(urth) Short Story 3: The Dead Man

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Sun, 3/25/12, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:







Absolutely right about the last two paragraphs being the first to go in later Wolfe. Instead, we might have gotten some kind of narration of confusion or lack of fulfillment. Or likely something about feeling "split" or incomplete even after the revenge since the story mentions a "full human" being both body and soul.


One very small question:


What is the hyena all about when he starts the ritual? He uses "a fine grey powder whose composition would have shocked the average hyena”? Is there something obvious a hyena I'm just missing?


And this line was almost prescient given what writing comes to represent in his own stories: “Writing which disclosed secrets so terrible that more than half of their contents was devoted to telling the reader how to receive them and remain sane.”
I think the hyena, while it is an appropriate familiar for a necromancer like a crow would be, is simply a shameless scavenger that is used to eating the most decayed of meat - and even a hyena would have been shocked at the components of his ritual. What would shock a hyena?  Seems like hyperbole.
 
 I tend not to read TOO much into that.  (factually, some hyenas actually kill their prey, but they have a cowardly reputation as far as I know)
 
Yes, there are some statements in these early stories that are really almost prescient about future Wolfe, I agree - or at least show the direction his nascent obsessions would take him.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20120325/22587f7e/attachment-0004.htm>