Blog-o-ween 2023: "Smee" by A.M. Burrage

Today is a special day. Not only for the story we’ll be discussing (and it’s a good ‘un!), but also for the date. Today, the 23rd of October, is Silver Shamrock Day, and it’s celebrated by all the weirdos out there who can’t get enough of Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1982 mash-up of futuristic science-fiction and ancient Celtic Samhain rituals, Halloween III: Season of the Witch. May the tags stay on your Silver Shamrock masks, kiddies, and may you never experience “misfire.”

With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, let’s get down to business.

Like yesterday’s Blog-o-ween 2023 tale, today’s tale is a Christmastime ghost story. Whereas M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is best told during the Christmas season even though it did not take place at that time, today’s yarn from A.M. Burrage is a proper Christmas tale. It takes place at an old country house where a group of friends gather to celebrate the holidays. To pass the time, they decide to play a game of hide-and-seek. One of their party, however, refuses to join in the revelries. Let’s gather round as Jackson, the party-pooper, gives his reasons for not being a good sport. Gather round and hear all about another game played on another Christmas night. Come close and learn how to play...“Smee.”

“‘I wonder if any of you have played a game called “Smee.” It’s a great improvement on the ordinary game of hide-and-seek. The name derives from the ungrammatical colloquialism, “It’s me.” You might care to play if you’re going to play a game of that sort. Let me tell you the rules.’

“‘Every player is presented with a sheet of paper. All the sheets are blank except one, on which is written “Smee”. Nobody knows who is “Smee” except “Smee” himself — or herself, as the case may be. The lights are then turned out and “Smee” slips from the room and goes off to hide, and after an interval the other players go off in search, without knowing whom they are actually in search of. One player meeting another challenges with the word “Smee” and the other player, if not the one concerned, answers “Smee.”’

“‘The real “Smee” makes no answer when challenged, and the second player remains quietly by him. Presently they will be discovered by a third player, who, having challenged and received no answer, will link up with the first two. This goes on until all the players have formed a chain, and the last to join is marked down for a forfeit.’”

In this manner, Jackson, a member of a group of friends gathered together for Yuletide, offers the game to his friends for their enjoyment. Jackson, however, steadfastly refuses to play the game himself. Why on earth would he be such a stick-in-the-mud about it?

“‘I sometimes go and stay at a house where a girl was killed. She was playing hide and seek in the dark. She didn't know the house very well. There was a door that led to the servants' staircase. When she was chased, she thought the door led to a bedroom. She opened the door and jumped — and landed at the bottom of the stairs. She broke her neck, of course.'

“We all looked serious. Mrs Fernley said, ‘How terrible! And were you there when it happened?’

“Jackson shook his head sadly. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I was there when something else happened. Something worse.’

“‘What could be worse than that?’

“‘This was,’ said Jackson.”

And thus follows Jackson’s tale of one terrible night spent playing Smee in that house.

Burrage uses the rules of the game — the dark house, the silence, the solitude — to chilling effect. “Smee” has a wonderful ending that, although you see it coming, is still powerful enough to elicit a shudder. Along the way, there are many moments where Jackson and his fellow players rub up against the uncanny and outré. One moment, in fact, on a staircase, involving the accidental (?) miscount of the number of players in the game will make the bottom fall out of your stomach. It is described so matter-of-factly that it’ll hit you between the eyes before you know what’s happening.

Alfred McLelland Burrage was born in Hillingdon, London, England, in 1889. Both his father and his uncle were prolific writers of boys’ adventure stories. After his father died in 1906, Burrage picked up his father’s mantle as well as his pen and began writing to support his family. After serving in the Great War, Burrage wrote a memoir of his time called War Is War. Like his father and uncle, Burrage wrote children’s stories including the humorous novel Poor Dear Esme (1925), about a boy who disguises himself as a girl.

If there is anything for which Burrage is remembered at all today following his death in 1956, then it is his many charming ghost stories. M.R. James himself proclaimed that the tales in Burrage’s collection Some Ghost Stories, “[keep] on the right side of the line and, if about half his ghosts are amiable, the rest have their terrors, and no mean ones.” The American scholar of fantasy literature, E.F. Bleiler said, “The best stories in Some Ghost Stories and Someone in the Room are intelligent, well crafted and imaginative.” Richard Dalby, a scholar and anthologizer of ghost stories called Burrage “one of the finest English ghost story writers, alongside Benson, Wakefield and James.”

