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| CD Issue #1 |
AUTHOR: Anke M. Kriske
CD APPEARANCE: Issue #1 (Dec. 1988: Vol. 1, Iss. 1), story 8 of 12
CD APPEARANCE: Issue #1 (Dec. 1988: Vol. 1, Iss. 1), story 8 of 12
PLOT:
Jim Conant has just finished a clandestine evening with his mistress. It was some rough sex, and they both liked it. The problem is that she dies immediately afterward, presumably of a heart attack.
He surveys the situation- scratches on her back & his arms, bodily fluids on the car seat, ripped clothes, a missing earring- and he realizes he'd easily be pegged as her murderer. And even if an autopsy eventually proved otherwise, his wife probably wouldn't appreciate his innocence. He decides his only course of action is to hide the body.
Conant (as the author calls him) is also a high school science teacher, and they had been having their fun parked after hours in the school's vacant lot. He quickly determines his best option is inside the school itself. Thanks to his coaching position for the track team, he has a key.
Inside his classroom, he struggles her body into the aluminum sink and gets to work. Using rubber gloves, an apron, a collection of the little knives used for the classroom frog dissections, and twenty years' experience teaching anatomy, he begins to dismantle her body piece by gruesome piece.
He starts with the skin and muscles on her back and soon moves to her internal organs. As he works, he names the various parts, feeling like one of his own students for the first time in years. It takes several hours, but with the addition of a limited amount of hydrolic acid & the cafeteria's garbage disposal, he reduces Debbie to nothing more than bones.
And then comes his "crowning achievement." Conant reasons that if the best place to hide a book is in a library, the best place to hide a skeleton (no, it's not the local cemetery... his is near a highway and practically next door to the police station) is in a science classroom. Taking another few hours to accomplish the task, he arduously strings together Debbie's bones. When done, he exchanges the classroom skeleton, Clyde- who is old & who he's been asking to replace for years- with his beloved Debbie.
Weeks and then months pass. Conant has gotten away with it. His students suspect nothing, his wife is none-the-wiser, and every morning he gets to have a brief chat with his old flame, often to his happy arousal.
Then, with only days before the end of the school year, tragedy hits. Another teacher presents him with a gift... a replacement skeleton for the one he's been asking to dispose of for years. The exchange, the teacher explains, has already been made. Old 'Clyde' is currently on his way to the incinerator.
Conant rushes to the boiler room just in time to prevent the janitor from destroying the collections of bones he has come to love. He screams at the mild-mannered man ("You are not to touch Debbie!") and pulls at the box containing her bones. His mind, however, is not quite entirely gone. He knows enough to let the janitor do his job and bring to an end the details of his own crime.
But the loss of Debbie pushes Jim Conant over the edge, and the story ends with him living in a mental ward. And he lives there with not one secret, but two. At the last possible moment, he stole a little part of her- a finger bone. But since the patients at the ward aren't allow to have pockets, he has kept her hidden inside his mouth.
REVIEW: 5 out of 5 stars.
Simply put, this story rocked. It has hereby set the bar for all future 5-star stories in this blog. As a reader I was entranced from the beginning. I was shocked to shivers several times along the way. And that ending... wow! Kriske has in one fell swoop reminded me what horror can be. The first thing I did when finishing was to look her up & see what other gems might await me since I decided immediately to read more of what she has to offer.
Though the vocabulary is simple, "The Departing of Debbie" is far from a simple story. It begins with an affair gone wrong. We see the confusion, the fear, and the rationalization of the primary character. Next we are given the meticulous cleaning up of the body, a thing Kriske does with fantastic detail (the scene where Conant uses a coffee spoon- "the only appropriate instrument he had handy"- to scoop out Debbie's brain from her skull is particularly nasty & memorable). Here we are given detailed gore mixed nicely with the slow undercurrent of growing insanity... Conant doesn't just name the body parts as he removes & disposes of them, he is constantly impressed with his progress as he goes. Finally, we get the twist ending which not only takes the story further than we had expected, but also gives us that great and true feel of horror as we close the magazine. For me, the story was a 5-star going into the final paragraphs. The ending was a welcomed exclamation point.
