A Pistol Full of Silver

Here we have some Halloween themed prose. Sorry it's been so long between posts, but we've been working hard on turning this site into something a little better (including audio book versions of these stories.)

I should be back in a week or two with another story (maybe sooner), I'm picking back up the pace with the writing.

Predictably, the moon was full and set high in the crisp autumn sky the night I found my family murdered, mutilated, torn to pieces. Something had crashed through the front picture window and began to tear them apart one by one. The gas lamps were out, snuffed by the drafty gale rushing in through the shattered window. I entered my home hurriedly, kicking the door open with my boot, illuminating the front room with my lantern. Shadows grew long and flickered in the lamp’s firelight. It was the remains of my wife I saw first. I was grateful that the light was so poor because the carnage was too great for me to bear, even in the dim light.

A low creak in the wood up the stairs snapped my attention in that direction. I felt a cold rush as the blood drained away from my skin, I must have been a pale white from fear, but with that fear, my resolve grew. I raised my pistol up to my hip, leveling it toward the noise. I hoped and prayed that it wasn't necessary to have smelted the six silver bullets that occupied each chamber of my revolver, but if they were indeed required to rid the world of this monster, then, by God, I would be prepared. Aiming the light as best I could toward the stairs. I took slow, careful steps in that direction. Another SNAP and a KLUNK stopped me in my tracks. I wished so badly to stop, to turn around to leave this problem to someone else, someone much braver than I, but I knew that wasn't possible. Choking down my fear, I gulped hard and took another step forward.

And another.

And another.

One foot in front the other, each one in front of the next. Each step closer to the stairs got my heart racing faster. Each step I took up the staircase raised my pulse to match my ascent. I'd worried so much about getting to the stairs and up them that I almost didn't notice the remains of my daughter intermingled with what was left of my wife's body. I didn't realize that hot, salty tears had been streaming from my eyes. It was a completely automatic response; I had to put my grief out of my conscious mind until I'd dispatched this grievous creature.

Finally, I'd reached the top of the stairs, either by overcoming my fear or being overcome by it. I couldn't tell which. Keeping the lantern raised in my left hand and the pistol aimed ahead in my right, I swiveled back and forth, looking for a sign of which hallway to direct my search.

I scanned the floor for any clue or indication, a bloody paw print, a scrap of flesh, anything that could give me an edge. I'd need any and every advantage I could obtain in order to get the drop on the monster. Unfortunately, no sign presented itself, so I stopped, trying my hardest to listen carefully for any audible giveaway. Sadly, I was winded so severely in fright, all I could hear was the wheeze of my own labored breathing and a rattle deep in my chest. It was obvious I was just going to have to simply pick a direction in hopes that my instincts proved accurate. My mind raced though worst case scenarios and my mind flashed instantly to my young boy, aged eight years old. IT would make a grim sort of sense that the beast would come up the stairs hoping for an easy snack to go with the main course he made of the rest of my family downstairs. With that in my mind, I turned to the left, down the corridor my son's room resided.

The lantern light swung back and forth down the hallway as I used that arm to wipe the sweat and tears from my cheek and brow.

Down the hall, I could see the door to my boys bedroom was ajar. No sign of light could be seen through the sliver of bedroom between the door and the jam, only the black of night. This made me nervous. Still I could hear little but the rusty creaks of the lantern shaking in my fist and my still belabored respiration. I crept forward, praying both that I'd guessed right and that my son had hidden away, out of reach of the jaws and claws of the feral beast. I counted slowly to myself down from three, working hard to compress and contain my overwhelming sense of dread. As I got to "one", I banished all the cowardice I could from my mind and body and quickly nudged the door open with my pistol arm. And behind the door, there he was!

I caught only a glimpse of him, his head snapped around, his blood red eyes took me in. His snout full of sharp teeth snarled at me, the low growl he was emitting was interrupted only by the loud report of my pistol as I squeezed off two quick shots, each missing its mark. Sensing the danger, the bipedal wolf turned quickly away from me and leapt desperately through the second story window, scattering glass across the lawn and shrubs beneath him. Following up to the window, I caught sight of him, hitting the earth on all fours, scrambling into the deep thicket that surrounded my once peaceful and lovely country home.

