Piranha to Scurfy: And Other Stories - Hardcover

Rendell, Ruth

 
9780385259804: Piranha to Scurfy: And Other Stories
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385259808 ISBN 13: 9780385259804
Verlag: Doubleday Canada, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

A deeply unsettling collection of stories that is two parts Stephen King, one part Edgar Allan Poe.

"Piranha to Scurfy" is a brooding story of a solitary, middle-aged man who devotes his life to writing scathing letters to newly-published authors. He does so in memory of his dead mother, who nurtured his love of accuracy, and his fervent desire to set things right. She herself is buried in the garden, for reasons that become clear as the story comes to its surprising end.

"The Wink" tells the story of a young woman, raped in a small English town, who has kept the event, and the identity of her assailant, secret for many years. During their inevitable encounters in town, the rapist has added to her humiliation by giving her a leering wink. In the end, the young woman exacts her revenge.

"High Mysterious Union" is a haunting and profoundly disturbing tale of a young man who borrows his friend's vacation home in remote, rural England to work on a literary translation. Told by his friend, after the fact, the story is full of foreboding and regret that she hadn't warned him of her strange experiences with the insular local townspeople.

These and the six other stories in this collection will keep readers transfixed.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ruth Rendell is the author of forty-five books, including Harm Done and A Sight for Sore Eyes. She is the recipient of three Edgar awards, four Gold Daggers, the Commander of the British Empire Award, and the most prestigious Edgar of them all, the Grand Master Award. She lives in London.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"The most brilliant mystery writer of our time." - Patricia Cornwell


Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

It was the first time he had been away on holiday without Mummy. The first time in his life. They had always gone to the Isle of Wight, to Ventnor or Totland Bay, so, going alone, he had chosen Cornwall for the change that people say is as good as a rest. Not that Ribbon's week in Cornwall had been entirely leisure. He had taken four books with him, read them carefully in the B and B's lounge, in his bedroom, on the beach, and sitting on the clifftop, and made meticulous notes in the looseleaf notebook he had bought in a shop in Newquay. The results had been satisfactory, more than satisfactory. Allowing for the anger and disgust making these discoveries invariably aroused, he felt he could say he had had a relaxing time. To use a horrible phrase much favored by Eric Owlberg in his literary output, he had recharged his batteries.

Coming home to an empty house would be an ordeal. He had known it would be, and it was. Instead of going out into the garden, he gave it careful scrutiny from the dining room window. Everything outside and indoors was as he had left it. The house was as he had left it, all the books in their places. Every room contained books. Ribbon was not one to make jokes, but he considered it witty to remark that while other people's walls were papered, his were booked. No one knew what he meant, for hardly anyone except himself ever entered 21 Grove Green Avenue, Leytonstone, and those to whom he uttered his little joke smiled uneasily. He had put up the shelves himself, buying them from Ikea. As they filled he bought more, adding to those already there until the shelves extended from floor to ceiling. A strange appearance was given to the house by this superfluity of books, as the shelves necessarily reduced the size of the rooms, so that the living room, originally fifteen feet by twelve, shrank to thirteen feet by ten. The hall and landing were "booked" as densely as the rooms. The place looked like a library, but one mysteriously divided into small sections. His windows appeared as alcoves set deep in the walls, affording a view at the front of the house of a rather gloomy suburban street, thickly treed. The back gave onto the yellow-brick rears of other houses and, in the foreground, his garden, which was mostly lawn, dotted about with various drab shrubs. At the far end was a wide flower bed the sun never reached and in which grew creeping ivies and dark-leaved flowerless plants that like the shade.

He had got over expecting Mummy to come downstairs or walk into a room. She had been gone four months now. He sighed, for he was a long way from recovering from his loss and his regrets. Work was in some ways easier without her and in others immeasurably harder. She had reassured him; sometimes she had made him strong. But he had to press on—there was really no choice. Tomorrow things would be back to normal.

He began by ranging before him on the desk in the study—though was not the whole house a study?—the book-review pages from the newspapers that had arrived while he was away. As he had expected, Owlberg's latest novel, Paving Hell, appeared this very day in paperback, one year after hardcover publication. It was priced at £6.99 and by now would be in all the shops. Ribbon made a memo about it on one of the plain cards he kept for this purpose. But before continuing he let his eyes rest on the portrait of Mummy in the plain silver frame that stood on the table where used, read, and dissected books had their temporary home. It was Mummy who had first drawn his attention to Owlberg. She had borrowed one of his books from the public library and pointed out to Ribbon with indignation the mass of errors, solecisms, and abuse of the English language to be found in its pages. How he missed her! Wasn't it principally to her that he owed his choice of career, as well as the acumen and confidence to pursue it?

