The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 20: Screaming Inside

by Peter Aldrich

Sometimes horror needs to be convenient. The mouldering books on the shelves of the secondhand bookstore are just too far away. Maybe I'm having a boring day at work and need a quick scare to get me to five o'clock. Perhaps I just don't feel like investing the time or cash in yet another novel that turns out bland. Short stories in Kindle format can fit the bill in this case. They're available to view on pretty much anything with a glowing screen, and the ones reviewed here range in price from a buck down to free.

Joe Hill's "Twittering From the Circus of the Dead" tells the story of a typical grumpy teenager on a family trip. As the title suggests, the story is told in tweets. Hill's take on the teenage voice rings true, and he avoids the feel of gimmickry one might expect in writing a story via twitter updates. Setting things up with a believable family dynamic, he could almost cut things short and leave it as a satisfying coming of age tale. Instead, his grasp of the everyday makes it easier to accept the weirdness that follows. Things go to hell in a way that could probably support at least two other interesting stories. These ideas end up well integrated here in a way that serves the final payoff. I first checked out Joe Hill by reading his excellent short story collection "20th Century Ghosts", and this short could almost be a late addition to that book. Aside from his solid technique, these works share Hill's gift for surprise. Occasionally in his stories I'll find myself in a state of wonder, like when I followed Lovecraft's narrator down the staircase in "The Rats in the Walls". I certainly found that sense of surprise here.

Next up is "Dead Pig Collector", an offering by Warren Ellis about a sort of combination hit man/cleaner. Like Harvey Keitel's Wolf character in Pulp Fiction, this enigmatic guy won't just leave your corpse hanging around after he's done the deed. He is quite meticulous and counts out his progress in seconds. From the airport to the hotel, through the various inevitable obstacles that interrupt his perfectionism and plans, he's always counting things down. Sometimes this hit man's quirks are interesting, and sometimes they leave the reader also counting down until the next interesting section. The horror angle is mostly contained in the cleanup aspect of things, and that's where I feel it could have used a bit more oomph. Ellis spends so much time making his character cool, aloof, and meticulous that not enough time is spent mucking around in the guts.

"Suspect Zero" is a recently released short story from Richard Kadrey, best known for his "Sandman Slim" series. If you've read those books, you know that Kadrey writes in a kitchen sink modern fantasy style, with his title character slipping in and out of Hell over the course of his stories. His description of Hell and its inhabitants is the selling point for me, and that sort of world building is absent from Suspect Zero. Instead we get a serial killers meeting cute kind of tale, which focuses on a junior killer seeking out the truck driving Grand Poobah of mass murder. It ends up reading like the Karate Kid of antisocial behavior, as the wise elder sociopath passes down his knowledge to the upstart. Kadrey really likes his characters in "Sandman Slim", and rarely kills them off even when it might serve the story. That disjointed mercy follows here, as does his proclivity for unexplained flourishes, such as the fortune telling runes in the senior killer's truck. There is an odd air of mystery and benevolence to the proceedings, with its iconic midwest diners and genial murderer monologues. It's hard to know whether Kadrey was thinking more of American Gods or Large Marge here.

"Serial" by Jack Kilborn and Blake Crouch. "Serial" is the modern bogeyman story stripped down to its most basic parts. Two working class psychos are separately trolling the roads for victims, one as a hitchhiker and the other posing as a friendly ride. Kilborn and Crouch quickly establish each character's nasty personality and method of operation, showing them dispatching one set of victims each before unwittingly reaching each other. Each character's standard method of killing is truly disturbing, yet also contains over the top cartoonish goofiness. While one killer is busy lacing a slurpee with debilitating opiates, the other is making sure his jalopy is in good enough shape to knock out its passenger with a quick stop. The grit and detail of the story leaves one with the impression of Michael Rooker's Henry taking on Mallory Knox in a semi slapstick sort of universe. Though occasionally trite, "Serial" remains satisfying by cutting out all the unnecessary parts, leaving only two monsters reaching for each other's throats.
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Peter Aldrich has enjoyed horror ever since he picked up Red Dragon as a kid, mistaking it for fantasy. You can sometimes find him playing guitar in the general area of Chapel Hill, NC. His album is on Silber Records. On his nights off you might also find him playing through Resident Evil, surrounded by his four cats.

