A Story That Ends with a Scream: And Eight Others

by James Leo Herlihy

For his new collection of stories, James Leo Herlihy explores the landscape of our time — from Key West in the 1930s to a hippie party in today's Greenwich Village — like a hunter intent upon something far more exhilarating than the kill: life itself.

Most of these stories take place in Florida or some other American place where pleasure after a while begins to pall and sunshine becomes as spooky as midnight. Most of the characters are ordinary people living ordinary lives — but living them in such a way that the terror they encounter is inevitable: modern men and women, cut off from themselves, haunted by the fragment that is missing.

Nelson Algren, reviewing Herlihy's first volume of stories for the Chicago Sun-Times eight years ago, said, "He writes with an edge of iron that Steinbeck lost and Saroyan never had, a real indignation at humiliation of the human spirit."

The edge of iron is still here, and so are the wild humor, the charged immediacy and the vitally accurate dialogue that have won praise in a dozen languages for his novels, Midnight Cowboy and All Fall Down.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Fiction

214 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

James Leo Herlihy was an American novelist, playwright and actor best known for his novel Midnight Cowboy, one of three of his works adapted for cinema. He attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina and was a friend of Tennessee Williams who became his mentor.

Reviews

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished this tonight. An excellent collection of short stories by the writer of "Midnight Cowboy," James Leo Herlihy. His stories in this collection are about people living on the fringe (mostly in Florida) and dealing with the usual demons — poverty, drugs, love, loss, violence and ennui. Herlihy captures the inner conflicts of the heart as only a great storyteller can. A vastly underrated (and mostly out of print) writer, Herlihy only produced three novels, but many more stories and plays (one of which, "Blue Denim," played on Broadway and was adapted for film). "All Fall Down" with Warren Beatty was another film based on one of his novels. Probably best known because of the film version of "Cowboy," the novel is beautifully written and vastly superior to the film. Herlihy died in 1993 at the age of 66.

[Cody VC · Rating 4 out of 5]

this collection is stronger than "filbertson", which was his first. i remember "laughs, etc" & "terrible jim fitch" from "stop, you're killing me", and enjoyed them just as much reading them again a year later. (would very much like to see someone try and stage them.) it's interesting, too, seeing the connections between jim fitch (among other characters) and joe buck - the weight of personal archetype bleeds through here and there, making some stories and scenes feel perhaps more intimate than intended.

my top selections are "the day of the seventh fire" and "sweet william". "sweet william" is less about coming-of-age than a metamorphosis made all the more terrible by its good intentions, and "seventh fire" - about two spinster sisters having a prolonged public fight - is one of those stories that upon first reading leaves one uneasy and the second go-through pulls the aha! pieces together to make everything more bleak and awful. i love it. the first paragraph is great:

Key West in 1936 was a dismal place. A bad hurricane had blown away the railroad, cutting off the island's one connection with the mainland. There were no jobs to speak of in that Depression year. Not much food either. A good fisherman always had something to set on his table, and you could get in line for sugar and grits and certain staples the Government was handing out; but many people had taken to eating grass and weeds, boiling the stuff with nothing to flavor it but a bird shot out of a tree with a BB gun. Some looked to Roosevelt for help and others said there'd be no letup at all: they blamed the bad times on a grand conjunction of certain heavenly bodies, claimed there was nothing to do but sit tight and wait for that movement of the stars.

There were those who believed in neither God nor Jupiter nor Roosevelt Himself and among this faction were a number who went berserk altogether....

[M.R. Dowsing · Rating 5 out of 5]

A second brilliant collection of stories by Herlihy. Loneliness seems less of a concern this time - here we get a variety of oddballs and grotesques, many of whom have strange superstitious or supernatural beliefs and some of whom are just plain crazy, and there's a rich vein of black humour running throughout the collection. Two are actually short plays - 'Laughs, Etc' and 'Terrible Jim Fitch' - the latter of which I'd read before when doing research for my Nicol Williamson biography. (Nicol Williamson and Marianne Faithfull starred in a 1971 BBC production of this which I'd dearly love to see, although I'm unsure whether it still exists).

[patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of short stories from an underrated midcentury American author and playwright.

His writings evoke a time and a way of life that no longer exist. I would have loved to have read these stories at the time they were published, but with an adult perspective.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful storytelling: spare, slightly twisted, with a hint of Southern Gothic. Another serendipitous find in a used book bin leaving me ready for more of his work.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, so, I got up to the play. Dnf at the play. Mostly because this collection felt like a bit of a slog and by the time I got to the play I said "I am not reading a play."

Someone had posted that this and Filbertson were the same book and I took them seriously. It took a while before I actually found this and picked it up again.

I preferred Filbertson. I enjoy all the imagery and settings and people of mid-century and early 20th century America but this felt more dated - like it was a slice of literature/writing from that moment in time and belonged to that time. It was harder for me to relate to or understand.

[Debra B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the stories in this book. Herlihy was a talented writer.