Dissecting ‘The Death of Abigail Goudy’ by Neil Williamson

For the love of love

At Short Story Club, we usually savour the classics, but this time we have a tale that has recently been published in one of the top-tier horror magazines, The Dark.

For anyone who loves a dark, often heart-rending tale, consider supporting the magazine and check it out often (they publish their tales for free).

If you want to read the tale, there’s always time. I spoil the feck out of the whole thing from this point onwards!

A wander through the performance

When I’m dissecting a story, I like to read it over and over, pinpointing the impact each paragraph had on me.

I love the opening of this tale. It doesn’t give everything to us straight away, but the description of those blossoms being dead and browned on the tree before they fall echoes nicely with his guilt and what is to come. It’s the added brushstroke of a master at work.

We then get invited to the creepy setting, which sets us up to expect something weird or scary. It’s certainly the place for it, so as readers, we gear ourselves up for the potential of this.

He takes some bumf (lovely bit of Scots flavour here), goes inside where the performance is about to begin.

It’s been too long since I last saw Abigail Goudy

All through this part, I find myself wondering how much he wants to be there. He is riddled with guilt, he’s running a bit late, surely this Abigail couldn’t have meant too much to him?

…I can just hear the scorn in Abi’s laugh when she finds out.

When he considers flirting with the person who hands him the brochure (a brouchure he pays not enough attention to…) we get the first piece of fondness for Abigail. She’d take the piss out of him for hitting on someone in her ‘team’.

On one side: a photograph of Abi, badly shot and too formal; it makes her look ill.

Speaking of the brochure, this mention is a nice primer for what is to come. He’s in too much of a rush to really notice anything. Something in him wants this over with, yet something deeper, something we feel as readers, tells us that he longs to see her. Through all the memories thrown at us, there’s a sweet relationship in there.

Back in the day, Abi and I would have taken much puerile glee in the fact that it looks like a stubby cock.

Warming us up to characters, particularly in short fiction, is a very difficult task. It’s why so many stories are given up on. That sense of connection with the ‘somebody’ within a tale is hard to come by. Comedy is one of the most effective tools in any writer’s toolbox, but it isn’t mentioned in the same light as the many (oh so many) rules for writers.

If you can make us laugh, you can make us feel. If you can make us feel, we’re sticking around. It’s hardwired into us. I’ve given a lot of ‘ink’ to what probably feels like a very small joke, but it has a large effect on us, holding us to the story at a crucial phase where we're still trying to feel what it’s about.

The more I got to know her afterwards, the more I learned that was just the sort of thing she did.

And so, we are taken on the memories of our main character as he details how he and Abi eventually got together, how they helped each other with their art (although she is the great one, not him).

He thinks through all these things as he sits out the immensly long, and at times tedious music performance in the location where sounds do weird things.

And we’re taken to the ending, not knowing where the hell the story is going. Is Abigail going to unleash some kind of super-music experience never done before? Is it going to be creepy? Will he stay until the end?

And we get the ending, which smacks us in the face all the harder as we’re left guessing. It’s a perfect twist, perfectly done.

So, what were some of the tricks deployed by the writer to punch us in the metaphorical mouth with love?

Weird death fascination and its purpose

“Jean-Baptiste Lully died from a conducting injury.”

This could very easily have been a clumsy, forced tale of love. A man who misses someone dearly comes to a recital, only to see that his love has passed away from some terrible disease. He has missed his chance. Oh, woe is he, blah blah.

It could have fallen to cliches and shoe-horned love for the sake of forcing a reaction from us. But instead, it's masterfully handled. This is a sign of someone who knows where his reader is through the journey of reading the tale, and how to reveal, leave out, and build up certain information at pivotal moments.

The further I go with these dissections, the more I realise we have very common findings, no matter who wrote the tale, or where it came from. The first, is that we need to get into the action of the tale (‘The Attack' as Edith Wharton terms it) as soon as possible. The second, is that in order to land a specific effect, the writer must prime us for it all the way through (such as Williamson does here with Abigail's fascination with weird deaths (and we spoke about at length in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’)).

Abigail is fascinated by death all through this story, collecting examples of whimsical deaths of artists and performers. This puts (subtlety) the two things together in our minds – death and artists. And she is very much a suffering artist. It’s a nice touch that, although the effect is small, pushes us further at the tale’s climax. It makes us feel for Abigail. She has become one of them.

“Do you ever worry that you’ll die before you create your masterwork?”

It’s a great love story

We go from our main character being late to the scene, being guilty for not caring enough to contact Abi through the years, all the way to utter devastation. We are shown the highlights of their romance and how besotted he seemed with her.

This is all done through showing, not telling. A lesser writer would simply tell us how he felt about her, and we wouldn’t experience the magic of finding out for ourselves. We feel how he felt for her through the honesty of the relationship shown.

It might just have been me, but I was waiting for some kind of spooky reveal all the way through. Maybe that’s why this tale pinged me in the heart-place so well.

It left us guessing, but the ending also made complete sense.

“How long do you think you have to dick around? How many tries to get it right? You want to be like poor old Alkan? His fucking coat stand fell on him.”

As ever, I've blethered on for far too long, but forgive me. I just blooming love short fiction and I believe we can all benefit from thinking deeply on the art we consume. Maybe the world would be a slightly better place. Maybe.

Until next time.

May your shadow never grow less,

Paul O