Story Batch Four, Part Two: 19 Stories Between 4,000 and 5,000 words
GRACE PALEY, EDOGAWA RAMPO, RING LARDNER, RAY BRADBURY, JOHN CHEEVER, EUDORA WELTY, THE OTHER MURAKAMI, ETC.
This batch is 4-5K length, part two.
Thomas Ligotti, The Red Tower 4457
This one seems influenced by Bruno Schulz; it’s one of the Ligotti stories that has barely any human presence at all. The narrator is mostly invisible, and the story has no characters. This is the mode borrowed by Jon Padgett for his excellent Indoor Swamp story.
If I tell you that it’s about an underground factory that produces evil tchotchkes, would that get you to read it? Some of you nuts are probably salivating already.
Walter De La Mare, Lichen 4514
De La Mare’s prose style is old-fashioned, but it’s so strong that I read him and wonder why we needed to upgrade. I think he must be one of the most unappreciated masters of English language prose; he’s one of those writers who gives us horror so poetic it seems crass to suggest that it’s genre writing.
This story is about an eccentric local character our protagonist meets at a small town train station; he’s spent years memorizing the epitaphs from tombstones. Walter makes hay with this premise, as usual.
Bora Chung, The Head 4524
Bora Chung is a revelation to me. Sometimes a writer from another culture than mine gets overhyped, because of the laudable effort to get Americans to read outside their comfort zone. (Writers from my own culture obviously get overhyped too, and for less defensible reasons.) But Bora lives up to her rep, writing parable-like fantasies that are truly horrifying. I think Felix Purat told me about her, but I often get my sources mixed up. Cf. My infamous gaffe where I mistook the excellent Doctor Kate (the Matterhorn) for the excellent Jules (the Dialectic). Or was it the other way around? Damn it, I’m just making it worse now.
Leslie Pietrzyk, Til Death Do Us Part, 4557
This story gives us a very convincing teen girl narrator, and a taste of DC area entitlement and children of divorce that rings true for me, a DC local yokel since 1971. It’s very effective as one type of story, the revealing first person stream of consciousness item, but the unexpected twist ending enriches it a bit. Great story; Leslie is a writer to watch.
The elevator door dings finally, and my eyes snap open. My mom’s mascara feels stiff on my lashes, but no touching or it’ll smudge. I flounce my way out of that elevator on very high heels that make me look at least eighteen and I go left as the Oklahomans or Iowans or Ohioans or whatever the fuck they are stare in cow-faced confusion at a sign, as if an ant-stream of people balancing sodas on plastic trays doesn’t clue them to go right, and definitely far, far away from me.
Guy de Maupassant, Mademoiselle Fifi 4595
I find myself here in the odd position of saying I haven’t seen the movie based on this, but I want to! I’ve been chasing it for a while; it’s the one Val Lewton production that is NOT a horror film, and it was an early directing credit for the great Robert Wise. It features the gorgeous forgotten star of Lewton’s two “Cat People” films, Simone Simon.
This is a terrific story, sort of a companion piece to Maupassant’s more famous Boule-de-suif. You’ll enjoy watching the titular character get their comeuppance. Who among us doesn’t enjoy watching a titular character get their comeuppance? That’s what they’re there for.
Maupassant scholars say his best work is only about a quarter of his output; I remain skeptical on that, due to this piece of circumstantial evidence— the neglect of his book “Afloat.” This book never gets discussed, even though for me it’s a minor masterpiece. NYRB reissued it, so those bastards were way ahead of me on this.
I’ll check back in when I find any Maupassant stories that don’t grab me.
Barry Yourgrau, Safari 4600
Barry had a collection out in the 80s, microfiction that overflowed its banks with a bounty of surrealism and comedy. He had some high profile readers for a minute; David Byrne and Roy Blount, Jr. were fans. But he stole a magical balloon from a toddler and floated away, having arrived too soon to benefit from the current mainstream normalization of this kind of short fiction.
“Wearing Dad’s Head” is one of my favorite collecions; Safari is the only piece in it that gets this long. I’ll look at his work in more depth when I cover Etgar Keret, Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and other current masters of that length.
My father and I are on safari. He wears a deluxe pith helmet with a decorative red strap and reinforced air holes. His sumptuous safari jacket is festooned with gussets, map pockets, zippered pouches, epaulettes, and a broad belt drawn with flair about his pot belly. I have on a similar outfit, but in its humblest, most discounted version, one that is mere crown and brim above, and bare, meagerly buttoned twill below. “Yes, you look the spitting image of a dashing young hunter,” my father declares, pressing my shoulders back straight and resetting my helmet by forcing it down painfully over my ears.
Steven Millhauser, A Haunted House Story 4626
Millhauser rarely gets this close to horror, and as usual when he plays around with genre, he does it in a way that genre fans probably wouldn’t dig.
