Even without the painfully creepy human faced puppet in Matthew Holness’ “Possum”, there’s a lot going on here that’s just plain wrong.  The relationship between Christie and the narrator (did we ever get his name?) was so odd.  There was a sense of coming home, but it seemed like the old man wasn’t quite right, I got a weird Norman Bates sense, that maybe Christie wasn’t even alive and the narrator was putting road kill in his own bed as an oh-so-funny practical joke.  The narrator first throws the dead fox on the stairs, “hoping that Christie might fall when he bent down to remove it.”  Then Christie puts it in his bed, then slaps the thing down on the kitchen table as the narrator is eating breakfast.  And then it shows up for dinner.  There’s a peculiar anecdote in which the narrator tells about a dead fox he found as a child, poked and mutilated, but the fox was playing a joke, and got up and walked away.  This is echoed later, by Christie faking a heart attack in front of school children.  There are a lot of jokes in this little story, and none of them are terribly funny.

            I think the most disquieting part of the story is the narration.  This person is telling us these things in a very matter of fact way.  He is never panicked, never shows much emotion, just reports details to us.  The thing he is telling us aren’t normal, aren’t okay.  This guy seems to be some manner of crazy, even aside from his creepy puppet developing a mind of its own.  Everything in the story is vary familiar to the narrator, which usually is comforting, but here it builds more and more tension as the story goes on.  His old house, his old stomping grounds.  It’s all so…creepy, though.  The descriptions of things are discordant and unsettling, the brown southern winter is a great setting, that cool damp brown weather is unpleasant in the best of circumstances.  It makes a perfect backdrop for this piece.  Everything in the story is dirty, another layer of unpleasantness that sets us on edge as we read.

            As I am reading this story, I wonder what kinds of “plays” this guy was performing, and again I wondered if they were in his head.  His perceptions of acceptable behavior set him up as an extremely unreliable narrator, and he really gnawed at me as a creep.  What kind of audience do you take this puppet to, where it devours the heroes, crashes through walls, and leaves a trail of flies (bluebottles, to be precise) behind it.  (One of the details that most upset me was when he woke up with Possum after tossing it in the water tank and there was a dead wasp in his pocket.  I hate wasps, living or dead, and the thought of someone “tucking” one into my pocket while I slept disgusts me.)  “I heard about your last performance” Christie tells the narrator, “One of my old teaching colleagues wrote to me about it.  An unpredictable affair, by all accounts.”  Christie used to be a teacher?  I wouldn’t have guessed that.  “They’ll have me back, once he’s gone,” says the narrator, more evidence that there is something wrong in his mind.  The story isn’t framed so that I think Possum (who spends this scene sitting at the dinner table with them after being dragged through the mud) is coming alive, I think the narrator is crazy.  Even Christie, saying the puppet is diseased, doesn’t make me think the troubles lie exclusively with Possum.

            It took two readings to come up with the sexual abuse theme, but it is there, quite thickly by the end.  Is this what is wrong with the narrator?  And he uses Possum as a coping mechanism?  I think this may be the most disturbing story I’ve read for this class (or ever?).  Well written, and well executed.

Check out our class' thoughts on the collection of short stories "The New Uncanny" here at Dr. Michael Arnzen's blog.  "The New Uncanny" involves modern horror writers revisiting Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny" and updating some of the ideas.

Here's my two cents on the short story "Ped-O-Matique"

            It’s happened to all of us at one time or another.  We’ve wished for something, maybe didn’t even articulate our wish, because it wasn’t something we could have actively allowed ourselves to have.  And then it happened. 

Uncanny.

In Jane Roger’s “Ped-o-Matique,” this is precisely what happens to Karen.  All she has left of a failed relationship is her son Zac: “Her mother wanted her to meet a man.  But I’ve met the man, Karen said to herself.  I’ve even had his baby.”  Her career is going wonderfully, she’s been selected to travel from Australia to deliver a paper at a conference in Paris.  She spends the entire beginning of the book telling herself this is where she should want to be.  She is weighed down impossibly by the word “should,” she should have had the sense to end her relationship with “P” (she can’t bring herself to use his full name), she should be honored to go to this conference, she should live in the now.  But all she wants is to be at home with her baby.

The uncanny piece in the story is the “Ped-o-matique”, an innocuous free foot massaging machine in the Singapore airport.  With a half hour to get to her gate, she steps in to use it.  Sits down, tells herself she should relax, reminds herself that the massager can prevent deep vein thrombosis in flight.  But it doesn’t stop.  She can’t get her feet out.  She is trapped, and the apprehension she feels builds to terror, as she screams and cries.  It’s easy to say, “why did she panic in a crowded airport?”  She wasn’t maimed, or even really hurt, but the thought of being trapped in a public place, the shame of not being able to operate a machine that hundreds of other people can use just fine, would get to you, I’d think.  I can imagine the frustration she felt.  It’s terrifying.  In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny” Freud tells us that “An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”  Karen is repressing her desires to get home to her boy, “When she said she didn’t want to go, people had been incredulous.  It was an honor—an accolade!  It showed she was a real high flyer.  Ha ha.  And why would anyone in their right mind not go to Paris?  Lucky her!”  Even in the short excerpt, Rogers allows readers to see that Karen has no interest in Paris, doesn’t want to be there, just wants to be home.  When, after screaming, weeping and wetting herself, Karen is finally freed from the Ped-o-matique bruised and relieved but otherwise no worse for the wear, she is offered the option for a later flight to Paris.  She instead elects to fly home, “almost happy enough to dance.”  Freud tells us “As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to support the old, discarded beliefs, we get a feeling of the uncanny.”  Through these definitions, “Ped-o-matique” succeeds as a work of uncanny literature.

Rogers updates the story by placing it in an airport.  Airports are generally ultra-modern, clean and safe places.  This one had a pool, a cinema, restaurants…and of course the Ped-o-matique.  An airport  is a metaphor for our rushed, busy lives, the need for all this entertainment, all of it at our fingertips lest we sit in idle thought for too long.  A mechanical foot massager is a luxury, Rogers describes the “squashy comfort” of the leatherette seat.  It increases the sense of the uncanny by having the horror come from something that is meant to cause relaxation and pleasure.  It’s so hard for us to relax these days that the thought of this kind of a swindle is deeply unsettling.  This is an extremely urban story, one that capitalizes on our weakness for things that are easy and are handed over to us.  It’s an interesting piece because of how little happens, Karen will probably laugh about this incident in a few months or years, but in the moment, all she could see was being trapped there forever and never seeing her son again.