Okay, so technically this week's (tardy) short story is not a ghost story. I thought I would tackle the wonderful crime collection from Oxfam called OxCrimes (set to be published in the US in February 2015), edited by Ian Rankin, but I think I've changed my mind. It looks like an excellent collection and when I am in the mood for some gritty crime stories I shall definitely pick it up again as it looks quite promising. But after reading the first story in the collection I think my mood is less for an overt sort of violence and more for something chilling and atmospheric and subtle. A story that leaves you wondering and questioning. And to be honest I have returned the Joyce Carol Oates collections to the library that I had contemplated reading. She's wonderful, but her writing definitely induces a different sort of unease than I am looking for at the moment. But R.I.P. IX lasts until the end of next month so anything can happen.
First, though, let me tell you about what I did read. I've heard George Pelecanos is a very good writer and I think his mysteries are quite popular and successful. Someday I am going to try one of them for a proper taste of his work. His story "The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us" certainly was very well done and I think it did what he set out to do, which is tell a gritty story of the seedy underbelly of immigrant life of 1930s Washington DC. He is perhaps a little too successful. The story, or rather the characters in it, made me uncomfortable and the tale was just a little too disconcerting and hopeless. The portrait Pelecanos paints of this world is just a little too realistic and made me feel the tiniest bit dirty peeking into it. It's not a world I would ever want to inhabit.
Does that make you curious? Now, don't get me wrong, I never try and steer any reader away from any book, and I am not doing so with this story. If anything he writes too convincingly. The man who narrates the story is just so base and without any real morals and no apparent goodness he made me feel sort of slimy. "Bill" is a Greek immigrant who carries an Italian switch knife (given to him courtesy of his father) and works as a busman in a restaurant. In this world there is a strict hierarchy of class and ethnicity.
"The way they had it set up was, Americans had the waiter jobs, and the Greeks and Filippinos bused the tables. The coloured, they stayed back in the kitchen. Everybody in the restaurant was n the same order that they were out on the street; the whites on top and the Greeks were in the middle; the mavri were at the bottom."
In this world no one mixes, and not even with "their own kind". It's already a mean world that Bill lives in. A world where women are either young and pure or older and loose (and therefore treated accordingly, which I would say in either case is--not very nicely).
The crime in this story comes as a result of the encouragement from other busman to meet and plan and try and organize themselves to demand better wages and working conditions. Enter a Pinkerton agent who is ready to bust heads, gather dirt and generally keep the workers down. In this story, however, there are no good guys. Everyone seems like a bad guy, with criminal intentions or at the very least a complete disregard for others.
As crime stories go, it's quite well done, just enough verisimilitude to make it all a little too convincing. The scary thing, and this is always the case with crime novels, is it feels too real. That's what causes the unease. I can picture it all to easily.
I wonder what Pelecanos's mysteries are like? Certainly not cozies. And that's okay, since a crime novel should feel pretty gritty.
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The New Yorker story I read this past weekend appeared in the August 25 issue, so I have a little catching up to do still. I've not yet (not yet but plan on doing so . . .) read any of Tessa Hadley's longer fiction, but the stories I've read by her have all been good. So good, that I need to just pull a random novel by her down from the library shelves and start reading. I am sure I will like it. "One Saturday Morning" is another well done story and another favorite of mine that I've read so far this year in The New Yorker.
What is it about coming of age stories? I really like them and am drawn to them. Hadley writes with such assuredness about adolescence and the dangers we find ourselves in sometimes when growing up. Dangers being not necessarily physical ones but the sort we encounter when navigating the adult world. The story is about the getting of knowledge, about trying to figure out and understand and grow into adulthood--though with mixed results. It's the 1960s and Carrie, who is just a young girl, is confronted with the death of a spouse of one of her parent's friends. It isn't just the death but how the man and her parents interact, which she views from a short distance and finds that she doesn't quite understand, her perception of her parent's world not quite "available" to a child, which is most certainly a getting of knowledge, too.
Always interesting is the author's Q&A which can be read here.
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As for Sunday's story? I'm not entirely sure which direction I'll go since I will set aside OxCrimes for the moment. I think I want a good, traditional ghost story and so have pulled out a few anthologies--my two volumes of Black Water edited by Alberto Manguel, my Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories edited by Michael Cox, and Something Was There: Asham Award Winning Ghost Stories edited by Kate Pullinger. And I am sure I will find something in the library too. Sometimes it is fun just to meander and opt for serendipity, choosing a story wholly based on whim. We'll see Sunday where my whim takes me!