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Book review: The Best of Slate

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The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology edited by David Plotz, introduction by Jacob Weisberg, foreword by Michael Kinsley. New York: Atlas Books, 2006. 304 pages.

First, I should note that I have no idea why I bought The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology. I didn’t know what Slate was, although I recently discovered that I joined the site in January 2008. I suspect I acquired the book because I’m fond of anthologies — usually collections of good or sometimes great stories built around a theme, a one-stop shop. In short,without knowing what Slate is, I wanted to read the best of its first decade.

As I learned from Michael Kinsley’s foreword, Slate began at Microsoft as an online magazine (currently owned by the Washington Post). I had in my hands a print tribute to an online publication — a way to package and sell tangible copies of electronically published words. More simply put, The Best of Slate is an opportunity to cash in on the site’s popularity, to sell books, and to get book buyers to the site.

Long-time fans of Slate may appreciate seeing articles they remember in print and having a piece of a favorite Web site in their hands. As a relative newcomer, though, I am disappointed if the articles selected by editor David Plotz truly are the best work Slate has produced in 10 years.

The first article, “Airline English” by Cullen Murphy, enlightens the reader with the obvious; airline terms such as “craft,” “crew,” “captain,” “first officer,” “deck,” “cabin,” “bulkhead,” and “hold” are derived from long-established shipping industry lingo (oddly, “pilot” didn’t make the list). If there is anyone left who hasn’t realized this, I’d be amazed. “Watching Couples Go By,” in which we discover that men like women for physical comfort and conversation and to fill his need to be needed is another space filler, but was undoubtedly included in the collection to honor its author Herbert Stein, who passed away.

I found some common ground if not insight in Seth Stevenson’s “Extroverted Like Me”; at least I recognized the emotionally numbing effects of antidepressants and the disturbing manifestations of withdrawal. Another personal essay, “Daddy Gets His Brain Back” by Michael Lewis, humorously recounts the disorientation the author feels after a head injury (“I remember that if I don’t hand in my book in six weeks, I’m [expletive]”), but ends on a flat note. “The Breakfast Table” features biting repartee between husband Timothy Noah and wife Marjorie Williams about the trivial (the posterior of Jennifer Lopez) and serious (the circumvention of Clinton’s attorney-client privilege and the social taboos around discussing racism, which is also addressed in “Racist Like Me” by Debra Dickerson).

A handful of articles provide useful background, such as “The Pledge of Allegiance” by David Greenberg, and relevant (if not original) commentary (“Fifty/Fifty Forever” by Mickey Kaus). From “What Did Bush Know?” (Fred Kaplan), we learn how 93 pages of intelligence information, caveats, and footnotes were distilled into only one page for the president’s benefit, while “The Misunderestimated Man” (Jacob Weisberg) hints at the president’s personal flaws that made this shortcut necessary. In “Unfairenheit 9/11,” Christopher Hitchens rants about Michael Moore rather than his movie, disingenuously using the same dodgy tactics of which he accuses Moore.

As a whole, The Best of Slate is disappointing. For example, the introduction to 2001 notes that, “Slate produced some of its smartest, and most moving, work in the days and months after the Sept. 11 attacks.” Yet the only piece about the attacks, “An Unlikely Hero” by Rebecca Liss, appears (toward the end of the 2002 chapter), and it is neither smart nor particularly moving despite the subject. Liss turns what could have been a compelling account of a painstaking rescue into a flat, spare story short on details or interest and focused more on why the media missed out on hero Dave Karnes (Liss reasons that, because Karnes wasn’t a police officer or firefighter, those organizations didn’t “make room” for him). When the subjects are solid, the writing is too often pedestrian.

If articles like the self-serving “Full Disclosure” by Henry Blodgett or “Not Dead at All” by Harriet McBride Johnson, who believes that liquid replacement of most of a functioning brain indicates a mere “disability,” represent The Best of Slate, I’d be afraid to see its worst. It’s like much of what appears on the Internet — it’s adequate as a time waster during, say, lunch, but not worth keeping or remembering.

18 May 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Portable Dorothy Parker

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The Portable Dorothy Parker with an introduction by Marion Meade. New York: The Penguin Group, 2006. 656 pages.

As I read The Portable Dorothy Parker, I thought of the short stories of John Cheever. Although many of their stories are set in about the same boozy time period, Cheever’s focus is often the suburban family man who has everything the successful American male should — and who still finds that life is elusive, even wanting and empty. Parker’s tales are primarily of the urban woman, some rich, some poor, rarely satisfied, never happy. In some ways, Cheever’s man and Parker’s woman live in the same void, although not at the same comfort level.

