During a second experiment yesterday a fly which I did not see must have got into the disintegrator.  My only hope is to find that fly and go through again with it.  Please search for it carefully since, if it is not found, I shall have to find a way of putting an end to all this.

- from "The Fly" by George Langelaan

"...Guess I shook you up a little bit, didn't I?  They handed you all that crap about love and rebirth, and now you find out it's just a butcher shop, like everything else, so you don't want to hear about it..."

- from Seconds by David Ely

In 1957, George Langelaan, a British writer born in France wrote a short story called "The Fly," about a French scientist named Andre Delambre who had invented a teleportation machine (called a "disintegrator" in the story).  The story is structured as a mystery, as early on Andre is found dead, his head and arm crushed under a steam press, with his wife Helene apparently his murderer.  However, Andre's brother and a police detective must know why this happened, and information from Helene and Andre's son about a strange white-headed fly eventually lead to the truth:  when transporting himself one night, to test his invention's ability teleport humans, a fly got into the machine, with the result that Andre and the fly somehow fused together, while also splitting.  A fly with the head and arm of Andre accounts for the strange fly, and Andre with the head and leg of the fly accounts for his method of murder, or suicide.  The year after its publication, this story was adapted into a film by screenwriter James Clavell and director Kurt Neumann.  The action of that film is moved to Quebec for some reason, but otherwise it's a pretty faithful interpretation.  In 1986, on the other hand, David Cronenberg (with co-screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue, whose script he rewrote) remade the film, or once again adapted the story, though this amounts to the same thing, and so therefore to an equal degree Cronenberg adapted neither.











John Frankenheimer's filmmaking career was a long one.  He died in 2002, with dozens of films behind him, the last of which was an HBO film that aired the same year he died.  He's primarily remembered for his first ten or so films, but he always did great work, and there's a handful in there that are genuine American masterpieces.  The Fly turned out to be, and may still be, David Cronenberg's biggest commercial success.  This is curious considering that it's still very much a David Cronenberg film, but that core idea is pretty irresistible.  The Fly is also one of his very best movies.  After this, he would enter a new phase.  In the subsequent 27 years, there would still be a scattering of films like eXistenZ that hearken back to his wild, twisted, viscera-splattered early days, but if before he made science fiction horror, he would soon begin making what might be called horror dramas.  And then he would change again, but we'll get to that.  David Ely is still alive.  He doesn't seem to write or publish anymore, and there's not much information about him out there, at least that I can find, other than that between 1963 and 1992, he published seven novels and two collections of short stories.

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A quick one today, by design, because certain things are starting to catch up to me here, and besides that, I mean, seriously. Come on already.
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By way of introduction, I will announce that today's anthology, from which I pulled the stories under consideration, is The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural from 1967, anonymously edited by Ray Russell. I've had this book for some time now, though I've only read from it sporadically over the years. Even so, I'm coming to the realization that this is something of an essential volume, being, as it is, a terrific sampling of mid-20th century American (mostly, anyway) genre fiction. Glance at the contents, and you will see stories by John Collier, a couple each by Bloch, Matheson, Beaumont and Bradbury, Gahan Wilson's excellent "The Sea Was Wet as Wet Can Be", Fredric Brown, Ray Russell, and Charles Motherfucking Willeford. That list comes perilously close to Cream of the Crop status, and that's just for starters! If you can find this book, you should really pick it up. Casually, without seeming to go too far out of its way, it's fantastic.
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Of the two writers on deck for today, one is virtually forgotten, remembered now, if it all, for having written the novel on which a well-loved but not-often seen film, and the other is probably not well known outside of genre readers, but something of a cult giant within that world. And this is my first reading of either of them.
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The forgotten writer is David Ely. The film that was based on one of his novels is the strange and compelling Seconds, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Rock Hudson (and John Randolph, too, who doesn't usually get a hat-tip when the film is mentioned, but who I believe gave the strongest performance). The Ely story I read is called "The Academy", and it's a very interesting thing: for the vast majority of its eleven pages, "The Academy" is not a horror story. It's about a guy named Mr. Holston who is touring the titular school with a man referred to only as the Director. Holston's son has been accepted to the school, and he wants to check it out before signing his son over. It's a private school, obviously, one that may or may not have possess a military bent. It also has a statue outside of a man and a boy facing towards the school -- thereby putting their backs to the rest of the world -- and a plaque that has faded to illegibility.
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The tour goes quite well, so it seems, with the Director not only pumping his school up to the rafters, but providing ample evidence to support his claims. This place is ship-shape. And to be honest, I slumped a little when I started to wonder if "The Academy" was going to be some kind of easy money, anti-military bleat. Perhaps it still is, to be honest, but it could just as easily be read as an attack on the whole institution of private schooling. There's nothing explicitly militaristic about the Academy, and towards the end the Director offers some unprovoked consolation to Mr. Holston regarding the latter's misgivings about foisting off his son (who it seems has some mild behavioral problems) to a bunch of strangers.
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Still, though: not a horror story. But then there's that final paragraph, and within that paragraph are two words that change the whole texture of "The Academy". It's really sort of remarkable, given how common the two words are, and the fact that had Ely settled for just one of those two words the impact would have been erased. As I say, interesting.
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The second story is by Jack Finney, he of the grander stature. The story's called "Hey, Look at Me!", and it, too, is quite interesting, though for different reasons. It's narrated by Peter Marks, book editor and literary critic for a San Francisco newspaper. As the story begins, we learn that a man named Max Kingery has died, and that Marks has seen his ghost. Kingery was a writer, having published one novel which Marks remembered giving a mixed review to some time back. Both men live in a small town called Mill Valley, about which Marks says:
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A lot of writers live here, and whenever a new one arrives people love to introduce us and then stand back to see what will happen. Nothing much ever does, though once a man denounced me right out on the sidewalk in front of the Redhill liquor store. "Peter Marks? The book critic?" he said, and when I nodded, he said, "You, sir, are a puling idiot who ought to be writing 'News of Our Pets' for The Carmel Pine Cone instead of criticizing the work of your betters." Then he turned, and -- this is the word -- stalked off, while I stood staring after him, smiling. I'd panned two of his books, he'd been waiting for Peter Marks ever since, and was admirably ready when his moment came.
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Minus the fireworks, this basically similar literary connection is more or less how Kingery and Marks met. Kingery was a withdrawn, brooding sort, and he and Marks became friends out of habit. This friendship developed despite Marks certainty that Kingery had nothing but contempt for Marks's profession:
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Some writers are belligerent about critics, some are sullen and hostile, but Max was just contemptuous. I'm sure he believed that all writers outranked all critics -- well or badly, they actually do the deed which we only sit and carp about. And sometimes Max would listen to an opinion of mine about someone's book, then he'd shrug and say, "Well, you're not a writer," as though that severely limited my understanding. I'd say, "No, I'm a critic," which seemed a good answer to me, but Max would nod as though I'd agreed with him.
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There's lots of similarly good writing in "Hey, Look at Me!" that I could quote. It's a modest story, really, but I really loved it. Far more melancholy than frightening, as ghost stories can often be, "Hey, Loot at Me!" is fascinating because of the various things it manages to be about in its brief allotted space. For instance, it's about loss and dealing with sudden death, and the ways in which this can be difficult to absorb. Finney even ties this into the supernatural element of the story, as Marks and his wife are away on vacation when Kingery dies suddenly -- they even miss his funeral -- so when Marks first sees him on the street again it doesn't even automatically register for him that he shouldn't be seeing Kingery at all, ever again.
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But the fact that Marks is a critic and Kingery is, or was, a writer are what's essential to "Hey, Look at Me!". The key thing about Kingery is that however good or bad his first novel was, he knew full well that he would one day become one of America's great writers. And then he died. Then there's the question of what drove Kingery to write, a clue for which is in the title. Pushing still further is Marks's position as a critic, and how Finney views this. Sympathetically, it would appear, but Finney wasn't a critic, he was a fiction writer. And if Kingery's literary ambition was to have people notice him, and to see his name sprawled across advertisements and newspapers, something he never lived to achieve, what of Finney's success at the time he wrote it? I don't really know what kind of status as a writer Finney enjoyed, but by the time he wrote "Hey, Look at Me!" he'd already written his novel The Body Snatchers, and had a successful film made from it. In fact, he'd been adapted to film four times by then, so household name or not, he'd made his mark. He'd even achieved immortality through The Body Snatchers, though he obviously didn't know it.
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There's a lot going on in "Hey, Look at Me!", while managing to be funny, sad, and eerie, all within about fourteen pages. Not bad at all. The lesson I learned from all this is that I'd better read more Jack Finney.