Framing Devices
Framing devices are used as bookends to a larger story, creating a story within a story, and when applied to short story collections, adds glue that connects the individual stories together. This literary device isn’t new and if we’re being honest, most of the time it’s a tired cliché. I’m going to talk about a couple of my personal favorites in order of publication, not preference. A word of caution, I’m only talking about framing devices in single-author collections under the speculative fiction umbrella (one is science fiction and the other is horror), so feel free to point out other examples. I’m talking about The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury and The Books of Blood by Clive Barker. What are some of your favorites?
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THE ILLUSTRATED MAN – Ray Bradbury published 1951
The title story opens the collection. The narrator meets a formal carnival worker covered with tattoos supposedly created by a time-traveling woman. Each tattoo is individually animated and tells a different story. Each story in the collection is a different tattoo that is told as you watch the ink’s animation. Pretty freaking cool, huh? Yeah, I thought so. But one key to a great framing story is that the rest of the story(s) must be on the level of the device, and the stories here absolutely deliver. My favorite story of the collection: “The Long Rain”
Quote from “The Illustrated Man” frame story: “If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed with all his sulphurous color, elongation, and anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s body for his art. The colors burned in three dimensions. They were windows looking in upon fiery reality. Here, gathered on one wall, were all the finest scenes in the universe, the man was a walking treasure gallery. This wasn’t the work of a cheap carnival tattoo man with three colors and whiskey on his breath. This was the accomplishment of a living genius, vibrant, clear, and beautiful.”
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BOOKS OF BLOOD – Clive Barker published 1984-1985
Once again, the title story is the frame story. In the story, a psychic investigator hires a medium to communicate with the dead in a particular haunted house. Turns out the medium is a fraud and fakes his visions. But there are real ghosts in the house and they grow tired of the medium’s shit. The ghosts attack the fake medium and carve words into the flesh all over his body. The words in the medium’s skin make up the stories in the collection (bit of a more gruesome throwback to Bradbury’s, huh?). Just like Illustrated Man, Books of Blood is a great collection, one of the best horror collections out there. My favorite story: The Midnight Meat Train.
I’ll leave you with the quote that opens the collection: “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.”