He’s one of the great literary stylists working today. A few years ago, his novel “Martin Dressler” won a Pulitzer. I guess this raised his profile a bit; he certainly publishes a lot of short stories. But it also meant that a lot of conventional readers tried to read his excellent novel and took to the internet to suggest that the Pulitzer committee had lost their damn minds.
An important point to make— there’s nothing at all in the neighborhood of experimental prose in his work; judged as prose, his fiction is easily accessible. It’s his ideas that are odd.
Snobbery alert: Rubes writin’ reviews are everywhere on the internet; they operate in the world of discourse the way a certain kind of driver does in traffic. Oblivious to the need of everyone around them to get from point A to point B, this kind of driver camps out in the fast lane with a blinking right turn signal, phlegmatizing the flow of traffic with tidy efficiency and making some of us drift dangerously close to the homicide lane.
These reviews have become catnip for me; I read one where a woman gave an electronic gizmo one star, because it used Bluetooth, and “I don’t understand Bluetooth.” I think the device was designed to help purchasers distinguish their ass from a hole in the ground. Some of our citizens should thank their lucky stars that it has a “Turbo” setting.
Thomas Ligotti, The Chymist 4679
Another of Ligotti’s unhinged first person narrators. This mode is effective for horror and comedy, both of which often turn on characters who aren’t playing with a full deck. In the days before everyone had a TV, The New Yorker got a lot of mileage out of the Robert Benchley “dementia praecox” model of first person essay, and they still do today.
The scientist narrator here picks up a woman in a bar, and don’t try to guess what happens next. Believe me, you don’t want to know.
Ray Bradbury, Homecoming 4705
Ray wrote a ridiculous amount of short stories, many of which are better known than Homecoming at this point. It is famous in some circles. I think it’s one of his most poignant and poetic, with a blend of horror iconography and charming sweetness. Many, many times since, people have used variations on this blend; read this story and see how a serious artist does it.
“What’s it like, Cecy?” “You can hear the mud pots hissing,” she said, slowly, as if speaking in a church. “Little gray heads of steam push up the mud like bald men rising in the thick syrup, head first, out in the boiling channels. The gray heads rip like rubber fabric, collapse with noises like wet lips moving. And feathery plumes of steam escape from the ripped tissue. And there is a smell of deep sulphurous burning and old times. The dinosaur has been abroiling here ten million years.”
Grace Paley, Enormous Changes At The Last Minute 4731
This story was a huge revelation for me; I knew its reputation, but you have to read it to see why it got the rep. Lovely story, another one blending the comic and the serious, and it’s packed with terrific dialogue. Interestingly, Grace uses here the “skip the quotation marks” method Cormac McCarthy got attention for years later.
Ryu Murakami, Whenever I Sit At A Bar Drinking Like This 4764
This is another one of his amusing O. Henry type stories. Ryu is pretty good at keeping the mood light, while also giving you just enough serious stuff that if one were so inclined, one could pretend there’s a serious and wise message in there somewhere. And he throws a little tawdry material in here and there too, just enough for me to have no idea how he does it, or what it is exactly he’s doing. He’s consistently entertaining; nothing of his has disappointed me yet.
Flannery O’Connor, The Life You Save May Be Your Own 4770
Another O’Connor tale with stellar prose and an unpleasant plot; this time she gives us a one-armed weasel taking advantage of a naive country girl.
Ring Lardner, Haircut 4807
Along with The Swimmer and the Paley and Welty stories, this is a top shelf American classic— another argument for this length. Lardner is more known for his comic and satirical work, but he’s got a few of the bitterest stories in English. This is one of the bitter ones. It’s also one of the quintessential “unreliable narrator” stories; writers take note— this is how it’s done.
Fitzgerald fans take note: Lardner was a FOF (friend of F.), and the character Abe North in “Tender Is The Night” was based on him. Also: his son, Ring Lardner, Junior, wrote the original script for the film version of “MASH.” When Junior died, the Washington Post ran a photo of Senior with the obit. (Even worse, arguably— when Norman Mailer died, the Post called him “Normal” Mailer. In the giant headline. I considered writing a sternly worded letter, and then drifted off to sleep.)
Charles Beaumont,The Murderers 4827
Beaumont, a protégé of Ray Bradbury, wrote some classic Twilight Zone episodes and a lot of decent popular fiction. He died tragically young, and I used to have to search for his out of print paperbacks, but his work is getting reissued these days. There’s a nice collection from Penguin. Maybe that means he’s literature now?
This story isn’t one of his very best, but it is good. It’s about a pair of entitled guys, aspiring to follow in the footsteps of the infamous Nietzchean thrill killers Leopold and Loeb.
