THE DEEP ONES: "The Sea Was Wet as Wet Can Be" by Gahan Wilson

"The Sea Was Wet as Wet Can Be" by Gahan Wilson

Discussion begins June 2, 2021.

First published in the May 1967 issue of Playboy magazine.



ONLINE VERSIONS

https://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/wilson/index.ht...

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?67130

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

A Little Purple Book of Phantasies
Blood Is Not Enough
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
Gahan Wilson's Favorite Tales of Horror

MISCELLANY

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/07/101-weird-writers-28-gahan-wilson/
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-beautifully-macabre-cartoons-of...
https://gahanwilson.net/
https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2019/11/gahan-wilson-born-dead-now-dead-again.htm...
https://tinyurl.com/ux3afpu4

A Little Purple Book of Phantasies for me.

Now that I finally have my own copy of The Weird, I'll be reading there.

Just read it from The Weird. As far as I know, it's the second story I've read that was originally published in Playboy, which publication apparently has or had a wider range of content than one might have thought.

>4 AndreasJ:

Over the decades, Playboy published an outstanding roster of short stories, including many by writers in the sf/horror/fantasy genres. At least a couple of anthologies were published. This reminds me that they're probably worth tracking down.

>3 paradoxosalpha:

I'm well pleased to have purchased a copy myself, since we regularly dip into it for DEEP ONES selections. At this point, I have no plans to dedicate time to reading it myself, instead preferring to steadily work through it via the group read. I will occasionally read an extra story or two after finishing the selection of the week, however.

I found the story enjoyably quirky. Apparently I need to re-read the Alice books, though, to live up to the narrator's standards!

Irene wanted to die, and seemed to understand on some level that that was going to be the result of following the Walrus and the Carpenter to their party. Did Carl, Mandie, and Horace too want to die?

I suppose that Wilson wrote this story from its central conceit outwards, but I liked how he developed the narrator's voice and established the characters before subjecting them to the horror-cartoon eventuation.

I'm an Alice fan, which I suppose accounts for my enjoyment of the story, or a large part of it. But as >8 paradoxosalpha: stated, it doesn't mimic yet fits very well Carroll's voice and characters, while also displaying it's own notes of menace. I especially liked how the desolation was at the core of what was so disturbing, which also fits the Looking Glass / Wonderland premise.

I think it lives up to the Vander Meer's introduction: "one of the weirder and more disturbing tales" in The Weird.

Thinking more on that aspect of desolation: the beach, the sky, the water ... no-one around the picnickers until Tweed and Farr come along. It was a crucial part of the setting, the desolation, and seemingly the party's drunkenness keys into that. Wilson could have accounted for it in numerous other ways, of course, but the tone would have been different. Is that the only reason he foregrounds the drunkenness so much? Wilson describes Carl as "the greatest little drink pourer in the world", and Phil admits to drinking and smoking too much, and the other three all seem to be in various stages of depressed and insecure. Perhaps it's simply good writing, once Wilson decided that was the premise.

I also suppose that Wilson "wrote this story from its central conceit outwards," but I can't help wonder about the creative process here. Was the drunken desolation a simple solution to a writerly problem: getting a group of victims to the beach for the Walrus and Carpenter to harvest? What were the circumstances for Wilson drawing a parallel between the chambers of an oyster shell and a beating heart?

This was a second reading for me. I read it decades ago in Blood Is Not Enough, but I remembered most of it because it's a memorable story.

I liked, in describing how desolate the beach was, how Wilson almost implied that the Walrus and the Carpenter had taken the "oysters" to another dimension.

>7 AndreasJ: I got the impression everyone but Phil was sick of life. Carl is said to be "born dead". Irene is so unhappy she has attempted suicide several times. Horace and Mandie are sick of each other.

I think that Spam awakened Phil to life at the beginning of the story. It reminded him of the past and, maybe, goals he still wanted to accomplish. He's not stuck in a rut. He's going to stop working for Carl. That, and the mismatch in numbers with the poem, were the reason he didn't become an oyster.

>11 RandyStafford: He's not stuck in a rut.
But is he stuck on that beach?

I didn't make all the connections you just did, but in some sense I felt them while reading. It's one of the reasons the story works, there's a strong sense that it elegantly follows the rules of the world it creates, and as short as it is, all the pieces fit.

>11 RandyStafford:

Meant to say this earlier but didn’t get round to it: I imagine spam had different associations to Phil’s generation than to mine. I knew it as unwanted email before I heard of it as food.

>13 AndreasJ: I'm of an age where it was served often -- though I myself have never tasted any of the stuff.

I read this story in The Weird but also looked at the online link in >1 gwendetenebre: and read Gahan Wilson's comments. Finding the Alice books scary as a child makes more sense of the set up of his story (I remember, now, having a similar reaction to an edition of my mother's from the 1940s or 1950s. Tenniel's illustratrations had been redrawn to soften them but somehow it had the opposite effect. And the book had been stored somewhere so that although it wasn't visibly mouldy it smelt of damp and mould - it didn't help endear the contents to me.

As to Wilson's story - cynical and self-destructive professionals in advertising or some profession like that (Mad Men types in the age of Aquarius; or, Playboy's assumed readership, or people they aspire to be, or people they feel superior to?) fall east prey to these childhood terrors - although the narrator has the expected affection for them.

Somehow He's able to see a bit more clearly than the others. I think a writer now would be more likely to link serving in WWII with PTSD, than with being able to mentally link back to a more idealogical, or at least more hopeful, younger self.

I've eaten Spam although I don't believe I was aware of it's role as army rations in WWII. It got served up as a cheap dinner from time to time in my childhood, as as per Monty Python it was a staple on transport cafe menus and the like.