Now I am getting ads when I click through to your comments. What an evil world.
All of Berlin's stories are somewhat if not entirely autobiographical. In this second one in the collection, as a punishment for striking a nun, our narrator had to work in her grandfather's dental office every day of the summer. He was an eccentric man who rarely spoke to his granddaughter. He was widely disliked but was the best dentist (west Texas) in the area. He was especially adept at making false teeth and treated it like art. As the summer went on, there were less and less patients and he spent more and more time making false teeth. Eventually he makes a set for himself. He takes his granddaughter down to the office on a Sunday night and has her pull all of his teeth so he can see how beautiful the false set sits in his mouth. This is both amusing and horrifying.
Looking forward to slowly making my way through this collection.
8 comments:
Yes! That was the last book I read in 2023, finishing it New Year's Eve. I remember that horrifying dentist story too. She had quite an interesting life - lived in different places and put them all into her stories.
Still reading four collections, the latest being the new Crippen & Landru collection:
Toni L.P. Kelner (also writing as Leigh Perry), The Skeleton Rides a Horse and Other Stories. I remember Kelner from my Malice days, but if you think of her as a "cozy" writer, this collection may very well surprise you. Most of these stories are set in North Carolina. But the settings range from a sleazy bar ("Now Hiring Nasty Girlz" - with a twist you won't see coming) to a carnival ("Where Does a Herd of Elephants Go?") to a high school ("Kangaroo Court") to a Jewish grocery in Raleigh ("Murchison Solves a Mystery" - a little too far out to be believed). I'm enjoying it quite a bit.
That one sounds good, Jeff. Will have to see if my library has it. Also I can order it from any other library in MI so some library will have it.
Definitely both amusing and horrifying, Patti! Just thinking about what the dynamics in that family must be....
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written a series of short stories I read some in AHMM, I believe) about working security at science fiction conventions, and Toni Kelner has a similar story, "Security Blanket," in this collection. I always enjoyed Rusch's stories, and this one was pretty good too.
That story does not appeal to me but I would like to read the collection someday anyway.
Perhaps Blogspot is Experimenting...I seem to have been the Only(?) person who was seeing the New Format comments Monday and yesterday, and I haven't been seeing ads...yet. And the New Format Comments aren't popping up again today...yet.
The house just lost its old water-heater this aft, a cool just-shy of $2K to replace. And no little rearrangement of the basement to accommodate the replacement.
Other things delayed any attempt at SSW from me, but it keeps being Something. Now to take out the last parts of the old bed for trash day, and go shopping for food for the other house mammals, feline and human...
Todd, not the only one. I had the same format on Monday but not today.
The threading was the only (small) improvement there.
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