“Fruiting Bodies” (1988)

Brian Lumley’s effectively unpleasant story is first one up in a Year’s Best anthology edited by Karl Edward Wagner. The steady and patient way the story unfolds reminds me in many ways of Wagner’s own stories (such as the rightly famous “Sticks”)—and even more of work by H.P. Lovecraft, using a version of his dense language to ratchet tensions slowly and deliberately. I also see a connection to Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla,” with ships bringing in the horror somehow from overseas (in this case, of course, Haiti, source of all that is terrifying in the European imagination). Lumley has some fanciful ideas about dry rot, which I don’t think have much to do with reality. But that’s OK. The story is mainly set atop the cliffs of an English seaside town that is crumbling away. The cliffs have been giving way slowly for decades to the steady pounding of the ocean, losing ground at the rate of six or seven feet per year on average. The town is almost entirely gone now, with only a few decrepit shacks remaining, along with a lonely and strange old man still living there. The kind of decay described, along with Lumley’s take on dry rot, contribute to a mood of grinding despair, ultimately making it a nice piece in the world-building self-consciously “weird” vein. A churchyard cemetery is being taken by the ocean after the church itself. The garrulous old man is a widower with his own obsession about dry rot. His wife died as part of the town’s own death. The “fruiting bodies,” which we get to in due time, are part of the process of decay. It’s suitably repulsive when finally encountered. This dry rot “thing,” which appears to grow like a cross between mushrooms and brambles, is classified here as fungus, an element of nature with lots of weird biological properties when you look into it. (William Hope Hodgson, another likely influence, also wrote a good story about fungus, “The Voice in the Night.”) The old guy explains some of the situation. But he’s not exactly reliable either. This strange character might be the most obvious element lifted from Lovecraft in a tale that moves slowly but comes to life with a slow-burn vengeance. “Fruiting Bodies” first appeared in a late-‘80s incarnation of the venerated Weird Tales magazine. It has the Weird Tales world views locked in. Lumley is a worthy inheritor of the Lovecraft style, and this story might be as good a place as any to start with him.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (out of print)
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“The Laughing Man” (1949)

Here’s a fun fact about this story by J.D. Salinger: in the movie The Last Days of Disco, director and writer Whit Stillman has someone ask Alice, an ambitious book editor (played by Chloe Sevigny), what her dream book to publish would be. Her answer is a book of new J.D. Salinger stories “more in the direction of ‘The Laughing Man,’ or ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’” (per Wikipedia). I think I know what Alice means, at least about this story. It’s sweet and nostalgic but has a bitter edge too. These elements work together very well. The narrator unnamed is remembering an episode from when he was 9. He was enrolled in a program with two dozen other boys called the Comanche Club. They were picked up after school for various activities led by “the Chief,” a 22-year-old law student who took them to Central Park and directed baseball, football, and soccer play, depending on the season. Afterwards he told them stories about the Laughing Man in serial form like the radio shows or the pulps. “The only son of a wealthy missionary couple,” he starts, “the Laughing Man was kidnapped as an infant by Chinese bandits,” and proceeds from there in all extravagant directions, depending on how much time he had to kill, such as on rainy days. The arc of this story is about a relationship the Chief starts with a young woman who becomes part of the afternoon crew until they suddenly break up in one or two scenes that make only dim sense to a 9-year-old. Then she is gone. And the Chief is sad. It’s all incorporated into his Laughing Man narratives, which take some especially wrenching turns at the time of the breakup, with the schoolyear’s end looming. In his grief, perhaps, or maybe for some other reason, the Chief is leaving his job and these kids. He weaves it dramatically into his last installment of the story of the Laughing Man—obviously the last and final. The Chief reminds me of Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance as Robert E. Howard in the movie The Whole Wide World. The Chief is a young man still finding his way. You hope he’ll make it through law school. But he also has a gift for storytelling and spinning yarns, specifically in the pulp and radio show modes of his immediate times—1949—and all the pulps and radio shows that preceded it. He is obviously a voracious consumer of the stuff, with a knack for spitting it back out. That could be his future too, with all the exuberance of D’Onofrio as Robert E. Howard (and perhaps the same sad ending too).

