copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman
This is the second of two posts concerning Bentley Little’s anthology of short stories, The Collection (2000).
Assembled in The Collection, Little’s short stories fall into two broad categories:
Those that make sense.
Those that don’t make sense.
Tales in both categories tend to entertain. However, the senseless stories also annoy--sometimes, enough to cause a pretty bad rash.
The reason that the senseless stories annoy is that they’re senseless.
After spending ten to twenty minutes reading a story, a reader may not be entitled to a kiss, but he or she should--and does--expect the tale to have had a point, which is to say, to have made sense. When it doesn’t, the reader feels cheated. Hey! he or she is apt to think, I paid over eight bucks for this book, and, at that price, I want each and every story it contains to make sense.
Those of Little’s stories that don’t make sense fail to do so because their endings don’t add up to anything. They don’t explain why the bizarre incidents and situations in the story existed (or may still exist at the story’s end). They don’t suggest that the protagonist’s experience meant anything. In short, these stories--the ones that don’t make sense--are annoying, disappointing, and frustrating because they fail to provide the reader with a satisfying and appropriate sense of closure; they have no proper conclusion. They’re nonsensical.
In a moment, we will cite an example of one of his stories that doesn’t make sense. First, however, maybe we should explain what we don’t mean when we say Little’s often otherwise good-to-excellent stories don’t make sense and are, therefore, unsatisfying and annoying.
We don’t mean that they are ambiguous. Stories that end ambiguously are legitimate if the author has examined the two (or more) sides of an issue and leaves the story’s outcome to the reader’s interpretation, provided that the author has sufficiently explained the two (or more) ways that the story’s conflict could be reconciled and both (or all) are satisfying and appropriate conclusions, as Frank R. Stockton's “The Lady of the Tiger” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” to name a couple, end. There’s a difference in leaving the ending up to the reader and leaving the reader suspended in midair air.
We don’t mean that they lack a happy ending. Not every story’s ending is happy, nor should every story’s ending be happy. There’s a place, especially in horror fiction, for the tragic outcome, after all, as well as the comedic. What matters is whether the story ends in a logical fashion, without violating its own theme, tone, purpose, and type. “The Tell-Tale Heart” does not end happily, but “The Pit and the Pendulum” does. Both of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, however, end logically and, therefore, satisfyingly and appropriately.
What we do mean by saying that some of Little’s stories don't make sense is that they either come to an abrupt conclusion, without bothering to offer any explanation at all for the bizarre incidents they’ve recounted, or that they offer only a half-hearted and half-baked explanation that hems and haws but doesn’t really explain anything. The whole bottom of the story simply falls out from under it, and it ends in midair, with neither foundation nor support, meaning nothing. They’re nothing more than absurd exercises in creating suspense, more like the assignments of a creative writing student than a creative writer.
Having prepared the groundwork for our discussion, let’s take a gander at a Little story that, because of its ending, does make sense and then at one that, for the same reason, does not make sense. The former is both satisfying and appropriate; the latter, neither satisfying nor appropriate.
One of Little’s stories that does work is “Life with Father.” In a brief blurb, Little explains its origin:
I wrote “Life with Father”. . . for an ecological horror anthology titled The Earth Strikes Back. . . . [It was] rejected. Judging by the title of the book, I figured that most if not all of the stories would deal with the negative effects of pollution, overpopulation, deforestation, etc.
So I thought I’d do something a little different.
My wife is a hard-core recycler. Cans, bottles, newspapers, grocery bags--she saves them all. Even on trips, she brings along plastic bags in which to collect our soda cans.
I exaggerated her compulsion for this story.
Anything can be taken to extremes (The Collection, p. 71).
In this story, a father requires that his family recycle everything possible: urine, excrement, sanitary napkins, clothing, father’s semen (through incestuous unions with his daughters), and the offspring of these illicit unions (as food). Finally, unable to endure their father’s abusive “recycling,” the daughters unite, killing him. However, the apples don’t fall far enough from the tree, despite the girls’ horror at their father’s insistence upon recycling everything possible, and, as the story closes, the elder of the two considers how she might best recycle her father’s remains:
I place the biodegradable bags next to the butcher block, and as I take the knife from the drawer, I plan out where and what I’m going to cut, what I’m going to do with his skin, his blood, his hair. I try to think of the best way to utilize his bones.
Old habits die hard (p. 79).
This story, a satire regarding recycling taken to extremes, works because its exaggeration has a reason. It is not exaggeration simply for exaggeration’s sake or as for no other reason than to serve as a means to effect horror or terror (to take a narrative cheap shot, as it were). Instead, it is integral to the story’s plot and theme. In addition, the father’s obvious madness is a satisfying and appropriate explanation for the story’s bizarre situation and the incidents associated with it. The story is, within the context that it creates, believable--or at least does not stretch to the breaking point the “willing suspension of disbelief” that Samuel Taylor Coleridge has argued should be allowed for the sake of enjoying the chills and thrills that imaginative literature, including horror fiction, provides.
“The Woods Be Dark” is one if the many of Little’s tales that doesn’t make sense. In this story, a daughter mates with her father and then her brother after the men of the family fall victims to a dark force associated with a “bad place” in a woods near their mountain cabin. Once she becomes pregnant, she, accompanied by her mother and a medicine woman-cum-midwife of sorts, smash the head of her freakish infant, and order is thus restored, by virtue of this “ritual.” Although the story itself is interesting, frightening, and suspenseful, it makes absolutely no sense, because Little never bothers to explain how and why the men are transformed into monsters, who or what actually is responsible for their transformations, what the ritual is based upon and why it is effective in breaking the power of the dark force (whatever it is), why the incestuous union with the father and the daughter or the brother and the sister is necessary or what it accomplishes and why, or other important questions related to the story’s conflict. “The Woods Be Dark” with ignorance, and, although the tale is frightening and weird, it does not apply to anything beyond its own action. There is neither symbolism, metaphor, theme, or (other than to frighten and earn a few dollars) reason for being. There is no outcome, and the tale leaves the reader annoyed because the narrative wool has been pulled over his or her eyes only to be removed and to reveal. . . nothing.
In his account of the occasioning of this tale, Little does a better job of explaining its inspiration than he does its denouement:
“The Woods Be Dark” was written in the mid-1980s for a creative writing class. At the time I was under the spell of William Faulkner and turning out a slew of interconnected Southern Gothic stories all set in the same rural county. I lived in California, had never been anywhere near the South, didn’t even know anyone from the South--but arrogant and self-important jerk that I was, I didn’t let that stop me (The Collection, p. 13).
For whatever reason, Little does not end tales well, whether they are short stories or novels. Is it carelessness, laziness, or ignorance? Possibly, it is, one time, one, and another time, another. In any case, it is always annoying, disappointing, and frustrating, and, despite Little’s considerable gifts and talents in other areas, his stories’ endings have the unfortunate consequence of destroying the tale’s intended effect and of leaving an unpleasant taste in the reader’s mouth.
Fortunately, there is both help and hope for Little. Edgar Allan Poe offers a solution to Little’s problem: plot backward. Since we have discussed Poe’s advice in a previous post, we won’t discuss it again here. Anyone who is interested in reading the discussion should click here, on the title of the article, "'
The Philosophy of Compsoition' and 'The Red Room.'"