"China Mieville - Details" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

China Mieville - Details




Details
China Mieville
China Mieville is the author of several short stories and three
novels: King Rat, Perdido Street Station (which won the Arthur C.
Clarke and British Fantasy Awards), and The Scar. Born in 1972,
he lives and works in London.
Mieville says: " 'Details' was an attempt to write an homage to
Lovecraft that was un-Lovecraftian in style. It was serendipity that
John Pelan and Benjamin Adams were putting together an
anthology with the same ideaтАФ tribute, not imitation or parody."
The story succeeds brilliantly in evoking Lovecraftian horror
without invoking any specifically Lovecraftian tropes. No small feat!
"Details" was originally published in The Children of Cthulhu.

тАФE. D.

When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of
potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I
wasn't an outsider. But I wouldn't join in when my friends went to
the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows.
One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up.
They defended me, even though they didn't understand why I

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China Mieville - Details


wouldn't come.
I don't remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my
mother.
On Wednesday mornings at about nine o'clock I would open the
front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my
mother had given me. Inside was a hall and two doors, one broken
and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and
enter the dark flat. The corridor was unlit and smelled of old wet air.
I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows
merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards
from me. The door to Mrs. Miller's room was right in front of me. I
would lean forward and knock.
Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there
recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter. Sometimes I was not alone.
There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of
the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.
I might find one or another of them in the hallway outside the door
to her flat, or even in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark