Alan Loewen's Blog, page 32

Re-enter Fu Manchu, by Sax Rohmer: A Review

Re-enter Fu Manchu is the twelfth book in the series of thirteen adventures Sax Rohmer wrote about his best literary creation, the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu.

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."

Written in 1957, the story follows the eleventh book in the series written in 1948: The Shadow of Fu Manchu. The evil doctor has been believed dead since the adventures in the last book, but Dr. Fu Manchu is very much alive and very much still involved in world conquest. Now the unquestioned leader of the Sai Fan, a secret order that he once worked for, Dr. Fu Manchu has kidnapped his old nemesis, Denis Nayland Smith, and using plastic surgery has created an almost perfect imposter. Next, the doctor hires under false pretenses, one Brian Merrick, a young man who is also the son of a U.S. Senator. He ships him off to Cairo to meet the fake Nayland Smith and then jets them both to New York where the real action takes place.

By the time Rohmer released this book, he had been aggressively writing novels, stories, and nonfiction for nigh on five decades. The writing in Re-enter Fu Manchu is very polished and very professional, but the plot line drags along slowly as we watch Brian struggle with his doubts and trying to discover who he can and cannot trust. It is not until the last few chapters we learn exactly what Fu Manchu is trying to do, the reasons behind hiring Merrick, and the final interaction between Fu Manchu and the real Sir Nayland Smith.

Compared to the other books in the series, there is very little action to speak of and I confess that in the first two thirds of the book, I was wondering if Rohmer had simply become bored with his creation.

Out of the original twelve novels, Rohmer wrote in the Fu Manchu universe, I presently own eight and I will continue to haunt used book stores until all twelve are mine.

On August 5th, 2010, I began keeping record of the books that I have read. Re-Enter Fu Manchu is book #229.

I Said It On The Internet!

Bob The Angry Flower's Guide to Apostrophe Use

Stolen from here. Caveat emptor and surf responsibly.

Two Great Author Graphics

This is why I don't think books should be bully pulpits...ever!

Though in my case, I'm the Sparkly Writer PRINCE!

No Joke! I'm Speaking At The Library of Congress!

To say that I am delighted is a gross understatement, I am ecstatic, but on Tuesday, July 21st, at 12 noon at the Library of Congress, I will be bringing a free lecture open to the public on how to self publish your manuscript. I will be lecturing on the various markets, the strengths and weaknesses of each as well as potential pitfalls, manuscript preparation, designing the covers, and then marketing the finished product so you’re not the best kept secret in the literary world.

Then overstimulated by the excitement, I will probably experience transient global amnesia and go off screaming about the reptilian overlords of Tajikstan and their plan to steal our air and it will all degenerate into me going into a fetal position in a corner and making motorboat noises with my lips.

I would like everybody to bring a tub of lard as well as an assortment of grease guns and spatulas for a group project. It’s going to be fun!

(Note: The first paragraph is true. The next two...not so much.

Much.)

Anthology Editor Fred Patten Accepts My Story "To the Reader ..."

Anthology editor, Fred Patten emailed me Monday, May 2nd with the following good news:

Congratulations! (The anthology) Gods With Fur has closed (to submissions), and your "To the Reader ..." has been chosen for publication. The anthology will go on sale at Anthrocon in Pittsburgh on June 30.

I'm always delighted and honored to have any of my work appear in a Patten anthology. He has a fine literary ear and his ability to assemble a good anthology has been honed from years of practical experience.

"To the Reader ..." is a 200-word piece of flash fiction and will be the opening story of the anthology.

Here are the opening three paragraphs. Purchase the anthology after June 30th for more:

And so you have found me.
 
What? After all this searching, you hesitate? You draw back? You searched for a god and now you have found one and yet you clutch your electric torch in fear.

Is it that I wear the mundane form of a fox? Or maybe you searched for a god of greater power, one who does more than sit in some great underground labyrinth surrounded by books and scrolls and clay tablets?

Faydra: A Tale From the Fractured World

I can write anything I want, but I can't write everything I want. At the age of 61 where a short story can take as much as three months, my time is limited. Here is part of a story I am shelving and thought you might enjoy the opening paragraphs.

Faydra: A Tale From the Fractured World,by Alan LoewenROUGH DRAFTALL RIGHTS RESERVED


I’m going to tell you how I met Faydra, but I really should start at the beginning. I’ll follow the advice the King of Hearts gave the White Rabbit: 'Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: Then stop.'

