Funny, I just reread "Ricki Ticki Tavi" this week (okay, mongoose, but still) and "Shredni Vashtar" about 3 weeks ago. Odd, that.
Why was this not named "Great...Caesar's Ghost" or "Great...Just Great...Caesar's Ghost" - are there no more Perry White fans?
This seemed like a cute, touching, humorous fantasy story that got sullied by becoming a horror story. Because a story with a ghost ferret can still be flexible, but if you want a ghost ferret AND a boyfriend/psychopath, that immediately makes it not only a horror story, but a particular kind of horror story, because that's asking a lot from the reader. Less serious, more (much more) pulpy. So, it's a lot for the writer to juggle and the reader to swallow unless you keep it deliberately cartoonish.
I figured early on that it would come down to the the ghost ferret wanting to "protect" his mistress from her new boyfriend (since those are the two set-ups), but I still figured this would be light-hearted and the boyfriend would be a cad or something. Or maybe, just maybe, the story would be about the boyfriend learning to live with the ghost ferret because he does love the woman and so it's about them both dealing with a new experience - her, the GHOST ferret, him the GHOST FERRET. Surely, neither outcomes are horror but then there seems to be a lot of bleed from the other genre podcasts happening here, and they both could be fun in a John Kendricks Bangs or John Collier kinda way.
Well, we get dead ghost animals (a nice effect, actually, and presents another direction possibility - the narrator keeps seeing more and more dead pets - is she mad or just overly sympathetic?), which works, but then we get to the "madman just keeping it under control" and the story loses me there. Then, it could only have ended as a Roald Dahl-esque, mean-spirited meditation on how we anthropomorphize pets and finished with the ferret finally getting comeuppance on his helpless owner (and that would have been too bitter and dark to mesh with the opening) to even have a chance of working for me.
So, no, not my kind of story. The writing, separate from the plot, was nice in spots and a little OTT in spots.
Alasdair missed a chance to mention...
Gef the Talking Mongoose
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gef_the_talking_mongoose...again? I'm shocked!
Here's a thought I had: presumably the police are going to analyze the scene of Richard's death and reconstruct the sequence of events. They have one heck of a job ahead of them if they don't take the actions of the undead pets into account...
Never think like this, it makes even awful movies like LEPRECHAUN seem even more hilarious if you consider what the survivors have to explain to the police!
Thanks For Listening
“Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.”
Charles Fourier, “Elephant And Dog”