I bought this collection on a whim a couple of years ago, and it languished on my shelf, unread.  I had tried reading Wells before, back in college, War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, and was fairly unimpressed.  His language was stuffy and old-fashioned, I thought, and his allegories tortured.  So even though I like short stories as a form, I really wasn't expecting much when I picked this up.

I love being wrong in that way.  It's one of my favorite things about reading, that moment when I suddenly realize I'm going to love this book I hadn't thought much of a minute ago.  From the first page of the first story in this collection, I was floored.

And unlike all too many short story collections, everything in here is good.  No filler, no duds, no self-indulgent B-sides thrown in to bulk up the page count.  With the quality of the selections, the haunting 1911 photo illustrations by Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the beauty of the book as a physical object (thick, textured paper; illuminated letters), this has joined Winesburg, Ohio and The Illustrated Man as one of my favorite short story collections of all time.

The Door In The Wall:

In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad -- as only in rare moments and when one is young and joyful one can be glad in this world.  And everything was beautiful there...

A successful politician is haunted by a magical garden he discovered once as a child and has never been able to find again.  Though the door to it has appeared to him occasionally throughout his life, he has always been too busy to stop and enter it when it is offered him.

This story is my favorite.  It has the feel of a religious allegory, a kind of "paradise lost", or stories about childhood like Peter Pan or The Polar Express, where as adults weighed down by petty quotidian concerns, the wonder and magic of childhood are forever lost to us.

But it's deeper than that, too.  And it's such a fundamental feeling for me, a frequency I am always tuned to.  I have always tended toward nostalgia, which at times is just a flimsy covering over a vast chasm of grief for things lost in the past that can never be regained.  This story offers a perfect encapsulation of that feeling.  A door into a place familiar and sacred.

The Star:

He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy.  "You may kill me," he said after a silence.  "But I can hold you -- and all the universe for that matter -- in the grip of this little brain.  I would not change.  Even now."

In this apocalyptic story, a strange celestial body enters the solar system from beyond, crashing into Neptune and causing them both to plunge headlong into the sun, narrowly missing Earth in the process.

The terrestrial effects of this cosmic fly-by are cataclysmic - storms, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and disastrous global warming.  But after it passes, a "new brotherhood grew presently among men" - those left alive, anyway.  And then the story pulls back to the perspective of Martian astronomers, who note that the Earth is little changed ("the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole").  How insignificant are our Earthly struggles from a cosmic point of view.  How fragile we are, and how vulnerable.

I am fascinated by this story for a lot of reasons: Is it true that only near-obliteration would create a "brotherhood of men"?  How bad would our present struggle against climate change have to get to bring something like that about?  And shouldn't we be working on colonizing space already, so that if something DOES happen to Earth all of humanity won't be obliterated with it?

A Dream of Armageddon:

"We are but phantoms!" he said, "and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights -- so be it!  But one thing is real and certain, one thing is no dreamstuff, but eternal and enduring.  It is the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether vain.  I loved her, that woman of a dream.  And she and I are dead together!"

Oh shit, this story.

A man on a train meets a stranger, who tells him he has been living a separate life each night when he dreams.  There, it is several hundred years in the future, and he is an important politician who has run away from a war and his duty to be with the woman he loves.  But he can only run for so long...

This is the most moving story in the book, powerful and searing and unforgettable in its imagery.  I may have to revise my statement above that "The Door in the Wall" is my favorite in this collection.  Because while that one is the most iconic and mythic, the one that taps most profoundly into the collective unconscious - this is one of the best pieces of short fiction I have ever read.  If you like science fiction at all, you need to read this story.  It's just that good.

The Cone:

"I am slow to make discoveries," said Horrocks grimly, damping her suddenly.  "But what I discover..."  He stopped.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing."

I really wasn't expecting to find a gothic horror story in this collection, so this one took me by surprise.  And it's so good.  Grim and grotesque and shockingly graphic.  The way Wells slowly buillds this heavy sense of foreboding from the very first paragraph is masterful, and then the payoff...!

I suppose the moral of this one is: Don't get involved with your boss's wife if he is an enormous, angry man and you are a sniveling pantywaist.