"Damn!" I shouted before I turned, wondering at the ultimate fate of my son. "Jonathon," I called out to him.

No response.

"Johnathon…?" I called out once more to no reply.

I took a glance around the room, pointing at dark corners with my lamp and seeing nothing, neither my boy, nor what could be his desecrated remains. I could not decide if I should have more worried or relieved when I heard a stirring from the closet. A hopeful sign, to be certain, but I still had to be cautious. I set the lantern on the bureau and watched my shadow shrink further and further as I got closer and closer to the closet door, my hand wavering over the doors knob, aiming my silver loaded gun chest-high toward the closet. With a whoosh, I swung the door open violently to see my boy standing amidst the clothes and various linens. The blood had left his face and he was a clutching a kitchen knife longer than his forearm. Upon the opening of the door, he lunged at me with the serrated instrument. It was fortunate that instead of firing one of the few precious silver bullets left at the boy, that I sidestepped and grabbed his wrist, forcing the knife from his grasp. As the knife fell, realization hit him and he understood that his father was there. God willing, I'd be able to protect him, by God I'd do my best.

"It got mother," was the only thing the boy could eek out in his stupor of deep shock.

"It's all right, my boy," I assured him, "I'll take care of him. I'll kill him dead."

I clutched the boy to my chest, holding him close, rough but tenderly. He was the most dear possession left to me in this world and I wished that I could have stayed longer to comfort him. But I had to give chase to the beast once more. "Stay here," I told my dear boy, "Hide in the wardrobe, stay there until I come to get you."

The boy nodded his understanding.

"If you don't hear from me, do not leave until the morning light. Do you understand?"

The boy said nothing as I guided him back to the mess of cloth. "Do you understand?" I repeated. I had to be sure he understood the danger he was in.

"Yes, father," he said meekly.

He sat in the closet, retrieved his knife and looked up at me. His face was sad, void of colour and any other shade of emotion. As I closed the door on him, I told him things would be all right and I silently hoped that this wouldn't be the last time he ever saw his father alive.

With that, I shut him back into what I prayed would not become his tomb and raced down the stairs and out the door of my home.

The woods seemed dead, the evening breeze had given way to the still of night and it made my spine shiver and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on their end. Once again, I began by creeping slowly in the direction I last saw the monstrosity heading. From the boy's window, he seemed to be heading due east, the direction the sun would be coming from and end him if I couldn't before hand.

Gathering my resolve, I set out toward the East.

Usually, it was a refreshing thing to come out here in the thicket in the evenings and listen to the nightingale sing and the crickets chirp, but tonight, the woods were filled with terror.

It may have been my imagination, but I thought that I could hear it breathing, hot and heavy, down my neck behind me. I turned on my heels and fired twice in the direction I was certain the beast was in, only to find that I'd fired two of my rare bullets into the empty knot of a hollow tree that splintered open upon impact. No sooner had my ears finished ringing from the sound of the gunshot, could I feel the beast rushing behind me in the opposite direction. I was left no time to marvel at how fast he was, I simply had to turn as quickly as I could in hopes of catching it with a bullet.

But no sooner had I turned, the creature had vanished into the night air like so much vapor and mist.

Once more, I wiped the sweat from my brow with my lantern arm, the shadows were much more menacing in the changing light from all of the gnarled tree branches and dense foliage in the wooded area. As I had the lantern hanging high and my bicep absorbing my perspiration, that's when it hit me.

Square in the back, I got it with all the force of his weight.

I could feel the pads of its feet and the claws toes jam into my back, knocking me off balance. I lost my grip on both the lantern and the pistol and I could perceive them skittering off in front of me into the thick, matted grass of the forest floor. The lantern spilled open, leaking fire onto the ground, brightening the scene more and more as it burned more and more dead branches. If I couldn't extricate myself soon, this whole region would be consumed in flame.

But first I had to deal with the beast.

I could feel the hot scratches deep into my skin as the creature dragged his paws and claws across my back. My shoulder grew hot, I could feel my blood spilling…

I knew if I was to survive, I had to do something drastic, but I was pinned. I tried hard to rotate to my right, to no avail, and then to my left, but the monster had me, dead to rights. I groaned under the strain and tried to leverage the wolf-man over me and that didn't work either.

