Bradbury Challenge Days 4-
Dec. 22nd, 2025 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1I got a little messed up on Days 4-5 because of going to Michigan with A. David one day, then working all day + going home to my parents' the next. But I still did my best XD
Day 4 (Dec. 18)
Essay: Mickey and Minnie by E.M. Forster
This is a cute 1934 essay by Forster about film, how much he dislikes it, and how much he loves Disney cartoons by contrast -- funny to me because I know Forster and T.E. Lawrence were friends, and Lawrence had an identical stance. I wonder which of them pinched it from the other, or if they just naturally agreed. In the course of the essay, Forster bemoans how Mickey cartoons have gotten worse ("They need to go back to having mouse adventures! Quit all this singing! Why is Pluto even there??) and gushes over the Mickey/Minnie romance before taking a sinister turn, where he paints a delicious picture of Minnie stuck in a time loop, or in a sort of liminal space -- never married to Mickey, yet always getting married; perpetually living in a stasis mode in an empty house with no family or servants (such a British thing to say) until Mickey collects her for an adventure. And at the end, he compares Mickey to animal gods like Ganesh (because of course Forster is gonna bring up Ganesh) and finishes it off with an exquisite line about how, of course, Mickey will die someday, as all animal gods do -- but at least he'll always have the honor of being the first animal god caught on film!
Letter: From F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter
This was included in the anthology of essays by famous authors writing about film -- but it barely counts! It's a short letter F. Scott wrote to his daughter as he was on a train en route to Hollywood. And ... that's it, that's its only relevancy. He moans a bit about Hollywood politics, then affectionately tells his daughter not to go crazy like Zelda.
Day 5 (Dec. 19)
Short story: The Dark Room by Tennessee Williams
A short, captivatingly vague story told mostly in dialogue, with very little context given -- which I love. As it unfolds we understand that the conversation we're reading is between a mother and a social worker. The husband has been off work for years -- something's wrong with his head -- and the teen daughter has been secluded in her bedroom for 6 months without coming out. She secluded herself when her Jewish boyfriend Sol broke up with her, and will only let Sol in -- nobody else. The story ends without any further context, and with an abrupt announcement from the social worker that the teenager, Tina, will have to be taken away.
Poem: Judas Iscariot by Knut Odegard
Probably my favorite poem I've read so far -- very long, starting with Judas' birth to a rabbi and a disgraced woman who already has one child born out of wedlock. Like Joseph and Mary, Judas' parents have traveled for the census and can't find an open inn, so Judas is born in a manger in the same stable as Jesus, and looks into Jesus' eyes as an infant, wondering why there are so many well-wishers over on that side of the barn. As an adult, Judas falls in love with Jesus and leaves his hometown, but becomes increasingly disturbed when Jesus' radical ideology turns into madness -- madness which the other disciples willingly feed into, because they're making so much money. Each episode in Judas' life is interspersed with linear scenes from his suicide, and ofc the poem culminates in his death.
Favorite line: "There is a yellow wind / that never stops in me."
Day 6: (Dec. 20)
Essay: Upstream by Mary Oliver
Since Rich got me this for my birthday, I read the first essay immediately! It's a beautiful, poetic love song to nature, a contemplation on death and life and consciousness, responsibilities, the spiritual beauty of being lost. Feels like an angelic twin to Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Supernatural without any elements of fantasy.
Short story: The Elephant Man by Susan Hill
What a treat! So disturbing. I've had "The Albatross," Hill's collection of short stories, for years but never cracked it open. "The Elephant Man" is told from the POV of William, a boy about kindergarten age, who is dealing with a lot of big changes all at once. His childhood nanny has died and been replaced by a hard-nosed anti-Irish Irishwoman; who seems to have no affection for William and a general hatred of men. His favorite pond, where he likes to sail boats and play with other boys, has just been drained, turning it into a muddy wasteland -- and Nanny won't answer his questions about why. And worse, Nanny makes a strange new friend and starts taking William to disturbing parties, where the friend (a circus performer) transformers himself into a monstrous half-man half-elephant, a show which delights the other kids but horrifies William. The whole thing feels very much like a metaphor for CSA, especially considering a "random" scene where William is approached by a friendly stranger in the woods who offers him conkers.
