"Sorcerer's Moon" (1959)

Charles Beaumont was a regular contributor to Rod Serling's Twilight Zone TV show, writing or collaborating on some two dozen episodes across the show's five-year history before he died of a strange brain disease in 1967 at the age of 38. This very short story shows how Beaumont absorbed his influences, with a take on M.R. James's classic story "Casting the Runes," in which curses are thrown by getting someone to take a slip of paper with mysterious writing on it. The only way to evade the curse then is by getting the original donor to accept the slip of paper back again. The further premise in this story is that only two immortals remain on the planet and both want to take out the other. "Casting the Runes" is widely considered James's best story. I need to read it again because it struck me as gimmicky, a type of Mr. Mxyzptlk story from the Superman comics. You might call it a rats-foiled-again story because it always tends to go one way. Beaumont leans into the concept further by using a process server to stick the curse, so the story is pretty simple and basic. But I like the mix of elements—the elaborate curse mechanism, the murderous immortal warlocks, and the distinctly modern process server. Beaumont is skillful at creating a mood out of them that is both menacing and humorous. The twist is so basic it is practically stupid, but this is another story saved by its own brevity, nimble about getting in and out of the point and being done with it. All in a day's work downtown, seems to be the idea. The gleaming modern world of 1959 turns out to be too complex even for warlocks with terrible powers. Beaumont was a great student of Serling—he could hit that stentorian tone that Serling used as bludgeon and even ape it with a lighter hand. I end up of two minds on this story. On the one hand, with Ray Russell's high praise in his introduction to the story in the Playboy anthology ringing in my ears, I'm impressed with how surely and swiftly it is brought off. On the other hand, it hits like a bad pun, like the little guy in the bowler hat finally tricked once again in some improbable way into saying "Kltpzyxm." But, well, if Mr. Mxysptlk can be fooled, I suppose the last two remaining immortals on Earth can be too. Just seems like it would be harder than this.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Story not available online.

"A Different Point of View" (1993)

[listen]

"A Different Point of View," the fourth song in the Very sequence and the first not to be released as a single, makes report from the unruly precincts of a new relationship, identifying genders carefully scrubbed as usual. The situation it describes is the sort of yawing back and forth between two people who might be in love, but not yet sure whether they are compatible, or "built for the long haul" in plain speaking. For those listening to the album in sequence, as I usually do, it's the point where it begins to settle into itself as a whole. It is the shortest song on the album after "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing," even though they have two of the longest titles on the album (with "Yesterday, When I Was Mad"). "A Different Point of View" serves as another place for Chris Lowe's soundscapes, which of course is fine. Besides these soundscapes, every track on Very bears feelings of sweet and wounded optimism, the knowledge of pain and love at once. They live on a spectrum of anxiety from butterflies to fear and trembling, the way people living through love affairs experience them. As always, the only thing that matters is love, a signal virtue of the album. At the bridge: "Just say yes / Please," which incidentally contains the titles of their first and 10th albums. So lovely, so felt, so slick—the slickness may well be part of the appeal. Lowe and Tennant are so convincingly urbane, so self-possessed, actually yawning on the cover of their second album. On "A Different Point of View" we begin to discover the interior world of the poser who can't be bothered to cover his mouth.

"The Sunday-Go-To-Meeting Jaw" (1993)

[spoilers] I know Nancy A. Collins vaguely by name—I see she's written vampire novels—but can't find much on the internet about this story. I caught it in a Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology but it's actually more of a war story, specifically a Civil War story, and very effective as such. It's not even as much of a ghost story as Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which many take as a more of a war story. Collins's story is skillful and almost showoffy in its effects. For example, briefly making us think the approach home of a Rebel soldier might be the approach of a marauding serial killer madman. But no, it's just a husband and father, missing more than two years and presumed dead. A POW. Mistreated. His jaw shattered. A grotesque. This story also flirts openly with Southern gothic, which Collins, an Arkansas native, comes by honestly enough. Besides which, she is completely credible. The story feels well researched and authentic to 1865 post-Civil War South. It focuses on the 10-year-old daughter, who was 6 when this man left for war as her hero. Like a 10-year-old, she can't stand the sight of him now, refuses to believe he is her father, and says appalling things. The wife and mother is more resigned to her fate. She loves her husband, but this is not exactly her husband, but she is committed to him and accepts it. But with resignation—her husband's return is good news but also more bad news from the war, especially with the daughter acting this way. One former slave has stayed with the family. She is practically the returned soldier's second mother. The story drives to a stunning climax, or at least it took me by surprise, when the soldier hangs himself in the parlor only weeks after his return. Hester, the 10-year-old, is shocked, intrigued, and ultimately relieved that her monstrously deformed father will no longer embarrass her. It's a sad and bitter story of the South and does not seem to have any love for the Confederacy. But it has none for the Yankees either. I mean, let's admit, it's true they were dealing with slavers, but it's also true they got carried away in many instances, such as their treatment of POWs. (And Sherman, of course.) This story was also written or published at such a strange time in our history, the 1990s. White Southern hegemony was accepted as the norm then. Everyone was furiously pretending about post-racial this and "kinder, gentler" that. The vicious beating of Rodney King was starting to crack some things open. Whatever—this is a great story.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