His hairy digits we're reaching around my throat when I heard him squeal and whelp as though he'd been hurt, though clearly not at my hand, and then his grasp around my neck went limp. His weight no longer borne on me in its entirety, I was able to crawl a few feet away, putting me within arms reach of my pistol. Having no idea what was going on, I could tell that something had at least hurt the beast, because it was alternating between wailing in pain and snarling…

Finally, I was able to grab the gun and contort my body around, hoping to get a good shot, but the only thing staring back at me was my boy.

I coiled around to see the demon fleeing into the woods, the knife I left my boy with was sticking out of its back, it bled profusely all the while. My boy must have come out here, hoping to save me, and did.

He succeeded. But more than saving my life, he succeeded in making me forgetful of the torch burning down the forest.

We were left with only one course of action: to flee. Pursuit of the werewolf would have to wait.
Tonight, we would watch our old family home and surroundings burn to the ground under the light of the full moon and tomorrow the boy and I would begin our training. We would avenge our family and make sure the werewolf didn't live to see another night like this.

He was wounded and we'd be sure to discover his true identity in the morning light that was creeping up over the crackling fire. Oh yes, we would have our revenge.

Orhan Pamuk: A Chapter in a Novel is not Necessarily a Short Story

Orhan Pamuk, the first Turk to win the Nobel Prize (2006), has a new novel released this week, The Museum of Innocence, translated by Maureen Freely, published by Knopf. Favorable reviews appeared today (Oct. 21) in The Los Angeles Times and yesterday in The Washington Post.

I have no intention of commenting on the novel, for I have not read it, but I do want to make a few comments about a chapter that appeared in the Sept. 7, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, entitled “Distant Relations.” According to Marie Arana in the Post and Tim Rutten in the Times, The Museum of Innocence is a “spellbinding, engrossing, mesmerizing” story of a romantic/erotic obsession. The story in The New Yorker is about the beginnings of that obsession.

Kemal, a 30-year old bachelor, is engaged to a woman named Sibel. Both are of the same class, urbane, educated, and sophisticated. American educated, Kemal lives with his parents in a wealthy neighborhood.

The story begins with this sentence: “The series of events and coincidences that would change my entire life began on April 27, 1975, when Sibel happened to spot a purse designed by the famous Jenny Colon in a shop window as we were walking along Valikonagi Avenue, enjoying the cool spring evening.”

When Kemal goes into the shop the next day to buy the purse for Sibel, he encounters an 18-year-old girl, named Fusun, who he recognizes as a poor “distant relation.” He is immediately attracted to her: “I felt my heart rise into my throat, with the force of an immense wave about toe crash against the shore.”

As usual with such fascinations, it is something inexplicably physical: “My eyes traveled from her empty shoe over her long bare legs. It wasn’t even May yet, and they were already tanned.” “With slender dexterous fingers, [she] removed the balls of crumbled tissue paper.” “I was admiring her honey-hued arms and her quick elegant gestures.” As Kemal leaves the shop, he pauses for a moment: “My ghost had left my body and was now, in some corner of Heaven, embracing Fusun and kissing her.”

Also, as is usual in such fascinations, what Kemal sees in Fusun is himself. When he must take the purse back because his fiancé says it is a fake, he “cannot deny the startling truth that when I looked at Fusun I saw someone familiar, someone I felt I knew intimately. She resembled me…I felt I could easily put myself in her place, could understand her deeply.”

When Fusun begins to cry about the returned purse, he holds her, “which made my head spin. Perhaps it was because I was trying to suppress my desire, stronger each time I touched her, that I conjured up the illusion that we had known each other for years.”

However, “Fearful of the sexual beast now threatening to rear its head, I took my hand from her hair.” However, he does not leave the store until he has figured out a way to meet her later in an unoccupied apartment owned by his mother. “Back in the street, my shame and guilt mixed with so many images of bliss in the unseasonable warmth of that April afternoon that the very sidewalks of Nisantasi seemed aglow with a mysterious yellow.”