Not too shabby!

You can find a copy of “Smee” in any good anthology dedicated to Christmas ghost stories. Why not look for one edited by the aforementioned Richard Dalby at your local library? There are also a few audio versions of the story available online. There is a terrific audio reading by the folks at HorrorBabble, as well as a wonderful reading of the tale by Tony Walker over at his Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. If you’d rather have a dramatized adaptation, then head over to Relic Radio to hear the old South African radio program Beyond Midnight render Burrage’s tale in a more “modern” shape in a 1968 broadcast.

Well, that’s all for today, folks. Be safe as you scurry about the house looking for a hiding place. Not only are there many little nooks and crannies to tuck yourself away in, there may also be an extra player in our midst. If you encounter her, just hold her cold hand, wish her a Happy Silver Shamrock Day, and you may just make it out alive to enjoy...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: “Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad” by M.R. James

If yesterday’s Blog-o-ween 2023 stories from Harlan Ellison were a terrifying trip into new literary domains, a paranormal pushing of the eerie envelope, so to speak, then today’s author and story should feel like a return to an older, more genteel tradition. They should make you feel like you are wrapping yourself in an old, warm blanket...or, at the very least, an old, cold shroud...

This year’s Blog-o-ween has featured quite a few tales from British authors that take place not on the 31st of October but on the 25th of December. In England, the winter ghost tale has a long and storied (pun intended!) tradition. What is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol but a ghost story, albeit one with a sticky, sappy center.

Today’s story is one such tale, although it doesn’t take place at Christmas. Instead, it is a story that was meant to be read aloud on Christmas Eve solely as entertainment. Its author wrote and performed many ghostly stories for friends during Yuletide. So, stoke the fire, pour yourself a snifter of brandy, and settle into an old comfortable chair while M.R. James reads to us the story “Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad”...

Parkins is a professor at Cambridge University, who takes an end-of-the-school-year golfing trip to the seaside town of Burnstow. Before leaving, a colleague asks him to investigate a site of archeological interest: the ruins of a Templar preceptory. Parkins agrees and soon finds himself ensconced in a room with twin beds at the Globe Inn.

After playing a round of golf, Parkins heads on over to the Templar ruins. While there, he spies a hole in the wall and discovers an ancient bronze whistle. He pockets his find and returns to the inn. On his way home along the beach, he notices off in the distance the indistinct shape of a person. Said person seems to be trying to catch up with the professor, but doesn’t seem to be making any headway in its efforts.

Uh-oh.

Back at the Globe Inn and alone in his room, Parkins cleans the whistle. From his window, he sees a form in the distance standing on the shore looking at the inn.

Double uh-oh.

Closely investigating his find, Parkins notes two inscriptions on the whistle. The first is a series of letters that he cannot make heads or tails of. The second, however, is in Latin (and being a professor at Cambridge, he can translate it, natch) and reads: “QUIS EST ISTE QUI UENIT” or “Who is this who is coming?” With the compacted soil freed from the whistle, Parkins does what any of us would do. He blows the whistle. Cue the wind, and cue the solitary figure in the distance.

Triple uh-oh!

Who or what is it that Parkins has called by blowing the whistle. Who or what is it that a young boy sees in Parkins’s window when the man is not there? Who or what has been sleeping in the other bed in his room, mussing the covers and sheets, twisting and contorting them?

The premier writer of the spooky tale told during Christmas, Montague Rhodes James, a provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton College, entertained his students and friends every Christmas Eve with one of his tales. These stories were eventually collected in several books: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). Though he was a serious academic and medievalist scholar, James is best remembered as the man who modernized the ghost story in the early 20th century.

It may seem funny to use that word – modern – when discussing James’s stories, because from our perspective, they seem quaint and cozy. Indeed, they are exactly what we mean when we say we long to hear an “old-fashioned” ghost story.

