Or perhaps cornering mice there, but she was more the type who liked to eye birds from a little ways away. She had been seriously ill for several weeks, but the end was still sudden and unexpected. She was sweet, not very bright, never suspicious, and always friendly to everyone. Our lives will be a bit duller and a bit emptier without her.
…turns to thoughts of baseball!
Opening Day was last week, on the U.S. mainland at least, so despite the calendar or the weather, spring is finally here. And not an inning too soon.
In working my way through Weird Tales #347, the issue containing my story “Excision,” I recently read Clayton Kroh‘s story “The Yankee at the Sitting-Up.”
Growing up in the South myself, with family roots in the upper and Deep South going back 350 years, I’ve always had a shine for Southern literature and culture. The region and its history are so checkered, good mixed with some very bad, and the juxtaposition of such elements has always fascinated me. I read tons of Faulkner and Penn Warren in high school and college, and I’ve tried to keep up with modern Southern lit like Bobbie Ann Mason and Daniel Wallace. As a fantasy writer, the Southern gothic has always intrigued me, but I haven’t yet found a way to make it work within what I do.
Clayton sure made it work in his short piece. The speculative element was slight, which isn’t a problem for me, but the characterization and the setting just dripped from his word-choice and descriptions. It might’ve helped that I knew all those things he was talking about, so the story leapt right off the page for me.
Clayton, according to his Weird Tales bio, got his degree at ODU, just down the road from where I went to school. He’s an Odyssey grad like me, but I haven’t yet had the chance to meet him. Hopefully I will soon.
I’m in Kill Devil Hills, NC (of Wright Brothers fame), eating grilled tuna & black bean burritos, drinking Cottonwood ales, and reading The Lies of Locke Lamora. All my music buddies are clustered around the kitchen table on their laptops, working. Yay beach!
