Letters from the Apostles

So… let’s talk about books.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night -

This one was a book from my grandparents’ house - at a guess, likely something one of my uncles owned as a teenager.

An anthology of horror stories - or maybe more accurately, mildly spooky stories, because most are not terribly frightening. A lot of them mention a spooky subject rather than really delving into its harrowing emotional ramifications, which is a little disappointing.

There are a few memorable ones.

“It’s a Good Life” (Jerome Bixby) involves a town held captive by a sort of proto-Stepford Cuckoo, a three-year-old psychic with virtually unlimited power. As might be expected, he doesn’t fully understand the damage he does to others - say, ‘playing with’ a mouse - and even his well-intentioned acts are often horrific for the townsfolk. In self-defense, the townsfolk have resorted to insisting everything is good, even when it’s very much not - because even thinking about a problem might make the child decide to do something.

The part which I found particularly striking was the almost post-apocalyptic character of the town, which has been stuck in a pocket dimension for three years - they’re desperately trying to keep food and basic supplies going, and anything novel, any surprise at all, is a coveted treasure. People’s forgotten attic boxes are now prized commodities for gifts and special occasions - and soon even those small surprises will run out too.

The child is clearly showing sociopathic symptoms from the beginning - see also, ‘playing’ with mice - but it wasn’t clear to me until quite late in the story that this wasn’t a malevolent, say, twelve-year-old. The fact that he’s three is particularly harrowing, because there just isn’t enough cognitive development yet to even potentially reason with him.

“Vintage Season” (C.L. Moore) is - pardon the spoiler for a short story from 1946 - a story about an ordinary landlord who slowly realizes his new tenants are time travelers from the distant future. And not just time travelers, but tragedy tourists, callous to the human suffering they’ve come to watch for fun.

Oliver spoke louder against the roaring from beyond the windows. “But you’ve got the power! Youl could alter history, if you wanted to - wipe out all the pain and suffering and tragedy -“
“All of that passed away long ago,” Cenbe said.
“Not— now! Not— this!”
Cenbe looked at him enigmatically for a while. Then— “This, too,” he said.

Quite good. The parallels to real-world tragedy tourism are very much there, and Oliver’s slow realization that these people are real to him - but he is not and never will be real to them.

“The Fly” (George Langelaan) is also interesting, mostly from a purely historical perspective given the movie it’s based on. This story is framed as a murder-mystery solved after the fact, which allows for more emotional distance than I suspect the movie would, and certainly there aren’t the gruesome depictions the 1986 movie is famous for. There are some interesting themes tying into post-war technological acceleration too - the drive to create new technology and devices in order to be safe against Russia or the next great crisis. (Also, everyone’s French. Go figure.)

But yeah, a lot that just don’t really hit home too much for me; a lot that tells instead of showing.

As promised, I’m giving this one along with its companion to J, and no real regrets about that.


When the Dolls Woke (Marjorie Filley Stover) -

I suspect this was a book my mom picked up at a garage sale when I was very young, because it’s from 1986 - too new to be one of my aunts’ and uncles’ books, and too old to have been bought new for me.

It’s unfortunately one which really shows its age, which is a bummer; I remember having some fond feelings for it as a small child. (It's also one I re-read in 2022, and kept for pure nostalgia reasons then. I think I'm feeling less charitable toward it now because I've been going through my kids' books, and... I have better.)

Briefly, a then-wealthy New England family built a dollhouse for their young daughter around 1900. Generations go by, and eventually, the 90-year-old aunt of the protagonist, a young girl, sends the dollhouse and comes to visit. They bond over restoring the dollhouse to its former glory, while the girl uses the excuse of “come see my dollhouse” as a way to make friends at her new school. Also, they eventually find secret jewels in the dollhouse that solve auntie’s money problems forever, because that’s just a thing in this sort of story.

The whole story is told from the dolls’ point of view, which is fairly shallowly sketched - they take very little initiative compared to other dollhouse characters, like those in The Castle in the Attic, and are almost wholly shaped by their children’s imagination.

Pretty much, they want human attention of any kind, are mildly baffled by how the world has changed in the last hundred years, and sometimes wish for something like ‘decorating the dollhouse for Christmas.’ They’re unambiguously magic, but they use their agency only twice: to cut a small branch off the Christmas tree for their own tree, and to clue the humans in on the secret jewel compartment.

Most of the culture clash is fairly benign - e.g., the modern little girl imagines that the doll matriarch cooks dinner, rather than having it be done by servants.

One standout exception, though - the Black doll. She’s named Martinique, she speaks broken English, and she’s a witch who everyone fears - possibly including the human characters. She does things like “try to collect a girl’s blood for her cauldron”, and what appears to be planning a voodoo doll. She’s a malevolent force until the very end, when a minor act of kindness - the protagonist makes her new bedding in bright colors - flips her to the side of good.

(She’s also a servant and maid in the house, and never treated as an equal - and there is another implied-White servant doll, but it’s all portrayed as basically old-fashioned and not…….. gross.)

Honestly, that kind of ruins the whole thing for me - and it does take up a pretty sizeable chunk of the pagecount. It’s clearly meant to be a “being nice to people who look different will often make them nicer” moral, but… oof. Not great.

I think I’m donating this one; I have some nostalgia for it, but I have better stories about magic dollhouses, and I’d feel kind of uncomfortable passing it down to a kid in the family.