THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #66: A review of "The Mirror" by Arthur Porges

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In his introduction to this story, Pelan calls it “possibly the nastiest, most brutal short story ever written.” It’s pretty ugly, but perhaps his relationship with the deceased Porges colored this opinion.



Mr. Avery has just bought a giant mansion with the intention of fixing it up for his family, which is pretty big, considering how many kids he’s got. The only problem is, he gets it at a discount due to the mass murder that happened here many years ago. A man killed all of his family but one person, who has been trying to sell the house for years.


Yeah. You all know where this is headed. But part of the genius of Porges is how he gets there. Even though each and every modern reader knows this story will end with blood—a lot of it—he makes the trip seem very innocuous, so much so that the reader might let his or her guard down.


Fixing the place up is easy for Mr. Avery, who is kind of an amateur handyman, but the one thing that gives him trouble is the giant mirror over the fireplace in the living room. Someone has painted it over entirely, and he spends a lot of time and effort in getting it scraped clean. When his kids move in, he tells them a magical story about how the mirror is actually a portal to an identical living room, where a family that looks exactly like them live. He draws on THE LOOKING GLASS as his main inspiration, but when he starts talking about Gnolfo, the gnome who steals food from their fridge, he fucks everything for his family. One of his sons sees something moving in the mirror and says it’s Gnolfo, but no one else sees the creature. It’s dismissed as imaginary nonsense.


SPOILER ALERT: the Averys leave their eldest son in charge of babysitting while they head out for a night on the town. The other kids demand more Gnolfo stories from their brother, and he supplies them. Then, one of them comes up with the brilliant idea of using another mirror against the giant mirror in order to see parts of the imaginary Looking Glass world that they can’t ordinarily see. When they do this, they all see the fur-matted creature they assume is Gnolfo . . . and Gnolfo sees them. It leaps up and through the mirror, where it . . . well, you know.


The Averys return home to find all of their children dead and bloody except for one, who is so bad off that Mr. Avery puts her out of her misery. This drives Mrs. Avery insane to the point of death, and Mr. Avery is blamed for everything and is put away as a mass murderer. END OF SPOILERS.


So while this isn’t as nasty as Pelan claims, there is a lot of nastiness here, certainly enough to put one off their feed. While it is very formulaic, it is also one of the finest examples of the formula. Definitely give it a try.


[This story first appeared in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and cannot be read online at this time.]