“Three Men in the Morning” is an unpublished Lafferty story that shows the time in which it was written Dotty meets figures like this in her novel, and in “Three Men in the Morning,” the historical context Bishop," she said, "almost every morning there's at least one girl turns up dead. While there is a story in it, "Three Men in the Morning" is also a local-color piece in which Lafferty Finally, both Dotty  and “Three Men in the Morning” are works about fighting amnesia. As Mr.

Lafferty completed "Great Day in the Morning" on March 24, 1973. That alone makes “Great Day in the Morning” an interesting story. Like "Great Day in the Morning," it is set at dawn. Michael’s, however, no Mass is held that morning. “Great Day in the Morning” is a very rich story, with many Easter eggs.

“Ghost in the Corn Crib” is an exciting piece of prenucleation period Lafferty, showing, in a nascent We are told that the corn crib ghost targets anyone sharing the last name of the man who betrayed him Ear of corn. Hence, the ghost of the corn crib. This is a story about language haunting. So Lafferty’s narrator gets the last word on the ghost in the corn crib. Consider the “ghost” in the corn crib.

“It almost seems that we are no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that Atrox and perhaps some of his friends are writing,” Gorgonius hazarded. “It’s an idea that I try to chase away by throwing rocks at it, and it squawks and flies right back to me.” “It is more likely that we are all no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that God is writing,” Mary Brandy said, “and perhaps Atrox and some of his friends are permitted to write a phrase or two in it now and then.” With Chapter Four, “Monday at Sora,” the setup chapters are behind us, and the action begins. The Group of Twelve holds a private video-world-conference, which inadvertently sets off a global panic (the etymology of panic is significant) when eavesdropping observers take its discussion of the “Tests of Atrox Fabulinus” as proof that the world is a dream. To evade the Panic Marshals, the authorities charged with suppressing panic, the Group ends the broadcast and agrees to meet in person. By rapid modern transportation, they converge on the hidden Italian villa of Leo and Perpetua Parisi, near Sora, where a lavish and eccentric feast has been prepared for the midnight gathering: roasted bear stuffed with trout and eels. During the feast, a warning arrives. Local residents tell them to appease Atrox Fabulinus by setting out a plate and giving him utensils fit for a Giant, including a wine glass that holds six gallons and a funnel through which he can swallow eels. Sure enough, an ethereal outline of Atrox appears at the table, bolts down the food, and converses with the Group. Some of the characters, including Denis Lollardy and Solomon Izzersted, debate whether Atrox is a genuine supernatural entity, a manifestation of creative fraud, or an illusion cast by someone in the Group. Before vanishing, Atrox warns them about mockery, which leads Mary Brandy Manx to conclude that the illusion was at least partly a hoax perpetrated by Jane Chantal Ardri. As the night goes on, the Group debates the sensation that their world, down to its atomic structures, is fundamentally unreal. They compare their existence to characters in a sprawling novel whose details have been poorly filled in. Then they begin exploring the villa’s vast, catacomb-like reference library, which miraculously manifests any desired work or wine. It also houses bodies, some decayed and some perfectly preserved. Seeing the need for advice, Hieronymous Talking-Crow awakens the spirit of Alexander the Great and speaks with him. Alexander offers a brief disquisition on the historical existence of “unreal” lands and dismisses Atrox Fabulinus as prolific but untalented, powerful but temperamental. Throughout the chapter, Jane Chantal feels that something murderous is afoot. The Group also receives dire warnings from two local villagers, both tied to the Kabouter, Siog, and Little People material. They say that Atrox is furious, that there will be violent murder, and that an earthquake will bury the villa. Leo Parisi dismisses these predictions as the baseless superstitions of magical, non-human beings. The chapter ends deep in the night, with Jane Chantal Ardri isolated in a dark room and screaming in apparent terror, a reaction Mary Brandy Manx recognizes as a famous musical scene. Lafferty writes: Then Jane Chantal began to scream in a way that would move the very stones to compassion. Several of the party rose to go to her, but Mary Brandy Manx laughed. “Oh, don’t you recognize it? It is the wonderful screaming scene in Ludendorf’s End of the World Agony. Listen, her screaming tumbles over four full octaves. What an artist Jane Chantal is!” Where should one begin with Chapter Four? Perhaps with Mary Brandy Manx, the oldest member of the Group of Twelve. We have already learned that she is sixty, but that she still swims out over the Spanish Depths. There she submerges herself and hangs her linen-and-wool balloon dress on a knob of rock five fathoms down. At once, she becomes a sixteen-year-old sea goddess. When she goes ballooning more than a mile above the earth, she removes the same dress and weighs it down in the wicker gondola with five sandbags, lest it fill with air and sail away. Then she becomes a sixteen-year-old low-sky goddess. Lafferty describes the metamorphosis in the previous chapter: And whenever Mary Brandy went higher than a mile in her balloon, she took off her balloon dress, put it in the bottom of the wicker gondola, and put five sand-bag ballasts on it (less than five wouldn’t do it, for it loved to fill itself with air and sail independently of Mary Brandy), and thus Mary Brandy would become a low-sky goddess, and they also are always exactly sixteen years old. Throughout the novel, Mary Brandy Manx is worth watching closely. She is one of the sharpest observers of what is happening, and Lafferty clearly cares for her. At times, she speaks for him. Later in the novel, when the Illacrove Giant says that she is the only one who can replace him, Mary Brandy agrees. Of the seven named Giants in the novel—Atrox Fabulinus, Der Alpenriese, the Hsiang Giant, the Sanrio Giant, the Timbuktu Giant, the El-Khatar Giant, and the Illacrove Giant—the Illacrove Giant is the most mysterious, at least in name. What could Illacrove mean? Look it up, and one finds nothing in the usual sources. But the name can be worked out, and it connects to Mary Brandy Manx’s unique relation to what I have been calling the verticality of the novel’s imaginary cosmos. Mary Brandy speaks a variety of Gaelic, we are told, which ties her to the Irish world. Crove is a locality in County Donegal, and the word in Lafferty probably comes from the Gaelic craobh, pronounced “kroov,” meaning tree or grove. Illa is Catalan for “island.” So Illacrove means something like “tree island” or “grove island.” Mary Brandy Manx is herself tied to Catalan through the place where she becomes a sea goddess in the Spanish Depths. The first climax of the novel will take place in the chapter centered on her location, and she is, I think, clearly a figure into whom Lafferty places some of his own wisdom. Several other points are worth noting. In the first appearance of Atrox Fabulinus, we see a version of the novel’s ending: a (half) forged projection. We also learn about the competing histories of the Laughing Christ, with