Author: Edward Trimnell

Does Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ need a modern reimagining?

“The Lottery” (1948) is one of those short stories that generations of high school students have read. And sure enough, I read “The Lottery” as a high school student in the 1980s.

I recently reread the story. “The Lottery” packs a powerful punch in less than 4,000 words. Having read this story, no one can doubt Shirley Jackson’s skills as a writer.

(Likewise, I won’t summarize the story’s plot here. If you haven’t read the story yet, then do so now and then come back to this essay.)

Shirley Jackson died in 1965 at the age of 48. We can only imagined what she might have accomplished, had she been given another three or four decades to write.

Shirley Jackson

“The Lottery” seems to imply that sinister things are happening in small-town America. Stephen King, who has cited Jackson as an influence, has often written about the evil fishbowl of the American small town. Many of King’s novels and stories—‘Salem’s Lot, “Children of the Corn”, Under the Dome, etc.—reprise this theme.

Shirley Jackson was born in 1916, and Stephen King was born in 1947. I was born in 1968, and I can’t say for certain what life in small-town America might have been like in say, 1959. I have no firsthand experience of that world.

Throughout my lifetime, however, the big cities have been the epicenters of mindless violence in American life. Crime rates are almost uniformly higher in our big cities. Our big cities are often sources of grassroots mass violence: the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the urban riots of 2020 being but a few salient examples.

Here in Cincinnati (near my home) a group of inner-city residents beat several people half to death over this previous summer.

Since 2020, residents of big blue cities have famously fled urban states like New York and California for more bucolic settings in states like Texas and Tennessee.

None of the above diminishes the impact of “The Lottery”. But perhaps this story, now published almost 80 years ago, needs to be “reimagined”. It would be interesting if a short story-writer were to pen a 21st-century version of “The Lottery”, set not in a small town, but in inner-city New York or Los Angeles.

For all you writers and aspiring writers out there, consider this a free writing prompt.

-ET 

Bad Bunny, Spanish, and the son of my childhood acquaintance

Regular readers will know that I’m a language aficionado, and I encourage others to learn foreign languages.

Language-related news stories, moreover, tend to catch my attention. This is especially true when I have a connection to the story, however tenuous.

The son of a woman I attended grade school and high school with has recently gone viral because of his Spanish study. Bad Bunny’s music has apparently motivated the young man to learn the language.

First he went viral on TikTok. Then the mainstream media picked up his story. The above video clip is his recent interview with Telemundo.

This young language learner’s mother and I are friends on Facebook. It would probably be most accurate to describe her as a friendly acquaintance in real life. We were a year apart in school, and I haven’t had any in-person contact with her in forty years.

Nevertheless, I remember her as a kind person with a sunny disposition. I’m glad that her son has received this recognition for his efforts.

-ET

The year is 1938…

The year is 1938. Betty Lehmann is an undercover German spy. Can anyone stop her? Find out in THE CAIRO DECEPTION, a 5-book, World War II historical fiction series.

**Read it for FREE in Kindle Unlimited**

 

 

1980s flashback: Halloween horror in the Shipley House (a scene from 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN)

Halloween 1980

You’re twelve years old, and trick-or-treating with your two best friends.

You know what they say about the Shipley House. Something very bad happened there in 1959.

For more than twenty years, the Shipley house has stood vacant. No one can live there for long.

You’ve been warned not to enter.

But it’s Halloween, after all. How can you resist?

You try the front door. You’re surprised to find that the Shipley house is unlocked. Almost as if the house has been waiting for you.

You go inside, and walk down the hallway toward the bedroom at the end of the corridor.

Be careful: what you find in that room may drive you mad. And you may discover things about yourself that you don’t want to know.

***

The Shipley house is featured in one of the chapters of 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN, a Gen X coming-of-age supernatural horror tale set on Halloween night, 1980.

Three young friends decide to go out for “one last Halloween before they enter their teenage years. But this will be a Halloween like no other.

12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN is available on Amazon, and you can read it for free in Kindle Unlimited.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene vs. Trump, and the problem with personality-based political movements

Marjorie Taylor Greene is now in open conflict with President Trump. This is not “fake news” or a mainstream media distortion. Both Trump and MTG are hurling insults from their respective social media accounts.

MTG claims that she is receiving threats because of Trump. Perhaps. But MTG has always been a controversial figure, with no shortage of detractors.

Trump and MTG used to be allies. In many ways, they represented two central planks of the MAGA movement: the septuagenarian, male Trump and the Gen X, female Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Marjorie Taylor Greene was born in 1974.) This feud is not what the Republicans need, going into the midterms, with mixed economic news and the culture wars as hot as ever. Continue reading “Marjorie Taylor Greene vs. Trump, and the problem with personality-based political movements”

Veterans Day, and my grandfather’s World War II stories

Tuesday was Veteran’s Day here in the USA. Many GenXers, myself included, had grandparents of the World War II generation.