USA / Mexico, 110 minutes

Director: George Roy Hill

Writer: William Goldman

Photography: Conrad L. Hall

Music: Burt Bacharach

Editors: John C. Howard, Richard C. Meyer

Cast: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross, Strother Martin, Ted Cassidy, Kenneth Mars, Henry Jones, Jeff Corey, Cloris Leachman, Sam Elliott, George Furth

Here's a Western that is overtly sentimental about the closing of the Western frontier and the end of the 19th century and the Old West. The Spanish-American War stands in as vivid time marker. It's 1898, no later than 1899. As a movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is all dressed up in the garb of late-'60s New Hollywood— chests are bared, people swear, they have sex, they crack wise, etc.—but really the picture sets its eyes squarely on old-school movie gloss confection. It's a buddy movie where the buddies make jokes and bicker all the way until the moment of their deaths and there's always time for one more musical interlude. You say you've got the Swingle Singers out there in the hall? Bring 'em in!

It's fair to say Burt Bacharach is responsible for the worst parts of this movie, and the bicycle-riding "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on Head" montage is the worst of that, the nadir of the whole picture (not to mention possibly entire sections of movie history). Another musical interlude that accompanies sepia-toned photographs of a journey to Bolivia is better but still pure sentiment. The Swingle Singers boppin' around over the good times in Bolivia is nearly pure 1969—dated ("Pepsi," rock critic Nik Cohn would call it). But this is a movie looking to make money and win awards, which it did, and somehow it is now considered among the 500 greatest movies ever made.

The Ritual (2017)

The Ritual has a simple and effective premise and then layers on some psychological complexity and a bunch of far-out folk horror tropes from the northlands. It's a pretty good ride. A group of college buddies are on a hiking vacation in northern Sweden. The men are in their 30s and old friends but inevitably there are weird frictions among them, set in motion or revealed months earlier when one of them is killed by random violence in an armed robbery. Another of them is in the liquor store with him during the holdup, but so paralyzed by fear that he does nothing but watch as his friend is murdered. Now he feels guilty and the incident is one of the sources of unease among the group. Once they are well along the hiking trail one of them twists a knee and is barely able to continue. They are far from help and decide, rather than continuing the loop trail they are on, to take a more direct route back through unmarked woods. Obviously these guys are behind on their folk horror studies and don't know how dangerous it is to hike through woods like that in northern Sweden. They don't particularly know where they are but use a compass to attempt going in a straight line in the direction that will get them back. They find strange markings on trees, apparently abandoned cabins, and scary figures constructed of tree branches, antlers, and who knows what. They find a recently slaughtered elk, the blood still dripping off it, impaled on branches far above the forest floor. Dark catches them and they decide to spend a night in one of the cabins, which they have to break into. They all have bad dreams that night, and worse. There also seems to be some kind of creature roaming these woods, roaring and breaking things. It's hard to make it out. From that point, in many ways The Ritual takes on the structure of a slasher picture, as the hikers are picked off one by one (in grotesque but generally creative ways) until finally there is only one "Final Girl" left—not a girl, these are all guys in their 30s, but you get my point. It sounds like predictable fare and IMDb viewers rank it at only an aggregated 6.3 (I gave it an 8.0). In fairness, it more or less is predictable, at least in broad strokes. But screenwriter Joe Barton and director David Bruckner have wound this story up pretty tight, with a nice transition from the urban horrors of armed robbery and its aftermath to the ancient forces at work in the dark woods, and they keep springing surprises. The monster, the backstory, a backwoods clan who worship the thing and perform sacrifices for it—all this unfolds naturally in escalating scenes of tension that make it harder and harder to watch this in any kind of free and easy way. It's definitely one worth going back for if you missed it and like gnawing anxiety. For faint of heart details, see the DoestheDogDie report.

