I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: October 28, 2025] “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be”

It has been six years since Ghost Box III came out….

After years of demand, the Ghost Box is back! Patton Oswalt’s much-beloved spooky-story anthology returns for a fourth edition, with the same trademark production details—magnetized box lid, anyone?—that Ghost Box fans have come to expect.

As always, working with Patton on Ghost Box IV was a dream, and we can’t wait to show you the nightmares that he’s wrangled and stuffed into the box this time around.

This story was accidentally left out of my Ghost Box (that’s the real horror!).  The nice folks and Hingston & Olsen said they’d send me my copy of the story, but with the stupid tariffs that our stupid president is ruining people’s lives with, I’m not sure when it will arrive.  But I’ll post it when it does.

This booklet finally arrived and it was totally worth the wait.

I know Gahan Wilson from his cartoons with the New Yorker.  He had a dark and memorable style (he died in 2019).  I didn’t know he wrote fiction.  This story appeared first in Playboy in 1967.

It opens with some co-workers (not quite friends) having a party (drinks really) on a beachfront.  While the narrator is complaining about the various people he is with, they note two strangers approaching.

As they get closer someone jokes that they look like The Carpenter and the Walrus from Through the Looking Glass.  And indeed, the story shows quotes from the poem and the strangers begin acting like they are those characters.

They complain about the quantity of sand and they are indeed in search of oysters.  Actually, they are looking for firewood to cook the oysters, but if they found more oysters, that would be fine too.  Eventually the strangers invite them all back to their own party.

But when the narrator quotes the poem that “they cannot do with more than four” he (being the fifth) says he wants to stay behind.  But, this being a scary story, he suddenly realizes he needs to rescue his not-quite-friends.

I love Alice in Wonderland and I loved the references to it in this story.  I need to see what else he has written.