The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 10: Damned Fool Men with Their Maggoty Ideas

by Andrew Bemis

As with many of Ray Bradbury’s stories, “There Was an Old Woman” combines supernatural elements with a matter-of-fact, Midwestern kind of pragmatism that often veers into deadpan comedy. First published in Weird Tales in June 1944, it’s the story of Aunt Tildy, an elderly spinster who finds herself visited by Death as the story begins. Aunt Tildy, as she’ll explain at great length, resolved long ago that death was a foolish, unnecessary act, and she has no intention of dying herself. It’s an effective little dark comedy because it begins with an inarguably logical idea - death should be avoided if possible - and follows its protagonist’s determination to do just that to morbidly hilarious lengths.

The story begins with Aunt Tildy already arguing with the visitor in her living room:

"No, there's no lief arguin'. I got my mind fixed. Run along with your silly wicker basket. Land, where you ever get notions like that? You just skit out of here; don't bother me, I got my tattin' and knittin' to do, and no never minds about tall, dark gentlemen with fangled ideas."

Much of the first half of the story is made up of dialogue like this, as Aunt Tildy makes her case to the visitor that she has no intention of going in his “silly wicker basket.” Her visitor is described, repeatedly and simply, as a “tall, dark young man.” He never tried to persuade Aunt Tildy to get in his basket, or speaks at all. Perhaps he realizes that there’s just no arguing with her. He merely stands in the corner, listening as she tells him about the comforters she needs to make, the death of her parents and sister, and the teenage niece, Emily, who has lived with her since her mother’s death and is the only person Tildy’s really close to. As it becomes clear that Tildy’s determination not to be touched by the pain of loss has kept her from experiencing much of life, the tall, dark young man seemingly serves as a reflection of the old woman’s loneliness without ever saying a word:


He seemed to know everything, with the dark, cold shining of his eyes, before she opened her mouth. He knew about her and World War II, when she shut off her radio forever and stopped the newspapers and beat a man's head with an umbrella, driving him from her shop when he insisted on describing the invasion beaches and the long, slow tides of the dead drifting under the silent urgings of the moon.

Midway through the story, Aunt Tildy drifts into unconsciousness in the middle of an anecdote - the visitor has literally allowed the woman to talk herself to death. The second half turns more broadly comic, as she struggles to convince her terrified niece that she’s still alive, then goes to the mortuary where her body is about to be prepared and convinces the mortuary president to give it back (the man seems more concerned at the possible loss of business from Tildy’s threats to haunt the funeral parlor than he is about the fact that he’s talking to a ghost). Tildy reminds the reader a bit of Gregor Samsa, as both are determined to not let the considerable changes they’ve undergone prevent them from going on with business as usual. I’ve never thought of Bradbury as Kafkaesque, but they do both have a knack for combining extraordinary story developments with the mundane details of everyday life. The ending of “There Was an Old Woman,” then, is a perversely happy one, as Tildy finds herself free to continue the life she’s fought for, never stopping to consider that, as she’s literally experienced proof of a life after death, that the eternity she’s rejected might be of more interest than the very small life she’s clinging to.

Bradbury’s story has been adapted for CBS Radio Mystery Theater, an episode of Ray Bradbury Theater and, most interestingly, an issue of Tales From the Crypt. It’s fun to see Bradbury’s story told through the comic’s trademark garish character designs and sickly color palette. At the same time, by turning Tildy into a ghoulish old crone, Bradbury’s matter-of-fact approach to the story is lost in translation. It’s his ability to coach the genre’s trappings in everyday, universal terms that is one of the strongest qualities of Bradbury’s writing - horror can take the form of a spectral, soul-stealing carnival, or it can be as simple as a middle-aged man realizing he’s too old to keep up with his adolescent son. And a stubborn old spinster can dig her heels in and cheat death because there are still many more comforters and pot holders yet to be made.
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Andrew Bemis writes about movies at his blog Cinevistaramascope, and has also contributed to If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Lot of Dead Copycats, Samurai Dreams, and The North Adams Transcript. He's also the writer/director of the film Black Light, starring AVN Award winner Bella Vendetta. He lives in New Hampshire with his family.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 30: It is All Disease and Nobody Will Know

When I wrote briefly about Ray Bradbury last October, circumstances dictated that I focus on those aspects of his writing about which I'm less than fond -- the particularly Spring-choked nostalgia, the cuteness, his special brand of densely sentimental prose. I haven't warmed to those aspects since he passed away earlier this year, but the story under discussion last year, "The Tombling Day," offered the opportunity to talk only about those things, and while I tried to temper my negativity with a "but I like these ones" list of Bradbury stories I was quite fond of, the overall impression I gave was not what I would call sympathetic to Bradbury's vast body of work. Given that vastness, I might have tried to temper things a bit more, but for what it was, the post was an honest one.