James jettisoned much of what had bogged down the genre since the Gothic period. His stories didn’t happen in a castle in the past; his stories took place in the ruins of that castle in the present. His protagonists are usually professors and/or antiquarians who find a clue to lost knowledge in an old book or manuscript or stained-glass window. This provenance gives the proceedings a sense of verisimilitude that makes the horror more tangible.

Quaint and cozy these stories may be, the reader of James’s tales considers them safe at their own peril. The horrors that stalk those pages are some of the most chilling in the history of literature. James keeps the ghosts in his stories just out of the reader’s view. They are seen out the corners of the eyes.

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad” is one of M.R. James’s best told and best-known tales. As with James’s other tales, the “ghost” (or whatever it is) is never truly seen. It is a shape on the horizon or seen fleetingly at a hotel room window. During the finale, James may be riffing ironically on the stereotypical image of the ghost. Whether it is intended as humor or horror, the end of the story will send shivers up the most jaded horror fan’s spine.

As is the case with much of what M.R. James wrote, there are several ways for us to enjoy his tale. Wanna read the full story? Then head on over to your local library and pick up Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Don’t wanna leave the house? Fine! You can probably check out the e-book from your library’s website. Just want to read this story? How’s about following this link to the Project Gutenberg site where you can read it? What’s that? You want someone else to read the story to you and your grandma ain’t available? Okay...how about this splendid audio version recorded by the good people over at HorrorBabble? Or how about this radio adaptation from the BBC that also includes a few other spooky stories like W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” and Marie Belloc Lowndes’s “An Unrecorded Instance”?

There, that should cover every—

What’s that? You also want a movie version of the story? Jeepers! Well, okay...check with your local library and see if you can find the British Film Institute’s DVD that includes two — that’s right, TWO — versions of this story. The first is the classic 1968 adaptation starring Sir Michael Hordern (who also stars in the radio adaptation above). The second is of a much more recent vintage. It’s from 2010 and stars John Hurt.

There. Happy? Whew! I think I’ve got all your storytelling bases covered. So, no matter how you enjoy it, I think you’ll have a frighteningly good time with old Professor Parkins. Just remember that it’s not just you alone in your room at the Globe Inn at night. You’ve got a friend with you in the other bed. A friend who wouldn’t mind if you wished them...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: Harlan Ellison

It is getting late in the Blog-o-ween 2023 day, wouldn’t you say, folks? Like long-distance runners, we’ve kept up a pretty fast and — dare I say it? — arrogant pace throughout the first twenty days of this crazy venture. Twenty days without a single kink, knot, stitch, or pulled hammy to slow us down. We’ve got miles behind, but miles yet to go. Now, it’s 21 October, we got ten days until the big day, and today is the first time in this run that I feel like Lilli Von Shtupp...

But, dammit, today’s a big day for me. Today is the day I was especially looking forward to when I started planning this whole month-long journey through spooky fiction. Today, we’re going to look at a few short stories by my personal favorite writer. A man who has more than 1,800 short stories to his name. A writer who has written countless essays and newspaper columns. He was an editor, a movie reviewer, and a television critic, He wrote scripts for shows such as Burke’s Law, The Outer Limits, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and Star Trek.

He also wrote the 1966 movie The Oscar.

No one’s perfect.

A writer with that many credits deserves my fullest attention, wouldn’t you say? So, like Uta Pippig, who battled ischemic colitis for 26.2 miles to win the 1996 Boston Marathon, I will persevere and push through this sleepy feeling to bring you five — that’s right, FIVE! — stories from the one and only Harlan Ellison. Unlike Pippig, I will attempt to do all this without so much blood and diarrhea running down my legs. I can’t promise anything, though.

Let’s go!

“He turned onto his left side in the bed, trying to avoid the wet spot. He propped his hand against his cheek, smiled grimly, and prepared to tell her the truth about why he’d been married and divorced three times...”

