Dark & Twisty

Harlan Ellison's story "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" took me by surprise.  This was not a horror story I expected it to be.  It started out as a loose retelling of the Kitty Genovese case from the point of view of one of the witnesses.  Then it turned around and became something different. 

Although the character in the story experiences many horrors,  (She witnesses the murder but does nothing, she's pretty much raped by her date, and she's mugged and almost killed herself with the witness  watching just like Kitty Genovese.) the real horror is that she becomes the same as most everyone else in New York.  She becomes part of the great unsympathetic, bitter, cynical tribe of New York, or in a more general term the city. 

This story has a bit more umpf with me because I'm a country boy.  I've lived, except for about a five year stint, in rural Alabama.  Even when I lived in the city, they were small unassuming cities (the college town of Tuscaloosa [Roll Tide] and the port city of Mobile).  One of the things the main character of this story has is the sensiblity of having lived in Vermont a rather rural state, much like Alabama with small cities.  She is not prepared for the harshness of living in a metropolis.  The horror of the story is she becomes the city.  The city itself is the monster.  It carries on like a vampire in the night devouring those innocents either by killing them off or making them one of its own.

Growing up in a rural setting, even though I technically grew up in the Birmingham census area and problably could be considered metro area by influence, I was raised to fear the city.  We fear the crime that seems so random.  We fear the nonchalance of the people in concerns over issues that face us.  We fear the city with its hordes of people and traffic.  It's smells like desiel dragons roaring street noise.  When we go to the city, we're told to "keep your doors locked and eye open."  That is why this story spoke to me.  It told the story of what we ruralites think the city will do.

I've been many different places in many cities.  I always do the same thing.  I keep my doors locked and my eyes opened.  I don't go out after dark if I can avoid it.  It's all because of that rural fear that the city will consume me.