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+ Fiction, Short stories, Short story

The Death of a Killer?

by

Photo by Irham Setyaki on Unsplash.

You can also read this short story on my Substack.

Every now and again a little victim is spared because she smiled, because he’s got freckles, because they begged. And that’s how you live with yourself. That’s how you slaughter millions. Because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind’s in the right direction, you happen to be kind.

Doctor Who, “Boom Town”

She was my last job.

My name’s not on any list of mass murderers. But that’s only because I have so many names and I pick them up and put them away again so often and so easily that no recordkeeper human or otherwise knows me as one man.

I quit the Service when I figured out that I could make more scratch with my gun without my badge but the Service still wanted to hire me for jobs and I would work them if they paid me well. They always did.

 They paid me five hundred grand for her.

That should have told me how good, how important, she was. That and they weren’t even willing to let her live and write in exile where her words could carry back home on anything as droplet sized as a Tweet.

She was lucky I was thorough.

I’d learnt the best jobs are the end of days or maybe even weeks of observation, and once I landed in New Delhi I became like a fly on her wall.

She slept in her apartment in Jor Bagh and I was in my white van parked on the other side of the street.

She woke up at 6am and ate breakfast, oatmeal with mango and coconut and chai, bathed, dressed, and left her apartment and drove to Delhi University, where she taught postgrads about Shakespeare, Simic, and Stallings, every day Monday to Friday. And I followed her.

It was Thursday November 9 2023 and at 1:30pm she gave a reading of her poetry. I was in the audience.

That was when I heard it.

Her words rose from her mouth like the smouldering mist from the cracked, concave head of a volcano. They twirled upwards around her almond face and bushy raven mane and her butterfly eyes, and they filled the lecture hall ceiling and then they grew so heavy they rained down on me, dripping and then pouring and then rushing inside my ears.

They were still there the night after next when I was ready to pull the trigger.

I tried to ignore them. I was in the back of my van parked across the street from her apartment. I was holding my rifle up. Its tip was aimed out the side window. I’d opened the side window. The bullet wouldn’t shatter the glass and attract attention or make a mess. I aimed the rifle up towards her study window on the left-hand side of her apartment facing the street. She always wrote at her desk in front of that window on a Saturday night with the window open. The bullet wouldn’t shatter her window either. There would be no sound. No footprint of glass shards anyone could follow back to me. I looked through my rifle scope. I tilted the rifle slightly up. The target etched in red lines inside the scope’s eye was in the dead centre of her forehead.

But I could still hear her words.

I couldn’t stop hearing them.

I didn’t want to stop hearing them.

In that business, if you mess up a job you don’t just get a bad reference.

I got the first flight out of Delhi and migrated towards my safe house buried in the snow, where I only see the sun for six months a year, via Abu Dhabi, London, and Reykjavik.

I stopped at a bookstore at Heathrow and bought a copy of a book of her poetry. Its title was a question: The Death of a Killer? I thought it was like she was asking me that question.

+ Artistic criticism, Literary criticism, Nonfiction

Stan Lee’s Super Power Part VIII: The X-Men

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You can also read this article on my Substack.

Who or what could be stranger than Dr Strange? After creating the Master of Black Magic in April 1963 Stan Lee gave his answer in July that same year: the X-Men.

But the original X-Men were not the X-Men I have known and loved through the 90s animated series, Wolverine and the X-Men, and Bryan Singer’s films. They were simultaneously one of Stan’s most impressive feats in characterisation but also one of his greatest failures.

Every writer can learn from how Stan created the X-Men.

Stan faced a problem. He wanted to create a superhero team but he’d hit the FF with cosmic rays, Bruce Banner with gamma rays, and sent a radioactive spider to bite Peter Parker. He was running out of miracles to grant his heroes powers.

Stan described what he did next as the coward’s way out. The heroes would be born with their powers rather than receive them by some turn or twist on that highway called Fate.

