Challenge 314

Right or Wrong? Heads or Tails?

1. In Nora B. Peevy’s “The Mermaid’s Shadow Lamp”:

   1. What is the significance of the “mermaid”?
   2. Does Miriam undergo a personality change in the course of her meetings with Tom? If so, by what stages?
   3. Why might it be significant that Tom and Miriam miss the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
   4. In what ways might this story be read as an inversion of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray?

2. What does Damian Herde’s “Love and Damnation” imply about the relative power of the intellect and emotions? What might the story imply about the treatment of addiction?

3. In Arnold Hollander’s “Gotcha!”:

   1. Would the speech be less effective if it were standard rather than stage dialect? What other changes would have to be made in the story if the speech were standardized?
   2. Stories written completely in dialect — whether the dialect is real or not — run the risk of being unreadable. What minimum use of spelling and vocabulary cues might be employed to convey the speakers’ social class?

4. In William G. Schweitzer’s “A Purpose in Liquidity”:

   1. Why might the story open with a James A. Michener style exposition of geologic history?
   2. Who drowns in the story, and at what point relative to the other events?
   3. What is the function of the character Mike Sharff?

5. In Paul Johnson’s “Pursuit”:

   1. What might imply that the hunting party is malevolent? Is any indication given that the hunters have a reason to hunt their prey or that they are wrong to do so?
   2. Is there any hint in the story before the last section break that the hunters’ quarry might not be human? Does even the ending require that the quarry be a space alien rather than a human being?
   3. A deus ex machina ending is a deliberately artificial dramatic device that typically turns a tragedy into a comedy. Does the ending complete such a reversal in “Pursuit”? What, if anything, does the ending seem to imply?
   4. Can the characters’ motivations be reasonably surmised or must the reader supply a larger story to explain them?
   5. If you wrote a story to depict the experience of a hunted person, which ending do you think would be more effective: to rescue the quarry or to kill it?

6. In Augusto Corvalan’s “Today’s the Day”:

   1. “Dave” is very unusual but not impossible as a legal name. Why might “David” not be used in this story?
   2. Does Dave Aires, Jr. have any particular motivation to cling to his father’s superstition about certain numbers?
   3. What defeats does Dave Aires, Jr. suffer until he begins playing Russian roulette?
   4. Is Dave Aires, Jr.’s life a tragedy or a series of catastrophes?

7. In Gary W. Crawford’s “The Beautiful Signature”:

   1. Why is it significant that Uncle Paul burns his letters in the narrator’s dream?
   2. The disappearing signature is ostensibly real, not a dream. What purpose does it serve? Would the account be materially affected if the signature did not disappear?
   3. What is the role of cigarettes in the story?
   4. At the end, why might it be significant that the apparition takes the form of a woman rather than a man?

Responses welcome!

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