Big Names, Short Stories, Mixed Results

Stephen King & Stewart O’Nan/Richard Chizmar, A Face in the Crowd/The Longest December

Dean Evers, an old New England widower in Florida, has become a reluctant Tampa Bay baseball fan. He whiles away lonely hours, largely estranged from his only son and with few surviving friends, by watching the Rays and reading. One hot afternoon, watching a low-stakes game, he sees a familiar face in the stands. A face from his personal past, which shouldn’t be possible, as its human is long deceased.

I can’t tell how much of “A Face in the Crowd” Stephen King wrote, and how much Stewart O’Nan contributed. King’s short fiction, unlike his novels, follows a reliable trajectory, building not toward some jump scare or twist, but toward a sense of inevitability. Characters see themselves as participants in events, until discovering that they’re mere passengers. Who knows if King wrote this story, or if O’Nan borrowed King’s vibe.

However, King and O’Nan aren’t this book’s star performers. Not only is their page count barely sixty percent of Richard Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” but their story is much more widely spaced and set in a larger font. Cemetery Dance Publications, Chizmar’s indie imprint, presumably put King and O’Nan on the cover to sell Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” which is more thematically ambitious but, ultimately, disappointing.

Bob Howard’s comfortable suburban Maryland life gets upended one snowy morning when local detectives appear at his neighbor’s door. A just-the-facts investigator informs him that his sweet, avuncular neighbor, James Wilkinson, has bodies under the floorboards. Bob finds himself beset on all sides, by suspicious neighbors, greedy reporters, and fair-weather friends. Everybody wonders what Bob knew, when. Then the midnight hang-up calls start.

This story differs from the other by rejecting a reliable beat sheet. Sadly, without a comfortable outline, Chizmar seems uncertain what story he wants to tell. Is this an amateur sleuth mystery in which a neighborhood family man must uncover deep secrets? A satire of the media circus following lurid crimes? A lone man’s descent into madness as the pressures of maintaining middle-class respectability crumble around him?

Yes, all this and more. Chizmar has selected an ambitious slate of themes he wants to address, backed by his admitted fondness for Twilight Zone-inspired narrative, but he seemingly doesn’t know how to keep all the balls in play. He gets just enough of one theme going to wet his readers’ whistle, then caroms onto another. It almost feels like he doesn’t know how to carry the themes forward once he’s introduced them.

As an author, I enjoy writing short stories because they let writers do something novels never permit: they let authors focus on character and plot, and politely ignore backstory. In full-length novels, the physical mass simply demands the author explain everything, or nearly everything, because there’s room enough. But short stories make no such demand. The brevity permits that, sometimes, things simply happen because they happen.

For instance, Dean Evers doesn’t need to ruminate on deeper themes of his buried past suddenly appearing on the Jumbotron. It simply happens because it happens. Evers tries to fight the inevitable but, like Oedipus Rex, his resistance becomes part of his breakdown. Yes, observant readers already know where his story is headed, and everyone except Dean realizes he can’t fight the tide. What tide? Doesn’t matter, the story’s over.

But Bob’s story, simply because it’s longer, has room to address the questions it raises. It just doesn’t, and one wonders whether Chizmar has started something he doesn’t know how to finish. The swarming, shark-like media frenzy gets introduced, then gets forgotten. Similarly, the pressures which the investigation puts on Bob’s ability to do his job, which is high in pressure but low in prestige. And the psychological toll on his family.

Indeed, in the final resolution, I find myself wondering why it stops there? Bob’s story not only isn’t done, but the “conclusion” actually opens more cans of proverbial worms about his family, his past, and his mental health. One wishes Chizmar took some guidance from King, whose notoriously long, family-oriented conclusions at least give readers some sense of where our protagonist now stands in a world forever changed.

These stories are arranged back-to-back, with two front covers, in the style of the old Ace Doubles that kept pulp classics in print during the 1960s. They feature two stories that go in different directions and ask different questions, but appeal to the same thriller audience. Both feel like good narrative introductions. Sadly, both also feel like something the authors intended to finish writing later.