Very Poor Devil

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Moral gray areas. That's what serious artists often claim they like to examine. "Here," they say. "Here's a movie I wrote. What it does is, is it presents you with a man who does things that are so awful that you know you should be plainly disgusted by him. But you find yourself rooting for him, despite everything. Why is that? What is it about us that we can so easily find a link to such men? Are we all beasts inside? Or do we at least recognize the potential for violence, under certain circumstances, within each of our breasts? Also, it stars Antonio Banderas." So you take the the movie they wrote, and you watch it. Turns out it's about this hitman, a brooding, tortured man who has found, perhaps to his dismay, and against his own values, that the work he's best at is killing other human beings. This work proves highly remunerative, but his soul is dying. Except that, by the way, he does have his own private code under which he works, which says that he will only execute other killers, assassins less scrupulous than he, or tyrants, or members of secret government cabals who plot to blow up all the oceans so that they can become even richer! This hitman won't kill just anybody. And that movie is called Grosse Point Blank, and it stars John Cusack, not Antonio Banderas.

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The point is, all that "moral gray area" bunk the guy was peddling was pure snake oil. We're not stupid. We know we're watching a movie, so a little violence directed towards those who would perpetrate cold-blooded, black and white evil on the world is something we can accept, especially if the person dealing that violence is a bit conflicted about it. "Oh, look," we might think. "He doesn't even want to be doing this. It's tearing him up inside! I'm really glad he shot that one guy, though, the one who recorded himself torturing single mothers, and then sold the videos to heads of corporations who think such things are funny. That guy was a real fucker."

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So we're complicit in this hypocritical bullshit, but Grosse Point Blank, for instance, had the good grace to be funny, and I wish I had it on DVD, because that might be good to watch tonight. Be funny, be entertaining, and I'll probably nod along with all the phony moralistic hokum that you didn't have the balls to go all the way with. I just won't take you that seriously.

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Where was I going with all this? Oh, right. Horns, by Joe Hill.

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Joe Hill's new novel begins with our protagonist, Ignatius Perrish (or "Ig", as I rapidly tired of seeing him referred to), finishing up a colossal drunk by urinating all over the plastic religious icons set out in the woods, as a memorial to Ig's murdered girlfriend. It is at this spot that Merrin Williams was murdered, by Ig, or so many people in the town believe. But there is no proof, so Ig is never charged. Yet he's tortured by the circumstances that led him to leave Merrin alone that night, a year ago, when she was killed, as well as his new role as town pariah, so he "spends the night drunk, doing terrible things", such as urinating on her memorial, and then when he wakes up in the morning, he has two horns growing out of his head.

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So far, so good. That was my reaction anyway, because as a sometime fan of Hill's short fiction, I thought a novel about a formally ordinary man, beat to the ground by grief and spiritually wrecked, transforming into a demon, or maybe even the Devil himself, is a pretty terrific premise. But as you might have guessed by now, Hill is playing the same spurious game as I described earlier. Ig is, after all, a demon, or becoming a demon, when we first meet him. And everyone he meets senses this, and after a blinking, confused reaction to his horns, proceed to confess to him all of their worst, most secret urges. Here, Ig is trying to get help regarding his horns -- he thinks he might be hallucinating due to a brain tumor -- from a local clinic, but the doctor has other things on his mind:
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"To be honest," Renald said, "it's a little hard to concentrate on your problem. I keep thinking about the [Oxycontin] in my briefcase and this girl my daughter hangs out with. Nancy Hughes. God, I want her ass. I feel sort of sick when I think about it, though. She's still in braces."

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"Please," Ig said. "I'm asking for you medical opinion -- your help. What do I do?"

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"Fucking patients," the doctor said. "All any of you care about is yourselves."

