There’s a new section, “Available in Audio…”, that will tell you where you can find audio versions of individual short stories.

In the revised “Short Stories & Collections” section, I’ve provided you with a more detailed bibliography, documenting publications since 2010 (along with relevant links, and brief notes about each work).  That’s where you can also find information about the three new stories scheduled for publication later this year.

Have a great weekend.  Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

What I’m not okay with is the drama surrounding awards – the near-manic frenzy for recognition and (sometimes vitriolic) bitterness when it doesn’t come. While I suspect this dynamic exists in all branches of speculative fiction, it seems to flourish in horror – a field that, in my opinion, too often mistakes rudeness for charisma. This morning I woke up to find an angry horror author on Facebook alleging favoritism in the Stokers. I have no idea whether or not his accusations have merit, but I found myself cringing at the snarky, entitled tone of his status update. It may not have been the best time and place for mudslinging.

Pay no attention to the menu at the Stoker awards banquet, the main course every year is sour grapes.

Let’s conduct a brief thought experiment (inspired by the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Imagine”). Imagine a world without awards – a world devoid of not only the Stokers, but all the rest of them, too. The World Fantasy Award, the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Black Quill Award, the Nebula, the Pushcart Prize, along with the awards for every other creative field (the Oscars, Golden Globes, etc).

Imagine all of them gone, as though caught up in the Rapture. Gone, at the snap of my fingers. Would genre fiction really be any worse off?

I know…awards fulfill some positive functions. Sometimes, they recognize work that might otherwise fall through the cracks. I’m acquainted with authors who’ve won awards.  Often, I have a deep respect for their work and — on a more personal level — I’m thrilled for them.  At their best,awards give readers a list of the sort of fiction worth paying attention to.  Hell, even a cynic like me can’t — in all honesty — be completely anti-award (in the interest of full disclosure, I’m volunteering to assist HWA with a project tangentially related to the Stokers, because I want to try to be a better citizen of the genre).

All that having been said, imagine the windfall writers and readers would get if all the time, energy, and emotion authors currently dedicate to campaigning for awards (and grousing about being overlooked) was channeled into something constructive like, I dunno, writing.

Of course, this is pipe dream.  There’s something in our DNA, something in our heritage as social primates, that leads us to appoint leaders/winners/”bests” even if we don’t need them. There’s something in our nature that loves knowing our place in the hierarchy. If World War III broke out and two-thirds of humanity died, it wouldn’t take long for the surviving third to establish an award for Best Hut. World War IV would be started by the runner-up.

So, we’re stuck with awards. Okay, then.  Let’s make lemonade out of lemons.  Can we at least use them as an opportunity to build each other up, rather than knock each other down? Can we use them as an opportunity to shine a spotlight on what we perceive as excellence, and accept defeat gracefully if it comes?  As an opportunity to focus on what we can give to the field, instead of what we can take from it?

[UPDATE:  By late in the afternoon, the angry Facebook status I referred to had been deleted.  I applaud the author for doing that.  Chalk one up for civility.]

This convention strikes me as a bit haphazard.  Why only ten?  What if there’s an eleventh book that deserves attention?  A 13th?  On the other hand, what if there are only six that stand out?  What if two books deserve a tie for first place?  What really separates number two on the list from number three?  More importantly, why not more discussion of individual short stories?

So instead, I’m just offering a list of short stories that I enjoyed in 2011 (sans ranking).  My criteria for inclusion is simple — I enjoyed them.  I felt moved by them.  They made me gasp or cry or laugh or they set off fireworks in my brain.  Some of these stories are classified as genre fiction, while others are classified as literary fiction.  I think the division between the two is growing increasingly hazy (and that that’s a good thing).  The main point is:  I enjoyed these stories, and I suspect many of the readers of Laughing at the Abyss will enjoy them, too.

Many of the stories I’m going to list here are reprints published in 2010 (or earlier), but only came to my attention this year due to the release of a new “Best Of” anthology or collection (or a new edition of an old anthology or collection).  But one of the stories is new, and I’m particularly excited to share that one with you.

