Hi there. I’m Keith, or “K. Edwin” if you prefer. I’m a middle school English teacher, a writer, and like any perfectly normal fan of horror these days, another random guy who is totally obsessed with Cemetery Dance Magazine. Ok, maybe I take it a bit further than most… I actually own every single copy (but that’s a story for another post).
Exhumed is my humble attempt to read and review every short story and novel excerpt ever published by CD. In their 35+ years of publication, there have been 577 pieces spread out over 79 issues featuring no less than 283 different authors. That’s a lot of scares! But since each Exhumed post covers just 2 stories (one “old” and one “new”), I think I’m going to be doing this for a while. I sure hope you’ll join me along the way. So grab your shovel and dig in. There’s no telling what we’ll unearth together.
Useful Links
- Current CD catalog
- Cemetery Dance Magazine Index (comprehensive list of issues 1-75)
The Goods
Hello again, super fans! This installment of Exhumed will feature works by Ronald Kelly and Kaaron Warren, both of which deal with the question of “undesirables.” Kelly’s tale features a narrator who is himself so undesirable that even he can’t wait to die. Warren’s is a far more subtle gaze into an entire society made of only those whom a former civilization deemed unworthy. But in both, the questions remaining are:
What should be done with undesirables?
What makes an undesirable?
Who decides?
Kelly’s story, “Diary,” appears in CD #3 (1990).
Warren’s piece, titled “The Left Behind,” is from CD #69 (2013).
Ok then.
Let’s get to it…
THE OLD: “DIARY”
AUTHOR: Ronald Kelly
APPEARANCE: Cemetery Dance #3: Winter, 1990. (Story #1 of 11).
A BRIEF PLOT SUMMARY (with spoilers!):
The story is written, not so surprisingly, in diary format. There are a total of 17 entries covering 3 different storylines/ time frames and spread over the course of 5 months. The writer is a man named Jerry Weller. What follows is a summary of each entry in Jerry’s diary.
For reference, the blue text = PRESENT DAY JERRY, the orange text = PAST JERRY #1: THE LIFE OF JERRY, & the pink text = PAST JERRY #2: PARK RANGER JERRY):
- AUGUST 21: Jerry writes that “they” want to know why he killed all those people. His answer, in brief, is that he’s a psychopath… “perversity is my forte… normality drives me insane.”
- AUGUST 29: Jerry reveals that he once had a twin brother. At only three months old, a babysitter and her boyfriend got high and literally cooked little Jamie in the oven. Jerry ends this entry by explaining that the teenage delinquints had killed the wrong twin.
- SEPTEMBER 5: Jerry begins telling a separate tale which he calls a “bedtime story” of a clean-cut, all-American family going camping. The entry ends with the revelation that a man with a stolen park ranger uniform suddenly appeared.
- SEPTEMBER 12: Jerry tells yet another story of when he was 6 and killed his grandmother’s canary by pushing a sewing needle through its eye.
- SEPTEMBER 23: Jerry continues the bedtime story… The park ranger sat at the family campfire, enjoyed a cup of coffee and pleasant conversation, right up until the “damned urge crept into his demented mind.”
- OCTOBER 7: Jerry explains that when he was 15 he cut off his girlfriend’s left breast and was sent to reform school. He can’t remember why he did it.
- OCTOBER 14: Jerry returns us to the bedtime story. The father was the first to be killed. The fake ranger plunged a knife up under his jaw and into his brain before rounding up the rest of the family.
- OCTOBER 19: Jerry explains that he fired his lawyer for suggesting he use the insanity plea. He chose another lawyer with a worse record because Jerry wants to be put to death on the electric chair.
- OCTOBER 31: Jerry returns to the bedtime story. It is a reference to “Little Red Riding Hood” (“Grandma, what big eyes you have… in the palm of my hand”) and nothing else.
- NOVEMBER 4: Jerry misses Vietnam. He liked the violence of it all. His first day there his platoon sergeant took all the new guys to a ditch filled with several dead enemy soldiers and forced them to kick their heads in to “drive the squeamishness out of our systems” before going into battle. Jerry enjoyed the activity so much they had to pull him out of the ditch.