He sighed anew. Then he returned to his newspapers and noted down the titles of four more novels currently published in paperback, as well as the new Kingston Marle, Demogorgon, due to appear this coming Thursday in hardcover with the maximum hype and fanfares of metaphorical trumpets, but almost certainly already in the shops. A sign of the degeneracy of the times, Mummy had said, that a book whose publication was scheduled for May appeared on sale at the end of April. No one could wait these days; everyone was in a hurry. It certainly made his work harder. It increased the chances of his missing a vitally important novel that might have sold out before he knew it was in print.

Ribbon switched on his computer and checked that the printer was linked to it. It was only nine in the morning. He had at least an hour before he need make his trip to the bookshop. Where should it be today? Perhaps the City or the West End of London. It would be unwise to go back to his local shop so soon and attract too much attention to himself. Hatchard's, perhaps then, or Books Etc. or Dillon's, or even all three. He opened the notebook he had bought in Cornwall, reread what he had written, and with the paperback open on the desk, reached for the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and Whittaker's Almanac. Referring to the first two and noting down his finds, he began his letter.

21 Grove Green Avenue London E11 4ZH

Dear Joy Anne Fortune,

I have read your new novel Dreadful Night with very little pleasure and great disappointment. Your previous work has seemed to me, while being without any literary merit whatsoever, at least to be fresh, occasionally original, and largely free from those errors of fact and slips in grammar that, I may say, characterize Dreadful Night.

Look first at page 24. Do you really believe "desiccated" has two s's and one c? And if you do, has your publisher no copy editor whose job it is to recognize and correct these errors? On page 82 you refer to the republic of Guinea as being in East Africa and as a former British possession, instead of being in West Africa and formerly French, and on page 103 to the late General Sikorski as a one-time prime minister of Czechoslovakia rather than of Poland. You describe, on page 139, "hadith" as being the Jewish prayers for the dead instead of what it correctly means, the body of tradition and legend surrounding the Prophet Muhammad and his followers, and on the following page "tabernacle" as an entrance to a temple. Its true meaning is a portable sanctuary in which the Ark of the Covenant was carried.

Need I go on? I am weary of underlining the multifarious mistakes in your book. Needless to say, I shall buy no more of your work and shall advise my highly literate and discerning friends to boycott it.

Yours sincerely, Ambrose Ribbon

The threat in the last paragraph was an empty one. Ribbon had no friends and could hardly say he missed having any. He was on excellent, at least speaking, terms with his neighbors and various managers of bookshops. There was a cousin in Gloucestershire he saw occasionally. Mummy had been his friend. There was no one he had ever met who could approach replacing her. He wished, as he did every day, she were back there beside him and able to read and appreciate his letter.

He addressed an envelope to Joy Anne Fortune care of her publisher (she was not one of "his" authors unwise enough to reply to him on headed writing paper), put the letter inside it, and sealed it up. Two more must be written before he left the house, one to Graham Prink pointing out mistakes in Dancing Partners, "lay" for "lie" in two instances and "may" for "might" in three, and the other to Jeanne Pettle to tell her that the plot and much of the dialogue in Southern Discomfort had been blatantly lifted from Gone With the Wind. He considered it the most flagrant plagiarism he had seen for a long while. In both he indicated how distasteful he found the authors' frequent use of obscenities, notably those words beginning with an f and a c, and the taking of the Deity's name in vain.

At five to ten Ribbon switched off the computer, took his letters, and closed the door behind him. Before going downstairs, he paid his second visit of the day to Mummy's room. He had been there for the first time since his return from Cornwall at seven the previous evening, again before he went to bed, and once more at seven this morning. While he was away his second greatest worry had been that something would be disturbed in there, an object removed or its position changed, for though he did his own housework, Glenys Next-door had a key and often in his absence, in her own words, "popped in to see that everything was okay."

But nothing was changed. Mummy's dressing table was exactly as she had left it, the two cut-glass scent bottles with silver stoppers set one on each side of the lace-edged mat, the silver-backed hairbrush on its glass tray alongside the hair tidy, and the pink pincushion. The wardrobe door he always left ajar so that her clothes could be seen inside, those dear garments, the afternoon dresses, the coats and skirts—Mummy had never possessed a pair of trousers—the warm winter coat, the neatly placed pairs of court shoes. Over the door, because he had seen this in an interiors magazine, he had hung, folded in two, the beautiful white and cream tapestry bedspread he had once given her but that she said was too good for daily use. On the bed lay the dear old one her own mother had worked, and on its spotless if worn bands of lace, her pink silk nightdress. He lingered, looking at it.

After a moment or two, he opened the window two inches at the top. It was a good idea to allow a little fresh air to circulate. He closed Mummy's door behind him and, carrying his letters, went downstairs. A busy day lay ahead. His tie straightened, one button only out of the three on his linen jacket done up, he set the burglar alarm. Eighteen fifty-two was the code, one eight five two, the date of the first edition of Roge...

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Verlag
Doubleday Canada
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385259808
ISBN 13 
9780385259804
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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