My maternal grandfather was born in 1921 and enlisted in the US Navy in December 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor. In the video below, I relate some of the stories he used to tell me.

Happy Veterans Day to all who served!

-ET

How about a haunted road tale?

ELEVEN MILES OF NIGHT is a tale of horror on a haunted road.

Jason Kelley is a college student who agrees to take a walk down the most paranormally active road in Ohio. His mission: to document the phenomena he encounters on the cursed stretch of rural highway. 

Along the way he encounters hellhounds, malevolent spirits, and trees that come to life. 

If you like traditional supernatural horror tales, you’ll love ELEVEN MILES OF NIGHT. Available on Amazon now.

The media: still hating Sydney Sweeney’s good jeans

A certain kind of media person is still stewing in bile over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle “good jeans” ad. Such media types are eager to see Sweeney suffer perdition for her perceived thoughtcrimes. As a result, she gets virtually no press coverage that doesn’t overflow with snark and sarcasm.

Case in point: a recent article on Yahoo entitled, “Sydney Sweeney’s great jeans couldn’t save ‘Christy’ from bombing at the box office”. The title tells you all you really need to know.

Indeed, it does seem that Sweeney’s biopic of Christy Martin, a 57-year-old boxer whose heyday was in the 1990s, failed to pack the theaters. But so did last month’s Bruce Springsteen biopic. And many people actually know who Bruce Springsteen is. (My apologies to diehard fans of women’s boxing.)

I previewed Christy, and it seems like a worthwhile film. But probably one that I can wait for on cable.

From what I can see of Sweeney’s performance, she did a virtuoso job of transforming herself into an unglamorous female boxer from West Virginia. (Sweeney gained 30 lbs for the role.)

Regular readers will know that I rarely compliment anyone in the under-30 crowd for anything. But Sydney Sweeney is not just another pretty face and overflowing bosom. She’s a damn good actress. And in recent exchanges, she’s proven that she’s a lot more intelligent than the typical mainstream media journalist.

-ET

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, and the secret lives of the middle-aged

In the spring of 1981, my seventh-grade English teacher assigned our class “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, a short story by James Thurber.

The eponymous lead character is a middle-age man who has gone into a trance in his day-to-day life. Walter Mitty is married, but there is no spark between him and his wife. (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was published in 1939, before the advent of no-fault divorce.) The story’s sparse 2,000-odd words don’t tell us much more about the details of Mitty’s circumstances, but we can easily imagine him as a low- or mid-level administrative employee in an office somewhere.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) theatrical release poster

To escape the dullness of his actual life, Walter Mitty retreats into various daydreams. He is alternately a US Navy hydroplane captain, a bomber pilot, and a brilliant surgeon. Mitty’s daydreams of a more glorious existence are inevitably interrupted when someone—often his wife—scolds him for zoning out.

I was twelve years old when I read this story for the first time. I remember enjoying some of the imagery of the story. But as a seventh-grader, I simply could not get my arms around the ennui and resignation that often accompanies middle age. I had not yet been on the planet for thirteen years. Everything was still new to me.

I recently reread Thurber’s story at the age of 57. What a difference 45 years can make, in the way one interprets a work of fiction.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a Walter Mitty. I don’t daydream about flying a navy hydroplane while I’m driving a car, as Mitty does. But at the age of 57, I do understand how a person can become disconnected from the larger world.

American society is forever fixated on the future, and that naturally tends toward a youth obsession. Once you reach a certain age, you tend to fall off society’s radar. People are much more interested in what younger folks are doing.

The flip side of that is that you, in turn, are much less interested in what most other people are talking about. This doesn’t necessarily lead to constant daydreaming. But it does lead to a sense that you are not as fully a part of this world as you once were.

This process might be unavoidable, and it might not be completely unhealthy, either, for aging individuals or for society at-large. Society would never change if the concerns of the same cohort of people forever dominated the zeitgeist. For the individual, gradually losing touch with the world—even in late middle age—might be viewed as an advance preparation for leaving the world entirely.

Anyway, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” has apparently struck a chord with a lot of people since it was first published. The story was made into a movie in 1947, and then again at 2013.

I found “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” in the recent anthology, A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025. You can also find the story on The New Yorker’s website.

-ET

Running Spectrum’s cancellation gauntlet

As I posted last week, I decided to change my Internet service from Spectrum to a local Cincinnati-based vendor. My dad is also discontinuing his use of Spectrum, and I’ve been helping him with his changeover details.

Tuesday I called Spectrum to cancel my service. I thought this would be straightforward. I was wrong.

