The Horror of the Ordinary

Stories
by Richard Krause

I'll start this review by going "schoolmarm" on you. Short stories are not easy to write - well. Many writers begin by writing a short piece of fiction because it requires less planning, plotting, and labor than a novel or in many cases, even a poem. They're often surprised to learn how difficult it can be to create a truly well-written short story.

There isn't really a defined length for a short story, but Britannica.com defines it as "a brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few characters." Generally, a short story will be a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents.

Horror typically deals with the para- or supernatural; Wikipedia says horror is a form of "speculative fiction which is intended to frighten, scare, disgust, startle its readers by inducing feelings of horror and terror."

This collection of "stories," at least for this reader, wasn't so much "stories" as "studies," or "musings" that dug down into areas of the psyche where the reader will feel uncomfortable. In fact, rather than "horror" of the ordinary, I might have called these stories "discomfort of the ordinary."

A man obsesses about killing Japanese beetles on his property, and invokes Gregor, the man in Kafka's "Metamorphosis" who wakes to find himself changed into a cockroach. Our narrator in a way becomes the revolting, insatiable eater in his garden that he imagines the beetles to be. 

In another story, a man gets a splinter in his finger, and in some odd way becomes wood - feels for and with the wood. The writer even plays with the various ways we use the term "wood." 

Of the first few stories, the only one in which anything "happens" in a direct sense is the tale about Hamid, an overly-tall Afghani who is mistaken for, we assume, Bin Laden, and killed by American troops out to right the wrong Bin Laden committed (note that it's never really stated that this is who it is). Hamid himself is actually the "father" of his people; the man who shelters and protects them. The "horror" is that he is killed simply because of his height.

In yet another musing, an orthodontist takes sadistic pleasure in tightening the braces of his young patients ever-so-slightly too much, and even more in killing the rare animals he hunts across the globe, mounting their sightless head on his walls to amuse and delight those same children who don't understand the horror that brought them to their final resting place.

Krause uses few of the standard literary conventions - opening paragraphs, descriptions, dialog and action. His preferred style is a series of questions, or, as I said "musings."  "Who are these foreigners who have invaded our homeland, flooded our major leagues, found an ally from intermarriage, and now this? Does it not show something's wrong with the game?" 

The events themselves in these short pieces are slight: Hamid is killed; a man strips beetles off his trees; a nun retires to her places of birth; a boy is injured by a hard-batted foul ball. The thoughts spilled onto the pages of the book are dark, troubling, disjointed - like trying to hold a conversation when the music is too loud or the other party isn't responding in a way you'd expect. You say, "How are you today," and they respond "The pants are about to split at the seams, and there is nothing anyone can do about it." At first you might be amused, or bemused - and after a while you'd begin to feel uncomfortable, and finally, if not horror, then certainly unsettled, disturbed, uncertain. And if their words almost made sense - were just out of reach, or invoked other characters or times or people or events with which you might have some familiarity, without being clear and precise about it - so much the more distressing as you try to grasp onto something familiar but it slithers away and won't be firmly gripped and held before the words move on to another idea or turn around on themselves.

Hence the "horror" of the ordinary. The things that might lurk in what appears to be normal - if you had eyes to see, or the imagination to invent.