New Noteworthy Short Fiction From 2011

• “A Brief Stay in Neligh, Nebraska” by Bonnie Nadzam in The Coffin Factory, Issue One.  I should clarify for this blog’s audience:  The Coffin Factory isn’t a horror magazine.  It’s a new, glossy literary magazine that publishes the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Milan Kundera, and Roberto Bolano.  I don’t think I found a disappointing piece in the entire magazine, but the ending of Nadzam’s story literally took my breath away.  You owe it to yourself to check this one out as soon as possible.  Simply brilliant.

Noteworthy Short Fiction From “Best Of” Anthologies Published in 2011 (Stories Originally Published Pre-2011)

• “The River Nemunas” by Anthony Doerr and “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” by Seth Fried in Pushcart Prize XXXV:  Best of the Small Presses.  Two dark stories, the first brooding and the second absurd.  Both blew me away.
• “The Ugliest Woman in the World” by Olga Tokarczuk in Best European Fiction 2011.  Dark meditation on identity, alienation, and the grotesque.
• “In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata” by Lauri Kubuitsile in The Caine Prize for African Writing 2011.  A smart, entertaining pseudo-paranormal bedroom farce set in a village in Botswana.

Classics I Only Discovered This Year Due To Being Reprinted In New Collections or Anthologies

• “Cram” by John Shirley in In Extremis:  The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley.   Originally published in 1997, this is a visceral account of a man who discovers himself only feeling truly alive when he is faced with certain, nightmarish death.  I’ve found In Extremis to be uneven, over all, but I think it’s almost worth buying just to get your hands on this story.  Highly recommended.
• “The Lottery in Babylon” by Jorge Luis Borges in Kafkaesque:  Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka.  Brilliant.  Jorge, where have you been all my life?  Why has it taken so long for me to discover you?
• “The Last Feast of Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti in Grimscribe:  His Lives and Works.  A perfect example of how Ligotti builds on Lovecraftian themes, but then transcends them with his own dark vision.  The Subterranean Press reprint of Grimscribe was one of my favorite books of the year.  Lots of great stories in Grimscribe, but this was probably my favorite.
• “Dancing Men” by Glen Hirshberg in Darkness:  Two Decades of Modern Horror.  This is the only short story (novella?) I’ve ever read that made me cry.  A mesmerizing tale of the multi-generational impact of trauma.  Darkness came out in 2010, but I didn’t discover it until late winter/early spring of this year.

Classics I Only Discovered This Year Due To Stumbling Across Books in Second-Hand Stores

• “A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver in The World of the Short Story:  A 20th Century Collection.  The most uplifting story about death you’ll ever read

So, for what it’s worth, that’s my take on things.  What’s yours?  Feel free to use the comments section below to share your own picks for noteworthy short fiction from 2011.

"This Little Piggy" by Lee Copeland (used with permission)

Artist Lee Copeland has created this digital painting depicting a scene from my short story “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Piggy Class”.

Ain’t it purty?

I met Lee last year at WonderFest in Louisville, Kentucky and fell in love with his snazzy portrait of H.P. Lovecraft.

You can buy a print of Lee’s “Piggy Class” art here at the linkety-link.

In other news, UK-based independent publisher Pendragon Press has purchased my flash fiction piece “A Burden No Less Heavy” for their forthcoming e-book anthology Nasty Snips II.

In a turbulent environment where genre publishers come and go, Pseudopod has kept bringing their listeners a short story just about every week  for five years now (with no signs of slowing down).  Past podcasts have included work by folks like Glen Hirshberg, Lavie Tidhar, and Simon Strantzas.

Wil Wheaton has blogged about Pseudopod, calling it “one of my favorites” and “pretty damn awesome”.

All of this is just my way of saying:  it’s a venue I’m proud to be associated with.

I know there’s a lot of hand-wringing that goes on about the future of the short story and the future of genre publishing and how all is Doom and Gloom.  There’s a lot of pining away for the good old days when [insert name of defunct horror magazine] appeared in your mailbox every other month like clockwork and the smell of the tabloid/pulp paper was intoxicating and sometimes, if the print was fresh, it’d rub off on your hand, etc.

I know.  I feel that way too, sometimes.

It’s easy to think that because magazines are struggling, the short story is struggling, too.  Easy, but mistaken.  Pseudopod is an example of technology enabling the horror short story to reach a whole new audience outside of our little (sometimes insular) community.  I’m thrilled that my work will be appearing in this sort of medium, accessible via iTunes (or the Pseudopod webpage).