"Fizzle, you fool!  Fizzle, you hunter of women!  You hot-blooded hound!  Boil!  Boil!  Boil!"

A Moonlight Fable:

He had made up his mind.  He knew now that he was going to wear his suit as it should be worn.  He had no doubt in the matter.  He was afraid, terribly afraid, but glad, glad.

This is the closest thing to a dud, for me, that the book offers, and yet it is critically acclaimed, so someone is finding something in it.

It's a highly symbolic wisp of a story about a little boy whose mother makes him a very nice suit that he is forbidden to wear except on formal occasions.  One night, he puts it on and sneaks out of the house, having a magical moonlit adventure in the yard before falling to his death in his now-ruined suit.  They find his corpse smiling.  Meh.

For me, it's just too similar (and inferior) to "The Door in the Wall" to be all that memorable.  And little allegories like this are probably the most difficult kind of fiction to pull off well.  Wells doesn't quite manage it here.

The Diamond Maker:

"I am sick of being disbelieved," he said impatiently, and suddenly unbuttoning his wretched coat he pulled out a little canvas bag that was hanging by a cord round his neck.  From this he produced a brown pebble.  "I wonder if you know enough to know what that is?"

In this one, the narrator is approached by a beggar who offers him a raw diamond the size of his thumb for 100 pounds.  He then tells the story of how he discovered the way to make large artificial diamonds, but because his neighbor accused him of making bombs he has been forced into hiding, rich with jewels that no one will buy.

This one isn't my favorite either, but it does make think of how just having some of the right accoutrements (wealth, beauty, smarts, diamonds) won't necessarily improve your lot.  And sure, the beggar's way of creating diamonds seems like forgery, a get-rich-quick scheme that isn't legitimate.  But how is it more legitimate to just be born into money?  How does that make you worthy?  At least the beggar is clever.

In any case, what this dude needed was a diamond launderer.  If only the narrator had been up for a business venture...

The Lord of the Dynamos

It is hard to say exactly what madness is.  I fancy Azuma-zi was mad.  The incessant din and whirl of the dynamo shed may have churned up his little store of knowledge and his big store of superstitious fancy, at last, in to something akin to frenzy.

This story, about a "fresh off the boat" foreigner who begins to worship the dynamos (generators) that he services, is another favorite.  Its major flaw is that it's pretty racist in its portrayal of the protagonist, Azuma-zi -- and the fact that the story is 100 years old doesn't make some of its descriptions any more comfortable to read.  Still, Azuma-zi is portrayed more or less sympathetically, and his abuse at the hands of his boss, Holroyd, is thoroughly condemned.

I just love the way this one develops and plays out.  It's another model for how short stories should be constructed - brief, punchy, unforgettable.  And without spoiling it too much, I love how Azuma-zi's dynamo god is actually a far more effective deity than many of its more famous peers.  That bastard answered some prayers.

The Country of the Blind:

There were deep, mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue deepening into purple, and purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was the illimitable vastness of the sky.  But he heeded these things no longer, but lay quite still there, smiling as if he were content now merely to have escaped from the valley of the Blind, in which he had thought to be King.  And the glow of the sunset passed, and the night came, and still he lay there, under the cold, clear stars.

This is probably Wells's most famous work of short fiction, and with reason.  If you haven't read it, you should probably quit reading my bullshit and get ahold of this collection.  I keep overusing superlatives, so I won't say that this one is "the best".  But damn.  Just damn.  Here's what the dustflap says:

The book concludes with "The Country of the Blind", a durably famous tale which underscores Wells's belief that a person can and should quit an intolerable situation.  Bernard Bergonzi notes, "it shows how the human spirit can assert its true freedom, even at the cost of physical extinction.  'The Country of the Blind' is a magnificent example of Wells's mythopoeic genius."

Critic Richard Hauer Costa says:

Wells viewed mankind darkly: as struggling in an evolutionary whirl to achieve a millennium of beauty, but always forced back into some sealed-off country of the blind.

I won't summarize this one.  It's a strange and precious and powerful story.  I've dreamt about it, and it terrifies me.

Among the blind, close your eyes.