I disagree that what Stan did was cowardly. Einstein said that we can’t solve our problems with the thinking that created them. Stan solved the problem of where the X-Men would come from by throwing out the thinking that made the problem. He thought he needed a miracle but he couldn’t find one, and he ditched the need for a miracle. The characterisation gridlock he was stuck in then melted away. Stan solved his problem by overcoming the thinking that created it. This is what makes a “Eureka!” moment.

“How Stan Lee Created the X-Men” is a story that every writer should sit down and listen to when they find themselves in that same gridlock, that seemingly inescapable and circular grind between two irreconcilable needs of your writing, that Stan was in and that every writer finds themselves trapped in at least once.

But the original X-Men are also a lesson in how not to write characters

They’re a badly orchestrated band. There are five original X-Men (Cyclops, Angel, Beast, Ice-Man, and Jean Grey), and except for those last two they’re all the same character. Cyclops, Angel, and Beast stand peering out the window watching Jean arrive at their school for the first time, and there’s not a fingernail’s worth of difference between their dialogue. “Wow! She’s a living doll!” Cyclops says. “Look at that face…and the rest of her!” Angel says. “All of a sudden, I’m in no hurry to graduate from this place,” Beast says. All three are horny teenage boys. There’s not the nuance, the fine shades, of character in Disney Channel high school sitcoms that have dumb nerds and popular brainiacs in one show, or in the trio of Jim, Judy, and Plato in Rebel Without A Cause who are all troubled teens but with completely different troubles. These teenagers made Stan’s original X-Men taste bland like vanilla for me. A band that sings one song all in the same key just sounds flat.

Stan forgot this when making the X-Men, and it turned his eureka moment of characterisation into a cautionary tale for all writers about character.

+ Fiction, Short stories

A Fly Lying on Its Back

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Photo by Erik Karits on Unsplash.

You can also read this story on my Substack page.

My room was upstairs but I heard the party downstairs all night.

It swelled up inside the living room, prodding its elbows into the kitchen and the hallway and at times stretching out to the base of the stairs and the front door’s threshold at the end of the hallway, and it spilled out into the backyard. It was Dad’s latest attempt to live like Jay Gatsby on a high-school English teacher’s pay. Its noise seeped into my sleep and stained my dreams.

I woke up and I smelt booze downstairs and I felt a chill.

Someone had left the front door open. I walked down the steps and closed it.

Dad was lying face down on the couch. His arms hung over the sides of the couch. If he just had a knife in his back he’d look just like a murder victim. I expected that, but the snapped stem of a cocktail glass was stabbed in the TV’s face, and there was a burnt faux scarf lying across the dining table and it looked like a massive and charred umbilical cord.

I walked into the kitchen. There wasn’t much left in the fridge but I found some eggs. I filled a saucepan with water and dropped two eggs into the saucepan to hard-boil them for my breakfast, and I lifted the saucepan onto the stove. I watched the eggs boil and I thought about Dad. I thought about how he was drunk most mornings. I thought about the cheap Christmas and birthday presents I got and how much he spent weekly on parties. I thought about Mum and the night they got drunk and she choked on her own vomit.

I cursed Dad inside the quiet cave of my mouth. My serpentine tongue hissed and thrashed.

Then I saw, a thumb’s distance away from the light grey hot plate, a still fly lying on its back. It was dead.

Maybe it had died crawling towards the heat in the cold night.

I watched this dead fly, and I thought about that a lot.

And then I walked back into the living room to check on Dad.

“Dad?” I shook his shoulder.

Nothing.

“Dad?” I shook harder and still nothing.

“DAD!”

I shoved both my hands into his shoulder. He rolled off the couch onto the floor.

A ball of vomit was lodged in his mouth. His head rolled limply to the left and the eyes rolled the same way in the sockets. A fly circled the body and landed on the body’s face and walked slowly across the still eyes, and the fly reached the mouth and began drinking the vomit from the mouth.

My tongue screamed but lead balls of tears fell from my eyes.

