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mr arnold's window - excerpt...
"Do you like fairy tales? You know, spells and curses, and frogs waiting for a kiss to become a prince, and gingerbread cottages wherein lies doom, and so on. You know, fairy tales. Do you like them?"
Barnard wondered if the old man was insane. "Honestly, I don't know."
"I guess some people might be sick of them. They might seem like the same thing over and over again if they aren't done with enough, uh, finesse. But I think, and I can't prove it, that humanity tells itself those stories over and over because it's trying to send itself a message. And the message hasn't been received yet. Well, I gotta go." The old man left.
Puzzled, Barnard opened the door and stepped out onto his front porch. He looked to the right, and then the left. The old man disappeared behind a billboard whose colorful animation advertised the popular theme park Wonder World. Barnard shrugged and went back inside.
Barnard looked at his wristwatch. It read 3:15, time for the daily routine of the clowns.
miller speaks...
When I showed an early draft of "Mr. Arnold's Window" to a fellow writer, he said, "Well, I think we should see the clowns committing these murders. That would be scarier."
The lethal clown is already a fixture in American Pop Culture. The Batman villain The Joker, the B film Killer Klowns From Outer Space, the rap group Insane Clown Posse, etc.
A little more elusive, although not completely original, is the Pop Cult narrative device of Everything You Are Saying And Hearing Is A Lie. The American mass audience got introduced to this idea with The Matrix films. Some of us recognized in those films (and I don't mean this as insult, at all) the influence of the great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, the ultimate Philip K. Dick novel being, perhaps, Time Out of Joint, with the hero leading a life that is a complete lie.
Follow the line of associations and you go to some interesting places. It's been years since I read Alice Adventures Through The Looking Glass, but if I remember correctly, there's a character in there called the Red King and Alice is informed by somebody that she, and everybody else, is inside the dream being dreamed by him.
Hooking up the fairy tale with the anti-utopia tale is just another way of me arranging the furniture in the Big House of Genres. Lurking in the background of "Mr. Arnold's Window" is a secret order of good-hearted sorcerers. (They are also part of my stories "Sorcerers" and "Eternal Moon.") It's like taking the DNA of 1984 and splicing in one of the Oz books. There are rogues infecting America's politics, religious life, and commerce, and I'm delighted to link them up with some evil king in a fairy story who is eventually overthrown.
"Mr. Arnold's Window" takes place in the same reality as "The Crazy Colored Sky," the title story in a book of mine from Silver Lake. ( http://www.silverlakepublishing.com/catalog/ccskyex.html). The heroes there help a woman named Alice and if you think I was thinking about the Alice books you bet I was. There are no good-guy sorcerers in that one. There we have the unborn son of the Devil causing all sorts of havoc.
"Havoc" and "chaos" are favorite words of any honest storyteller. The one unwritten line that is in any story is "everything was wrong" or "and then everything went wrong." If we can think of the classic form of story as being order, order overthrown by chaos, and then order restored we can be damned sure that the curtain is going to come down again, soon after order pops back on the stage. And thus I admit my ambivalence about Heaven. For how could a place of perfection find a home for stories?
There's also the "reality-based coalition" thing. I'm sitting here at a library computer trying to remember where I first heard the phrase. I think in one of the books about the George W. Bush administration an unnamed administration official speaks with contempt of all who oppose the Bush administration as part of the "reality-based coalition" and his "yeah, okay". COMRADES are going to create, create, and create reality and that "we are now an empire."
As guy who, as a teenager, read 1984 about a dozen times, it's like a glass of ice water being tossed into my face and seeing that I'm living in an Orwellian narrative.
I wish I could say the whole George W mob is just some distant fixture in my life. But bottom line, when my late sister Debbie was doing temp work in the 1980s, for a few weeks she was a secretary at J.D. Searle in Evanston. One of the people she worked closely with was (wait for it) Donald "known unknowns" Rumsfeld. Debbie had to constantly correct this moron's spelling and punctuation.
I don't know if it works to talk of George W and Nixon in the same breath, but I'm doing it now. My first understanding of evil in the real world was, as a little kid, watching the TV show that was the American Film Institute's salute to the great Hollywood director John Ford. One of the guest speakers was President Richard Nixon. I remember an energy of evil coming off the TV screen, from Nixon, and hitting my thirteen-year-old body.
If it wasn't clear enough already the Iraq war wasn't far from my thoughts when I wrote "Mr. Arnold's Window," I'll say so now, but it's never far from my thoughts. Given everything we know about that war, and everything we are learning every single new day, all the best arguments for it amount to one idea:
"The end justifies the means."
The liberal columnist Molly Ivins said for years the U.S. had to take down the Iraq regime for human rights reasons. This is now the George W gang's third or fourth or fifth reason for invasion and war and it feels very weird and bad to be in a society where a chunk of the population (about half) has edited their own minds to go along with this.
I started writing this about a story and now let me end with a story, a true one. I'm writing this on Sunday, December 11, 2005, in my community library. I live in a town, in a part of the world, usually thought of as very Republican. On my way here, I talked to a lady who teaches Sunday school for 8 to 11-year-olds. She asked her students, "What is your Christmas hope?"
And one of these 8 to 11-year-olds said, "Can we have a new President now?"
miller bio...
Kevin James Miller's 70 published stories and poems include "Stealing Klatzman's Diary" in PLOTS WITH GUNS (edited by Anthony Neil Smith), "A morbidly amusing caper with a Shakespearean body count," according to PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. THE CRAZY COLORED SKY AND OTHER TALES is coming soon from Silver Lake Publishing.
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Chimericana Books.
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Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Hellbound Books, Spring 2006
Plus six other short novels (approx 40,000 words each) that I'm looking to publish in a special 6-pack.
