(urth) Short Story 4: The Dead Man

[Marc Aramini]

Yes, I agree, especially looking back now to a time without easy access to the internet; it is pretty easy for me to look up the terms in a general database and find references - Gene seems to me obsessively complete in his reasearch even very early in his career.  
 
The gun stories we are coming up to now are so meticulous in their detail about the type of wood used in construction, how long it would take for the scent of that wood to fade, etc.  Even in his fairly amateur works, he really does make most other writers look very shoddy and sloppy - this is why I feel when something is elided in Wolfe, HE knows exactly what should feel the gap, and it was engineered that way.  

--- On Thu, 3/29/12, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:


From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Short Story 4: The Dead Man
To: "Craig Brewer" <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>, "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Thursday, March 29, 2012, 6:30 PM



I can only add to this that the depth of research needed for this little OMG-I'm-the-ghost ghost story is remarkable. It's not entirely convincing, because of the little Orientalist "footnotes," but the sheer legwork to get us into the peasant's mind---banter of women, jungle species succession, the croc's chimney, if true (I can't confirm it)---is commendable. 

Incidentally, the croc is known as the "mugger" crocodile and does lie in wait for prey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugger_crocodile). However, the manner in which it actually killed the peasant sounds more like the "death roll" described for the saltwater croc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltwater_crocodile). One would need to delve deeper than Wikipedia to  sort it out further, but the conflation works, if conflation it is. 

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