and a magazine called The True North Literary Review slipped into his hands. Carroll was used to getting magazines in the mail, although most of them had titles like Cemetery Dance and specialized in horror fiction. People sent him their books, too. Piles of them cluttered his Brookline townhouse, a heap on the couch in his office, a stack by the coffee maker. Books of horror stories, all of them.

No one had time to read them all, although once - when he was in his early thirties and just starting out as the editor of America's Best New Horror - he had made a conscientious effort to try. Carroll had guided sixteen volumes of Best New Horror to press, had been working on the series for over a third of his life now. It added up to thousands of hours of reading and proofing and letter-writing, thousands of hours he could never have back.

He had come to hate the magazines especially. So many of them used the cheapest ink, and he had learned to loathe the way it came off on his fingers, the harsh stink of it.

He didn't finish most of the stories he started anymore, couldn't bear to. He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul.

At some point following his divorce, his duties as the editor of Best New Horror had become a tiresome and joyless chore. He thought sometimes, hopefully almost, of stepping down, but he never indulged the idea for long. It was twelve thousand dollars a year in the bank, the cornerstone of an income patched together from other anthologies, his speaking engagements and his classes. Without that twelve grand, his personal worst-case scenario would become inevitable; he would have to find an actual job.

The True North Literary Review was unfamiliar to him, a literary journal with a cover of rough-grained paper, an ink print on it of leaning pines...When he flipped it open, two stapled pages fell out, a letter from the editor, an English professor named Harold Noonan.

The winter before, Noonan had been approached by a part-time man with the university grounds crew, a Peter Kilrue. He had heard that Noonan had been named the editor of True North and was taking open submissions, and asked him to look at a short story. Noonan promised he would, more to be polite than anything else. But when he finally read the manuscript, "Buttonboy: A Love Story", he was taken aback by both the supple force of its prose and the appalling nature of its subject matter. Noonan was new on the job, replacing the just-retired editor of twenty years, Frank McDane, and wanted to take the journal in a new direciton, to publish fiction that would "rattle a few cages".

"In that I was perhaps too successful", Noonan wrote. Shortly after "Buttonboy" appeared in print, the head of the English department held a private meeting with Noonan to verbally assail him for using True North as a showcase for "juvenile literary practical jokes". Nearly fifty people cancelled their subscriptions - no laughing matter for a journal with a circulation of just a thousand copies - and the alumna who provided most of True North's funding withdrew her financial support in outrage. Noonan himself was removed as editor, and Frank McDane agreed to oversee the magazine from retirement, in response to the popular outcry for his return.

Noonan's letter finished: "I remain of the opinion that (whatever its flaws), "Buttonboy" is a remarkable, if genuinely distressing, work of fiction, and I hope you'll give it your time. I admit I would find it personally vindicating if you decided to include it in your next anthology of the year's best horror fiction. I would tell you to enjoy, but I'm not sure that's the word. Best, Harold Noonan

Eddie Carroll...read Noonan's letter standing in the mudroom. He flipped to the beginning of the story. He stood reading for almost five minutes before noticing he was uncomfortably warm. He tossed his jacket at a hook and wandered into the kitchen.

He sat for a while on the stairs to the second floor, turning through the pages. Then he was stretched on the couch in his office, head on a pile of books, reading in a slant of late October light, with no memory of how he had got there. He rushed through to the ending, then sat up, in the grip of a strange, bounding exuberance. He thought it was possibly the rudest, most awful thing he had ever read, and in his case that was saying something. He had waded through the rude and awful for most of his professional life, and in those fly-blown and diseased literary swamps had discovered flowers of unspeakable beauty, of which he was sure this was one. It was cruel and perverse and he had to have it. He turned to the beginning and started reading again.

It was about a girl named Cate - an introspective seventeen-year-old at the story's beginning - who one day is pulled into a car by a giant with jaundiced eyeballs and teeth in tin braces. He ties her hands behind her back and shoves her onto the backseat floor of his station wagon - where she discovers a boy about her age, whom she at first takes for dead and who has suffered an unspeakable disfiguration. His eyes are hidden behind a pair of round, yellow, smiley-face buttons. [Zid's comment; Shades of "Coraline"...] They've been pinned right through his eyelids - which have also been stitched shut with steel wire - and the eyeballs beneath.

As the car begins to move, though, so does the boy. He touches her hip and Cate bites back a startled scream. He moves his hands over her body, touching her face last. He whispers that his name is Jim, and that he's been traveling with the giant for a week, ever since the big man killed his parents.