- NOVEMBER 8: Jerry tells us about how the day before a big guy in prison tried to rape him in the showers. Jerry attacked him and bit off part of his anatomy (we are left to imagine which part). The guards never found it because Jerry swallowed it.
- NOVEMBER 11: Jerry shares another installation of the bedtime story. The park ranger is asking the kids to pretend it’s Christmas time and to decorate a nearby pine tree with body parts from their mother.
- NOVEMBER 28: Jerry tells how, after he returned from the war, he met up with a guy who seemed to have similar tastes. Together they made a series of snuff films. Jerry laments, however, that while he still had the film in his van “with all my other scrapbooks and trophies,” he didn’t have the projector to watch it. He considered taking it to a Fotomat to have it transferred to cassette, but he chickened out.
- DECEMBER 1: Jerry shares another piece of the bedtime story. This one takes the lines from “This Little Piggie” and makes them literal, presumably cutting off another of the victim’s toes with each line.
- DECEMBER 13: Jerry confesses a gas station robbery in which he forced the attendant to eat a turd out of the bathroom toilet, promising to let him live if he did. Jerry killed him anyway.
- DECEMBER 22: Jerry reveals that it is he who was the murdering park ranger. He also confesses that the All American family he butchered had a baby and that he left the baby in the camp trash cans where the bears forage for food.
- JANUARY 7: In his final entry, Jerry explains that the trial is over and he has been convicted and sentenced to the death penalty. Jerry “get[s] off just thinking about it.” In his state of Tennessee, the method is the electric chair. Jerry knows he is going to burn.
MY GRADE: C+
MY REVIEW:
I’ve neer been a fan of splatterpunk, and that’s what this story is. The protagonist is a ruthless, heartless killer who finds joy in the suffering of others, and the majority of the story is a sequence of descriptive acts of gruesome violence. I am thoroughly disgusted by Jerry. There are no redeeming features in his character, and the only recompense the story offers is his rightfully-earned death penalty, though Jerry manages to ruin even that level of satisfaction by sharing his general glee at the prospect.
I must give credit where credit is due, however, and as a tale in the horror genre, Ronald Kelly’s “Diary” is definitely one that “horrifies” me. Thus it succeeds in its intended goal. I understand that this style of horror was more popular in the ‘80s & ‘90s — many of CDs early publications have the same tone — so I also can’t fault Kelly for writing it. It’s what was selling at the time. I also presume that modern readers such as myself have developed a greater sensitivity and aversion to splatterpunk. To be clear, there are certainly niches of splatterpunk lovers out there today, but you hardly ever hear of those stories being accepted by mainstream readers. I’m sure that those who like this subgenre would have given this a higher score.
Interestingly enough, I can say that I’m a fan of Mr. Kelly’s other works right here in Cemetery Dance. I’ve already reviewed “Forever Angels” (CD #1) and ”Better than Breadcrumbs” (CD #1) and found them both thoroughly entertaining. I also reviewed “Pelingrad’s Pit” from CD #63, and while that one wasn’t as good as the others, in my humble opinion, it was also a good tale. Sadly, “Diary” doesn’t fulfill my reader’s needs.
To that end, I feel compelled to observe and appreciate the complicated structure of Kelly’s tale. In only 17 entries and a mere 1,500 words, he actually manages to tell not one story, but three.
> First there is the PRESENT DAY JERRY. That’s the one writing the diary and confessing his crimes and sick mind. There are only 4 of these entries, and yet we easily see the full nature of the character. In the 1st entry, he confesses he has murdered people and is a psychopath. In the 2nd, we are privy to just how insane he is when he explains how he doesn’t take his lawyers advice because he’d wants to make sure he is given the death penalty. In the 3rd, he takes us another step further into his madness when telling how he disfigured a fellow prisoner. And in the 4th, we see the full extent of his psychosis when he expresses his joy at knowing he is going to fry in the electric chair. At first, we are given to understand that Jerry is a man who has merely come to understand his place in the world (a psychotic killer), but by the end we know he is much more than that: he is someone so profoundly diseased that his ultimate joy will come only from his own painful destruction.