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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Blue Blood (2001)

Blue Blood was released in the same year as James Blood Ulmer’s epic collaboration with Willie Dixon and Vernon Reid, Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions (recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis). Blue Blood is a collaboration with Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, and Amina Claudine Myers. Less concerned with Memphis bloodlines, inevitably it is also less fiery. What surprised me was a religious note running through much of it that left me wondering whether Ulmer is an avowed Christian (as opposed to the more general “spiritual person”). In album opener “O Gentle One,” an Ulmer song, he declares, “I believe in God and all of his creatures” and goes on to provide detail: “He’s the one, the only one.... He made the heavens and the Earth, in six days and nights. He made me, and you. Ain’t that out of sight?” Two songs later, on “99 Names,” he is back at the work of exalting the Lord. I didn’t count them, it might actually be 99, but it’s stuff like the Absolver, the Conqueror, the Restorer, the Provider, the One and Only Merciful and Compassionate King, etc. We’re talking about the Bible God again and even more specifically our old friend the jealous Old Testament God. Blue Blood is just altogether more pious than I expected from the guy doing Memphis sessions with the actual breathing Willie Dixon that same year, but maybe it just goes to show ... something. I see I picked up this CD at a used-CD place I used to frequent. The Bible God theme recurs often in Blue Blood in many ways, but not exclusively or even overbearingly. Some references are more subtle than others. To be clear, I don’t hear “O Gentle One” as subtle. Many of these songs have little if anything to do with God, some are at least mostly instrumental, and finally this album is approximately as warm as I’ve ever heard Ulmer. He is still found rumbling in with his electric guitar flashes of musical bent barbed wire, as on “As It Is.” He offers up a sweltering luxurious turn on “On and On.” And “Momentarily” is a lighthearted romp on a gorgeous soaring melody. Heartfelt pleas for unity on “We Got to Get Together” are made more bitingly sincere with lines like “I’ve seen my people kicked in the face,” not letting anyone off the hook yet for purposes of unity. It’s a funny interesting mixed bag we get from Ulmer in Blue Blood, and one I’ve been more inclined to listen to over the Memphis sessions, for whatever reason. Worth a try, I’d say.

Casino (1995)

USA / France, 178 minutes

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writers: Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese

Photography: Robert Richardson

Music: Martin Scorsese’s record collection

Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker

Cast: Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, James Woods, Don Rickles, Alan King, Kevin Pollak, L.Q. Jones, Dick Smothers, Frankie Avalon, Frank Vincent, Don Ward, Melissa Prophet, Vinny Vella

I believe the general knock on Casino, the one I seem to hear a lot, is that it’s too much like Goodfellas—long movie, sprawling story, voiceovers propelling the action, big lively cast, Joe Pesci a terrifying ankle-biting purveyor of extreme violence. I guess that’s fair enough but I’m still a fan—maybe just a reflection of how much I like Goodfellas. For me, Casino is like getting seconds at the banquet, detailing another big story. Both are from books by cowriter Nicholas Pileggi. This time it’s the attempt of organized crime (aka the Mafia, etc.) to take over Nevada’s gambling industry in Las Vegas in the 1970s and 1980s—the attempt, and the failure. The big narrative arc of Casino was written up by Pileggi, director Martin Scorsese’s screenwriting collaborator here and on Goodfellas, and published the same year the movie came out as Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. That’s the big picture context of everything going on here, but I suspect the plot points involving the characters are more on the fictional side.

The cast is undeniable, delivering on the high tragedy of a doomed love story, which feels like it comes from someplace ancient. Robert De Niro is Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a seemingly mild-mannered genius of a bookie. For much of the first two-thirds of the picture De Niro plays against type. We’ll get back to that. Joe Pesci is Nicky Santoro, childhood friend of Sam and a made mobster who sees Vegas as a vast opportunity for wealth by whatever means necessary. Sharon Stone is Ginger McKenna, a call girl who is beautiful (well, she’s Sharon Stone) but primarily into money. And James Woods is Lester Diamond, her one-time pimp. Sam falls hard for Ginger and marries her. Ginger just can’t quit Lester, but Sam says love will come in time. What could possibly go wrong?