- Turkish proverb

(2014 #15)

I've always known there was something deeply wrong about Ikea.  It's like some kind of Swedish hellscape, a garish blue-and-yellow mercantile abyss.  You go there and wander that infernal labyrinth in despair, and you feel your soul being sucked out of you slowly by some unseen chthonic force.  That endless forgery of rooms that will never be lived in, fake books on the shelves, cardboard televisions staring out at you blankly.  All of it mocking you, all of it exposing the vast meaningless depths of modern consumerism.  And all around you, the shrieks of small children and the gripes of sullen adolescents.  Hounding you, assailing you, wearing you down.

And all you wanted was a god damn particleboard bookcase.

Leave it to China Miéville to delineate and intensify and vivisect that vague revulsion.  Who else would situate a horror story in the kiddie ballpit of a suburban furniture megastore?

The short story collection Looking for Jake is disappointingly mediocre, overall.  This story is its best offering, but it's a triumph.  Worth picking up the book for this one alone.

In this story, the narrator John is a security guard in an unnamed superstore:

It's on the outskirts of town, a huge metal warehouse.  Full of a hundred little fake rooms, with a single path running through them, and all the furniture we sell made up and laid out so you can see how it should look.  Then the same products, disassembled, packed flat and stacked high in the warehouse for people to buy.  They're cheap.

Yeah, I think I recognize this place...

But not all is well in this consumer mecca.  John keeps getting called over to manage various incidents in the childcare area.  They seem innocuous at first -- upset children, frazzled attendants -- but oddly they all seem to surround the ball room, that vibrant chamber of childlike glee:

And how can anything be terrifying about that place?  I googled all kinds of variations on "scary ball pit" and "horror ball pit" and so forth, and got nothing more creepy than, well, this.  Or rather, this:

(who--or WHAT--is collecting all the yellow ones at the end of the abandoned hallway??)

So, you know, ball pits: FUN FOR ALL!  Except when they are terrifying.

What could be hiding just out of sight within all those colorful balls, after all?  Who are all the lonely children playing with?  Why does the attendant have so much trouble keeping track of how many kids are in there at a time?

"It always seems like there's too many," she said.  "I count them and there's six, and I count them again and there's six, but it always seems there's too many."

Read this one alone, or late at night, at your own risk.  It may have put me off ever shopping at Ikea again, but then... I always knew there was something off about that place.

--

Other recommended stories in this collection: "Foundation", "An End to Hunger", "'Tis the Season".  The rest can be skipped.

(2014 #12)

The grandson wants to remember what the father wished to forget.

- Anonymous

The moral of "The Rats in the Walls", like so many Lovecraft stories, is Ignorance is bliss.  Or more specifically its corollary, Cognizance is torment. So don't go poking around swampy cyclopean structures, or digging up hex-marked graves, or hanging out with pagan cannibal cults.  Just don't.  "We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

But every Lovecraft story worth its salt features some dumbass protagonist who does not heed this warning.  Here, we have the last scion of the de la Poer family, a once-prominent English clan, who decides to restore the ancestral home, Exham Priory.

The place had not been inhabited since the reign of James the First, when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely unexplained, nature had struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants; and driven forth under a cloud of suspicion and terror the third son, my lineal progenitor and the only survivor of the abhorred line.

So yeah, going back there and digging up the past: sounds like a great idea!  How could this possibly end badly?

Shortly after moving in, de la Poer is wakened at night by what sounds like a massive horde of rats scratching and scurrying within the ancient walls, descending from the eaves down toward the cellar.  This cacophony repeats nightly and has him understandably unnerved, especially since it seems only he and the cats can hear it.

And rats at Exham Priory are not without precedent: Legend has it that a "scampering army of obscene vermin had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion"; the rats had swept throughout the countryside devouring everything in their path, including livestock and a couple of humans.  If rats are again infesting the manor, de la Poer wants them exterminated immediately.  And that means investigating the basement, which turns out to be a lot deeper and more sinister than he ever expected...