> Next there is the PAST JERRY #1: THE LIFE OF JERRY. That’s the one that tells Jerry’s evolution through life, beginning with his witnessing a horrific crime as a child and progressing slowly but inevitably through various gruesome acts until he reached the full level of maliciousness we see of him in prison. There are 6 of these entries, and once again we see a full compliment of the budding psychopath. After witnessing his twin brother’s murder by a couple of teenage junkies, he begins his murderous tendencies the way most serial killers do: by experimenting with animals. This time, it was his grandmother’s canary that bore his wrath. Next he mutilates a girlfriend and receives what appears to be his first punishment — admission into a reform school. Next he is a soldier, allowed (nay, encouraged) by his commanding officer to engage in further acts of violence. Upon leaving the war, he is on his own and finds a fellow conspirator and together they film the murder of at least one young woman. Finally, the last entry (the one with the gas station attendant) explains how Jerry has progressed beyond mere murder and is interested in the degradation and humiliation of others before killing them.
> Finally there is the PAST JERRY #2: PARK RANGER JERRY, the worst of the lot and the one who slaughtered the family of peaceful campers. There are 7 of these entries, and while none of them are really very different than any of the others, they do represent a progression of immorality. The first victim was the father, arguably the hardest to kill and the least innocent of a given All-American Family. Next is the grandmother, the oldest and therefore the one who has already lived a full life, but also the first woman. Next to die was the mother, and Jerry ups the ante by using her bowels to decorate a makeshift Christmas tree. The children are presumably next, and once again Jerry takes his sadism to the next level by suggesting he is pulling their toes off one by one. Last and certainly not least is the most innocent of all, a baby. The fact that Jerry doesn’t actively harm the baby should not be overlooked because, after all, he literally throws it away in a trash can and assumes it will be eaten by bears. And while we might think that the bears are not likely to eat an actual human child (especially one that is likely screaming out of hunger, pain, and fear), we also recognize that this infant may very likely suffer greatly and ultimately die anyway. To reveal the murders in this order is, of course, part of the horror of the story. Oh, and let’s not overlook the fact that Jerry was wearing a stolen uniform. It’s therefore a fair assumption that there is another victim: an unknown park ranger left somewhere in the campground whom Jerry never even bothers to discuss.
Collectively, each of the three stories shows a different manner in which the psychopath named Jerry Weller moved swiftly and decisively from comparative normality to outright absurdity. PRESENT DAY JERRY goes from being a prisoner who knows and accepts his fate to one who relishes his own suffering. THE LIFE OF JERRY shows how Jerry advanced from harming to killing to finally causing the greatest suffering. PARK RANGER JERRY goes from a mere killer to a killer of a particularly sadistic nature. We can safely assume these events took place shortly before getting caught and incarcerated, since so much of his diary is dedicated to that one series of events… the kind of thing the authorities would be asking about the most. Overall, though, they’re all just different versions and time periods of essentially the same tale.
My personal aversion to the splatterpunk subgenre aside, I must respect Ronald Kelly’s skills are nevertheless on full display in this tale. The story’s structure (3 different stories from 3 different time periods) is complex enough to make us pay attention while remaining short enough to consume in the time it takes to drink a mere half cup of tea (true story), yet its actual content (murder, murder, and more murder) is so simple that it’s extremely easy to consume and understand.
I will continue to anticipate more of Mr. Kelly’s stories in the future. And according to my very nerdy spreadsheet, I still have 4 more to go. I’m looking forward to them.
THE NEW: “THE LEFT BEHIND”
AUTHOR: Kaaron Warren
APPEARANCE: Cemetery Dance #69: [April, 2013]. (Story #3 of 5).
A BRIEF PLOT SUMMARY (with spoilers!):
Planet Earth has succumbed to an unspecified disaster. All we know is that most people have fled on rockets some years ago in hopes of colonizing somewhere else. Those who were left behind all have serious physical defects. Collectively, the “left behind” are few but are trying to put together some semblance of a new society with the resources and skills they have remaining. Many modern technologies like television and the printing press were lost because it took too much effort for too few people to enjoy. The only critical technology were the generators, which they need for light since, due to an increase in global ultraviolet radiation, humanity has become mostly noctural. Few can withstand direct sunlight for more than a few minutes. Everyone, it seems, is also constantly coughing with sickness.