In Parker’s world, as in Cheever’s, the sexes seem to be at cross purposes, unable to communicate openly and hoping to hint their way to understanding. When the girl in “The Sexes” says, “There isn’t a thing on earth the matter. I don’t know what you mean,” the young man, along with the reader, must be able to guess at the nature of the conversation that is about to follow and its inevitable outcome — including the final, “I was not sore! What on earth made you think I was?” Parker’s keen ear and sense of timing make even the dated dialogue and references relevant today.

“Lady with a Lamp” requires only monologue to reveal the actions, sufferings, and feelings of the silent Mona, whose garrulous friend observes her every move and expression and yet is oblivious to the depth of Mona’s pain.

In many stories, Parker relies on monologue and dialogue to reveal the truth underneath the words, which mean nothing. In “Arrangement in Black and White,” the more the “woman with pink velvet poppies” asserts her colorblindness, the deeper her racism is revealed to be. She can say sincerely both, “You know, so many colored people, you give them an inch, and they walk all over you,” followed by, “I haven’t any feelings at all because he’s a colored man” without seeing any hypocrisy.

For “Big Blonde,” perhaps Parker’s best-known story, she uses a narrative approach. Like Hazel Morse, the reader becomes lost in an ill-defined haze of men and alcohol. “She was always pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go” sums up Hazel’s meaningless relationships and life. Parker captures the American obsession with the show of happiness and the burying of genuine emotions in the constant exhortations to “slip us a little smile” — an effort that requires alcohol to sustain. Even the maid responds to Hazel’s suicide attempt with, “You cheer up, now.”

In some ways, the title character of “Mr. Durant” evokes Cheever. An insignificant and complaisant business- and family man leads a double life for which he pays no consequences. Women are to be used until they threaten the security and comfort of his position, yet his actions toward the stray dog his children find reveal that he sees himself as the victim. His “peace with the world” is more important than anything, including people.

Parker is a literal writer who seems to avoid the type of symbolism that makes Cheever’s “The Swimmer” so powerful. This lack of literary and psychological stretching may have kept her from achieving her dream — writing a novel, which she believed was necessary for a writer to be taken seriously by both the literary establishment and the reading public. Her failure did not prevent her from being a harsh critic, and The Portable Dorothy Parker includes rather flippant dismissals of novels by Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, and others.

Parker despises whimsy and fantasy, including the works of J. M. (“Never-Grow-Up”) Barrie and A. A. Milne (“And it is that word, ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up”). One wonders what she thought of the more adult efforts of her British contemporary, J. R. R. Tolkien.

If Parker cannot say anything positive about another writer’s work, however, she sarcastically praises the book itself. “. . . it is brought out by the Grove Press in a most pleasing form — a small book with excellent print and paper, and hard covers, though not of cloth.”

Parker’s poetry reflects her no-nonsense, stark view of love and life (and death); there’s little romanticism here. “Unfortunate Coincidence” (“Lady, make a note of this:/One of you is lying”) is compact blend of eroticism and cynicism; “Faute de Mieux” reveals a rare wistfulness (“I never said they feed my heart”); and “Fighting Words” (“But say my verses do not scan,/And I get me another man!”) shows what she believes her priorities to be, although Enough Rope‘s many suicidal and death-wish poems lead the reader to another conclusion. While Parker often stretches a rhyme, rhythm, or literary device to the breaking point, her verse is often painfully personal and evocative.

Already hefty, Dorothy Parker is made less portable by the addition of “A Dorothy Parker Sampler,” random ephemera that includes letters. Most of these are not highlights of the Parker canon and could have been left out. The one exception is a long letter to Robert Benchley, written from Switzerland. Parker reveals heartfelt compassion for her friends and their sick children as well as her own anguish over a dead love affair (“I honestly don’t know where John leaves off and I begin.”). It’s a rare glimpse into Parker’s heart that isn’t obscured by sarcasm and wit.

Parker’s straightforward, surface style can detract from the darkness of her subject matter. As Marion Meade notes, Parker had a “capacity for listening and watching with amazing clarity.” If only Parker had been willing to dig a little deeper, she might be remembered as a successful novelist rather than as a wit — a label she despised.