Poem: From "Chronicle of Drifting" by Yuki Tanaka
This is a short, sparse prose-poem, very utilitarian language. It follows passengers on a Japanese train which has just stopped unexpectedly in a rice field. Favorite line: "The jingling of my apartment keys in my pocket seems to say this is our home, where is the door."
Day 7: (Dec. 21)
Essay: A Hanging by George Orwell
Disturbing, of course. Orwell, stationed in India, watches as a Hindu prisoner is led to the gallows early one morning. He touches on the routine callousness of the guards (and himself), the terrible last-moment realization that a human life is about to be snuffed out, and the strangeness of a happy stray dog crashing the party. In the end, when the deed is done, Orwell shakes off his horror and laughs hysterically with the other guards; they dig back to the past, looking for something they can use to make fun of the prisoner and destroy the power of his dying moments, where he cried out in a dignified, chilling manner to his god.
Short story: The Yellow Bird by Tennessee Williams
A bit easier to parse than The Dark Room. "The Yellow Bird" follows a fictitious family from Salem, using real events (or, well, real accusations) about a demonic yellow bird which tormented the pastor, Increase Tutweiler. Centuries later, Tutweiler's descendants include another preacher in the South, and his wilful daughter Alma, who at age 31 starts taking back her agency. Smoking cigarettes, dyeing her hair, going with boys. Alma ends up running away from home and sleeping with various men in New Orleans, and one of those men gives her a magical child, a son, who in his infancy has a habit of crawling outside unseen and returning with wet jewels and gold. Alma has no clue where these jewels come from until she dies, and her son's father returns to her as a sort of merman or sunken Greek statue, bearing the treasure of lost ships. When Alma dies, her son raises a strange monument with an inscription honoring that yellow bird.
Poem: Glamor on the West Streets / Silver Over Everything by Hanif Abdurraqib
I ran across this poem randomly on Tumblr, didn't intend to pick an Abdurraqib poem for the 21st -- not that there's anything wrong with Abdurraqib! But my taste in Abdurraqib doesn't align with Tumblr's taste in Abdurraqib. I like him when he's at his most twisty and opaque, and ofc lyrical; Tumblr seems to like him when he's at his most simplistic and open. I felt like a bad poem was nonconsensually forced on me XD
Day 8 (Dec. 22)
Essay: Writing off the Subject by Richard Hugo
It feels wrong to see "off" uncapitalized here.
Wonderful essay on writing poetry, with some tips from Hugo and an analysis of a poem called "Rattlesnake" by Brewster Ghiselin. Some choice quotes:
"When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music."
(Hugo then advises the reader to discard the first notion immediately, and to subscribe to the second option if they like, but not by requisite. I like the idea very much that art doesn't have to say anything true -- that there's value in art that lies. I think that's an idea that, if it ever was in fashion, fell out years ago and needs to be rediscovered.)
"One mark of a beginner is his impulse to push language around to make it accommodate what he has already conceived to be the truth, or, in some cases, what he has already conceived to be the form. Even Auden, clever enough at times to make music conform to truth, was fond of quoting the woman in the Forster novel who said something like, 'How do I know what I think until I see what I've said.'"
(Hugo then gives the example of a poem having two subjects -- the triggering subject, i.e. the thing that you see while on your daily walk that makes you think, "This would be a good poem!" and the actual subject, which the poet himself rarely knows or is aware of. He warns against picking a subject that "needs" to have a poem written about it, because it's too big, and it cramps your mind -- if a student picks "Autumn Rain" as his subject, he might write four good lines, but then he runs out of things to say and scrambles to write more. Then he has no clue where to end the poem, and he gets stuck with something long and meandering and unaffecting.)
"Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you'll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good. Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone."
From there, Hugo jumps into the analysis of "Rattlesnake," which I guess counts as my poem for today XD I'll include the full poem here, then summarize Hugo's analysis:
Rattlesnake by Brewster Ghiselin
I found him sleepy in the heat
And dust of a gopher burrow,
Coiled in loose folds upon silence
In a pit of the noonday hillside.
I saw the wedged bulge
Of the head hard as a fist.
I remembered his delicate ways:
The mouth a cat's mouth yawning.
I crushed him deep in dust,
And heard the loud seethe of life
In the dead beads of the tail
Fade, as wind fades
From the wild grain of the hill.
Hugo points out that multisyllabic words automatically trigger thoughts of civilization, culture, education etc. in readers, so Ghiselin uses them to good effect here: "sleepy" and "gopher burrow," "silence" and "noonday hillside" at the start. Then, it's all hard fast monosyllabic words for the next few lines, a blunt description of the snake. Ghiselin veers back to culture before the kill; he compares the snake to a domesticated cat, engenders affection for it in the readers, just to do away with multisyllabic words again as he goes in for the kill. He doesn't qualify the kill or justify himself, he just portrays it with hard grunting words straight to the end -- but, notably, his final line slips back a little, compares the snake favorable to grain, life-giving crops.
The triggering subject is the rattlesnake; the real subject, found through the process of writing, is death and morality, facing the inexplicable motivations behind your own impulsive actions, and doing so honestly, without flinching.
To end the essay, Hugo suggests that writers trust themselves and have a bit of arrogance when writing: trust that each sentence you write means something, and that your word choice was done for a reason, even if right now you don't know what that reason is. He uses a few lines from one of his early poems to illustrate this point -- there's a part in that poem where he used the word "suicide" simply because it sounded a bit like "cascade" and just felt right to him. If he'd thought about it more, he might have chosen "masquerade" instead of "suicide." But masquerade rhymes with cascade, which would have called undue attention to it; and though he didn't really know the true subject of the poem when he was writing it, when he looks back years later, he sees that "suicide" was far more impactful, really was the perfect choice.
Short story: There Shall Be No Darkness by James Blish
I dipped into genre-fiction for this one. There's an anthology called "Werewolf!" that's been sitting on my shelf for years -- originally bought it because it included a rare Peter S. Beagle story, but never ended up reading it. "There Shall Be No Darkness" is more of a novella, 60 pages long, published in 1950. It follows a mean-spirited painter at a party full of elite artistic types on the Scottish moors; the painter has no ear for music and is thoroughly bored when a Polish guest starts showing off his piano skills. As his mind wanders, the painter notices some odd things about the pianist, Jan: first of all, his index and middle fingers are the same length; second of all, his ears are pointed and rotated at an odd angle; third, as night falls and the moon rises, Jan's eyes seem to turn from gray to bloodshot red; and fourth, he keeps scratching at his palms.
The reveal that Jan is a werewolf comes fast, in part because this story exists in a world where science has concluded that lycanthropy is a real disease, and one of the party guests is an esteemed medical researcher who's written extensively about werewolves. The bulk of the story follows the party guests as they attempt to hunt Jan down and kill him.
There's not much depth here -- there are brief, shallow passes at deeper themes, often clumsily executed. For example, very late in the story, the painter has a sudden attack of conscience and he wonders, I Am Legend-style, if perhaps werewolves are the next step in human evolution, if humanity as we know it is meant to die out, and if it's wrong to kill Jan -- but he quickly gets over this and does in fact kill Jan shortly afterward. There's the potential for an interesting feminist message through a character Doris, who is in love with Jan and who is also, without realizing it, a witch -- but that's scarpered in the end. And there are even subtle hints that Jan might be gay, but this is pushed aside as soon as it's introduced, and we're reassured that Jan is straight and in love with Doris.
