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‘The Fascination of the Abomination’
Matthew Cheney’s short story ‘Mass’ in ‘The Last Vanishing Man’
Matthew Cheney’s collection, The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories, came out last month from Third Man Books. The story I relate to most is “Mass,” previously published in Conjunctions. In the acknowledgements, Cheney nods to “The Mappist” by Barry Lopez, The Mad Man by Samuel R. Delany, and Warrior Dreams by James William Gibson for their influences on this story.
It is hard to tell you what happens in a short story without giving away the whole thing. Besides, “Mass” is not a traditional story with a surprise at the end but is more like a philosophy to be understood, so I don’t know the “proper” way to talk about it. I will anyway though. By the way, it’s somewhat of a horror story, if you read it as a nightmare.
Happenings in ‘Mass’
The time-markers wobble, but when unrolled, the story looks like this:
Wendell Hamilton
Hamilton taught literature at Cornell. In 1984, he published his first paper. It was about Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. He was interested in meta-texts. He moved toward “popular paramilitary fiction”—Barry Sadler’s Casca…