When Bradbury died on June 5, like the rest of you I read a lot about him on-line, and along with coming across this quote...

I learned that I was right and everyone else was wrong when I was nine. Buck Rogers arrived on the scene that year, and it was instant love. I collected the daily strips, and was madness maddened by them. Friends criticized. Friends made fun. I tore up the Buck Rogers strips. For a month I walked through my fourth-grade classes, stunned and empty. One day I burst into tears, wondering what devastation had happened to me. The answer was: Buck Rogers. He was gone, and life simply wasn’t worth living. The next thought was: Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies.

I went back to collecting Buck Rogers. My life has been happy ever since. For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction. Since then, I never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

...which is unimpeachably magnificent, I also picked up a lot of recommendations for Bradbury stories I hadn't read. That night, I scoured through my collection of his books and picked two of those stories, "The October Game" and "Heavy-Set," and read them. Both are terrific, "The October Game" being an especially nasty horror story of unconscionable revenge, and "Heavy-Set," while not horror, turned out to be a pitch-black chronicle of a mother and son relationship that ends, I suspect, right before it did, in fact, become a horror story. I loved "Heavy-Set" in particular -- there was no genre category in which it could be slotted, it didn't deal with imagination, there was no hint of fantasy, even in a metaphorical sense, which in my experience of Bradbury was up to then unheard of. That one opened up the possibilities of Bradbury for me a bit, that for every story I disliked there could be one or two or three that hit me like a brick across my jaw. The fact that both stories were rather chillingly bleak did not escape my notice, and did not strike me as coincidental. I hope that doesn't say anything about me.

I read four Bradbury stories for today, but one of those wasn't horror, and I plan on dispensing with it quickly. Also, I didn't like it. While "The Haunting of the New" is certainly not a happy story (I'm not sure Bradbury wrote a lot of those, to be honest), in terms of the prose it does make room for just about all of the things about Bradbury I don't like. Nearly a ghost story, but a self-conscious flip on the idea, "The Haunting of the New" describes characters who live lives of unending and frivolous decadence, the globally scattered crew coming together every few years at Grynwood, the home of Nora, the chief and most enabling sybarite. But Charles, the narrator, arrives one day after being invited to another blowout only to be told by Nora that Grynwood burned down four years ago -- the identical structure he can see and walk through is a complete, exact-to-the-last-dust-speck replica. And this house being new, despite looking old, it doesn't want them anymore. Nora says that people like her and Charles are "evil" (a strong word that I doubt even Bradbury means) and is forcing her to leave. She offers the house to Charles, but the house wants him gone, too. A fine enough idea for a story, I suppose, except:

"There are a thousand young men in me, Charles.

They thrust and buried themselves there. When they withdrew, Charles, I thought they withdrew. But no, no, now I'm sure there is not a single one whose barb, whose lovely poisoned thorn is not caught in my flesh, one place or another. God, God, how I loved their barbs, their thorns. God how I loved to be pinned and bruised. I thought the medicines of time and travel might heal the grip marks. But now I know I am all fingerprints. Their lives no inch of my flesh, Chuck, [that] is not [in the] FBI file systems of palm print and Egyptian whorl of finger stigmata. I have been stabbed by a thousand lovely boys and thought I did not bleed but God I do bleed now. I have bled all over this house. And my friends who denied guilt and conscience, in a great subway heave of flesh have trammeled through here and jounced and mouthed each other and sweat upon floors and buckshot the walls with their agonies and descents, each from the other's crosses. The house has been stormed by assassins, Charlie, each seeking to kill the other's loneliness with their short swords, no one finding surcease, only a momentary groaning out of relaxation."

So. Lots of metaphors in there. I won't try to sort through them all, but I'm pretty sure "barbs" are penises. So are "thorns" and "short swords." This story made me groan and squirm and fire buckshot at crosses, and I was very glad to realize it wasn't a horror story and I could flee from it in good conscience.

