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Last night the McNally Robinson bookstore in Grant Park Shopping Centre hosted a book launch for the chapbook produced from last year's Read Off at Keycon. Eight stories on the theme of "horror" were included, including my own, and seven of the authors showed up (including me) to read from their works.
A whole LOT of people showed up for the launch. The atrium was packed, with standing room only for those who came late. Even George came, in spite of having just finished a 30-hour shift of work and running on no sleep. (Now THAT'S devotion... *hugs him gently*) We took some photos, but this one comes from another person's album on Facebook:
(That's me on the left in the front row.)
My story, "Recording", is below the cut. I highly encourage anyone in Winnipeg to buy copies of the chapbook -- only $10 each, with proceeds going to the Winnipeg Library Foundation. McNally Robinson has copies on sale and there'll be more available at Keycon. Two hundred were produced, so get 'em while they're hot.
Onward to the fiction...
****************************************
“Recording”
by Laurie E. Smith
Keycon Read-Off 2009
Theme: Horror
************************
Whoever ends up hearing this, I can guarantee that it’s not what you were expecting. You won’t find the reasons why a successful psychotherapist to the upper classes has chosen to commit suicide. But you will find the solution to the Seville Row murders, the details of which are familiar to everyone in London who reads a newspaper. How could they not be? Successful men drugged and strangled, their bodies cut open and posed, blood splattered around them like sprays of parsley on a plate of fine cuisine...
Let me tell you about horror — and I can, believe me. I’ve been up to my wrists in a man’s abdominal cavity, unravelling his intestines for display (and you’d be very surprised at how much tensile strength intestines have for something that looks so pale and flimsy). I know what flesh feels like when you hammer a six-inch nail through it, and I know all the seemingly boneless ways that a corpse moves unless you know exactly how to keep it under control — the human body in death being often more tricky than it ever was in life.
But that’s not what I want to talk about, because that’s not real horror, at least by the standards of our civilization. I think horror, like terror, can be defined as that which stands beyond the bounds of common life and decency, and in today’s world, where graphic violence can be rented at the corner store for less than a dollar on a good day, simple “blood and guts” doesn’t qualify anymore. No, that sort of gruesomeness has been seen by anybody over the age of fourteen (and a great many children under that age, I’m guessing). Movies and crime scene photos have taken care of that.
What I want to talk about is the REAL horror, the REAL “outside”, the REAL “beyond the pale”. Because all the movies and all the images in the world are just that — snapshots, ephemera, either faked or out of our lives the second we switch off the screen or put down the book. To me, the posing of the bodies was only a flourish, a bit of whipped cream on top of the solid fact underneath, which is this:
There are some things that are irreversible. “No take backs,” as Stephen King (one of my favorite authors, by the way) might say. Not many things, but a few. And the big one, the one that there is absolutely NO chance of recovery from because it stops everything in its tracks, is physical death.
Well. In some cases that’s a blessing, isn’t it? One thing about all my victims — the thing that qualified them to become an object lesson in permanence in an impermanent world — is that they dealt the same hand to someone else that I dealt to them, but without the mercy of oblivion or transcedence. Samuel Whig, the alderman, has (or had) a daughter who keeps her eyes down and speaks in whispers, even though she’s in her late thirties and a successful painter. Brian McIntyre had a wife who kept watching my hands as if she expected them, at any moment, to rise up of their own accord and smack her into submission. And the other ten had similar stories in their background for anyone who cared to look to find. In their cases, also “no take backs”. At least my victims didn’t have to live with the irreversible, night after night after night. I gave them that much. Better than they gave their own “loved ones”, I must say.
As I was saying... death. Not the gore, not the putrefaction, but the sheer INSULT to the human condition that death constitutes. The end of a whole world, and more than that — all the secret dreams, unwritten stories, silent passions, unvoiced random thoughts on various subjects which might, for all we know, be as profound as anything written by Socrates or Neitzche. A rich and varied tapestry of living experience, extinguished and cast into final darkness that nothing can banish. Every death is a tragedy, even when the person in question sows misery by destroying companies or betraying the confidence of the people around them or diddling little children. Anything as awe-inspiring in its complexity and drama as a human mind deserves more than an hour-long service and a bouquet of calla lilies when it fades away. In fact, I think that if people could really think about death, really understand what it means, they’d be driven mad with rage and grief every time they read about a homeless man found dead behind a dumpster.
But they’re not, of course, because we don’t really consider it as a rule. I have. The death of... but I’ll let you figure that out for yourselves, shall I? Nobody will be able to make money writing a book about me if I give ALL my secrets away at once.
Imagine realizing that my face is the last face you’ll ever see. Realizing that you’ll never wake up from a good sleep again, or carelessly drive to work through the miracle of a sunrise, or have chocolate pudding or read the evening paper or see that little broken corner of the moulding in your front hallway. Realizing that this choking agony, this burning in your throat and ravening hunger in your chest, this gathering darkness, is all there is and all there will ever be.
Ever.
That’s a level of regret and horror that no one can conceive. Not even when it’s happening. I’d swear on my own life, soon to be ended, that up through that last instant of consciousness they were convinced that someone would save them.
The equally awful thing, of course, is that no one did. And that when it comes to death, no one can. People think that death is malevolent. They’re wrong. It’s a moon-eyed slack-jawed witless idiot, and worse. At least evil can be bargained with. At least evil offers some hope of reprieve.
On that note, I bid you all goodnight. It’s time for me to taste a bullet with oblivion as a chaser. How strange... even I, who have made this subject my midnight living for so many years, am finding it hard to comprehend that I’m about to step past the point of no return. But I’m going to do it anyway.
