Not all questions need to be answered, or ought to be answered. For example, who is the witch here, the crazy lady or Fran (or both)? Who is caught up in a snare of evil imaginings, who is haunted by paranoid hatred and deformed longings? If one of these women, surely the other also. Perhaps the only witch here is Fran, as an “unreliable narrator,” i.e., self-deluded liar, her barbed emotions and ill-wishings circling endlessly inside her own skull until they extinguish the human soul living there. And extinguished she undoubtedly is. Her life is exploded, her soul smothered in powdery blackness.
Never let it be said that this author always sees women as positive, as heroines, as the good—guys. Although the questions I start out with are often occasioned by my feminist consciousness of the way the cultural dice are loaded, once in motion I see what my characters show me and report it as best I can. That’s the job, that’s why I feel I have a right to call upon your attention with my stories: I’ll tell you entertaining lies, but they’ll be true lies, as true as I can make them.
Authors are not originators, for the most part; we cruise through our times like basking whales, sieving the Zeitgeist for ideas, for impressions and stereotypes and concerns, fears and longings, goals and regrets. Those who stray too far from the central stream of a culture risk being stranded in some forgotten ox-bow of too-original thought, self-obscured and forgotten. Perhaps we keep our endings open as part of the effort to keep ourselves open, as creatives, to the shifting gradations of cultural interest and concern, for as long as we can.
One way of keeping a grip on the Zeitgeist, of course, is to hitch our stories to the avatars of permanent fascination, the creatures of mythology who may shift shapes but who still retain some measure of their ancient forms in order to keep their power in changed times. They are the shadows of our imaginative heritage: the monsters of depravity and of genius, the border-runners of cultural values, the ancestors of our deep and vigorous inner lives. They are the gold that artists mine, the bogeys that we long to outgrow, the angels of inspiration and creativity.
This work is meant to honor these eminences of the deep cultural mind even as it makes playful use of them, invades them and exposes them. Vampire, werewolf, witch, and monster: they are our siblings and our teachers, our mirrors and our guardians. Enjoy them, learn from them, treat them with respect, because where we go, these unreal beings will go with us until we have evolved into different creatures ourselves.
And maybe even then.
Other Books by ElectricStory
Terry Bisson
Numbers Don’t Lie
Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories
Suzy McKee Charnas
The Vampire Tapestry
The Ruby Tear
Barry Malzberg
Shiva and Other Stories
Paul Park
Soldiers of Paradise
Sugar Rain
The Cult of Loving Kindess
Howard Waldrop
Dream Factories and Radio Pictures
Suzy McKee Charnas, Music of the Night
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