Our first story, “All the Birds Come Home to Roost,” is from the 1980 collection Shatterday. It was originally published in the March 1979 issue of Playboy. In it, Michael Kirxby is a man who finds himself being forced to meet all of the women he’s ever had relationships with over again. The thing is, however, Michael Kirxby isn’t a very nice guy. He hasn’t treated the women in his life very well. In fact, he’s the love-’em-and-leave-’em type. And when he leaves ‘em, he doesn’t much care about the damage he leaves behind. As he travels backwards in time, meeting the last woman he was seeing before moving on, and then meeting the woman before her, and the woman before her, he knows that eventually he will get to Cindy. And Cindy...well, you’ll have to read the story to find out what Michael and Cindy’s relationship was like.

“On the night after the day she had stained the louvered window shutters of her new apartment on East 52nd Street, Beth saw a woman slowly and hideously knifed to death in the courtyard of her building. She was one of twenty-six witnesses to the ghoulish scene, and, like them, she did nothing to stop it...”

Next, we have “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” from the 1975 collection Deathbird Stories. It was originally published by Thomas M. Disch in his 1973 anthology Bad Moon Rising: An Anthology of Political Forebodings. Ellison, himself, has admitted to being haunted by the murder of Kitty Genovese outside of her New York City apartment in 1964. The rape and stabbing death of Genovese allegedly happened in view of thirty-eight people, who did nothing to stop it. (This version of the crime has since been debunked.) It was a national news story and used by media outlets as a prime example of what living in the big city does to people: it puts blinders on them and makes them selfish and uncaring.

“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” begins with a murder in full view of an apartment building. None of the witnesses do anything to stop it. Instead, they stand by and watch the whole thing unfold below them. What causes so many “good” people to do nothing in the face of such evil? Ellison suggests that our cities have become sites of dark energies, places that demand sacrifice...and worshippers. But worshippers of what exactly?

“In the third year of my death, I met Piretta...”

Written in 1959 for The Saint Detective Magazine, “The Time of the Eye” has since gone on to be a part of numerous anthologies and many of Ellisons’s own collections, including Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction (1971), From the Land of Fear (1973), and the many editions of The Essential Ellison.

In a hospital known only as “The Place,” a young man recovering from injuries and a breakdown brought on by action he saw in the war meets a beautiful, blind young woman. He and she give their nurses the slip to sit quietly in the garden, alone. He soon recognizes the young woman to be a famous model who disappeared some years before. She was a woman known to be a hedonist, someone looking for the highest, rarest experiences that the world could offer her senses. She became a member of a group known as “The Men of the Eye,” and during a ritual called “The Time of the Eye,” they took her and...well...you’ll just have to read the story for yourself to see what else they took.

“Chris Hudak knew he was in trouble when his computer bit him. Not hard, not the first time. Just a nip. The merest drawing of blood from his index finger...”

Published in the January 1995 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and included in his 1997 collection Slippage: Precariously Poised, Previously Uncollected Stories, the short story “Keyboard” is a quickie. Ellison’s work in the last decades of his life became shorter, sharper, snappier. They cut to the chase, as well as the bone, quickly.

On its face, “Keyboard” is a simple story of technology gone mad, a subject that Ellison had touched upon numerous times throughout his career. Here, a writer finds that his computer needs to feed on more than electricity to work. And the television looks pretty hungry, too.

Last, but certainly not least, we have two stories from Ellison’s 1978 collection Strange Wine. The fifteen tales in this book are described on the jacket as being “from the nightside of the world.” Indeed, they are. Let's start with the story “Killing Bernstein.”

“If God (or Whoever’s in charge) had wanted Dr. Netta Bernstein to continue living, He (or She) wouldn’t have made it so easy for me to kill her...”

Life at MyToy Corporation is a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog business. No one knows that more than Jimmy Duncaster. As Director of Market Research, Duncaster works closely with Dr. Bernstein. Maybe a bit too closely. The day after they spend the night together, Dr. Bernstein acts like she doesn’t know him at all. It’s like he’s a stranger. Then, she proceeds to feed him to the corporate sharks over his Little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes Doll project. Duncaster kills Bernstein in a fit of rage that night, but when he arrives at work the next morning — there she is at her desk! So, he kills her again. And she comes back again. He kills her again. She comes back again. He kills her. She comes back. What’s going on here?

“Beneath the city, there is yet another city: wet and dark and strange; a city of sewers and moist scuttling creatures and running rivers so desperate to be free not even Styx fits them. And in the lost city beneath the city, I found the child...”