You can’t simply cancel. Spectrum has set up a system whereby you have to answer twenty minutes worth of questions, and endure repetitive sales pitches from a representative who is obviously compelled by management directive.

If you don’t go for the Spectrum sales pitches, Spectrum resorts to scare tactics. Did I know, I was asked, that the company I’d chosen to replace Spectrum would probably damage my utilities when burying the fiberoptics cable? And what about their poor customer service? Wouldn’t I rather cancel my new service and go back to Spectrum?

No, I repeatedly said, and the questions were rephrased to me in a slightly different way.

Needless to say, this all became quite frustrating. But you can’t simply hang up—or your service will never get canceled. It’s the perfect Catch-22.

After going through all that, I thought: what the heck is going on here? I did some research, and it seems that Spectrum has lost around 117,000 residential customers in the second quarter of 2025.

The company’s real problems began last year, when the end of the COVID-era Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) ended government subsidies for low-income households. My guess is that Spectrum then decided to raise rates on its other residential customers. That caused the company to lose even more users.

The CEO of Charter Spectrum, Christopher Winfrey, enjoyed a total compensation package of $89.1 million in 2023.

Last year that was downgraded to a measly $5.75 million because of the Spectrum debacle. So Winfrey is now working for near starvation wages, as he struggles to undo the damage that he and his management team have wrought. (Don’t worry, though—Winfrey’s package still includes personal use of a corporate airplane.)

But Spectrum is not going to have me and my dad as customers. Not even if Christopher Winfrey personally calls me and offers the use of his private jet. (Okay—I might consider if Spectrum throws in the use of Winfrey’s corporate jet. But that’s the only way they’re getting me back.)

-ET

THE EAVESDROPPER

Three of your coworkers are planning a murder. Will you stop them, or become their next victim?

**View it on Amazon**

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  • Horror in the American heartland!
  • Here’s an excerpt from Book 2 (Chapter 1)
August 1882
 
Ellen Briggs, née Ellen Sanders, was in her own house, and she was absolutely terrified.
 
Of course, this was not really her house, was it? It was her marital residence, where she now effectively lived in a state of captivity.
 
Not to mention…absolute terror.
 
She had married Theodore Briggs—railroad tycoon, necromancer, and murderer—only a few months ago.
 
In the early days of the marriage, Briggs had warned her: Stay out of unfamiliar rooms. Although the house was not old, it was home to many old secrets, Briggs had explained.
 
But she had forgotten his warning, in light of all that had happened since then…
Today Ellen had been wandering through the first floor of the massive house. Since her escape attempt earlier in the summer, Briggs seldom allowed her leave. But she could not sit still within these walls. If she remained in one place, she would go completely mad.
 
So today she had gone wandering, even though she had known better.
 
That was how she came across the undead child…
 
The door to the room containing the undead child was located adjacent to the first-floor ballroom. Ellen had opened the door, not realizing that the room connected to the basement via one of the home’s labyrinthine internal tunnels.
 
She reckoned that only later—after it was too late.
 
It was in the basement that her husband kept his worst secrets. Bodies were buried in the basement—and they didn’t always stay buried. Sometimes, they found their way to other parts of the house…
 
Nevertheless, this miscellaneous room had seemed harmless enough when she had first entered it. Heavy draperies were drawn on both of the room’s high windows, but some late afternoon sunlight filtered through.
 
The room seemed made for casual exploration. Various works of art had been stored within it. Paintings bound in frames, but not yet hung, stood stacked against all four walls.
 
Throughout the floor, in a random arrangement, were various statues: of nymphs, cherubs, and Greek deities. There was one life-size replica of the Venus de Milo. There were waist-high vases, and teak dividers carved in what looked like Turkish patterns.
 
The fortunes of Ellen’s husband were vast. He had no doubt purchased most of these items in bulk from a broker, with the intention of placing them around the house at a later date.
 
That work might have been left to Juba, the maidservant whom her husband had ordered killed, for her part in Ellen’s escape attempt. That same escape attempt had also resulted in her husband murdering Wilbur Craine, her former beau and would-be rescuer.
 
As she made her way through the cluttered room, Ellen endeavored to push those thoughts from her mind. She couldn’t think about Juba now. And certainly not about Wilbur.
 
She was kneeling down on the hardwood floor, admiring one of the paintings leant against the wall, when she heard something shift from a corner of the room.
 
Ellen immediately looked away from the landscape painting, toward the movement. She stood up. Something had stirred behind the teak screen in the room’s far corner, near one of the windows.
 
The teak screen was suspended above the floor on a set of wooden legs. In the gap between the screen and the floor, Ellen could see two small feet, clad in simple leather shoes. The shoes were caked with dried mud.
 
The feet moved toward the edge of the screen, but not in proper steps. One foot dragged behind the other.
 