But the Bradbury stories that were horror? Or near enough anyway? Those are something else again. Taking the stories in the order of least to most horror, I'll begin with "A Touch of Petulance," first published in Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces anthology. This story exemplifies one of Bradbury's greatest strengths, which was to take an old idea and employ it towards an end no one had thought of before. "A Touch of Petulance" begins this way:

On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Johnathan Hughes met his fate, commuting from another time, another year, another life.

His fate was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island.

That "fate" turns out to be Hughes's future self, an old man who has traveled from 1999 (that Bradbury doesn't waste a second with some useless explanation of the mechanics of time travel is also to his credit) just a few days after murdering his wife, a woman that present-day Hughes has only been married to for one extremely happy year. It is the goal of future Hughes to make current Hughes aware of this, and to plant the seeds that will stop this from happening. What could have gone wrong in their marriage, the current Hughes wonders, and his older self really doesn't have an explanation. All he can say is that over time, Hughes will come to hate his wife, and he must avoid this at all costs. To say more about the plot would be to ruin it, but this story did wind up in a horror anthology. I'm not sure it is horror, really, but it's black, all right, even hopeless. The old man is referred to as Hughes's "fate," after all. That's no accident.

Better still is "The Women," from his 1969 collection I Sing the Body Electric!. If "A Touch of Petulance" is a great example of one of Brabury's creative gifts, "The Women" is an example of what may have been his greatest gift, which was to imagine something entirely new, to look at something ordinary and imbue it with a mystery that is unique. In "The Women," a man and his wife are near the end of their vacation at a beach-side hotel. They are on the beach, and the man is anxious to take one last swim before they have to leave, but his wife keeps finding ways to distract him, by asking him to do a favor, or getting him talking about some other topic. She does this because she knows she has a romantic rival, namely, the ocean.

This sounds absurd when phrased bluntly, but at his best, Bradbury's magic was to take the most wild and ridiculous fantasy or horror ideas and make them seem, if only for the span of a ten page story, entirely believable. Not to beat a horse I'm sure I killed years ago, but one of the keys to this is to not explain himself. Bradbury doesn't tell us why or how the ocean can love anything (the thinking and feeling part of the ocean is described only as "the phosphorescence"), let alone this particular man, whom Bradbury describes as having a "cow body," nor does he let us in on how the man's wife clues into this. That's just how it is, and the world is a mysterious place. Bradbury writes:

Each day he should have come down to the water, to bathe, to swim. But he had never moved. There was a woman on the sand with him, a woman in a black bathing suit who lay next to him talking quietly, laughing. Sometimes they held hands, sometimes they listened to a little sounding machine that they dialed and out which music came.

The phosphorescence hung quietly in the waves. It was the end of the season. September. Things were shutting down.

So from the ocean's point of view, it's now or never. Well, it turns out to be now, and the end of "The Women" is brutal and tragic and free from any maliciousness or villainy. Like any natural disaster, it just is.

Finally, there's "Fever Dream," an eight-page bit of awfulness and horror that seems to have been written specifically to terrorize all of Bradbury's young readers the next time they got sick. Available any number of places, but read by me in The Vintage Bradbury, "Fever Dream" is about a young boy named Charles, who is sick. With a cold, maybe, or maybe, according to his genial but possibly arrogant doctor, scarlet fever. Charles is convinced something else is going on, something much worse. He sees his hands and legs changing color and twitching, and he forms a theory that he explains to his doctor this way:

"I've been thinking...Do germs ever get big? I mean, in biology class they told us about one-celled animals, amoebas and things, and how millions of years ago they got together until there was a bunch and they made the first body. And more and more cells got together and got bigger and then finally maybe there was a fish and finally here we are, and all we are is a bunch of cells that decided to get together, to help each other out. Isn't that right?"

"What's all this about?" The doctor bent over him.

"I've got to tell you this. Doctor oh, I've got to!" he cried. "What would happen, oh just pretend, please pretend, that just like in the old days, a lot of microbes got together and wanted to make a bunch, and reproduced, and made more--"

Of course, no one else can see these changes in Charles's body, which leaves the door open for more than one explanation for what's going on here, but the best-case scenario is that a thirteen-year-old boy has gone insane. The worst case scenario is one of the blood-chilling "Patient X" scenarios I've ever read, and, like I say, "Fever Dream" is all of eight pages long. It really is a superior story, and the last page or so is so wonderfully precise in its clinical horror that I had to smile. Wonderful, and terrible. That, to me, was Bradbury's greatness.