I've read plenty of getting-away-with-murder stories before. They can be entertaining, but they also sometimes leave me wondering if the author is using fiction as an outlet for deeper problems. And even if they don't, the point of these storis is almost always to showcase the cleverness of a born killer. Creepy, yes, but also somewhat ho-hum. Kriske's story is light years better than these predictable pieces. Her protagonist isn't a killer; he's a (mere) cheater and liar, a thief of his wife's devotion. Moreover, he starts the story in perfect (albeit pig-headed) sanity and works towards insanity as the story progresses.
As a writer, I was struck mostly with the story's final 700 words. But I don't mean the power of the events themselves. I'm talking about the structure of the story. Think for a moment about the standard design of a piece of fiction. It goes something like this: Character A has Problem B which forces him/her to take Actions C, D, & E until Climax F solves the problem and leaves us with Resolution G. What Kriske has done is sneak in an additional part of the narrative plotline between F & G. Call it "Climax 2.0."
When we see Conant hang Debbie's skeleton in his classroom, he has solved his problem. We suspect the final paragraphs we have yet to read are the resolution- showing how he goes on with his life- and we also suspect something will go wrong (this is, after all, a horror story). Possibly he'll get caught. Possibly Debbie's bones will come alive and strangle him to death (for a supernatural twist). Possibly he'll eye that skeleton day after day, slowly working up the courage to commit a real murder just so he can dismantle another body. And at first it seems Kriske is giving us just that. Conant gets away with it and starts to develop an unhealthy connection to Debbie's skeleton. But then, just before we get the final results of his deeds... WHAM! That awesome twist. The other teacher brings in a new skeleton, Conant fully loses his mind, and we see him in a mental ward with her finger bone hidden in his mouth for... how long?... oh, I don't know, but years it feels. Years, certainly.
It's another, higher climax than we had been expecting, and it works simultaneously as a resolution. I love what Kriske has done here, and I am certain I'm going to find a way to buy old copies of magazines her work has appeared in, if nothing more than to see if its a common theme in her stories or if this one was unique in that regard.
What I've learned from reading this is that not all stories need to follow a prescribed format. Better still, having the courage to break the mold- a little anyway- can have very powerful results. In the future, I'm going to open my mind to other ways to lead my readers to the emotional state I want them.
Jim Conant has just finished a clandestine evening with his mistress. It was some rough sex, and they both liked it. The problem is that she dies immediately afterward, presumably of a heart attack.
[He's later revealed to be in his early 40s, so while a little odd, it's not impossible.]
He surveys the situation- scratches on her back & his arms, bodily fluids on the car seat, ripped clothes, a missing earring- and he realizes he'd easily be pegged as her murderer. And even if an autopsy eventually proved otherwise, his wife probably wouldn't appreciate his innocence. He decides his only course of action is to hide the body.
Conant (as the author calls him) is also a high school science teacher, and they had been having their fun parked after hours in the school's vacant lot. He quickly determines his best option is inside the school itself. Thanks to his coaching position for the track team, he has a key.
Inside his classroom, he struggles her body into the aluminum sink and gets to work. Using rubber gloves, an apron, a collection of the little knives used for the classroom frog dissections, and twenty years' experience teaching anatomy, he begins to dismantle her body piece by gruesome piece.
He starts with the skin and muscles on her back and soon moves to her internal organs. As he works, he names the various parts, feeling like one of his own students for the first time in years. It takes several hours, but with the addition of a limited amount of hydrolic acid & the cafeteria's garbage disposal, he reduces Debbie to nothing more than bones.
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| THE AWESOME PIC THAT COMES WITH KRISKE'S STORY |
[The story could pretty much end there, topping out around 1,800 words,
but Kriske give us so much more story in only 700 more words.]
Weeks and then months pass. Conant has gotten away with it. His students suspect nothing, his wife is none-the-wiser, and every morning he gets to have a brief chat with his old flame, often to his happy arousal.
Then, with only days before the end of the school year, tragedy hits. Another teacher presents him with a gift... a replacement skeleton for the one he's been asking to dispose of for years. The exchange, the teacher explains, has already been made. Old 'Clyde' is currently on his way to the incinerator.
