Tuesday 31 January 2012

Strange Story #3: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Wheel of Love and Other Stories

Strange Story #3: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
 Collected In: The Wheel Of Love; High Lonesome (New & Selected Stories)


I'm not coming in that house after you... but you are coming out here. You know why?

One of the reasons I'm not entirely happy with 'weird' as a term for the kind of stories I want to discuss is that it seems to exclude any realism, anything non-supernatural; an exclusion I don't think is justified.


That said, I'm not entirely sure Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is necessarily a work of realism either. But unlike the previous stories discussed, it certainly could be read as such, and it comes from an author with pedigree as a writer of realism; of literature. Oates strikes me as one of the best short story writers out there, and her 'best of' High Lonesome (in which this story appears) is a largely realistic (although dark) affair. Some of her stories are closer to horror or crime than standard literature, but  Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? straddles the line between, I think.


It tells the stories of Connie, an American teenager, chaffing against the restrictions of being young. She goes out with her girlfriends to the mall, the drive-in... where there are boys watching. One time she is walking with one of the boys, when another - maybe older? - meets her gaze.


"Gonna get you, baby" he says.


Some days later this boy turns up in his car at her house (although Connie doesn't immediately recognise him). He says his name is 'Arnold Friend' and he and his companion want to take Connie for a ride; Arnold has decided Connie is the girl for him. By a combination of hipster talk and later, veiled threats, Arnold tries to persuade Connie to come with him.


She's at first somewhat flattered and intrigued, but gradually realises Arnold Friend may not be all he claims to be. He is like someone doing an impression of the boys Connie is interested in, and a bad one: he looks older than he claims, and the first sign of his anger is when Connie asks his age. He might be wearing a wig, and his use of teenage slang is slightly off and scattershot. Even weirder: 


One of his boats was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it.


Despite this accumulation of odd detail, there's nothing Arnold Friend says or does that necessarily tips the story over into the realms of the supernatural - Arnold could just be a perv-y middle-aged man. He may be planning to force Connie into doing something she doesn't want to, to rape her, to kill her even... but he's just a man. Surely.


Just a man, despite the odd things he knows. Despite the way he insists Connie must come to him. And despite the fact that she does.


Because Connie, in the end, does go for a ride with Arnold Friend, whoever he is. And whatever he has planned for her will happen, and whatever it is, Connie knows she has finally left her constricted teenager life behind her. 


She was hollow with what had been fear.


Because what is truly scary and weird about this story is that Connie does open the door and go to him, and whether he is the Devil, whether he is Death (a metaphor Jim Breslin uses in his discussion of the story here) or whether he's just a crazy sex fiend almost doesn't matter. He has come for his girl on her "day set aside for riding [with him]" and, like he said she would, she goes with him. It almost doesn't matter who he is, although it's hard not to wonder.


"Don't you know who I am?" he asks her, and we never get an answer. 


Next Week: Strange Stories #4. What's He Building? by Tom Waits

Monday 30 January 2012

A Romantic Comedy

I've a new piece of flash fiction published over at Luca Veste's Guilty Conscience - it's pretty dissimilar from the kind of thing I normally writer, in terms of tone, length, and genre. So I've been wondering what to do with it for awhile - Luca was someone I came across and Twitter and various places (he masterminded the Off The Record charity anthology which I've mentioned before) so I was very pleased when he liked it and wanted to publish it.on his site.

You can find it here: A Romantic Comedy. I'd be genuinely interested to know what people make of it.

(Don't worry, back to the weird scary stuff tomorrow with a new 'strange story'...)

Saturday 28 January 2012

Love Songs & The End Of The World...

Coming Soon To A Blog Near You!
I'm unlikely to be able to post about this tomorrow when it goes live, due to having to go to the office sometime between 2am and 6am tonight (don't ask) after attending a stag-do... but do check out the weekly post on 52 Songs, 52 Stories tomorrow, as the story Iain posts will be based on a song requested by me:


So check  52 Songs, 52 Stories tomorrow.

That is, if the world lasts that long. Forget all that Mayan calendar nonsense; The Abominable Gentlemen really know when the world will end, or at least be changed out of all human recognition.