Lydia is a “judge listener.” Their local society has but one judge, and the community seems to respect him. Though he is bound to a wheelchair, the judge is one of the rare few who can stay in prolonged sunlight. When others seek his advice, Lydia accompanies him and tells him what she “hears.” These are philosophical observations as much as they are confirmations of what the judge himself has heard and said. Lydia, then, serves not only as a recorder of important information, but also a direct advisor to the judge. She is also one of the only people who has been able to stand up to him in the past.
The most recent judgement the judge provided was when three people came to him, arguing that a companion of theirs didn’t bathe, causing his hair to become matted and irritating, which is why the man wore no clothes. They each needed to work closely with the hairy, naked man and wanted the judge’s advice. After hearing their plight, the judge simply asked if each of them was perfect. Immediately understanding their error, none complained when the judge sentences them each to a month of wearing a bear suit.
Outside of her work with the judge, Lydia spends her time with her husband, Leo, who is a blind yet skilled shoemaker. He is kind and protective of her. He holds an umbrella up to block the bright moonlight despite her telling him that her pregnancy doesn’t make her weak. Her only concern in that regard is in telling the judge. Children are rare, after all, and having a child would change things. That night they have breakfast at a local restaurant where the chef takes their order after greeting them by saying “No, I didn’t lose them cooking.” When she’s gone, Leo asks why she said this, and Lydia explains that the chef has no fingers on either hand. All of the meal choices include meat, which Lydia dislikes. Leo reminds her that one day not too distant from then, the animals’ lungs will likely fail and there will be no meat left. Lydia makes a pun which Leo likes. It is a pleasant night away from her work.
Later, Lydia repeats the pun to the judge, but he does not laugh. Soon they are talking about the rockets and the colonists and Lydia is reminded that the judge sent his family with them even while he had been rejected and left behind. Still, this rejection was the impetus for his position now. Had he been admitted on the rockets, he would surely have been delegated to the lowest place in the new society.
A messenger arrives with news that a baby has died. It appears to be a deliberate killing. It is the first murder since the rockets left, and the judge says this is the thing he has been fearing ever since the rockets left. It suggests the people who were left behind haven’t learned very much after all. They each reveal they had had dreams of children the night before, a shared experience that sometimes happens. In the dream, all the adults were shrinking to child size while all the children grew large and cared for the adults. It was a comforting experience. In a previous community dream, a single rocket returned to Earth and landed safely in the sea, but when the doors were opened nothing but skeletons emerged.
Lydia returns home to Leo late in the morning. She tells him of the murder and they both fall silent. They had already lost a child themselves, though this was some time ago, soon after the rockets left and when they were still living alone in the wilderness before the new society had come to be. Leo concedes that children often die in their world. Lydia counters that they rarely have their throats cut. Their conversation turns to what they claim to be an imaginary story which they often repeat to each other. In it, Lydia and Leo are laying on top of a cliff, listening to the hum of the rockets, which could still be heard three days after they’d left. Prior to the rockets leaving, there had been much chaos and noise. Screams and explosions. Cries and pleas. Then they left and the silence that followed was somehow even more deafening. A week later, when the rocket hum was entirely gone and only the firework display of their many propulsions was evidence they were there at all, one ship exploded. They had felt nothing for the people who had died on that ship because even that quickly the rocket people were already separated from the ones who had been left behind. The rockets’ departure had destroyed the ozone layer even more than decades of living on Earth ever could have. The story ends by admitting they would soon change the words of their history from being “left behind” to having chosen to stay.
The following night, Lydia accompanies the judge to visit the grieving mother of the deceased child. The judge surprises her, though, by first going to the local school. There are only five students, and they mostly ignore their teacher, who is deaf and does not realize they mock him. All five children are healthy and strong. Unblemished. Cherished. The oldest among them is a teenager who remembered the world before it had changed. He would have been allowed onto the rockets, but his blind mother had hidden him, unable to live the rest of her life without him and his sharing eyesight. Many people watch the children at school and weep. Many women had suffered at the hands of the rocket people, having had their wombs removed to stop them from the hideous crime of giving birth to another monster.