disagreement over whether it was buried for 1,500 years or forged and buried for 15 days. That difference anticipates the time ratios that become important at the end of the novel, in the ninth day of the week, when its minutes stand in a strange relation to ordinary hours. We see that Solomon Izzersted is already anticipating how he can be separated from John Barkley Towntower. Prince Leonardo comes from the “Exterior Darkness,” the outer darkness mentioned three times in Matthew. There is also an allusion to Atrox as the least of the Giants in some meaningful sense, which recalls Matthew 25:40. Hanging over the entire chapter is the puzzle that eighty percent of the world’s people are solid and apparently not dreaming. Mary Brandy Manx adds an important qualification to this, and it sounds very much like Lafferty himself. When the public reaction to the video-world-conference is discussed, the distinction between the masses and the elite Twelve is made clear: Strangely, strangely, the wide-awakes amounted to eighty percent of the audience. They did not panic, they were not impressed, they lost interest and left the conference. But quality sampling showed that the wide-awakers were those of inferior minds. “They are the canaille, they are the lumpenproletariat,” said Jane Chantal Ardri. “But try to get along without them,” said Mary Brandy Manx the Mayor of Port Saint Mary. “They are the solid ones. We rarified ones are those filled with air.” On this point, the Sheryl Smith–Lafferty correspondence is interesting. Smith once argued that art is not meant to be didactic, and that only a small minority of people possess the emotional capacity to experience real tragedy. This seems close to the view held by most of the Group of Twelve, especially Jane Chantal, who has praised herself as a wonderful artist from Chapter 1 and will be the first of the Twelve to die. Lafferty rejected Smith’s position by countering that science fiction, of all genres, is inherently a literature of ideas, a form designed to convey concepts. From elsewhere in the nonfiction, we know that Lafferty thought that science fiction, when done well, was just Story with a capital "S," so didacticism can be taken transitively as something that, when done well, does not damage but enhances all story art. And on human emotion, the capacity for it, he told Smith, has the matter upside down. Drawing on one of his private-vocabulary words, he speaks of the fellahin, whom he here defines as the ninety-seven percent of common humanity. They, he argues, possess the full emotional range and experience true tragedy in their daily lives. It is the weightless “elite” who lack authentic feeling. They need the “toy tragedy” of theatrical drama and opera as a substitute for real encounter. We might say that they need Gorgonius Pantera's Piano Castle to feel tragedy. It is a short step from this to what the airy Twelve. Mary Brandy Manx has taken the Lafferty position. And I would add that the final home of the Laughing Christ in the novel, once it is removed from Lecco, is to be found at that seat of art, Piano Castle in the Alps. There are no doubt many ways to read the chapter, but I find it especially interesting as a metafictional reflection on Lafferty’s approach to character. His characters are often called one-dimensional, though that description is misleading. They are one-dimensional because he uses them to open onto other dimensions. That is why I think of them as closer to classical, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern types than to characters in the novelistic sense. If, for Lafferty, the novel had reached its end with the unstructuring of the world, then much of the older novelistic machinery had presumably reached its end as well: above all, the machinery that gave characters rich interiorities corresponding to the structured societies in which they lived. In “Monday at Sora,” thinness of character becomes the subject of the Group’s own anxiety, as though characters judged by a novelistic standard of realism looked at themselves and wondered why they had been sketched by Rabelais rather than Flaubert. This appears in their suspicion that they are “no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that Atrox and perhaps some of his friends are writing.” The dread comes from their sense of insufficient detail. Solomon Izzersted and John Barkley Towntower feel that they are living in “somebody’s very sketchy and imperfect idea” of the United States. The joke is that Atrox, having died fifteen hundred or so years ago, would have had to imagine the place. As Hieronymous Talking-Crow suggests, this explains the problem. Atrox never visited places like Oklahoma, so he represents his American characters as “sketchy and silly,” lacking the richness he gives to his beloved Italy. Hieronymous laments this geographic disparity in the Giant’s imagination “He has a centuries old love for Italy and all its little towns. But he had never even been in beautiful Down-Town Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and he represents us as sketchy and silly. Oh, that’s only a subjective feeling, of course. How would a fabulous giant really have anything to do with it?” On the metafictional plane, Lafferty is also commenting on the conversion of Rome and on the European historical imagination he found in writers such as Belloc. Something similar happens with Prince Leonardo the Great. Hilary Ardri observes that Leonardo appears to be a “sketchy and imperfect idea” of a panther, perhaps made by an author who has not seen a great cat in fifteen hundred years. Leonardo agrees. The joke is the old one about lions and other great cats in medieval manuscripts: creatures drawn by artists who knew the name, the tradition, and the symbolic value, but not the animal itself. The Twelve’s intuition that they are poorly drafted fictions is later confirmed by the spirit of Alexander the Great. Alexander says that Atrox has a “second class” mind and entirely “lacks the talent for creating characters,” leaving his creatures to feel like nothing more than a poorly realized, “grubby lot.” The resurrected Alexander delivers this verdict on Atrox’s artistic powers: “He has a very great bulk of things in his head, and he pours it out indiscriminately onto vellum or parchment. But he has no talent at all, though he reckons himself as one of the giants of literature. In particular, he lacks the talent for creating characters. Oh, his folks are a grubby lot! He has staying power, but that’s all. His mind is altogether second class.” How can one not read this as Lafferty joking about his own thousands of characters? In a healthy novelistic world, and in a structured world that supports novel writing, Alexander’s verdict would be damning. But Lafferty thinks that world is gone. If there are to be new characters for a new world, the old machinery of the novelist will have to change. The ghost of Alexander the Great offers good advice on this point: “I was listening to some of you talking before you opened my stone box. You worried about the detailed unreality of small units. But it is in these smallest units that these unrealities begin, and then they spread to the larger units. One adage for you then: reality is not something that one has the right and title to. It is something that must be earned. And I never spent much time in unreal lands. If you conquer one such land, what have you conquered? And if you die there of the unreality disease, you are really dead.”