Those of us born on what we arrogantly call Earth Prime all remember where we were when the Fracture occurred a good decade ago. Those of us who survived it of course.

I sat in the kitchen of the home I had been born twenty two years previously, freshly graduated from Penn State, and waiting for the job offers to just come rolling in. I had just hung up the phone after speaking to my parents who called me with last minute house sitting instructions before they boarded their cruise ship and I had just made myself the perfect sandwich for my lunch: minced bologna, real mayonnaise, a layer of sweet bread and butter pickles, and a few leaves of lettuce. And then the lights went out literally and figuratively.

I miss that sandwich so much.

When I came to, I lay on the kitchen floor looking over at Hypatia, my Sheltie, licking her lips, her breath smelling of minced bologna, real mayonnaise...well, you get the picture.

I had no idea why I blacked out and still feeling a little queasy in the stomach, I felt no hurry in getting up. I thought that I would just lay still for awhile and then see about maybe getting to a phone, crawling if I had to, and getting an ambulance to come take a look at me. The Biglerville Fire Department only had to travel one mile to get to my house, close enough that on days when the wind didn’t blow I could easily hear the siren calling volunteer firefighters and EMTs to some fire or medical emergency.

I’m convinced the shock of passing out is why I didn’t hear the screaming right away. I lay on the floor considering it, confusing it at first for the Biglerville fire siren, but the siren never paused for breath.

Somebody somewhere was having a hard time and after a few moments I thought I better look into it because the screaming just went on and on.

Carefully, I got up on my hands and knees and when my gut stopped flip-flopping, I crawled to the dining room picture window and took a peek outside.

The human mind has some very elaborate mechanisms for protection, so I could not take in all that I saw right away.

My mind first registered my next door neighbor, Miss Pitzer standing on her lawn with a push mower beside her. Facing away from me, I could not see the reason for her pointing in the direction of her house and screaming until my mind decided to do the great reveal.

Miss Pitzer’s house wasn’t there. In it’s place, stretching as far as I could see stood a forest with trees that would have made the California Redwoods look like twigs.

Standing behind the picture window I craned my head up to see if I could see the treetops, but no go on that plan. Just one of those trees would have met the world’s demand for toothpicks for millennia.

I rubbed my eyes a couple of times, and then made the decision to stand. After a while, with the help of the window ledge, I made it to my feet and after a few moments started feeling better. Tentative steps seemed to work so I went to the back door and with Hypatia at my heels, opened the back door into madness.

Miss Pitzer ignored me as I went to stand next to her. Not knowing what to say to her, I just stared at what must have been a primal wood that would have made Paul Bunyan drool.

The sharpness of the division between her lawn and the wood looked like it had been made with a cookie cutter. Not knowing what had happened to Miss Pitzer’s house or how a wood with giant trees had taken its place, I thought a phone call to 911 would be in order.

And my cell phone would not connect.

Of course it took seven years of suffering and fighting and trying to keep one’s sanity before we ever learned what had happened. When life reached some form of stability, that’s when we discovered the huge crater eighteen miles in circumference beneath the France-Switzerland border near Geneva where the Large Hadron Collider once lay.

The eggheads think a power surge made the universe go flip flop and about twenty three parallel earths became fractured and got all messed up like a jigsaw puzzle.

Now I know you know all this, but I’m telling the story and I’ll get to Faydra eventually. Just let me tell the story my own way.

All I know now is that a forest from some parallel earth ended up as my neighbor and on some other planet in some other universe, Miss Pitzer’s house and her yappy Pekingese sits without Miss Pizer in residence.

I miss my parents.

I miss my minced bologna sandwiches.

The shame that I did not help my next door neighbor is sometimes overwhelming, but does it help if I say I had a bad case of shock? Especially after the sun set and that big spiral galaxy filled up half the night sky and the truth hit hard that we weren’t in the world that we knew anymore. I never saw Miss Pitzer ever again. I never even knew when she stopped screaming. I just hope she’s okay.

Of course, we were lucky. Biglerville found itself surrounded by three other chunks of real estate from three other parallel earths: the primal wood, New Rome (that’s what we call it) where Romans discovered the New World but never grew beyond the Iron Age, and finally, Faydra’s world that we still call Disneyland to this day. Of course, I wasn’t going to meet Faydra for another eight years, but like I said, this is my story to tell. I’ll tell it the way I want.

Anyway, after my fellow small town residents and I endured the initial shock of being plunged back to the 19th century and its lack of electricity and Internet and video games and television and all the other toys that kept us busy, the only joy we had was to discover a world where basically peaceful red pandas lived and walked like human beings.

