Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction by HPS1

Author:HPS1
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

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“Nackles” Donald Westlake (1964)

Donald Westlake examines the question of whether gods create people or people create gods in this bitingly satiric tale of the anti–Santa Claus. He opens by pointing out that most of the historical gods have a nemesis, such as God and the devil and the Norse gods and the Frost Giants, and that good and evil are usually portrayed as being locked in a perpetual battle, balancing each other. He then postulates that Santa Claus is, in a sense, a god. He is omniscient, is able to watch and keep track of the activities of every child in the world, and on Christmas Eve obviously has a supernatural power that enables him to be in so many different places simultaneously. Millions of children believe in him, and he rewards good and punishes evil. Letters requesting gifts are the equivalent of prayers, and his attendants are not entirely human. If not a god, he is certainly very like one.

The narrator is troubled by his brother-in-law, Frank, a thoroughly nasty man who once abused the narrator’s sister but has behaved reasonably well ever since thanks to a timely beating with a baseball bat. Nevertheless, he is thoroughly despised and a source of terror to his three children, and their domestic arrangements are tense at best. When the kids became old enough to believe in Santa, Frank tried to discipline them by threatening that Santa would leave them no presents, but that was too mild a concept for him, so instead he invented Nackles.

Nackles is the anti-Santa, tall, thin, and dressed in black. He travels through a maze of subterranean tunnels in a carriage drawn by eight white goats, visiting the homes of children who have not behaved so he can stuff them into his sack and later eat them. Frank is so pleased with his creation that he tells other parents, and inevitably some of them adopt the concept as well, so that it spreads almost of its own volition. The first Christmas passes, but the following year Frank’s job has gotten worse, he is drinking more, and his temper has become dangerously violent. On Christmas Eve he locks himself in his study, and the following morning he is gone. The author concludes that despite his years, he was still at heart a spoiled, ill-behaved child and that perhaps Nackles became real and spirited him away. Westlake writes in the mystery genre almost exclusively, and this rare venture into the fantastic was originally published under the name Curt Clark.

“Naples” Avram Davidson (1978)

Sometimes the most effective stories are those that avoid being explicit, that paint a detailed landscape in which we become immersed. Then, just when it appears that we understand the place and what is happening in it, the author introduces a concept or an event that suggests that we may have misunderstood everything that has gone before. That is the case with this very prose-conscious story, which won the World Fantasy Award.

“Naples” is set at some unspecified time

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