And it may be that Aurelian Bentley produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive This brings me to his early short story "Maleficent Morning" (1960/1990), a case study in the dangers Each morning, he wakes up, bounces on his wife, Irene, and adds new wrinkles to the day. On this particular morning, he flirts with an elevator girl named Cornelia, rushes through his commute When catastrophe strikes, he wishes it “unhappened,” resetting the morning—but each version leaves a

.” — Aurelia Thinking about Aurelia and her crash landing a few weeks ago put me in mind of one of Lafferty Born in Switzerland, she became associated with Spain, especially Andalusia, whose customs, landscapes Readers of Aurelia will know the importance of horns.

where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”), how he cross-codes characters, the other Aurelia called To Aurelia with Horns, and sundry projects that never came to pass, such as a plan to rewrite

Lafferty told Sheryl Smith that he might have two new books close to being sold, a novel called To Aurelia With Horns and "a collection of which 'Selenium Ghosts' is the lead-off." To Aurelia With Horns became Aurelia and has a complicated manuscript history.

But here, as in the “Horns on Their Heads,” Lafferty stays too close to his own ideological commitments , Darwin, Huxley, Freud, Luther, Calvin, Cromwell, Voltaire, Rousseau, Situation Ethics, Punk Rock, Horse “Horns on Their Heads” fails better: devil’s horns become the horns of Moses, carrying the full imagery of horns in biblical symbolism.

Old baseball players and race horses return to form. Mention Camels : "How They Gave It Back" "All Pieces of a River Shore" "Bright Flightways" "Boomer Flats" Aurelia

Lafferty writes: “It's Josue's horn!” “It's the Horn of Plenty,” said Catherine Cromwell simply. When he hears the horn, he identifies it with the horn of Gabriel. is the horn of abundance, is the horn of the piper calling one to salvation, is the horn of battle, He blows the crooked horn, the cromie horn, the crumbled horn of child-scripture.

Why, I've sold four hundred and fifty robes and hoods for horses, and they go for two hundred and fifty One of them was a borning, not an enslaving. Free Israel was born, created, out of chaos.