He began to walk toward her stiffly.
'You haven't made me big enough, Gerald. That's the trouble. I'm
too big for you. Perhaps Poe, or Dosteyevsky, or Melville. . . but
not you, Gerald. Not even under your royal pen-name. Not you.
Not you.
She began to laugh again, huge racking explosions of sound.
'Don't you laugh,' Gerald said stiffly.
* * *
The tool-shed, after the manner of Zola:
Wooden walls, which showed occasional chinks of light,
surrounded rabbit-traps hung and slung in corners; a pair of dusty,
unstrung snow-shoes: a rusty spaceheater showing flickers of
yellow flame like cat's eyes; Tales; 2 shovel; hedgeclippers; an
ancient green hose coiled like a garter-snake; four bald tires
stacked like doughnuts; a rust), Winchester rifle with no bolt; a
twohanded saw; a dusty work-bench covered with nails, screws,
bolts, washers, two hammers, a plane, a broken level, a dismantled
carburetor which one sat inside a 1949 Packard convertible; a 4 hp.
air-compressor painted electric blue, plugged into an extension
cord running back into the house.
* * *
'Don't you laugh,' Gerald said again, but she continued to rock
back and forth, holding her stomach and flapping the manuscript
with her wheezing breath like a white bird.
His hand found the rusty Winchester rifle and he pole-axed her
with it.
* * *
Most horror stories are sexual in nature.
I'm sorry to break in with this information, but feel I must in order
to make the way clear for the grisly conclusion of this piece, which
is (at least psychologically) a clear metaphor for fears of sexual
impotence on in), part. Mrs. Leighton's large mouth is symbolic of
the vagina; the hose of the compressor is a penis. Her female bu Ik
huge and overpowering, is a mythic representation of the sexual
fear that lives in every male, to a greater or lesser degree: that the
woman, with her opening, is a devouter.
* * *
In the works of Edgar A. Poe, Stephen King, Gerald Nately, and
others who practice this particular literary form, we are apt to find
locked rooms, dungeons. empty mansions (all symbols of the
womb); scenes of living burial (sexual impotence); the dead
returned from the grave (necrophilia); grotesque monsters or
human be ings (externalized fear of the sexual act itself); torture
and/or murder (a viable alternativ e to the sexual act).
These possibilities are not always valid, but the postfreild reader
and writer must take them into consideration when attempting the
genre.
Abnormal psychology has become a part of the human experience.
* * *
