Welcome again to the Short Story Club and the premiere (on ShelfActualization.com) of Guillermo Martinez's story "Vast Hell." (full text of the story can be found here)
I first happened upon this story in The New Yorker a few years back, and I remember liking it. Upon re-reading it now, I realize it is a surprisingly simple story, by which I mean that the story maintains good inertia until the finish, without deviations or tangents or overly-cooked rhetoric. It's just simple.
Martinez is good at lacing into the story "significant moments" that give the story its inertia. Moments such as "suddenly, it had all become true" on the penultimate page, or "then the inspector shouted that he'd hit something" on the last page. Simply put, there is no drag to the story. It moves, and moves quickly.
What I love most about the story, though, is the ending (which in my opinion is often the hardest component of a story to execute well). In this case, "The French Woman returned a few days later: her father had completely recovered. We never mentioned the boy again. The tent was stolen as soon as the holiday season started." The whole story is one huge crescendo (an erotic affair!), and then more crescendo (disappearance of the lovers!), and then even more crescendo (they're dead! buried on the beach!) and then CRESCENDO (there are dead and mutilated bodies all over the beach!), and then that last line, which is the equivalent, of a big "Never Mind."
It's clever.
What are your thoughts? Two thumbs up? One thumb up and one down?
(Postscript: The one component of the story I didn't quite grasp was why the inspector shot the dog at the end. It seemed out of place. Granted, there had been a lot of violence and death, but shooting the dog seemed too easy . . . didn't it? What was the purpose?)