The American Claimant (1892)

This short comic novel by Mark Twain treads familiar ground. The Prince and the Pauper might be the earliest and better model, but it's a tired old story rooted in high romanticism tropes, with vaguely medieval trappings, involving mistaken identities and lost lineages of nobility, set into a tiresome context of USA vs. Europe (and/or democracy vs. monarchy). The plot is detailed enough to hold water, and maybe even sturdy enough to sail, but for me most of the elements are merely hackneyed, stale for Twain and in general too. It's got enough to hold interest, especially if you are already inclined toward Twain. I have unfortunately lost some of my enthusiasm by reading more of him, but I am soldiering on. Twain liked to claim this was the world's first dictated novel, using some recording device, so there is that too. Seems legit. But it doesn't make much difference—he likely had a shot at revisions from a transcription, and his literary voice always was garrulous and natural. The jokes are so familiar they tend to be more pro forma than funny—about the foibles of people, the inanity of bureaucracy, and all the hypocrites and buncos cluttering things up everywhere. I can appreciate a lot of it—especially the railing against religion and aristocracy—because I'm generally in agreement with it. But he rambles often beyond my PC limits. At the moment I shudder at every casual use of the N-word I see or hear by a white person and unfortunately it shows up again here too. He is often not funny at all, which I don't have to tell you is a fatal flaw in a comic novel. Another interesting and jarring point of Twain that intrudes here is his fascination with business and making money. His characters often seem to be negotiating complex contracts with business jargon suddenly all over the place. Not surprising, perhaps, given that among other things Twain was also a failed businessman a few times over. The American Claimant is short and charming enough and with enough of his themes that you could package it up with some of his other stuff, as Library of America has, for a decent collection down at his secondary level. Not sure I'm interested in any levels below that, but I still enjoy reading him even when he's kind of an idiot.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic (Library of America).

Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)

In software development circles, a "1.0 person" is someone who likes to be in on the start of a project. To be a 1.0 person is a badge of honor. You are an innovator or inventor, creating the future. By contrast, I have found I am more of a "4.0 person"—my term for preferring to wait to work with something until it has had the bugs thoroughly worked out but is not yet bloatware. A 4.0 person is no badge of honor, of course, but it saves me a lot of glitchy beta-testing headaches. I know I can take this to extremes—it took me 10 years to get wi-fi, and I only recently finally got a smartphone, which technically I think makes me more like a 13.0 person. I mention this because I noticed Lifes Rich Pageant is the fourth album by R.E.M., a band I've never been entirely easy with. But I certainly loved this album more than any of their others. They perfected a certain R.E.M. look and feel here. I hasten to say the 1.0 / 4.0 thing falls apart a bit when you consider I did like "Radio Free Europe" and the Chronic Town EP quite a bit. Murmur was where I fell out of step on this journey although I have since made my peace with that album—not bad! But the next two seemed weak and weaker and I thought I was done with R.E.M. when Lifes Rich Pageant came along. Wikipedia declares it a bridge between R.E.M.'s alt-rock origins and their later commercial fortunes as the wise old alt-men of the '90s. I'm not even sure how I came to own Lifes Rich Pageant, but once it was in my house it was on all the time for months. It starts a bit slow but with the third track, "Fall on Me," it takes off into open-hearted soulful regions they had never really embraced before, though you can hear the origins of it in "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)" from Reckoning. I really loved that song too and then used it up until Lifes Rich Pageant came along, which I went ahead and used up too. I mean, it was nice to revisit it a few more times recently, but it hasn't changed much in the years since I played it lot. It's one of those things that seem smaller with time, perhaps, like your old grade school. Stipe's singing and the songwriting let loose in nice big ways that had seemed small and guarded before. It felt liberating and revelatory at the time. It's easier to make out the words, and they're more heartfelt: "Don't FAA-AAALLL on meeee" and "CuyahOOOga" and "Eye YAM Superman." It's a groove album—most of the songs are basically in the same one—and if I can only hear memories now of what I used to love at least I've got, etc. For a year or two, until Document, I could feel more onboard with the legions of fans who adore and still adore this odd classic rock band.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Angst essen Seele auf, West Germany, 92 minutes

Director/writer: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Photography: Jurgen Jurges

Music: unspecified Arabic

Editor: Thea Eymesz

Cast: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin, Katharina Herberg, Irm Hermann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Walter Sedlmayr, Wolfgang Hess

I'm not the most dedicated fan of German director and writer Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 before he was even 40, but I have seen a lot of the movies he made in a prodigious if short-lived career. I associate him more with Berlin Alexanderplatz and The Marriage of Maria Braun, so I was surprised to find this one at the top of his films on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?—#144 in the latest iteration, with Berlin Alexanderplatz next down at #327. I didn't even get a look at Ali: Fear Eats the Soul until 10 or 15 years ago and at that time its story of hostility toward Arab immigrants in West Germany struck me as way off-brand for Fassbinder, an extreme student of director Douglas Sirk, and the movie just too dreary.

