THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #25: A review of "The Smoking Leg" by John Metcalfe

Lascar: An East Indian sailor.



Now that that has been defined, you shouldn’t have any difficulty in getting through this tale that could best be described as an issue of HELLBLAZER mixed with bizarro fiction from Eraserhead Press.


The lascar in question, Abdullah Jan, is injured on the job, and a very strange, “whisky mad” doctor by the name of Geoghan tends to the lascar’s ruined leg with a little something extra. You see, from that moment on, Abdullah Jan’s leg seems to be haunted, and it has a nasty habit of burning down ships upon which he sails. It gets so bad that most of his fellow lascars have decided that he’s kind of a Jonah, so they want to be rid of him as soon as possible. Sometimes, witnesses see the leg shine, and other times, they see it . . . smoke.


What the hell has Geoghan done to this poor guy? Well, nothing he doesn’t pay for in his own blood, of course. Shortly after he operates on Abdullah Jan’s leg, the lascar takes a blade to him in a very horrifying fashion. Though not precisely described (although a lot of gore and feeling goes into it), the lascar drives a blade up into Geoghan’s anus and keeps pushing until the tip comes out of his mouth.


But this solves nothing. SPOILER ALERT: Geoghan wasn’t just being an asshole to randomly be an asshole. He needed to get back at an old enemy he knew he wouldn’t be able to himself (presumably because of his whisky madness). He set a trap in Abdullah Jan’s leg. There is a ruby worth two-thousand pounds sewn up in the lascar’s leg, but it’s kind of cursed. Included in the leg is an amulet to help control the curse, or, as Geoghan says, “I popped it in to give the chap a sporting chance and keep the jewel quiet.” Freddy Shaw is the only one qualified to remove the ruby and amulet, as is told to Abdullah Jan early in the story, and as it turns out, not even Shaw can do the trick. He lets his greed get the better of him, and as a result, he’s evaporated on the spot. END OF SPOILERS.


It’s also worth noting that while a few other stories so far have danced around this, “The Smoking Leg” is the first to bring up the dreaded n-word. In fact, the way Metcalfe uses it, it’s just any old noun. Nothing special here. It’s odd to come upon a story where a character is called a “nigger” without malice, that it was just the ordinary word of the day.


That aside, the horror story is definitely a changing climate, and this is another fine example of that. 75 years to go . . . .

[This story first appeared in THE SMOKING LEG AND OTHER STORIES, and cannot be read online at this time.]