+ Artistic criticism, Literary criticism, Nonfiction

Stan Lee’s Superpower Part VII: A Strange Tale

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Stan Lee meets (in a fashion) Dr Strange over 50 years after creating the master of the mystic arts.

You can also read this article on my Substack.

After Stan Lee created Iron Man in 1962 the roster of iconic Marvel heroes he would create was almost complete, but his next invention was neither an ideal man like Tony Stark nor an everyman like Peter Parker. He was…strange.

He was defined by mystery, right from the very start. “I need help!” a haunted man says on the first page of Strange Tales # 110 after nightmares have kept him awake for another night. “I’ve heard of a name-spoken only in whispers…he dabbles in black magic! Perhaps he can help me!” Stan’s master of black magic exists in an alluring mist even before you meet him. 

But this sorcerer is also tight-lipped. “Speak…” he tells the man who comes to him to chase away his nightmares. “Enough!” he orders when the man’s completed his tale. He releases no drops or drips in which you could glimpse any feelings, history, or motive. He stands inside the panels as serenely enigmatic as a buddha. Nothing he says punctures the enchanting mist that surrounds him.

But he does make the poor, tortured man a promise. “Tonight I shall…find the answer to your dream!…By entering your dream!!!” Through the mist comes a promise of the impossible, and it comes on a voice so confident in what it says that I believed the promise would be fulfilled and went into the mist to see it happen. Edgar Allan Poe was one author Stan read as a boy. Stan’s sorcerer hero is a direct descendant of Poe’s enigmatic yet dramatic style. “I know not how it was but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.” This sentence from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” wouldn’t sound out of place in Strange Tales # 110. Nor would this sentence from The Masque of the Red Death: “No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.” Like Stan’s sorcerer’s dialogue, they’re all general rather than specific yet shot through with vows that the strange, bizarre, and bloodcurdling will follow. Stan learnt Poe’s art of being enigmatic without becoming boring, and he filled his magician’s mouth with it.

This magician also practiced magic in the real world. He lived in Greenwich Village. In his first adventure in Strange Tales # 110 he was threatened by the ruler of the nightmare realm but also by a man with a gun. Like JK Rowling and Guillermo del Toro, Stan inserted and enmeshed his magical character into our world. He gave us the excitement of magic but here on Earth rather than on Middle-Earth, continuing his talent of combining the extraordinary with the everyday.

His sorcerer was and still is an enigma that walks our Earth. He is a living mystery that could live next door. He is…Dr Strange!

+ Fiction, Short stories, Short story

A Matter of Life and Sex

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Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

You can also read this story on my Substack.

She first saw him on a street corner in the red-light district. He was leaning against a lamppost and he looked like he needed it for support. The other women walked past him and he watched them pass but he never opened his lips to call for their services.

            She thought he looked sad.

            “What’s the matter?”

            He looked at her and began crying slowly. The wet streaks the tears left down his cheeks stained and smudged his tan and square face.

            He sat down next to her on the end of the sofa bed in the apartment where she often took clients and he told her the story.

            Their marriage, he said, had turned like coffee after it’s gone cold. The flavour was still there but the warmth was gone. They exchanged no more than three words a day at breakfast and they were: “Pass the sugar.” Not even a please.

            They still laid each other but they didn’t make love. Even amidst the sex she didn’t smile at him and she didn’t speak to him, and he never smiled at her or spoke to her. Their legs, coiled around each other’s thighs, like snakes strangling a tree trunk, crushing their hips and buttocks, were the sole bonds holding them together.

            Then one day it just…stopped.

His instrument remained stiff and inert like a dog’s tongue butcher-knifed from the floor of the poor beast’s mouth and tossed into the gutter.

            They spent three frustrating nights together.

            And then he woke up the next morning and she wasn’t in bed next to him,  her jewellery was gone from the drawers, and her wardrobe was bare.

            He stopped talking.

            “What next?”

            “There isn’t anything next.” He looked down at the floor between his knees and he was holding his knees with both his hands.