A small figure stepped out from behind the screen. It was short, between four and five feet tall. The very sight of it was absolutely terrifying.
 
***End of excerpt****
 

**View the complete boxset on Amazon***

The Bruce Springsteen biopic: a film in search of a target market?

The biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere hit cinemas on October 24. Box office results were underwhelming. On its opening weekend, Deliver Me from Nowhere earned $9.1 million, trailing behind Black Phone 2 and a romcom called Regretting You.

I love horror. But if a horror film is beating your movie, there is most likely a problem somewhere.

Conservative media sources are blaming Springsteen’s (leftwing, of course) political activism in recent election cycles.  But leftwing politics have seldom hurt mainstream celebrities. Continue reading “The Bruce Springsteen biopic: a film in search of a target market?”

1980s tech was expensive, and it didn’t do much

I vaguely remember the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Introduced in 1980, this little device was manufactured and marketed by the Tandy Corporation/Radio Shack. (Every shopping mall in the 1980s had a Radio Shack.) Science fiction author Isaac Asimov appeared in a series of marketing spots for the gadget.

1980 Radio Shack ad featuring the TRS-80 Pocket Computer and Isaac Asimov

I didn’t own a TRS-80 Pocket Computer, however. The MSRP was $169.95. In present-day money, that’s about $670—the cost of a base-model iPhone.

And of course, the TRS-80 Pocket Computer had a minimal functionality when compared to an iPhone. It couldn’t make phone calls, play music, or take photos. It couldn’t surf the Internet—which didn’t yet exist, anyway.

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was programmable in BASIC (which couldn’t do much for the average consumer). Other than that, it was basically a glorified pocket calculator.

Herein lies an important realization about 1980s tech: it was very expensive, and it didn’t do much. Even if you could afford it, you usually concluded that you could do without it.

-ET

Reagan, tariffs, and the 1980s

Yesterday President Trump announced an additional 10 percent tariff on Canadian products. The president claims to have done this because the Canadian province of Ontario aired an anti-tariff commercial that featured quotes from US President Ronald Reagan.

The commercial uses quotes from a 1987 Reagan speech. Among the included Reagan quotes are “Over the long run… trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer,” and “When someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes, for a short while, it works — but only for a short time.”

President Trump called Ontario’s use of the Reagan quotes “dirty play”, and accused the Ontario government of “twisting Reagan’s words”.

I remember Ronald Reagan. Reagan was basically the president I grew up with. I was in junior high when Reagan took office in January 1981, and in college when Reagan left the White House in January 1989.

Throughout the 1980s, the Democratic Party was known as the party of tariffs and protectionism. Congressional Democrats like Dick Gephardt, Dan Rostenkowski, and Lloyd Bentsen repeatedly sponsored bills that would impose protective tariffs on our trading partners, especially Japan and South Korea.

Republicans generally opposed these measures. Opposition to managed trade, and the promotion of free trade, was a consistent theme of both the Reagan and the George H.W. Bush administrations.

Republicans of the 1980s were almost universally opposed to protective tariffs. Democrats were in favor of them.

Once again, folks: I remember watching all of this on TV as it happened. At the time, Americans were concerned about the struggling US domestic automobile and electronics industries. Trade-related debates were constantly in the news.

Outside of Congress and the White House, opinions varied. Critics charged Democrats with being too cozy with the unions (who favored protectionism). Republicans were accused of favoring business and economic growth over the concerns of the working class.

Forty years later, we can have a spirited debate about which side was correct, but two basic facts are indisputable: the Republican Party of the Reagan era was pro-free trade, and tariffs/protectionism was the default Democratic Party position.

There is, of course, another side to this. Neither of our two major political parties is what it was in the 1980s, back when the world made a lot more sense.

The Democratic Party used to be the party of farmers and factory workers. The Republican Party, on the other hand, used to function as a pro-free market, pro-business party.

In the 1980s, then, we had one party to make sure the people were taken care of, and one party to make sure there was money to take care of the people.

Today the Democratic Party is the party of Drag Queen Story Hour, open borders, and other fringe positions. The GOP, meanwhile, has become the party of MAGA, at times indistinguishable from a personality cult. At the national level, I’m not sure if there are any Republicans remaining who are willing to oppose President Trump’s positions when he goes off the rails. (Maybe Rand Paul, a little.)

But here’s the point, where Reagan is concerned. You can choose your own interpretation of history, but you can’t choose your own historical facts. If you want to claim that Reagan and the GOP of the 1980s were wrong about free trade, you can do that. But you can’t deny that Reagan and the GOP of the 1980s were opposed to protective tariffs and in favor of free trade. Those of us who were there remember the truth.

-ET

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TERMINATION MAN

A ruthless business consultant meets an even more ruthless client. But is he willing to commit murder in order to complete the job?

***View it on Amazon***