Midnight Call
Jonathan Thomas
An artist is summoned to paint the portrait of sinister Mr. Finster in a decaying mansion . . . A suburban couple is vexed by the inveterate lawn-mowing of a ghost . . . In ice-bound Vermont, one farmer's crop is suspiciously bountiful . . . A miniature nymph is found swimming in an office water cooler . . .
These are the bizarre conceptions of Jonathan Thomas, a powerful new writer of weird, horrific, and supernatural fiction who introduces himself to the reading public with this rich and varied short story collection.
Thomas is, however, a practiced hand at terror-weaving, and his work spans the spectrum from comic fantasy to psychological suspense to science fiction. Unifying all his tales is a prose style of singular fluency and grace, enlivened by keen observation and mordant satire.
An artist is summoned to paint the portrait of sinister Mr. Finster in a decaying mansion . . . A suburban couple is vexed by the inveterate lawn-mowing of a ghost . . . In ice-bound Vermont, one farmer's crop is suspiciously bountiful . . . A miniature nymph is found swimming in an office water cooler . . .
These are the bizarre conceptions of Jonathan Thomas, a powerful new writer of weird, horrific, and supernatural fiction who introduces himself to the reading public with this rich and varied short story collection.
Thomas is, however, a practiced hand at terror-weaving, and his work spans the spectrum from comic fantasy to psychological suspense to science fiction. Unifying all his tales is a prose style of singular fluency and grace, enlivened by keen observation and mordant satire.
Maybe because it's only 544 words and doesn't take up a lot of space, "An Office Nymph" has the longest rap sheet of anything in Midnight Call.
It first showed up as xeroxed typescript, with illustrations, in Symbol, a very limited-run artzine by NY friends of friends who'd picked up sponsorship from Cindy Sherman and other "name artists." Symbol was a "handmade magazine" whose cover and contents were pasted into issues of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and other "real" periodicals. It was great fun, but too labor-intensive to last.
From a couple of years later there's footage (whereabouts unknown) of me reciting the story in a desolate former mill for a video documentation of Providence writers. Afterward, "An Office Nymph" appeared in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Fantasy Macabre. It was then included in the 1992 collection Stories From the Big Black House, under the imprint of Providence author and editor Brian Gallagher, who also spearheaded Radio Void magazine and an associated performance troupe, the Radio Void Roadshow.
At the time, though, latching onto distribution or even local reviews for homegrown products was impossible, making Big Black House Brian's first and last foray into the frustrations of book publishing. Sorry, Brian (in
It first showed up as xeroxed typescript, with illustrations, in Symbol, a very limited-run artzine by NY friends of friends who'd picked up sponsorship from Cindy Sherman and other "name artists." Symbol was a "handmade magazine" whose cover and contents were pasted into issues of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and other "real" periodicals. It was great fun, but too labor-intensive to last.
From a couple of years later there's footage (whereabouts unknown) of me reciting the story in a desolate former mill for a video documentation of Providence writers. Afterward, "An Office Nymph" appeared in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Fantasy Macabre. It was then included in the 1992 collection Stories From the Big Black House, under the imprint of Providence author and editor Brian Gallagher, who also spearheaded Radio Void magazine and an associated performance troupe, the Radio Void Roadshow.
At the time, though, latching onto distribution or even local reviews for homegrown products was impossible, making Big Black House Brian's first and last foray into the frustrations of book publishing. Sorry, Brian (in
perpetuity)! Finally, when weird-fiction scholar and Lovecraft expert nonpareil S. T. Joshi, in his capacity as editorial director at Hippocampus Press, was perusing Big Black House for anything to extract for Midnight Call, "An Office Nymph" was one of his choices.
"An Office Nymph" is so brief mainly because I wanted to see how much verbiage a story could shed and still make sense. I was also going through a phase of trying to complete a vignette or sketch or "routine" daily, usually when the supervisors at work weren't looking, though "An Office Nymph" happened in one sitting at the kitchen table on a Friday evening (another time, my roommate back then, the guitarist/band producer Dave Auchenbach, walked in on me working on a "cut-up" at the same table, and offered some trenchant comment about what good use I was making of my college education).
For better or worse, Burroughs and Gysin and ReSearch magazine were on my mind those days, putting me in a mood to "innovate," even if this meant "innovations" on my terms that wouldn't be anything new elsewhere (I think a character in Dickens' Pickwick Papers used a similar truncated diction).
