A family on an anchored pleasure craft saw the fish and brought it aboard in a net. They were unable to determine what had killed it, though they were only mildly curious. The fate of a single fish held little interest for them, and they threw it into a garbage pail.
After a short while, they went for a swim.
Visiting Dreamthorp – And Coming Back Alive
by Chet Williamson
(First published in Mystery Scene # 22, August/September 1989)
Dreamthorp exists – sort of. Its counterpart is only several miles away from my home, a wonderful chautauqua community named Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania, and it is, as described in my acknowledgment, even more beautiful – and far safer – than Dreamthorp. As my wife and I were walking through its shady streets one evening, I let my imagination go ga-ga, and when I got home I wrote in a notebook, “The Little Houses – sentient houses that destroy their owners. ‘But how should stone live, or wood breathe?’” I have no idea where that quotation came from. I probably made it up, though it smacks of King Lear’s final lament. Sometime later, The Little Houses it became. I had my premise. But there had to be more to a novel than novel ways for wooden items to squish people. And why are these little rolling pins and desk drawers performing radical lobotomies anyway? Indian curses? Nah, that’s been done to death, unless…
What if the Indian curse was a red herring, or maybe just a small part of a larger, more contemporary evil? Or a little of both? I just love ambiguity – I figure that I work so hard writing these things, the readers should have to work a little too.
In my search for that more up-to-date evil, I stumbled across Gilbert Rodman, a true sociopath, involuntary eunuch, and the nastiest person (and perhaps the saddest) I’ve ever written about. When Gilbert came along, I had no choice but to go full-out on the violence scale (he would have carved me up had I refused), and as a result, what with the ravenous toothpicks and “ole Nubby-Stump” (as my friend Greg Nicoll refers to him) on the loose, the book turned into my bloodiest to date – too bloody, it seems, for the tastes of the genteel library newsletter crowd.
When the first draft of The Little Houses was finished, I felt I had a fast-paced and savage, but somehow empty, book. It was desperately in need of (dare I say it) a theme. There. It’s hard to be an ex-English teacher.
And then I came across a very obscure book on my shelves entitled Dreamthorp: Essays written in the Country that I had bought at a library book sale years before, but never read. Alexander Smith, a Scottish poet and essayist who published the book in 1863, had created Dreamthorp as his idealized village (Thorp = Village/of Dream).
And in that glob of tissue that fits so well in my warped brain-pan, everything went click.
My fictional Mount Harmony immediately became Dreamthorp, and I realized that nearly all the characters in the book are motivated by the desire for home, from Laura’s wish to make Dreamthorp the haven from the horrors she has seen, to Gilbert’s need for the father who deserted him years before. I had my theme, and more.
I completely revised the book, and then carefully chose selections from Smith’s original Dreamthorp to use as chapter headings that would comment, dramatically or philosophically, upon the action. They fit so well that my agent assumed that the older Dreamthorp was my creation, and that I had written all the quotations as I had the “Scottish ballad” that was the framing device of my novel, Lowland Rider. But no, Dreamthorp is a real book, and I am thankful for it.
Dreamthorp (mine now, not Smith’s) is the first book I’ve done that underwent no editorial changes, so if it’s not perfect (ha!) the fault is all mine. It’s also the first book I’ve done with a woman as the central character. It wasn’t intended that way, but Laura was so strong and good that she took over, and I’m glad of it. She has self-doubts like the rest of us, ones that are almost crippling at times, but she overcomes them, and she triumphs.
All in all, I must confess to being pleased with the way the book came out. As cruel and furious as it is at times, I hope readers will also find an underlying tenderness at its heart. It’s about evil. But it’s also about home, and the kind of love one can find there. Maybe that’s why I dedicated it to my son. And maybe in a few years I’ll let him read it…
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