No word yet on when “The Orchard…” will be podcast.  Stay tuned.

 Prior to reading “Gone”, I was obsessed with the power of the absurd and satiric; the dadaistic, outlandish, and the transgressive. These tendencies run deep in my personality. They’re part of who I am, and even now I’m not seeking to exorcise them. The only problem was that, for a good long while, those shades dominated my palette, to the exclusion of all else. Read any of the work I sold from 2009 or 2010 and I think you’ll see that.

 Then a few things happened (by sheer chance, really) that added new colors to my palette. I attended an event last December thrown by Apex Book Company to celebrate the launch of Gary Braunbeck’s non-fiction book To Each Their Darkness. As I’ve shared in part one of this blog series, Gary’s book was the place I first discovered “Gone”. I don’t know Gary Braunbeck well, personally, but after spending some time around him (sometimes as a student in various workshops), I’ve learned that I should take his opinions pretty damned seriously.

 I read the story.

 I discovered a new kind of horror, much different from most of what I’d been reading. It wasn’t really“new”, of course. It’d been around since the days of Ambrose Bierce, at least. But, for some reason, I hadn’t the opportunity to engage it. Maybe I hadn’t been taught before that it was worth engaging.

 “Gone” showed me how to terrify a reader without showing even a second of violence. “Gone” showed me that I could weave enough subtext around a tale to support it, without yielding to a compulsion to explain everything – it showed me a kind of horror the reader can deduce from putting together the puzzle him-or-herself. (“Gone” is like nothing so much as a jigsaw puzzle which remains inscrutable until the very last piece is placed. But the recognition of the completed picture – however delayed – sends waves of soul-sickness through the reader in a way few other moments can.)

 I’d learned in one of Gary’s short story classes (a few years ago, now) that there’s a trade-off with the short story form: what you lose in length you gain in intensity. (Of course, this isn’t an automatic sort of thing. It might be better said, “since what you’re offering is short you’d damned well better make things intense). “Gone” taught me a new way to manage that intensity. It taught me that there are times when a whisper or a whimper can be more intense than a scream. Tears can be more disturbing than blood.

 “Gone” also taught me that one of the most effective themes in storytelling is the ache of relationships lost (particularly the loss of relationships with children). It’s in The Odyssey. It’s in the myth of Demeter & Persephone. It probably goes back even before then.

 Around the same time I first encountered “Gone”, I also found myself – for the first time, with significant support – able to confront a variety of hitherto-triumphant personal demons. This, of course, impacted my writing. Before, my storytelling emanated from my head. Slowly (inspired by the work of Braunbeck, and Ketchum’s “Gone”, and enabled by my new ability to look past traumas in the eye), I started to let my heart into the act, too.

 Then my reading habits changed. An interest in “Gone” led to an interest in another author Braunbeck talks about in To Each Their Darkness, John Cheever. Cheever led to Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver led to Junot Diaz, and before you knew it I was knee-deep in so-called literary fiction (all of it with a decidedly dark bent, mind you). Nowadays, my reading habits are more diverse than they’ve ever been – and I’m loving it. Variety is the spice of life.

 And that’s what this blog is really about, isn’t it? Balance. This isn’t about throwing the baby out with the bath water. This doesn’t mean that my work won’t continue to be weird, a fair bit of the time. It doesn’t mean I’ll never play around with the transgressive again. What it means is that I’m no longer limited to the weird and transgressive. It was almost as though, before all of this, I only saw a limited band of the visible spectrum, and now I can see more of it. I have more colors on my palette. This means I have more ways to create. In the last year, I’ve written dark stories that weren’t weird at all. I’ve written stories influenced by a Bradburyesque nostalgia. I’ve written stories without any horrific or speculative element at all. Then I’ve also written stories that were every bit as odd and transgressive as the stuff I wrote before, but the oddness is tempered with what I like to think is a heightened emotional awareness.

