China Mieville - Details

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 41.1KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Details

China Mieville

China Mieville is the author of several short stories and three

novels: King Rat, Perdido Street Station (which won the Arthur C.

Clarke and British Fantasy Awards), and The Scar. Born in 1972,

he lives and works in London.

Mieville says: " 'Details' was an attempt to write an homage to

Lovecraft that was un-Lovecraftian in style. It was serendipity that

John Pelan and Benjamin Adams were putting together an

anthology with the same idea— tribute, not imitation or parody."

The story succeeds brilliantly in evoking Lovecraftian horror

without invoking any specifically Lovecraftian tropes. No small feat!

"Details" was originally published in The Children of Cthulhu.

—E. D.

When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of

potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I

wasn't an outsider. But I wouldn't join in when my friends went to

the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows.

One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up.

They defended me, even though they didn't understand why I

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/China%20Mieville%20-%20Details.html (1 of 22)13-8-2005 23:44:36

China Mieville - Details

wouldn't come.

I don't remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my

mother.

On Wednesday mornings at about nine o'clock I would open the

front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my

mother had given me. Inside was a hall and two doors, one broken

and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and

enter the dark flat. The corridor was unlit and smelled of old wet air.

I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows

merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards

from me. The door to Mrs. Miller's room was right in front of me. I

would lean forward and knock.

Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there

recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter. Sometimes I was not alone.

There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of

the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.

I might find one or another of them in the hallway outside the door

to her flat, or even in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark

hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-

looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.

There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and

smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks

who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and

incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into

his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously,

walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry.

Occasionally I'd meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller's room,

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/China%20Mieville%20-%20Details.html (2 of 22)13-8-2005 23:44:36

China Mieville - Details

swearing in a strong cockney accent. I remember the first time I saw

him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and

moaning loudly.

"Come on, you old slag," he wailed, "you sodding old slag. Come

on, please, you cow."

His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realized I

could hear her voice, Mrs. Miller's voice, from inside the room,

answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.

I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and

eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I

could continue as usual.

I asked my mother once if I could have some of Mrs. Miller's food.

She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of

bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.

My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up.

She dissolved a bit of gelatin or cornflour with some milk, threw in

a load of sugar or flavorings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills

into the mess. She stirred it until it thickened and let it set in a plain

white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-

smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me,

along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller and

sometimes a plastic bucket full of white paint.

So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller's door, knocking, with a

bowl at my feet. I'd hear a shifting and then her voice from close by

the door.

"Hello," she would call, and then say my name a couple of times.

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/China%20Mieville%20-%20Details.html (3 of 22)13-8-2005 23:44:36

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

China Mieville - Details.pdf

共22页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

China Mieville - Details

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: