Chapter 45 "gut" effect

Also counts as postscript (or warning) The first time I read that nominated short story, no one passed out. It was a Tuesday night at a writers' workshop where some of my friends and I had been sharing our work since 1991.Each week, I read a short story from a novel that I'm nominating for "Spoof Camp."My aim is to use very ordinary things: carrots, candles, swimming pools, microwave popcorn, bowling balls, etc. to create horror. No one passed out, in fact, my friends all laughed.At times, the room falls silent in shock and concentration.No one jotted useful notes on the side of their copy, and no one reached for a wine glass.

It was better than the Tuesday before, when my story called "Exit" got a friend of mine in the bathroom.She locked the door and cried inside all night.Later, her psychiatrist came and asked me for a manuscript to help her with psychotherapy. Yep, this week my writer friends just laughed while I told them that this three-act story was based on three true anecdotes, two of which fell on my friend and the last of which I While doing research for a fourth novel, it happened to a guy I met at a sex addiction rehab support group.Those were three hilarious and increasingly strange true stories about masturbation experiments gone awry, so horribly wrong it was almost like a nightmare.

But the stories are both hilarious and tragic enough that for years, every time I got on a plane, I prayed silently, "Please, Lord, don't let this plane go down, because I'm the only one of your people who knows all three amazing stories." people..." I silently discussed: "Just let me do something to keep all three..." I wrote it later, one of about two dozen stories, interleaved with chapters of some poems and one-episode novels, with dozens of true stories in it.All more or less... it makes people feel hairy. I did my first public reading when I was on the novel tour, at a crowded bookstore called City of Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon.There was a film crew from Holland making a documentary.There are about 800 people crowded in the store, which is the maximum capacity under the fire safety regulations.The reading is done in one go, and you don't have much time to look up.But every time I looked up, the faces of the audience in the front row were a little gray.Then there's question and answer time, and a book signing.Finish.

It wasn't until I signed the last book that a clerk told me that two customers passed out, two young men, and they both fell on the concrete floor while listening to the reading, but they are all fine now, just remember You must not stand and listen to the reading until you wake up and find that you are surrounded by human feet, what is going on. The time sequence is September, and the bookstore is hot and stuffy, so there should be nothing to worry about. The next night, in an air-conditioned bookstore in Boulder, two more people passed out, a man and a woman, among another large audience listening.

Another day in Seattle, I went to a high-tech company to read to the staff at lunchtime, and two more men passed out, two big men.At the same moment as the story was being heard, both men fell so violently that the aluminum folding chairs fell with a loud crash on the polished hardwood of the Great Demon in the hall.At the sound, the whole company stood up, everyone tiptoed to see who had fallen, and wondered if they were all right.There was a pause in the reading, someone came with water in paper cups, and the fainted people were woken up. With their consent, I finished the story, but now we seem to have a fixed pattern.

The next night, in San Francisco - even after the Discord Society* came to harass the reading, sprayed me with cream, and all the members dressed up like Santa Claus.Even with a publicist punching a Santa in the face and me bribing them fifty bucks to go get another drink, after all of that -- three more passed out. (*Cacophony Society, a change from Dadaism, a group without strict organization, often interferes with cultural activities with activities, and some people regard it as a cultural terrorist.) The next night, in Berkeley, three more passed out while a reporter from Publishers Weekly watched.The following night in Santa Cruz, two people passed out.

The publicist, who was there all three times, said those people fell when I said "Corn and Peanuts."It is such details that make the sitting person paralyzed.First, their hands slip from their arms, their shoulders sag, their heads tilt to the side, and then the weight of their bodies causes them to fall to the ground or into the arms of the person next door. According to my translation in Italian, those who were standing just dropped down and disappeared into the crowd, and in Bologna, an actor recited in Italian, and there were many hollows in the large audience, all of which were passed out. On the flagstone floor. "Did you know," said my interpreter, "that this dreadful story was read in a cathedral?"

In the great hall of the Beverly Hills Library in Los Angeles, a woman sitting in the back kept screaming for paramedics and an ambulance, crying so hard that her red smock looked like it was soaked in blood.It was just her tears.Her husband lay on the ground convulsing.In the men's room, another man who had escaped from a half-stop, passed out when cold water was splashed in his face, and smashed his head against the edge of the sink. In Kansas City, too, a man left a meeting, fled outside to get some fresh air, passed out, and broke his lip on the sidewalk.In Las Vegas, two halls at the county library were packed with people who wanted to hear, and a man had cramps while I was reading.In another room watching CCTV, two people passed out.In Chicago, two halls of the city library were filled with audiences, and two people passed out in the hall watching the televised broadcast.One of the people waiting to greet me after the three-hour book signing had dried blood on his face from biting his lower lip in half.During that reading that he will never forget, he had a seizure that he did not remember.

Before that tour, I had only heard rumors of people passing out from the stories.Much of it happens when Dickens reads the murder scene from Orphan Tears.The strangling scene left the Victorian woman in a corseted waistcoat passed out.The most recent example was John Irwin's reading of the part of John Irwin's novel "The Dust of the Heart" in which he had a miscarriage on the kitchen table, and a female listener passed out. (John Irving, American novelist and screenwriter, famous works include "New Hampshire Hotel", "The World Through Garp's Eyes", etc., and the book "My Past" was adapted into a movie script by Zixing, and 19 Won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999.)

By the time I got back to New York City, there were almost equal numbers of men and women who passed out, and they were all very young, between the ages of eighteen and thirty.Usually someone breaks into a cold sweat just as the swooning audience is overwhelmed by the previous page.A few times, on page seven, I'd glance over and see groups of half-naked listeners stripping off their sweaty trades and drenched shirts. Playboy had originally declined to publish the story, which some editors thought was too extreme.But Chris Napolitano, their editor-in-chief of fiction, went to a reading held at the Union Square store of Barnes & Noble Books in New York and saw several half-naked people passed out-that night, he and my agent crossed the street W The contract was signed in the bar of the Grand Hotel.

A reporter for Publishers Weekly wrote a feature titled: "The 'Fight Club' Writers Knock Them Out Without Punching." The next day, at Columbia University, two students passed out.The second was sitting right behind my editor and his wife, the young man on the ground, howling like a beast, while the EMTs scrambled to keep him from choking on his own vomit. When the ambulance took him five hundred ocean miles to the hospital, my editor walked to the edge of the stage, waved me over, and said, "I think your story has done enough damage. No When you're done reading, skip straight to the Q&A section..." More and more, in Pittsburgh and Lansing, Madison and Ann Arbor, Doc and Miami and Spokane, I used to finish reading that story as the ambulance siren came out the door.If that bookstore had big windows, I would have had the red lights of an ambulance sweep across my face.If that bookstore had sharp-edged hardwood shelves—even if I warned listeners of the possible implications of this story—some evenings would end up with the clerk cleaning up a pool of blood from someone who had bumped his head. In England, people passed out when Reid read aloud.In London, washrooms were filled with well-dressed people fleeing the scene, lying on the cold tiled floor trying to recover from what they had heard. In Cambridge, a man rolled out of a chair with a groan like that, and a doctor explained that this stuck-in-the-throat sound always happened just moments before passing out.The doctor said that when you pass out, your neck will go limp, your head will drop, and your trachea will be blocked and you will not be able to breathe.In order to save your life, your body automatically thrusts your head forward to open your throat.He uses a lot of fancy terms like "soft palate".This jerk, which brings your head forward to resume breathing, causes your body to drop to the ground as heavy as a hunk of meat. If you sit all the time, you will suffocate, he said. In Italy, an actor named Massimo read the story into Italian in his trained, booming voice, and the audience fell as if they were being shot.There were so many targets that they looked like targets at an airsoft shooting booth at a fairground. In Milan, a man woke up to find men's feet all around him.He stood up, waved his fist and shouted, "Why are you reading this story?" Still pale and sweaty, he wondered: Was my purpose just to humiliate him in public?Let him pass out in front of so many people...? All told, seventy-three people passed out while I was reading.I've heard from the internet that others have read this story aloud and passed out their colleagues as well, so the number is still growing. For a nine-page story, some evenings took thirty minutes to read aloud.In the first half, I often have to pause because the audience roared with laughter.In the second half, you stop because the audience passes out. Many actors like to use this story as a monologue during their auditions. But when I read it for the first time, no one passed out, and my purpose was just to write some new form of horror fiction, something that happened in ordinary life, without supernatural monsters or magic.It's going to be a book you don't want to keep next to your bed, a book that's like a secret door that takes you down through some dark place.A place where only you can go when you open this book. Because only books have that power. Movies, or music, or television, must have some moderation in order to be shown to a wide audience and audience.Other forms of mass communication are too expensive to produce to risk being available to a limited audience, just one person.But books... a book is cheap to print and bind, a book is as intimate as sex and as you please, books take time and effort to absorb - and give readers all kinds of opportunities to stop halfway.In fact, because the number of readers who are willing to pay attention to reading books is so small that it is difficult to call books "mass media", no one really cares about what the books say.For decades, no one would think of which book to ban. But what comes from neglect is the freedom that only books have.If a storyteller decides to write a novel instead of a screenplay, then you have to exploit that freedom.Otherwise, it's better to write movie scripts, to write TV scripts, those can make a lot of money. But if you want the freedom to go everywhere and talk about anything, write a book.That's why I wrote it, just a three-paragraph short story based on a real-life anecdote. Someone posted that this novel was the funniest they had ever heard. Some people wrote that it was the saddest novel they had ever heard. And by no means is it the darkest or the funniest or the most creepy of the slasher novels.Others I dare not read aloud at all. Some places are only accessible with books. This is the advantage of books, so I write. Thank you for looking at my work.