Inspiration for Holiday

From the Little Professor, Things Victorian and academic.
November 04, 2008

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008: Twenty-First Annual Collection


And, in what is arguably the collection's most unpleasant tale, M. Rickert's "Holiday," the murder of JonBenet Ramsey gets smashed together with something resembling Capturing the Friedmans (n.b.: deduced from print descriptions of the film). The narrator, haunted by the ghosts of murdered little girls, is trying to write a memoir about life with dad, but gets caught up in the now-forgotten story of little Holiday, once "everyone's little girl" (28); when he admits to his agent that his own father is guilty of molestation, the agent informs him that "[t]he market is satured with them [stories about molesters]" (33), but then suggests that yoking the two tales together might make for a marketable product. While the narrator's eerie transformation into the popular idea of an abuser is interesting, I must admit that I was genuinely disgusted by the ending, and not in the good "oooh, scary" sort of way.

Rickert's won the Shirley Jackskon Award for Holiday, with an interview around Rickert's inspiration blogged at the awards blog.

What was the inspiration for "Holiday"?

Many years ago I wrote a poem that revolved around the idea of a young beauty queen child having been killed by her parents.

When I assembled my short stories I realized that I had written, over the years, many that featured dead or missing children. The publication of my collection seemed a good time to break free of that theme and move on to others. I issued myself an edict. No more dead children stories.

Then she came back.

What terrifies me most is the inner beast, the unspoken thoughts, the secret deeds, the unbearable legacy of damage humans have done to each other, the way we pretend none of it has occurred, or if we admit that it has, it is an anomaly, an enigma, a strange crack in the perfect world, when, in fact, the bad things we do to each other defines us.

Humans have the ability to consider existence, time, and space. That so many, in the light of this potential for creation, choose destruction instead, terrifies me. This is why I write horror the way I do. When I have met the monster, its name has always been Human.