The Sleeper and the Beauty of Dreams

T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge

Toadling, a human foundling stolen by evil sprites, has guarded the nameless castle for 200 years, while civilizations rose and fell around her. Hidden behind an impenetrable thorntree wall and a blighted desert, the keep once governed a pastoral kingdom. But through the centuries, Toadling has secured the fortress, and ensured the old stories were soon forgotten. All for one reason: to assure the sleeper within never wakes.

This is my third T. Kingfisher novella, and each retells existing stories from new perspectives. Here, Kingfisher retells “Sleeping Beauty” as a dark fantasy, in which the princess and the fairy who cursed her dwell in a dysfunctional symbiosis. Except that the story which everyone tells has grown distorted by retelling, and there’s a deeper violence sleeping in the tower. But the fairy Toadling has never told her story.

Into the myth rides Halim, an itinerant Muslim knight without a war to fight. Uninterested in tourneys and too amiable for mercenary work, he seeks another avenue to make his name. So he approaches the fabled castle, pursuing the “fair maiden” supposedly immune to time. Instead, Halim finds Toadling, a half-fairy hybrid who, after centuries of isolation, is eager to confess her secrets. Assuming anyone will believe her.

“Sleeping Beauty” has evolved over centuries. Early forms exist in Italian and Catalan folktales, though the version we know comes mainly from Germany by way of France. The story’s development has taken some weird turns, but all share one characteristic: until the later Twentieth Century, the eponymous princess has no autonomy. She’s merely the passive, often nameless battleground between patriarchy and a dark netherworld.

Kingfisher reinvents the princess as Fayette, too young to understand her own unfettered power. But there’s a second princess, Toadling, a human who learned magic while growing up in fairyland. Toadling came to Fayette’s christening with one simple gift—and promptly fumbled it, trapping herself and Fayette inside the king’s castle. Thus begins a battle for power that threatens to become apocalyptic if they slip out of balance.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Mass-media critic Jude Doyle sees, in many stories of feral adolescent girls, a shared fear of our sweet child becoming a woman. There’s something here. But where conventional stories conflate this fear with sexual maturity, Kingfisher finds something else. Catholic theology and the “age of accountability” lingers in the background. As Princess Fayette becomes old enough to answer for her choices, we wonder whether she really has free will.

Doyle dedicates an entire chapter to the changeling myth. The sweet babbling infant learns to walk and talk, and suddenly, the poor harried mother becomes terrified of what she’s created. This being, once part of me, has become willful, greedy, possibly destructive. Why, this must be a monster from a dark netherworld, not a human child anymore! Toadling and Fayette become diametrical forms of this internal conflict, the good and bad daughters, ego and id.

The story unfolds forward and backward. Toadling knows she out to keep Halim away from the sleeping princess in the tower, to fulfill the enchantment that keeps her safe. But after centuries of loneliness, she permits Halim to carve his way through the titular thorn hedge. As he works, she tells her story, which contradicts the centuries of legend that have accrued to her. Halim must decide who he believes.

Kingfisher writes with a plainspoken style that’s become common in genre fantasy lately. Not for her either C.S. Lewis’ playful voice nor Tolkien’s stern epic storytelling. Toadling, her viewpoint character, is definitely a supernatural being who has survived two centuries alone with an onerous responsibility. But she’s also a young woman, stuck for centuries in her early twenties, desperate for someone to talk to.

On one level, we could read this as a grim, grown-up fairy tale. It’s short enough to read in one dedicated evening, builds to a taut double climax, and pays off with a firm resolution. Kingfisher’s characters are sober without being ponderous, and her revision of a well-loved fairy tale takes risks without veering into silliness. Kingfisher hits Sleeping Beauty’s beats without ever feeling beholden to the old story.

But there’s another level. Toadling tries different tactics to control the other, darker princess, but her internal abilities aren’t enough. Only when she trusts another person with the secrets she’s been carrying, will she finally reconcile the conflict between the good and bad daughters. Only then can she walk away from the thorn hedge she built around her childhood home, and venture out into the world.

Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto, Part 2

This essay follows Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto

Abraham Lincoln

It’s difficult to grasp how large Planet Earth was before petroleum. The most direct driving route across Great Britain from Land’s End to John O’Groats takes about thirteen hours, if roads and traffic allow. Trained endurance walkers, covering twenty miles per day, could walk that distance in two months, assuming conditions cooperate—which, in Britain, they won’t. The Mayflower crossed the Atlantic in 66 days, a distance air travelers today cover in under eight hours.