16 March 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Literary Lover: Great Contemporary Stories of Passion and Romance

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The Literary Lover: Great Contemporary Stories of Passion and Romance. Edited and with an introduction by Larry Dark. New York: Penguin Books USA, 1994. 368 pages. ISBN 0140171649.

From the young to the old, the sanctioned to the illicit, the mundane to the erotic, and the bored to the ecstatic, editor Larry Dark traverses the sometimes perilous territory of love, lust, and marriage in this collection of twentieth-century stories.

Dark deliberately progresses from the young to the middle-aged to the elderly. He begins with “Faces of Madness” by Rachel Ingalls, a tragic story of teenage love and adult lives destroyed by parents who are more concerned for their money and reputations than for their own children. Left to themselves and in their simplicity, William and Jean discover more about love than the adults around them have ever understood. When they are betrayed by those who claim to love them, they separately retreat into madness, wounded irrevocably.

While not as disturbing as “Faces of Madness,” Steven Millhauser’s “The Sledding Party” is haunting in its own way. Most of us will recognize Catherine’s adolescent perturbation and discontent as she struggles with her friend’s half-understood declaration of love. Millhauser captures the mixed, confused emotions of the girl on the cusp of womanhood — fear, longing, alienation, desire to belong, and the pull between the things of childhood and those of adulthood. During the course of one crisp winter’s night, a subtle transformation takes place that leaves Catherine’s future to the reader’s imagination.

At the other end of the spectrum is the calculating woman whose “Instruments of Seduction” (Norman Rush) include not only objects but a keen sense of how to manipulate her men earned through decades of practice. In “The Habit of Loving,” Doris Lessing shows how even an older man with a lifetime of experience can mistake basic sympathies for love in his quest for something wonderful and greater than himself. “Letter to the Lady of the House” by Richard Bausch outlines what can seem to be the natural course of a long marriage. “People start out with such high hopes,” the letter writer’s aunt tells him after revealing that “whatever she had once loved in [her husband] she had stopped loving, and for many, many years before he died, she’d felt only suffocation . . . only irritation and anxiety when he spoke.” The letter writer begins his epistle after “another one of those long, silent evenings after an argument . . . We had been bickering all day . . .” but asserts that, “. . . whatever our complications, we <i>have</i> managed to be in love over time.” He concludes, “And if I could, I would do it all again, Marie. All of it, even the sorrow. My sweet, my dear adversary. For everything that I remember.”

Some stories, such as “Morning” by Joyce Carol Oates, seem strangely uninteresting given the topic. Caught between her safe, predictable husband and her married lover, Lydia makes the obvious choice, which somehow works out — at least for the near term, with a hint of what is to come.

As a contemporary tale from 1988, “Graduation” by Andre Dubus is dated. Even with its deep South setting, the story’s focus on virginity, the effects of its loss on a 17-year-old girl, and the lie she tells her future husband seem overstated. “Safe Houses” by Nadine Gordimer is dated by its historical context, but is nonetheless a compelling story of a political enemy whose “safe house” is that of a woman too rich, insulated, and bored to realize or guess at his identity or his nature. Theirs is the relationship of people who do not want to change their lives, but who seek opportunity and the passion of the moment. “Yet of course he had feeling for her — hadn’t he just made love to her, and she to him, as she did so generously — he should not let himself dismiss the relative sufferings of people like her as entirely trivial because it was on behalf of nothing larger than themselves.”

“Innocence” by Harold Brodkey, 34 tedious pages of the student-narrator’s detailed analysis of his attempts to bring his girlfriend to climax, does not improve with a second reading (I had read it before in another anthology). By contrast, the gem of this collection is William Kotzwinkle’s beautiful, moving, sizzling “Jewel of the Moon.” The older bridegroom of the arranged marriage begins as his wife’s slave and, through months of delaying and building up to the consummation, completely masters her and her desires to their mutual ecstasy. “Jewel of the Moon” is both loving and highly erotic, a combination that is rare in this anthology.

The Literary Lover has its moments, but there are surprisingly few insights into relationships. Even John Updike’s “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer,” while more original and interesting than the Oates story with a similar theme, falls short, as does “Houses” by David Leavitt, in which a man is torn between life with his wife and the emotional home and future he has imagined for himself and his male lover. By the time I came to the end of The Literary Lover, I was afraid that perhaps all that can be said about love in its many forms has been and that there is nothing left. I hope I am wrong.

27 January 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Collected Stories by Paul Theroux

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The Collected Stories by Paul Theroux. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998. 660 pages. ISBN 0140274944. Recommended.

From troubled marriages (“World’s End,” “You Make Me Mad”) and families (“After the War”), from Africa to Malaysia to London, The Collected Stories by Paul Theroux covers a lot of physical, political, social, and emotional territory. Whether he is writing about the past, present, or future (“Warm Dogs”) or as the first-person or omniscient narrator, Theroux describes places, people, and events colorfully yet coolly, as though as a writer he is not part of the world or life portrayed.

Parts I, II, and III are mostly discrete, unrelated stories covering a wide range of places, people, and themes. Unhappy marriages and relationships, also found in Parts IV and V, are the topic of many Theroux stories. “World’s End” begins with, “Robarge was a happy man . . .” and ends with, “. . . he knew now they were all lost,” with a subtle revelation of disloyalty and the realization of distrust in between. In “A Political Romance,” love and life come full circle; bloom, discontent and stagnation (“. . . in thirty years he would be — this hurt him — the same man, if not a paler version”), and renewal (“Lepska, I love you”). “What Have You Done to Our Leo?” uncovers a woman’s perfidy and a man’s naivete, assumptions, and developing understanding (“Her laughter was coarse, that stranger’s laugh that fitted the new image that Leo had of her.”). A rarity in fiction, the older couple of “You Make Me Mad” knows each other too well, yet clearly not well enough. “Sinning with Annie” takes a quirky look at an arranged marriage between two children from the perspective of the adult, prudishly westernized husband. “Words Are Deeds” starts with what appears to be a potentially exciting and risky erotic adventure that resolves quickly into bitter reality (“I hate that tie”).

Set in the recent past, “The Imperial Icehouse” is an agonizing story about time that evokes its slow movement along with its decisive moments. “The sounds of the horses chewing, the dripping of the wagon in the heat; it was regular, like time leaking away” ties the preceding procession of the melting ice to the denouement, when “Mr. Hand raised his whip and rushed at John Paul . . . The ice was not larger than a man, and bleeding in the same way.” In “After the War,” the teenaged stranger masters the master of the house, opening the door for the man’s unhappy family; ” . . . the child . . . without warning arched his back in instinctive struggle and tried to get free of the hard arms which held him” — perhaps an allegory for what happened to colonial nations after the war. In the future of “Warm Dogs,” a couple finds that is the children who possess them.

The stories in Parts IV and V are narrated by a fictional career Foreign Service officer who serves in Ayer Hitam, a backwater Malaysian village, and then London. A memorable exception is “Fury,” the story of an expatriate American woman in which the narrator does not appear until after the shocking if not surprising climax.

These stories reveal Theroux’s skill as a storyteller. They are recounted so vividly and objectively that they seem to be memoir, not fiction. The reader feels both the narrator’s fascination and boredom with his surroundings and acquaintances and senses his emotional detachment and occasional rebelliousness. In particular, small and remote as it is, Ayer Hitam becomes a bottomless well of characters and stories, from the somewhat senile Sultan, the proud Japanese businessman who turns hatred to his advantage, the shaman who commands the tiger, and the anthropologist who gets too close to her subject to the feverish American who sees the ghosts of a local man’s relatives. The narrator indulges in a few stories about his own lovers, but these are among the weakest tales. In these stories, Theroux is at his best when the voice he uses is most detached from the characters and their stories and at his weakest when his narrator loses his detachment by associating himself too closely with the group. For example, when he writes, “We rather disliked children; we had none of our own,” his narrator loses the outsider status that gives these stories their believability, interest, and even poignancy. At times, however, this objective perspective is too observational and cold, for example, “She saw me and sat forward to let me kiss her, and she lingered a fraction as if posing a question with that pressure.” The narrator’s point of view is that of a raconteur rather than that of the person experiencing people and events; he writes about what he observed, not about what he felt or feels. Even during his erotic encounters, the narrator is ever the Foreign Service official, ready to observe and report.

As with any short story anthology, some of The Collected Stories are haunting and memorable, while others are almost instantly forgettable. Generally, I prefer the earlier stories to Diplomatic Relations (i): The Consul’s File and Diplomatic Relations (ii): The London Embassy because they are less constrained, more inventive, and yet more real. While not a great short story writer like John Cheever, Paul Theroux is certainly a master storyteller who conceives stories worth telling.

5 January 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe {and Other Stories of Women and Fatness}

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The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe {and Other Stories of Women and Fatness} edited by Susan Koppelman. Foreword by Alix Kates Shulman. Recommended.

In this anthology about “women and fatness,” fat women eat, exercise, laugh, cry, love, give birth, and are abused and exploited. In fact, they experience the joys and tribulations of women everywhere, but what defines them, or sets them apart, is their body size.

The American interest in fitness seems to have begun in the late 1800s, when urban sophisticate May Welland of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence was compared to the hunt goddess Diana and noted for her slimness and athleticism. By the 1920s, thinness was firmly established as the fashion, with characters such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker (The Great Gatsby) representing the slender, athletic, almost boyish ideal. In Koppelman’s collection, Octavia Thanet’s “The Stout Miss Hopkins’s Bicycle” (1897) is an early example of how women suffered socially for their weight and how they began trying to manage it through exercise — an unthinkable notion for ladies of previous generations. One hundred years later, 1997’s “The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe” (Hollis Seamon) also pairs two woman who to the world appear to have eating disorders — Suzanne Brown, who prefers the fullness of flesh, and Theresa, a teenager with apparent anorexia.

Some stories, like “Fat” (Grace Sartwell Mason) play purposely to the popular stereotype. Mrs. Payton Tierney substitutes a constant supply of rich foods for the love that no longer exists between her and her husband. Food is the problem and the solution as “The prison of her flesh received her” and the story ends in a surprisingly predictable way.

Stories like “Good-Bye, Old Laura” (Lucile Vaughan Payne) and “Skanks” (Rennie Sparks) capture the respective times and experiences of their teenage protagonists. Laura and Janine are complex characters whose peers influence their feelings about themselves and their bodies, with disturbing results for both. “The Hershey Bar Queen” (Elena Diaz Bjorkquist) is a teenage revenge fantasy, although the protagonist’s food obsession and child-like simplicity and gullibility make the supernatural ending disappointingly ineffective.

If Mrs. Tierney, with her bonbons and distaste for exertion, is the stereotypical fat woman, the husbands in “The Feeder” (Maria Bruno) are alpha males whose wives fight back by taking control of their food, their bodies, and their weights — the thin wife consciously, the fat one less so. This story stands out for the disturbing image of a trapped, dying bird, wings broken, that is not worth saving to the insensitive husband.

“Perfectly Normal” (Lesléa Newman) is about the fat hatred and other prejudices of an anorexic wife. After making her promise not to get fat like her active, happy, lesbian sister, her husband sends her to a sanitarium before she wastes away even more. The combination of the wife’s first-person perspective and the extremities of her opinions (“The least she [sister] could do was rip out the labels [of her clothing] so she would not have to be embarrassed” [about her size]) puts this story at the border of two-dimensional for the sake of making a point.

That is part of the problem with any focused collection like this; the focus on food, fat, and fat attitudes casts a blinding glare on the issues rather than truly illuminating them. It’s interesting to see attitudes over the past 100 or so years, but questions arise, such as: How do those attitudes compare to those toward fat men, or to those who are different physically in other ways? If, as is claimed, only 10 percent prefer a fat partner to a normal-sized one, can the bias against fat be so definitively said to be social and cultural? Are those influences that widespread and strong? If the claim is true, are fat women really powerful erotic symbols to any but a few? It’s mentioned that Lillian Russell, at more than 200 pounds, was a sex symbol of her time — but is that because she was fat or despite the fact she became fat with age?

In her defensiveness about fat, Koppelman writes, “There is nothing in women’s fiction to affirm the calamitous claims of health risks made by the bariatricians, the exercise gurus, and the weight reduction mavens.” Koppelman cannot be so single-minded as to confuse what appears in fiction with what happens in reality. Obesity, like other extremes, not only comes with serious health risks (for example, diabetes and all its complications), but also can limit the fat person’s activities in ways that have nothing to do with societal bias (for example, I am too heavy for horseback riding, which I would love to be able to do). Koppelman’s logic seems to be that, until a woman writes fiction about obesity-induced illnesses, they are not an issue for women.

