R.I.P. Deal Me In Lite: Stories by Tim Lebbon and Robert Sheckley

Deal Me In Lite, R.I.P. Edition: Week 9
"Pay the Ghost" by Tim Lebbon
"Warm" by Robert Sheckley

This is the final week of my Peril of the Short Story adventure, culminating in Halloween tonight. The final two stories from my list of thirteen were definitely a mixed bag, however. First, though, the cards:

These corresponded to two stories from two different anthologies:

"Warm" by Robert Sheckley

This story comes from the Arbor House anthology, but it was originally published in the old Galaxy magazine, one of the pulp science fiction magazines from the 1950's. It's a weird little story that is oddly effective, although it takes a little while for the reader to understand what is happening. 

The main character, Anders, is lying on his bed, waiting until it's time to go pick up his date, Judy, and take her out to a party. Suddenly he hears a voice in his head that says "Help me!" Surprisingly, Anders is not terribly concerned about this, and begins a conversation with the voice. The voice doesn't know where it is, but it can see with and through Anders, and it helps him to see the world differently as the evening progresses. With the coaching of the voice, which tells him when he is getting "warmer" or "colder" with his thinking (hence the title of the story), he becomes more and more distantly removed from the scenes around him. He begins to see other people as "articulated skeletons," "flesh machines," and even just collections of atoms. He eventually carries this kind of thinking to its logical conclusion (well, it seems logical in the story anyway) and gets in a real pickle, not to give away the end of the story. Suffice it to say, the ending is a real twist that I did not see coming, but it is entirely fitting.

"Pay the Ghost" by Tim Lebbon

This story, on the other hand, didn't do much for me -- which is a shame, really, because it's one of those stories that starts out very promisingly. And then somewhere along the way, it goes off the rails.

Lee and Kate lost their daughter, Moll, on Halloween a year before the story begins. She simply disappears from Lee's side that day after asking a very strange question: "Daddy, can we pay the ghost?" This is a question that Lee agonizes over, trying to figure it out over the weeks and months following Moll's disappearance. Predictably, Kate ends up leaving Lee, perhaps thinking that he was somehow responsible for losing Moll. Not so predictably, however, Kate now returns just a couple of days before Halloween rolls around this time, and she is completely changed. She's gaunt, sick, and half-crazed. But she claims she has found the man who is holding Moll captive. Apparently this man is holding Moll in a house along with other children. Kate convinces Lee to try and find the man and get Moll back. Lee has trouble finding the house, although he does stumble upon a burn pit near where Kate says the house is, and the pit is full of the charred remnants of bodies, and small bones. This is a tremendously disturbing image to both Lee and the reader. Soon it's clear that nothing is what it seems in this story, and the "man" holding Moll is not really a man, but something far more sinister. By this point, though, I was tremendously confused about the plot and the story just kind of fell apart for me. I wanted to like it, but... no. The ending is something of a twist, but in my book, a twist at the end only works if the reader thinks he or she understands what's happening up until that point, and I was adrift long before the ending of this story.

However, win, lose or draw, that's a wrap for both my Peril of the Short Story and my Peril the First ventures for this year's R.I.P. It was fun, and I plan to do it again next year!

R.I.P. Deal Me In Lite: Stories by China Mieville and Stephen Mark Rainey

Deal Me In Lite, R.I.P. edition, Week 8:
"Reports of Certain Events in London" by China Mieville
"Orchestra" by Stephen Mark Rainey

Here we are at the end of Week 8 of my special R.I.P. edition of Deal Me In Lite, and I am reading two stories again. The Mieville story comes from my McSweeney's anthology, and the Rainey story comes from the October Dreams anthology:

"Reports of Certain Events in London" by China Mieville:

I did not like this story as much as I thought I would. The premise is interesting but it's just too weird and I think it loses something trying to be so weird. Here's the premise: the author mistakenly receives a packet of documents in the mail, addressed to a Charles Melville. The documents are quite mysterious, and the bulk of the story consists of the text of the documents. They concern the members of a secret society whose function is to track and document sightings of "feral streets" -- streets from particular cities that suddenly show up in other cities, complete with their houses and everything. And it seems that these streets fight each other, and damage each other's buildings. The author put a lot of thought and creativity into the "reports," but unfortunately, they read like reports, and the "story" overall is dry and weird enough to be uninteresting to me. I can't recommend it.

