“Eumenides in the Fourth-Floor Lavatory” (1979)

I have found myself in general to be too PC for Orson Scott Card, though I enjoyed both Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead before his politics drove me away. I was interested after all this time in seeing what he could do with the horror or so-called “dark fantasy” genre. And this is a dilly in many ways, in spite of the terrible title and even though it’s also a little derivative of Harlan Ellison (start with the terrible title). But Card really has created a monster of fiendish, fearsome, and wonderful qualities, which in many good ways deliriously overwhelms everything else about the story. Eumenides is not some Greek philosopher, as I assumed, but a term (Greek, yes) for mythological “Furies” entities—goddesses of vengeance, it says on the internet, sent out to bring justice to people who have committed crimes. Our main guy and victim of righteous justice is a rich dude in New York City, bitterly separating from his wife, defiantly trying to manipulate her by moving into a hideous Bronx tenement fourth-floor walkup with shared bathroom. He is plainly nasty business. Unfortunately for the story, his greatest crime, raping his 14-year-old daughter, is kind of handled sideways. It comes up as a certainty too late. Anyway, the good stuff: the bastard comes home drunk from a party and goes to the bathroom around 3 a.m. That is where he finds it. At first it appears to be a baby someone has attempted to flush down the toilet. The scene is vivid and squalid and I have to admit I’m here for it. It hits hard. Once he pries it loose he finds it is not a baby. A lot of what makes the scenes so riveting and appalling is that Card keeps talking about it as a baby. Good God man, it's the Eumenides! You keep thinking with him that he has finally put it away, but you are both wrong. The story is from early in Card’s career and shows him still on the learning curve in certain ways. The last third is devoted more to explaining it—it’s when we learn that his daughter may be pregnant, a detail that should have come up earlier if you’re going to truck in this kind of bombshell material. I think Card had much the right idea in the first place. Forget the explanations. Let the cosmic revenge factor speak for itself. End it on a bleak note, over and out. So it’s flawed but worth reading for the great and amazingly original monster—and Clive Barker not even on the scene yet.

A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
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