LITERATURE: 100 Jolts

Well, I’ve finished it–not my framing as I should be doing, but Michael Arnzen’s "100 Jolts."  I think my favorite was "Convictions", and I’ll do a brief review.

Let me enter here the questions Dr. Arnzen suggests on this story in his teacher/reader guide:

Convictions

1. Why does the narrator feel so haunted by his job?

2. What does the use of the Psalm as a recurring motif add to this piece?

The story opens with a man acknowledging, welcoming actually, a recurrent dream of death.  As he walks through the tunnel towards the light, he hears the Twenty-third Psalm in a voice somewhere near him, though he walks alone.  At the end of the tunnel, he opens a door and enters a room filled with light, sits down upon a throne, and as two shadowy figures approach, realizes that he is about to be electrocuted.  He screams.  He wakes; to bright light as his wife tries to calm him, then she goes back to sleep.  But he cannot, and is up at sunrise, ready to go to his job on "the row."

This story is by no means green gore and putrid pus as are many in the collection, yet it appealed to my literary nature perhaps and I found it very engrossing (not gross–engrossing). 

It is told in the first person pov, and we are immediately let in on the fact that the man is aware he is dreaming (possible?), but are thrown the curve ball of him enjoying the dream of dying–much as one would enjoy a dream of paradise.  Why?  It is obviously not just the comfort of the words of the psalm, yet this threads throughout to cast a steadying sense on the reader.  Besides the voice, there is a constant hum, both in the dream (electricity) and in the waking (the hum of the refrigerator).  There is as well the consistent return of the light; in the tunnel, the room, his bedroom as his wife wakes up, in the sunrise and in his eyes as he drives to work. 

Along with the interplay of light and dark, noise and silence, life and death, we have the conflict of feeling.  While the dream of being dead supposedly comforts him, the manner, the impending actuality of death does not.  While he’s waiting to go to work, he drinks five beers.  Think his job bothers him?  He hasn’t told his wife yet that he’s working the row. 

There are several kinds of horror, as many perhaps, as are individuals.  Last night on Dateline I watched as a fifteen-year old girl overcame her arachnaphobia (fear of spiders) by facing them in gradually increasing doses from a plastic spider to a real live hairy tarantula.  But we can’t all afford therapy, and sometimes we just need a good story to give us the fright or the release that we need to face and either overcome, or reduce us to quivering cowards of flesh.

There are lessons to be learned in 100 Jolts besides the horror fiction genre, that of compression of story, and here I was very aware of the necessary details being highlighted and the lack of distraction by providing minimal settings, for example, where they would do nothing to enhance the story.

A fine read, especially in combination with the short interview with Dr. Arnzen at the end of the book, and the reading guide that forces one to look deeper into both story and writing techniques.