 Ketchum’s entire career is a testament to the power of equipping one’s fiction-making toolbox with lots and lots of tools. Switching metaphors, no one can accuse him of being a one-trick pony. He can depict grisly violence or he can write quiet horror.   I think in Peaceable Kingdom he even includes a story set in the old west as well as an SF tale.  As he says in the introduction to that volume:  “As a writer, I’m all over the place.” In these days when newer authors are repeatedly told they need to rush to define themselves and “establish a brand”, Ketchum’s career shows this ain’t necessarily so. Or maybe it shows that “establishing a brand” doesn’t mean limiting yourself to a single creative approach.

 (Or maybe I just don’t know a damned thing about branding.)

 Brands are, after all, reserved for livestock. To the best of my knowledge, they’re never used for the benefit of the cow (or even for the benefit of those who eat they cow). They’re only for the benefit of its owner. We’d all do well to remember that.

]]> http://nicolecushing.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/how-reading-jack-ketchums-%e2%80%9cgone%e2%80%9d-changed-my-writing/feed/ 1 nicolecushing peaceable kingdom 1 http://nicolecushing.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/teasing-you/ http://nicolecushing.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/teasing-you/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:01:26 +0000 nicolecushing http://nicolecushing.wordpress.com/?p=1582 ]]>

19th Century Stripper "Dusty Drapes" LaRue. (So named because of the fabric she made her dress out of, right?)

Tease #1:   My short story “The Orchard of Hanging Trees” has found a good home.  Where?  Buy me a coke zero and I’ll spill the beans.  (Or, just wait a few days until I’ve signed the contract, then I’ll post the news here).  I will tell you this, though.  I’m particularly excited about this sale because this will extend my work into a new medium, giving me access to a broader audience.

I’m proud of this story, and can’t wait to share it with you.

Tease #2:  I’m editing a chapbook titled The Pessimist.  This will include reprinted work by a critically acclaimed author (a living legend in horror and dark fantasy, actually), as well as original work by a less-well known author who happened to send me a story that was paralyzingly dark.  (Is “paralyzingly” even a word?).  There’s still some work I’m acquiring for this one.  (And before you even ask, The Pessimist is not open to unsolicited submissions, sorry).  More news about this in a couple of weeks.  At this stage, even if you bought me a whole case of coke zero, I wouldn’t whisper a word of the delicious details.

Tease #3:  Mama Cushing’s Short Story Society will recommence next Monday with the last in a series of blogs on Jack Ketchum’s “Gone”.  I’ll be discussing the influence that story has had on changing the scope and direction of my writing career.

Stay tuned, Cushingistas!  Your patience will be rewarded.

NOT a command, just a title.

Umm…no.

That should be Drown by Junot Diaz.  It’s just a title, not an imperative sentence.

By the way, Drown is a superb collection of bleak literary fiction, reminiscent of the work of Raymond Carver.  I’ve only recently discovered both authors during my Story Each Night  project, and I’m grateful to have started reading both of them.

I know there are some readers of genre fiction who don’t engage literary fiction (and vice versa).  This is a shame.  If you’re the type of reader who tends to stick with a single author or genre (and let’s include “literary fiction” as a genre), I’d like to encourage you to branch out a little and try something new, something you might not ordinarily read.  This is what I find myself doing during Story Each Night, and I’ve been richly rewarded for the effort.

Photo Courtesy of Kevin Kovelant / JackKetchum.Net

Jack Ketchum’s books have sold over three million copies.  He’s won four Bram Stoker Awards.  Stephen King has referred to him as the “scariest guy in America”.  If that’s not enough to pique your interest, how about this:  he was a protege of Robert Bloch and served as literary agent for Henry Miller.

His most recent release, The Woman (co-authored with director Lucky McKee) is a novelization of  the controversial film of the same title.

This month, Laughing at the Abyss is taking a detailed look at Ketchum’s Stoker-winning Halloween story “Gone” in a three-part series.  Part one, posted last week, provided a synopsis and analysis of the story.   Today in part two, we hear from Jack, himself.  He tells us about the inspiration for “Gone”  and explores the connection between horror fiction and trauma.

Nicole Cushing:   I always enjoy it when an author shares his or her thoughts about a story (as Harlan Ellison has done in his famous story notes in his collections). I know that it’s been over ten years since “Gone” first appeared, but can you share with your readers any memories about how it came together?