Our final story for today is “Croatoan.” A man recklessly impregnates a casual dalliance and calls on friends to give the woman a backstreet abortion. They have done this for him many times before. Too many times. With the job complete and the aborted fetus flushed away, the woman demands that he go after it and bring it back. Soon, the man finds himself in the New York City sewer system and in the company of...let’s just say that what finds him down there in the moist dark corners of the underworld calls him “Daddy.”

One of the reasons I wanted to include so many of Ellison’s stories (I mean, besides the fact that I just love the guy’s writing — believe me, I could have included A LOT more!), is that these aren’t tales of your usual ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. The horrors in much of Ellison’s work don’t come from “out there” but rather from inside the human heart. The monsters in these and other Ellison tales grow out of the heartlessness with which the protagonists treat others and themselves. The lead characters in stories like “Croatoan,” “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” and “All the Birds Come Home to Roost” do not ever want to take responsibility for their own actions. They try to deflect and ignore the issues — whether they are using other people for their own ends or pretending they don’t see the brutality of the world — and they try to make them someone else’s problems. Like in the best EC Comics/Tales from the Crypt tradition (see this previous post for more on the wonderful poetic justice of those stories), however, these characters are confronted by their own callousness and made to atone for it. This atonement is not a pretty thing. Crawling into the sewers at night and finding an ancient civilization beneath the streets is not supposed to be a trip to Funsville, you know?

Harlan Ellison was born in Painesville, Ohio, in 1934. His childhood in this small town outside of Cleveland was fraught with bullying and antisemitism. Leaving at a young age after the death of his father, Ellison rode the rails and worked as a fisherman, a door-to-door salesman, a short-order cook, and a nitroglycerine truck driver in North Carolina, amongst other jobs. He attended Ohio State University for eighteen months before being expelled. After moving to New York City in 1955 to become a writer, Ellison sold over a hundred short stories and articles over the next two years. The man was off and running and didn’t look back.

I can’t do justice to the crazy life that Ellison led. If you want to find out more about the man, then I highly suggest you watch the documentary film Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Even then, you won’t get the full story. To do that, you have to turn to his writings. His non-fiction work is especially eye-opening. Maybe read his two collections of television criticism written form the Los Angeles Free Press from 1968-1970, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. The Harlan Ellison Hornbook is also collected from weekly columns he wrote for the “Freep,” mostly from 1972-1973.

You should also look for Ellison’s audiobooks for a glimpse into the man’s mind. Whether he’s reading his own stories — like in The Voice from the Edge and Run for the Stars — or the works of others — as in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game or Jule Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (which is a great favorite of mine and my son’s) — you get to hear a man who loves, Loves, LOVES telling stories. He puts on accents, whispers, shouts, cackles wildly, weeps, rushes headlong through this and that paragraph, and takes his sweet-ol’-time tasting every word in a particular sentence so that you come to hear every sense of every word. He always delivers a masterful performance and is worth listening to again and again.

That’s all for today, kiddies. I hope you’ll take a trip to your local library and dig up some books from ol’ Uncle Harlan. Grab anything you can find. You really can’t miss. Crack one of his books open and you’ll find yourself transported into the circuited belly of an insane supercomputer or to a world run strictly on time by the Tick-Tock Man or to a warehouse where the Phantom Sweetener has just pulled the soul of your dead Aunt Babe from a long-forgotten, sit-com laugh track. No matter where you end up, you’ll be sure to have...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: Aura by Carlos Fuentes

You open your eyes. It is morning. Sunshine is streaming through the slats of your window blinds. The straight lines of light on the floor are slowly creeping their way up the edge of your bed. You pull yourself upright to sit on the edge of your mattress. Your hands rub the crust from your eyes while your feet find your slippers. You grab your phone before stumbling out to the kitchen. As you lean against the counter, listening to the coffeemaker burp and hiss, you check your favorite blog, LARPing Real Life. It’s another great “Long Form Friday” post. This time, it’s a novella by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes called Aura. It’s a shame, you think, that this poor slob can’t make a living from his writing. You decide to send the blogger twenty bucks. Twenty? More like fifty! A hundred! Anything to keep these great little essays coming your way...

