"The Most Dangerous Game" (1924)

I recall Richard Connell's chestnut as being taught in high school. I wonder if that wasn't how the Zodiac serial killer was exposed to it, who made oblique references to it in one letter to Bay Area newspapers. Operating just behind the Zodiac in the '70s and '80s, in Alaska, was Robert Hansen, who kidnapped women, raped them, flew them to remote wilderness areas, and hunted them. "The Most Dangerous Game," alas quaint now at best after such true-crime episodes, is further weakened by being full of absurd convenience. A man falls off a yacht in the Caribbean and swims "the blood-warm water" to the nearest island. His name is Sanger Rainsford and he happens to be a big-game hunter. He also happens to be an author. The owner of the island happens to know his work. That owner is General Zaroff, a Czarist loyalist, who I imagine having a scar on the side of his face like Fearless Leader from Bullwinkle. It's a reasonably good idea, this horror of humans formally hunting one another (what next, cannibalism?!), but it's a little too impressed with its awesomeness to work out the details and make it credible. It's still fun to read as a sort of adventure story with a tang of existential dread. It's mostly setup and then the last third is a lot of chasing around the jungle making booby traps and/or avoiding them. It reads like a story that is still a little shell-shocked from the Great War. Indeed, our hero, besides being a big-game hunter and author, also happens to be a veteran of that war. His experience quickly digging trenches comes in handy. The story is haunted by human brutality even as it seems to have little idea how bad it can get. I appreciate the dark spirit but by the time I was reading it in high school movies like Night of the Living Dead and Last House on the Left were more the latest word in human brutality. Interesting that those movies are likely not yet taught in high school, and this Connell story might still be, but the reasons are obvious and understandable. An interesting curiosity but not that much to see here, folks.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Fisherman From Chihuahua" (1954)

Story by Evan S. Connell not available online.

This moody and atmospheric story by Evan S. Connell, set in the boardwalk of Santa Cruz, California, during the off-season, struck me as comical, though looking into what others say it doesn't seem to be generally taken that way. The diner that provides the specific setting is owned by Pendleton. One of his regular is "a short fat Mexican who worked as a mechanic." Pendleton thinks of him as "Toltec" because of his resemblance to Toltec idols. He calls him "Pablo," which offends the Mexican. The Mexican is a regular, showing up most nights for dinner, pinball, and music from a jukebox. One night he shows up with a companion, who is taller, better dressed, more handsome, and silent. Silent, that is, until the Mexican plays music, at which point he begins to raise a mighty sound. It's actually hard to make out what is going on at first: "His lips had peeled away from his teeth like those of a jaguar tearing meat, and the veins of his neck looked ready to pop. In the shrill screams bursting from his throat was a memory of the Moors, the ching of Arab cymbals, of rags and of running feet through all the marketplaces of the East." It's singing. At first Pendleton tries to get him to stop—but the strange tall man doesn't respond to being addressed, only carries on that way whenever the Mexican plays music. After about a week of it, Pendleton notices that he's getting more customers for dinner. The strange tall man has started to become an attraction, even though it's the off-season. Here's where I started to take it as comedy. The eruption of noise appears to be unpleasant but it's the spectacle itself, the mere fact that it happens—the grotesquerie—that seems to be drawing people. Tracking down other interpretations, they speak of it more as a clash of cultures, where the California tourists are ignorant rubes and the strange tall man represents the dignity of an alien culture. But I don't get that. From the descriptions, the narrator seems as convinced of its alienating nonmusical qualities as Pendleton or any of the tourists, who seem to be there to gawk. He provides colorful detail ("the ching of Arab cymbals") but the experience does not sound very appealing. Then, just as Pendleton figures out he has something of a cash cow for his diner, the strange tall man disappears. The Mexican says he's out on a drunk. A few nights later, that he's recovering from the drunk. When the strange tall man finally comes back, he's apparently ill, fading away, and by story's end he's gone, leaving only the memory of the image of him wailing and shrieking, surrounded by fascinated Californians and visitors.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks