THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #80: A review of "The Autopsy" by Michael Shea

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In his intro to this story, Pelan says that while editors may have their differences, they find common ground on “The Autopsy.” They all love it. Does it live up to the hype?



Well, kind of.


Dr. Winters is a dying man. He has a lump of cancer in his guts, and his way of coping is to talk to it, as if it is a guest and he is the cordial host. He is called in by his friend, Sheriff Craven, to perform a mass autopsy on a bunch of people who died in a mine explosion. There is a wrinkle in the job, though: Craven has recently been investigating a series of disappearances, and he has reason to believe that a new miner by the name of Joe Allen is responsible. When he lays his trap to catch the guy, it results in an odd sphere, probably a bomb, going off and killing nine people.


Craven wants Winters to get to the bottom of this. Here’s the cool part about this story: the mystery. Very few other tales in this anthology present us with a problem to solve. We discover more and more about the case as Winters delves into the corpses in the lonely morgue.


Sadly, that’s also kind of the problem. Shea takes sooooo much space up with this story. Maybe he was being paid by the word, because this story could have been pared down considerably. It takes too long to get the story rolling, and the scene where Winters is conducting the autopsy is drawn out and boring. He’s not even trying to build suspense with these moments.


There is a creepy scene in Craven’s story, when they find parts of a human body, and it turns out to not be one of the missing people. And Shea describes Winters’s perverse joy in unzipping a corpse pretty well. He’s good at conveying the loneliness of the morgue. But the extra shit is just too hard to get through.


The tale pays off though. Just as Winters is about to start the autopsy on Allen’s body, it starts moving. Before long, it’s standing up and talking to him. SPOILER ALERT: Pelan does it to us again. This is more of an SF story with horror elements. Allen’s body has been possessed by an alien (much like Winters’s cancer is a guest in his own body) who uses human beings as food. The reason no one has ever been found is because Allen has been eating them.


Now the alien has found the perfect host. Think about it: a coroner has easy access to bodies, and they’re usually still warm when they’re brought to him. Allen manages to subdue Winters and strap him down to a gurney. Then, in the second most grotesque scene in the story, Allen starts carving his belly out until he can reach inside and pull out the alien that is possessing him, so he can put it in Winters’s body.


(Unfortunately, Shea fumbles a bit here. As Allen slices himself up, he describes everything he’s doing in a super-scientific fashion, which completely destroys the imagery of a lunatic cutting himself to pieces and feeling around inside his own body.)


Winters realizes that in this moment, the alien is helpless and blind. But he can’t reach down to destroy it. The alien left one arm open, so after it possesses him, it can free itself. Winters manages to get the scalpel from Allen’s now completely dead hand and, in the most grotesque scene in the story (and one of the stomach churning of all time), he cuts one of his own veins to leave a message warning Craven about what has happened, and he stabs himself in both of his ears until he is completely deaf. He cuts his vocal chords so the alien can’t lure anyone else into this mess, and he cuts certain tendons that would make it impossible for him to lift his head. Finally, he scoops out his own eyes and cuts a major artery, so he can bleed out. He then waits for the alien to enter his trap.


The only drawback is, Shea doesn’t really do anything with the cancer aspect of this story, aside from make a couple of good jokes. It’s almost incidental. The argument could be made that since Winters knew he was dying anyway, it was easier for him to completely mutilate himself and commit suicide, but that’s just not enough. END OF SPOILERS.


While this story is a clunker in many ways, you will never forget the ending. All in all, it has earned its place here. It might not be as good as Pelan says it is, but it’s good enough to grace these pages. Just make sure to stick with it until the end.


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