Eudora Welty, Why I Live At The P.O. 4831
Eudora got typecast as a “southern writer,” but to be fair to the typecasters, she certainly was that. This story is as fine as this sort of thing ever gets. It’s a serious story, but she’s also mining a rich comedy vein here. That makes three of the top American women writers all using this length in this survey; Eudora, Grace Paley, and Flannery are all top drawer with American prose and storytelling. Somehow, they’re also hugely entertaining writers. (Sorry, I forgot Shirley Jackson, from the previous batch of this length.)
Edogawa Rampo, The Human Chair 4883
I love that Rampo writes under a fake name, a Japanese phoneticization of Edgar Allan Poe’s name. That is what you call committing to the bit.
I need to read more Rampo; I doubt this particular story— a perversion classic— is representative, but aside from the plot, which most people would probably prefer not to know about, it’s stellar writing. I have a feeling Ryu Murakami has read some Rampo.
Note: Amazon has, all of a sudden, a flood of Rampo translations. I don’t know yet if I can recommend those; they look like dubious public domain reprints, but the jury’s still out on that. I have a couple collections, one with this excellent cover.
This book is a classic, a modern reprint of the first collection of Rampo English translations. The other collection I own— The Edogawa Rampo Reader— has some stories and some essays. I’ve only glanced through it but it looks enticing.
Thom Jones, Fields Of Purple Forever 4895
These Jones Vietnam stories are really something. This one has an unusual structure. The memorable character Sgt. Ondine pops up here, postwar, talking about his distance swimming habit, his experiences with sharks, slathering his body up with Vaseline and Vicks, the mystical world of the deep sea, and so forth. But then he cuts back to the Nam, how close he got to death after a plane crash, and what he went through before he got out.
There’s a little bit of him ruminating on how he became a guy who could do terrible things to people.
How Thom wrote these items without having actually been there is a mystery for the ages; most readers assume he’s writing from experience. Officially, he was never stationed in Vietnam, but when you read the stories, you’ll wonder if somebody’s pulling a fast one on us.
With all the superlatives floating around in this survey, it seems silly to throw another one on the fire. So I’ll do it in spite of. Thom Jones is so good, and has so many of the best stories I’ve ever read, that if a reader were to come away from all this blathering with only the message “read Thom Jones,” it would be okay with me.
I wish Hollywood would have left me to die. Could have blowed with the plane or shot myself, but then I didn’t—three hits of morphine gave me hope. A fourth pop might have given me the answer to this whole deal, why we just puppets in the big show with no idea of the whole picture; if there is one. I do believe there is. I am not the fool I sound. I read books. I know things I can’t express. Serious things. A U.S. Marine will save his brother whether he wanting saved or no. You want somebody to bring you out, dial Second Recon: “Swift, silent and deadly!” Located in the Yellow Pages.
John Cheever, The Swimmer 4905
This is another classic of the form, and a top ten fave of mine. I’ve used this with songwriting classes, suggesting students observe where and how information is revealed in this story. You begin the story with no clarity about the main character, and gradually the dialogue will reveal new details. But the new information just makes you more puzzled. This makes it a story you can read many times, and still enjoy it.
Ray Bradbury, The Jar 4942
This underappreciated short story is one of Ray’s darkest, and it was adapted for an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour that was way more disturbing than that show usually got. It’s particularly creepy seeing Pat Buttram (Mr. Haney on Green Acres) in this southern gothic context, as well as other character actors known for southern lowbrow comedy. Billy Barty plays a seedy carnival worker, and we get another bonus— William Marshall, the stentorian actor who played Blacula, and also the King of Cartoons on Pee Wee Herman’s kiddie show. He was one of two actors to play that character.
Okay, the story: a rube buys a jar from a carnival sideshow, containing a mysterious and frightening item that his neighbors show up and stare at for hours. The strong implication is that it’s just a carnival scam. I suspect Ray was making a comment about TV, but that’s not really the reason to read it.
The southern gothic atmosphere is exquisite. Mostly Bradbury seemed to prefer to be remembered for his work that was not pulpy horror, but he certainly wrote an awful lot of the best material you can find in that cul-de-sac. I love the justly lauded “Martian Chronicles,” a favorite book of my youth, but as I get older I can’t get enough of the creepy Bradburys like The Jar.
Slim Pickens and George “Goober” Lindsay, pictured here with William Marshall. This disturbing tale is one of the highlights of television history. The excellent TV adaptation was directed by Norman Lloyd, one of Hitchcock’s most important evil henchmen. I don’t see how Hitch could have done it better.
Such gems!! And lots of new ones for me. Looks like I need to brush up on my Maupassant.
Aside: have you heard of this new film called Wildcat from Ethan Hawke about O'Connor? It looks phenomenal. Hope it lives up to my imagination.
Was it Ray Bradbury who wrote a story about a man who hated people?