"Orchestra" by Stephen Mark Rainey

This story was quite a bit better. The main character, Jacob Kravitz, is a feisty little Jewish man (his ethnicity turns out to be important for the story) who is the concertmaster for a community orchestra. The members of the orchestra are in a tizzy because their annual Halloween concert is coming up and the orchestra's conductor has gone missing. Luckily (or not, as it turns out), a man named John Hanger shows up and volunteers his services as conductor. Skeptical, Kravitz agrees to let him audition by conducting their next rehearsal, and the orchestra members are astounded by his incredible talent as a conductor, and the beautiful music he manages to extract from what is essentially an amateur orchestra. Hanger is hired as a replacement conductor, and the performance night eventually comes and is a huge success. After the concert, Hanger invites Kravitz to his apartment for a celebratory drink, and we finally find out the details about this mysterious man who, of course, has a hidden agenda. He is truly a conductor, but as the story races to its climax, we realize he makes a different kind of evil music with the souls of humans like Kravitz. As usual, I don't want to give the ending away because you really need to track down this story and read it. Suffice it to say, however, that the story has a chilling ending and is a perfect story for Halloween or any other time of year when you want a good, spooky story.

"Orchestra of the Apocalypse," retrieved from http://abstract.desktopnexus.com/wallpaper/1602356/

R.I.P. Deal Me In Lite: Stories by Oscar Wilde and Robert Philips

It's Week 7 of the R.I.P. version of Deal Me In Lite, and this week the synchronicity machine broke down -- I couldn't find a single similarity between the two stories I read.  Except: they're both good.

I drew the three and Queen of spades from my "Tragic Royalty" deck:

The Queen looks pretty evil, doesn't she?  That's because she IS.

(In the background you can see part of my short story collection shelf.  So many stories to read!  I'm already gearing up for next year's Deal Me In.)

The first story this week is "The Canterville Ghost," by Oscar Wilde.  I was familiar with Wilde's works such as "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray," but not so much with anything else.  This is a longish short story, but highly entertaining and pretty humorous as well. 

The story opens as the Otis family, an American family with typical American brashness (in the eyes of Wilde, at least), buys Canterville Chase, an old English estate complete with furnishings, land, and a resident ghost.  The family, being a modern American family, pooh-poohs the idea of a ghost, despite all the warnings to the contrary.  Their first encounter with the supernatural consists of a mysterious blood stain on the floor of the sitting-room which has never been able to be removed.  One of the family members whips out a tube of Pinkerton's Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent, and promptly makes the stain disappear, to the consternation of the housekeeper.  And this sort of becomes the theme to the story.  There IS a ghost, and he tries his best to scare the family and make them believe in him -- and they DO eventually believe in him, but after a fashion: they begin to play tricks on him and try to thwart his every effort at haunting.  It's a truly amusing story (although I think Wilde goes on a little too long with the gag), and it eventually winds up to an interesting and satisfying conclusion.

The second story this week was "A Teacher's Rewards" by Robert Philips.  Old Miss Scofield, a retired schoolteacher, gets a visit from a former student, Raybe Simpson.  She doesn't remember him at first, although he certainly remembers her.  And unfortunately, she remembers him too... at the end, when it's too late.  This story is an interesting game of cat and mouse on the part of the author, where he leaks out one little detail after another, all of the details adding up to a more and more unsettling story.  As it turns out, Raybe is fresh out of prison, and while he was locked up, he got to wondering how he ended up there.  He decided it was his mistreatment as a child in Miss Scofield's class, from her and his classmates, so he has come to visit her and settle up some old scores.  This is an excellent story with a type of horror that gradually creeps up on the reader and produces a good old-fashioned shudder at the end.

R.I.P. Deal Me In Lite: Stories by H.G. Wells and E.F. Benson

It's the sixth week of my R.I.P. "Peril of the Short Story" version of Deal Me In Lite, and this week I start reading two stories each week in order to get to the magical number of 13 by the end of October.  And this turned out to be a very interesting event.  There's already a lot of serendipity built into the Deal Me In method of reading, but when you pick and read two stories together, you can achieve even greater levels of serendipity, as I found out this week.

So for this week I chose the Ace and two of spades from my "Tragic Royalty" deck of cards:

The Ace corresponded to "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells, and the two corresponded to "How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery" by E.F. Benson.  Both of these stories are available on the Internet, but I got them from an anthology I have owned for quite some time, Ghosts, edited by Marvin Kaye:

Yes, that is Edward Gorey artwork on the cover.  I found an image that shows the entire dust jacket because it's really wonderful and highly appropriate for this book.

Both of these stories involve a person who spends time in a haunted room -- but one spends time there on purpose (because they don't really believe it is haunted) and the other KNOWS the room is haunted and gets trapped there by accident.

