Almost 20 years ago, at the end of my freshman year of college, I wrote to you from some long-lost email address as “Bad Judge of Character.” 

I just wanted to say thank you for your rightfully blunt advice, which I followed. “These people could not care less about your feelings if they were dead and in the ground” was a wakeup call I needed to hear. The next year, I transferred to one of the Seven Sisters and indeed never thought again of the chuckleheads I wrote about with such passion in my letter.

For what it’s worth, I definitely did not love him and I’m incredibly grateful that our lives never became entangled long-term. I can’t even give you an update about how he and “Jane” are doing because I have no idea. : )

Thanks again,
Also Learned To Be Slightly More Concise

Dear Concise,

Thanks so much for this update! Should have followed my own advice a little more closely in this regard, history has shown, but we can only live forwards, as they say.

…Hey, this is also SDB, just in bold so you can tell it’s an Ask The Readers.

I’m looking for a short story I read probably 40 years ago. I thought SURE it was in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology I recall reading around the same time, Boys and Ghouls Together, but I finally got a copy of that off eBay and it doesn’t look like the story I have in mind is in there…so I’m hoping you genii can help me track it down.

Here’s what (little) I remember:

• the genre is horror
• it was in a midcentury anthology; the paperback seemed old even at the time — mid-1980s — so we’re probably talking about a ’60s book
  • almost positive it was the very first story in the book
  • also pretty sure it was British
• broadly speaking, the plot has to do with the heroine — Harriet, I feel like her name was? — getting stuck in a recursive purgatorial/hell loop where she dies and keeps coming back to her fat, sweaty, grabby husband; the overall effect is extremely claustrophobic
• IIRC, the ending is the protag realizing the fact of the loop, and that it’s not remediable

I THINK the basic gist is that Harriet (if that’s her name) is something of a high-strung bitch, she keeps dying over and over again and coming back into the same airless situation with this husband…again, it tracked with this Hitch anthology, but Boys and Ghouls seems to be largely detective stories and if it’s in here, I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Add to that that there are apparently a dozen Hitchologies and I was like, fuggit, let’s get the Nation to help me. ANYONE know what this story might be?

Bunts

Share!