Just recently, I was reading about literary descents into the abyss in Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead.  She discusses voyages to the underworld as a metaphor for writing.  Where does a writer's inspiration come from?  Somewhere deep and shadowy in the earth, where the dead who have gone before us can grant to us their tales and the words we need to tell them.  And though Atwood doesn't describe it this way, to me this murky destination signifies not so much the underworld as the human subconscious.  It isn't the dead providing us with inspiration; it's something buried deep and shrouded within ourselves.

But horrors lurk within our subconscious as well - appalling and forbidden desires, disquieting repressed memories, blood-lust and power-lust and plain old lust-lust.  All those Freudian grotesques.  And perhaps a subliminal and indelible racial memory lurks there too, following us doggedly down through the generations.

For de la Poer is haunted not just by the sound of the rats in the walls, but also by a recurring nightmare:

I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike.

This is not his own memory, but an impression filtering in from his family's distant past.  He knows, before he can know, what lies there forgotten in the fathomless sub-basement.  He has inherited this dreadful knowledge, like one might inherit a snub nose or a lazy eye.  He carries the past within him.  It is him, and with the right trigger it may be able to overtake him.

For it isn't the dusty relics entombed far below the basement of Exham Priory that are so terrifying, in the end.  It's the relics entombed within de la Poer's mind, within his soul, quietly scurrying like the rats within the walls and waiting for their moment

to

emerge.

This is the first in a series of single-serving short story reviews.  Though I am not certain about my future at GoodReads, or my satisfaction with BookLikes as an alternative, the blog format over here makes it ideal for reviewing short fiction individually - something that had always been awkward on GR.

It's October, so I'll start with something creepy.

In 1945, Ray Bradbury visited Guanajuato, Mexico, and "The Next in Line" is the disturbing result.  It's one of my favorite scary stories, not least because the truth behind it is so unnerving on its own.  Where many horror writers take something mundane and make it spooky, here Bradbury takes something spooky and makes it terrifying.

It all started because of a grave tax imposed in Guanajuato in 1865.  Relatives of the dead were required to pay annually to keep their dearly departed underground; fail to pay up, and your loved one's corpse would be dug up to make room for someone else in the crowded cemeteries.

When they began to exhume bodies, however, the authorities discovered that many of them had naturally mummified in Guanajuato's arid soil.  And what do you do with a bunch of disinterred mummies whose deadbeat descendents won't pay the grave tax?  Stand 'em up in a line, of course, and charge tourists a couple of pesos to gawk.

This is what disturbed Bradbury so much when he and a friend visited the Museo de las Momias in 1945.  And it's easy to see why:

Because holy shit, that's why.

And as if these tranquil corpses weren't freaky enough, there's Ignacia Aguilar.  Believed to have died from a heart condition, it was discovered upon digging her up that in fact she'd died of being buried alive - which was a thing that happened disturbingly often back in the day.  Bradbury's characters tell her story:

"Here is an interesting one," said the proprietor.

They saw a woman with arms flung to her head, mouth wide, teeth intact, whose hair was wildly flourished, long and shimmery on her head.  Her eyes were small pale white-blue eggs in her skull.

"Sometimes, this happens.  This woman, she is a cataleptic.  One day she falls down upon the earth, but is really not dead, for, deep in her, the little drum of her heart beats and beats, so dim one cannot hear.  So she was buried in the graveyard in a fine inexpensive box. . . ."

"Didn't you know she was cataleptic?"

"Her sisters knew.  But this time they thought her at last dead.  And funerals are hasty things in this warm town."

"She was buried a few hours after her 'death?'"

"Si, the same.  All of this, as you see her here, we would never have known, if a year later her sisters, having other things to buy, had not refused the rent on her burial. So we dug very quietly down and loosed the box and took it up and opened the top of her box and laid it aside and looked in upon her--"

Marie stared.

This woman had wakened under the earth.  She had torn, shrieked, clubbed at the box-lid with fists, died of suffocation, in this attitude, hands flung over her gaping face, horror-eyed, hair wild.

"Be pleased, señor, to find that difference between her hands and these other ones,"said the caretaker.  "Their peaceful fingers at their hips, quiet as little roses.  Hers?  Ah, hers! are jumped up, very wildly, as if to pound the lid free!"

