Luggage By Kroger, Or, The Mania of Obsession

Sunday morning I watched a TV interview / profile of Glenn Close. One of her most famous roles was as the seriously crazy book editor Alex Forrest in the movie Fatal Attraction.

During the interview, I learned that the movie's original ending was for Glenn's character to kill herself. This was changed, and now Glenn's character tries to kill her lover's wife. Glenn herself said in the interview that she fought against the changed ending, thinking that the original ending was a better fit for the character.

Fittingly enough, Sunday evening I read Gary Taylor's new book Luggage By Kroger. This is the real-life story of Gary's involvement with Catherine Mehaffey Shelton, a Texas attorney associated with a distressingly long list of dead bodies.

Taylor tells a very entertaining (in a "glad-it's-not-me" fashion) story of his involvement with Mehaffey during 1979 and early 1980. Basically, Taylor was broke - he was using Kroger grocery sacks as luggage, hence the book's title - getting a divorce and working as a reporter for a Houston paper. There he met Mehaffey, prime suspect for the beating death of her boyfriend, George Tederos.

Apparently, nobody ever told Taylor "don't stick your dick into crazy." Well, he did, and on the 4 month anniversary of that event, Mehaffey put a bullet into Taylor's back. Obviously Taylor survived (and wrote an entertaining book about the experience) but what I found really interesting was the juxtaposition of Close's opinion and Taylor's reality. In short, obsessive people really do get violent.

Here's the thing - obsession of this type is not rational, and it's not love. It's about an irrational need to control others. To the obsessive person, failure is not a option. Thus, the level of violence and irrationality is escalated to the point of no return.

I'll have a more formal review of Luggage By Kroger later this week, but Taylor's book is a fascinating and entertaining look at obsession.

Return To Luna

Hadley Rille Books is a new small publisher, specializing in science fiction anthologies. The press, named after a valley or “rille” on the Moon, is the brainchild of Eric T. Reynolds (ericreynolds). They’ve put out six or so books so far, and if they are anything like this one, of which Return To Luna is my second purchase from the company. Based on this experience, one can’t go wrong buying from them. Although Hadley Rille Books may be a small operation, they have first-rate production values, so this book is solidly edited and assembled.

Return to Luna is the result of the National Space Society’s 2008 fiction contest, and the nineteen short stories in this anthology were selected by a jury of editors and writers. In a typical anthology, I find a couple of the stories less engaging then others – not so here. All nineteen of these short works are gems, well worth your time.

The rules of the contest were simple: write a short story about man’s return to Earth’s moon. The story had to be relatively near-future, and couldn’t include aliens or non-realistic levels of technology. This might seem to be a limiting rule-set, but the stories here all met the rules and a surprising level of originality.

Since I liked all the stories, deciding which ones to talk about in this review was a bit difficult. I ended up settling on the criteria of “most memorable” out of the group. They are:

Visual Silence by M. C. Chambers – This short was the Grand Prize winner, and deals with the interaction between a man born deaf since birth and a woman rendered mute by a stroke. Both of them are residents of a lunar colony on the Moon’s south pole.

Joe the Martian Goes to the Moon by Ken Edgett – The title refers to a character in a children’s educational program. A young man goes to the Moon wearing the “Joe the Martian” costume, and his adventures during the trip prove interesting.

The Return by David Schibi – This story tells the tale of the ill-fated first settlement on the Moon and that settlement’s sole survivor, 62 years later. It’s a real tear-jerker.

Apples on the Moon by Karen T. Smith – A shipment of apples arrives on a lunar settlement, and some of the local teenagers decide to intercept a few. Romance and danger follow.

In Their Own Words by Brenta Blevins – A historian conducts several interviews while developing a history of lunar settlement. Not much plot, but a very interesting character study.

Return to Luna is an outstanding short story anthology, and I hope you decide to buy it.