The big question here is, “What does fat mean?” To the 5’7″ patient in “Perfectly Normal,” it means weighing more than 100–115 pounds. “The Hershey Bar Queen” weighs more than 400 pounds, as must the sideshow attractions in “Noblesse” (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) and “Even as You and I” (Fannie Hurst). Suzanne LaFleshe weighs a little over 200. It’s an important question because an active, confident, 200-pound woman, while fat by medical and social standards, may fall within the realm of normal deviation, while a girl like “The Hershey Bar Queen,” enormous and obsessed with food, is a clear case of pathology. People fear pathology, whether it’s morbid obesity, autism, or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe {and Other Stories of Women and Fatness} is hampered by the restrictions and biases of its focus. A few stories stand out, but many are slices of life that lack depth, context, and subtlety. Another issue is that the book copy was not proofread; there are numerous typographical errors throughout, sometimes several on a page, so that the trustworthiness of the texts is in doubt — an unfortunate problem in a work produced by an academic professional like Koppelman. Still, it’s worth reading for the handful of gems.

11 November 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre

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The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. Highly recommended.

With the shift from agriculture to industry and advancements in technology and scientific understanding, the 19th century was one of rapid change. This collection of horror stories, anchored by John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” reflects the popular tastes and issues of the the times.

A sense of vice, moral ambiguity, and lawlessness pervades many of the stories. Polidori’s vampyre does not simply drain blood and life in the literal sense; he tempts the innocent, further corrupts those who are debauched, and supports the sinner financially whenever he can. He is known for his social and emotional vampirism because even the most rational members of mainstream society can witness these evident depravities.

Criminals, living and supernatural, appear in stories such as “Sir Guy Eveling’s Dream,” “Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman,” “The Victim,” and “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess.” A contemporary fascination with madness manifests itself in “Monos and Daimonos,” “The Red Man,” “The Curse,” and “The Bride of Lindorf.” The interest in medicine and medical research, exploited in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, appear here in “The Victim,” “Post-Mortem Recollections of a Medical Lecturer,” and, less successfully, “Some Terrible Letters from Scotland.” “Life in Death” touches upon one of Frankenstein‘s themes: man’s imperfect and arrogant attempts to mimic or best God and nature.

The most horrifying of these stories rely strongly on either realism or fantasy. “Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman,” based on an actual event, takes the reader into the inner circle of a criminal brotherhood for whom brutality mocks and replaces morality and spirituality. William Carleton’s description of the group’s meeting and the atrocities it subsequently commits resonates of a satanic mass and hell itself, complete with a ring of fire. In “The Victim,” coincidences are stretched, but the murder of people for medical research specimens was headline news fresh in the minds of readers.

On the other side, “Monos and Daimonos” is written in a dark fairy-tale style, narrated by a giant rejected by society, yet unable to shake his sociable tormentor. The supernatural tale of “The Master of Logan” is wonderfully spun, with the forces of good and evil engaging in near-comic repartee and an exchange of witty compliments before the unmasking. “The Red Man” may be the most disturbing of the tales, as it blends recent history (the French Revolution) with medieval horrors, and tortures.

Some stories, like “The Bride of Lindorf” and “Passages in the Secret History of an Irish Countess,” are weak because the short story format seems to rush and constrain the narrative. The novel form of Uncle Silas allowed LeFanu to explore themes such as murder, religion, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexuality, and incest while developing a greater sense of the Gothic mystery, atmosphere, and shadows surrounding the title character and the terror of the heroine’s helpless situation. For example, the shady French maid of “Countess” is replaced in the novel by the sadistic and depraved Madame de la Rougierre, a memorable accomplice.

The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre is a fascinating and varied collection of stories published in the UK in the early 1800s. For today’s reader, the language and style may present an obstacle to enjoyment and even understanding. To me, however, the writing creates a sense of time and place that enhances the richness and even the timelessness of these tales, best read late at night by candlelight.

26 August 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories

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100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg. Recommended.

Like other tales, ghost stories set a tone that may be terrifying, mournful, moralistic, thought provoking, whimsical, or even humorous. In this anthology, ghosts appear for a variety of reasons. In “Across the Moors” by William Fryer Harvey, the anonymous ghost seems to wish only to tell someone about the experience that “served as the turning point in my life.” Predictably, others seek revenge, even against the descendants of those who harmed them. In many stories, the presence returns because it is not at peace in some way or it wishes to warn the living. A handful of ghosts relive their deaths, so to speak. A few ghosts are not even aware that they are dead. Another twist features inexorable, repeating events of a ghastly nature instead of the beings themselves.

Interestingly, ghosts rarely transcend their humanity. Unlike Jacob Marley, whose vision beyond the grave is clearly greater than his living one was and who warns Ebenezer Scrooge against making the same errors he did, these ghosts remain true to their human nature and outlook. The family of “The House of Shadows” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman continues to live as they always have, unchanged. In “How He Left the Hotel” by Louisa Baldwin, a dead man walks whose habits and paths are no different from those he followed when he was alive. Vicious killers become vicious ghosts; malicious people become malicious ghosts, like the engineer of “The Light Was Green” by John Rawson Speer. “A Grammatical Ghost” (Elia W. Peattie) is as fastidious in the afterlife as she was in life. Few if any of these spirits behave any differently than we expect them to, given what we are told and can see of their lives and values. There are few surprises here.

I bought 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories edited by Al Sarrantonio and Martin H. Greenberg and 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories at the same time because they seemed to make natural companions for long winter nights. I read the second almost a year after reading the first and found it disappointing in comparison.

Perhaps it is their very nature that makes ghost stories less effective than tales of horror. Ghosts are personal, connected in some way to the specific people and places that they haunt. I have nothing to fear from Jacob Marley or from any of the motley crew that roams the pages of this collection. I have killed no one, cheated on no one, and sent no one to the gallows, nor do my home or work place seem to attract spirits. I do not collect morbid objects like “Mordecai’s Pipe” (A. V. Milyer). Some of the ghosts’ actions seem horrifying, but I felt detached from them, perhaps because they are fictional ghosts acting out against fictional people in ways that are not entirely unexpected.

In comparison, horror stories, like those of Poe, rely on the darkness of the mind and its imaginative ability — how terrifying can the soul’s darkness be? It is difficult to translate that sense to ghost stories, which, ironically, seem more tangible. Horror can extend as far as the mind can, but in the end ghosts are merely dead people — mostly predictable dead people. Without a spectacular ending twist, part of the suspense and the element of the unknown is lost.

Still, although there are more misses and fewer hits here than in the horror anthology, this is an entertaining book, worth curling up with on a dark and stormy night.

13 January 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories

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100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories edited by Al Sarrantonio and Martin H. Greenberg. Highly recommended.

The best horror fiction is subtle. This point is missed by the producers of today’s horror films, in which blood and gore — and the anticipation thereof — have become a substitute for the storytelling art and the art of horror.

Horror can be the ordinary or the possible, taken one step further. Sometimes it is allusive, so that the reader is told, more or less, what happened but not how. Fiction like that of Edgar Allen Poe finds its roots in common fears and foibles of the human psyche stretched to unimaginable ends (for example, guilt in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”). In other stories, the ending, or what happens next, is left to the reader’s imagination. The author plants the seed and fertilizes it, but leaves the reader to reap it.

In 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories, Sarrantonio and Greenberg have captured the essence of horror fiction at its best — its subtlety and its interactivity with the reader’s mind and emotions. In some, supernatural or science fiction elements play a role, but not at the expense of the psychology. In many of these, the reader must decide how reliable the narrator is.

In stories like “Ants” by Chet Williamson, the commonplace becomes the unthinkable. “Examination Day” twists one of the worst fears a schoolchild has into a parent’s nightmare, while making a political statement. In several stories, the abuse inflicted on children are turned back upon the parents, guardians, or peers — or are they? Examples include “Holly, Don’t Tell” by Juleen Brantingham; “Moving Night” by Nancy Holder; “Making Friends” by Gary Raisor; and “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki. “In the Corn” by Robert Fox is memorable for its setting, the naïveté and vulnerability of its protagonist, and the situations that lie behind and ahead of him.

A story like “The Grab” by Richard Laymon deceives the reader by presenting several twists; the game is not what it appears to be at first, and that makes the players’ attitude toward it as shown at the end even more horrifying.

In real life, sometimes there are crimes that seem inexplicable until the culprits are caught and their depravity shown. In “Down by the Sea near the Great Big Rock” by Joe R. Lansdale, another explanation is revealed — or is it?

A few stories combine horror and whimsy, including “The Adventures of My Grandfather” by Washington Irving, “The Kirk Spook” by E. G. Swain, and “The Disintegration of Alan” by Melissa Mia Hall. “Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale is beautiful and haunting, with an ending that should not surprise but does. In some cases, though, the horror lies in the tale’s realism, for example, “The Upturned Face” by Stephen Crane and “Night Deposits” by Chet Williamson.