And even if I could describe what I find, I wouldn’t come back to tell you.
****************************************
A whole LOT of people showed up for the launch. The atrium was packed, with standing room only for those who came late. Even George came, in spite of having just finished a 30-hour shift of work and running on no sleep. (Now THAT'S devotion... *hugs him gently*) We took some photos, but this one comes from another person's album on Facebook:
(That's me on the left in the front row.)
My story, "Recording", is below the cut. I highly encourage anyone in Winnipeg to buy copies of the chapbook -- only $10 each, with proceeds going to the Winnipeg Library Foundation. McNally Robinson has copies on sale and there'll be more available at Keycon. Two hundred were produced, so get 'em while they're hot.
Onward to the fiction...
****************************************
“Recording”
by Laurie E. Smith
Keycon Read-Off 2009
Theme: Horror
************************
Whoever ends up hearing this, I can guarantee that it’s not what you were expecting. You won’t find the reasons why a successful psychotherapist to the upper classes has chosen to commit suicide. But you will find the solution to the Seville Row murders, the details of which are familiar to everyone in London who reads a newspaper. How could they not be? Successful men drugged and strangled, their bodies cut open and posed, blood splattered around them like sprays of parsley on a plate of fine cuisine...
Let me tell you about horror — and I can, believe me. I’ve been up to my wrists in a man’s abdominal cavity, unravelling his intestines for display (and you’d be very surprised at how much tensile strength intestines have for something that looks so pale and flimsy). I know what flesh feels like when you hammer a six-inch nail through it, and I know all the seemingly boneless ways that a corpse moves unless you know exactly how to keep it under control — the human body in death being often more tricky than it ever was in life.
But that’s not what I want to talk about, because that’s not real horror, at least by the standards of our civilization. I think horror, like terror, can be defined as that which stands beyond the bounds of common life and decency, and in today’s world, where graphic violence can be rented at the corner store for less than a dollar on a good day, simple “blood and guts” doesn’t qualify anymore. No, that sort of gruesomeness has been seen by anybody over the age of fourteen (and a great many children under that age, I’m guessing). Movies and crime scene photos have taken care of that.
What I want to talk about is the REAL horror, the REAL “outside”, the REAL “beyond the pale”. Because all the movies and all the images in the world are just that — snapshots, ephemera, either faked or out of our lives the second we switch off the screen or put down the book. To me, the posing of the bodies was only a flourish, a bit of whipped cream on top of the solid fact underneath, which is this:
There are some things that are irreversible. “No take backs,” as Stephen King (one of my favorite authors, by the way) might say. Not many things, but a few. And the big one, the one that there is absolutely NO chance of recovery from because it stops everything in its tracks, is physical death.
Well. In some cases that’s a blessing, isn’t it? One thing about all my victims — the thing that qualified them to become an object lesson in permanence in an impermanent world — is that they dealt the same hand to someone else that I dealt to them, but without the mercy of oblivion or transcedence. Samuel Whig, the alderman, has (or had) a daughter who keeps her eyes down and speaks in whispers, even though she’s in her late thirties and a successful painter. Brian McIntyre had a wife who kept watching my hands as if she expected them, at any moment, to rise up of their own accord and smack her into submission. And the other ten had similar stories in their background for anyone who cared to look to find. In their cases, also “no take backs”. At least my victims didn’t have to live with the irreversible, night after night after night. I gave them that much. Better than they gave their own “loved ones”, I must say.
As I was saying... death. Not the gore, not the putrefaction, but the sheer INSULT to the human condition that death constitutes. The end of a whole world, and more than that — all the secret dreams, unwritten stories, silent passions, unvoiced random thoughts on various subjects which might, for all we know, be as profound as anything written by Socrates or Neitzche. A rich and varied tapestry of living experience, extinguished and cast into final darkness that nothing can banish. Every death is a tragedy, even when the person in question sows misery by destroying companies or betraying the confidence of the people around them or diddling little children. Anything as awe-inspiring in its complexity and drama as a human mind deserves more than an hour-long service and a bouquet of calla lilies when it fades away. In fact, I think that if people could really think about death, really understand what it means, they’d be driven mad with rage and grief every time they read about a homeless man found dead behind a dumpster.
But they’re not, of course, because we don’t really consider it as a rule. I have. The death of... but I’ll let you figure that out for yourselves, shall I? Nobody will be able to make money writing a book about me if I give ALL my secrets away at once.
Imagine realizing that my face is the last face you’ll ever see. Realizing that you’ll never wake up from a good sleep again, or carelessly drive to work through the miracle of a sunrise, or have chocolate pudding or read the evening paper or see that little broken corner of the moulding in your front hallway. Realizing that this choking agony, this burning in your throat and ravening hunger in your chest, this gathering darkness, is all there is and all there will ever be.
Ever.
That’s a level of regret and horror that no one can conceive. Not even when it’s happening. I’d swear on my own life, soon to be ended, that up through that last instant of consciousness they were convinced that someone would save them.
The equally awful thing, of course, is that no one did. And that when it comes to death, no one can. People think that death is malevolent. They’re wrong. It’s a moon-eyed slack-jawed witless idiot, and worse. At least evil can be bargained with. At least evil offers some hope of reprieve.
On that note, I bid you all goodnight. It’s time for me to taste a bullet with oblivion as a chaser. How strange... even I, who have made this subject my midnight living for so many years, am finding it hard to comprehend that I’m about to step past the point of no return. But I’m going to do it anyway.
And even if I could describe what I find, I wouldn’t come back to tell you.
****************************************
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