But it hits a little differently in this era where immigrants are so widely reviled and blamed for all problems once again. Obviously this is a continuing theme through history and arguably the US is a nation of immigrants. The problem may or may not be worse here, but it is certainly more comically hypocritical. In my second look at Ali, in the midst of our present-day intense hysteria about immigrants (the whole "border crisis" which is just Benghazi 2.0 a political stunt), I still found the story hard to believe in many ways, but its didactic points about intolerance are put over convincingly, along with tremendous performances from the main players, Brigitte Mira as Emmi and El Hedi ben Salem as Ali.

"The Fly" (1957)

This story by the French-born British writer George Langelaan feels like a classic to me now for a few reasons. Published originally in Playboy, a solid source of horror in the '50s and '60s under Ray Russell's editorial hand, "The Fly" made it into an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology a few years later, where I read it as a kid. It was actually anthologized a lot in the '60s, as science fiction as well as horror. It has a fly theme, obviously, with which I had mild preoccupations then (see also Jane Rice's "Idol of the Flies"). It was quickly adapted for a 1958 movie, and I remember even staying up late to see it on TV. In the '80s, director and cowriter David Cronenberg adapted it for one of his best movies. I recently made a Fly day of it—read the long story and looked at the two adaptations. The 1958 movie is quite faithful to Langelaan's story, which is decidedly clunky and slow, but carried by its great idea: a scientist has basically invented teleportation and then a terrible mistake happens. Andre Delambre is a reckless cowboy of a scientist. For example, he's so excited about a successful teleportation of an inanimate object that he throws the family cat in to see how it goes with life and blows it to nothingness. He's sincere, he means well, but he is impatient and remarkably heedless. Having finally worked the bugs out of teleporting living beings, he climbs in to teleport himself. But alas there is a fly in the chamber with him.

In the story and the first movie, the switcheroos happen on a macro level and are relatively more antiseptic. There's one intriguing detail nothing is made of, but it always sticks with me: the printing on the first inanimate object he successfully teleports comes through backwards, suggesting levels of mirrors and reflection. But the rest is horrifying and/or gross enough. Andre's head and right arm end up on the fly, tiny size ("Help me!" this strange "white-headed" fly calls in munchkin voice), while the head and one tentacle-leg of the fly end up human-size on Andre. He drapes a towel over his head and communicates with his fashionable '50s wife Helene by typing out messages. I was surprised to see it's a color movie (my TV the first time was black and white) and then a little jarred by the motley cast, which includes Vincent Price, doing his usual thing, and David Hedison as Andre. I only know Hedison as a star of the TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (rendered as "Voyage to See What's on the Bottom" by Mad magazine ... not sure why that has stuck with me). Hedison was later a ubiquitous hey-that-guy on TV shows like Cannon and Love, American Style. Patricia Owens as Helene plays it more or less like a screaming sexpot, and their kid Philippe (Henri in the story) is an unbearably normal Leave It to Beaver specimen. How Vincent Price got mixed up with all this is anyone's guess.

David Cronenberg rechristened all the characters and moved them to the big city, but his real innovation was taking the teleporter mix-up down to the genetic molecular level. The computer was confused during the reintegration process, we learn. This version of The Fly is focused more deliberately on the slow-motion transformation. The result is something far better than Langelaan's story, though plainly indebted to it. It doesn't hurt that the cast includes Jeff Goldblum as the reckless scientist Seth Brundle and Geena Davis as his casual love interest Ronnie. Goldblum is nearly pure sparkling charisma, eccentric as always but putting it over especially well here, and Davis keeps up with him. We see tendencies of flies start to overtake him, such as an inordinate taste for sugar. Eventually it proceeds to more fly-like modes of digestion, at which point we're reminded how much body horror is a staple of Cronenberg's work. Of all three versions, this Fly is best at working the horrific tragedy Langelaan intended. To unlock the secret of teleportation, and then to become vermin. Has anyone ever conceived a greater fall?

