. Spinning .

Well, I’m glad I took this little side trip in reading these stories of both another genre and of another era. 

It is rather surprising that language changes with the times, and reminds me of photographs of a certain time period where try as you might, you cannot imagine these people existing in the present, even given updated clothes and hairdos. 

"Why yes, I have been quite gay while you were asleep.  Three men from outside.  Englishmen.  It is a pity you missed them."  (The Man Who Liked Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, p. 314)

One obviously does soon become comfortable with the style, but it is sometimes difficult to jerk oneself out of this world and into that of the present, let’s say, as given by Cormac McCarthy.  But I think there’s more than the mere difference of seventy years gone by, and the genre of horror–although some might consider McCarthy’s stories as horrific as any written.

And so, though not for that reason alone, I’m anxious to get right back to him.

Having my own work critiqued recently may have made me even more diligent in the reading of story, and there are a couple that I’ve found in this Hitchcock anthology:

Finger!  Finger! by Margaret Ronan is about a young girl who comes into the employment as a servant to a wealthy, bedridden, grossly overweight and particularly nasty old woman who tends to stick out her pinky finger (and why so much emphasis was placed on this is part of my problem with the story).  Miss Amanda, the old woman, has gone through many serving girls prior to Carola, and the premise is that not only is she obnoxious, she switches souls and personalities with the girls once she gets a close grip on them, leaving in the body of the servant and leaving the girl in the lump in the bed.  While it is believable that once this switch is made that the trapped personality would get just as anxious and cranky to leave (though it’s doubtful that she’s been successful before, since girls leave or commit suicide) the ending that has Carola (in the gross body) strangling to death Miss Amanda (in the young body) doesn’t make sense–since I assume that she is then trapped forever.  And the pinky finger that’s so important?  Well Ronan has dramatically pointed out that the old woman (really Carola) has it stuck out as she strangles the young girl (really Amanda).  To me, the arching of the pinky finger is a learned affectation, and therefore, would have been transferred to the young girl’s body along with the rest of Amanda.  So no, that story didn’t work for me.

In Henry Slesar’s A Cry from the Penthouse, Slesar starts out and continues on and on about the bitter cold "The wind carried knives; Chet winced at every thrust…" (which is a neat metaphor and phrase here), but when Chet finally gets a cab and is inside a friend’s new penthouse to collect money loaned to his friend, the friend "strode over to the double doors and flung them open, admitting an inquisitive cloud of cold air."

Inquisitive?  If it was icy and bitterly windy on the street, what would you expect at the top floor terrace?  Chet has also been relieved of his overcoat and is talked by his host into going out on the terrace, admiring the view until he realizes he’s shivering. 

I’m sorry; I just don’t believe it.

Just finished two stories, George Langelaan’s The Fly, which was the basis for two movies, one in 1958 and the remake we all know, in 1986.  Langelaan was credited in each movie.

The other is Our Feathered Friends by Philip McDonald (1900-1980) which appeared first in a collection When Churchyards Yawn (London, Hutchinson) in 1931, then in this Hitchcock Presents in 1961, and in The Saint Detective Magazine in 1963.  Even from the title, I thought of Hitchcock’s 1963 movie, The Birds. But in the movie, the credited writer is Daphne DuMaurier, based on her short story, The Birds, first published in 1953, and again in 1963.

Of course the same idea occurs to different authors, but the tie-in here is Hitchcock, and I’m wondering why MacDonald, who was alive when both DuMaurier’s story and the movie came out, didn’t take note of the similarities.  Here’s an excerpt from Our Feathered Friends:

The birds were nearer.  Much, much nearer.  And their line was solid now; an unbroken semicircle with bounding-line so wide-flung that he felt rather than saw its extent.  (…) Even as he stared, his face pale now, and his eyes wide with something like terror, that semicircle drew yet nearer, each unit of it taking four hops and four hops only.  Now, its line unmarred, it was close upon the edge of the moss.  (p. 223)

Through the pall of silence he could feel those countless eyes upon him.  Little eyes; bright, glittering eyes… (p. 224)

There were two feathered mounds which screamed and ran and leapt, and at last lay and were silent.  (p. 224)

Not hard to imagine that DuMaurier was influenced by seeing a flock of birds watching a farmer plow his field, and later hearing that a single bird attacked him as he opened a window, but somehow, MacDonald’s story seems even closer to the what the movie presents as a dedicated plot of attack on humans by the birds.