Halloween Countdown 2018, Day 19
Oct. 19th, 2018 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eldritchhobbit
Today I have a powerful story to share. It’s not spine-tingling horror, but it is haunting in a very different way. And it’s definitely related to our Halloween interests: “The Ghoul Goes West” by Dale Bailey at Tor.com.
Here’s a teaser:
My brother Denny died when I was twenty-six.
I got the call at 1:13 in the afternoon—which made it 10:13 in Los Angeles. I know this so precisely because I’d been at my manuscript all morning, lost in a dream of old Hollywood, and when the phone startled me out of my reverie, I glanced at my watch, as you do when you have been surprised awake. I was in my apartment, at my desk, the merciless August sunlight of east Tennessee molten in my windows. Denny and I had both fled the grim wastes of western Pennsylvania, seeking warmer climes. As soon as he’d collected his high school diploma, Denny had gone west, to California. Two years later, when I collected my own, I’d headed south. I sometimes thought he’d made the better choice, but that morning, when I picked up the phone, I was reminded otherwise.
The man on the other end asked if I was Benjamin Clarke.
“Ben,” I said.
The man paused as if the intimacy was unwelcome. When he spoke again—“Mr. Clarke,” he said—I recognized the flat, impersonal sympathy affected by all officialdom, from priests to principals, when bad news was to be delivered. I braced my hand against the desk, and when he started to introduce himself as Officer Something or Other I interrupted him.
“It’s Dennis, isn’t it?” I said.
It was, of course. I’d known it from the minute I’d heard that tone in the officer’s voice. He went on to describe the circumstances, but he needn’t have bothered. Heroin might have been the proximate cause. But it was Hollywood that killed him.
The way Hollywood has of grinding up its postulants was much on my mind at the time. For the better part of a year, I’d been working on my thesis, a study of Ed Wood and his bizarre entourage: Vampira and the Amazing Criswell, Tor Johnson and Bunny Breckinridge, the whole gang of oddballs and misfits, Bela Lugosi among them. In one way or another, Hollywood destroyed them all, but it was Lugosi’s doom that particularly interested me, then and now. It was Lugosi who had drawn me to study film in the first place. It was Lugosi who had drawn Denny to Hollywood.
no subject
Date: 2018-10-19 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-21 11:42 am (UTC)re: the ghoul goes west
Date: 2018-10-19 10:57 pm (UTC)That was awesome and haunting.
Great use of the disappeared shop trope.
The Prof will adore it like I do.
Re: the ghoul goes west
Date: 2018-10-21 11:43 am (UTC)Re: the ghoul goes west
Date: 2018-10-21 02:59 pm (UTC)Back when Dragoncon wasn't so crowded, Martin Landu attended, and he spoke mostly on his role in the Ed Wood movie. It was great to see and hear him. :)