100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories is a marvelous anthology of the genre. In only a few words and a few pages, each gifted author establishes well-drawn settings, scenarios, and characters, and then sets the reader up for an experience that ranges from amusing but disquieting to disturbing and terrifying. Many of these stories reminded me of the best of 1950s and 1960s television, such asThe Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Outer Limits. If you appreciate the subtlety, the tautness, and the art of the well-written horror story, you must read this anthology.

26 February 2006
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Oxford Book of Short Stories

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The Oxford Book of Short Stories ed. by V. S. Pritchett. Recommended.

In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Short Stories, V. S. Pritchett discusses the short story’s “relatively new and still changing form,” an odd statement since one could make a case that the short story is ancient, whether in oral or written form. For his anthology of short stories written in English, Pritchett draws on approximately two centuries and writers from several countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand.

Pritchett suggests that an anthology is bound to be a matter of personal taste. When I began reading this particular anthology, I learned that Pritchett is a much-respected short story writer, so it’s to be assumed that his opinion and his taste are to be respected. Given the difficulties of editing an anthology, which he mentions in the introduction and which include copyright issues as well as the length of a story and how much it has been anthologized, Pritchett has done an adequate job of representing the short story in a relatively short volume.

For me, the problem with this volume—and the “still changing” form of the short story—is alluded to in the last paragraph of the introduction, where Pritchett says, “A modern story comes to an open end.” In my opinion, this approach helps to negate the beauty and the power of the short story as distinguished from the novel, that is, “the novel tells us everything, whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely.”

This point is easily illustrated in great short stories, like Sir Walter Scott’s “The Two Drovers” and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner (both surprising choices because they are so often included in anthologies). Unlike Pritchett (and, I would suspect, many others), I do not see “Grace” as a story in which James Joyce’s “genius was first signalled”; rather, it’s a pointless exercise in tedium, like watching people you don’t know doing nothing interesting, that left me feeling I couldn’t justify the time wasted reading it. There is nothing “intense” about “Grace,” nor about Pritchett’s own contribution, “Many Are Disappointed,” which is an apt description of my reaction.

When a short story is “intense”—and good—the reader cannot be left feeling indifferent by an “open end.” Stories like “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” with its straightforward narrative and fable-like simplicity, evoke strong feelings of horror and dread, despite the commonplace setting and people—a household perpetually in growing debt, like so many, and men who indulge in casual horse betting, like so many. The normalcy of the tone underscores the weirdness of the tale. Other stories, like “The Coup de Grâce” (Ambrose Bierce), “Sredni Vashtar” (Hector Hugh Munro, also known as Saki), “An Official Position” (W. Somerset Maugham), “The Woman at the Store” (Katherine Mansfield), “Various Temptations” (William Sansom), and “Parker’s Back” (Flannery O’Connor), seared lasting impressions into my mind due to the richness of setting, characterization, situation, and plot. This is the type of story that makes this anthology worthwhile.

Between these gems of the craft are weaker stories that made little if any impact on me. For example, John Updike’s “Lifeguard” seems to be a pointless exercise in the author’s own wit. The much-touted (and frequently anthologized) “Hills Like White Elephants” (Ernest Hemingway) is also cleverly told and shows the potential of the short story, but left me cold and indifferent. (In fact, I’ve read this story many times in anthologies and never remember what it’s about.) “The Tent” by Liam O’Flaherty shows an “intense” moment, but falls flat. The weaker stories fail to capture the imagination, the heart, or both.

The best stories seem to be those that make use of either quirky humor or underlying suspense and horror. Despite its dark theme, Bret Harte’s “The Iliad of Sandy Bar” is humorous, with its two protagonists doing their best to outdo each other after what appears to have been a simple disagreement. Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” also a favorite of anthology editors, is dry, witty, and folksy and is a good introduction to Twain. Many of the other stories mentioned, plus stories like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Thrawn Janet,” are dark, unsettling, and disturbing. You cannot read them and be unaffected.

Indeed, The Oxford Book of Short Stories highlights why the short story format is ideal for humor and horror; these are life’s moments of intensity that deserve to be told and heard. For this reason, the stories of the apparently mundane with an open end are the weakest, failing to leave a lasting impression or make an impact.

For someone interested in a very limited overview of the short story in English, this is an adequate book with which to start. I would recommend choosing an author whose story strikes you, for example, a John Cheever (“Goodbye, My Brother”) or a Stephen Crane (“The Open Boat”) and exploring their work in more depth. Find out what moves you and read more of it.

Sunday, 8 January 2006
© 2006 by Diane L. Schirf