Presence (2024)

Director Steven Soderbergh continues active in his so-called retirement since 2013 with the star-studded spy movie Black Bag and this somewhat unusual ghost story. Lucy Liu is impressive as Rebekah, the mama bear head of this family unit of four. She has a decided, unhealthy preference for their son Tyler (Eddy Maday). She’s doing everything she can to launch him into life with all the advantages, including buying a home and moving into a school district that will work better for him. The dynamic forces husband and father Chris (Chris Sullivan) to take on defending their daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), who recently lost her best friend to a drug overdose and has begun showing signs of misbehavior due to the grief. Chris keeps suggesting things like new therapists, new treatments, new drugs, but Rebekah insists what she needs is time. She might be right, in a way, but mainly she doesn’t really seem to care. They have bought the haunted house (not knowing it is haunted, which even the realtor doesn’t seem to know, though she might be lying) because it puts Tyler in a school district where he can compete more effectively as an athlete—Rebekah’s idea. What makes Presence unusual is that it is largely told from the point of view of the ghost. It takes a little while to figure out. At first the swirling camera just seems like the restless camera Soderbergh has frequently resorted to, but gradually the conceit becomes more obvious. It’s a pretty good story about a dysfunctional family, though as a ghost story it’s somewhat cliched, turning to grief and trauma as the single source of all the supernatural business. And there are convenient and familiar plot developments we’ve seen a lot, such as a serial killer with a fiendish manner of killing. But Soderbergh has skills, and Presence builds to a high peak of intensity that makes it a reasonably good movie overall (likely helped a little by a short running time under 90 minutes). I’m a little tired myself of the grief and trauma freight train running through so much horror these days, but I’d say Presence is worth a look—more for the dysfunctional family, harrowingly detailed, than the clumsy and helpless ghost, which mostly comes to feel like a device.

The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

I read this in the Delphi kindle product for Mark Twain, which is not clear about which of many possible versions of his unfinished last novel it is. It sounds most like the one described in Wikipedia as the “Paine-Duneka text of 1916,” which is where I get my publication date six years after Twain’s death. Most of his work on it was reportedly done between 1897 and 1900. The Paine-Duneka was slapped together from fragments and various arguably untoward editorial additions, inserted surreptitiously, and it is considered by some to be a literary fraud. So caveats, caveats. What I read more or less worked. Three boys are enchanted by a powerful figure named Satan who hates humanity, often with good cause. He claims to be an angel and a “sinless” nephew of the actual Satan. But he is often casually and astonishingly cruel. In many ways Twain’s conception of Satan here is less as a cackling hooved madman with a pitchfork and more as an irresistible seducer, which ultimately makes him an unnerving character. The three boys love him madly and miss him badly when he is gone. In his spiritual style he is more authoritarian, for example using magic to make it impossible for the boys to speak of him credibly even when they want to. They simply can’t get the words out of their mouths. I thought Twain was formally an atheist, but this is a deeply Judeo-Christian view of the universe, where God is more democratic (if still jealous), granting free will, such as it is. I like that and what I really like is how seductive Satan is. He performs simple miracles for the boys, such as filling their pockets with their favorite fruits, but he works on many readers, including me, with his utterly rational denunciations of humanity. When you’re right you’re right, amirite? Lots of great stuff going on here. Just using the name Satan is bold and effective, continually making us uncomfortable. Then his character. He’s likable. You can even see how people hope he likes them too. He’s like John Wick in his tender regard for animals and ruthless consequences for humans. His idea of mercy is to kill someone quickly. And the boys just go on liking him and liking him. The narrative itself seems to be the most unfinished part. Here it involves lost and found or stolen bags of gold coins and a criminal court trial with a callow attorney. My favorite fragment is the one called “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” where Twain’s great cynical rejections take over. He died a bitter man and there’s some explanation for that here. My sympathies remain all with him.

