I've excerpted the following essay from my website page devoted to 'Oddities & Entities'. Check it out at www.rolandallnach.com
For the full book tour, visit my earlier post, or my page at TLC Book Tours.
"Elmer Phelps"
As a single story, "Elmer Phelps"
nevertheless is the longest piece in 'Oddities & Entities', perhaps because of the
tricky ground that it traverses.
What can I say about this story? Oh,
Elmer, Elmer, Elmer. . .where do I
begin? It's difficult to
discuss this story without giving too much away, as so much of what
happens that might be considered strange, disgusting, and gruesome all
find their subjective justifications and explanations. And that,
if nothing else, is what lies at the heart of "Elmer Phelps", and was
touched upon for a moment in "Boneview": the idea that once one crosses
over the boundaries of everyday life, the common rules of morality we
know might not apply in the ways in which they are accustomed. The
challenge of "Elmer Phelps" was not only to portray such a situation,
but at the same time maintain an awareness that some things, regardless
of how they might attain understanding and even moral equivocation, are
still to be rejected to maintain a basic sense of humanity.
"Elmer Phelps" had its origins in something
much more ordinary than the story it came to be. I've always been
interested in writing a zombie story, not just for my private enjoyment
of almost all things zombie, but for the challenge of writing a
different kind of zombie tale. I still like the idea I developed,
so I won't discuss it here in case I do flesh it out (no pun intended)
to a full length book, but in its original conception as a novel
entitled "Elmer Phelps" I found there to be some deep problems in the
basic logic structure of the story. Despite that I typed up a
short two page story treatment, as I often do for a book, containing
some basic plot points, character profiles/motivations, and some of the
underlying themes.
After that, it collected dust for a year,
though it never left the back of my mind. In the meantime I took
up another book project, a yet unpublished piece of main stream fiction by the title of 'Snowflake', and started hammering away at that. As the title
might suggest, it takes place in a wintry climate. To make this
seeming tangent relevant, I mention all this because while I was toying
with the ideas of a wintry setting and what type of symbolic and
aesthetic elements such a setting could lend to a story, the ideas for "Elmer
Phelps" welled up once more, to the point where I put 'Snowflake' aside and dove into Elmer's story. I backed off from the zombie
idea, and went for something more subtle, and perhaps more penetrating,
as subtle things tend to be.
All that aside, "Elmer Phelps" was meant to
do what I like to often do with my writing, and that is present the
reader with a set of circumstances that on their surface defy
explanation but at the same time challenge the innate compulsion to
condemn such things. In this gray area there lurks not only a
creeping chill for the story but the the anchor point of what I was
trying to map out with 'Oddities & Entities'. Life does not always present
itself to us in black and white and, as Elmer realizes, it's up to the
human mind to make sense of things - "the human mind, with all its three
pounds of eternity."
Although Elmer appears as the second to last
story of 'Oddities & Entities', it was the last piece I wrote for the anthology,
and I wrote it with the direct understanding that it was to lead into the
final story, which was already completed, a story by the title
"Appendage".
Stay tuned for the last installment...
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