Conant rushes to the boiler room just in time to prevent the janitor from destroying the collections of bones he has come to love. He screams at the mild-mannered man ("You are not to touch Debbie!") and pulls at the box containing her bones. His mind, however, is not quite entirely gone. He knows enough to let the janitor do his job and bring to an end the details of his own crime.
But the loss of Debbie pushes Jim Conant over the edge, and the story ends with him living in a mental ward. And he lives there with not one secret, but two. At the last possible moment, he stole a little part of her- a finger bone. But since the patients at the ward aren't allow to have pockets, he has kept her hidden inside his mouth.
REVIEW: 5 out of 5 stars.
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| CD BLURB ON AUTHOR ANKE M. KRISKE |
[The results, btw, showcased one of the problems doing this blog will bring.
Many of the authors in the early issues will have only been published in magazines that are now out of print. While www.isfdb.org lists a total of 21 short pieces published under her name,
only 3 are actually available for sale on Amazon].
Though the vocabulary is simple, "The Departing of Debbie" is far from a simple story. It begins with an affair gone wrong. We see the confusion, the fear, and the rationalization of the primary character. Next we are given the meticulous cleaning up of the body, a thing Kriske does with fantastic detail (the scene where Conant uses a coffee spoon- "the only appropriate instrument he had handy"- to scoop out Debbie's brain from her skull is particularly nasty & memorable). Here we are given detailed gore mixed nicely with the slow undercurrent of growing insanity... Conant doesn't just name the body parts as he removes & disposes of them, he is constantly impressed with his progress as he goes. Finally, we get the twist ending which not only takes the story further than we had expected, but also gives us that great and true feel of horror as we close the magazine. For me, the story was a 5-star going into the final paragraphs. The ending was a welcomed exclamation point.
I've read plenty of getting-away-with-murder stories before. They can be entertaining, but they also sometimes leave me wondering if the author is using fiction as an outlet for deeper problems. And even if they don't, the point of these storis is almost always to showcase the cleverness of a born killer. Creepy, yes, but also somewhat ho-hum. Kriske's story is light years better than these predictable pieces. Her protagonist isn't a killer; he's a (mere) cheater and liar, a thief of his wife's devotion. Moreover, he starts the story in perfect (albeit pig-headed) sanity and works towards insanity as the story progresses.
As a writer, I was struck mostly with the story's final 700 words. But I don't mean the power of the events themselves. I'm talking about the structure of the story. Think for a moment about the standard design of a piece of fiction. It goes something like this: Character A has Problem B which forces him/her to take Actions C, D, & E until Climax F solves the problem and leaves us with Resolution G. What Kriske has done is sneak in an additional part of the narrative plotline between F & G. Call it "Climax 2.0."
When we see Conant hang Debbie's skeleton in his classroom, he has solved his problem. We suspect the final paragraphs we have yet to read are the resolution- showing how he goes on with his life- and we also suspect something will go wrong (this is, after all, a horror story). Possibly he'll get caught. Possibly Debbie's bones will come alive and strangle him to death (for a supernatural twist). Possibly he'll eye that skeleton day after day, slowly working up the courage to commit a real murder just so he can dismantle another body. And at first it seems Kriske is giving us just that. Conant gets away with it and starts to develop an unhealthy connection to Debbie's skeleton. But then, just before we get the final results of his deeds... WHAM! That awesome twist. The other teacher brings in a new skeleton, Conant fully loses his mind, and we see him in a mental ward with her finger bone hidden in his mouth for... how long?... oh, I don't know, but years it feels. Years, certainly.
It's another, higher climax than we had been expecting, and it works simultaneously as a resolution. I love what Kriske has done here, and I am certain I'm going to find a way to buy old copies of magazines her work has appeared in, if nothing more than to see if its a common theme in her stories or if this one was unique in that regard.
What I've learned from reading this is that not all stories need to follow a prescribed format. Better still, having the courage to break the mold- a little anyway- can have very powerful results. In the future, I'm going to open my mind to other ways to lead my readers to the emotional state I want them.
Great column, Keith.
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