Challenge 302 Response

The Imagery of “Elevator”

by Bill Bowler

This one totally cracks me up! What a vision! And what language! It’s just barely under control, and that’s being charitable (see, for example, the switch to present tense after the opening paragraphs).

The story seems to be set in some crude inferno with an incessant and incredible stream of dense mixed metaphors that is a marvel to experience:

“A set of bulky power lines sat right above his balcony. They crackled and hissed all the time. They sounded mad, and Clark always thought that one of them would break free and rattle the skin loose from every bone in his body in one cracking lash, like an electric bull whip from hell. He once saw a pigeon fry to death up there. It was left clutching the line with one calloused foot. It must have been soldered to the cable when the spark exploded through its small body, charred from foot to beak like a piece of charcoal with wings. It had been dangling upside down there for the past month...”

Objects are personified:

His bed had recently collapsed on him. He came home exhausted one night with only one thing on his mind — SLEEP. He dropped his tools all over the floor and left his boots in the hallway, falling backwards towards his bed like a weary person collapsing into the arms of a charismatic preacher. His bed must have been made out of false wood, because it decided not to catch him.

Persons are reified: “He saw himself being handed over to his mother, wrapped up like a screaming sausage in a tight blanket.”

And how about “Clark,” our anti-hero? The scene of his battle with the stinking garbage bag — “The smell was life-changing” — is epic humor.

The effect is a nightmarish, howlingly funny leveling of the landscape and its inhabitants. I find this story to be original, fresh, unassuming, a bit crude, and hysterically comic.

Copyright © 2008 by Bill Bowler

Quite agreed, Bill. The story impresses me as a stylistic stand-up comic routine with a catastrophic backdrop. I wish the ending maintained the tone of the rest of the story, but “Elevator” is not only a hard act to follow, it’s a hard act to end.

We often receive submissions that might begin, to paraphrase the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, “It was a dark and gloomy day...” and go downhill from there. Does “Elevator” parody the theme of pessimism by taking it over the top or under the bottom? It all depends on the reader’s point of view, I imagine.

Don