            She slid across the bed end to press herself against him and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and she pulled his face into her shoulder and she let him sob and sob and sob there…until.

            He raised his head out of her shoulder.

            His eyes were wide open.

            “What is it?”

            He looked down at his groin, his pants straining against something rising underneath, smiled and said: “I feel…something.”

+ Artistic criticism, Literary criticism, Nonfiction

Stan Lee’s Superpower Part VI: Iron Man

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Photo by Igor Bumba on Unsplash

You can also read this article on my Substack page.

Spider-Man and Thor were the purest examples of Stan Lee’s super-powered common men, but Iron Man flies in the face of any assertion that these were the only characters Stan Lee could create.

            In 1961 Stan created Bruce Banner who was an Oppenheimer amongst boneheads. When he created the billionaire Tony Stark and armoured hero Iron Man in 1962 in Tales of Suspense # 31, Stan came closer than he ever had before to creating an ideal man.

            Tony Stark is the man few of us are but who we all want to be. His life is defined by achievement, wealth, and glamour. “General,” he tells a visitor to his lab, “you will see my tiny transistor increase the power of this small magnet so tremendously that it will open that locked vault.” The general doesn’t believe him. “Oh, come now, Stark! That just isn’t possible!” But when Stark throws the switch the solid metal door strains, bends, and is finally torn apart by Stark’s invention. On top of this genius, Stark is rich and handsome. Stan calls him “a sophisticate and a scientist! A millionaire bachelor, as much at home in a laboratory as in high society” and a woman tells him “The riviera was a real drag till you showed up, darling!” Stark is a sexy Thomas Edison: a man of Promethean-like inventive powers who could drive up to the Ritz in a Rolls Royce with Raquel Welch on his arm.

            But he is also a hero. He’s not just a mind or a Rolex-wearing pretty boy. The Red warlord Wong-Chu captures the fatally injured Stark in Vietnam and the rotund tyrant orders him to build weapons but instead Stark builds his Iron Man armour to escape. “I know I’ve only days to live,” he thinks, “but my last act will be to defeat this grinning, smirking red terrorist!” Stark is dying but he doesn’t give his mind to this villain. He uses it to transform himself from a helpless and dying captive into an invincible knight in mechanized armour. As Iron Man, he grabs and tosses Wong-Chu through the air and is immune to the bullets, grenades, and bazookas of Wong-Chu’s troops. At his lowest point, this forger of weapons transforms himself into a weapon to defeat the villain. He does what is right and does it spectacularly.

            But not without a cost. “In order to remain alive,” Stark laments from inside his iron shell, “I must spend the rest of my life in this iron prison.” Stark is sealed inside his suit like the Man in the Iron Mask. His great power also becomes his great handicap. Stan doesn’t let this ideal man escape without some scar.

            Stan Lee diluted Stark’s purity with tragedy. He wouldn’t create a perfect, ideal man until 1964 when he created the Man Without Fear.

+ Fiction, Poetry

One Night

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Image by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash.
Mum and Dad were out
Late and I found
This doorway into yesterday.

Yesterday’s paper
Lay at the feet of the privy.

I opened its black-etched battle terrain map
Of letters and numbers paving sentences
Connecting into streets
Inside the cities of paragraphs
That were locked inside their columned borders.

I pressed my face into the map
And fell through this doorway
Into those cities and streets
That I still walk
And never want to leave.

+ Uncategorized

Stan Lee’s Superpower Part V: Thor

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(This is Part V in my ongoing series devoted to answering the question: “Was Stan Lee a great writer?”).

Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash.

Thor wasn’t always a god.

            When Stan Lee created him in Journey Into Mystery # 83  in June 1962, Thor was just a mortal like you and me. He was “Dr Don Blake, an American vacationing in Europe.” That’s all he was: a doctor on holiday. We’ve all been to a doctor and we’ve all been on holiday. Thor didn’t come to us as a Herculean titan descending from the clouds but as a man in a suit, hat and tie you could walk past on the street.