RIP Ray Bradbury

He had never liked October.  Ever since he first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother's house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees.  It had made him cry, without a reason.  And a little of that sadness returned each year to him.  It always went away with spring.

But it was different tonight.  There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years.

There would be no spring.

- Ray Bradbury, "The October Game"

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 10: Death's Nicer Than Life

I was poking around my bookshelves the other day and I found a horror anthology I've had for God knows how long, but had completely forgotten about called The Supernatural Reader, edited by Groff Conklin and first published in 1953 (my edition is from 1970). Though perhaps not at the same high level, The Supernatural Reader reminds me of The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural in that both were picked up by me with no particularly high expectations, but both turned out to be loaded with a wonderful lineup of talent. In the case of The Supernatural Reader, you have stories by John Collier, Ambrose Bierce, Nigel Kneale, Lord Dunsany, Theodore Sturgeon, Saki, E. M. Forster, and so on. How I forget I owned this book, I do not know. The extra special bonus to this discovery is that it allows me, however briefly, to post something about horror of the late-early, early-mid 20th century, which period I often feel makes up the hinge of this entire series every year.

The first story I chose is "Minuke" by Nigel Kneale. Kneale is best known as the creator of Quatermass, and the writer, obviously, of Quatermass and the Pit and The Quatermass Experiment and the like. Also a playwright and writer for British television, Kneale is most intriguing to me as the author of a collection of short stories called Tomato Cain and Other Stories, a volume that is regularly mentioned as an important part of British horror writing but is also now completely unavailable unless you are willing and able to spend $100 or more on a single book, which I am not (though I sometimes kick the idea around in relation to Charles Willeford's Off the Wall, but that's neither here nor there). So generally when I think of Kneale, I don't think of Quatermass, but rather my own disappointment. Happily, though, I have twice now found stories from Tomato Cain tucked away in old anthologies, and have now read both. I almost wrote up "The Patter of Tiny Feet" last year, and can't now remember why I didn't, but in any case that's probably for the best as "Minuke" is better, and is, I'll admit right here, my favorite of the three I read for today.

"Minuke" takes the form of a story being related to our...narrator? Does that count if only two or three paragraphs are narrated by him? Anyway, I guess it's a two-person narration story, where the bulk is narrated by a man referred to only as "the estate agent", the other narrator being a potential customer. The estate agent wants to ease the other man's mind regarding some odd business transaction he's just witnessed, so the estate agent tells him about the Pritchards, a family who has bought through the estate agent a newly-built bungalow. And right there, it's interesting straight away because "Minuke" is a haunted house story where the house is brand new, and therefore has had no chance to build up a history of horrific psychic anguish or restless spirits or anything. There is a hint that perhaps, maybe, the bungalow was constructed on land of some questionable past, but this is very vague, and as far as I'm concerned could have been left out entirely. The most important part for me is that, apart from that, "Minuke" is fairly standard as a plot, but Kneale has such an easy way of depicting the horror and of sketching his characters out, and the mild personality clashes, and the well-earned cynicism towards his clients of the estate agent, and also the off-handed way that he reveals that this estate agent isn't entirely skeptical towards the idea of ghosts or hauntings. And this gets Kneale over so many hurdles, by making the characters open to the idea right from the beginning, that I don't know why more writers don't do it. It's a wonderful, professional -- a cold-sounding approbation until you've suffered through long periods of its total absence -- spooky piece of writing, very clean and entertaining and British in its prose, this last I mean in the best sense, and for me that counts as high praise, if based very squarely in personal taste.

Next I read, largely because I couldn't figure out how I was able to go four years without mentioned him, a story by Ray Bradbury called "The Tombling Day." This story, like the third one, as you will see, isn't really horror, and that's a shame, but I can't blame Groff Conklin (he didn't call his anthology The Supernatural Horror Reader, after all) but at least this gives me an opportunity to talk about horror tropes used for different purposes, and to talk about Bradbury. Who I'm very, very mixed on. I think the first Bradbury story I ever read was "In a Season of Calm Weather" from A Medicine for Melancholy, which I'm sure I chose because it was short, and which Young Me was quite dismayed to discover was about Picasso drawing pictures in the sand. I think that actually put me off Bradbury for a while -- I was a kid -- but since I became a fan, and then dropped way back down to being put off again. Bradbury has written some unimpeachable masterpieces -- "There Will Come Soft Rains", "The Small Assassin", pretty much all of The Martian Chronicles, great swaths of The October Country and I'm very fond of his poem "When Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns" -- but my God, his desire to wallow about in words like "summer" and "sunlight" and "flowers" and "grass" and "golden" and he can be so goddamn turgid about themes of aging or childhood or loneliness...I ground my teeth to shrapnel trying to get through From the Dust Returned, a book I thought would go down like water. All of this to the point that I haven't read any of his straight-up novels (The Martian Chronicles doesn't count) because I don't think I could put up with this in any kind of long form. And considering that "The Tombling Day" is only six or seven pages, and I still struggled, what hope is there?

