Metamorphosis E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Short stories
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 56

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Metamorphosis is collection of three short stories, written by three young students in collaboration by James P. Blaylock for a class taught by Tim Powers, who provides the introduction. Mirrors, shadows, and secret rooms: the houses in which we dwell are sometimes much stranger than they seem to be, as are the people we think we know. Here are three stories of haunted places that stand waiting for you to enter, their windows shuttered, but their doors unlocked. REVIEWS "Coauthored by Blaylock and a trio of his high school students, these three reflective short-short stories employing Blaylock's signature nostalgic prose are individually strong in technique, but weakened by thematic similarities. The eccentric hero of Adriana Campoy's lighthearted "Stone Eggs" uncovers an entryway into a fantastic world while house-sitting for his uncle. In Brittany Cox's well-written but unexciting "P-38," Anderson revisits his imperfect childhood by assembling a model airplane from his father's former shop. Alex Haniford's "Houses" hurtles toward darkness when Michael returns home for his mother's funeral and accidentally unearths the chilling secret behind his father's spiraling dementia. While Tim Powers offers a short foreword and William Ashbless (Powers and Blaylock's joint nom de plume) provides a whimsical afterword, readers will recognize both as padding and be left wanting more real content. (Apr.)" Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

NOVELS

The Elfin Ship

The Disappearing Dwarf

The Digging Leviathan

Homunculus

Land Of Dreams

The Last Coin

The Stone Giant

The Paper Grail

Lord Kelvin’s Machine

The Magic Spectacles

Night Relics

All The Bells On Earth

Winter Tides

The Rainy Season

Knights Of The Cornerstone

Zeuglodon

The Aylesford Skull

COLLECTIONS

Thirteen Phantasms

In For A Penny

Metamorphosis

The Shadow on the Doorstep

NOVELLAS

The Ebb Tide

The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

WITH TIM POWERS

On Pirates

The Devil in the Details

Copyright © James P. Blaylock 2009

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Dirk Berger.

Published as an e-book in North America by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD., in 2013.

ISBN: 9781625670557

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Also by James P. Blaylock

Epigraph

From the Catacombs by Tim Powers

Stone Eggs with Adriana Campoy

P-38 with Brittany Cox

Houses with Alex Haniford

Haunted Places: An Afterword by James P. Blaylock

A Note from William Ashbless

About the Author

“Are you sure you are not your own father?—or, excuse me, your own fool?”

—GEORGE MACDONALD, Lilith

From the Catacombs

by Tim Powers

THESE THREE STORIES are collaborations between James Blaylock and three students at the Orange County High School of the Arts, known as OCHSA. He and I both teach there.

Blaylock is the head of the Creative Writing department—my boss—and our attitudes toward fiction writing are pretty similar: take your story seriously, make it intriguing and accessible and entertaining to readers, and work at getting it published. The ceiling of the basement room I generally teach in is papered with rejection slips the students have received, and they’re always adding more—and many of them have already made professional sales, too.

There aren’t actually any chairs or desks in that basement room, just pillows and beanbags and an extensive library that stretches away into other subterranean chambers. The Creative Writing department is in a converted 19th-century church, complete with choir lofts, and tall stained-glass windows, and this catacomb basement which Blaylock took over.

I’ve taught fiction writing at a lot of places—at various colleges, and the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University, and the Writers of the Future Workshop in half a dozen cities—but I’ve got to say I’ve seen the brightest and most promising writers at OCHSA.

Even as I write that, it seems peculiar—high school students?

Well, I guess these aren’t typical high school students. We get to choose from among a lot of applicants, based on samples of their writing, and they come from all over the southern California area, sometimes with long commuting—and they’re powerfully motivated. By the time we first meet them they’re generally already impressively well-read and writing their heads off.

I like to think that Blaylock and I, and the other creative writing instructors, all of whom have professional credits, are leading these students away from—well, from majoring in creative writing in college, among other things. I hope they’ll major in anything else—literature, history, anthropology, engineering!—and write fiction on the side, learning the writing craft from their widespread reading and their experiences. Lester del Rey once said that “to know everything about writing, and nothing else, is to know nothing about writing.”

I have high hopes for these students. They write stories because they love stories, and they bring to their developing craft an enthusiasm that excludes self-conscious conformity to whatever literary postures happen to be in style. And here’s the work of three of them! Enjoy it, and remember their names.

Stone Eggs

with Adriana Campoy

HIS UNCLE JONATHAN had been gone only a couple of days when Max tried on a pair of the old man’s trousers. The strange idea came into his mind when he was petting the cat, and he didn’t question it. The trousers fit him well, as did the khaki work shirt and suspenders that had been hanging in the closet next to them. They were old fashioned, but they suited the house, in which everything hearkened back to a lost age. A suitable suit, Max thought, smiling at his own joke and feeling somehow more at home now, like a hermit crab in a new shell. Elmer, his uncle’s ancient, tailless cat, regarded him from the doorway with an air of approval, as if borrowing the clothing had been the cat’s idea all along.

The invitation to housesit had come in the form of a letter, posted, apparently, when the old man was already leaving, because Max had found the house empty, with a note on the kitchen counter that read, “Make yourself at home.” The invitation had been as vague about the date of his uncle’s return as it had been about his destination. That also suited Max well enough, since his lease had run out on the flat he had been renting above Watson’s Drug Store in the Plaza, and he was temporarily homeless. Most of his own stuff was in a closet-sized storage unit that cost him forty dollars a month, a sad comment on the state of his worldly goods. It occurred to him impulsively that he would quit paying the storage bill and simply let the stuff go. If he was going to make himself at home, he might as well do a thorough job of it.

God bless the generosity of uncles, Max muttered, reaching for the pull-cord to the ceiling lamp, waving his hand around before looking up and discovering that there was no pull-cord, which confounded him for a moment, because he had the absolute idea in his mind that there should be, and that he had reached for a pull cord a thousand times over the years. The certainty faded into curiosity. He had never, after all, lived in a house old enough to have such an item as a pull cord for a ceiling lamp.

He shut off the wall switch and went out into the living room, where he found Elmer holding an immense dead lizard. If it was a fresh kill, it had been a quick one, given that Elmer had just minutes ago been lounging in the bedroom doorway. “That’ll make you skinny,” Max warned him. “There’s nothing nourishing in a reptile.” In the dim light Elmer could easily be mistaken for a bobcat, and he pretty much had to cram himself through the cat door when he came and went. How he had hauled the saurian back in through the door was a mystery. The battle must have resembled a scene in a Godzilla movie. Dragging the lizard, Elmer walked along the edge of the room toward the kitchen where he vanished into the shadows at the edge of a bookcase, glancing back momentarily, his eyes glowing green.