They move on to the mother of the dead child. The child was only two. The judge asks if the child was perfect, and the mother agrees. Her daughter had been devoid of defects. This makes the judge smile, and he asks if she had been a good girl, knowing full well the tantrums the child has made in the past. The mother says she had been an angel. The judge finally tells them he is sorry for her loss, and Lydia has to fight the urge to hold her hand to her belly.
After leaving the grieving mother’s house, the judge surprises Lydia again by suggesting they go to the theater. It is easier, he explains, to overhear gossip in a place like that than to ask direct questions around town and be ignored. The play turns out to be excellent. Penned by one of their own people after the rockets has left, Lydia finds it more fulfilling, entertaining, and meaningful than anything she had seen in the old days. The fact that the playwright had polio and all the actors limped or were blind somehow seemed to add to the quality of the piece. None of the faces Lydia saw showed strain, condescention, duty, or guilt. All were there of their own volition. She reflects that things would be very different if the rockets ever returned. It would, in fact, be horrible. Somewhere in the middle of it all, the judge asks what Lydia hears within the audience. He asks because her ears are in fine condition. What she hears is the mutter of words like “strong,” “danger,” “mother,” and “sacrifice.” Other phrases claim that the children are growing stronger every day. What she tells the judge that everyone is talking about the play. Later that morning, in bed with the sleeping Leo, Lydia remembers the first days after the rockets left when she and Leo were so desperate for additional companionship.
In the night, Lydia tells the truth of the audience’s mumblings to Leo. They agree it was clearly the mother who had murdered the child. Lydia remembers and early meeting with the local doctor who had said they were safe to conceive again and that it was entirely possible they would have a child without damage. “After all,” the doctor had told her, “you should hardly be here yourself.” She spends the rest of a glorious night reading adventure stories to Leo. She felt like her unborn baby was even listening, so she chose happy stories to read.
The following night, the judge was summoned to the home of another mother who had only recently given birth. The doctor had shared with the judge that he was concerned for the welfare of the child. When they arrived, the infant was in a box in the corner of the room, wailing and untended by the mother, who lay on the bed with her back to her perfectly healthy child. Lydia sees the mother’s hands are webbed when she raises them to cover her ears.
Later, Lydia and the judge are alone in the empty courtroom. They discuss the recent murder but cannot decide how to proceed as it is unprecedented and so few in their community seemed to care. The only viable option of punishment seemed to be exile, yet this feels too cruel because of how lonely the world has become. Lydia comments that “You know we will do anything to keep our world safe.” The judge responds with “We cannot allow it, Lydia.” Later, the judge fell asleep and Lydia left him there, as was his preference. Still later, Lydia gets home to find Leo has a fresh cut across his forehead. He explains that he went to visit the children at the school and they threw rocks at everyone. There were several visitors, in fact, and all of them accepted what the children gave them. Lydia shares that in another, nearby community there are children who aren’t so perfect but are learning well, who don’t attack their elders, and who are well-loved by all. Leo agrees that perhaps that would be a better place for them to live.
The following night the messenger comes again. There has been another child murder. And while the messenger wants to fetch the judge, Lydia insists they go to the scene of the crime first. It turns out to be the very home they had visited the night before. The baby’s throat had been cut clean across. The mother is up off her bed, cleaning and tidying her home. The baby was still in its box. The murder weapon was still on the floor. Lydia asks what happened and the mother simply says that she woke up and the baby was dead. There is no sign of tears in her eyes. The child’s father, meanwhile, sits across the room, watching the two speak but without speaking himself. It is then that Lydia thinks of their new world and how long it had been since she had been laughed at. She thinks of the judge and his love of strength and perfection, and the truth. Without confronting the mother or father, she secretly collects the knife and hides it in a fold of cloth. Outside, Lydia allows the messenger to lead him to the judge’s home, knowing full well he will be at the courthouse where she left him. It is the messenger who suggests they check his place of work. When they get there, the judge is still fast asleep, so Lydia deliberately shakes him roughly awake and drops the knife to the ground. The messenger gasps and bends to pick it up, but Lydia tells him to leave it as it is evidence.