"The Tombling Day" is about an old woman named (oh for Chrissake) Grandma Loblilly who, with her family, and for reasons I can skip here, has to dig up the graves of their deceased and plant them again elsewhere. Among those exhumed is the old woman's one-time fiance' William Simmons, who died very young, and whose body has somehow, sixty years on, been perfectly preserved. This drives home Grandma Loblilly's own age and sends her into despair as she remembers how she once looked:

"...And me, I was twenty and all golden about the head and all milk in my arms and neck and persimmon in my cheeks. Sixty years and a planned marriage and then a sickness and him dying away. And me alone, and I remember how the earth-mound over him sank in the rains -- "

I have to be honest: I can't stand that stuff. "Golden about the head"? In fairness, sometimes Bradbury in this mode can really strike me, such as here:

The sunlight was late by each window, the last butterflies were settling amongst flowers to look like nothing more than other flowers.

That's great, and I admit that once I saw the word "butterflies", I kind of panicked. And with good reason!: "Yes, him lyin' there, all twenty-three and fine and purty..." And by the end, the reader is meant to celebrate Grandma Loblilly's sudden embracing of the idea of living in the moment, and life being better than its opposite, but this follows a rather horror-like disintegration scene so that Grandma Loblilly's reaction to it seems almost cruel and mocking and frankly in poor taste. Not to mention insane. The story ends like this:

"Whee-deee!" she cried. "Whee-heee!"

You telling me that's sane?

Finally, I read a story called "The Stranger" by Richard Hughes. Hughes is the author of one of my all-time favorite novels, A High Wind in Jamaica from 1929. This novel is to me what everybody else claims Lord of the Flies is but is too tedious to actually be, which is a mercilessly God's-eye-view of childhood cruelty. I cannot praise this novel too highly, a novel whose last paragraph forced from me one of those little from-the-nose laughs inspired less by humor, even though a very black sort is there, but rather a kind of disbelief that A High Wind in Jamaica actually turned out to be as brilliant as I'd come to suspect it must be (please do not see Alexander Mackendrick's film version, by the way. Or rather, go ahead and see it, but read the novel first). Hughes didn't publish much, and I've subsequently struggled, possibly my own fault, with what I've tried to read. Which hasn't been much. His short novel In Hazard and a short story, the title of which escapes me, which I was going to read for last year but had to abandon it due to a case of profound indifference on my part. I was determined to not feel that about "The Stranger", though, mainly because I wanted to yell at you all to go out right now and read A High Wind in Jamaica. Nothing else about this post matters but that.

So "The Stranger" isn't bad. Like the Bradbury story, it's not quite horror, but it comes closer, and anyway doesn't have any of Bradbury's gentleness of spirit as its goal. "The Stranger" eventually turns out to be a kind of religious satire about a small Welsh village (probably a double redundancy there). The village, called Cylfant and containing citizens with names like Mrs. Grocery-Jones and Mrs. Boot-Jones (unrelated), has a church pastor named Mr. Williams whose wife finds the titular Stranger on their doorstep:

...a grotesque thing, with misshapen ears and a broad, flat nose. His limbs were knotted, but the skin at his joints was yellow and delicate as a snake's belly. He had crumpled wings, as fine as petrol upon water: even thus battered, their beauty could not but be seen.

Hopefully that passage gives you some hint of Hughes's talents -- "fine as petrol upon water" is superb -- though it can't possibly give you any idea of the extent of Hughes' romance with the punctuation mark known as the "colon". He uses that thing more than commas, to the point that it's actually ridiculous. But never mind, I'm getting off track. The Stranger in "The Stranger" turns out to be a devil who is seeking to do bad, and there is a rather amusing cruelty which is not unheard of from Hughes but is of the type that places the story more in the realm of satire than horror -- it doesn't even, somehow, quite function as satirical horror. It's an odd story, which, all things considered, is perhaps expected.

Anyway, you know what you guys should all do? Read A High Wind in Jamaica, goddamnit.