The story ends with Kemal’s mother pressing the key to the apartment in his hand, giving him a look like the one she gave him as a child, warning him that “life held unsuspected dangers that were far deeper and more treacherous than, for instance, failing to take proper care of a key.”

According to the reviews of this book, which I will probably never read, Kemal “takes” Fusion’s virginity and begins an affair with her. However, Fusun does not love Kemal and marries an unsuccessful art film writer. Kemal’s obsession becomes more intense. He loses Sibel to another man and begins stalking the neighborhood where Fusun and her husband live, stealing cigarette butts, underwear, bits of jewelry, and keeping them in the apartment where they had first had sex—which, of course, becomes his “Museum of Innocence.”

Well, being the irredeemable romantic that I am, I love novels of romantic/erotic obsession. At the top of my list of favorite novels are Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. However, it seems to me that for such an obsessive novel to succeed, it has to be consummately written. It has to be miraculous in its style. For it is its style that “mesmerizes,” not its mere story, which can so easily devolve into the merely sentimental. I realize that quoting passages out of context, as I have above, can be misleading. But I just cannot take a man who talks the way Kemal does seriously. The language just does not create a world that makes the story transformative.

As I have argued many times in this blog, it is much easier to forgive careless writing in a novel than it is in a short story. Reading a novel, (Lord knows there is so much of it) one can certainly get caught up in the mere plot or an obsessive character and be “carried away” or “mesmerized,” as the reviewers in the LA Times and the Washington Post seem to have been, ignoring stylistic infelicities, easy sentimentalities, and phrases that could have used another rewrite.

Stylistically, structurally, and thematically, the fragment of Pamuk’s new novel that appeared recently in The New Yorker makes a poor short story. Stylistically, it is casual and careless. It includes long passages about the nature of Fusun’s “distant relation” to Kemal that are not relevant to the fragment. It focuses on a central event—the purchase and return of the ostensibly fake purse—that has not significance except to make possible the initial meeting of Kemal and Fusun—which could have been accomplished in many other ways with absolutely no loss of thematic significance.

I have no objection to writers publishing sections of upcoming novels in The New Yorker. It is a great way to “double dip” into the meager pot of money that writers must scrabble for. I just wish The New Yorker would not call them short stories. I just finished “listening to” Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves (As you might recall, I seldom “read” novels, but listen to them on my Ipod as I take my morning walk, accompanied by my aging dog, Shannon.) I had read many of the “stories” that make up Erdrich’s novel previously, mostly in The New Yorker, or as they appeared in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Awards Stories. But Erdrich’s novels are, by their very nature episodic, the parts of which are detachable. She seems to have written them as self-sufficient tales—creating a stylized rhythm and a magical-realist world that I often find self-indulgent, but that I can become “engrossed” in or “mesmerized” by.

The obsessive novels that I love so much—Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The French Lieutenant’s Woman—amaze me every time I read them. I cannot quite believe that ordinary humans wrote them. In my humble human opinion, Orhan Pamuk is just an ordinary human.

Poe: Baltimore comes to bury him; I come to praise him

Last week, in this bicentennial year of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore staged a second wake and funeral procession for the writer most responsible for recognizing the unique characteristics of the short story as an artistic form. The following is a quote from The Baltimore Sun:

"Edgar Allen Poe is finally getting the send-off he always deserved -- from a city that has spent decades claiming him as one of its own.

True, he's spent more than a century-and-a-half buried in the hallowed grounds surrounding Baltimore's Westminster Hall. It's also true that Baltimore isn't the only city celebrating Poe, in this bicentennial of his birth on Jan. 19, 1809. At least four other East Coast cities -- Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston -- have legitimate claims to Poe's legacy. The five cities have been squabbling for years, and have spent the past year exploiting their connections to the pioneering writer and early master of the horror and mystery genres.

But Baltimore has something that none of the rest of them have. And over the coming week, his fans here are going to flaunt it for all it's worth -- in ways the macabre Mr. Poe would doubtless appreciate.

"We have the body!" says Poe fan Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law. No one else can say that."
Which explains why Baltimore will be holding a second wake, funeral procession and funeral for the long-dead Poe, 160 years after the first.

