Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Short Story Wednesday" Lauren Groff "The Midnight Zone" from FLORIDA




You can hear the Lauren Grof read "The Midnight Zone" here. https://www.wnyc.org/story/lauren-groff-reads-midnight-zone/ although I read it in her collection of stories called FLORIDA. It is also available to read in a May 2016 issue of the New Yorker.

 One of Groff's greatest strengths (for me) is her ability to make a landscape come alive. And in this story, it's a woodsy, primitive area of Florida filled with sink holes, wild animals, dangerous men, snakes, etc.

A panther has been spotted just before the father of a young family is called away. Immediately, we are on the edge of our seats as readers. He will be gone two days, leaving his wife with two small boys, no Internet, and even getting the cell phone to work is iffy. The mother has already admitted to not being the most engaged mother in the world. And it seems like she may now be ill with an unnamed malady.

Very quickly things spin out of control, and in trying to change the sole light bulb, with her son holding the stool, she falls and suffers a nasty head injury. She wakes to find her two boys looking down at her and they try as best they can to care for their injured mother. She comes in and out of consciousness and fantasizes roaming the woods around them, seeing the dangers awaiting them. The boys tend her and when their father returns, she can see from his face just how dire her situation was. 

I very much admired that Groff never allows the reader to be off the hook in terms of awaiting a panther's arrival or some similar dire fate. She creates a threatening environment although the boys seem unaffected by it. It is the mother who is terrorized. A great story for me. 


Jeff Meyerson

Edward D. Hoch, Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (Crippen & Landru 2018).

When I thought of which book to choose for the first of these short story collections to review, the choice was fairly easy.  Why not go with possibly the most prolific short story writer ever, a man who published over 950 stories, including one or more in every issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for 35 years?  Ed Hoch created a dozen or more series characters of varying types, but my favorite remains the impossible crime specialist, small town Connecticut doctor Sam Hawthorne, who had some 72 recorded cases, published between 1974 and 2008, of a remarkably high quality.  Hoch did something interesting here, besides the ingenuity of the stories themselves, by setting them in a specific time and place, a smallish town in Connecticut between the doctor's arrival in 1922 and his final story, in 1944.  You always get a feel for what was going on in the world then, from the Depression to the Second World War.  Crippen & Landru has done fans a favor by publishing all 72 stories in five volumes (of which this is, clearly, the last), all with "Impossible" in the title.  From the first story, "The Problem of the Covered Bridge," in which a man drives into a covered bridge and seems to vanish off the face of the Earth, Hoch was a master at coming up with truly impossible-seeming crimes and then providing mostly brilliant solutions.  I'd recommend starting at the beginning and reading all five volumes, but you can't go wrong with any of them.
 
Jeff Meyerson
 
Other reviews of stories can be found here. 
 
 

16 comments:

Todd Mason said...

excellent start! and good luck with the appointments!
https://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-short-stories-by-damon-knight-he.html

Cullen Gallagher said...

Thank you for organizing this! Here's my contribution: http://www.pulp-serenade.com/2020/10/league-of-grateful-dead-and-other.html

I'm working on one for next week, too.

Margot Kinberg said...

I really like this idea, Patti - thanks for putting it together!

George said...

Patti, I think we're off to a Good Start! Thanks for organizing this short story endeavor.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Thanks, George.

Jeff Meyerson said...

Next time I will pick out a single story. Good choices, everyone.

Prashant C. Trikannad said...

Great idea, Patti! I have generally enjoyed reading short stories more than novels.

TracyK said...

Thanks for pulling the links together, Patti. I went to the doctor this morning to have floaters in my eye checked out, and I am very dilated, so I won't be checking the posts out until later. All is fine with the floaters, a normal occurrence with aging.

pattinase (abbott) said...

I have my share. Your brain learns to ignore them. Thanks for participating.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Either is fine!

David Cranmer said...

I enjoyed that audio link! Thanks.

Todd Mason said...

Uncozy suspense fiction with a nonetheless domestic setting, though I'm wondering how the panther might be too much of a threat unless they have to go outside...though how else the kids can get help without a phone is the crux there...cool.

Hoch isn't the most prolific short story writer, but he is one of those who did more solid work at such production in his long career...and was a perfect gentleman in our one meeting, very glad, for example that I was aware that he was one of Robert Lowndes's two most notable "discoveries" in his 1950s editing who went on to remarkable careers, the other being Carol Emshwiller. (In the 1960s, all Lowndes managed to first publish professionally were some kids named Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson among several others maybe a little less famous now, though he was close to first, I think, with a few more close to my heart such as Janet Fox.)

Gerard Saylor said...

I tried out a couple stories from a 2011 compilation of dark fantasy and both were blah. I'll try to give it a go next week.

TracyK said...

Lauren Groff's story sounds good. Suspenseful. I have never read anything by Ed Hoch. I will have to see about finding one of the Crippen & Landru books. Does he only write impossible crime stories?

Todd Mason said...

The late Ed Hoch ("hoke") definitely Did Not write only "impossible" crime stories. The earlyish story from him that is still often cited by many, with reason, as their favorite, "The Oblong Room", is a rather sad, outré suspense story and definitely not at all "tricky"...

TracyK said...

Thanks, Todd. And thanks for the pronunciation guide, because I have been wondering for years how to pronounce his name (seriously).

Then I will look for another anthology online for some stories to try.