It's a very straightforward action story, not even really horror -- just adventure with fantasy elements. There are gruesome deaths which SHOULD be emotionally affecting, but they're brushed past so quickly that they just don't land. What I will say for it is that, even though the prose is dense and wordy, it's an arresting read, and it kept my attention even though I was VERY tired when I started it, and assumed I would have to give up after 10 pages and start again tomorrow. That didn't happen, it kept me captive till the end.
Things I wish had been explored more:
1) the painter's misanthropic nature, his natural antagonism with the other guests. I wish that had impacted the story more. Here you have a guy who seemingly everyone finds annoying and mean, and he's telling them all that there's a werewolf in their midst. They just believe him? They don't think he's pulling a joke?
2) Politics - there's a brief line or two about how one of the party members is a staunch leftist, but just as rabid for Jan's blood as everyone else. I think this could have been quite fun if explored further. Most of the party guests are fabulously wealthy; Jan, the werewolf, is famous but not wealthy at all due to his condition. C'mon, do something with that!! Make it fun!
3) Feminism, tradition - witches, like werewolves, are real. Again, there's a brief line pointing out that in the Middle Ages, women like Doris were considered just as dangerous as men like Jan. But this isn't explored at all. Hey, why do you guys, the party guests, feel so sure that Jan is bad and must be killed just for being a werewolf ... when you're perfectly accepting when you find out Doris is a witch?? Does she seem less dangerous because she's a young, innocent woman? IS she young and innocent? What gives?
4) Homophobia - Jan's final speech is so tantalizing. It's just before he dies, and he reveals that he's suffered from lycanthropy for years, and has learned the warning signs that a "seizure" is imminent. Whenever he senses that he's about to transform, he runs away to Sweden to stay with Dr. Lundgren, that scientist. Lundgren doens't know that Jan is a werewolf, but there's something about the seasons in Sweden that keeps lycanthropy at bay for a while longer. This speech is loaded with hints, the most obvious of which is when Jan simply says, "I loved him" about Lundgren. But the hints are also present in his veiled comments about why he had to run, why he couldn't hold down a career, the various unnamed things that colleagues and friends suspected of him... PLEASE SAY MORE.
Day 4 (Dec. 18)
Essay: Mickey and Minnie by E.M. Forster
This is a cute 1934 essay by Forster about film, how much he dislikes it, and how much he loves Disney cartoons by contrast -- funny to me because I know Forster and T.E. Lawrence were friends, and Lawrence had an identical stance. I wonder which of them pinched it from the other, or if they just naturally agreed. In the course of the essay, Forster bemoans how Mickey cartoons have gotten worse ("They need to go back to having mouse adventures! Quit all this singing! Why is Pluto even there??) and gushes over the Mickey/Minnie romance before taking a sinister turn, where he paints a delicious picture of Minnie stuck in a time loop, or in a sort of liminal space -- never married to Mickey, yet always getting married; perpetually living in a stasis mode in an empty house with no family or servants (such a British thing to say) until Mickey collects her for an adventure. And at the end, he compares Mickey to animal gods like Ganesh (because of course Forster is gonna bring up Ganesh) and finishes it off with an exquisite line about how, of course, Mickey will die someday, as all animal gods do -- but at least he'll always have the honor of being the first animal god caught on film!
Letter: From F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter
This was included in the anthology of essays by famous authors writing about film -- but it barely counts! It's a short letter F. Scott wrote to his daughter as he was on a train en route to Hollywood. And ... that's it, that's its only relevancy. He moans a bit about Hollywood politics, then affectionately tells his daughter not to go crazy like Zelda.
Day 5 (Dec. 19)
Short story: The Dark Room by Tennessee Williams
A short, captivatingly vague story told mostly in dialogue, with very little context given -- which I love. As it unfolds we understand that the conversation we're reading is between a mother and a social worker. The husband has been off work for years -- something's wrong with his head -- and the teen daughter has been secluded in her bedroom for 6 months without coming out. She secluded herself when her Jewish boyfriend Sol broke up with her, and will only let Sol in -- nobody else. The story ends without any further context, and with an abrupt announcement from the social worker that the teenager, Tina, will have to be taken away.
Poem: Judas Iscariot by Knut Odegard
Probably my favorite poem I've read so far -- very long, starting with Judas' birth to a rabbi and a disgraced woman who already has one child born out of wedlock. Like Joseph and Mary, Judas' parents have traveled for the census and can't find an open inn, so Judas is born in a manger in the same stable as Jesus, and looks into Jesus' eyes as an infant, wondering why there are so many well-wishers over on that side of the barn. As an adult, Judas falls in love with Jesus and leaves his hometown, but becomes increasingly disturbed when Jesus' radical ideology turns into madness -- madness which the other disciples willingly feed into, because they're making so much money. Each episode in Judas' life is interspersed with linear scenes from his suicide, and ofc the poem culminates in his death.
Favorite line: "There is a yellow wind / that never stops in me."
Day 6: (Dec. 20)
Essay: Upstream by Mary Oliver
Since Rich got me this for my birthday, I read the first essay immediately! It's a beautiful, poetic love song to nature, a contemplation on death and life and consciousness, responsibilities, the spiritual beauty of being lost. Feels like an angelic twin to Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Supernatural without any elements of fantasy.
Short story: The Elephant Man by Susan Hill
What a treat! So disturbing. I've had "The Albatross," Hill's collection of short stories, for years but never cracked it open. "The Elephant Man" is told from the POV of William, a boy about kindergarten age, who is dealing with a lot of big changes all at once. His childhood nanny has died and been replaced by a hard-nosed anti-Irish Irishwoman; who seems to have no affection for William and a general hatred of men. His favorite pond, where he likes to sail boats and play with other boys, has just been drained, turning it into a muddy wasteland -- and Nanny won't answer his questions about why. And worse, Nanny makes a strange new friend and starts taking William to disturbing parties, where the friend (a circus performer) transformers himself into a monstrous half-man half-elephant, a show which delights the other kids but horrifies William. The whole thing feels very much like a metaphor for CSA, especially considering a "random" scene where William is approached by a friendly stranger in the woods who offers him conkers.
Poem: From "Chronicle of Drifting" by Yuki Tanaka
This is a short, sparse prose-poem, very utilitarian language. It follows passengers on a Japanese train which has just stopped unexpectedly in a rice field. Favorite line: "The jingling of my apartment keys in my pocket seems to say this is our home, where is the door."
Day 7: (Dec. 21)
Essay: A Hanging by George Orwell
Disturbing, of course. Orwell, stationed in India, watches as a Hindu prisoner is led to the gallows early one morning. He touches on the routine callousness of the guards (and himself), the terrible last-moment realization that a human life is about to be snuffed out, and the strangeness of a happy stray dog crashing the party. In the end, when the deed is done, Orwell shakes off his horror and laughs hysterically with the other guards; they dig back to the past, looking for something they can use to make fun of the prisoner and destroy the power of his dying moments, where he cried out in a dignified, chilling manner to his god.
Short story: The Yellow Bird by Tennessee Williams
A bit easier to parse than The Dark Room. "The Yellow Bird" follows a fictitious family from Salem, using real events (or, well, real accusations) about a demonic yellow bird which tormented the pastor, Increase Tutweiler. Centuries later, Tutweiler's descendants include another preacher in the South, and his wilful daughter Alma, who at age 31 starts taking back her agency. Smoking cigarettes, dyeing her hair, going with boys. Alma ends up running away from home and sleeping with various men in New Orleans, and one of those men gives her a magical child, a son, who in his infancy has a habit of crawling outside unseen and returning with wet jewels and gold. Alma has no clue where these jewels come from until she dies, and her son's father returns to her as a sort of merman or sunken Greek statue, bearing the treasure of lost ships. When Alma dies, her son raises a strange monument with an inscription honoring that yellow bird.
