Soft & Others: Stories of Wonder and Dread by F. Paul Wilson

Author:F. Paul Wilson [Wilson, F. Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilsongs
Published: 2010-11-19T21:00:00+00:00

introduction: “Buckets”

I remember some highly offended comments about this story in the London Times by a pro-abortion reviewer. And then, on the flip side, came angry letters from the goofier Right-to-Life types who decried the story's Halloween connection because they thought it smacked of Satanism.

Like the man says, it ain't easy being me.

But I guess I asked for it.

I knew when I wrote it that "Buckets" would raise hackles. Sometimes you write things for just that reason – to tick people off, or rub their noses in something they refuse to notice. Sometimes a whack upside the head is the only way you can get some folks' attention.

"Buckets" didn't come about that way. "Buckets" was written to order, so to speak. I never would have written it at all if Alan Ryan hadn't been editing Halloween Horrors II.

At the 1985 World Fantasy Convention in Tucson, at the Friday night autograph party, Alan Ryan tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I need a story for an anthology. Doctors and Halloween: see if you can write a something around that." And then he was off.

But his idea stuck. The juxtaposition of those two disparate elements intrigued me. So I paged through the notebook where I store my scraps of ideas and found an old entry scribbled at the height of the Atlanta child murders: "Child-killer faced with ghosts of his victims." I substituted Negligent Doctor for Child-killer, and Dead Patients for Victims, but the result excited me no more than had the original. All right, how about a Child-killer/Doctor? Nah. It didn't grab me. Still no second tier. I was about to move on when it flashed through my mind that an abortionist could be considered a child-killer. So how about a physician abortionist faced with the shades of all the kids who were never born because of him?

What if...?

What if one day a year those unborn kids were allowed to return to the world as the children they would have become had they not been aborted? Who would they most want to visit that day? Their mothers? Maybe. The guy who'd turned them into fetal soup? Definitely. And what if that one day were Halloween?

Yes.

The story demanded to be written. Not later – now. And once I'd put myself in the position of those kids, allowed myself to tap into their feelings, sample their grief, their sense of loss, their rage – oh yes, their screeching, eye-clawing rage – the story consumed me. I wrote it in a wild rush. Actually, it wrote itself. Given the premise, there was only one way to bring it all home, only one way to provide the catharsis that the story, the characters, and the author demanded.

I took the opportunity to offer a different perspective on a touchy problem and did as much as I could with it. I never worried about its political correctness, but I knew from the start that "Buckets" would be extremely unpopular with a fair number, perhaps even a majority of readers.

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