So New Rome gave us goverment and leadership, Biglerville still had working farmlands and orchards, and once we learned the red pandas weren’t murderous, they kept us sane with their inquisitive friendship.

Unfortunately, some of the parallel Earths that bordered New Rome and Disneyland weren’t very friendly, but unlike the Iron Age Romans and the peaceful red pandas, we of Earth Prime were fortunate. We had guns.

New Rome had to deal with a bordering Earth that would have made H.P. Lovecraft giddy with joy, but the monsters there were not like their literary or cinema cousins. When you shot them, they obediently lay down and assumed room temperature.

Connecting to Disneyland was another world of humans that bore some philosophical crossbreeding between Ayn Rand and Kim Jong-un, but as they had not fought a war in their world for centuries, they could not put up to much of a fight. The pandas just stood aside and let us play target practice. Once we removed the old guard, New Rome stepped in to teach them their version of a Roman Republic and that world seems to be doing better.

It took the better part of seven years for the Fractured World to reach a form of stability, seven years of a lot of wars and a lot of death. The number of suicides from Internet deprivation alone almost wiped out an entire generation.

Ecologically, it will be hundreds of millennia before our new Fractured Earth reaches some form of natural homoeostasis, but until then, we do the best we can. So far, a decade after the Fracture, we’ve catalogued about twenty-three different versions of Earth.

So here we are, a decade after the Fracture and I’m working for Knouse Foods on a plan to expand the orchards into Disneyland when there’s a knock on the door.

And here is where I finally get around to telling you about Faydra.

My Advice to Writers: 4theLuv Anthology Submission

Today I received a general invitation to submit to an anthology.

They wanted a 1,000 to 3,000 word story on the theme of Halloween, but until I went to their website, they did not say this was a 4theLuv market.

4theLuv means you get paid nothing. De nada.

But at least, you would be able to get a contributor's copy, right?

Nope. You had to buy it after it came out.

So let me get this straight. They want a part of my life just for the sheer joy of having my piece buried in an anthology that I have no assurance will be marketed well so at the very least I can get market exposure?

When I started out as a writer, I wrote for several anthologies like that and I was paid nothing. No problem. They stated that bluntly in their submission guidelines. They did not even send me a contributor's copy.

And where are those anthologies today? Well, because they were marketed poorly (actually they weren't marketed at all), they have dropped off the radar. I didn't even get market exposure for my work.

My advice is to take a hard look at any anthology you submit to. I'm not going to say 4theLuv markets are intrinsically bad, but just be fully aware of what you are getting.

Nothing.

Addendum: I have sent reprints for anthologies put together for charitable reasons. Speaking only for myself, I will submit without problem to a 4theLuv charitable market if I know the editor, support the charity, and know for a fact the monies will be ethically distributed.

Conversation With A Dying Unicorn

I did not write this, but I have permission from the author to repost it here. Ken Pick is my writing partner for the Jill Noir series and I met him through this work. The story is not for everyone, but I believe that it will speak to genre authors and readers who hope that the act of literary or artistic creation may somehow impact reality. I was deeply moved when I read this so many years ago and it moves me still. I'm grateful and honored to be able to bring this story to you now.
The Age of Reason Has No Need of Unicorns
Conversation with a Dying Unicornby Ken Pick ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The rumble of the garage door closing two floors down vibrated through my bedroom, followed by Steve’s motorcycle fading in the distance. With him gone to work, I could put in a couple hours without distraction before I had to crash for the night and go back to live-action Dilbert in the morning.

March was my month to catch up on my backlog of furry art projects, and I was finishing up the one original amid the xeroxed-and-inked copies of my doodle pile that I was sending off for a try at the conbook for the next AnthroCon. And deadlines for the conbook and at work had to coincide.

AnthroCon’s theme this year was “Join the Furry Revolution!,” and from the imagery on their Web page – Betsy Ross as a raccoon – they obviously were thinking “American Revolution.” As soon as I’d downloaded the detailed solicitation for conbook art, my mind had gone fiendish in a way it hadn’t in a long time. They wanted “Furry Revolution” art? They’ll get a Furry Revolution – just not the one they’re expecting!

I’d forwarded a copy of the conbook page and release form to Eric Blumrich – he drew his “revolutionary imagery” from the First Russian Revolution; that ought to be good for a few fried brains on the conbook staff. Steve had suggested a parody on Latin American banana republics and Clint something based on an Andrew Swann novel, but my neurons were already exploding down another path, prodded by memories of Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Here Comes a Candle. Why should Mary Hanson-Roberts be the only one of us to tap French Revolution imagery?

In all my life, I’ve only had one story, one possible paranormal experience, and two other pictures burst full-honk into my mind like this one – straight into my head, demanding to be drawn. A melodramatic, sort-of-Gothic horror piece – an anthropomorphic unicorn, traditional Western symbol of purity getting the chop during the Reign of Terror. Striking on the surface – the black silhouette of the guillotine looming over the white figure of the unicorn – and symbolic on a couple of levels, my commentary on attitudes both inside and outside the fandom.

I’d never done a unicorn before, but this one came out surprisingly well – sort of a Stephanie Peregrine style, with a facial expression mixing shock and dread that had come about completely by accident I’d dressed her in some simple generic period garb I remembered from my SCA days, and (after a hurried e-mail warning from Blumrich) given her enough points of difference from Vicky Woman’s “Empress Alicia” that no one could possibly confuse the two. Which, of course, guaranteed that some fanboy would. Even more striking when traced and cleaned-up, late at night on that light table at Kinko’s with nobody else in the store, afraid someone would see it and get the wrong idea.

And now, I was puffing the final touches on the piece. Actually, two pieces – an inked black-and-white version, Victim of the Furry Revolution, for the conbook and a color version, The Age of Reason Has No Need of Unicorns (L’Age de Raison n’a pas Besoin de Licornes), for the art show. I had just put my signet and date on the former – dated using the French Revolutionary Calendar – and was getting the release forms ready when the Reality Barrier broke.

“Why?” The voice was female, sweet and musical – and coming from inside the room, behind and to the left, from the direction of my bed.

“HUH?” I spun the desk-chair around, homing on the voice.

She was sitting on my bed. The unicornette, exactly as I had drawn her – white fur, disheveled golden mane, liquid golden eyes, petite cloven hooves, white peasant-blouse top and coarse white skirt soiled with prison dirt, hands/forehooves/whatever lashed behind her back and a large cork stuck on the end of her golden horn.

“If I am to be executed, Monsieur, I should at least know why.”

“You – You’re real?”

“Non, Monsieur.” She shook her head, golden mane falling half-over her eyes. “I live only in your mind, and there -” She angled her horn toward my drawing table and the artworks. “- I am about to die.”

A tulpa – an imaginary construct that somehow jumps over Planck’s Wall into reality? Or just my neurons gang-firing from sleep deprivation and stress? Or subconscious storytelling making the jump into consciousness, like Clint’s characters telling him “how it really happened”? But in a full-sensory hallucination? The last time anything remotely resembling this had happened – “Thirty Seconds Over Narnia”, that possible paranormal experience – it had come in the form of a vivid mental image, not an apparently-solid critter materializing in front of me.

“You created me, Monsieur, and in creating me you condemn me to death,” she continued. “What crime have I committed to deserve la guillotine, to ‘sneeze into the sack’ before a cheering mob?”

“N-none; you’re – innocent.” Like so many others, from Paris to Phnom Penh, in the two centuries of revolutions patterned after the French.

“But of course I am innocent, Monsieur,” she said, getting the hair out of her eyes with a toss of her head. “I am a unicorn, Non?” She rose off my bed, the futon mattress rising as her imaginary weight left it, and stepped over to my drawing table, her hooves sounding daintily on the carpet. Eyes wide with wonder; she looked over the furry art hanging on the wall; then bending down, she pulled the lamp around with her horn and studied both unicorn-and-guillotine pictures intently.

After a moment she spoke again. “So why must I die unjustly? Do I represent something or someone you hate? Am I a martyr for some cause I know not what? Or do you simply wish to see a unicorn beheaded?”

“No, unicorn – I’m not completely sure myself.” I reached out to touch her on the shoulder; she felt solid, and warm. “If there’s any reason, you’re there because you’re a unicorn and what unicorns represent.”

“Explain, s’il vous plait?”

Great. Where do I start? I tried to tell her how she first came to be, how the image of a unicorn going to the guillotine had come out of nowhere into my head and wouldn’t let go, how everything had just fallen into place when I’d gotten the details on AnthroCon’s theme and conbook.

How I’d poured myself into a picture for the first time in years, and how it had drained me afterwards, and how anything that could have that effect had to have power in it.