Well...you can’t blame a starving artist for trying.

It may or may not be morning when you read this, but today’s Blog-o-ween 2023 post really is all about that great short little novel by Carlos Fuentes, Aura. Unlike the other stories we have covered this month, which have all been written in either the first-person, the third-person limited, or the third-person omniscient, Aura is written in the second-person present. It addresses the reader directly as “you” in this moment of “now.” This choice of narrative voice and the story that Fuentes tells conspire to place the reader in an interesting, if not frightening, time-space conundrum. How does this happen? Well...you scroll down the page...you read on...you can’t help but be fascinated...what is Carlos Fuentes’s Aura all about?

“You’re reading the advertisement: an offer like this isn’t made every day. You read and reread it. It seems to be addressed to you and nobody else. You don’t even notice when the ash from your cigarette falls into the cup of tea you ordered in this cheap, dirty café. You read it again. ‘Wanted, young historian, conscientious, neat. Perfect knowledge of colloquial French.’ Youth...knowledge of French, preferably after living in France for a while...‘Four thousand pesos a month, all meals, comfortable bedroom-study.’ All that’s missing is your name...”

Felipe Montero, young French-speaking historian, conscientious, neat, follows the advertisement’s direction to a neighborhood in the old center of the city. There, the buildings are a jumble of the old and new: the ground floors are all new shops and businesses selling cheap wares; above, the second floors are untouched by time. “Up there,” Felipe says (or you say), “everything is the same as it was.” Before entering the house at 815 Donceles Street, Felipe tries to “retain some single image of that indifferent outside world.” Then, the door closes behind him and he is enclosed in darkness.

In the house, he meets an old woman, Consuelo. She is the widow of General Llorente, whose journals Felipe is to organize, finish, and publish before her death. Also living in the house is the widow’s young niece, Aura, who doesn’t seem to say much, but for whom Felipe quickly develops strong feelings.

As the work on the General’s writings progresses, Felipe finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the the story of Llorente and Consuelo’s life together. What is the connection between himself and the General? What is the connection between the old woman and her niece? Why is it when one talks, the other’s lips move? For what is Felipe being groomed?

Written in 1962, Aura is a magical realist novel that has more to do with reality than one suspects at first glance. The man whose letters Felipe is asked to organize was a member of the conservative group who welcomed and fought for the French invasion of Mexico in the 1860s. When that insurrection was defeated (thus giving us Cinco de Mayo), Llorente, who was forty-two at the time, and his young bride, Consuelo, went into exile. One hundred years later, this same conservatism is reawakening in Mexico. In order to succeed, it must infiltrate, absorb, and be reborn in the youth of the country. Aura, then, is about the return of the repressed.

The second-person present narrative works in Aura like a black magic spell being cast over the reader. Indeed, it is black magic that Consuelo and Aura are weaving around Felipe. The use of “you” gives the reader a sense of immediacy and a false sense of agency. Aura is like a choose-your-own-adventure novel but with only one choice available — Consuelo’s.

In addition to the odd narrative voice, Aura is a bilingual novel. On the left page, you have the story in Spanish; on the right, it is in English. This split also works to draw the reader into the story even if you can’t read the other language. While reading the story in English, you can’t help but glance over at the Spanish page. It’s like it is beckoning to you, wanting to draw you into its rhythms, to pull you into its hegemony. Aside from the ways in which the dual language presentation works in the story, it’s a great way to pick up a second (or third or fourth!) language. As Fuentes once said, “Monolingualism is a disorder that is easily remedied.” 

Carlos Fuentes was born in Panama City, Panama, in 1928. His father was a Mexican diplomat, so Fuentes’s family spent much of their time moving from city to city throughout Latin America. This, Fuentes claimed later, gave him an important, outsider’s perspective on Latin American culture and history.

