Some Homemade Southern Gothic for Halloween

[Susan Wesley]

Here is by way of introduction to me a short story I wrote back a few years ago in 2007 which was a very tumultuous year for me similar to what happens to the main character of Ride The Bullit. I come from a small town in south Georgia which is almost as strange and remote as many parts of Maine. Perhaps the only remarkable thing about my hometown is that the author of No Time For Sergeants Mac Hyman lived and worked there writing for The Andy Griffith Show and so many of the people, scenes and situations from Mayberry NC were based on real people and events and locations where I grew up. Maybe the most remarkable thing about myself is that like many children born in Cordele, I was the eldest female child of an past beauty queen much like the heroine in the novel The Help. My mother was the winner of the beauty pagent during the Watermelon Festival of 1954 which in my imagination must have been as surreal as any Dali painting and consequently she was never quite satisfied with my appearance or her own as focusing only on outside perfection will warp anyone. My father was a fan of the truly old horror movies and books from the 40's through the 70's and this is the most significant thing that he passed on to me was the love of a really bad "B" movie with atrocious special effects and more terror implied by through the quality and talent of the actors than any computer generated green screened backgrounds or harness flying could convey. I like Stephen King grew up with Errie and Creepy comic books and Scream In on chanel 17 the first turner network channel hosted by Quasimodo the Hunchback of Notre Dame that came on on Friday nights at 10pm back in 1968. My brother and I were allowed to stay up late to watch this with my father who would turn out the lights and make weird noises and grab us at the right parts and generally give a running commentary on the actors, director, production design and any number of trivial shreds of fact and fiction he retained from going weekly to see the movies as a child growing up in Atlanta during the 30's and 40's when you could go to the movies all day long for a dime sitting in the front row of course and still have money left for popcorn and Cokes. It was his collection of strange and wonderful books filled with novels, and short stories from Lovecraft, Bradbury, Kafka, Clarke, Asmimov, Herbert and many others which I picked up and read myself when I was too precocious and too young to be reading such things and no one was paying attention to what book I had in my hand that week as long as I wasn't bothering anyone. These pieces of literature gave me a taste for anything weird, twisted, bent, strange, fantastic, other worldly, or otherwise unusual and extreme. King's show "Tales From The Crypt" was so characteristic of what I consumed as a child in words and visually and that still colors my thinking and outlook on life. So I hope you all enjoy my little homemade Halloween treat.

 

[blunthead]

Welcome to the SKMB! Keep posting!