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See? So at least he's trying to be funny. This kind of exchange, by the way, almost completely accounts for the novel's first forty pages, and I may not have to tell you that it gets really damn old, really damn fast. But in that time, it's not hard to notice a certain trend, which is that all the worst confessions come from people that Hill has decided we shouldn't like. And not just the specific characters, but rather the kinds of characters. The doctor, a man of authority, is a pervert. The nurse Ig met just moments before confessed merely to wanting to take her anger at a neglectful parent further than society would deem appropriate. Ig's girlfriend only wanted to eat a whole box of doughnuts, while the policemen he meets later want to brutalize him -- beat him with their nightsticks and possibly, what the hell, rape him. A nun confesses to being lonely, oppressed, a closeted lesbian who only wants to be happy. The priest, on the other hand, blithely confesses to screwing the mother of Ig's murdered girlfriend. So Ig leaves the priest gasping under a barbell, and helps the nun escape to a new life, aided by stolen church funds.

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And so it goes, throughout the novel, the plot of which, by the way, revolves around Ig's discovery of who actually murdered Merrin -- it was Lee Tourneau, his best friend from childhood, a fact you learn early on, before you even meet the character -- his quest for justice, and a series of idyllic, bittersweet flashbacks to his younger days, his life with Merrin, and Lee, and Ig's family, especially his brother Terry, now, like their father, a successful trumpet player (horns, you see) and late night talk show host.

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I'm not sure that Hill had any idea what kind of character he was creating with Ig. When he leaves the priest under the heavily-weighted barbell, I got the sense we weren't supposed to care much what happened to the priest, because Hill already told us what a dick the guy was. Plus, he helped that sad nun! Not long after, however, he pushes his elderly, wheelchair bound grandmother down a steep hill outside his family home and watches her frail body crash into a fence at, he guesses, about forty miles-per-hour. Ah, but here's what he learns about his grandmother after touching her wrist (another one of his powers):

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His grandmother, he learned then, had no hip pain at all but liked people pushing her here and there in the wheelchair and waiting on her hand and foot...She especially liked to order around her daughter, who thought her shit didn't stink because she was rich enough to wipe with twenty-dollar bills...It was Vera's [the grandmother] privately held belief that Ig knew what his mother had been -- a cheap whore -- and that it had led to a pathological hate of women and was the real reason he had raped and killed Merrin Williams...[who] had been a frisky little gold digger...

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So she hates everybody, and faked her way into that wheelchair. But hold on, she's still a frail eighty-year-old woman, and Ig still pushed her down a hill and into a fence. Unpleasant as she may be, that still makes Ig pretty hard to root for. Well, Joe Hill has anticipated your uncertainty, and we learn some time later that the old bat's fine! A little banged up but, crucially, Ig didn't kill her. Shouldn't have done it, maybe, but no real consequences to be het up about, so you can put your rooting caps back on.

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Much later in the book, Ig is asked by another character how he came to have those horns, these new powers, such a devilish appearance and demeanor. Ig says "Without Merrin in my life...I was this."

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The Devil is in us all without true love and whatnot, except for two things: Hill goes out of his way to make a case for the goodness -- of a sort -- of the Devil, Biblically speaking, and he also seems to forget that he's painted a reasonably full portrait of the young Ig, before he had Merrin, and guess what? He was a fucking peach! He helped people, giving Lee (who he believes saved him from drowning when they were teenagers) money and CDs when he thought Lee had nothing. Hill repeatedly tells us -- and I mean, repeatedly -- that Ig was a terrible liar, because lying made him sick. In short, he was a good kid. Oh, sure, we're told that the young Ig does some maneuvering so that the young Lee won't pursue the young Merrin, but he doesn't maneuver dishonestly, and besides, given that years later Lee will rape and murder Merrin, Ig wouldn't have been out of line if he'd skipped past the aforementioned maneuvering and simply pushed Lee under a train. So what's all this "I was this" business? You were what? A nice guy whose horns hadn't grown out yet? Physically grotesque, but still a person who would forever prove that it's what you're like on the inside that really counts? I mean, it's not like you were a priest, or a cop, or anything like that.