In "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells, the narrator proposes to spend the night in a haunted room, the so-called "red room" of Lorraine Castle, in which braver souls than he have spent the night, and died there.  The servants, who are elderly and who have lived through the history of the house, do their best to dissuade the narrator from this foolhardy act, but he is determined to do it.  As he makes himself comfortable (if that word may be used here) in the room for the night, he tries to dispel the overwhelming gloominess and darkness of the room with candles that he lights and sets up in various nooks and crannies of the room.  Then the candles start going out, in various combinations.  Is it a draft?  Or something more sinister?  Eventually the candles all go out at once, and the fire goes out as well, and the narrator is thrown into a terrified panic.  He runs around frantically in the dark, trying to find the door of the room, and knocks himself out on a piece of furniture.  Not to spoil the story for you (because it's really not much of a story, although very well-written and interesting), the next morning the narrator comes to the conclusion that what really haunts the room is Fear itself.

This leads us to the synchronicity with the second story I read this week, "How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery," by E.F. Benson.  Let me just take a moment and make another plug, as I have before, for E.F. Benson as one of the more underrated modern British novelists (modern as in the early 20th century).  I have waxed eloquent about the pleasures of his Lucia novels elsewhere on this blog, and in my opinion this gem of a story is another example of his expert way with a tale.  I have never read much of his other work besides the Lucia novels, but apparently Benson is also well-regarded for his ghost stories, of which I believe he wrote several.  If they are anything like this one, I will have to hunt down the others and read them too.

In Benson's story, the Peveril family lives in a house that they know is haunted; in fact, they co-exist happily with several different family ghosts, and take a kind of pride and pleasure in interacting with their long-dead ancestors in this way.  This part of the story is actually pretty humorous, in Benson's typical understated, droll style.  However, there is one pair of ghosts that the family fears: the ghosts of twin babies that were brutally murdered by the ruthless Dick Peveril, so he could inherit the estate instead of them.  This murder, which involved throwing the babies into a fire, happened in the long gallery, and ever since then, the ghosts of the babies have haunted that room.  They appear only once or twice a year, and only in the dead of night, but the family is terrified of seeing them, because everyone who has ever seen their ghosts has died a horrible, gruesome death.  So every member of the family simply makes sure to stay out of the long gallery after dark, and they make sure their houseguests know this rule as well.

So this sets the stage for a New Year's Eve party where the family is hosting several guests, including Madge Dalrymple, who unfortunately twists her knee skating on the lake.  Madge decides to rest her leg by sitting in front of the fire in the long gallery.  She's warned not to forget about being in there after sunset, but of course you know what happens next.  Madge falls asleep over her book and wakes up right at dusk.  When she realizes what time it is, she becomes terrified, and of course the twin baby ghosts show up soon after.  What happens next, though, is an interesting twist on the traditional ghost story, and this ghost story actually turns out to have a happy ending.  It's not a sappy, tacked-on happy ending though -- it fits the tone and plot of the story perfectly.

I enjoyed both of these stories and would highly recommend both of them.  Look them up and let me know what you think!

"Lusus Naturae" by Margaret Atwood

Deal Me In Lite, R.I.P. Edition, Week 5: “Lusus Naturae” by Margaret Atwood (Story 5 of 13)

I have a confession to make: I would read Margaret Atwood's grocery list.  Any kind of words she wants to put down in any order would be OK by me.  I think she is one of the most interesting and inventive writers today.  So when I saw her story "Lusus Naturae" in my McSweeney's anthology, I knew it had to go on the R.I.P. Peril of the Short Story list.  And this week, the 5 of spades dealt it up for me.

    

"Lusus naturae" is Latin for "a freak of nature," and that's what the narrator of this story admits to being.  She is a nameless young girl whose family does not know what to do with her, except they know they cannot keep hiding her any longer.  We never get any real picture of what she looks like, but she refers to her yellow eyes, pink teeth, hairy face and body, and red fingernails -- so the "lusus naturae" terminology is apt.

The family decides that she should "die," so they fake her death and burial.  Oddly, this gives her more freedom than she has ever known before, as long as she stays out of sight.  Completely self-aware and intelligent, she uses her new-found freedom to educate herself by reading and trying to learn about the world.  But she has a penchant for roaming around at night, and it is this which finally becomes her undoing.  Stumbling upon lovers meeting furtively at dusk, she mistakes them for creatures who are in the preliminary stages of becoming like her, and she is oddly, irresistibly, and tragically drawn to them.  The story ends rather predictably but Atwood's decision to write the story from the point of view of the monster gives the ending a great deal of nobility and redemption that it would not have otherwise had.

