…and I think that my earlier critique of it was in fact a bit off-base. Read aloud (in the right style), this story of a monstrous, growing fish is deeply unsettling. It’s also really quite remarkable how the author hit all the cosmic horror tropes without ever quite realizing it. Helen Palmer (Geisel) could have made for a credible horror writer, honestly.
Seriously, if you do the voices the right way you can unnerve yourself.
It could have been Dr. Seuss meets HP Lovecraft:
…I mean, it had the right narrative arc. Naive fool meddles with forces he does not understand, disobeys instructions, gets a horrific result that breaks the very laws of time and space, and disaster is averted at the last second by a mysterious loremaster (who caused the problem in the first place). Potentially good stuff… but there was far too much people getting mad at the kid for having a steadily-growing, monstrous fish; and not nearly enough people going mad at the sight of a steadily growing, monstrous fish.
:pause:
The Sixties were weird, man.