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Horns is really, for all it's profanity and perverse sexual shenanigans, something of a PC joke. The truly good guys are given nothing truly bad to live down, and the bad guys are never given anything truly good to cloud our view of them. Men are the worst, authority figures worse yet, and there's not a moment of gray in the whole damn thing.

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(In fairness, I must add that there is a scene involving a Christian Conservative politician, and Hill portrays the man with a surprising amount of sympathy. It's brief, however, and the implications of the scene go a pretty far way towards erasing that sympathy, at least in my eyes.)

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To truly illustrate this, late in the book Hill gives us a scene with Merrin's still-grieving father. Since this is a pretty good guy, Merrin's dad, he doesn't confess anything too bad to Ig, and later becomes a bit philosophical:
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"...My father wouldn't let me take the theology course I wanted, but he couldn't stop me from auditing it. I remember the teacher, a black woman, Professor Tandy, she said that Satan turns up in a lot of other religions as the good guy..."

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And stop. Now, listen. Joe Hill's dad is Stephen King, and King has in the past been called out by critics for portraying his minority characters, specifically his black characters, as one-note saints, magical souls whose only purpose is to help the more important white characters. Though I personally think a bit too much is made of this, it's not like those critics are basing it on nothing -- there's Mother Abigail in The Stand, Halloran in The Shining, John Coffey in The Green Mile, and possibly others I'm forgetting. But at least in King's novels the black characters get a look in. Despite what the critics say, even despite the validity of what they're saying, Mother Abigail, Halloran and Coffey are allowed to be more than just black. Joe Hill turns the only reference to a black person in the entirety of Horns into a politically correct non sequitor. Why would Dale Merrin feel it necessary to point out, apropos of not a goddamn thing, that the professor in question was a black woman? Because she's the one, indirectly, whose going to explain the whole thematic structure of the book, and you can't have a white guy do that. What would people say? The fact is, the race (or gender) of this never seen, and never again referred to, professor is entirely irrelevent. Why does Hill seem to think it is?

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Well, so that's it. Oh, the book ends with a sort of chase, and snake bites and stabbings, and it's all pretty tedious, but at least it signalled to me that the end was nigh. And to that, I say "Thank God."

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 12: You Don't Really Know Either of Us

I approached the prospect of writing about Joe Hill today with a curious enthusiasm. "Curious" because I felt his much-praised first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, threw a rod no later than the halfway mark, and went from a bit of an intriguing high-wire act -- which I say based on its fairly absurd premise -- to an utterly rote spook-show full of mysterious green glows and convenient talismans that are put to use just in the nick of time. However, by that time I'd also read his short story called "Best New Horror", a story I've mentioned in passing around here once or twice. That was such an unusual, unnerving and wonderful story that I knew it couldn't have been a fluke. And I knew that his collection of short fiction, 20th Century Ghosts, was full of stories that have had horror fans, critics and fellow writers absolutely unable to contain themselves about this incredible new talent. I'm not even really being sarcastic -- the praise has been effusive. But so it was with Heart-Shaped Box. Hence, "curious" and "enthusiasm".

The other thing about Joe Hill is that he's Stephen King's* son. I don't know when he copped to this exactly, but I think it was right around the time that Heart-Shaped Box came out, and after I'd read "Best New Horror". Whether that was planned on his part, or whether people started actually seeing pictures of the guy and saying "Hey, wait a minute", I don't know. The beans were going to be spilled eventually, unless Hill wanted to truly commit hardcore to the life of a pseudonymous writer, which he obviously didn't, and I can't blame him. The thing is, though, he's Stephen King's son. And he writes horror fiction. Martin Amis -- son, of course, of the great Kingsley Amis -- once said that as the child of a famous author who himself becomes a writer, you get "one free book". Meaning that, unlike so many struggling writers, you will get your first book published, but after that you're on your own. I don't remember if Amis has ever addressed the question of fairness with which that first book is received, but Hill might well have either been unfairly shat on, or unfairly fawned over. Clearly, the former didn't happen, and, despite my reservations, I don't really think the latter has happened, either.
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So I pulled 20th Century Ghosts off the shelf, and the good news is that "Best New Horror" wasn't a fluke. The bad news is that neither was Heart-Shaped Box. The bad news comes in the form of "The Black Phone", a story about a kid named Johnny (not "John", of course. If you're a kid in a horror story, you'll go by the diminutive form of your name, and you'll damn well like it) who, while waiting outside a convenience store to be picked up by his father, gets kidnapped by a fat guy named Al. A feature of the con Al uses to entice Johnny towards his van is a flock of black balloons, released from the van's rear door, and here Hill does show his writing chops by describing the balloons as being the color of "sealskin", and making Johnny think of "poisoned grapes".