Jack Ketchum:  When I was growing up we lived on a dead-end street, and almost every house on that street — about fourteen of them as I remember — was built on the post-World War II GI Bill.  That meant that, with only two exceptions, all the kids on the street were Baby Boomers, only a few years apart in age.  The same was true of most of the streets nearby.  Halloween was always our favorite holiday (unless you count the night before — Mischief Night.) It was one of my mother’s favorite holidays, too.  She made most of my costumes on her Singer Sewing Machine.  Superman, Peter Pan, etc.  We had a tub filled with water where the kids could bob for apples and apple cider for all of us thirsty trick-or-treaters and slabs of homemade pumpkin pie for the moms and dads of the younger ones.  Then we…grew up.  Went to college, moved away.  Got too old for kids’ stuff.  And I remember my mom’s very real sadness when on Halloween night hardly anybody came around anymore.  When Rich Chizmar asked me for a story for October Dreams I knew that was what I wanted to write about, that sadness.  Only I gave it a darker underpinning than just us kids fleeing the nests.

N.C.:  I first read “Gone” in October Dreams. Since then, I’ve started reading your collection, Peaceable Kingdom, and have discovered that several other stories touch on themes related to trauma and loss (in particular, the loss – either literal or metaphorical – of children). I’ve been kicking around a theory that horror fiction is, quite often, the literature of trauma – that horror readers and writers tend to be folks who’ve had more than their fair share of life’s dark side. This might not be an entirely new idea. Gary Braunbeck explores the notion in To Each Their Darkness. Do you think there’s anything to this? Is horror the literature of trauma?

J.K.:  Sure it is.  And loss.  I remember after 9/11 having a conversation with Peter Straub in which we both admitted we had no idea what the hell to write about.  The real-life trauma was too huge, especially for us New Yorkers.  With me this lasted for months.  Finally I got the idea to write about terror, only on a small, personal scale, and what emerged was the novella Closing Time, about a guy who robs bars at night, not so much for the money as for the thrill of terrorizing the bartenders, set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (to make the connection).  I’d just broken up with a woman I loved very much and based the bartender on her, with myself as the model for her ex-lover, who just happens to go looking for her that night — with terrible consequences.  I thought I’d broken my dry spell about writing about terror.  Clever me.  But when I re-read it I realized I hadn’t written about terror nearly so much as I’d written about loss — my own loss.  And then, a reader of mine told me subsequently that he thought that pretty much everything I’d ever written was about loss.  I’d sure never thought of it that way.  But when I checked back into my stuff, damned if he wasn’t right.

N.C.:  In “Gone”, the story starts with the protagonist already in a dark place, and progresses to an even darker place. I think it’s fair to say that many of your short stories progress in a similar fashion. In a Locus interview Caitlin Kiernan once talked about her propensity to inflict misery on her characters. She’s quoted as saying: “…I’m wondering, ‘Why do I do this to people?’ I keep dragging these poor characters through these horrible things – it’s just what happens when I write. Am I a literary sadomasochist, or am I only trying to accurately describe the way things are?”

I’m curious if you’ve ever asked yourself that question. What’s your answer?

J.K.:  It’s a cliche to say that I proceed from the dark side into the light, but sometimes a cliche is simply truth put simply.  Yeah, I put my characters through hell, but I’m also interested in human resourcefulness under pressure and the power of love, friendship, and courage.  I don’t think I’ve ever harmed one of my characters gratuitously — even those who richly deserved a world of hurt thrust upon them.  You have to have compassion, even for your bad guys.  I always want to look inside.

N.C.:  Last question.  Currently the book and film versions of The Woman are enjoying quite a bit of publicity, but I’m wondering if you’re working on any new short stories?

J.K.:  The answer to that one’s easy.  I haven’t for a while.  But yup, time for a short one or two.

Next week this series of articles on “Gone” concludes with part three — a look at the story’s continuing influence.  If you have comments about this interview, please feel free to post them in the area below  (note that comments will be moderated).  — N.C.

Jack Ketchum (Photo Used With Permission of Kevin Kovelant/ JackKetchum.Net)

Author: Jack Ketchum

Originally published in: October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween (Cemetery Dance hardcover edition, 2000; Roc trade paperback, 2002)

 Reprinted in: Peaceable Kingdom (Subterranean Press hardcover, 2002; Leisure Books mass market paperback, 2003; Leisure Books ebook, 2011)

 Awards: Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction for the year 2000 (presented in 2001); part of the collection Peaceable Kingdom, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Fiction Collection for 2003 (presented in 2004).

