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This is another one of those stories that Wagner knew would be in this volume from the very get-go, and there shouldn’t be a single dissenting voice in horror on this one.
Colin Leverett is an artist on a fishing trip in the woods. While making his way to the creek, he stumbles upon a bunch of odd natural sculptures. They seem to be human made, and they’re made of sticks. This speaks to the artist in him, so he stops to sketch them before he goes on to discover a decrepit farmhouse. He explores the place only to find a bunch of drawings of—you guessed it—the stick sculptures. He calls out on the off chance that someone actually still lives here, and he makes his way down to a cellar that is far too big for the house above it. (Sound familiar, readers of "The Thing in the Cellar"?) While stumbling around in the darkness, something grabs him. He pulls back into a beam of sunlight to see a zombie-ish creature holding his wrist. Scared shitless, he clobbers it with a frying pan he was going to cook fish with and flees.
That’s a horror story on its own, but as far as Wagner is concerned, he’s just revving the engine. Leverett goes off to fight in World War II, and when he gets back, the pulp magazines he used to do cover work for want him to get back to producing. The problem is, his art is too ghastly now. Even WEIRD TALES turns him away, and soon he finds himself laboring in obscurity . . . until 25 years later, when an old editor friend, Scottie, gets in touch with him. Scottie is planning a 3-volume set of H. Kenneth Allard’s short fiction, and he wants some artwork. Not only that, but he’s offering Leverett a chance to be as dark and ghastly as he wants to be.
Leverett, a huge fan of Allard’s, accepts and throws himself into his work. Nothing really comes together until he remembers the sketches he’d made of the lattices he’d found in the woods. He throws them into his new work, and Scottie goes crazy for it, demanding more. In the meantime, a scholar of local history gets interested in Leverett’s account of the lattices, and he wants to find out more. Sadly, when Leverett tries to find them again, he comes up with nothing.
The books are well on their way to being published when Scottie is brutally murdered. The scholar also meets his untimely end while investigating lattices he’d found on his own. And Allard’s nephew has shown up on Leverett’s doorstep with newly discovered work by his long-dead uncle.
It’s obvious that Wagner used Lovecraft as his inspiration for Allard, and he removes all doubt when he starts making references to the Great Old Ones. Mostly, when writers try to pay homage to HPL, they just don’t get the guy’s work. They throw a bunch of tentacles and unpronounceable names into a jumble with a very unfortunate ending for their protagonist. Very few get it right. Wagner, on the other hand, doesn’t need to get it right. He makes it his own.
SPOILER ALERT: As you might be able to discern, the deaths are not a coincidence, and the cult that made these stick sculptures is still out there. What you might not be aware of is that Allard never had a nephew; it’s just Allard’s reanimated corpse wearing a lot of make-up. (In fact, the cult is made up exclusively of living corpses.) He’d been tricking Leverett into producing more of his artwork for purposes of invading the minds of possible converts. Moreover, the fellow Leverett had crowned with the frying pan is still around, and he’s the one who gets to usher our protagonist to his unfortunate demise. How’s that for a twist? It’s something Lovecraft would have been proud of. END OF SPOILERS.
When it comes to honoring Lovecraft, it’s too easy for a writer to focus on one aspect of his writing, whether it is the monsters, the esoteric references, or even the atmosphere. Wagner shows mastery over all of these things to produce one of the greatest horror stories ever written. But then again, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already read “Sticks.” One hopes, at least.
[This story first appeared in WHISPERS, and it cannot be read online at this time. This, my friends, is a great and terrible crime.]
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I knew the title sounded familiar but I was sure I'd never read the story. It took me a while, but I finally located it (in my dogeared copy of the 1990 edition of TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS). So I finally got around to reading it and...wow.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to be kicking myself for a while for having that book for fifteen years and never reading the story.