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

Pacific Ocean Blue (1977)

Per the stalwart Wikipedia, Dennis Wilson’s brother Brian Wilson said in a 1976 radio interview that he jeered at early mixes he heard of Dennis’s solo album. "Dennis, that's funky! That's funky!" he said. He wasn’t talking about Sly Stone. Mostly I take it as further adventures of the toxic Wilson family, but I have to admit I might have a kind of similar problem with Dennis’s only album. It’s got the mellow vibe of one lane of the ‘70s singer/songwriter style, hewing close to, say, Jackson Browne or the more depressed versions of the Eagles (say, “Desperado”). Where the Beach Boys were sparkling bright at their best, this strain of ‘70s folk-rock (they called it) tends more toward the resolutely dour. My problem, which I invite you not to have, is that I can’t get the idea of Dennis’s association with Charles Manson out of my head. For all the session pros lending a (hired) hand to support him here—and in fairness Pacific Ocean Blue is convincing enough as ‘70s rock tinged with weary experience—Dennis sounds eerily absent to me, removed, apart, disconnected. It’s an unnerving and out-of-step note at the center of this album. Is it really just a case of drug casualty? Or is it my imagination? Taking up the few songs that actually reached me, “What’s Wrong” stands out as a certain epitome of ‘70s rock, grinding in slow motion and exalting “rock ‘n’ roll.” “You and I” (which Brian later claimed to love) and “Moonshine” could well be the best songs here, but that could well be because they sound the most like the Beach Boys. It’s not really surprising, given everything we know, that Dennis is the “darker” Wilson (setting aside Murry for the moment). He’s not sweet like Brian and Carl, and he’s credited as having a hand in writing all of these songs. Carl, by the way, ever the loyalist, is on hand here playing lead and rhythm guitars. He also cowrote a couple songs (“River Song,” “Rainbows”). Mike Love cowrote “Pacific Ocean Blues.” On a certain level you have to wonder what Dennis might have done if he hadn’t died in 1983 at the age of 39. Then you might remember that, though he continued to work on material, he never released anything more in the six years after this album. Probably a drug casualty, all things considered. File under sad stories of rock ‘n’ roll.

“Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” (1985)

This story by Thomas Ligotti—a story is really the only thing you can call it—is fairly impressive in combining a critical voice with a fictional one, turning the latter practically into words from a madman. It may be a little too pleased with itself but it is also very well executed. The notes on the writing of horror err on the side of glib, an occupational hazard of the critic at all levels. But the story Ligotti creates for illustrative purposes and analysis (or “analysis”) is deceptively simple. It is strange and only stranger as you think of it, which you do as he brings it to your attention over and over until he finally finishes it off, kind of. It involves a malevolent pair of pants and a flat tire in the bad part of town. The preoccupations Ligotti can have with things that may not land the same way 40 years later do date this dazzling story a little. He often resorts to serial killers and even more often to a “bad part of town.” Ligotti—or whatever fictional persona may be making these notes—divides horror in various arbitrary ways, e.g., the realistic technique, the traditional gothic technique, and the experimental technique. I’d like to know more about how he wrote this story. It’s possible that the story outlined here was one Ligotti tried to write, as his maybe kinda sorta alter ego here, named Gerald K. Riggers (with variations), claims outright. “Frankly, I just couldn’t bring myself to go the distance with this one,” he writes. From the notes it seems likely he broke down the horror project the way he describes and couldn’t find one that worked and so tried to make a story out of that. Two-thirds along the way, he (whoever “he” is, I’m still going with Ligotti) is seized and the story wakes and comes alive as an incandescent fragment. It’s almost stunning. It doesn’t 100% work but the inspiration of it is 100% felt—the breakthrough, almost liberating moment is terrific. And the glib critical voice is a lot of fun too. The story feels somehow pivotal. It’s very good, for example, at being a realistic, traditional gothic, and experimental horror story. It might be one of the best, except I’m not really sure what to compare it to.

Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
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“The Locked Room” (1986)