 Commentary on this story appears in: To Each Their Darkness by Gary A. Braunbeck (Apex, 2010)

 Spoiler-free synopsis: Our protagonist, Helen, decides (after some emotional struggle) to give out candy to trick-or-treaters for the first time since the kidnapping of her three year old daughter five years ago. She finds her house shunned by the neighborhood children. However, a trio of kids from outside the neighborhood show up at her doorstep. As a result of the brief encounter, Helen’s life descends into an even darker chasm of grief and loss.

 Why this story is important to the genre:

 “Gone” as an Example of the Power of Subtext

 In his nonfiction book on the horror genre, To Each Their Darkness, Gary Braunbeck devotes several pages to “Gone”, citing it as an example of the power of subtext in horror fiction, as well as an example of the “after the fact” story.

 To the uninitiated, Braunbeck describes an “after the fact” story as a short story in which “the main action of the story has already happened before the first sentence..in these stories you’re presented with a situation that, nine times out of ten, is in no way connected to what actually happened; you have to piece together the events by what is said and done by the characters.”

 Braunbeck makes a convincing case that “Gone” is the type of story the genre could benefit from seeing a lot more of, a story in which the horrific effect is magnified by having the horrific events deduced by the reader (much as the protagonist in the story also pieces the puzzle together, herself). It’s the sort of tale that works because of the power of understatement and suggestion. The general outline of the conclusion can be pieced together by the reader (which is disturbing, in its own right), but the ending is open-ended enough to leave the reader unsettled by considering a handful of alternate specific scenarios, leaving the ending hurtfully ragged and raw.

 Braunbeck refers to “Gone” as “one of the most elegant, chilling, and genuinely disturbing” stories Ketchum has ever written.

 “Gone” as an Example of Effective “Escapable Horror”

 I’m kicking around a hypothesis that horror stories can be divided into two categories: those in which the horrific is inevitable, and those in which the horrific is escapable.

 Fine examples of inevitable horror abound. Cosmic horror falls into this category. In the work of Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, horror is sewn into the very fabric of existence. But there are other examples of this sort of horror. I would argue that both Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” fall into the category of inevitable horror. (Digression – Yes, Butler is typically classified as a SF writer; ignore that classification. “Bloodchild” is one of the more disturbing pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. It’s horror set on another planet.)

 In both Jackson’s and Butler’s stories, horror may not be sewn into the fabric of existence, but it’s built into the social compact and is thus almost-equally inescapable.

 “Gone”, however, is an example of a case in which the horror is derived from missed opportunities. The horror of “Gone” is partially derived from how our protagonist could be spared her suffering if events had occurred just slightly earlier or later. While Jackson, Butler, and Ligotti invoke dread, “Gone” induces a sort of tragic agony because of all the near-misses involved.

 (Readers Beware: Beyond Here Be Spoilers)

To start off with, there’s the near-miss that happens before the story even starts. Helen refers to the kidnapping of her daughter as “the three minutes that changed everything.” If not for “an inconsequential event” (forgetting the newspaper and going back into a 7-Eleven for it, leaving her daughter in the car), the kidnapping may not have happened in the first place.

 The reader gets a sense of the guilt Helen feels about this, the torture she inflicts on herself, the rumination on how things would have been much different had she not gone back for the newspaper, or had gotten in and out of the store quicker.

 This initial near-miss is mirrored by the final, devastating one. Another three minutes that change everything. The trick-or-treaters reveal that they’re aware that Helen is “the lady who lost her baby” and that her child was a “little girl”. Then, just as she’s closing the door, Helen is given a clue about the possible whereabouts of her daughter when one of the trick-or-treaters says to the others “too bad they wouldn’t let her out tonight, huh? too bad they never do…”. Yet she is unable to piece together the meaning of this until it’s too late.

 (“…but at first it didn’t register, not quite, as though the words held no meaning, as though the words were some strange rebus she could not immediately master, not until after she’d closed the door and then when finally they impacted her like grapeshot, she flung open the door and ran screaming down the stairs and into the empty street.”)