Once Johnny is again of clear mind, he immediately realizes who Al is -- which, in brief, is the serial killer who has been targeting kids in the area. Johnny even vaguely knew one of Al's earlier victims, a guy named Brian Yamada, against whom Johnny once faced off in baseball. Since Brian is dead, Johnny knows that he will rapidly follow suit unless he can think of some way out of the basement Al has locked him in. But the basement is, of course, virtually barren, save two things: the mattress Johnny sleeps on, and an old black rotary phone mounted on the wall. Al tells him that the phone doesn't work, although it does occasionally ring -- due to static electricity, Al believes. Obviously, the phone rings for Johnny, too, and while he occasionally puts the receiver to his ear only to hear dead air, he does eventually hear a voice on the other end.
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As you knew he would, and I bet you also know who those voices are. The truth is that I was attracted to "The Black Phone" by the title. In an indefinable way, I just thought it sounded creepy. I thought there would be much more to what Al was about than simply another in a long line of John Wayne Gacy stand-ins, and that the phone would be something more interesting than a conduit for helpful ghosts. In fairness, of its type, "The Black Phone" is a decent story, but it's also not the kind of story you're likely to remember, or tell anyone about, unless you're the proprietor of a blog that requires you to. Furthermore, I'm aware, or at least suspicious that this is a possibility, that my demand for pure originality in horror fiction might sound both unreasonable and slightly rabid (at least, I sometimes think it does). An entirely original story, or as near as is possible, is not something I find myself demanding of crime fiction, my other favorite genre. But of course, the crime genre allows for a very finite amount of imagination -- there are only so many types of crimes to write about, and once you cut out things like trespassing and drunk in public, you're left with, like, two around which you can reasonably construct a story, whereas in horror fiction you're limited only by your own creative powers.

Not only that, I've always been struck by something Hemingway once said, which of course I can't find now, but basically he said that a writer needs to create something new every time out, but if you can't do that, you at least need to beat the guys who came before you. I would change that slightly to say that you at least need to want to beat the guys who came before you. Which is mighty big talk coming from me, an "aspiring" writer who has never published a word professionally, but, damn it, I know what I think is good, and with the "The Black Phone", Joe Hill wasn't trying to beat anybody. You read "The Black Phone", and you think, "Oh, yeah. I've read bunches of stories like that. What this is, is another one of those, I guess." And that's exactly how I felt about Heart-Shaped Box.

Ah, but wait, because I also read a story by Joe Hill called "My Father's Mask", and that, my friends, is a story I'd never read before. I picked it because, in his introduction, Christopher Golden says that "'My Father's Mask'" is so weird and upsetting that it made me giddy." And I'm here to tell you that it's both of those things. I didn't quite become giddy, but I can at least understand Golden's reaction..

