For many years, the Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama has been publishing off-beat, quirky, sometimes experimental fiction. Sometimes the stories seem too far out. These are just right. In fact, the Goldilocks syndrome is explored in more than one.
In a truly creepy story, “Bed Just Right,” the protagonist, Abel, surely demented, sneaks into a neighbor’s house and spends considerable time there. He touches and tastes everything and sits in the chairs: “This chair is too soft, he says. This one, too hard.” He arranges the family’s laundry into facsimiles of bodies then returns all the clothing to the laundry basket. He lies on the bed. He knows he should leave, but “there is no place Abel would rather be.”
The most straightforwardly humorous is an elaborate spoof on Hallmark Christmas movies. Shaw creates plots that should have been made into movies, fan fiction of a sort. In “The Christmas Ornament,” the husband has died. His new widow is depressed until a Christmas shop owner gives her an ornament symbolizing hope. She learns to love again. The ghost of the husband, watching, says: “What the hell?”
Then the community center in the afterworld holds a speed dating night, for ghosts. Upon entering, a song “about saving time in a bottle” is playing. He flees. Over time, the dead husband begins to experiment with possessing the living. He tries one living human after another. None is a good fit. Eventually, he decides to possess a small pebble, much more relaxing.
Perhaps my favorite story is “Gilman.” The protagonist is Gill Man, that is the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Brenda, an ichthyologist from Florida, invites him to leave his Amazon lair and join her. He swims up. They get along fine, go sightseeing, including the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum. She dies but leaves him her house.
Determined to fit in, find a mate, Gilman consults men’s magazines then dresses himself in trendy lightweight sweaters in citrusy colors, white button-down shirts, chinos, and rounded tortoise shell glasses. This should make him irresistible but he is, after all, a creature from the black lagoon. He cannot change his nature, so when his boarder Enrique irritates him: “oopsie.” “Call it a lack of judgement, not a bloodbath.” Gilman is chagrined. He likes to think of himself as more civilized now, “Enrique’s recent disembowelment notwithstanding.”
There is a highly imaginative story, “Crash Test Zombie,” in which an artificially created intelligence is placed in test crash dummies. In this story, however, the test bodies are not dummies but cadavers, from sources like executed criminals. Dick, the driver, a lonely fellow, wants to hold hands with his crash wife Jane, even though Jane is a hairy chested biker with extensive tattooing including an eagle and a confederate flag.
Joshua Shaw is a professor of philosophy whose recent professional writings are essays defending pessimism and misanthropy.
