I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-“Halloween” (1986).

This early Sonic Youth song is creepy mostly for Kim Gordon’s whispered, drawling, sexy delivery.

The music is a simple, somewhat pretty guitar melody.  The drums are almost tribal toms, that propel the story along.  There are noisy shards from the other guitar.  I don’t hear any bass at all.

The musical motif repeats itself over and over as Kim whispers

There’s something shifting in the distance
Don’t know what it is
Day as dead as nights
Except for the feeling That’s
crawling up inside of me As you
sing your song As you
swing along, and you’re
It’s your, your song
It’s the Devil in me
makes me stare at you As you
twist up along, you
sing your song And you
slithering up to me and You’re
so close I just a
Wanna touch you and I
sing your song And you
don’t know what’s going on
But you want me to come Along
As you sing your, your song

It ends with a hollow bell ringing over and over.

I don’t know what it has to do with Halloween, but it’s pretty creepy (and sexy at the same time).

[READ: October 23, 2018] “The Lake”

Just in time for Halloween, from the people who brought me The Short Story Advent Calendar and The Ghost Box. comes Ghost Box II.

This is once again a nifty little box (with a magnetic opening and a ribbon) which contains 11 stories for Halloween.  It is lovingly described thusly:

The Ghost Box returns, like a mummy or a batman, to once again make your pupils dilate and the hair on your arms stand straight up—it’s another collection of individually bound scary stories, edited and introduced by comedian and spooky specialist Patton Oswalt.

There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, Patton Oswalt will be reviewing a book a day on his Facebook page.

Much respect to Oswalt, but I will not be following his order.  So there.

This was the first contemporary story in the box that I read.

I have been interested in Tananarive Due as a writer and lecturer on Afrofuturism, but this the first story I’ve read by her.

I really enjoyed this piece and the way it unfolded.  It wasn’t exactly scary.  There was something about the way the author and the main character seem to embrace the transmutation that happens that makes the story more unsettling than if she fought it.

I also liked the way race was thrown into the story–not a major component but an under current that you kind of feel once it is brought up.

This story is about Abbie LaFleur, a third generation Bostonian who had moved to Florida to teach.  Her friends and family warned her not to jump into the Florida scene straight away–stave off on buying a house or anything like that, but Abbie fell in love with the place immediately and bought a house (that really needed work) right on a lake.

It was heavenly. She loved the isolation.  And to celebrate, she took off all her clothes and strolled into the lake–if the neighbors could see her they would be scandalized–and she had not even started teaching high school yet.

It was all a new beginning.

The thing is, the story tells us, that no one told her (but anyone could have) that

one must never, ever go swimming in Gracetown’s lakes during the summer…the natural lakes that had once been swampland were to be avoided by children in particular.  And women of childbearing age–which Abbie LaFluer still was at thirty-six….  Further, one must never, ever swim in Gracetown’s lakes in summer without clothing, when crevices and weaknesses were most exposed.

She was foolish, but how could she have known?

I love that this story is more or less about this new beginning for Abbie.  We learn about her and the class she is teaching.  How she is looking for young strong boys to help with the repairs her house needs.  She doesn’t want to seem improper in any way but she does need the help.

In the same way the story is not about race but it is.  As she gets introduced around the school, one of the secretaries asks,

“La Fluer…where is that name from?”  Abbie wasn’t fooled by the veiled attempt to guess at her ethnicity since it didn’t take an etymologist to guess at her name’s French derivation.  … What [she] wanted to know was whether Abbie had ancestry in Haiti or Martinique to explain her sun-kissed complexion.

I love the answer she gives.

I also loved the central part of the story–the reason Abbie’s feet and sides itch.

I really wish this was a novel and not just a short story.  I want to read more about Abbie.