Completed in September 1977 and first published in 1995, "Happening in Chosky Bottoms" is an intriguing Lafferty story. On one hand, we have the inexplicable nature of the Slew-Foot (Quick-Lout) people. On the other, we see the over-rationalization of the central murder plot involving Malcom.
In a nutshell, the story follows a towering Slew-Foot youth nicknamed Chalky, who joins Lost Haven Consolidated High School’s football team and turns it into an unstoppable force. His supernatural strength, quickness, and intelligence make him a local hero, but his success fuels the jealousy of former star quarterback Malcom Schermerhorn.
After Chalky quits the team, a series of animal mutilations are discovered around the swampy Chosky Bottoms. Next, two children are mutilated. Fear spreads into panic, and suspicion falls on Chalky. In the final confrontation, Chalky is shot and sinks into the quicksand—only to rise again.
Overcome with terror during this, Malcolm dies of fright. His secret is revealed: he had been orchestrating the killings while disguising himself as a hairy “monster”: Chalky. With Malcom’s guilt confirmed, the townsfolk accept the truth. Chalky—who can run 100 miles a day—then departs, setting his sights on a professional football career.
Chalky is a “hairy ghost,” unstoppable on the football field. But when he is shot, swallowed by quicksand, and presumed dead, he rises again with an otherworldly sheen. His strange resurrection is rationalized as a matter of mica attaching to his fur:
“It’s the mica,” Crescent Harvestman said matter-of-factly. “There’s always been specks and little sheets of mica in the quicksand slime, and it gathers in pockets.”
Of course, this explains nothing at all. Lafferty is playing a game here. He has a character rationalize the supernatural with a flimsy materialist explanation. Chalky’s “glorified flesh” is deflated by geology.
This is how the entire story works. After the wild violence and the numinous, readers are left with a few pages of limp rationalization. On a first reading, it might feel anticlimactic. While there’s much to explore, I want to focus on this aspect.
Michael Saler’s concept of animistic reason in As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (2012) sheds light on what Lafferty is doing in "Happening at Chosky Bottoms." In Chapter 3, Saler considers Sherlock Holmes and the interplay of reason and imagination in Doyle’s portrayal of the detective.. He writes that Holmes
“. . . expanded the definition of rationality beyond a narrow, means-ends instrumentalism to include the imagination.”
Saler’s argument is worth quoting at length for its relevance to Lafferty’s story:
Sherlock Holmes became a modern icon partly because he utilized reason in a manner magical and adventurous, rather than in the purely instrumental fashion that many contemporaries feared was the stultifying characteristic of the age. Science and art, which had been associated from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, as well as in the writings of early romantics such as Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, appeared to be severed by the mid-nineteenth century. Holmes restored their vital interchange, rendering science creative and art enlightening. He expanded the definition of rationality beyond a narrow, means-ends instrumentalism to include the imagination, resulting in the more commodious form of ‘animistic reason’ that imbued its objects with meaning. It was through his animistic reason that Holmes the private detective bested professional detectives on cases, as he often boasted. (In one case he confides to Watson that ‘Inspector Gregory, to whom the case has been committed, is an extremely competent officer. Were he but gifted with imagination he might rise to great heights in his profession.’) Holmes solved cases by relating seemingly discrete facts to a more encompassing and meaningful configuration, whose integuments were derived from a combination of rigorous observation, precise logic, and lively imagination.
Saler’s point is that Doyle makes the incomprehensible legible without dispelling its wonder. No matter how much we enjoy the terror of the hound that haunts the Baskervilles, Holmes is there to explain. He imposes a higher, rationalistic magic that dissolves the supernatural. He’s just that much of a genius.
This dynamic reveals something important about what happens in "Happening at Chosky Bottoms." Lafferty’s little town of Lost Haven has no Sherlock Holmes. The residents try to apply Holmesian logic to the monstrous events—especially the bloody dismemberments—but fail to unmask the real killer until Chalky supernaturally resolves the mystery. After an explosively Sam Peckinpah-esque climax, in which Chalky is repeatedly shot and then swallowed by quicksand, he miraculously rises. What follows is that madcap scene of mysticism and rationalization, where the characters struggle to make sense of everything, much like a failed exposition at the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? They want there to be animistic reason. They need an explanation that ties every clue together in a satisfying causal chain.
Here is one character near the end:
"Oh, sure,” Coach Goodbeaver said. “You can get several thousand pounds of pull with one of those. It will pull a quarter-mile length of barbed wire clear of the ground. It would easily pull a dog apart, or a kid goat, or the children. That is what chewed up the two posts it was anchored to in the corral of the barnyard where the kid goat was killed. There are probably a couple of sets of trees around here that are chewed up a little bit too. I should have known from those two posts what happened.”
And a little while after:
There were cameras in the “nest” too. There was a little cylinder of methane gas that might have been used to bubble through swamp water to create long-hovering glows of swamp fire. The ape-suit soaked in such methane-water would probably glow in the dark and create a Saturday Night Specter. And it would give an illuminated sort of photo. There were other things there. “I guess it is tied to Malcom,” deputy sheriff Al Moss said. “But, Chalky, to tell the truth I had my heart set on tearing you apart as the monster.”
In a story that over-explains, much remains unexplained—that’s the point. Lafferty leads us to the edge of deeper mysteries: Who are Chalky’s people? How does he stretch so well? Why do his stories change every time he tells them? We get no tidy explanation for how he can run! or how he “lives in a slightly different world from our own.” In the face of this, the eagerness with which the characters rationalize the modus operandi of Malcom’s crimes becomes black comedy. Animistic reason will not get the job done.
Here, in Lost Haven (the same setting as The Reefs of Earth), the clues won’t line up to neatly explain away the hound of the Baskervilles: there simply isn't a rational solution to take the mystery out of Chalky. There is the supernatural remainder.
The real mysteries—the ones that demand deeper thought—go ignored. How do we understand the Malcom and Chalky mini-drama of the ape costume and the man-costume? We have clues but no answers. We know what Malcom did with the hooks: he tore a goat and children apart, but we never find out what Quick-Louts do with them.
One of [Chalky's people] used to come to the Bait Shop in Lost Haven to buy fishhooks of the biggest size (six inches across the hook) for a dollar each. These were deep-sea hooks, but Henry Stone, who ran the Bait Shop, stocked a few of them especially for the Quick-Louts. “I don't know what they hook with them,” Henry always said, confessing his ignorance. “Whales, I guess. Yeah, Wagoner County whales, I bet.” These very large fishhooks were the only things that any of the Quick-Louts ever bought, the only commerce that they ever carried on.
So back to the ending. The townsfolk remain transfixed by the spectacle, unable to see beyond it. It’s like watching Chalky play football and only noticing the football. In overlooking the truly mysterious, they fail to see the world as it is. What might seem like a narrative weakness is, in fact, the story’s raison d’être. A telling clue comes early on: we’re told football isn’t the most important thing in the world—yet the story treats it as if it is.
Which means that in talking about football, Lafferty is also, in his own way, talking about the most important things: death, resurrection, and mystery.
Current notes:
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