 It’s a tragic near-miss. A second tragic near-miss and, arguably just as devastating as the first. I don’t use the word “tragic” loosely. This is a story of connections between mother and daughter lost by a matter of seconds and inches. As Braunbeck says: “This is what turns ‘Gone’ into the stuff of classic tragedy. Helen’s closing the door before the kid’s words finally register is akin to Romeo walking past the nurse who carries Juliet’s note, and like with Romeo, by the time Helen realizes what it means, it’s too late; the kids are nowhere to be seen.”

 In “Gone” the reader is left with a sense of horror because both the initial trauma and the new trauma are escapable, but aren’t escaped. Both the initial loss and the re-experiencing of loss could have been avoided had the timing been different (had Helen not gone back into the store or had gotten out of the store sooner, had Helen pieced together the meaning of the trick-or-treater’s statement early enough to demand further answers). This double-dose of tragedy twists the knife into the protagonist, and reinforces the theme of guilt. In this case, I think that it’s possible for the reader to come away from the story knowing, intellectually, that Helen’s guilt is inappropriate. That she’s not to blame, but the kidnapper is. But Ketchum deftly sucks us so deep into Helen’s point of view that this isn’t immediately obvious. We’re left at the end with a belly full of guilt, soul-sick, regretting the missed opportunity.

 “Gone” in the Pantheon of Great Halloween Stories

 Lots of horror stories are written about (or at least set during) Halloween. In my reading experience, very few of these stories excel. “Gone” is, in my opinion, among the top-tier of Halloween stories.

 It’s not a supernatural horror story, but like Ray Bradbury’s “The October Game” it’s impossible to imagine a scenario in which “Gone” was set any other night of the year. The plot relies on children who would not ordinarily visit Helen coming to her house while wearing disguises that render their physical description (let alone their identities) a mystery.

 This underscores another theme that runs throughout the story, the tension between closeness and boundaries in a community. Helen’s initial, basic trust (that no one in her community would steal her child outside of the 7-Eleven) is betrayed. In response, she builds emotional walls to keep the community out and the community seems to also build walls to keep her at a distance. Conversations come to a halt when she walks by others in the grocery store. The loss has stigmatized Helen. While Helen’s descent into depression may be one reason the community keeps her at arm’s length, another may be that she’s living proof that the community is not as safe as it would, perhaps, like to imagine itself as being. The community has stopped seeing Helen, the individual, a long time ago and now only sees in Helen the ugliness of loss. It’s as though there’s an understanding that if they marginalize her, they can ignore the reality that their connection with their children is every bit as fragile as Helen’s was to hers.

 Halloween is a time when neighbors who would not ordinarily mix lower the boundaries, if only a little. “Gone” works, in part, because it exploits the pre-existing tension between trust and suspicion that seems to run through Halloween these days. We see that theme also touched on (in a much different style) by Thomas Ligotti in “Conversations in a Dead Language” (another top-tier Halloween story, in my opinion).

 Okay, so this is the point where I stop blabbing and try to get some discussion going.  Feel free to post any thoughts you have about “Gone” as a comment to this blog entry.  In the spirit of a “book club” sort of discussion, I’m offering a couple of questions here in the spirit of stimulating discussion.  But those questions are just intended to get things started.  Feel free to ask questions or make comments of your own, apart from anything I’ve written.

Questions for Part One

1. In To Each Their Darkness, Braunbeck writes: “At least one-third of the Ketchum fans I have spoken with are wary of ‘Gone’ for one simple reason: they don’t understand the ending.”

 I know a few readers went out and read “Gone” for the first time as a result of it being featured here at Mama Cushing’s. I’m curious – did anyone here have a hard time understanding the ending? Is there any feeling that it’s too suggestive/not concrete enough?

2. Do you agree that “Gone” ranks in the top-tier of Halloween horror stories? What other Halloween stories do you enjoy?

I’m looking forward to at least one (possibly two) additional Mama Cushing’s posts on “Gone”; one in which I discuss some of what a newer author can learn by looking at the nuts and bolts of “Gone” and another in which I’ll post an interview  where Jack Ketchum responds to a few questions about the story and his writing in general.  Keep watching Laughing at the Abyss for updates.