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
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Nirvana's In Utero (2006)

Gillian Gaar's contribution to the 33-1/3 shelf is a fast and fun read, one of the better I've seen of the more straightforward volumes in the series. This is because there are interesting sideline stories about this album and because Gaar has the skill to chase down the details and make it a good story altogether—which it should be, given that it's Kurt Cobain's last studio project. He gave us a great live set in the Unplugged show and that was it. Full disclosure: I know Gillian, and I can still be nostalgic for those days of 1993. One notorious storyline of In Utero was Steve Albini's participation as producer/engineer, which was a moiling cloud of media confusion at the time. Gaar spoke to Albini years later and his sober perspective is one of the best parts of this book. She spares us as much of the drama as she can regarding Courney Love, Frances Bean, Axl Rose, Cobain's fraught relations with reporters, etc., but inevitably some of that is here. We are also spared a good deal of Cobain's angst, but that is just as inevitably here too, including the stomachaches and plagues of insecurity. Mostly she shows us a group of professionals intent on getting things done. They largely produced about half of a great album, with some of his best songs alternating with noise squalls that somehow sound a lot better than I remembered. In the track-by-track rundown section (also inevitable in most of these books), Gaar does a good job of sorting out and analyzing these squalls and accords them the punk-rock respect Cobain sought in them. She never stack-ranks the Nirvana albums, but makes an interesting point that listening to Bleach, Nevermind, and In Utero together makes the development of the band clear. As always you have to wonder how far it might have gone. Dave Grohl has reinvented himself as a rock star as surely as New Order rose from the ashes of Joy Division. I will say I don't hate him the way some do. Gaar, writing in 2006, doesn't have much to say about Grohl or Krist Novoselic either, apart from their contributions to In Utero, which of course were significant.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Titane (2021)

I really loved the wild ride of Titane, last year's big winner at Cannes, but wow, take note, the road is quite bumpy in this picture of strange extremes and ultraviolence. The various flailing labels applied to it tell part of the story: suspense, drama, horror, sci-fi. Um, OK. Agathe Rousselle is Alexia, a problem child involved in a bad auto accident as a young girl. Part of her skull had to be replaced with titanium. This is about as much explanation as we get for what follows—note it is highlighted in the title too. After the opening credits, we see Alexia has grown up to be a porny exotic dancer at auto shows. The story seems to be operating as a variation on Crash, the J.G. Ballard novel and David Cronenberg movie in which cars and auto accidents are sexualized. However, 50 years on from the novel (and 25 from the movie), fetishizing cars feels more debased as a social value, contaminated, sick. Yet there she is, getting off on the glitzy convention scene, along with all the car salesman types in their suits. The sickness of the auto industry is one sign of how times have changed. Director and cowriter Julia Ducournau seems to know very well what she is doing. Alexia becomes pregnant by one car and soon starts oozing motor oil. Did I mention Titane is body-horror? Well, it is. Alexia is a rip-roaring ultraviolent version of Anne Carlisle's Margaret from Liquid Sky, hip, disaffected, and toxically ironic. She kills people, always for rational reasons, but it's usually over the top and she always seems to have more killing to do. These John Wick bashes are often quite unpleasant though riveting and even entertaining. It's a movie where you find yourself saying "what now?" a lot. The brutality keeps coming until a significant turn at the half, at which point Titane elevates to the insanely inspired implications of one simple and ludicrous plot twist. It ratchets the tension but more importantly it takes the picture to realms where all you can do is gape. My favorite kind of movie. Titane suddenly bursts with tender, provocative ideas about family and sexual identity, fatherhood and motherhood, masculinity and femininity, love and devotion. It's all there to be discovered, so go have a good time, but remember—content warnings, content warnings. Titane has a lot of hooks to trigger. Check DoestheDogDie and approach with all due caution.

Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)

I had mixed feelings about this Anne Tyler novel. I enjoyed it but it's hard to miss that lots of the characters and themes are familiar: a middle-aged man locked into his routines and limited ambition, the eccentrics around him who are not as inhibited, his attempt to come to terms with himself, and, of course, Baltimore. There is a little bit here from The Accidental Tourist and a little bit from A Patchwork Planet. For better or worse, there's a definite sense in the basic elements of a generic Anne Tyler. Mostly I enjoyed it. It had more substance than some of her others in this century. In fact, a Kirkus review found it "suffused with feeling and very moving." A review on Goodreads was closer to my reaction. The reviewer, Marchpane, liked it in spite of misgivings about a number of weak points. She notes the novel is affecting but mentions Tyler is 78 now and having a hard time hiding her age in some ways. For example, Micah Mortimer, the main character here, runs a solo business as a computer handyman, but Marchpane notes that his "clients come to him with tech problems from the 1990s.... Meanwhile all the characters seem like they are from several decades earlier." That's all true although I actually liked the thread about Micah's work, partly because it was a route that fleetingly appeared viable for me circa 2007. And I want to say, contra Marchpane, that some of these problems are more like from the 2000s, Wi-Fi and such, but I take the point and it makes me worry a little about my own antiquating views of things. But all that said, everyone seems to end up liking Redhead by the Side of the Road and I did too. It's quite short—Marchpane also argues it should have been a shorter story or a longer novel and that might be right too. That led me to notice on Wikipedia that Tyler has actually published a number of short stories, which have never been collected. That might be a project for someone—some of them are from her best years and in venues like The New Yorker. I didn't find Redhead by the Side of the Road to be as good as 2016's Vinegar Girl (which is her best of the past decade, I think) but it's a little better than 2018's Clock Dance.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Duck Soup (1933)

USA, 69 minutes

Director: Leo McCarey

Writers: Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin

Photography: Henry Sharp

Music: John Leipold

Editor: LeRoy Stone

Cast: Marx Brothers (Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Zeppo Marx), Margaret Dumont, Louis Calhern, Edgar Kennedy, Raquel Torres

Classic comedies from the 1930s tend to befuddle me some. The lifelong familiarity of the Little Rascals, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and all the others, with the primitive '30s technology, provide a certain comfort, recalling late nights and early Saturday morning appointment TV reruns. But I don't actually laugh very much at these comedies, at least not on my own. The way I like to see them best is in crowded theaters where all the laughter is infectious. But if you can even find a well-attended screening of Duck Soup somewhere at the moment, I probably wouldn't go. There's the rub.

Duck Soup generally seems to be regarded as the best Marx Brothers movie, highest-ranked on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? and on lots of google search results. And yes, seeing it again recently (alone at my computer, periodically checking email), I can see the case for that even if Chico doesn't get a piano scene, which I missed, and Harpo's harp-playing (which I missed less) is limited to a few seconds on a grand piano's strings. The plot hangs together better than most. Margaret Dumont, who should be considered a Marx Brother, is her usual stiff-necked society dame straight man. And Groucho's compulsive logorrhea is in peak form: Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you: he really is an idiot. I implore you, send him back to ...

"The Summer People" (1950)

This Shirley Jackson story is devastating in a very sneaky way, which is typical of her clinical style, half New Yorker breeze and half ancient eerie portents warning you not to do things, like go into that house. Or, in this case specifically, not to stay at your summer place after Labor Day. The Allisons—Mr. is 60, Mrs. 58—have always talked about staying but have always returned to New York on time, white shoes put away. Then they usually spend much of September and October regretting it. We never do find out things like the source of their income. They are obviously wealthy on one level, but not so much that they feel they are. They put up with things at their summer place like no electricity or plumbing in order to enjoy the soft, rustic summer views of a lake. The inconveniences make the Allisons seem more hardy and adventurous. This year, they finally decide at the last minute to stay. Jackson then wields an artful sledgehammer to knock the foreshadowing into place. Not a single local they mention it to likes the decision one bit. They could simply be resistant to change, as the Allisons take it. But the news travels like fire among them and their resistance feels sinister. And indeed, by the time of the story's insanely undetailed end, sinister is practically all that's left. Certainly it has exact parallels with Jackson's more famous story, "The Lottery," the two stories written within months of one another. The style is pure midcentury New Yorker, with a chirpy third-person voice relating compressed description and dialogue. It bears a vertiginous sense of pitching forward momentum that is unnerving, hard to put a finger on. We don't know where we're going, ever, but we feel the motion almost right away. The reveals, such as they are, come swiftly and they are powerful, almost physically affecting. In the space of a day or two the Allisons go from looking forward to an extra few weeks at the lake, to encountering trouble getting their usual services, to—apparently—sitting quietly as the sun sets waiting for their deaths. Their kerosene has been cut off. Their car has been tampered with and won't start. Their phone is dead. A letter from their son doesn't sound right—a very effective detail that throws the scope of this into much broader perspective. I haven't really been able to let go of this story since I first read it several years ago.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
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