About causes gone lunatic, from Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité! to Prohibition to militant anti-smoking to Save the Fill-in-the-Blank to whatever was the latest Important Cause of the week, and how the perfect Utopian omelet always required smashing more and more eggs.

About my hyperactive, runaway imagination that had spaced me out until I was well into my twenties, and how that awe and wonder had worn down over the years – like my father; who had lost his ability to dream by the time I was old enough to notice.

How imaginary critters like her had been a part of that imagination as far back as I could remember -classic Poul Anderson and Andre Norton “aliens” with fur and tails, mythical critters like herself, a noble young white lion, a one-shot skunkette glamor-actress, two-legged talking beasts of every species. Then my own critters; imaginary playmates becoming safe rehearsals for how to act on dates which never came, finally growing into full-fledged characters and stories and art as I aged, all expressing what C. S. Lewis had expressed the best:

You had an animal with everything an animal ought to have – glossy coat, liquid eye, sweet breath, and whitest teeth; and added to all that, as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true, the charm of speech and reason.

And how those “earliest dreams” had become “adult” nightmares – like that “furban legend” of a Blumrich rant, the one everybody claimed to have seen but nobody could produce a copy of, the one that goes on and on about all that these creatures of the imagination could do or be and ends with “And all you can think of doing with them is to draw them with their clothes off.”

And how dealing with the fandom – the Muckers, the yiffy-boys, the Spandex Commandoes, the way over-the-top lifestylers, with only the occasional thinker amid the droolers and foamers and wankers – had worn me down.

“But they’re not human! They’re Furry!” The cry of the fanboy always used to justify sick and twisted behavior of or towards the critters they’ve created – just like “But I was only role-playing my character” always justified any sort of treachery in D&D. Never uplifting the critters to their level and beyond – transcending the animal – instead of seeing how low they could go with them. Even animals eat, sleep, and play as well as rut.

If insanity was part of these times, we’d embraced the madness as thoroughly as Paris 207 years ago. Our mobs of fanboys howling for spooge, up to and including stuff that would make the Marquis de Sade vomit. Our factions and denunciations, our Girondists and Jacobins, our high-sounding Robespierres, our gloating Heberts, our vicious Marats.

And me? I’d come into this like Lafayette only to wind up with a rep like Dr. Guillotin, the part of me that could dream those “earliest dreams” slowly dying in writer’s block, artist’s block, stories sitting half-complete and art commissions sitting unsaturated for years. Until her.

Vive la Revolution de Pelage.

She listened quietly, with an occasional flick of her tail. When I finally finished rambling, she spoke again, thoughtfully.

“I believe I understand. I am the innocent who finds herself in the path of a cause so ‘righteous’ as to justify any evil. I am a creature of imagination, who cannot possibly exist in an ‘Age of Reason’, so I cannot be permitted to live. And to you, mon createur, who can see virtue only when embodied in such creatures of imagination, I am something else.”

“I represent what was worn away in you, what these – pelagists – throw away when they make of their creations less than animals.” She shrugged against her bonds. “You do not kill me, they do; your art but records the fact, and my – execution – mirrors what they have done and what they have become.” Her voice softened, turned even more thoughtful. “When to be called ‘Virgin’ is an insult, to whom can a unicorn appear?”

“To me.”

“Oui, and you know why.” Oh, I knew – all the years of embarrassment and ridicule, direct and indirect. The biggest continuing failure in my life; blindsided by another revolution, saving myself for a marriage that never came.

“Unicorn, I might be able to spare you. I’m no Scarlet Pimpernel, but -” I was babbling now, my stomach doing slow sick backflips. “- I can shred the pictures – or at least not submit them or show them. Nobody will ever see them, and you’ll keep your head.” I didn’t like destroying artwork, any artwork, especially my own – but ink on paper and Prismacolors on illustration board was one thing, but to actually take a living, breathing unicorn-girl – even in imagination – and slice off her head  

“NON!” A hoof stamped against the carpet, sounding through the room. She shook her head like a stallion in triumph, eyes flashing golden fire; I remembered the earliest tales of unicorns, and how they could vanquish elephants in a one-on-one fight. “Mon createur, I now know I die for a reason, not just amusement or titillation.” She paused, seemed to shrink a bit. “You may take my head.”

Anything I said now was going to sound really stupid – especially so to an imaginary critter about to die an imaginary death – but I said it anyway. “I don’t want your head, unicorn. I don’t want you to die – not after actually meeting you.”

“Neither do I, but we both know I must. You drew me for a purpose, and I fulfill that purpose by giving up my life. And with that life you drive home your point” – she tapped my head with the corked tip of her horn – “to the mob. Perhaps some will listen.”