Monday 23 January 2012

Strange Stories #2. House Taken Over by Julio Cortazar

Strange Story #2: House Taken Over
Author: Julio Cortazar
Collected In: Blow Up And Other Stories
Anthologised In: Black Water

...it happened so simply and without fuss

I first read this story in the superb anthology Black Water (ed. Alberto Manguel) which is tragically out of print. House Taken Over is the first story in the book and it is a great opener. One of those short stories that, upon finishing, you immediately turn back to the first page and re-read. And it is very short too, a compressed little marvel of story telling and omission.

The plot is deceptively simple, and as such I can't really talk about it without *Spoilers*. You have been warned. Anyway, the narrator and his sister Irene live in a large house in Latin America; they don't work - the house belongs to their family and one imagines they live on inherited wealth. They live a simple, some would say boring existence, and they both seem to have retreated somewhat from the outside world after vague failures in their personal lives. The first part of the story gives some details of the layout of the house and of the pair's mundane existence. Then the narrator hears some noises from one part of the house:

"...they've taken over the back part" he says simply to his sister. She responds "You're sure? [...] we'll have to live on this side"

This deceptively simple and low-key response is typical of the story as a whole. Who or what "they" are is never explained, nor how they can take over parts of the house. Why the siblings are so unsurprised is not clear, nor why their reaction simply involves accepting it and living in smaller and smaller parts of their house. Their only regret appears to be that when a section of the house is taken over, they cannot enter it to retrieve any belongings they may have left there. Eventually, the brother and sister are forced out of their house completely, after the narrator hears "them" on their own side. He locks the door and tosses the key down a drain, not wanting anyone else to inadvertently enter the house while is is "taken over".

What this all means is never clear; there have been many attempts to interpret the story in light of Cortazar's left-ist political beliefs, but while interesting none of these interpretations can be definitive when the central story is so ambiguous. It's true that the brother and sister's passivity, and their acquiescence to their house being taken over does seem to imply some of the fault is theirs, although it's never explicitly stated. And did they ever deserve or need such a big house anyway?

Irene and I got used to staying in that house ourselves, which was crazy.

Or are they in fact crazy? For there are psychological interpretations of this all, alongside political ones. But this multitude of possible meaning doesn't make the story less ambiguous, but more so. At the end of the day, it's a cracking ghost story, also.

This story made a big impact on me at the time, and encouraged me to buy the collection from which it came,   Blow Up And Other Stories, which contains many more great stories, both strange and realistic. This is the one that has always stayed with me though, and whenever I'm woken by a strange noise in my home in the middle of the night it's always in the back of my mind - maybe "they" are taking over my house too.


Next Week: Strange Stories #3. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

Sunday 22 January 2012

The Weird

"What's good about the majority of these stories is precisely that they leave you with many more questions than answers..." Michael Moorcock, Foreword to The Weird

Agreed!

Monday 16 January 2012

Strange Stories #1: What Water Reveals by Adam Golaski

Strange Story #1: What Water Revels
Author: Adam Golaski
Collected In: Worse Than Myself
Anthologised In: Strange Tales II

Montana's funny. There's a lot of underground out here.

Last week I introduced the Strange Stories series on this blog; although my definition was rather loose the key to it was ambiguity. This first story is from a collection that has ambiguity in spades -  Worse Than Myself  by Adam Golaski. I've not been so impressed by a collection by an author new to me for a long time.  It's serendipity that I was reading this book when the idea for Strange Stories came to me - I'd first heard about it on the great Supernatural Tales site months ago, and I was given it as a recent birthday present. Golaski takes risks, and some of the stories in this volume teeter on the edge of being too ambiguous, of being too hard to make any sense of. But it contains a significant number of tales where he doesn't put a foot wrong - The Animator's House; A String Of Lights; They Look Like Little Girls; The Man From The Peak... and What Water Reveals.

This story is probably one of the more straight forward in the collection. There is a definite plot, which largely follows a typical horror story construction: person goes somewhere they shouldn't; person flees but finds real life has gone a bit weird; things fall apart; person returns to bad place and finds out.... something. But the execution is brilliant.

The bad place in question is an island in a fast flowing river in Montana; the person in question is Nicolas, a recovering alcoholic; the time in question is April, a cruel month, and one where ice water melts and reveals things that were hidden. Nicolas's recovery from alcoholism is borderline, and although there's no explicit suggestion that he is a classic unreliable narrator, a lot of what he sees and does is coloured by his illness. During his first possible encounter with the supernatural, Nicolas quotes mantras from his AA group to get through it; afterwards he still does:

"I admit I'm powerless over alcohol and that my life has become unmanageable." He stops by a bench and cries. His mouth tastes as if full of gin.

