MACABRE MONDAY

"Where the Summer Ends" by Karl Edward Wagner (1980)

This story is about many things. It is about living in penury as a graduate student yet suffering from an obsession with antiques and other unaffordable habits; it is about the modern American South (specifically Knoxville, TN) and the grim, grinding process of rentier capitalism and gentrification; it is about the way the light fades and falls as autumn proceeds (and the way that autumn, a time that comes without fail every year, regular as clockwork and the death-watch beetle, reminds us of our own impending fate); it is about the macabre American habit of skull collecting and the fact that American WWII veterans (the “Greatest Generation”) were perhaps not all the stainless heroes they are today cracked up to be; and it is about an invasive vegetable which provides a habitat where Things may dwell, sullen and silent and plotting revenge.

In the end, it is a story about how the ugly deeds of the past have a nasty way of catching up to us as our parents’ inheritors.

Opening lines: “Along Grand Avenue they’ve torn the houses down, and left emptiness in their place. On one side a tangle of viaducts, railroad yards, and expressways – a scar of concrete and cinder and iron that divides black slum from student ghetto in downtown Knoxville. On the other side, ascending the ridge, shabby relics of Victorian and Edwardian elegance, slowly decaying beneath too many layers of cheap paint and soot and squalor. Most were broken into tawdry apartments – housing for students at the university that sprawled across the next ridge. Closer to the university sections had been razed to make room for featureless emplacements of asphalt and imitation used-brick – apartments for the wealthier students. But along Grand Avenue they tore the houses down and left only vacant weed-lots in their place.”

It was originally published in Kirby McCauley’s Dark Forces, that rare beast; a horror anthology that is not only widely available but actually good. You should be able to find it for a pittance, Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forces-Various-Kirby-McCauley/dp/B0043KLYQC/) is way overpriced; haunt your local used bookshop or public library book sale, the damned thing is everywhere.

Could not find a pic of Wagner with a cat, but here he is with a beer (arguably the next best thing to a cat.)