I enjoyed this very short story.  It was well-written and suitably creepy for my R.I.P. short story enterprise.  Atwood has a new short story collection that's just come out, and you'd better believe it's on my wishlist!

"Shut a Final Door" by Truman Capote

Deal Me In Lite, R.I.P. Edition, Week 4: “Shut a Final Door” by Truman Capote (Story 4 of 13)

For the fourth story in my R.I.P. Short Story Peril, the spades dealt me a Jack. This means I turn again to The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural for a weird little story by Truman Capote. According to the short introduction in the anthology, this was one of Capote’s earliest stories, written before his first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms. This story also won first place in the O. Henry prize competition of 1948. It is an interesting story, but I'm not so sure it's worthy of its place in a horror anthology.

     

The protagonist, Walter Ranney, is a vile little man with little to nothing of a moral compass. And that's going easy on him. He's one of those people who drifts from thing to thing, and person to person. He makes friends with a young man only to steal his girlfriend away from him. And then he uses the new girlfriend to advance in his career, and eventually as a stepping stone to a new girlfriend. In fact, he pretty much uses every woman in his life that way, always “trading up,” as they say. Until he ticks off his last girlfriend, an important heiress, and goes plummeting back down to the bottom of the ladder, even losing his job.


The supernatural part of the story, I guess, comes in when Walter begins getting calls from an person who refuses to identify himself or herself (Walter can’t even tell if it's a man or a woman) and simply keeps saying, every time they call, “Oh, you know me, Walter. You’ve known me a long time.” We never get even a hint of who this is (and I have my own suspicions as to what Capote is trying to do with this but I won't tell them to you for fear of spoiling the story) but it's definitely a little on the creepy side.


I don't think this is really supposed to be a scary story, so I was a little disappointed that it got into my R.I.P. mix. It's really more of a psychological study/morality tale kind of thing. However, as a short story it stands very well on its own merits and I'm glad I read it. It's one of those stories that I had to read twice to make sure I was catching even half of what Capote was trying to do with it, but it was definitely worth reading that way.

"Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Deal Me In Lite, R.I.P. Edition, Week 3: "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Story 3 of 13)

For week 3 of the R.I.P. version of Deal Me In Lite, I drew the 10 of spades, which led me to the classic "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Although I have no doubt this story is widely available online, I read it out of The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, an anthology I have owned for many years and which has always served me well at this time of year.

 

I have read this story before -- I think maybe in high school or college -- but I didn't remember it at all, so I thought it was a worthy choice for my R.I.P. short story list.  Plus, there seemed to be a chance at some synchronicity since I am also reading my way through The House of the Seven Gables as part of the Castle Macabre readalong.  I have never had so much Hawthorne in my diet (ha) and I'll say one thing about him: good old Nathaniel never used one word when he could use ten.  But in spite of all his verbosity, the man can tell a story.  By the way, did you know that the villainess Poison Ivy from the Batman comics is based in part on this story?  It's true (according to Google!).

The story opens as a young student, Giovanni Guasconti, procures lodgings for himself in Padua.  His window overlooks a beautiful garden which he later learns is owned and tended by a certain Dr. Rappaccini.  Not only does Rappaccini own this beautiful garden, he also has a beautiful daughter named Beatrice.  Once Giovanni sees her, it's love at first sight, of course.  However, there's something not quite right about the garden or Beatrice.  The flowers and plants in the garden look strange to Giovanni, and he eventually learns that they are the products of Dr. Rappaccini's unusual experiments, as is Beatrice herself.  Giovanni sees some things in the garden that alarm him (I'm not going to spoil it for anyone who has not read this story), but like the proverbial moth and flame, he cannot stay away from his window and eventually makes his way into the garden and into Beatrice's heart, with tragic consequences.

Although this is one of the classic short stories, it's not particularly scary.  Creepy and suspenseful, maybe, but not scary.  However, it's only the middle of September, so there's still plenty of time to fire up the big guns of horror and the things that go bump in the night.

"What You Do Not Know You Want" by David Mitchell

Deal Me In Lite, R.I.P. Edition, Week 2: "What You Do Not Know You Want" by David Mitchell (Story 2 of 13)

For Week 2 (and Story 2) of my R.I.P. version of Deal Me In Lite, I selected the 6 of spades which led me to a story from a most interesting anthology, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Michael Chabon.  Three or four of the stories on my R.I.P. short story list come from this anthology, and the initial story I picked, "What You Do Not Know You Want," did not disappoint.

