Sunday Shorts with the Sheriff: Roald Dahl is cruel to children

Hello all! Sheriff Tom here. I seem to be the only one making Notes From Stansbury right now. That's cool, I guess. But I didn't even get an introduction this week. What gives? It's like I'm just expected to show up and write about short stories now.

Well, okay, it gives me something to do and it bugs Steve that I get to write stuff for the town blog and he doesn't. His little weasel face gets all twisted up which is just funny which makes this worthwhile.

Anyway, I suppose everyone else is outside doing things and too busy to stare at a computer screen. It's just too beautiful for words around now...or beautiful enough to partake of words outside. Books are wonderful for a lazy late spring day sitting out on the grass under a tree somewhere. When I was a kid, I used to love Roald Dahl's works and as an adult, I was thrilled to discover that he wrote stuff for us, too. 

“The Wish” – Roald Dahl

If you ever have the chance, pick up a Roald Dahl omnibus. There is a treasure trove of wonderful dark stories. "The Wish" is one of those great stories about a child’s imagination that slowly blurs the line between what is imagined and what is real. At the outset, the child’s journey across a huge rug is the kind of game many kids (including myself as a child) play. There are three colors in the rug and only one is “safe” to walk on while stepping on the other two will lead to certain death.  The ending of the story is ambiguous as to whether or not the game had somehow become real.

Throughout the story, Dahl’s language captures the mindset of the child perfectly. Because it is a child’s imagination, the reality of the situation is always in doubt. It is only when the titular wish is made in passing that there is even an inkling of a sense that the child has willed something real into the world. As a reader of Dahl’s work, I always have an expectation of some kind of twist at the end of the story, something unexpected (but expected). More often than not, it is a moral or a lesson being taught to the reader from Dahl’s very strict sense of right and wrong. This story was an interesting diversion from the norm because I didn’t get the sense that the child was being punished for anything. Because of the ambiguous ending, I am not even sure if anything happened to the child at all and, unlike many Dahl characters, I did not really want anything to happen to this child.

The tension in the story reflects the sense of play. Dahl effortlessly creates a lack of danger by filtering everything through the child. Because I felt this was a child’s game, even though I suspected that it would become real, I was never really worried for the child. The tension is consistently deflected until the end, where the lack of definite resolution creates a greater tension. Not really knowing what happened, worrying that the snakes in the rug were real and devoured the child… there is real angst in this beyond a tidy conclusion.

Sunday Shorts with the Sheriff - That's Mr. Lovecraft to you.

Sheriff Tom was so happy to take part in this, that we're letting him make this his weekly thing. We'd actually like to rename it, Sunday Shorts with the Sheriff. So here's our lawman with his pick for the week.

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Hi, everyone. Being the sheriff of a small New England town that has...a history, it's only natural that I have some interest in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I mean, when things around Stansbury get bad, I can at least look to Lovecraft's work and say, well, at least it's not as bad as all that. This week, I want to share the story, "Nyarlathotep" with you.

Lovecraft mainly wrote of people who discovered the world was doomed to succumb to dark, insane gods. If you have never read a Lovecraft tale, it is hard to relate to you the power of his language. His vocabulary and tone make Poe seem like Jane Austen.

This particular story is a treasure trove of dark descriptions. Just about every line is pregnant with dread. I am particularly fond of the line: “A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low.” It is poetic, evocative and deeply disturbing both in the context of the story and, simply, in the image it creates.

Writing horror is a tricky business because you really have to think about what you intend your story to do. Do you want your readers losing sleep to nightmares? Do you want to create disgust or shock? I think Lovecraft wanted his prose to disturb his readers. He wanted to create vivid landscapes of a nightmarish pseudo-reality and mindscapes of psychosis born of the knowledge that nightmares are the pale reflection of the really horrible things that exist and have been discovered. This story is effective because it is relentless horror. It smothers the reader with so much vivid dark detail that by the time you reach the end you are breathless and, yes, disturbed.

Something About Bridges - Sunday Shorts

So here in Stansbury, we like a good short story as much as the next person. As a matter of fact, Sheriff Tom has written a number of them and he keeps submitting them to The New Yorker and The Atlantic and "important" magazines like that and he always gets rejected and everyone keeps telling him that the stories are really good, but just not quite right for the Algonquin set. But we did ask the sheriff to contribute something about a story he likes for Sunday Shorts, which can be found both here at Goodreads or here, which is a cool blog from another northern town. 

So here's Sheriff Tom with one of his recommendations...

Neil Gaiman - Troll Bridge

Neil Gaiman writes excellent fantasy tales. He knows the tropes and he works well in the genre. Because I write a lot of bridge centered stories, this one stuck out to me simply on title. But I really love all the stories in this book...and most of Gaiman's work. As an illustrator, I wish I could draw the stuff he writes. That would be incredible.

Anyway...

There are two aspects of this story that work nicely. The first is the way Gaiman seamlessly introduces a very basic fantasy character, the troll under the bridge, into the very real, ordinary life of his narrator. There is never a moment where the narrator wonders how the troll exists in his world. He simply accepts the troll and the troll’s demand of his life as he would a criminal who had stopped him to take his wallet. The magic of the creature and his “attack” is not shocking for the reader because it is not shocking to the narrator. I have never read magical realism that integrated traditional fantasy until this story. The magic is natural and of nature in the way that defines magical realism.

The second aspect of the story that was very successful was the melancholy of the narrator’s life. It is sad while not pathetic. It would have been very easy for Gaiman to create pathos. But it is simply sad. As the character’s life progresses, the missed opportunities and poor choices play nicely against the fall of the natural world to modernization. The simple fact that the narrator would rather be the troll under a graffiti-scrawled, condom strewn bridge than to continue in his own sad life, or, as he states at the end, any sad modern life, speaks volumes to the decay that modern life has imposed upon living.