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Post by callipygias on Nov 23, 2010 12:12:13 GMT -5
#42 River of Names(1988) Dorothy Allison[/center][/color] Suicide, nightmarish abuse, murder, incestuous child-rape. This is one disturbing story. More so for the brutally dark humor Allison uses. "Almost always, we were raped, my cousins and I. That was some kind of joke too. What's a South Carolina virgin? 'At's a ten-year-old can run fast." River of Names' present is set in the narrator's bed, where she lays with her lover, Jesse, who tells her idyllic stories from her own childhood, of which the narrator says, "I listen with my mouth open, not believing but wanting, aching for the fairy tale she thinks is everyone's life." Here's an illustration of the two by Ashley Dumonchelle. But most of the story is filled with impressions and fragments from her horrific childhood. Many of her relatives' stories are summed up in short paragraphs: James went blind. One of the uncles got him in the face with home brewed alcohol. Some take a little more space, like this sickening one: My Uncle Matthew used to beat my Aunt Raylene. The twins, Mark and Luke, swore to stop him, pulled him out in the yard one time, throwing him between them like a loose bag of grain. Uncle Matthew screamed like a pig coming up for slaughter. ...Little Bo came running out of the house, off the porch, feet first into his daddy's arms. Uncle Matthew started swinging him like a scythe, going after the bigger boys, Bo's head thudding their shoulders, their hips. Afterward, Bo crawled around in the dirt, the blood running out of his ears and his tongue hanging out of his mouth.From the opening paragraph, where children discover their 8-year-old cousin's body swinging from the rafters in the barn, "his face as black as his shoes," all the way through, a real horror story. Dorothy Allison
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Post by callipygias on Nov 23, 2010 19:39:45 GMT -5
#41 The Moonlit Road(1907) Ambrose Bierce[/center][/color] Part I: Joel Hetman, Jr. is summoned from Yale to the family home in Tennessee, where he is told his mother has been brutally murdered while his father was away on business. Months later, on the moonlit road just in front of the house, Joel Hetman, Sr. is driven mad by what he thinks is the ghost of his late wife. His son sees nothing, and before he realizes it his father has run into the woods, never to return. Part II: Caspar Grattan (alias Joel Hetman, Sr. [arguably], alias Number 767 [arguably]), an old man who has wandered for the last twenty years unable to remember anything before them, prepares to die. Though he has no memory beyond twenty years, he is "...always and everywhere haunted by an overmastering sense of crime in punishment of wrong and of terror in punishment of crime." He relates a terrible story of "One luckless evening it occurred to me to test my wife's fidelity in a vulgar, commonplace way...." Part III: The late Julia Hetman tells her story through the medium Bayrolles. Oh it's true. The part where she wakes from peaceful sleep to terror is some of the best ghost-story-type writing I've ever read. She lights a lamp but quickly puts it out, afraid of attracting whatever's after her. You that are still in the flesh, subject to horrors of the imagination, think what a monstrous fear that must be which seeks in darkness security from malevolent existences of the night. She waits for hours, and finally... At last it came--a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to my disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. Ambrose Bierce is one of the most fascinating people I've ever read about. He apparently wasn't one of the most well-liked, though. Of his flaws, for the purposes of The Moonlit Road the important one seems to have been his intense jealousy and distrust of his wife, which led to their separation in 1888, and eventual divorce in 1904. His wife died the next year. Ambrose Bierce
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Post by callipygias on Nov 25, 2010 14:05:07 GMT -5
#40 Harrison Bergeron(1961) Kurt Vonnegut[/center][/color] "The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal." The Handicapper General sees to that by inhibiting any qualities a person has that might otherwise raise them above another. George and Hazel Bergeron are watching ballerinas dance on television. The ballerinas are weighted down with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and they are masked in order that no one will feel unattractive in comparison. Hazel is crying, but she can't remember why. The government-placed transmitter in George's ear blasts chaotic noises at him every so often so he can't take advantage of his above average intelligence. The dance stops, and the most beautiful and graceful ballerina, identifiable from the ugliness of her mask and the volume of weights she bears, announces that Harrison Bergeron has escaped prison. Suddenly there are screams off camera and the studio shakes. George Bergeron recognizes the earthquake caused by his enormously powerful son, Harrison, entering a room. Harrison, whom the government had taken from them for his extreme physical and mental superiority ("Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps") appears on the television, declares himself Emperor and stamps his foot, shaking the building. Then... well, nobody, NOBODY does bittersweet like Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut
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Post by callipygias on Nov 26, 2010 17:30:12 GMT -5