"He made holes in my eyes and he said after he did it he saw my soul rush out. He said it made a sound like when you blow on an empty Coke bottle, real pretty. Then he put these over my eyes to keep my life trapped inside." As he speaks, Jim touches the smiley-face buttons. "He wants to see how long I can live without a soul inside me."

The giant drives them both to a desolate campground, in a nearby state park, where he forces Cate and Jim to fondle one another sexually. When he feels that Cate is failing to kiss Jim with convincing passion, he slashes her face, and removes her tongue. In the ensuing chaos - Jim shrieking in alarm, staggering about blindly, blood everywhere - Cate is able to escape into the trees. Three hours later she staggers out onto a highway, hysterical, drenched in blood. [See what I mean about 'long on the "spagetti sauce"...??? Zid]

Her kidnapper is never apprehended. He and Jim drive out of the national park and off the edge of the world. Investigators are unable to determine a single useful fact about the two. They don't know who Jim is or where he's from, and know even less about the giant. Two weeks after her release from the hospital, a single clue turns up by U.S. mail. Cate receives an envelope containing a pair of smiley-face buttons - steel pins caked with dry blood - and a Polaroid of a bridge in Kentucky. The next morning a diver finds a boy there, on the river bottom, horribly decomposed, fish darting in and out of his empty eye sockets.

Cate, who was once attractive and well-liked, finds herself the object of pity and horror among those who know her....Cate tries, without much luck, to resume a normal life. She has no close friends, no employable skills, and is self-conscious about her looks, her inability to speak. In one particularly painful scene, Cate drinks her way into courage, and makes a pass at a man in a bar, only to be ridiculed by him and his friends. Her sleep is troubled by regular nightmares, in which she relives unlikely and dreadful variations on her abduction. In some, Jim is not a fellow victim, but in on the kidnapping, and rapes her with vigor. The buttons stuck through his eyes are mirrored discs that show a distorted image of her own screaming face, which, with perfect dream logic, has already been hacked into a grotesque mask. Infrequently, these dreams leave her aroused. Her therapist says this is common. She fires the therapist when she discovers he's doodled a horrid caricature of her in his notebook.

Cate tries different things to help her sleep: gin, painkillers, heroin. She needs money for drugs and goes looking for it in her father's dresser. He catches her at it and chases her out. That night her mother calls to tell her Dad is in the hospital - he had a minor stroke - and please don't come to see him. Not long after, at a day care center for disabled children, where Cate is part-timing, one child pokes a pencil into another's eye, blinding him. The incident clearly isn't Cate's fault, but in the aftermath, her assorted addictions become public knowledge. She loses her job and, even after kicking her habit[s], finds herself nearly unemployable.

Then, one cool fall day, she comes out of a local supermarket, and walks past a police car parked out back. The hood is up. A policeman in mirrored sunglasses is studying an over-heated radiator. She happens to glance in the backseat - and there, with his hands cuffed behind his back, is her giant, ten years older and fifty pounds heavier. She struggles to stay calm. She approaches the trooper working under the hood, writes him a note, asks him if he knows who he has in the backseat. He says it's a guy who was arrested at a hardware store on Pleasant Street, trying to shoplift a hunting knife and a roll of heavy-duty duct tape.

Cate knows the hardware store in question. She lives around the corner from it. The officer takes her arm before her legs can give out on her. She begins to write frantic notes, tries to explain what the giant did to her when she was seventeen. Her pen can't keep pace with her thoughts, and the notes she writes hardly make sense, even to her, but the officer gets the gist. He guides her around to the passenger seat, and opens the door. The thought of getting in the same car with her abductor makes her dizzy with fear - she begins to shiver uncontrollably - but the police officer remids her the giant is handcuffed in the back, unable to hurt her, and that it's important for her to come with them to the precinct house. At last she settles into the passenger seat. At her feet is a winter jacket. The police officer says it's his coat, and she should put it on, it'll keep her warm, help with her shivering. She looks up at him, prepares to scribble a thank you on her notepad - then goes still, finds herself unable to write. Something about the sight of her own face, reflected in his sunglasses, causes her to freeze up.

He closes the door and goes around to the front of the car to shut the hood. With numb fingers she reaches down to get his coat. Pinned to the front, one on each breast, are two smiley-face buttons. She reaches for the door, but it won't unlock. The window won't roll down. The hood slams. The man behind the sunglasses who is not a police officer is grinning a hideous grin. Buttonboy continues around the car, past the driver's side door, to let the giant out of the back. After all, a person needs eyes to drive.

