#394 Dimension- Alice Munro

#394 Dimension- Alice Munro

This was a hard story to read. An emotionally oppressive marriage ends it the murder of three children. Lloyd was insane, getting there slowly, while Doree seemed happy at first, but as it is in this situation, she couldn’t reason with herself a way to get out.

“No matter how worn out she got with him, he was still the closest person in the world to her, and she felt that everything would collapse if she were to bring herself to tell someone exactly how he was, if she were to be entirely disloyal.”

Her fears seemed to be dead-on. When they had an argument and Doree spent the night with a friend to give it some space, he took that as betrayal, and killed their children: “I wanted to save them the misery…the misery of knowing that their mother walked out on them.”

In her emotional recovery—if a person can really recover from something like this—she decided to go visit him in prison. “It was almost like seeing a ghost.”

He was more worried about his own soul--“Peace. I arrived at peace and I’m still sane”—then the souls of his children. He wasn’t contrite or apologetic, just interested that he, himself was getting better. I guess that’s the true definition of psychosis…you murder three people, and make it all about yourself.

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#327 For Love of Trains- David Dante Troutt

#327 For Love of Trains- David Dante Troutt

The Patterson’s learned of a horrible event. Their 19 year old son, Haywood had been falsely arrested for murder and rape aboard a train. Him and 8 others were convicted and sentenced to death in an Alabama prison. The family became hardened to the hopeless reality that faced their family.

“[He] became like a hopeless kind of iron, just thickening and hardening under flames he couldn’t put out.”

After the ineptitude of the NAACP lawyer, they accepted the help of a white, Jewish, communist group from New York. They won a stay of execution and finally were able to see Haywood in person. He was beaten, and desperate, but he was their son:

“They’d beaten him across the left side of his face, and his eyes swole up. But when you looked deep into them there were the brown, tender eyes of the boy.”

They won a Supreme Court appeal, but didn’t win the re-trial. As the case continued to make its way back and forth, disaster strikes again. Even without hope, you can still have fight, what else is there?

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#141 Movietone: Detour- Peter Weltner

#141 Movietone: Detour- Peter Weltner

Movietone was the name of the black and white newsreels shown before films during W.W. II. Weltner said that just like some of the horror movies of that period, these newsreels represented films in which “…dread and beauty, horror and wonder are nearly indistinguishable.”

Sayler the Sailor (yes, you read that correctly) is on shore leave. He explores NYC and looks to exploit the local scene to make a little money. He meets up with other seamen and all goes well until it doesn’t. Drunken nights, prostitution, gay strip clubs…then murder, awol, on the run, new identity, etc.

At first this reads like a kind of pulp-noir story, with writing like:

“The night is stubborn, the stars like pins. Saylor squats by the shore-end of the pier and watches the day’s second lover disappear behind the stacks of crates and boxes that had hid them from the streetlight.”

By the end it reads more like a Burroughs or Kerouac Beat adventure. Either way, I enjoyed it.

Notable Passage: “Dead eyes are as lusterless and scratched marbles.”

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29