a solid china mug nearby. They are questions of Reach, maybe: do the dead sing? And do they love the living?”
On the nights after Lona and Hal had gone back with their parents to the mainland in Al Curry’s boat, the children standing astern and waving good-bye, Alden considered that question, and others, and the matter of his father’s cap.
Do the dead sing? Do they love?
On those long nights alone, with his mother Stella Flanders at long last in her grave, it often seemed to Alden that they did both.
Notes
Not everyone is interested in where short stories come from, and that is perfectly proper—you don’t have to understand the internal-combustion engine to drive a car, and you don’t need to know the circumstances which surrounded the making of a story to get a bit of pleasure from it. Engines interest mechanics; the creation of stories interests academics, fans, and snoops (the first and the last are almost synonymous, but never mind). I’ve included a few notes here on a few of the stories—such things as I thought might interest the casual reader. But if you’re even more casual than that, I assure you that you can close the book without a qualm—you won’t be missing much.
“The Mist”—This was written in the summer of 1976, for an anthology of new stories being put together by my agent, Kirby McCauley. McCauley had created another book of this sort, called Frights, two or three years previous. That book was a paperback. This one was to be a hardcover and much more ambitious in scope. It was called Dark Forces. Kirby wanted a story from me, and he pursued that story with doggedness, determination... and a kind of gentle diplomacy that is, I think, the hallmark of a really good agent.
I couldn’t think of a thing. The harder I thought, the more easily nothing came. I began to think that maybe the short-story machine in my head was temporarily or permanently broken. Then came the storm, which was much as described in this story. At the height of it there was indeed a waterspout on Long Lake in Bridgton, where we were living at the time, and I did insist that my family come downstairs with me for a while (although my wife’s name is Tabitha—Stephanie is her sister’s name). The trip to the market the next day was also much as described in the story, although I was spared the company of such an odious creature as Norton—in the real world, the people living in Norton’s summer cottage were a very pleasant doctor, Ralph Drews, and his wife.
In the market, my muse suddenly shat on my head—this happened as it always does, suddenly, with no warning. I was halfway down the middle aisle, looking for hot-dog buns, when I imagined a big prehistoric bird flapping its way toward the meat counter at the back, knocking over cans of pineapple chunks and bottles of tomato sauce. By the time my son Joe and I were in the checkout lane, I was amusing myself with a story about all these people trapped in a supermarket surrounded by prehistoric animals. I thought it was wildly funny—what The Alamo would have been like if directed by Bert I. Gordon. I wrote half the story that night and the rest the following week.
It got a little long, but Kirby thought it was good and it went into the book. I never liked it that much until the rewrite—I particularly didn’t like David Drayton sleeping with Amanda and then never finding out what happened to his wife. That seemed cowardly to me. But in the rewrite, I discovered a rhythm of language that I liked—and keeping that rhythm in mind, I was able to peel the story down to its basics more successfully than with some of my other long stories (“Apt Pupil” in Different Seasons is a particularly good example of this disease I have—literary elephantiasis).
The real key to this rhythm lay in the deliberate use of the story’s first line, which I simply stole from Douglas Fairbairn’s brilliant novel Shoot. The line is, for me, the essence of all story, a kind of Zen incantation.
I must tell you that I also liked the metaphor implied in David Drayton’s discovery of his own limitations, and I liked the story’s cheery cheesiness—you’re supposed to see this one in black-and-white, with your arm around your girl’s shoulders (or your guy’s), and a big speaker stuck in the window. You make