R.I.P. Short Stories, Rnd 2

I woke up at 3:30 a.m. today. (For the record, I fell asleep at 4 p.m. yesterday, so I’m not exactly being deprived of sleep.) It was pitch black outside, and rather chilly, so I made my tea, toasted some GF rice bread, and settled down to catch up with my favourite blogs.

Then, at 4, I heard it. The coyotes began howling, screams so high pitched that when I first moved here and heard them, I thought a toddler was being tortured. The cat jumped out of his nap, every bit of him alert from his pointed ears to twitching tail. I paused from reading blogs. Then, one coyote howled much closer than the others; he must have gotten lost. The cat decided to run to the back of the house for safety, and I decided this was the perfect time to read some short stories for the R.I.P. IV challenge. So I got out the anthology I’ve been exploring, Poe’s Children ed. by Peter Straub, and then remembered that it’s Monday, when I usually review short stories as part of John Mutford’s Short Story Mondays!

Unfortunately, I’m not sure Straub and I agree on what horror stories should be like. I’m finding more stories that I dislike, or that simply don’t move me, than ones that I love. That being said, the ones that I love I really really love so I shall probably read the whole book. The first three stories I discuss I didn’t like very much, but the last two I loved, so feel free to skip to them (“Louise’s Ghost” and “The Sadness of Details”)! :)

“The Great God Pan” by M. John Harrison
This one came close to being great. The guy narrator has these two friends, Lucas and Ann, who used to be married. Here’s how the story opens:

Ann took drugs to manage her epilepsy. They often made her depressed and difficult to deal with; and Lucas, who was nervous himself, never knew what to do. After their divorce he relied increasingly on me as a go-between. “I don’t like the sound of her voice,” he would tell me. “You try her.” The drugs gave her a screaming, false-sounding laugh that went on and on.

 They’ve all known each other for a long time, since they were in college, and there are hints that something happened back then that made Ann the way she is now. But in the end, Harrison just doesn’t give enough information. You know me-I’m all about authors who trust the readers to put it together (hence my adoration of Ishiguro). But that type of writing takes a lot of skill-to drop just enough hints to get at what’s behind the narrative. And I think the author has to know what he’s hinting at…I’m not sure Harrison knew what had happened. So in the end, I just felt unsatisfied. However, there was enough potential that I want to try out a few more of his stories!

“The Voice of the Beach” by Ramsey Campbell
This story has a first-person, somewhat unreliable narrator who lives on a bungalow on the beach quite peacefully. But when a friend Neal comes to visit, he becomes obsessed with the beach, which in turn seems to be more dangerous by the hour. The problem I had with this one was the narrative voice. It was so high-strung, so dramatic about everything, that by the time the scary things started happening I didn’t really care. Rather than building up tension by slowly making things creepier, the whole story is told rather hysterically. Here’s how to starts:

I met Neal at the station.
Of course I can describe it, I only have to go up the road and look, but there is no need. That isn’t what I have to get out of me. It isn’t me, it’s out there, it can be described. I need all my energy for that, all my concentration, but perhaps it will help if I can remember before that, when everything looked manageable, expressible, familiar enough-when I could bear to out of the window.

See what I mean? When the narrator’s that overwrought discussing a train station, there’s not much more emotion possible when discussing murderous beaches. The story didn’t scare me-it just made me feel numb. Has anyone else read Campbell? Is his other writing different?

“Body” by Brian Evenson
Honestly, I have no idea what’s even going on in this slim story. It started out with such promise:

I have been privately removed to St. Sebastian’s Correctional Facility and Haven for the Wayward, where they are fitting me for a new mind, and body too.

 But from there, I was simply confused. I don’t know if the narrator was insane before he got to the facility, or if it drove him insane. I don’t know why the ‘brothers’ at the facility wanted to drive him insane. I don’t know why there’s a strong correlation between women and shoes. It felt a tiny bit reminiscent of the reprogramming part of A Clockwork Orange, but at least I knew what was going on in that novel! I feel like this is the kind of short story that makes people not like the genre. But maybe I’m just not po-mo enough. ;) If you’re a fan of books like The House of Leaves(which I actually enjoyed back in college), you might want to check Evenson out.

“Louise’s Ghost” by Kelly Link
Finally, a short story that I loved! This is another long one, around 40 pages, and Link has the kind of style that I just love. I’m going to quote quite a bit of the beginning, so you can get a flavour for it:

Two women and a small child meet in a restaurant. The restaurant is nice-there are windows everywhere. The women have been here before. It’s all that light that makes the food good. The small child-a girl dressed all in green, hairy green sweater, green T-shirt, green corduroys, and dirty sneakers with green-black laces-sniffs. She’s a small child but she has a big nose. She might be smelling the food that people are eating. She might be smelling the warm light that lies on top of everything.
None of her greens match except of course they are all green.
“Louise,” one woman says to the other.
“Louise,” the other woman says.
They kiss.

 It’s definitely quirky writing, and as we learn more about both of the Louise’s (best friends since Girl Scout Camp) and Anna, the daughter of one of them, it’s obvious that the characters are quirky too. There is a ghost in the story, actually a couple of them, but this isn’t scary-horror. Similarly, I was always a bit off-balance, not sure if I could believe everything I was reading, but this isn’t a play-with-your-mind story. In the end, I think it’s just a story of being human, and relationships, and I’ll definitely be reading more of Kelly Link in the future!

“The Sadness of Detail” by Jonathan Carroll
Carroll has been on my radar since reading a glowing review by Nancy Pearl of his novel The Ghost in Love. But I’d never actually read anything by him, so I was delighted to try him out in a short story! And I loved this one to pieces. :) First there’s Carroll’s descriptive style. The story opens with our narrator describing her favourite bakery:

I used to spend a lot of time at the Cafe Bremen. The coffee there is bitter and delicious, and the teal-blue velvet seats are as comfortable as old friends. The large windows greet the morning light like Herr Ritter, the waiter, greets anyone who comes in. You don’t have to order much: a cup of tea or a glass of win. The croissants come from the bakery next door and are delivered twice a day. Late in the evening, the cafe bakes its own speciality for the night-owl customers-“heavies,” a kind of sugar doughnut the size of a pocket watch. A wonderful treat is to go in there late on a winter night and have a warm plate full of them.
The Bremen is open nineteen hours a day. December twenty-fourth is the only day of the year it’s closed, but on Christmas it opens again, wearing red and green tablecloths, full of people in bright new sweaters or singles looking a little less lonely on a day when people should be home.
There are small, real pleasures in life-the latest issue of our favorite magazine, a fresh pack of cigarettes, the small of things baking. You can have all of them in that cafe; you can be happy there without any of them.

 It’s a rare author that can do that kind of detailed description while making it all sound essential. Even the teal-blue colour of the seats seems important. This is a pretty short story (10 pages), so it’s difficult to talk much about the plot without giving it all away. But let’s just say that the narrator meets an odd man in the cafe, one who offers her an even odder deal. The story felt perfectly complete, it didn’t have that odd hanging sensation I sometimes get at the end of a modern short story, and I want to read more of Carroll right away! :)

Do you read short stories? If so, do you enjoy anthologies or collections better? Any great anthologies you can recommend? (in any genre)