Golaski presents a realistic (and poignant) story of someone recovering from alcoholism here, and what makes the story work, I think, is the ambiguity of how that alcoholism relates to the supernatural element. The tale seems to be a metaphor for the lack of control in Nicolas's life, but there's an ambiguity to the symbolism throughout the story: surely water - clear pure river water at that - is the antithesis to alcohol? But it is quite literally water that undermines Nicolas's life after his encounter on the island - a hole opens up in his cement floor, behind the refrigerator, and gradually gets bigger. It's deep, and the landlord can hear things moving around. Nicolas speculates that there is a flooded sub-basement down there. He also believes that something - a man? - has come out of the hole and into his home. Golaski doesn't give us the easy option of believing that Nicolas is drunk when he thinks this - he hasn't started drinking again, although he desperately wants to. By this stage the reader is almost willing him to drink as well - giving up certainly doesn't seem to have stabilised his life. He flees his flat:

Nicolas thinks, "Where do I go?" and thinks "There are three unopened bottles of vodka in a dumpster behind this building [he dumped them there earlier]. He steps into the rain...

It keeps raining, and the river water rises. Nicolas starts to notices the strange holes in other places in his home town. Eventually he returns to the island where his life, nominally back in his control after quitting the booze, slipped out of his grasp again. He buys a bottle of gin before he does so, and clutches it like a safety blanket around the island. And then.... well, you'll have to read it to find out.

This is a classic weird tale, or strange story, or messed up horror story, or whatever you want to call it. Moving, scary, written in flawless prose and endlessly re-readable to try and understand it's depths.

Next Week: Strange Stories #2. House Taken Over by Julio Cortazar.

Tuesday 10 January 2012

Penny Dreadnought Volume 2: Descartes' Demon

From the malignant minds of the Abominable Gentlemen come fearful tales of paralyzing epistemic doubt. What do you do when you turn a corner and you find yourself where you hadn't intended to go, and you turn back and find that what's behind you isn't where you came from? When nothing makes sense, do you doubt your own sanity, or the world’s?

You’ll find no easy answers within the following tales:

“Falling Over” by James Everington
“All the Pretty Yellow Flowers” by Aaron Polson
“Ice Age” by Iain Rowan
“A Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet” by Alan Ryker

Penny Dreadnought: Descartes' Demon is approximately 23,000 words. Available from Amazon (US | UK), B&N, and Smashwords.



My story, Falling Over, is a brand new tale not available anywhere else. You lucky things. 

Monday 9 January 2012

Strange Stories #0: An Introduction

Introducing a new weekly(ish) column... 'Strange Stories'.

When I released The Other Room I called it a collection of 'weird fiction' rather than horror stories. Weird fiction is a term that was first used with reference to fiction by the likes of Lovecraft and Machen, and has been used intermittently by writers ever since. It's a term which seems to have come into vogue again, especially with the publication of The Weird, a vast (and I do mean vast) new anthology which you do need to get. You do.

In a similar vein, Robert Aickman called his fiction 'strange stories' meaning much the same thing, I think - horror fiction that wasn't quite horror, ghost stories that didn't necessarily feature ghosts - weird, odd, strange, ghostly, uncanny fiction.

In this weekly feature I plan to talk about some of my favourite 'strange stories' (I also plan to open up the slot for some guest posts). Each post will be about a single story, whether short story, novella, or novel length (although a lot of the best of this kind of fiction has been done in the short story form).

But what distinguishes strange stories, or weird fiction, from normal tales of horror?

Well, for certain it's a sprawling and largely undefined tradition of writing, but one I feel very much a part of. I don't think it has rigid boundaries or borders; some authors write almost nothing but 'strange stories' and some more traditional horror or literary writers occasionally wander into its strange territory, and report back on what they find.