The story ends with Lydia wondering to herself some months later if the mothers should, in fact, have been charged with murder rather than the judge being charged with treason. Leo explains that it is all inevitable… something the rocket people called “Survival of the Fittest.” They are happy now, as a family of three. Soon after the judge’s exile, Lydia had considered not letting her baby come to term at all in fear it would be born perfect and grow to think it was better than them. But her mothering instinct was stronger than this, and eventually their daughter was born with a twisted leg. They then moved to the other community where they were quickly accepted, Leo for his shoes and Lydia for her knowledge of judgements. She has not accepted the role of judge, though. She doesn’t want to become their scapegoat. After all, children are dying in this community, too. And here, they feel safe.
MY GRADE: A
MY REVIEW:
As I began to suggest in my review of “Diary,” the more Cemetery Dance stories I read, the more I have come to understand that there has been a fundamental shift in horror storytelling over the past thirty years. Splatterpunk rarely appears these days whereas back in the early issues probably half of the stories CD published fell wholly or at least partially into that category. Warren’s story, however, is different. It’s “horrible” (ie: a horror story) not because it disgusts us with depravity and gory details, but because it reeks of the worst of What Might Be. It suggests rather than divulges. And, of course, people have always feared what they do not know.
The first terrifying unknown in “The Left Behind” is the dystopian world the characters are living in. We’re not sure, exactly, what has happened to Earth, but we know it’s bad enough to warrant most of humanity abandoning our home planet. Then, when one of the escape rockets explodes, the atmosphere is further compromised, leaving little to no filter from the sun’s powerful ultraviolet radiation. So the people still living there now have an even worse version of Earth than the one that caused the mass exodus of the lion’s share of humankind.
Secondly, everyone in the story was already handicapped even before they were left behind. They are blind, deaf, confined to wheelchairs, have stunted growth and twisted limbs, or suffer from devastating old-world diseases such as Polio. The wide range of deformities described in only a handful of characters suggests an even wider, more excessive, list of disfigurements. But of course we don’t know the extent of it. We only know it is absolute, effecting everyone left on Earth, and we are left once again feeling the discomfort of the unknown. Even worse than all of this, abolustely everyone is sick. It seems every column within the story features at least one cough by yet another character. The clear explanation here is a worldwide cancer due to everyone’s exposure to the sun’s increased power. Collectively, we understand they are a doomed species with the best possible survival looking to be a few generations at most. Imagine a world where literally everyone is dying of a terminal illness. There are few examples I can think of where fear of the unknown is worse than that.
Finally, we have Lydia herself. As the protagonist who speaks to us in the 1st person perspective, we connect with her easily and early. We want her to “win” by the end of the story. Yet the end comes with the powerfully distressing truth that Lydia is not a good person. When she frames the judge as the killer of the second child, she has essentially murdered him (in their world, the exile he is punished with comes to the same thing), and her actions are emotionally detached and calculating. Upon first reading the story I wondered why she had done this. However it didn’t take too long to see why. It’s because she viewed him as a threat. “What threat?” you may ask. “He was the only character who had genuine hope for a better life.” That, precisely, is Lydia’s problem. She is like the mothers who kill their unblemished children: the judge (and those “perfect” children) remind them of the colonists who also judged them all and doomed them to their fate on the dying planet. The judge represents sedition from their world full of broken people where everyone is accepted despite — or, perhaps, precisely because of — their deformities. Lydia is overjoyed, after all, when her child is born with a twisted leg.
One subtle detail that I find particularly brilliant is the fact that Lydia is the only primary character who isn’t described with a specific physical deformity. Her only visible issue is that she is even more sensitive to the sunlight/ atmosphere that everyone suffers. Both the judge and Leo can withstand the sun much longer than she. The suggestion, then, is that Lydia’s sensitivity was her only true deformity and she was nearly healthy enough to go with the colonists on the rockets. At one point, the doctor even states that she “should hardly be here yourself.” And yet the sun’s power didn’t take it’s turn for the worst until after the rockets had left and one exploded, affecting the atmosphere. Thus Lydia was still rejected even before her sensitivity became so extreme. What, then, was the colonist’s reason for rejecting her? We simply don’t know. My best guess is that there was already some kind of sunlight sensitivity worldwide and Lydia was among those who were the most sensitive. Either way, there is a certain coldness to the fact that she was nearly healthy enough to escape with the rest of the colonists, and yet she maintains a hatred for them and what they represent. It suggests she hates herself because she is almost whole.