These distances didn’t just consume time. Travelers needed food, water, and places to sleep. Haulage couriers needed places to reshoe their horses and repair their wagons. This need created work for manual trades: farmers, taverners, wheelwrights, blacksmiths. Agricultural products were mostly consumed locally, by residents, travelers, and livestock. War didn’t only require warriors; it required baggage trains, cooks, farriers, stable-keepers, and more. Maintaining early nation-states required intricate, ongoing coordination between the public and private spheres.

Much of modern history has involved attempts to decouple this coordination. American pioneers on the Oregon Trail needed five months, mostly walking, as their Conestoga wagons mainly hauled cargo. The Trans-Continental Railroad, which President Lincoln initiated to connect California to the more settled East Coast, required four days. That meant not only less time, but less food, fewer services, and no interactions with the physical space. Prairie towns became something travelers whizzed past without stopping.

Consequently, most agricultural output was no longer consumed locally. Farmers produced for distant markets, specializing in crops that shipped safely under harsh conditions without refrigeration. Lincoln signed the bill creating the USDA to stabilize American food supply the same year he inaugurated the Transcontinental Railroad. To this day, the USDA subsidizes the five most shelf-stable crops that best handle shipment and processing: corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, and cotton. (Some lists also include sorghum and peanuts.)

Please note, this subsidy schedule isn’t morally neutral. It rewards farmers who wring the highest possible output from their lands, which in turn rewards ammonia-based fertilizers, heavy equipment, and consolidated ownership. It also discourages crop rotation, diversification, and even letting a field lie fallow occasionally. Farmers must produce maximally, and thrust it onto the market, irrespective of floating prices or consumer demand. Only by keeping outputs high do farmers receive the subsidies they rely upon.

The frontier as depicted by Currier and Ives (click to enlarge)

Children still sing about Old McDonald’s diverse farm animals, but that’s bucolic poppycock. Farming for the long-distance market means abolishing not only traditional American farm autonomy, but also Native American traditions of land stewardship. There’s no separating the massive Nebraska monocropping that famously terrified Stephen King, and the racism that justified Wounded Knee. Nor from the European colonialism that, as I wrote last time, wrecked a 9,000-year stable relationship between humans and nature in Newfoundland.

These changes create short-term convenience, but have massive long-term costs. Oregon Trail pedestrians owned their Conestoga wagons; rail passengers rented access for a few days. We can argue that motorists own their cars, but most are deeply leveraged with debt, and the bank owns the actual note. Today’s industrialized farmers are paper millionaires behind their land holdings and equipment, but their “ownership” is deeply leveraged, and most are one bad season away from losing everything.

Far from making us free, our massive technological do-funnies make us more beholden than the English peasant who needed months to walk Britain. Our hypothetical peasant probably couldn’t travel far from his birthplace because the journey was impractical. We could travel, but mostly can’t, because our car payment, rent or mortgage, student loan debt, utilities, credit card bills, and internet access are coming due. Our peasant owed fealty to one feudal lord; we have dozens.

Please don’t mistake this for naïve nostalgia. We live with amortized debt the way our distant ancestors lived with smallpox, wars of religion, and an infant mortality rate hovering around forty percent. We can’t fight the tyranny of false convenience by embracing cottagecore aesthetics, wearing gingham, and rereading our Little House books. The solution comes in looking forward, not back, and creating something new, not nesting in the store-bought emblems of a beatified, ahistorical past.

Historian Greg Grandin writes that, in America’s early republic, James Madison advocated for westward expansion to hasten continental democracy. Madison asserted that Americans could never expand enough to occupy the continent, giving the state a permanent mission. But Americans occupied the entire continent in scarcely a century. To do so, we wrecked forests, devastated bison habitat, strip-mined Appalachia, and overthrew world governments. Continental convenience wasn’t an accomplishment, it was a mortgage that’s now coming due.

Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto

Elinor Ostrum, 1933-2012

When Italian-English explorer John Cabot “discovered” the island of Newfoundland in 1497, he marveled at the ocean’s abundance of North Atlantic cod. Cabot’s journals claim his men could fill their stocks by simply dangling baskets overboard. When English printers published news of Cabot’s discovery, commercial fishers flocked to what became Canada. But, as Cabot sailed with Bristol seamen, some historians suspect that Bristol fishers harvested the waters now called the Grand Banks even before Columbus.

