Book Club (Indianapolis) of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.

Reading this alone at night is not recommended. Wow, doesn’t get much creepier than that. I could feel my beard-stubble pulling off tiny bits of her skin, could hear her broken jaw grinding like a branch with ice on it.” I told myself to die, but my heart kept pounding. Jacobs story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” and his guilty-conscience-driven hallucinations of seeing rats everywhere reminded me of Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart.” All in all a great short story/novella (it’s 130 pages) in classic Stephen King style. Her visit to the house is eerily reminiscent of the W.W. Wilfred struggles on alone, but is haunted by Arlette’s spirit (or her literal corpse, if we assume he’s not hallucinating) and her minions (rats!). His life speeds “down the tubes” after he follows a neighbor girl (who he’s gotten “in trouble”) to an Omaha “home for girls” where her parents have sent her. Poor Henry struggles to deal with the secret of their crime and begins to view Wilfred with contempt.

They figuratively (and literally!) make a mess of it though, and returning to the well a couple days after the deed find her body seemingly animate (turns out it’s rats(!) though, who have already begun to feast on her) and with her head in an odd position which seems turned upwards to laugh and mock Wilfred. Somehow he convinces his son (who also loves and doesn’t want to leave the farming life) to become complicit in the murder. He calls upon his inner, so-called “conniving man” and decides to kill her and dump her down an old well on his property, planning on explaining her absence by saying she “ran off” to The Big City. Wilfred is legally powerless to stop her, as she owns the majority of “their” land herself. (I guess that would make the murderer “the father of Henry James”… Not sure if that has hidden meaning or not) Anyway, Arlette is NOT a contented farmer’s wife and wants to sell the farmland and move to The Big City (as in Omaha or St.

He had a wife, Arlette, and an almost fifteen year old son, Henry. ***Spoiler Alert*** A quick summary of the plot: the story is presented as a written confession (told eight years later, in 1930) of a man who murdered his wife. I was also, on other occasions during reading, reminded of The Monkey’s Paw and The Tell-Tale Heart.

The quotation above, for instance, isn’t from “1922”, but instead from a classic Bram Stoker (yeah, the Dracula one) short story entitled The Judge’s House. It’s not surprising, then, that I found many elements of this new story that recalled to me several of the horror classics.

I learned this years ago when I read his non-fiction effort, Danse Macabre, a sweeping review of the horror genre. Stephen King’s knowledge of the canon of horror literature cannot be disputed. “There on the great high-backed carved oak chair by the right side of the fireplace sat an enormous rat, steadily glaring at him with baleful eyes.”

Full dark no stars review