Brain Bombs or How to Read My Stories

This afternoon I asked one of my mystery colleagues what he thought of “The Ice Cream Truck’s Song” (now “The Ninth, Not Final, Plague”). He said frankly that he frankly didn’t get it at all, even after reading it twice. Interesting. Here he was a native speaker and he’d fared worse than my students. They at least knew it was a ghost story. Hmm. We talked about the title, which I admitted was misleading. He said it made you think something nice was going to happen. Well, something nice did happen, from a certain perspective. He said it reminded him of Poe’s madmen stories. Lots of detail. I can’t remember what triggered it, but he suddenly shouted, “Oh! I know who the ghosts are!” I must have said something about its being a ghost story. I think that’s right. The minute he knew it was a spooker, everything clicked. Hmm.

The conversation reminded me that I’d planned to write a brief treatise on how to read certain of my stories which begin “in medias res” and don’t supply obvious hints about what’s going to come in handy down the road. I’m referring here to things like the James Bond movies, where Bond invariably pays a visit to Q, who invariably hands him a set of disguised weapons and other gear, which Bond invariably calls upon in a tight spot, or the Harry Potter stories, in which one or two magical gadgets introduced casually early in the tale end up being crucial to the plot (think of the time-turner in The Prisoner of Azkaban, the portkey in The Goblet of Fire, the pensieve in The Order of the Phoenix and the vanishing cabinet in The Half-Blood Prince).

While I don’t mind, and even enjoy, this obvious style of presentation in other people’s work, I like to do it more subtly myself. I like to show you the world and let you notice what you will, the way it works in the real world. Of course, there are myriad differences between any story and the real world. Any report or representation of reality is going to be restricted in content, our attention is going to be funneled to a few pertinent items, but I so like those moments in M. Knight Shyamalan’s movies when a whole mess of seemingly insignificant details or oddities suddenly string together into one tight and intense realization (as when Malcolm Crowe can’t open the basement door in The Sixth Sense, David Dunn sees Elijah Price’s diagrams in Unbreakable, and Graham Hess confronts the alien in Signs).

And so to “The Ninth, Not Final, Plague”. I’m not entirely pleased with that title, which may be the subject of a future entry called “Evolution of a Title”. It’s a good title, but it’s a bit heavy for the story, just as “The Ice Cream Truck’s Song” was too light. Anyway, let’s talk briefly about how the story works.

It starts with what for some readers would be, and is, an obvious clue: “I myself would not believe it, if not for the bell.” This is a pretty plain tip off that something weird is about to be described. If that isn’t enough, we have the next sentence: “Every night it rings–and rings and rings until I open the door and find–nothing.” What else could we be talking about but ghosts, especially after the next paragraph, which tells us that “there was no one there. The elevator had opened and was closing and stood empty on my floor. There was no one in the stairwell for two floors and not a soul on the roof”?

Next thing you know the narrator is hearing voices. Not much later he is making them out. It could only be ghosts, ba.

The question for most of my students is “Who are the ghosts?” They really puzzle over that one. Yet the clues are so numerous it’s almost embarrassing. You could be forgiven for thinking the narrator was freaked out until you read paragraph five: “It seemed like a game. It was a game. I had played it before.” If that doesn’t help, he tells you “I would have let it ring a decade if I could”, not what you’d expect from someone experiencing fear, unless you take it to mean he’d rather hear the bell ring than face the ghosts in the corridor. Ooh! That gave me the cold pricklies! But then he goes on “grasping at shadows”, actually trying to touch the ghost that rings the bell, so he’s obviously not afraid of the ghosts, and then he claims to know where the ghost’s hand, arm, shoulders and head should be–even what the look on its face must be! If that doesn’t do it for you, he digresses about shoes and dust and about an apartment that hasn’t been looked after for a while. Then there’s the perfume, a sly little twist to show he has a grip on reality. He’s sure he must be imagining the perfume. It wouldn’t be so apparent if its wearer were returning.

Then we have paragraph eleven, which spells out in huge flaming letters the relationship between the ghosts. Taken with paragraph ten’s “family grave” simile for the vacant parking spot that neighbours wish to buy or rent but which the narrator refuses to sell or rent in case “they” return and paragraph eight’s dust and shoes description, paragraph eleven amounts to a statement of the relationship between the narrator and the ghosts. The second to last paragraph talks about fear, but not of the ghosts: of their eventually not coming anymore, a fate the narrator would rather avoid. Why? Well, you figure it out.

This type of story I call a brain bomb. You go along, wondering or not, and somewhere very close to the end, it all clicks and your brain explodes with it. In the explosion, all the subtle hints come rushing together to be relived, everything takes on new meaning (or just meaning, if you didn’t start to get it earlier), and there’s this intense, exquisite paroxysm of understanding and awe, awe not for my finesse with the pen or keyboard, but for the splendour and terror of the human soul, the beauty and horror of our state.

Does that help anybody?