“They won’t.” I had enough experience along those lines – Clint quitting in disgust halfway through his grand story arc, Canuss gone to ground, Blumrich’s on-target rants, the pros who’d bailed because of “one fanboy too many”, the career-killing reputation of being “one of them!” More eggs cracked for the perfect Furry omelet. Vive la Revolution? Vive la Terreur.

“You don’t know that” She shrugged again. “The draw of the card, the roll of the dice – you never know the results before you make the attempt.” She took a deep breath, stretching the ropes that bound her; and power entered her voice. “And for whatever purity and virtue remains in you, and by my blood about to be spilled, YOU MUST MAKE THE ATTEMPT.”

She stood tall, head high, nostrils wide and eyes blazing. “And I shall be part of that attempt, sealed with the lifeblood of a unicorn. Perhaps my death will bring that part of you back to life.

“Now, mon createur,” her voice returned to normal, “I ask one last favor from you, before I go.”

“What?” I had learned long ago never to answer “anything” to an open-ended favor – especially when magic was afoot – and physical courage was never one of my strong points. What could she want? She’d refused my offer to spare her; she was a classic unicorn of pre-mass-market Western Christian tradition, not some fanboy spooge-i-corn…

“I know I am not ‘real’, and do not die ‘for real’, yet still -” Her voice started to quiver; her expression changing to the one in the picture. “-I am afraid. Embrace me – s’il vous plait?”

I gathered her in my arms, crushing her against me until she stopped shaking, her heart hammering faster than mine at my father’s funeral; her breasts pressed against my ribs, her ear and mane tickled my nose and her snout rubbed against my cheek, her tail flicked against my thighs. So unicorns must have lain in the laps of other virgins, so long ago…

“Mon createur?”

“Yes?”

“I am honored to have spoken with you, as if I were real.” She pulled her head off my cheek and looked at me with great golden eyes. “I came from you, and I am always a part of you. You know Who we unicorns – at least our males – have symbolized in every Medieval Bestiary. You once wrote Stauros how much you ‘longed to romp and play with the furries in Aslan’s Land’. If and when you do, I pray that I shall be one of them – given substance in reality instead of imagination.”

I squeezed her tighter, kissed her on her snout, between the nostrils; her breath smelled like fresh roses mixed with cinnamon. She pulled back, blinked once in astonishment, then raised her head to where our mouths met – para-equine to human – and reciprocated with a long, gentle kiss. Just like my only girlfriend had, on our first date, all those years ago…

“Merci – and adieu.” She stepped back, radiant despite the bonds and prison dirt; I brushed her mane back from her eyes. “And now, if you will excuse me, I must go. La guillotine is waiting.”

And turning around, with head held high and tail flicking, she walked through the wall and was gone.

Inspiration For An Incident At A Carnival

Paperback CoverNot all my ideas for stories come from dreams.

My short story, An Incident At A Carnival, is a piece that is entirely in dialogue and was first published in the March 2012 issue of Cover of Darkness magazine that unfortunately is out of print. However, the story is still available in my collection, Dark Dreams and Darker Visions, both as a paperback and an eBook.

The narrator, Madame Gianopoulos, is a carnival fortune teller with a "wicked pack of cards." Written completely from her point of view, An Incident At A Carnival is her one-sided conversation with a young lady who decides to have her fortune read resulting in tragic consequences. Here are the story's opening lines.

“Please come inside. Sit down there across the table from me.
“My, my. What a pretty one you are!
“No, no, my dear. Don’t be concerned over a silly old lady like me. Sit! Sit!
“So you want to know the future? Maybe the past? Yes?
“Well, of course you already know the past! At least you think you do, but my cards have a way of helping you remember it.
“Ignore the noises of the carnival outside. Here it is just you and me.
“Now I will unwrap the cards and we shall begin.
“Yes, that’s real silk they are wrapped in. I’m not some carnival hack, not Madame Gianopoulos. I have dealt these cards for over seventy years.

Madame Gianopoulos found her genesis in Madame Sosostris, one of the subjects of T.S. Eliot's epic poem, The Waste Land (written in 1922):

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.

You can read An Incident At a Carnival in its entirety along with nine other tales including The Pond, Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, Killer Lullabies, and The Pig and is available internationally through your country's Amazon.com.

eBook Cover Amazon USA Paperback

Amazon USA eBook

Amazon UK Paperback

Amazon UK eBook