Sticks (short story)

"Sticks" is a short story by horror fiction writer Karl Edward Wagner, first published in the March 1974 issue of Whispers.[1] It has been reprinted in several anthologies, including the revised edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, indicating that it is part of the Cthulhu Mythos genre.

While on a fishing trip in the Adirondack Mountains, horror illustrator Colin Leverett encounters an old abandoned house surrounded by bizarre stick formations. Enthusiastically sketching the strange constructions, he enters the house and is attacked by a lich in the basement, from whom he narrowly escapes. Many years later, Leverett is contacted by a descendant of a famous horror author, H. Kenneth Allard (supposedly based on H.P. Lovecraft), who hires him to illustrate a volume of Allard's previously unpublished stories. When Leverett decides to base the illustrations on his old sketches of the stick lattices, he is unwittingly drawn into a supernatural conspiracy of potentially apocalyptic magnitude.

The mysterious lattices of twigs were inspired by the work of Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye, who illustrated two Carcosa Press volumes which Wagner edited: Manly Wade Wellman's Worse Things Waiting and Hugh B. Cave's Murgunstrumm and Others (the latter volume appeared some years after "Sticks" was written).

"Sticks" was also the inspiration for the lattice stick structures in the HBO show "True Detective".

Adaptations

In the mid-1980s, "Sticks" was adapted for The Cabinet of Dr. Fritz, a 1984–85 binaural radio drama series produced by Thomas Lopez and the ZBS Foundation for NPR. Some characters from the short story are excised entirely, while a love interest for Leverett is introduced as a foil. Steven Keats provides the voice of Colin Leverett, while Laura Esterman and Bill Raymond perform as Carol and George/Althol respectively. The soundtrack is composed by Tim Clark.[2]

In June 2019, British synthwave band Kish Kollektiv released an imaginary soundtrack concept album broadly inspired by "Sticks", entitled "Dwellers in the Earth". [3][4]

Critics have noted similarities between the plot of "Sticks" and that of the film The Blair Witch Project (1999).[5][6][7]

gollark: We have exciting TV like "BBC Parliament".
gollark: Analog TV got shut down here ages ago.
gollark: So I guess if you consider license costs our terrestrial TV is *not* free and costs a bit more than Netflix and stuff. Oops.
gollark: - it funds the BBC, but you have to pay it if you watch *any* live TV, or watch BBC content online- it's per property, not per person, so if you have a license, and go somewhere without a license, and watch TV on some of your stuff, you are breaking the law (unless your thing is running entirely on battery power and not mains-connected?)- it costs about twice as much as online subscription service things- there are still black and white licenses which cost a third of the priceBut the enforcement of it is even weirder than that:- there are "TV detector vans". The BBC refuses to explain how they actually work in much detail. With modern TVs I don't think this is actually possible, and they probably can't detect iPlayer use, unless you're stupid enough to sign up with your postcode (they started requiring accounts some years ago).- enforcement is apparently done by some organization with almost no actual legal power (they can visit you and complain, but not *do* anything without a search warrant, which is hard to get)- so they make up for it by sending threatening and misleading letters to try and get people to pay money
gollark: Hold on, I wrote a summary ages ago.

References
  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2006-08-23. Retrieved 2006-09-02.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  3. [https://www.thehypemagazine.com/2019/11/a-look-into-the-mind-of-the-king-of-the-horror-soundtrack-kish-kollektiv/
  7. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2006-09-23. Retrieved 2006-09-02.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.