#39 How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar(1872) Bret Harte[/center][/color] If I was doing a list of most underrated American short story writers (I won't though, I promise!) Bret Harte might come in at #1. In the fourteen months or so of hunting for great short stories I never once encountered his name as a writer of interest. I was at this website and the strange name of this story made me check it out, and with a start like this I was hooked: It had been raining in the valley of the Sacramento. The North Fork had overflowed its banks and Rattlesnake Creek was impassable... The mud lay deep in the mountain road; wagons that neither physical force nor moral objurgation could move from the evil ways into which they had fallen... farther on, cut off and inaccessible, rained upon and bedraggled, smitten by high winds and threatened by high water, Simpson's Bar, on the Eve of Christmas Day, 1862, clung like a swallow's nest to the rocky entablature and splintered capitals of Table Mountain, and shook in the blast. Harte has (or at least had, at this point in his career) that ease and facility with English that makes all his stories seem like first drafts. And something else in the way he writes seems to give most everything a vaguely satirical feel; at least it seems that way to me. Anyway, whatever his style is it's a perfect fit for what he chose to write about: the American West, and specifically, the Gold Rush. This story is about a group of rough men, a game of cards, a shrew of a wife, a very strange, very sick boy, a determined man and a ferocious, near-unstoppable beast of a horse. Sing, O Muse, the ride of Richard Bullen!.. the sacred quest, the fearsome ride and grewsome <sic> perils of the Flower of Simpson's Bar! Alack! she is dainty, this muse, she will have none of this bucking brute and swaggering, ragged rider, and I must follow him in prose, afoot! There's a perfect example of Harte's sense of humor, making fun of his own story and himself. Even if his stories fall from the public eye, as they apparently kind of have, I'd think he'd remain famous at least for contracting with The Atlantic Monthly for an annual salary of $10,000 all the way back in 1872! Sort of makes him the first superstar author, as far as I know. Bret Harte
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Post by callipygias on Nov 26, 2010 21:18:11 GMT -5
#38 I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream(1967) Harlan Ellison[/center][/color] You know those "If you could dine with any author in history, who would you choose?" questions? I'm not sure who my #1 choice would be, but I'm pretty sure my very last choice would be Harlan Ellison. Make that second-to-last. I forgot Oscar Wilde. I'm far far FAR from being an expert on Ellison, but he sure seems like one angry, over-opinionated, whacked-out individual. (If I could pick one author in history to dine with me and the Queen though, I might pick him. Go figure.) This insane entry from Ellison's insane mind has a small group of humans -- the last small group of humans -- slave to one of the super-computers that annihilated the rest of mankind. The computer is called AM, and it hates humans beyond our comprehension. AM has trapped these last survivors (within him, somehow?), apparently for eternity, and brutally tortures and mutilates them over and over and over, endlessly. Harlan Ellison and the pic that inspired him to write this story
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Nov 27, 2010 9:39:02 GMT -5
The last image of Ellison's story has haunted me for decades.
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Post by callipygias on Nov 27, 2010 13:40:43 GMT -5
That ending description was pretty damned terrifying. I just can't put it together with the goofy picture that inspired it, though somehow that makes the story even creepier.
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Post by callipygias on Nov 27, 2010 13:59:24 GMT -5
#37 Peter(1892)Willa Cather[/center] Other than being maybe the greatest American authoress in general (I said maybe), something I love about Cather is the Old World perspective her heartland stories provide. Most of us grew up with the fully Americanized immigrant perspective, where everyone looks forward, but Cather always seems to have at least one character in her Nebraska stories who can't assimilate to the New World, whether because of the landscape, like Canute Canuteson from On The Divide, or because of the minimalist lifestyle, like the ineffectual patriarch of his family at #37, Peter Sadelack. Peter dreams only of the past, of his glory days as second violinist in the great theatre at Prague. He is lazy and absent minded, and he would pawn anything he could get his hands on for a drink, save his pipe and precious violin. Peter's son, Antone, ....... oh just read the story already, it's not even three pages long! Willa Cather
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Post by callipygias on Nov 27, 2010 20:39:57 GMT -5
#36 The White People(1899) Arthur Machen[/center][/color] The prologue is simply a theoretical discussion on the nature of evil, which leads the host/speaker to loan the mysterious journal of a Welsh girl titled The Green Book to the doubtful but receptive Cotgrave. About the longest prologue I've ever heard of for a short story. The Green Book itself (part II) is the great thing about The White People. It is written in a strange, incredibly evocative style that can seem one-part extraordinary young Welsh girl and one-part ancient, otherworldly thing within the same sentence. She hints at things she cannot tell, she names things she knows--ceremonies of different colors, languages, secrets she dare not think of unless she is alone. As a very young child she would speak a language she learned from the little white faces that used to look at her as she lay in her cradle. When she is thirteen she has what she calls a very singular adventure. She becomes lost in woods she doesn't know, but she keeps going. (It very much has the feel of Alice through the looking glass, just... eviler. I went on into the dreadful rocks. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Some were like horrid-grinning men; I could see their faces as if they would jump at me out of the stone, and catch hold of me, and drag me with them back into the rock, so that I should always be there.
I went on among them, though they frightened me, and my heart was full of wicked songs that they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist myself about in the way they did.... SPOILER Machen builds suspense repeatedly, and though after a while it becomes clear there will be no resolution, every event--even every non-event--serves to increase the story's intensely creepy atmosphere of dark, otherworldly evil. You can easily see why Lovecraft was so fond of The White People; it reminds me of The Colour Out Of Space in that the source of terror is completely foreign to, and even more or less unconcerned with the world of man. So I went to the wood where the pool was, where I saw the white people... the dark nymph, Alanna, came, and she turned the pool of water into a pool of fire.... Arthur Machen PS "That's a very queer story," said Cotgrave.
