Snowbird Gothic Stories #3 - "Missing Pages"
There is a certain danger implicit in taking a genre fiction piece to a non-genre writing workshop. For one thing, there’s definitely a bit of a literary hierarchy at work in many places, whereby anything genre is reflexively deemed less worthy than something that is “realistic” (excepting, of course, magical realism and the works of Margaret Atwood). There’s also the very real chance that the folks who will be critiquing your piece, whether it be the workshop leader or the fellow attendees, won’t have the vocabulary or the experience to offer useful criticism on some aspects of the story. Someone who doesn’t read horror, doesn’t know horror and doesn’t like horror might be put off enough by the genre of a piece that they’re unable to drill down to the material they can offer useful feedback on. Other folks might simply not be able to deal with genre convention, and base their critiques on a misunderstanding of the work.
“Missing Pages” was originally published in the one and only fiction anthology put out by Hero Games, a pulp-themed collection edited by the estimable James Lowder and dedicated to recreating the various genres of pulp stories under one suitably lurid cover. James was kind enough to let me take a swipe at the Lovecraftian slot - other folks took war stories, or sports stories, or detective stories, or cowboy stories - and the result was “Missing Pages”, a Case of Charles Dexter Ward riff filtered through the perspective of a child whose search for a father figure leads him to some very dark places.
But before it was published, it got workshopped at a writing festival at North Carolina State, which I attended courtesy of my then-manager Kevin Perry. State is notoriously welcoming to specfic writers; award-winning science fiction writer John Kessel is on faculty, for starters. But workshop attendees are always a mixed lot, and the folks in this one (Kevin aside) tended toward the more mundane. One guy had attempted noir and, in my opinion, failed terribly. There were a few older women in there writing sweet domestic drama stuff, and so it went. And then there was me, in the corner, with “Missing Pages”.
We went back and forth on it a bit, and the workshop leader provided some valuable tips. But at the end of the session, when we were wrapping up, one of my fellow workshoppers made a comment that made me realize that she had no idea what had actually happened in the story. She thought it had a happy ending. And when I told her that it didn’t (yeah, I know, spoilers, but c’mon, it’s Lovecraft homage. There’s no such thing as a happy ending in Lovecraft homage) she got shocked look on her face, drew herself up, and said, “You mean we don’t get him back?”
No. We don’t. But how he gets lost, well, that’s the interesting part.