In this story, a 13-year-old kid named Jack is traveling with his parents to an old family vacation home, left empty following his grandfather's sudden and unpleasant death. This death -- brought about by accidentally falling into an empty elevator shaft -- happened some years ago, and the trip to the vacation house comes, for Jack, completely out of the blue. He had plans for the evening that have now been scuttled by his parents, who are a bit cagey about the motives behind the trip. But they're also entirely chipper about it, especially Jack's mother, who tries to pass the time by playing a strange game with her son, involving a story, apparently created off the top of her head, about Jack's father being harassed at work by rumors spread by the "playing-card people". The playing-card people have caused his well-to-do parents to lose all their money, and will soon be coming after Jack. This is why Jack and his parents are now going to the vacation home. This game -- not this exact game, but ones like it -- appears to be something of a common thing between Jack and his mother. By the end of this story, this fact, as well as the fact that Jack's mother gently cuts off her husband when he attempts to take part, gains a bit of significance that is only just unexplainable.
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When they reach the house -- a place Jack hasn't been to since he was very young -- they find the walls festooned with party masks, the small ones you wear over your eyes; all different colors and styles, hanging everywhere. When Jack asks what the masks are for, his mom says:
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"Every vacation home ought to have a few masks lying around. What if you want a vacation from your own face? I get awfully sick of being the same person day in, day out."
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Jack will go on to find another mask in his own room, which his mother will talk him into wearing. He will also have what he believes to be a nightmare, in which a boy in a white nightgown, with silver eyes and teeth, rides an old-fashioned bicycle into the vacation home's front yard. This dream will drive Jack into his parents' bed, and when he wakes in the morning, he will be alone in the bed, but will see his dad unzipping a suitcase, while standing completely naked, wearing only his own mask -- a clear one that "squashed the features beneath, flattening out of their recognizable shapes." His father's expression is otherwise blank, and the two do not exchange words. When Jack hurries down to the kitchen, he finds his mother, wearing a "sex-kitten" mask of her own, a long t-shirt, and suggestive black panties. The conversation between the two that follows between mother and son is both natural on the surface, and, somehow, entirely wrong.
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There is much more that is deeply weird about this story, but I'm not going to tell you about it, so I hope that I've given you some sense that this story is about as far removed from "The Black Phone" as it's possible to be, and still be of the same genre. Joe Hill has a solid talent for evoking strangeness, the kind that is perhaps not immediately threatening, but which can freak you out more than the most lovingly described decapitation. As a reader of contemporary horror fiction, you may not even be aware that you miss this kind of writing, until you find yourself reading it for once. It's hard to explain why this sort of thing, when done well, is so effective and not sound hopelessly boring about it, to the point that you come close to castrating the story itself. The truly strange in art is at its most compelling, in my view, before people like, well, frankly, like myself have had a chance to really get their hooks into it and rob it of its power by trying to infuse it with meaning. Which is not to say that it must be meaningless, but you should never feel comfortable that the meaning you've carved out of the story, or film, is "correct". It's the assault against what we take to be normal and proper, the chaos of "My Father's Mask" that lingers. As Christopher Golden said, this story is weird and upsetting. To me, that is what the story means.
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And, though not in quite the same way, that's how I feel about Hill's "Best New Horror". Hill is a writer of real talent, and great potential, a potential that has occasionally been realized. He has a new novel in the pipeline, and whatever I might have thought of his last one, Joe Hill has earned another look.
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*I've thought about doing a post about Stephen King, but I'm worried that no one cares anymore. What more needs to be said, pro or con, after all? Any thoughts?

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 8 - A Horrible Obscenity

Ian McEwan seems to have turned his back on the weirder part of his imagination, but for a while there he looked like he was gearing up to be a very high-end horror writer. Early short stories, and novels like The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers (for the record, I didn't care for the former, and I really liked the latter) had an unsettling Gothic quality, not unlike Shirley Jackson's work. McEwan has said that he consciously put that stuff behind him, marking it off as a sort of young man period, and has since, obviously, gone on to be one of the most highly respected writers in the English language today. Enduring Love, one of his novels from this more "mature" period, is a personal favorite of mine, and most people in the Western world are aware, in one form or another, of Atonement.

Both of those novels are unusual, original works of fiction, but I'll be damned if some of his early stories weren't flat out bizarre. Take "Solid Geometry", from his collection First Love, Last Rites. It's about a guy -- another goddamned unnamed narrator -- who has taken to spending all of his time editing his great-grandfather's numerous diaries. The man's marriage is falling apart (he's very cruel to his wife, Maisie) for various reasons, among them a non-existent sex life, his disdain for his wife's interest in New Age thinking, and his apparent obsession with the diaries.