On an early October day in 1849, Poe was found walking the streets of the city, bedraggled, incoherent, possibly beaten up, dressed in clothes that didn't belong to him. He died four days later at Washington College Hospital (later Church Home & Hospital, closed in 2000) and was buried at Westminster the next day, after a sparsely attended three-minute service. His death warranted a paltry four-sentence obituary in The Sun. "This is Baltimore's chance," says Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, where a Wednesday-afternoon-and-evening viewing of the famed poet and author's body will begin a five-day commemoration of both his mysterious death on Oct. 7, 1849, and the quiet, almost secretive funeral services that followed. "This is what I've been working for, to honor Poe and to say, 'Thanks.' It's the least I could do."

I did a book on Poe’s short fiction several years ago. He has always been a favorite of mine, much underestimated by many of my colleagues. I remember once when I was teaching a full semester course on Poe’s work, one of my fellow teachers said to me, “I don’t understand what you can find to say about Poe for a whole semester. I can barely fill up one class meeting on his work.”

In honor of Baltimore’s "reburial" of Poe, I come to praise him, not to bury him, by making a few comments on his contribution to the theory of the short story as a completely different narrative form than the novel.

It can be argued that a literary genre does not really exist as long as it is merely practiced. Because a genre concept is just that--a concept--it only truly comes into being when the rules and conventions which constitute it are articulated within the larger conceptual context of literature as a whole. Poe's rigor as a literary critic and genre theorist is thus as important for understanding his contribution to the short story form as is his skill as a short-story writer.

There is little doubt that Poe was, if nothing else, a thoroughgoing formalist, always more interested in the work's pattern, structure, conventions, and techniques than its reference to the external world or its social or psychological theme. The meaning of the work for Poe was its technique, so much so that in many of his stories he thematizes aesthetic and literary theory issues, making the creation and explication of unity the central thematic "truth" of the work.

Since there was no theory of the short prose tale when Poe was writing, he took theoretical ideas from those genres that did posses a critical history, such as drama and poetry, and applied them to the Gothic tale form which was popular during his time. The following generic elements are the most important ones Poe made use of: (1)the conventionalized and ritualized structure of the drama; (2)the metaphoric and self-contained unity of the lyric poem; (3)the technique of verisimilitude of the eighteenth-century novel; (4)the point of view and unifying tone of the eighteenth-century essay; and (5)the spiritual undercurrent and projective technique of the old romance and the Gothic story.

When you add to these the notion of prose assuming the spatial form of painting, which Poe suggested in the 1842 Hawthorne review, you have the basis for a new generic form. Poe's notion of short fiction as a picture is particularly important, for to see narrative as a painting is to see it as a design in space rather than a movement in time. Although the consequent implication of considering characters as static groupings in a composition means a loss of dramatic effect, this is compensated for by a gain in emphasis on overall pattern, which is equivalent to thematic design.

Poe’s 1842 Hawthorne review is of course the central document for understanding Poe's contribution to the theory of the short story, for it derives from his earlier discussions of the relationship between aesthetic unity and the concept of plot and looks forward to the ultimate implications of pattern and design in Eureka. The logic of the argument in the Hawthorne review is quite clear: What is most important in the literary work is unity; however, unity can only be achieved in a work which the reader can hold in the mind all at once. After the poem, traditionally the highest of high literary art, Poe says that the short tale has the most potential for being unified in the way the poem is. The effect of the tale is synonymous with its overall pattern or design, which is also synonymous with its theme or idea. Form and meaning emerge from the unity of the motifs of the story.

Poe carries his concern with unity of effect even further in "The Philosophy of Composition," for here he asserts the importance of considering the work backwards, that is, beginning with its end. Obviously, the possibility of beginning with the end is what distinguishes fiction from reality, what transforms reality into narrative discourse. A narrative, by its very nature, cannot be told until the events which it takes as its subject matter have already occurred. Therefore the "end" of the events, both in terms of their actual termination and in terms of the purpose to which the narrator binds them, is the beginning of the discourse.

It is hardly necessary to say that the only narrative which the reader ever gets is that which is already discourse, already ended as an event, so that there is nothing left for it but to move toward its end in an aesthetic, eventless way, i.e, via tone, metaphor, and all the other purely artistic conventions of fictional discourse.