The New York Trilogy
The third piece in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy makes a strong case that it is indeed a trilogy, with shared themes and tone. Auster also distributed various details across it—a detective and/or writer named Quinn, a red notebook, a character named Stillman, and more—that give it a somewhat deceptive sense of unity. I’m not entirely convinced Auster is that good at endings, but he’s certainly good at most of the rest. This is an even better mystery story than the first piece in the trilogy, “City of Glass,” though both go similarly off the rails. It seems to promise a locked-room mystery, a staple of the mystery / detective genre, but it is not a locked-room mystery at all. A locked room only appears near the end. Instead, this is another staple of the genre I like even more, when done well, which is the missing-person case, a disappearance. As with the rest of this trilogy it turns all questions into existential mysteries we can only ponder, never solve. The pondering is the solution. Thus, Fanshawe, the narrator’s childhood friend (I don’t believe we get a name for this first-person narrator?). Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind a wife, a son, and manuscripts that fill two suitcases. It’s hard to say why he has vanished. We do learn it is his own decision, not some crime. His manuscripts are popular and launch him into some upper realm of literary regard. The narrator marries Fanshawe’s widow—the public story is that Fanshawe is missing, presumed dead—and essentially enjoys all the fruits of Fanshawe’s work, including substantial royalties. But when publishers want him to write a Fanshawe biography and he gets a big contract his life starts to fall apart. Auster does not succeed in steering the genre everywhere he wants to take it, but he’s such a good writer, and can work so acutely well with the conventions, that he is rarely less than a pleasure to read. All three pieces in The New York Trilogy are perfectly enjoyable, even if the endings seem a bit muddled. Auster takes the genre conventions and works them well, exaggerating certain points absurdly, such as the vigils of shadowing suspects, adding whole new dimensions to the mystery story. It’s all arch and ironic and deserves all the “scare quotes” you can muster up. But it’s fun too and the kind of thing you might be inclined to gobble up in one or two sittings.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
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As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

USA, 288 minutes

Director/writer/photography/editor: Jonas Mekas

Music: Auguste Varkalis

With: Jonas Mekas, Hollis Melton, Oona Mekas, Sebastian Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Allen Ginsberg, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Robert Breer

Jonas Mekas’s lengthy “diary film” from the turn of the century lasts nearly five hours, gathering up the home movies of his life from about the late ‘60s on and splicing them together with no obvious method or strategy, accompanied by bursts of voiceover. He explains at the beginning of the picture that even the thought of trying to organize all the material was overwhelming. He started out trying to do so but quickly gave it up. He managed to divide it into 12 chapters, but only Chapter Three, about his wedding, honeymoon, birth of Oona, his daughter ... and more, coheres his themes even remotely. He reports to us from his “little editing room,” usually late at night. All of it is amateurish—these are home movies, after all—even if Mekas was known as an experimental filmmaker (and poet, and artist). The sound, if it is even there, is often terrible, with inconsistent audio levels. The images are not much better than that. The camera shakes a lot and there are many, many cuts.

“You must, by now,” he says at the beginning of Chapter Five, 91 minutes in, speaking in his gravelly, measured Lithuanian accent, “come to a realization that what you are seeing is a sort of masterpiece of nothing. Nothing.” I was thinking that myself but at the same time it occurred to me that just previously he showed Oona’s first steps (to the accompaniment of the Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run”). It’s arguable that first steps are profound in terms of human development. He captured that, even dwelt on it. It’s a beautiful moment. Then Mekas, at the beginning of Chapter Five, catches himself on the point. He speaks of the importance of those images of Oona’s first steps, emphasizing the word “importance.” He calls them “little moments of paradise.” It’s not the first or last time he will use the phrase—and, indeed, many others.

Heretic (2024)

The directing and screenwriting team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods is responsible for the ongoing franchise, A Quiet Place. This is a trial by faith—two young women Mormon missionaries versus well-informed religious skeptic Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), home at his leisure. The young women knock on his door to ask if he has heard the good news of our savior Jesus Christ. He has indeed. It’s pouring rain. He invites them in. They can enter only if another woman is present. He says his wife is at home with him, baking blueberry pie. They cross the threshold. These young women don’t know it yet, but they are in big trouble. Mr. Reed says his wife, who is suddenly shy, will be with them shortly. The blueberry pie smells delicious but later they learn it’s just a scented candle. He confronts them, diplomatically, with awkward questions about polygamy. It’s all quite uncomfortable. Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) is defensive and reflexively tries to explain the Mormon position. It’s soon evident Mr. Reed has them trapped. The storm outside has grown more intense, with snow. The front door is locked and the key to their bike lock is in their coats, which Mr. Reed has taken and put somewhere. Sister Paxton (Chloe East) attempts to flatter and mollify him but he’s got them now. The main point of Heretic, of course, is Hugh Grant—with impeccable manners and stammering appeal (as always). His light-hearted bantering style morphs from charming to menacing though he doesn’t actually change that much. He’s just Hugh Grant, as we know him, but now full of religious thought and philosophy, and aggressive about it. As things get worse one of the victims cries, “Why do you do this?” With an answer that incidentally helps explain our present political predicament, he responds, “The question is, why do you let me?” Indeed. There’s some gore here, not much, but Grant typically makes the most of it. The basic idea seems to be the casting against type, turning everyone’s favorite British romantic lead into a monster. It’s fun to see Hugh Grant having so much fun, but we’re already seen this kind of religious debate many times in the movies (Dogma, First Reformed, Rapture, The Seventh Seal). Basically this one is for Hugh Grant fans and/or the religiously curious almost exclusively.

