THE DEEP ONES: "The Oram County Whoosit" by Steve Duffy

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Oram County Whoosit" by Steve Duffy

2RandyStafford
maaliskuu 30, 6:38 pm

A fairly straightforward Mythos story, but I especially appreciated Duffy's skill with the two narrators and the evocation of the Klondike Gold Rush.

3housefulofpaper
Muokkaaja: toukokuu 1, 10:53 am

I've probably read this story twice already. I've read The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 and New Cthulhu but I read it this time from The Faces at Your Shoulder. I had a vague memory of being a bit underwhelmed by the story on at least one previous reading, but I think maybe I'd just overdone it on my Mythos reading and was feeling a bit jaded. On this occasion I enjoyed it a lot, for the same reasons as RandyStafford (in fact, I appreciated the Oram County evocation as much as the Klondike in Horton Keith's flashback narrative).

Steve Duffy has added an afterword to the book in the form of "Notes to the Stories". For this one, he says the core idea came from the "hollow-face" illusion, where from the correct viewing angle a concave mask suddenly looks like a concave face. From there the "frog in a rock" idea followed (it also suggested HPL's Non-Euclidean geometries).

He also noted the "dash of Ambrose Bierce" in the characterisation (and fate?) of Horton Keith.