Poem: Glamor on the West Streets / Silver Over Everything by Hanif Abdurraqib
I ran across this poem randomly on Tumblr, didn't intend to pick an Abdurraqib poem for the 21st -- not that there's anything wrong with Abdurraqib! But my taste in Abdurraqib doesn't align with Tumblr's taste in Abdurraqib. I like him when he's at his most twisty and opaque, and ofc lyrical; Tumblr seems to like him when he's at his most simplistic and open. I felt like a bad poem was nonconsensually forced on me XD
Day 8 (Dec. 22)
Essay: Writing off the Subject by Richard Hugo
It feels wrong to see "off" uncapitalized here.
Wonderful essay on writing poetry, with some tips from Hugo and an analysis of a poem called "Rattlesnake" by Brewster Ghiselin. Some choice quotes:
"When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music."
(Hugo then advises the reader to discard the first notion immediately, and to subscribe to the second option if they like, but not by requisite. I like the idea very much that art doesn't have to say anything true -- that there's value in art that lies. I think that's an idea that, if it ever was in fashion, fell out years ago and needs to be rediscovered.)
"One mark of a beginner is his impulse to push language around to make it accommodate what he has already conceived to be the truth, or, in some cases, what he has already conceived to be the form. Even Auden, clever enough at times to make music conform to truth, was fond of quoting the woman in the Forster novel who said something like, 'How do I know what I think until I see what I've said.'"
(Hugo then gives the example of a poem having two subjects -- the triggering subject, i.e. the thing that you see while on your daily walk that makes you think, "This would be a good poem!" and the actual subject, which the poet himself rarely knows or is aware of. He warns against picking a subject that "needs" to have a poem written about it, because it's too big, and it cramps your mind -- if a student picks "Autumn Rain" as his subject, he might write four good lines, but then he runs out of things to say and scrambles to write more. Then he has no clue where to end the poem, and he gets stuck with something long and meandering and unaffecting.)
"Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you'll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good. Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone."
From there, Hugo jumps into the analysis of "Rattlesnake," which I guess counts as my poem for today XD I'll include the full poem here, then summarize Hugo's analysis:
Rattlesnake by Brewster Ghiselin
I found him sleepy in the heat
And dust of a gopher burrow,
Coiled in loose folds upon silence
In a pit of the noonday hillside.
I saw the wedged bulge
Of the head hard as a fist.
I remembered his delicate ways:
The mouth a cat's mouth yawning.
I crushed him deep in dust,
And heard the loud seethe of life
In the dead beads of the tail
Fade, as wind fades
From the wild grain of the hill.
Hugo points out that multisyllabic words automatically trigger thoughts of civilization, culture, education etc. in readers, so Ghiselin uses them to good effect here: "sleepy" and "gopher burrow," "silence" and "noonday hillside" at the start. Then, it's all hard fast monosyllabic words for the next few lines, a blunt description of the snake. Ghiselin veers back to culture before the kill; he compares the snake to a domesticated cat, engenders affection for it in the readers, just to do away with multisyllabic words again as he goes in for the kill. He doesn't qualify the kill or justify himself, he just portrays it with hard grunting words straight to the end -- but, notably, his final line slips back a little, compares the snake favorable to grain, life-giving crops.
The triggering subject is the rattlesnake; the real subject, found through the process of writing, is death and morality, facing the inexplicable motivations behind your own impulsive actions, and doing so honestly, without flinching.
To end the essay, Hugo suggests that writers trust themselves and have a bit of arrogance when writing: trust that each sentence you write means something, and that your word choice was done for a reason, even if right now you don't know what that reason is. He uses a few lines from one of his early poems to illustrate this point -- there's a part in that poem where he used the word "suicide" simply because it sounded a bit like "cascade" and just felt right to him. If he'd thought about it more, he might have chosen "masquerade" instead of "suicide." But masquerade rhymes with cascade, which would have called undue attention to it; and though he didn't really know the true subject of the poem when he was writing it, when he looks back years later, he sees that "suicide" was far more impactful, really was the perfect choice.