FINAL THOUGHT
Though on opposite ends of the horror spectrum (splatterpunk vs. psychological), both stories address the issue of what should be done with those we do not like. The questions I posed at the top of this column were:
1- What should be done with undesirables?
2- What makes an undesirable?
3- Who decides?
Yet how the authors go about dealing with those questions are quite different.
In “Diary,” they are all answered by the narrator/ protagonist himself. Jerry begins by telling us he is an undesirable (Question 3) then quickly proceeds to show us exactly why he is so undesirable (Question 2). He ends by elucidating that even he has decided that he should die (Questions 1 and 3). Suffice it to say that readers would generally agree with Jerry. He is an undesirable and he probably should be put to death. But it’s not that simple because Jerry has managed to spoil each and every one of these opinions for us. Clearly Jerry is an undesirable… but he went so far beyond what we would call an undesirable, we are left still wondering where the fine line between Good and Evil lies. What about the sociopath who doesn’t kill, for instance, but is the vindictive, malicious manager overseeing several dozen hardworking, good people? What about the neighbor who doesn’t allow children to make the happy noises of playtime outside their home? Or the parent or friend who always finds a way to point out your faults while turning the conversation to their own achievements? Are these each true undesirables? Where the line lie?
Jerry also makes us question what to do with these people who make our lives so miserable. Sure, the death penalty is an easy answer for the worst offenders, but Jerry isn’t satisfied with that, either in his own practice or in his own fate. No, Jerry wants suffering as well. Which makes us wonder again how difficult it truly is to have the punishment fit the crime. What about that mean boss/ uncaring neighbor/ selfish friend? We wouldn’t consign any of them to the electric chair, but what exactly are we to do? Finally, when Jerry admits to us precisely what he wants of his demise, we must ask ourselves who to trust to make these difficult decisions. After all, judges and juries can be bought just as easily as congressmen who make the laws in the first place. In Jerry’s case, he is telling us that we cannot be trusted to decide his fate… that only he can choose the proper punishment because only he knows the full extent of his sickness. Considering he has just confessed a long list of horrific crimes, we are left with the sickly unease wondering if there is somehow something even worse which he hasn’t yet confessed… something that would corroborate his bold suggestion that we still don’t know how truly sick he is.
Meanwhile, in “The Left Behind” the undesirables are the victims of the story rather than the creators of the misery. Here, a whole class of people are simply left behind to eek out the remainder of their lives on a dying Earth (Question 1). What makes them undesirable are their physical deformities (Question 2) which the colonists (Question 3) have deemed to be a threat to the future of humanity. The fact that the colonists are comparatively “perfect” is significant, because of course they are inevitably just as flawed as the Left Behind, only in other ways. The colonists’ weak morals — a dispassionate capacity to abandon friends, neighbors, and loved ones — are immediately suspect. In this story, however, there is a bigger sense of that separation between the undesirables and those who condemn them because there are so many more people involved. All of humanity has been allocated to one side or the other, not just a serial killer and his victims.
Agree or disagree with any of this?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
NEXT COLUMN
Next time I’ll be reading/ reviewing each of the following tales:
- “Surrogate” by Janet Fox (CD #3 from 1990)
- “Burying Betsy” by Brian Keene (CD #59 from 2008)
I do hope you have the opportunity to read along with me. (And remember to get your copies of the CD issues still in print).
Until next time…
-K. Edwin Fritz
Keith Edwin Fritz entered this world on Halloween. The year, 1974, was the same as when Stephen Edwin King published his first novel. Keith prefers to think neither the date nor their middle names were a coincidence.
Today Keith teaches middle school English and writes to his heart’s content during his “spare time.” The best of these moments are nearly always by moonlight. The worst of them are also by moonlight.
Keith lives with his wife, Corina, and their brilliant, adorable, and infinitely silly daughter, Isabella, in Pennsylvania.