THE DEEP ONES: "The Horror on the #33" by Michael Shea

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Horror on the #33" by Michael Shea

2paradoxosalpha
Modificato: Dic 10, 2021, 4:51 pm

I've got this one in The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 9 (where I did once read it in 2011, and memorably so), but I have no idea where in the house to find it.
:(

3elenchus
Dic 14, 2021, 9:59 pm

Making slow headway against the backlog of stories scheduled over the recent holiday.

The prose is deliberate and almost dares me not to notice it, yet for me never tipped over into distraction or pretention. Somehow.

I was preoccupied, however, by a concern for how the letters could be accounted for, and for the ending not to be a letdown. Somehow, Shea managed that, too.

I was also occasionally distracted in trying to figure out the locale, without resorting to online searches. Reno? Salt Lake City?

These observations are perhaps by way of admitting I liked the story, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Beyond drawing parallels to various urban Weird we've read here, I will have to leave that for another day.

4AndreasJ
Dic 15, 2021, 3:22 pm

What I enjoyed the most about the story was the tone, and the way the characters treat wino as just another career choice.

5RandyStafford
Dic 18, 2021, 12:39 pm

I was surprised Knavle lived to tell his tale.

I liked the odd tone of this. Two friends in the same city (I suspect either Phoenix or Albuquerque but I don't know) communicating partly by letter. It's 1982 so Knavle can't dial or text it in with a cellphone. Besides the letters, the other odd, somewhat antique-flavored touch was the name McSpittle which sounds rather comical.

Like Shea's "The Autopsy" this is another successful defiance, at least for now, of forces from outside though the protagonist in that story succeeds at the cost of his life.

I thought the ending was logical and cheerful. Yes, the Trashbagger, that representative of death and entropy, will get us all, but Knavle is the symbol of defiance in the meantime.

I never figured out if the bus drivers were in on what the Trashbagger was doing or were, in their own way, hypnotized by it.

Shea's "Tsathoggua" is another tale, a Mythos tale, set in the world of hte homeless.

6AndreasJ
Dic 19, 2021, 11:06 am

As you presumably recall, we’ve done both “The Autopsy” and “Tsathoggua” as previous DO reads. I think the first is my favourite of what I’ve read by Shea.

7paradoxosalpha
Dic 19, 2021, 12:08 pm

From my 2011 review: "Michael Shea's 'The Horror on the #33' speculates on the pleasures of drunken vagrancy and reinvents the angel of death."

8housefulofpaper
Dic 28, 2021, 6:19 pm

>3 elenchus:
I liked the story, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it would be my assessment too. I couldn't work out if the almost hyper-literacy of Knavle and the narrator were indicating a tongue-in-cheek intention on Shea's part, or not. Similar thought, or possible objection: was Knavle being presented as a kind of stereotype of the surprisingly cultured down-and-out, or was it a straightforwardly positive representation of a type of person who is more usually subject to negative depictions?

It sort of reminded me of those stories depicting the Irish as a nation of boozy storytellers and philosophers - it sounds like a positive thing on the face of it, but more often than not it comes over as condescending (when the author is not him or herself Irish).

9paradoxosalpha
Dic 29, 2021, 4:20 pm

Found it!* I'll give this one a reread while I'm still on my year-end vacation.

*Thanks to my Other Reader deciding to exhume, organize, and weed the boxes of books under our bed.