Luckily "An Office Nymph" seems to have managed some distance between itself and what I was reading, maybe by dint of failing as mimicry.
"An Office Nymph" is so brief mainly because I wanted to see how much verbiage a story could shed and still make sense. I was also going through a phase of trying to complete a vignette or sketch or "routine" daily, usually when the supervisors at work weren't looking, though "An Office Nymph" happened in one sitting at the kitchen table on a Friday evening (another time, my roommate back then, the guitarist/band producer Dave Auchenbach, walked in on me working on a "cut-up" at the same table, and offered some trenchant comment about what good use I was making of my college education).
For better or worse, Burroughs and Gysin and ReSearch magazine were on my mind those days, putting me in a mood to "innovate," even if this meant "innovations" on my terms that wouldn't be anything new elsewhere (I think a character in Dickens' Pickwick Papers used a similar truncated diction).
Luckily "An Office Nymph" seems to have managed some distance between itself and what I was reading, maybe by dint of failing as mimicry.
A cellular biologist I used to know was a native of southeastern Massachusetts, a.k.a. true Swamp Yankee country. As a child, he'd found some Lovecraft stories, e.g., "The Lurking Fear," especially scary because of his belief that Lovecraft had been inspired by real life.
As late as the 1980s at least, a few dirt roads in Bristol County, well off the main drag, allegedly led to hardscrabble settlements of a few families apiece who derived their subsistence from pig farming. Intermarriage had progressed to the stage where albino complexions and pink eyes were common, making these folk conspicuous during rare expeditions to shopping plazas.
Up to the early 1700s, the herding of pigs (and of sheep and cattle) had been the economic mainstay in this part of the colonies, begging the question of how old these settlements might have been. The inhabitants wanted nothing other than to be left alone, and blocked their dirt roads with tree trunks, and reportedly blasted rock salt at more persistent trespassers.
It's open to question whether Lovecraft had ever crossed paths with any of these backwoodsmen, though I briefly encountered unsociable gun-toting poachers who may have been cut from the same cloth in the Great Swamp of Washington County, Rhode Island. This reputed existence of "pink-eyed, inbred Swampies" formed some of the basis for "Eben's Portrait," in which a lonely artist is persuaded to do a portrait of the patriarch of "too close a family for a long time."
However, I gave the overly clannish Finsters a mansion and upper-crust pretenses in a postindustrial landscape. Inbreeding is definitely not a pastime exclusive to "hillbillies" and swamp dwellers.
As late as the 1980s at least, a few dirt roads in Bristol County, well off the main drag, allegedly led to hardscrabble settlements of a few families apiece who derived their subsistence from pig farming. Intermarriage had progressed to the stage where albino complexions and pink eyes were common, making these folk conspicuous during rare expeditions to shopping plazas.
Up to the early 1700s, the herding of pigs (and of sheep and cattle) had been the economic mainstay in this part of the colonies, begging the question of how old these settlements might have been. The inhabitants wanted nothing other than to be left alone, and blocked their dirt roads with tree trunks, and reportedly blasted rock salt at more persistent trespassers.
It's open to question whether Lovecraft had ever crossed paths with any of these backwoodsmen, though I briefly encountered unsociable gun-toting poachers who may have been cut from the same cloth in the Great Swamp of Washington County, Rhode Island. This reputed existence of "pink-eyed, inbred Swampies" formed some of the basis for "Eben's Portrait," in which a lonely artist is persuaded to do a portrait of the patriarch of "too close a family for a long time."
However, I gave the overly clannish Finsters a mansion and upper-crust pretenses in a postindustrial landscape. Inbreeding is definitely not a pastime exclusive to "hillbillies" and swamp dwellers.
While I was writing "Doctor Farrell's Goddesses," the idea of incorporating it in a thematic set of stories came to mind (two other items in the series, "The May Day Melée, Explained" and "Midnight Call," dated from a couple of years earlier). I'd been interested since college in Celtic myths and prehistory, and the four major seasonal holidays of the "insular Celts" sounded like promising springboards for some weird tales (Miranda Green's Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend was especially helpful). Right about then, an arts space in downtown Providence had launched a small-press operation, with two chapbooks by local poets under its belt. I'd received a tentative nod for Conjurings and Celtic Holidays, but before it was ready, the small press had lost steam, and the formerly interested parties were on to other things. When Derrick Hussey at Hippocampus Press agreed to publish Midnight Call and Other Stories, he was amenable to letting me cordon those stories off in a discrete section, as originally intended, for kind of a book within a book.
"Doctor Farrell's Goddesses" exploits some years' experience in my sideline as housesitter, which can be an easy but unsatisfactory way to supplement income. Wearing someone else's life, in a superficial sense, for a week or two makes for a mixed blessing. It can be fun living above your means for a spell (you seldom housesit for people poorer than yourself), but it's a constant reminder of your own monetary shortcomings. The job is also good for object lessons in the extent to which a neighbor's house can be foreign terrain. At one posh address, I needed an extension cord in a hurry (long irrelevant story involving a refrigerator), and in the course of ransacking drawers from the front hall to the attic, I dug up two riding crops in widely separated locations, before finding what might have been in the first place I'd looked anywhere else.
Insofar as it involves a one-man pagan revival and/or madness, "Doctor Farrell's Goddesses" doesn't present much of a Lovecraftian front, but there is a connection or two. The setting "Rooseweldt Woods" is modeled on the state park Lincoln Woods, one of Lovecraft's favorite Rhode Island places. The park is also one of those alleged sites of ancient New England standing stones he mentioned on occasion, though any monoliths there are particularly elusive, if not purely subjective. Closer to the "real world," the pond in Lincoln Woods, like its fictional counterpart, is notorious for claiming a life or two every summer, for no straightforward reason.
"Doctor Farrell's Goddesses" exploits some years' experience in my sideline as housesitter, which can be an easy but unsatisfactory way to supplement income. Wearing someone else's life, in a superficial sense, for a week or two makes for a mixed blessing. It can be fun living above your means for a spell (you seldom housesit for people poorer than yourself), but it's a constant reminder of your own monetary shortcomings. The job is also good for object lessons in the extent to which a neighbor's house can be foreign terrain. At one posh address, I needed an extension cord in a hurry (long irrelevant story involving a refrigerator), and in the course of ransacking drawers from the front hall to the attic, I dug up two riding crops in widely separated locations, before finding what might have been in the first place I'd looked anywhere else.
Insofar as it involves a one-man pagan revival and/or madness, "Doctor Farrell's Goddesses" doesn't present much of a Lovecraftian front, but there is a connection or two. The setting "Rooseweldt Woods" is modeled on the state park Lincoln Woods, one of Lovecraft's favorite Rhode Island places. The park is also one of those alleged sites of ancient New England standing stones he mentioned on occasion, though any monoliths there are particularly elusive, if not purely subjective. Closer to the "real world," the pond in Lincoln Woods, like its fictional counterpart, is notorious for claiming a life or two every summer, for no straightforward reason.
"In the Wake of Bridget" takes place in 1816, which really was the "Year Without a Summer." Descriptions regarding the weather that destroyed crops from Vermont to Pennsylvania are based on eyewitness reports. Present-day science attributes the abnormal cold of those months to a major volcanic eruption in the South Pacific, blocking the sunlight with tons of dust in the upper atmosphere and imposing a kind of "nuclear winter." But to stick up for Bridget, who's to say what ultimately causes a volcanic eruption? (In Hawaii, it's the goddess Pele, isn't it?)
The title character's name evokes very divergent connotations out of a single origin. Bridget was one of those saints from the Dark Ages (apparently decanonized in the 1960s; hard to get a straight answer online) whose legend and attributes are rife with connections to the Celtic goddess Brigid, and it could be that she was revered in one benign guise in Christian Britain and Ireland, and worshipped as a more complicated figure at the same time in pagan country.
Protestants of nineteenth century New England probably would have considered both incarnations weird and distasteful. I'm definitely not writing about a beloved saint, but neither is she simply evil… Rather, Bridget's bound by a different set of rules, forcing the mortal protagonist into a no-win impasse between personal loyalty (and happiness) and the general good. The weird tale has a lot of untapped potential, I think, for setting up situations (with some bearing on real life or not) leading to moral grey areas, and I'm fond of coming up with premises delving into that potential.
I don't know if it comes across at all, but "In the Wake of Bridget" was intended to wear the trappings and follow the pattern of a fairy tale. In the purer sense of the Brothers Grimm and even Hans Christian Anderson, that doesn't preclude carnage and nastiness galore, of course. Reading Great Swedish Fairy Tales (a compendium by Elsa Olenius) at the time might have had some influence, even if this story derives from Celtic folklore.