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Post by callipygias on Nov 28, 2010 14:53:24 GMT -5
#35 A White Horse(1992) Thom Jones[/center][/color] Odd, semi-surreal story of an American called Ad Magic vacationing in Bombay. He is a temporal-lobe epileptic subject to fits of amnesia, and he has an attack just as his tour bus is involved in a crash. After being saved from choking to death on a "jawbreaker-size horehound lozenge" by Bahrainian tourists Ad Magic separates himself from the tour group and embarks on a little Odyssey, remembering virtually nothing about his life. Though his odyssey is short, Ad Magic has quite a day. He sees a monkey perform an incomprehensible mime ("Bravo. Excellent monkey," say the Bahraini women), he gives away his sweater, he wanders through a cardboard shantytown: The settlement was centered around a crescent-shaped ditch, and people could be seen squatting there, shamelessly relieving themselves, while at the other end of the obscene ditch, women were washing laundry. Along a deserted stretch of beach he spots a small white horse standing in the surf. He moves closer and sees that the horse, swaying on its feet, is starved to the brink of death, and is covered with oozing sores. At this point he realizes, "...He'd done it again. He had abandoned his seizure meds, flipped out, and somehow gotten on a plane, this time bound for India." Though he still couldn't remember his own name, he searches his pockets and finds thousands in cash. All he wants then is to save the pitiful horse. (The only place the 14-page text to A White Horse is available online appears to be on some blogger's Viagra-sponsored site here. I thought I'd hide the link because it has inappropriate language in the address.) Thom Jones
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Post by callipygias on Nov 28, 2010 17:11:43 GMT -5
#34 Born of Man and Woman(1950) Richard Matheson[/center][/color] I got my first book of Matheson's short stories because of references made on this board ( CL + others), and from seeing his name in connection with The Twilight Zone, but I still wasn't prepared for the pure awesomeness of the first story of his I read, Born of Man and Woman. Turns out it was the first story he ever published, too. Talk about entering the room with a bang. SPOILERSI don't think I've ever been so excited, so quickly, about finding an author of short stories---it was love at first paragraph. It's told first-person by a mentally retarded... child-thing who expresses itself in sentence bursts like this, "Mother is a pretty I know," and "The day it has goldness in the upstairs," and though there is a little menace under the surface right away, the real thunderclap comes with, "Today mother let me off the chain a little so I could look out the little window." That blew me away. For me it was the literary equivalent of when Cos popped his hernia out to show it off, "Ooooh, maaaan, that is reeeeaally cool, Jack!" That was about my response to that sentence. No surprise here, this is the shortest story on my list. I can't imagine the better use of two pages.
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Post by solgroupie on Dec 6, 2010 22:27:43 GMT -5
more like:
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Post by callipygias on Dec 18, 2010 13:12:35 GMT -5
^ That's what heaven will be like. Except I'll be able to float, so no steps.
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Post by callipygias on Dec 18, 2010 13:34:05 GMT -5
#33 The Five-Forty-Eight(1954) John Cheever[/center][/color] This is the first of Cheever's stories that I really liked, and it has grown on me till it's become a favorite (obviously). The Five-Forty-Eight is the "brief but harrowing ordeal of a selfish, thoughtless male executive whose recent past comes back to haunt him in the person of a deeply disturbed young woman lately employed—and dismissed—as his secretary." (Thanks to whoever wrote that online so that I could steal it.) Reading about this one online has been pretty funny. Almost everything I've read has a real "Girl Power!" feeling to it. Like Miss Dent is acting in a way that's appropriate for someone who has been wronged. Almost everything I've read! John Cheever
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Post by callipygias on Dec 18, 2010 19:42:35 GMT -5
#32 Eva is Inside Her Cat(1961) Gabriel Garcia Marquez[/center][/color] Two of Marquez's most often repeated themes (and that's saying something), beauty and loneliness, are again in the forefront. This time -- pre-Remedios the Beauty -- it's Eva, who is cursed with otherworldly beauty which she perceives as tiny insects living within the blood of her family line. Literally, tiny insects. She believes those insects were born in the womb of the first woman who had a beautiful daughter, and that the line needs to end with herself, "It was no longer beauty, it was a sickness that had to be halted." Once you get past the first few pages (okay, I get it, she's pretty!) it gets interesting. She thinks of a dead boy she had loved, buried beneath the orange tree in the courtyard. She thinks she hears him sobbing, his mouth is filled with wet clay. *SPOILER* (sort of) Next thing you know a paragraph starts, "But now, in her new life, temporal and spaceless...." Rat poison is mentioned at one point. Eva is overcome by and terrified by her need to eat an orange. She knows that under every orange tree there is a boy buried, "...sweetening the fruit with the lime of his bones." Eva needs a body to eat an orange, and the cat is all that's near, but she's horrified by the idea that if she enters the cat's body her craving would change and she might instead eat a mouse. She doesn't understand (I think, at least) that she is already in the cat, and has been for thousands of years. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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