After spending much of his childhood in Washington, D.C. (becoming fluent in English in the process), Fuentes and his family moved to Santiago, Chile, where he became interested in the work of Chilean poet Pablo Naruda. He moved to Mexico at the age of sixteen. It was the first time he’d lived in his native country. He studied law, worked for a daily newspaper, and then moved to Geneva, Switzerland, to attend the Graduate Institute of International Studies. In the late 1950s, he was the head of cultural relations at the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. This diplomatic post only lasted until 1958, when he wrote and published his first novel, Where the Air Is Clear (La región más transparente). After this book made him a national celebrity, he was able to leave his job and write full-time.

Like Aura, many of Fuentes’s novels employ avant-garde and experimental narrative techniques. Books like The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz), A Change of Skin (Cambio de piel), Terra Nostra, and The Old Gringo (Gringo viejo) bounce back and forth in time, use multiple narrators, and use cinematic techniques borrowed from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, such as close-up, cross-cutting, deep focus, and flashback.

Fuentes died on May 12, 2012, after being found collapsed on the floor of his Mexico City home. His last message on Twitter is one that, sadly, is still prescient today:

“There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.”

You finish reading today’s Blog-o-ween 2023 post. You put down your phone and pour yourself a cup of coffee. Standing in the kitchen, looking out the window, you wonder why odd thoughts leap into your mind. Thoughts that seem at one and the same time utterly alien and completely your own. You feel like you are caught between worlds, having to choose between waking nightmare and...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Bacchae" by Elizabeth Hand

Just the other day, I was having an online discussion with someone about the 1980s Satanic Panic (Hello, johnwithanhberry!) In the course of that conversation, I mentioned that I used to watch the evangelical preachers on television because, aside from the fact that they were comedy gold, they would rail against heavy metal and punk music with a real gusto. Heck, they had better musical tastes than a lot of my friends! I used to sit there with a notepad and pencil and jot down all the albums I needed to buy the next time I was at National Record Mart. “Dead Kennedys? Check! W.A.S.P.? Alrighty, then! Talking Heads? Wait...Talking Heads are Satanic? Okay, okay, Pastor Gary Greenwald, whatever you say!”

I find this method to still be useful in this new Satanic Panic we find ourselves in. (Now with 33% more panic!) Nosy parental groups and know-nothing political action committees are demanding the removal of scores of titles from school and public libraries. Why? Because they’re too violent, they’re too sexy, they’re too “woke”! Hell, sign me up, I say! You got a list of those book titles handy so I don’t get carpal tunnel syndrome writing them all down?

Today’s Blog-o-ween subject is another example of my “Well, if it’s making [enter your favorite stick-in-the-mud, busybody group here] uncomfortable, then it’s gotta be good.” style of media consumption. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a damn fine story.

Now, just imagine (or as my college French teacher would say, “Imaginez...imaginez...”) it’s 1991, you are perusing the letters section of the British magazine of science-fiction and fantasy, Interzone, and you come across this doozy that fairly drips with butthurt male indignation:

“I think I have seldom encountered a story as repulsive as ‘The Bacchae’...It was a vile parade of anti-male hatred, an exhibition of baroque man-killing justified, so it seems, by the crimes of discarded beer cans and a dying fish...[It] is nothing more than a snuff movie in prose, heaped with feathers, jewels, and fins...I hope that you’ll never again subject the magazine’s readers to similar chuckling depictions of agony.”

If you are like me, then your very next thought is “Where, oh where, do I find Elizabeth Hand’s short story, ‘The Bacchae’? I have to read it!” What kind of kinky kicks are committed in said story that could have ruined this poor guy (and, of course, it was a guy) for marriage and caused him to write such a strongly-worded letter? Let’s find out...

“She got into the elevator with him, the young woman from down the hall, the one he’d last seen at the annual Coop Meeting a week before. Around her shoulders hung something soft that brushed his cheek as Gordon moved aside to let her in: a fur cape, or pelt, or no, something else. The flayed skin of an animal, an animal that when she shouldered past him to the corner of the elevator proved to be her Rottweiler, Leopold. He could smell it now: the honeyed stench of uncured flesh, a pink and scarlet veil still clinging to the pelt’s ragged fringe of coarse black hair. It had left a crimson streak down the back of her skirt, and stippled her legs with pink rosettes.”