            Dr Blake becomes Thor by chance. He discovers stone men from space who’ve come to conquer Earth and flees from the aliens into a cave. “I might as well wait for the stone men to find me,” he sobs, “I-I’m trapped!” He only escapes by discovering the hammer that transforms him into “Thor!! The legendary God of Thunder!! The mightiest warrior of all mythology!!” Dr Blake didn’t try to become Thor, like Bruce Wayne trained to become Batman. Like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk, he gained his powers by chance.

            This accident gave this common man the power to be a hero. Dr Blake couldn’t defeat the Stone Men any more than Peter Parker could defeat Dr Octopus. But Thor can. The Stone Men trap him in their metal “captive cage” but he pulls the bars apart with his bare hands and smashes their giant mechanized “Mechano-Monster” to pieces. “The human is too mighty-too skilled in the art of battle,” the Stone Men cry. “BACK!! Back to the ships at once,” they yell and run, “We must flee this accursed planet!!” Thor began the story as a helpless common man but ends it having vanquished every weapon the villains raised against him and driven them back into space.

            Thor began his life the same as Stan Lee’s other super-powered common men, like Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four: as someone familiar to real people who gains the power by fate to become a hero by defeating the villains. 

+ Fiction, Short stories, Short story

The Sweet Smell of Mudd

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Mudd had been sure the man was a poofter.

            He was coming out of the dog joint and Mudd was going in. He held the door open for Mudd and Mudd saw, in the mustard light cast by the neon hot dog sign over the door, his thin, feminine chin and nose and his lavender overcoat. Mudd walked through the door. He didn’t say thanks.

            Mudd thought he should have waited until after dinner to tell his wife he was leaving her. “I’d be eating steak and mushrooms and mashed potatoes,” he thought, “instead of this.” He bit into the end of his hot dog and tore it off. The frank was soft and slick with sticky butter and stinking grease.

            Mudd paid his bill without leaving a tip and left for Dolley’s apartment.

Alexander “Mudd” Walker had his own column in the Moonshine Telegram. It was the highest office in the traditionally women-dominated field of gossip columns. He was the most successful sniffer, sampler, and purveyor of “the sweet smell of mud” as his editor called it and he could read a person’s soul in the knit and colours of their tie.

            That’s how he knew Dolley loved him. His editor’s newest secretary had asked him to join him for coffee the third Tuesday after she began the job AND she’d warned him about the dangers of missing sleep before she left one night when he stayed behind late to finish his column.

            He rode the elevator up Dolley’s building and when he stepped out onto her floor he saw, and his jaw fell to the floor, the man he’d thought was a poofter on Dolley’s door step.

            And she had her arms around him and her mouth on his.

            “Oh Monty,” she purred and looked at his thin, feminine chin and nose and his lavender overcoat hungrily. “Look at what studies in Paris have done to you.”

+ Artistic criticism, Literary criticism, Nonfiction

Stan Lee’s Superpower Part IV: Spider-Man

by

You can also read this article on my Substack.

By 1962, Stan Lee had created the Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk. In June 1962, he created Spider-Man and reached the height of his characterisation craft.

Spider-Man, AKA Peter Parker, is a real person.

He’s loved by his family. His Aunt May makes him his favourite breakfast of wheat cakes and thinks “the sun [rises] and set[s] upon her nephew,” and his Uncle Ben warns his wife not too “fatten him up too much…I can hardly out-wrestle him now” and thinks his nephew is “a pretty special lad.”

He’s liked by his teachers. Stan writes that “The faculty at Midtown High were also fond of the clean-cut, hard-working honor student,” and Peter’s teacher tells him to “Keep up the good work…and you’re sure to rate a scholarship when you graduate!”

But he’s shunned by his classmates. They gather in a large crowd on one side of the title page, leaving him alone, downcast and small, and call him a “bookworm [who] wouldn’t know a cha-cha from a waltz!”