Childhood’s End (1953)

I first read this Arthur C. Clarke novel, a certified science fiction classic, when I was in my 20s, but I didn’t remember much about it except I had a meh reaction. I liked it more this time but still think it’s within range of meh. The streaks of mysticism seem out of place to me. The larger view is of human evolution going to places we can only imagine, much like the movie and novel he collaborated on with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a general way that novel and movie is equally hard to fathom. There’s no denying the ambition of Childhood’s End even as short as it is. It starts with a first contact story (the 1996 movie Independence Day lifted a lot of ideas about how it would go) and ends with the last generation of human beings as we know them. The universe here is mostly rational, ordered, and hierarchical. The “Overlords” who take over running planet Earth have their own masters up the chain. This “Overlords” thing is funny—the Overlords don’t like the term. It reminds me of one of the best gags in The Simpsons, from broadcast news anchor Kent Brockman: “And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.” Humanity gonna humanity! For the most part I appreciate what the Overlords do, wiping out war and poverty and such. It’s not their primary purpose here, but that’s where the mysticism cup begins to froth over. In many ways it’s a pastiche of nuclear anxiety, riffing on relativity and time dilation in space travel, and seeking for the greater purposes of life. Clarke has a lot of ideas that keep it interesting, such as exploring the mysteries of the ocean depths. There is a notable passivity to the human beings here, but that’s plausibly understood as the ultimate response to the Overlords’ superior powers. There’s something cringy for me about the physical appearance of the Overlords, which they don’t reveal until 50 years after the occupation. It's kind of like the way we’ve been denied information about the JFK assassination. When the reveal finally came it struck me as very silly. But that doesn’t mean Childhood’s End is not still entertaining as a classic of SF.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“Soft” (1984)

I liked this story by F. Paul Wilson—another good one in The Weird, which may have its ups and downs, but the highs tend to be unusually high. Here the concept is a virus (and/or environmental toxin—they haven’t figured it out yet) which decomposes and liquefies bones, usually (but not always) from the feet up. The disaster is spreading widely. The story involves a father and daughter in a Manhattan apartment who have both mostly lost their legs. Like multiple sclerosis the progress of this thing is unpredictable. It can stop getting worse. Government-sponsored research is ongoing, but—eerily, as with Covid—people don’t trust the government, including the father in this story. There’s an interesting tension between the father and the daughter. She is a little worse off and wants to take advantage of the government programs. He thinks it will do them no good, at best they are experimenting on people with mixed results. A great detail here is that the bone deterioration is audible to the victim, “like someone gently crinkling cellophane inside your head.” The narrative arc is the father’s investigation into a neighbor across the street who has not been responding to his walkie-talkie for a few days. The journey there is an arduous one, walking on his knees. And really that’s about it. Brevity once again helps to make a story work. “Soft” freezes you and leaves you, establishing the condition and then the scope—worldwide, the entire human species, and moving fast. Prognosis negative, in other words. One thing that’s interesting here is that disintegration of bones does not appear to be painful. It just happens, and it is devastating, but there are few direct physical agonies associated with it, just that horrible crinkling sound. “Soft” is kind of like the Titanic story after the iceberg. Everything is ending—in relatively slow motion but ending certainly. Wilson does a good job of laying it out and a better one of letting it lay there: an apocalypse. It reminds me that way of Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life”—the same level of disaster as we enter. Strange and weird and horrible, science fiction but also horror because it is so utterly despairing in its implications. But its tone, by contrast, is more upbeat, plucky—the vibe of someone who wants to survive and means to but probably won’t but still wants to but won’t. Teetering right there. Good one.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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