In thick forest, it's easy for a person to get lost and walk around in circles, and for the first time, Cate can see this is what happened to her. She escaped Buttonboy and the giant by running into the woods, but she never made her way out - not really - has been stumbling around in the dark and brush ever since, traveling in a great and pointless circle back to them. She's arrived where she was always headed, at last, and this thought, rather than terrifying her, is oddly soothing. It seems to her she belongs with them, and there is a kind of relief in that, in belonging somewhere. Cate relaxes into her seat, unconsciously pulling Buttonboy's coat around her against the cold." [end of story sent by Noonan to Eddie Carroll...]

It didn't surprise Eddie Carroll to hear Noonan had been excoriated for publishing "Buttonboy". The story lingered on images of female degradation, and the heroine had beeen written as a somewhat willing accomplice to her own emotional, sexual, and spiritual mistreatment. This was bad..., But Joyce Carol Oates wrote stories just like it for journals no different than The True North Review, and won awards for them. The really unforgivable literary sin was the shock ending. Carroll had seen it coming - after reading almost ten thousand stories of horror and the supernatural, it was hard to sneak up on him - but he had enjoyed it nonetheless. Among the literary cognoscenti, though, a surprise ending (no matter how well executed) was the mark of childish, commercial fiction and bad TV. The readers of The True North Review were, he imagined, middle-aged academics, people who taught Grendel and Ezra Pound and who dreamed heartbreaking dreams about someday selling a poem to The New Yorker. For them, coming across a shock ending in a short story was akin to hearing a ballerina rip a noisy fart during a performance of Swan Lake - a faux pas so awful it bordered on the hilarious. Professor Harold Noonan either had not been rooming in the ivory tower for long or was subconsciously hoping someone would hand him his walking papers.

Although the ending was more John Carpenter than John Updike, Carroll hadn't come across anything like it in any of the horror magazines, either, not lately. It was, for twenty-five pages, the almost completely naturalistic story of a woman being destroyed a little at a time by the steady wear of survivor's guilt. It concerned itself with tortured family relationships, shitty jobs, the struggle for money. Carroll had forgotten what it was like to come across the bread of everday life in a short story. Most horror fiction didn't bother with anything except rare bleeding meat..."

Zid here again.... stopping at this point; to be continued in the near future... I find it ironic that the author [Joe Hill] clucks his tongue over other authors' "rare bleeding meat" stories, yet I don't see much more than that in this story....

To be continued - and my rewrite suggestions for this story - in my next installment... Zid

snowbird

Zid!!!

However, I had to LOL at this:

For them, coming across a shock ending in a short story was akin to hearing a ballerina rip a noisy fart during a performance of Swan Lake - a faux pas so awful it bordered on the hilarious.

Hey, I couldn't help it!

Sylvia

snowbird

The Way We Were

We gentle folk either marry young or get pregnant at an early age down in these here parts.

Three of us who became sisters-in-law married at 15, 17, and 19. I am the latter.

We were naive and very inexperienced, not lazy or unintelligent, mind you, just not wise to the ways of the wide, wide world.

As an example, one of my SIL, who'd never before eaten canned biscuits, thought the Pillsbury Dough Boy was for real. Her husband got a big kick out of relating how she stood expectantly with cupped hands to catch the little creature when the can popped open!

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!

Though just as green as the next, even I knew better than that ...

More when CoCo gets back ...

Sylvia

ziddina

Okay, now, Snowbird/Sylvia, you DO understand that I'm posting ANOTHER author's work here, 'cause I want to rework it after I've demonstrated his main storyline and story-telling methods???? That piece isn't mine; it's the work of author JOE HILL, published in his own book titled "20th Century Ghosts"... Zid

Oh, and as I said - I don't like his story; too much "spaghetti sauce" [blood, guts 'n gore...] I want to re-do the story - which I'll post after I've finished typing a shortened version of his...

snowbird

Okay, now, Snowbird/Sylvia, you DO understand that I'm posting ANOTHER author's work here, 'cause I want to rework it after I've demonstrated his main storyline and story-telling methods????

Yes, ma'am, you made that clear.

But ... are you sure???

Sylvia

ziddina

Sorry, Sylvia, I don't understand... Sure of what? Whether I want to continue posting this guy's story?? It has potential; the challenge [for me] will be to reconstruct the first part of the story - the stuff you've already read... Making it scary enough, I mean... The rest of the story, which you haven't read yet, is about as 'yukky', but I won't be posting most of it. Just enough to give you - and whomever else reads it - a feel for how the author gets to his ending.

I feel that the ending - the entire story, but especially the ending - could have been much more effective without the grotesque 'charnel-house' atmosphere - more suspense and mysticism, less "spaghetti sauce"... Zid

snowbird

Sorry, Sylvia, I don't understand... Sure of what?

Sure about the genre?

OK, nevermind, I'll shut up now.

Sylvia

Through a Darkened Pane

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