Short story: There Shall Be No Darkness by James Blish
I dipped into genre-fiction for this one. There's an anthology called "Werewolf!" that's been sitting on my shelf for years -- originally bought it because it included a rare Peter S. Beagle story, but never ended up reading it. "There Shall Be No Darkness" is more of a novella, 60 pages long, published in 1950. It follows a mean-spirited painter at a party full of elite artistic types on the Scottish moors; the painter has no ear for music and is thoroughly bored when a Polish guest starts showing off his piano skills. As his mind wanders, the painter notices some odd things about the pianist, Jan: first of all, his index and middle fingers are the same length; second of all, his ears are pointed and rotated at an odd angle; third, as night falls and the moon rises, Jan's eyes seem to turn from gray to bloodshot red; and fourth, he keeps scratching at his palms.
The reveal that Jan is a werewolf comes fast, in part because this story exists in a world where science has concluded that lycanthropy is a real disease, and one of the party guests is an esteemed medical researcher who's written extensively about werewolves. The bulk of the story follows the party guests as they attempt to hunt Jan down and kill him.
There's not much depth here -- there are brief, shallow passes at deeper themes, often clumsily executed. For example, very late in the story, the painter has a sudden attack of conscience and he wonders, I Am Legend-style, if perhaps werewolves are the next step in human evolution, if humanity as we know it is meant to die out, and if it's wrong to kill Jan -- but he quickly gets over this and does in fact kill Jan shortly afterward. There's the potential for an interesting feminist message through a character Doris, who is in love with Jan and who is also, without realizing it, a witch -- but that's scarpered in the end. And there are even subtle hints that Jan might be gay, but this is pushed aside as soon as it's introduced, and we're reassured that Jan is straight and in love with Doris.
It's a very straightforward action story, not even really horror -- just adventure with fantasy elements. There are gruesome deaths which SHOULD be emotionally affecting, but they're brushed past so quickly that they just don't land. What I will say for it is that, even though the prose is dense and wordy, it's an arresting read, and it kept my attention even though I was VERY tired when I started it, and assumed I would have to give up after 10 pages and start again tomorrow. That didn't happen, it kept me captive till the end.
Things I wish had been explored more:
1) the painter's misanthropic nature, his natural antagonism with the other guests. I wish that had impacted the story more. Here you have a guy who seemingly everyone finds annoying and mean, and he's telling them all that there's a werewolf in their midst. They just believe him? They don't think he's pulling a joke?
2) Politics - there's a brief line or two about how one of the party members is a staunch leftist, but just as rabid for Jan's blood as everyone else. I think this could have been quite fun if explored further. Most of the party guests are fabulously wealthy; Jan, the werewolf, is famous but not wealthy at all due to his condition. C'mon, do something with that!! Make it fun!
3) Feminism, tradition - witches, like werewolves, are real. Again, there's a brief line pointing out that in the Middle Ages, women like Doris were considered just as dangerous as men like Jan. But this isn't explored at all. Hey, why do you guys, the party guests, feel so sure that Jan is bad and must be killed just for being a werewolf ... when you're perfectly accepting when you find out Doris is a witch?? Does she seem less dangerous because she's a young, innocent woman? IS she young and innocent? What gives?
4) Homophobia - Jan's final speech is so tantalizing. It's just before he dies, and he reveals that he's suffered from lycanthropy for years, and has learned the warning signs that a "seizure" is imminent. Whenever he senses that he's about to transform, he runs away to Sweden to stay with Dr. Lundgren, that scientist. Lundgren doens't know that Jan is a werewolf, but there's something about the seasons in Sweden that keeps lycanthropy at bay for a while longer. This speech is loaded with hints, the most obvious of which is when Jan simply says, "I loved him" about Lundgren. But the hints are also present in his veiled comments about why he had to run, why he couldn't hold down a career, the various unnamed things that colleagues and friends suspected of him... PLEASE SAY MORE.