The title character's name evokes very divergent connotations out of a single origin. Bridget was one of those saints from the Dark Ages (apparently decanonized in the 1960s; hard to get a straight answer online) whose legend and attributes are rife with connections to the Celtic goddess Brigid, and it could be that she was revered in one benign guise in Christian Britain and Ireland, and worshipped as a more complicated figure at the same time in pagan country.
Protestants of nineteenth century New England probably would have considered both incarnations weird and distasteful. I'm definitely not writing about a beloved saint, but neither is she simply evil… Rather, Bridget's bound by a different set of rules, forcing the mortal protagonist into a no-win impasse between personal loyalty (and happiness) and the general good. The weird tale has a lot of untapped potential, I think, for setting up situations (with some bearing on real life or not) leading to moral grey areas, and I'm fond of coming up with premises delving into that potential.
I don't know if it comes across at all, but "In the Wake of Bridget" was intended to wear the trappings and follow the pattern of a fairy tale. In the purer sense of the Brothers Grimm and even Hans Christian Anderson, that doesn't preclude carnage and nastiness galore, of course. Reading Great Swedish Fairy Tales (a compendium by Elsa Olenius) at the time might have had some influence, even if this story derives from Celtic folklore.
Northbound Route 7, after crossing Victory Highway in North Smithfield, Rhode Island, is known locally as the Mohegan road. It becomes more and more of a country byway, and eventually one lane of stony, rutted dirt. Widely spaced houses give way to second-growth forest, except where power lines cut a broad grassy swath.
To the left of the road in this neck of the woods, trails lead past low stone walls, house and barn foundations, and what seem like the ruins of a 17th century "stonender." To the right of the road, up a gentle slope, is an iron-railed cemetery containing two or three family names, abandoned for decades.
It's been dubbed "Witches' Hollow," and when Poe and Lovecraft scholar Barton St. Armand introduced me to it ca. 1970, it was a magnet for northern Rhode Island ghost lore. Birds were said to avoid flying in, and no vegetation would flourish there. Anyone foolhardy enough to walk around a certain gravestone thirteen times at midnight risked possession by the tenant of that grave.
Alternately, walking around a certain gravestone three times would conjure the face of the deceased to appear above the epitaph. Curiously, witches never seemed to figure in the rumors about the Hollow.
Witches' Hollow has functioned as a setting for me in three instances: in a novel revised several years ago and which has yet to see print, in the lyrics of a "Yankee Gothic" country tune ("Old Graveyard in the Woods," on the Pot Liquor CD by Angel Dean and Sue Garner), and in the short story "Graveside Friday Night."
One element of the story's locale can be verified, i.e., the Hollow has been extensively vandalized, though I've no idea if the real-life culprits have met with their just desserts. One caveat may be in order… I haven't had the heart to visit the site in ages, after the presence of heavy machinery and felled trees warned of impending "development," so perhaps the Hollow and the derelict foundations have become more than ever a landscape of the mind.
To the left of the road in this neck of the woods, trails lead past low stone walls, house and barn foundations, and what seem like the ruins of a 17th century "stonender." To the right of the road, up a gentle slope, is an iron-railed cemetery containing two or three family names, abandoned for decades.
It's been dubbed "Witches' Hollow," and when Poe and Lovecraft scholar Barton St. Armand introduced me to it ca. 1970, it was a magnet for northern Rhode Island ghost lore. Birds were said to avoid flying in, and no vegetation would flourish there. Anyone foolhardy enough to walk around a certain gravestone thirteen times at midnight risked possession by the tenant of that grave.
Alternately, walking around a certain gravestone three times would conjure the face of the deceased to appear above the epitaph. Curiously, witches never seemed to figure in the rumors about the Hollow.
Witches' Hollow has functioned as a setting for me in three instances: in a novel revised several years ago and which has yet to see print, in the lyrics of a "Yankee Gothic" country tune ("Old Graveyard in the Woods," on the Pot Liquor CD by Angel Dean and Sue Garner), and in the short story "Graveside Friday Night."
One element of the story's locale can be verified, i.e., the Hollow has been extensively vandalized, though I've no idea if the real-life culprits have met with their just desserts. One caveat may be in order… I haven't had the heart to visit the site in ages, after the presence of heavy machinery and felled trees warned of impending "development," so perhaps the Hollow and the derelict foundations have become more than ever a landscape of the mind.
