“Then
swing your rope slowly and rattle your spurs lowly,
And give
a wild whoop as you carry me along;
And in the grave throw me and roll
the sod o'er me.
For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong.”
For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong.”
—from
The Streets of Laredo (1927)
The
use of letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, excerpts from obscure texts,
diaries, and various other documents to create a narrative is a technique used
often in horror literature and in fiction generally. Ambrose Bierce, near the end of his classic The Damned Thing (1893), uses a victim’s
last journal entries to describe the nature of a strange, invisible predator. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) opens with Jonathan Harker’s journal of his frightful
adventures in Transylvania, and later moves on to the diaries and correspondence
of the other characters who encounter the vampire.
H.P.
Lovecraft made effective use of an epistolary approach in several of his
stories, especially The Whisperer in
Darkness (1931) and The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward (1941). One of
his most accomplished stories, The
Whisperer in Darkness makes use of both letters and an old fashioned
phonograph recording to depict the menacing activities of a colony of extraterrestrials.
(See ‘The
Whisperer’—One of Lovecraft’s Best) Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928) also relies to a certain extent on
newspaper reports, research notes, a police report, and a seaman’s journal, but
these are paraphrased and not presented verbatim for the most part. Nevertheless, the principle is the same: the reader is expected to glean from the artful
presentation of documents the full horror depicted in the story.
Frank
Belknap Long was less successful with
this technique in The Hounds of Tindalos
(1929). The story begins as straight
narrative: a doomed scholar experiments
with a drug that will expand his consciousness beyond ordinary perceptions of
space and time. Later there are two
newspaper reports, a chemist’s analysis, and an excerpt from the now dead
scholar’s writing that depict the negative consequences of his psychic
investigation. (See A
Death by Metaphysics) But the story loses focus and becomes
incoherent and disconnected. The point
of view becomes distant and fractured too soon.
One of the challenges of using the epistolary technique, at least within
the confines of short fiction, is maintaining continuity and focus across
multiple viewpoints with differing degrees of closeness to the subject of the story. It seems to work best in novellas or longer fiction.
Robert
E. Howard tries his hand at this in a story he published in Argosy in 1936, called The Dead Remember. The narrative is a fairly straightforward,
even predictable tale of vengeance.
However, the story is an interesting combination of western and
supernatural genres, and the structure of the text, basically a series of
documents from different viewpoints, is clever. In fact, the sequence of these documents forms a narrative in itself: a doomed cowboy’s letter to his brother, a
statement from the cowboy’s trail boss, the bartender’s account of an apparent
shooting in his saloon, the deputy sheriff’s report, a saloon customer’s
observation of the event, and appropriately at the end, the coroner’s report.
“Exhibit
A”, the cowboy’s letter, written by one Jim Gordon, is the longest document in
the set. Gordon writes to tell his
brother about his altercation with Old Joel and his woman Jezebel, a slave
couple he encounters somewhere in late 19th Century Kansas. Jezebel, a “high-yellow gal”, is rumored to
be a witch, and the local white people are afraid of her. Gordon and Old Joel play several rounds of
craps while downing Tequila, a fight breaks out, and Gordon kills Joel and
Jezebel in drunken rage. However, before
she dies, Jezebel curses Gordon “…by the big snake and the black swamp and the white
cock.” Because the author’s sympathies are
clearly with the murdered black couple, readers know it will not end well for the
cowboy.
Violence
is common in stories by Howard, but in The
Dead Remember, the events are depicted realistically and believably, as are
the troubled race relations in America circa 1877. So is the cowboy’s emotional state in the aftermath
of the murders, as conveyed in his letter to his brother. But with each succeeding document, the view
becomes colder and colder as the distance grows between the cowboy and his observers. Yet at the very end—the last line—the coroner
discovers an unusual detail that ties the end of the story to its beginning. The tone at this point of the narrative will
remind some readers of “strange, but true” stories—one can almost hear the
voiceover asking, “Fact…or fiction? You
decide!”
Despite
the predictable ending, Howard was able to make effective use of the epistolary
approach in The Dead Remember. He appears to have done this by using a highly structured presentation
of documents, with careful attention to repeated details. The doomed cowboy appears clearly in all of the
“paperwork”, so that continuity and focus is maintained, no matter who has “spied
a cowpuncher, all wrapped in white linen, wrapped in white linen and cold as
the clay.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your interest in The R'lyeh Tribune! Comments and suggestions are always welcome.