To be fair, this great-grandfather seems to have been a fairly interesting guy. While he might not have spent a lot of his life actually doing things, he was fascinated by a variety of topics, and kept abreast of the world's goings-on with the help of his friend, referred to in the diaries only as "M". To give you a better idea of these two, here's how "Solid Geometry" begins:

In Melton Mowbray in 1875 at an aution of articles of "curiosity and worth", my great-grandfather, in the company of M his friend, bid for the penis of Captain Nicholls who died in Horsemonger jail in 1873. It was bottled in a glass twelve inches long, and, noted my great-grandfather in his diary that night, "in a beautiful state of preservation". Also for auction ws the "unnamed portion of the late Lady Barrymore. It went to Sam Israels for fifty guineas." My great-grandfather was keen on the idea of having the two items as a pair, and M dissuaded him. This illustrates perfectly their friendship.

The fact that our narrator keeps that jarred penis still on his desk as he pores over the diaries perfectly illustrates certain unpleasant, eerie and generally off-putting aspects of his personality.
Eventually, our narrator becomes as obsessed by one aspect of the diaries. His great-grandfather and M used to dine together several times a week. One day, that simply ended, with no explanation given in the diary. Further, shortly before that, the diary mentions a science conference M attended, at which he heard about a Scottish geomitrist named Hunter, who claimed to have found "a plane with no surface". Hunter announced this without warning at an informal gathering between seminars, and the first part of his demonstration, involving a piece of paper which, through careful cutting and folding, he was able to make vanish, deeply angered his audience. The second part stunned them into silence. The great-grandfather wanted to reproduce Hunter's results, and was dilligent in his note-taking. Our narrator becomes similarly obsessed, and finds himself following the same instructions, with similar results.

Horror writer (and son of Stephen King) Joe Hill, in an overall rave of First Love, Last Rites, made passing mention of "Solid Geometry", calling it a "straight-forward Lovecraftian horror tale". Okay, first, it's straight-forward-ish, in that you can chart the story's course easily enough. But it's also a story that uses geometry and a jarred penis as its central metaphors. Second, if Joe Hill (who I don't want to bash, really -- his story "Best New Horror" is well worth a look) wasn't who he is, I would think he'd never read a Lovecraft story in his life. Other than some very glancing similarities, "Solid Geometry" has nothing to do whatsoever with Lovecraft. Lovecraft was about massive, cosmic horror returning to wipe out mankind. "Solid Geometry" is about science, sex, and failing marriages. It is, however, a horror story, of sorts. I guess what I'm saying is, it's just the damndest thing, this one.

What I wondered, when I finished this, is how McEwan even came up with it. I have to assume the inspiration started with geometry, but when the story as it exists came to him, where did he find the confidence to not only write it, but to commit to it enough to write it straight? What I'm getting at is that this is a very strong, very unusual short story, imaginative in a way that very little fiction of any kind is, and I know from my own struggles writing fiction that confidence in your own ideas is a tough hurdle to leap over. Had any other writer come upon this idea, I have to think they would have tried to make it comic, because the received wisdom seems to be that bizarre stories must contain winks and self-concious nods to the audience: don't worry, we know this is pretty weird! This ends up muting the effect, and, I think, shows a lack of commitment by the writer.

But McEwan committed, in a way very few writers do. This story, unpleasant as it is, was a breath of fresh air for me. Check it out.

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PS - I should have put this in my last post, but if, for some ungodly reason, some of you are bemoaning the increasing brevity of my last couple of entries to The Kind of Face You SLASH, allow me to apologize. Most of my blogging for this had been done during my lunch break at work, but exploding toilets near the law library where I take that break have, for the time being, removed that option. So, I have more time to read, but less time to write. This weekend, I'll have plenty of time, but we'll have to see how next week goes. Again, sorry. If you don't mind, even prefer, short posts, then fuck you, you bunch of dicks.