Peter is a good person struggling for acceptance like many real people.

He’s more real than any of Stan’s previous characters. The FF went clothes shopping and met friends for tea like real people but these were just mannerisms. The Thing and Sue Storm just dropped their shopping and tea and dashed off to save the world when they had to. Spider-Man is different. Peter sobs after again being ridiculed by his class mates and says “Some day I’ll show them!…Some day they’ll be sorry-sorry that they laughed at me!” He’s angry and to get back at the world he becomes Spider-Man to become a celebrity, make cash, and look out for number one. Spider-Man doesn’t drop what makes him like real people to go off and save the world. His struggles and his pain that he shares with so many real people is the core of his character and it’s what drives his story.

And his story sweeps from triumph to tragedy. Across just ten pages, Spider-Man goes from nerd to super-powered TV star and then to “a lean, silent figure slowly fad[ing] into the gathering darkness” after learning he’s partly to blame for his dear Uncle Ben’s murder. Spider-Man is a real person but his story is epic.

Stan Lee gave Spider-Man an everyman’s pain to ignite his amazing transformation into Stan’s most spectacular hero.

+ Fiction, Haikus, Poetry

Go West and Find

by

Hot Dog and Burger

wrappers rolling along like

Old West Tumbleweeds.

+ Artistic criticism, Literary criticism, Nonfiction

Stan Lee’s Superpower Part III: The Incredible Hulk

by

You can also read this article on my Substack.

In 1961 Stan Lee wrote Fantastic Four # 1 but in 1962 he took a sharp turn onto a bomb testing site and created his next hero: Bruce Banner and the Incredible Hulk.

            Bruce Banner is different from the FF. He doesn’t meet a friend for tea or go clothes shopping like Sue Storm and the Thing did in Fantastic Four # 1. There’s no blending of the everyday with the extraordinary. Banner isn’t like many real people. “YOU FOOL!” his assistant Igor accosts him. “Nobody has checked your work! If you made an error, you might blow up half the continent!!” Banner replies: “I don’t make errors Igor!” Banner just as calmly brushes off General “Thunderbolt” Ross when Ross demands to know if Banner is “going to test that blamed bomb or not?” and tells Ross that he “must be sure every precaution has been taken” since they “are tampering with powerful forces.” Banner is a man of intellect who “detest[s] men who think with their fists.” He’s the rational mind real people should aspire to but so few actually are. Igor and Ross are more representative of the majority of real people. Banner is an ideal man rather than a common man.

            This makes him interesting. He is an Oppenheimer-like figure. Banner’s intellect has created “the most awesome weapon ever created by man-The Incredible G-Bomb!” His intellect and distaste for brute force puts him at odds with a world full of people, typified by Igor and Ross, who only want to yell at and shake problems. Being the ideal of human intellect gives Banner power and puts him in constant conflict with the world of common, stupid people around him.

            His transformation into the Incredible Hulk in the rays of his own invention only makes Banner a more compelling character. It enfolds him in a delicious layer of irony. The Hulk is a “creature…which despises reason and worships power” Banner says. “FOOL!” the Hulk bellows at Banner’s teenage companion Rick Jones. “I am glad it happened. I’d rather be me, than that puny weakling in the picture.” The Hulk is a creature of pure physical power. Yet he shares a body with a man who is pure intellect and despises brute force. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Bruce Banner and the Hulk must each become their antithesis. Stan Lee acknowledged Robert Louis Stevenson’s story as an inspiration when creating the Hulk. The character’s double-identity is not just another brilliant layer of characterisation but a demonstration of Stan’s ability to draw on his literary influences. Bruce Banner alone is a good character but Bruce Banner AKA the Hulk (or the Hulk AKA Bruce Banner) is a great character thanks to Stan Lee’s mixture of irony and influence.

            The Hulk and Bruce Banner were the first characters to show Stan Lee’s gift for characterisation didn’t just lie in creating everyman superheroes.

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