ENTRY

The story in this entry was "Hannibal Shooting Fish in a Bucket".

         “Hannibal Shooting Fish in a Bucket” is part of what I call “The Brookdale Cycle” or “The Extended Brookdale Mythos”----which is my fancy-ass way of saying it's a handful of short stories that revolve kinda loosely around my first novel, HELLO, UGLY and its setting, the fictional town of Brookdale, New Hampshire. Most of the stories center around two characters, either Old Man Delprete (who's referenced in the book but who's long-since out of the picture and faded into local legend by the time the action of the book takes place) and this story's subject, Mike Hannibal.

Hannibal is really just a peripheral character in HELLO---in a book whose main characters tend to be marginalized misfit kids, Hannibal is the kind of unpleasant worm burner that even those misfits are wary of. For whatever reason I found Hannibal to be an interesting enough character to where I revisited him in a couple of different stories. The other story, which is one of the single ugliest stories I've ever written, is relatively recent and I'm still shopping it around to potential publishers----hence you're not gonna see it in this blog anytime soon. I briefly brought “Hannibal Shooting Fish” back into circulation recently and what you're reading is a slight rewrite of the story I was peddling around in the early '90s, but hell with it---no avail----stick a fork in it----it's done.

This particular story picks up after the action in HELLO, UGLY where Hannibal is an adult. He's hanging with a gang of friends and acquaintances but as per usual, he sticks out like a sore thumb.

I think what I was getting at with the shooting of fish and then Hannibal getting sick on seafood at the end of the story was your basic stock Christ symbology---I played with a lot of religious ideas and imagery at that time and I think what I was shooting for was a picture of Hannibal's actions as a “rejection of Christ”....although “Christ”, such as it is here, is more a supernatural proxy for general morality, human decency or just good things in general. I'm not particularly religious and this is not a religious story, per se. Pretty much just a character sketch---one unsavory individual doing stupid shit. Theater of the Irrational.

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:
THE S.E. APOCALYPSE KREW-"RISE" (plug, plug)
STARCRAWLER-S/T
RUSH-"MOVING PICTURES"