 

The story revolves around an item from a real-life incident, the death by seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment, otherwise known as hara-kiri) of Yukio Mishima, the notable Japanese actor, poet, playwright, and film director (picture at left).  The narrator of the story, whose name we never find out, is a dealer of esoteric and exotic antiques, and he is on the trail of the dagger that Mishima used to kill himself.  He rightly figures that it would be worth a lot of money to the right customer, and he just happens to have one lined up.  However, as the story opens, the narrator is in a hotel in Hawaii, looking for clues about the death of his business partner, who killed himself by jumping off the hotel roof.  The dagger, which he was supposed to be procuring, is also missing.  His search for the dagger and the outcome of that search is the rest of the story.

The narrator has nicknames for everyone: his business partner is "Vulture," his fiance (whom he is planning to marry for her money primarily) is "Nightingale," and the proprietor of the hotel where Vulture died is "Werewolf."  Another character, a young Chinese girl who is supposed to be the proprietor's niece, is named Wei, and this appears to be her real name.  I think there might be some significance there, but I would have to read the story another time or two to see if I am right.  The narrator has quite a few run-ins with Wei, as it turns out, and we feel an undercurrent of danger in their interactions with each other, but we never quite understand exactly what it is -- until it's too late.

The entire story has a kind of hard-boiled, noir-ish feel to it as the narrator hunts down the dagger in some very seedy and dangerous locales.  Add to this the nightly screaming of someone a few rooms down from the narrator's room, and you have the ingredients for a highly atmospheric and unsettling story.  By the way, the title of the story (which was the reason I chose it) comes from the phrase on the narrator's business cards.  By the end of the story, this phrase has been given new significance with a shocking twist that puts a special spin on it.

I did not know it when I chose this story, but the author just also happens to have written Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, the latter of which appeared on this year's Man Booker Prize longlist (but not the shortlist, as was announced a couple of days ago).  I found this story riveting and suitably creepy, a perfect story for my R.I.P. reading, and it makes me eager to read more of Mr. Mitchell's stuff.  Have you read any of his works?

"The Trick" by Ramsey Campbell

Deal Me In Lite, R.I.P. Edition: "The Trick" by Ramsey Campbell (Story 1 of 13)

As part of my participation in R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) this year, I am doing the "Peril of the Short Story" to add to my Deal Me In Lite activity.  (Click that link for a list of the stories I will be reading.)   I'm using a special deck of cards to pick the 13 stories of the Peril, the Bicycle Tragic Royalty set.  Here's what the suit of spades looks like:

The pips on the number cards have a little decoration, but the face cards are the real highlight of this deck.  They are creepy!  And according to the packaging, they glow in black light.  I don't have a black light, so I haven't tested that out yet.

The backs of the cards also have a suitably creepy design, for Bicycle cards:

So, on to the story!  This week my assignment was to read one story, and I chose the eight of spades which led me to "The Trick" by Ramsey Campbell, from the anthology October Dreams.  If you do not have this anthology, it is well worth the money.  It's filled with all kinds of modern Halloween stories and essays plus authors' reminiscences of "My Favorite Halloween Memory."  It's a unique and excellent anthology.

"The Trick" is a weird, creepy, and somewhat confusing story.  The story opens as a young girl named Debbie, and her best friend Sandra, are getting ready for Halloween.  Debbie lives across the street from an old woman that she believes to be a witch.  Witch or not, the old woman is disliked by pretty much everyone in the neighborhood -- she's mean to both people and animals, and lives in a dilapidated house with an unkempt, wild yard.  However, no one will say anything to her or against her, because they are all secretly afraid of her.

On the morning of Halloween, Debbie and Sandra decide to visit an old abandoned railway tunnel near their house.  The witch sees them and essentially loses it, telling them to stay away from there.  They get the impression that she's hiding something there, but they don't know what.  That evening, as they make their rounds of the neighborhood trick-or-treating, they go to the witch's house and she gives them each a piece of homemade candy.  There's clearly some kind of magic associated with the candy, but it's never clear exactly what the candy does.  At first it seems as if it may be some kind of drug, because Debbie goes on a weird and spooky expedition to the tunnel with Sandra in the middle of the night, looking for Sandra's dog which has run off.  There they meet the witch plus some other unsettlingly creepy friends of hers.  Debbie wakes up and it appears to have been a dream.  But further events transpire (as in all good scary stories) to suggest that maybe the events of the dream were more real than the characters first imagined.

I liked this story well enough.  But as in my thoughts on The Haunting of Hill House, I really don't care for stories where the author is SO obtuse that the reader gets confused and wonders what is really going on.  This story was a little like that.  However, it was a fine start for my R.I.P. short story project.