Elinor Ostrum is the only woman to date to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Her reputation rests mainly on her first book, 1990’s Governing the Commons. In this book, Ostrum demonstrates how traditional agrarian societies manage commonly owned resources, like pastureland. She commences the book by describing how a Turkish fishing village partitioned access to their patch in the Aegean Sea, ensuring everybody has equal access to prime waters without depriving anyone else.

I remember reading Ostrum’s description of folk governance and thinking: that sounds great, but one diesel-powered trawler with a five-mile line could ruin that arrangement for everyone. Ostrum wrote her book to refute Garrett Hardin’s 1968 classic The Tragedy of the Commons, which postulates that humans will inevitably exhaust commonly held property. Generations of economists, like Ostrum, rebut Hardin’s claim by noting that, for centuries, humans didn’t exhaust the commons; that’s a Twentieth Century phenomenon.

Archeological evidence suggests that Newfoundland was the last part of the Americas to receive permanent human settlement. But the Maritime Archaic people, a lost culture known only by their artifacts, settled the island around 9,000 years ago, and humans have occupied the island ever since. Humans, both indigenous nations and European colonists, survived side-by-side with Newfoundland’s caribou herds, abundant timber, and Grand Banks fisheries for centuries, and all four flourished. The relationship seems highly reciprocal.

Now the timber, caribou, and fisheries are critically endangered. Deep-water fishing, once an artisanal trade conducted with hand tools in wooden vessels, is now performed commercially by steel-hulled ships with diesel engines and massive refrigerator compartments. Those who could afford these massive pollution machines could haul enough catch to feed the lucrative European and North American markets, while artisans lost revenue on scale. This became an embodiment of that capitalist truism: Them that has, gets.

Garrett Hardin, 1915-2003

Garrett Hardin based his treatise on the theories of Thomas Malthus and the behavior of single-celled organisms in laboratories. Malthus claimed that humans’ ability to procreate will inevitably exceed nature’s ability to grow food, leading to resource depletion and catastrophic die-offs, which Hardin verified among paramecia, which exhaust all their food, then starve. Malthus (a former clergyman) believed the most charitable action was to let the poor die. Hardin preferred benevolent intrusions into market economics.

These conclusions contain stacked assumptions. Malthus assumed that conditions he observed among Surrey peasant farmers, in a historically unique time of economic upheaval, represented humanity overall. Hardin assumed that microorganisms in laboratories behaved like wild microfauna. Both are wrong for comically obvious reasons. Surrey was heavily impoverished by aristocrats adjusting poorly to the rapid transition to industrial capitalism, while lab samples don’t reflect wild conditions, where food replenishes itself, while predators thin the wild microbiome.

For centuries, humans managed natural resources fairly responsibly. This includes indigenous American populations, which (generally) regarded land husbandry as sacred duty, and Europeans, who simply lived on the land they worked. Then the Enclosure Movement happened. Once-shared resources, like Hardin’s hypothetical pastureland, became private property, which one could license to exploit. Same with mineral resources, wild game, and even residential land. Communities, which once governed resources jointly, became atomized, competing for access to scarce staples.

Newfoundland fisheries didn’t collapse because “fishers” depleted the ecosystem; they collapsed because industrial trawlers depleted the ecosystem. And industrial trawlers happened because the government distributed fishing licenses, subsidized oil extraction, and collected taxes in ways that disadvantaged small operators. The Grand Banks yielded a record haul in 1968, then fell precipitously; yields tumbled around ninety percent in five years. A two-year federal fishing moratorium, introduced in 1992, has been extended indefinitely for over thirty years.

In other words, technology and policy combined to endanger the once-lush Grand Banks. Because humans assumed the trend lines would continue forever, they made no transitional plans; Newfoundland’s economy collapsed overnight. This bears consideration, not just for Hardin and Ostrum’s debates, but because it can happen again. As America has recently drawn in its own record harvests, powered by million-dollar equipment and ammonia-based fertilizer, we must think carefully about whether we’re following the same path.

The chain of thought continues in Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto, Part 2

Are Nation-States Obsolete?

The U.S. Supreme Court Building

The President Taco Administration has performed elaborate gymnastics to preserve its adherents’ notions about American identity. Within its first few weeks, it mistakenly deported a refugee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom America was supposed to protect. It’s spent the subsequent months desperately excluding him, and others of a similar complexion, from the country. This has included snatching veterans and citizens in its absurdly wide net.

This emphasizes a question underpinning America’s foundation, a question that remains unresolved 250 years later: what is a nation-state for? Not a government, which exists to make and enforce laws, but the state itself, which exists irrespective of who holds power. Why do nation-states exist? Closely related, what purpose do borders serve? Why do we draw hypothetical lines, then demand citizens stay on their side, under penalty of law?

The Taco Administration clearly sees states as ordained to sort humanity into protected and unprotected classes. The protected class is apparently White, English-speaking, and at least implicitly Protestant Christian. Critics have documented the administration targeting suspects by superficial characteristics, like skin melanin and speaking Spanish in public. These standards of insidership are irrational and inconsistent, but serve a nationalist narrative.

If your 11^th-grade American Civics course resembled mine, you probably heard fuzzy bromides about “government by consent of the governed” and “rule of law in a free society.” Textbook writers cherry-pick these sayings from philosophers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Baron Montesquieu. Armchair political theorists browse these writers to justifiy a moral nation-state the way religious scholars once selectively read the Bible and Talmud.

Yet these Enlightenment-era thinkers worked backward to attribute purpose to the state. They mostly worked between the Thirty Years’ War in the 17^th Century, and the Seven Years’ War in the 18^th. During that century, old definitions of nationhood, founded on ethnicity or religion, seemed increasingly phony, as European states expanded beyond their homelands to claim vast overseas colonies. Nations needed new justifications simply to exist.

Charles, Baron de Montesquieu

Before this Enlightenment interregnum, states were the monarchs’ private property. Kings owned the military and the treasury, and commenced wars to gather riches, power, and personal glory. Longstanding wars, such as those between the English Plantagenets and the French Valois, were driven not by principles but by personalities. Monarchic dynasties didn’t influence ordinary people much, provided their battles didn’t happen on peasant farmland.

I’ve written about this before. If you dig back far enough, states basically existed as vessels to contain the military. “King” and “Emperor” are, in their origins, not political titles, but military ranks. When theoreticians like Rousseau postulate a “social contract” to justify the state, they’re imposing later moral expectations that simply don’t apply. States didn’t organize themselves to protect the hoi polloi, they fought for the sake of fighting.

Later thinkers, especially John Rawls and David Gauthier, further extend the social contract experiment. Their theories attempt to recreate primordial social selection, when states first organized themselves, and question how we can recapture that supposed purity. (I’m oversimplifying; stick with me.) But anybody who’s read Edward Gibbon knows that states didn’t emerge from social agreements, they arose from swordsmithing and horsemanship.

Modern attempts to repurpose the nation-state for moral ends create frequent slapstick outcomes. My personal favorite is when Paul Robeson—actor, activist, legend—couldn’t cross international borders during the Red Scare. So, he mounted a sound truck along the U.S.-Canadian border and sang to a multinational audience, while nominally honoring the law. The product highlighted borders’ inherent absurdity.

States invent laws to justify themselves, then draw invisible lines across the globe, demanding that people stay inside whatever lines they’re born into. Instead of the cultural flourishing that we regularly see where borders are loosely enforced, in places like Miami or New Orleans, modern borders become absolute walls that ordinary people must never, ever cross. Literal walls now, in Taco’s America.

Conservatives, especially American religious conservatives, are frequently terrified of a one-world state. Organizations like the United Nations, or even cooperation pacts like the USMCA, reduce them to pants-wetting terror. But I suggest we consider something else: a no-state world. Instead of inventing moralistic justifications for boundaries drawn during the horse-and-buggy era or earlier, maybe states themselves are outdated.

I can’t speculate what comes after nation-states. Future predictions consistently go sideways behind the forecasters’ personal blind spots. But the chaos emerging from the Administration’s attempt to define America’s purpose, shows we need to move beyond this medieval model. We don’t do polity for ancient reasons, so we can’t do it within ancient boundaries.