Chriswell is a decent old soul, but now that her husband has passed and she’s living with her son’s family, she feels like an outsider with nothing to do. Minister Without Portfolio – F&SF, Feb 1952 A surreal idea wrapped up in a short, insubstantial story. Dick the bartender does that gag every night to thrill the regulars and confuse the newcomers-but for him the trick is real to him, as he walks into another dimension. You’ve seen the stair trick without knowing what it is-the gag where someone pantomimes walking down stairs, crouching while the lower half of their body is obscured by something. Equal parts horror and tongue-in-cheek send-up of horror stories, it’s a well-crafted piece. Enter a critic-scholar of the one Bottle son who fled to England and became a poet, hoping to see the old homestead. The Bottle children fed it chickens when their parents weren’t watching, and have thrown it a chicken once a year ever since. When the Bottle family settled in Oklahoma, their farm was built next to the strange stone well and stone barn home to what the natives called Stickeney-some kind of ancient monster living in the well’s oily waters. Stickeney and the Critic – F&SF, Feb 1953 A well-written story, commentary on the power of faith and superstition with its surprise revelation.
When her maid Iris finds her moping and hears of her nightmare, Iris offers up a solution that may get Hugh through alive.
But for the past few months as Hugh makes his first night jump, she’s been having a growing nightmare: Hugh making a jump, drifting down and impaled on a jagged fence-post.
Our unnamed protagonist’s husband Hugh is a paratrooper training in the South, soon to be shipped out to the European Theater. Ballantine 519k – 1961 – illo by Richard Powers.
0 kommentar(er)