It is the not-too-distant future (next Sunday, A.D.), and the earth is in the throes of an ecological collapse. There are shields in orbit to protect the planet from the sun’s UV radiation. Gordon, our protagonist, is wandering through the landscape of his city as a sort of “stranger in a strange land.” There seems to be a shift occurring of which poor Gordon is slowly becoming aware. Women seem to be lashing out, striking back against the men in this world.

“Gordon had heard of some of these on television, but other tales came from friends, male friends. Near escapes recounted in low voices at the gym or club, random acts of violence spurred by innocent offers of help in carrying groceries, the act of holding a door open suddenly seen as threatening. Women friends, even relatives, sisters and daughters refusing to accompany family on trips to the city. An exodus of wives and children to the suburbs, from the suburbs to the shrinking belts of countryside ringing the megalopolis. And then, husbands and fathers disappearing during weekend visits with the family in exile.”

Gordon hears the story of Debbie Delucia on the evening news. She was on trial for the murder of a young man she claimed had assaulted her the summer before:

“The young man had been beaten severely about the face and chest with one of Ms. DeLucia’s high-heeled shoes. When he was found by the parking lot attendant most of his hair was missing. Gordon switched off the television when it displayed photographs of these unpleasantries, followed by shots of a throng of cheering women outside the courthouse.”

Ms. DeLucia was found not guilty.

The next morning brings the story of three women who, having left a nightclub and been harassed by a group of young men, killed one of them “with a ferocity the newspaper described as ‘demonic.’”

Gordon finds that his partner, Olivia, is also experiencing some sort of awakening, a kind of violent metamorphosis. One night, they take a walk by the river. Gordon wants to get back to the street, but Olivia walks to the river’s edge and pulls a dying fish from the water. She angrily accuses Gordon of being blind to what is happening to the world, of not caring that this poisoned planet is becoming unlivable. “There’d be nothing left at all,” she tells him, “if it was up to people like you.”

Uh-oh, Gordy!

On their way home, Olivia confronts two men and proceeds to kick the everloving snot out of them. Worse (at least from Gordon’s perspective), she seems to enjoy the violence.

What is happening to Olivia? What is happening to the world? Why does there seem to be a switching of gender roles, with men afraid to walk the streets alone at night for fear of running afoul of predatory women? 

In her notes about this story in her collection The Best of Elizabeth Hand, she says that “the Bacchae” is her “ecofeminist homage to J.G. Ballard.” After its initial publication in Interzone, Hand says readers named it their most hated story of the year and that

“The mostly male readership of that magazine hated it and wrote letters to that effect, which is how I knew I’d done a good job and hit a nerve.”

Oh, yeah, you did!

You can see the inspiration and influence of Ballard in Hand’s tale. However, where Ballard would have detailed and investigated the ecological space, Hand is more concerned with the psychological toll that space has on the individuals within it. Hand uses the play “The Bacchae” by Euripedes to great effect. In that ancient Greek tragedy, King Pentheus is torn asunder by the women of his kingdom, driven mad by the god Dionysus during a festival. Hand’s women are also driven mad, not by a god, but by a world destroyed by men.

After being published by Interzone, “The Bacchae” was included in the anthology Best New Horror 3, edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell. It later made its way into Hand’s own collections Last Summer at Mars Hill and The Best of Elizabeth Hand. You can still read it online here on the Nightmare magazine website.

The Dark Tome (which I always call “The Dark To Me” because there’s just something about their logo that makes me read it that way) is an audio drama podcast that follows a young girl named Cassie who uses the books she finds in a spooky old shop as doorways to other worlds. One of the stories she travels to is “The Bacchae.” It’s a slightly different telling of the tale, but still an interesting one. You can find the link to the episode here.

This is the second Elizabeth Hand story we’ve written about for Blog-o-ween 2023, so if you want to learn more about this amazing writer, then jump back to the post about her novel Wylding Hall here. Since writing about that short novel, I’ve had the opportunity to listen to its audiobook, and I have to say that I loved the way it used multiple actors to mimic the epistolary-documentary interview narrative format of the novel. Highest recommendations!

So, we come to the end of another Blog-o-ween entry. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember, fellas, not everything in this world is meant for or about you. One man’s repulsive, vile parade of baroque anti-male hatred is another woman’s...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!