One of the key things that distinguishes this kind of writing, for me, is ambiguity (a topic I recently touched upon in a guest post on the Greyhart Press site). Maybe it's perverse to try and define 'ambiguity' to any great degree, but the kind of things I mean are:


  • Ambiguity of perception - how much of the story is real (in the context of the story) and how much is a product of the central character's distorted, confused perception? 
  • Ambiguity of events - how certain can the reader be exactly what has happened?
  • Ambiguity of significance - how certain can the reader be of what the things that have happened mean? Both to the characters themselves, and symbolically?
  • Ambiguity of omission - do important details or emotional responses seem lacking from the story, stopping the reader make full sense of it?
  • Ambiguity of reality - does the story imply in some way that we can't trust our senses, and reality may be slightly or completely different to how we perceive it?
I'm sure there's more, and I'm sure I'll feature stories that don't seem to meet the above criteria, but the literary weirdness or strangeness I'm after is more a feeling than anything. I'll certainly aim to feature stories by writers such as Julio Cortazar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, T.E.D. Klein, and Algernon Blackwood. But first...


Next Week: Strange Stories #1. What Water Reveals by Adam Golaski


Coming soon...! Volume Two of Penny Dreadnought.


Friday 6 January 2012

A nice start to 2012 - The Other Room has featured in the 2011 Red Adept Reviews Indie Awards short story category alongside three other collections. (Congratulations to the others, and those in the other categories too.)

You can read the original Red Adept review of The Other Room here.

"The horror angle in the stories is almost always a metaphor for other things – loneliness, fear, isolation, regret... I enjoyed this collection so very much"

Thursday 5 January 2012

Ghostly Stories at Greyhart Press

Hey all,

I've a guest blog post up over at Greyhart Press today - it's called Ghostly Stories and it is about horror fiction, The Turn Of The Screw, and guessing the age of ladies. If you read it, I'd love to know what you think of it.

Also stop by Iain Rowan's new blog 52 Songs, 52 Stories - the crazy cat is writing a story a week based on a different song, and posting both the story and the tune. As well as being a great writer he also has good taste in music, having brought my attention to such brilliance as this:


So this promises to be a great site. Rumour has it he's also taking requests, so feel free to send him something especially challenging, such as one of the songs from the Sigur Ros album ( ).


Tuesday 3 January 2012

Boring Writing Post

I've just finished a new story called The Time Of Their Lives. I started this one on the 28th June 2010. It's almost exactly nine thousand words long.

Oh no, some of you might be thinking, at that pace I'm going to have to wait years for the sequel to The Other Room! (I hope at least some of you are thinking something along those lines anyway...)

But I haven't actually been working on a solitary 9k story for nearly 18 months. I tend to have multiple stories on the go simultaneously, all at different stages of completion. Most I write in three drafts:

1. Handwritten draft where everything is a frantic, illegible scribble, with lots of crossings out, notes to myself, and misspellings. Character's names may often change mid-story at this point, and I'll get really basic things wrong in the rush like there/their/they're. My first drafts look something like this:


2. Second handwritten draft. Here I'll try and sort any basic structural plot problems, and rearrange, add or delete whole scenes or characters. I think there's something to be said for handwriting stories, even in this electronic age. There's an old adage for writers which says "kill your darlings". Don't let your oh so pretty sentences survive just because they are pretty. And for me that's a lot easier to do when early drafts are handwritten because it guarantees I'll have to physical write/type each and every sentence (and every word in every sentence) multiple times. Which helps me spot opportunities to quash something pretty.

3. Word processor draft. This can be quite quick, or another painful flailing around if the language of the story is still all wrong. I like to have fixed anything structural before I get to this stage though.

So at any given point I'll have multiple stories at various different stages in the above sequence, and I like to take a break from a story between drafts, and work on a different one. So now The Time Of Their Lives is finished, I might go back to a story called The Man In Blue Boots (at draft 2.) or one with the working title(s) Flies, Eggs, or No Insects At Sea (at draft 1. - titles are definitely things I don't have sorted until 2. at the earliest. I hate titles).

God knows if any other writers do anything remotely similar. 

This year though I want to get some stories written from start to finish in a lot quicker manner, to mess with my approach a bit. Maybe I've become too comfortable in my routine, like a man who always has sausages on a Tuesday. I want to write some stories for markets with a set theme, with a set word count, to a set deadline. I think this will be good for my sense of writing discipline. Penny Dreadnought will help with this some, as will some other projects I have my eye on. I may fail, but even those failures will help me learn about the contours of my talent, such as it is. 

That's the plan today, anyway. Wish me luck.

(By the way if you think 18 months was a long time for The Time Of Their Lives that's nothing - the final draft of The Shelter was completed 16 years after I first set pen to paper! I told you I might need some writing discipline...)