"Couldn't rigor mortis do that?"

"Believe me, señor, rigor mortis pounds upon no lids.  Rigor mortis screams not like this, nor twists nor wrestles to rip free nails, señor, or prise boards loose hunting for air, señor.  All these others are open of mouth, si, because they were not injected with the fluids of embalming, but theirs is a simple screaming of muscles, señor.  This señorita, here, hers is the muerte horrible."

And here's Ignacia, discovered face-down in her coffin, arms up by her scratched and bloodied face, as though she had attempted to push up the coffin lid with her back:

Clearly, this tale did not need much embellishment to freak a reader out.  But that's Bradbury's genius, because "The Next in Line" isn't really about a bunch of creepy-ass mummies.  Or in any case, not just about a bunch of creepy-ass mummies.  It's the living in this story that are infinitely more frightening.

Note: Spoilers follow.

"The Next in Line" opens with a middle-aged American couple, Joseph and Marie, on vacation in a small Mexican town.  Joseph is eager to check out the famed mummies on display in the cemetery catacombs, but Marie is skittish and filled with a formless dread.  Just that morning, they had witnessed a funeral procession for an infant, and Marie is fixated on morbid thoughts:

He said, "Some little girl or boy gone to a happier place."

"Where are they taking-- her?"

She did not think it unusual, her choice of the feminine pronoun. Already she had identified herself with that tiny fragment parceled like an unripe variety of fruit. Now, in pressing darkness, a stone in a peach, silent and terrified, the touch of the father against the coffin material outside gentle and noiseless and firm inside.

That is not the right state of mind for descending into the catacombs to rub elbows with the unquiet dead.  And indeed, when Joe drags her down there, she doesn't take it too well.

Marie counted in the center of the long corridor, the standing dead on all sides of her.

They were screaming.

They looked as if they had leaped, snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands over their shriveled bosoms and screamed, jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils flared.

And been frozen that way.

All of them had open mouths.  Theirs was a perpetual screaming.  They were dead and they knew it.  In every raw fiber and evaporated organ they knew it.

She stood listening to them scream.

Meanwhile, Joe is giving the mummies silly nicknames and telling them to "say ahh!"  Such a comedian!

So it's no surprise that Joe and Marie's marriage is in trouble.  One sentence early in the story cuts to the heart of it:  She lay back and he looked at her as one examines a poor sculpture; all criticism, all quiet and easy and uncaring.

But as the story continues, it becomes increasingly clear that Joe is not just inconsiderate, but actively and derangedly cruel.  Mocking Marie's obvious distress over the mummies, he insists on buying a candy skull left over from the Day of the Dead.  He relishes eating it in front of her, making sure she notices that it is emblazoned with her own name.

Then, when she insists that they leave the town right away, the car mysteriously breaks down, requiring days of repair.  Trapped in this town with its buried, screaming secrets and this mocking stranger in her bed, madness creeps in on Marie.

What, after all, is the difference between a living person and those howling mummies?  Skip a few too many heartbeats, miss a few too many breaths, and we'll all end up just lifeless skin stretched over bones.  Marie becomes obsessed with her own heartbeat, terrified that it will abruptly stop.  Or that one tiny malfunction in a single cell will metastasize catastrophically.  But it isn't her own body she needs to fear.  It's the other body in the room, whom she begs - as her psychosis deepens - not to bury her in the catacombs.  She pleads with Joe, screaming - "Promise me!"

But he laughs at her, and he will not promise.

It's never clear what brought Joe and Marie to this place - why he despises and she cowers in fear.  Was he planning to murder her all along?  Is that why he's dragged her down to Mexico?  Or is it the trip itself, this endless traipse through foreign terrain, that drives them to destruction?  Marie says:

"Mexico's a strange land. All the jungles and deserts and lonely stretches, and here and there a little town, like this, with a few lights burning you could put out with a snap of your fingers."

And it is, in the end, Marie's light that is snuffed.  Maybe her own madness did her in after all, or maybe not.  All we see in the end is Joseph driving away alone, humming absent-mindedly with his little sheepish smile.

You can almost hear the corpses screaming.