Hiya all, Ellen-your-friendly-slushpile-reader here.
I've been following the comments on this week's story with interest, largely because I pushed to get The Teacher podcast here. No, it's not the usual supernatural horror fare, but I think it's one of the best-written short stories I've had the good fortune to read in a long time. Mur's reading really does it justice, and Alasdair's outro is awesome.
Now I know stories are open to interpretation, and this is a difficult one to pin down. It's undeniably creepy and unpleasant, but a number of commenters here seem to be asking what's its point? What's going on? So here's my take on it.
What's horror, really? (Bear with me here, or, yanno, skip to the next comment. Meh. *shrug*) Think about this for a minute: you're driving a car. It's winter. You hit a patch of ice, and the car spins. That's the kind of thing which makes your heart race, your adrenaline pump. Then imagine that it's dark, and as you spin, your headlamps catch the front of a truck, a really big rig, a split-second before it hits you. In that split-second, there's the horror. It comes from powerlessness, from the knowledge that pain and death are coming and that this is completely, utterly inevitable. There is nothing you can possibly do to make a difference.
The futility of action. The irrelevance and obliteration of hope.
Whatever lessons Paul Tremblay's teacher set out to teach his students, these are the ones which they take away with them. Maybe he wants to fire them up, get them mad at the injustice and random cruelty of the world around them, inspire them to make a difference. Or maybe not. But it's the random cruelty of the world, demonstrated lesson after lesson, frame after frame, in the videos the teacher shows, that destroys his students.
Innocence and childhood are lost, but they have no enlightened idealism to take its place. The shine is gone. Families are no longer a place of love, warmth, safety. Friends are the people you can be cruelest to. There's no capacity for trust, not any more, because anyone, everyone, the world, will do the most terrible of things for no reason at all. And this is all the more horrific when you remember that these students are the brightest and the best, the students who should be full of optimism, who should be getting ready to leave school and change the world.
With the video of the boy, Mr Sorent appears to be suggesting that all possibilities are present until one finally reaches an ending. While the boy is in flight, he isn't injured, dead. The wall isn't the inevitable outcome that it appears to be. And when he asks Kate to return to her seat so that they can watch the end of the video, he's closing off those possibilities, pointing out that the end of everything is death. But in her refusal to take the final step, Kate rejects his teaching, holding on to the moment of infinite possibility. After all the torture and torment and death she's seen, if she hangs on to the happier, friendlier days of her childhood, she won't die. She'll never reach that wall.
Upbeat, right? Well, no. Because we, the readers, the listeners, we know death is coming. Some day that wall will hit Kate, just as it'll hit us. The car won't spin forever. The big rig will plow through you. The moment of infinite possibility is also the moment in which horror lives.
So, there you have it. My take on some of what's going on in this story, and why I think it's a great horror story. Feel free to disagree. Remember, this is just my opinion: YMMV! (your mileage may vary)
Have a great day. Don't hit that wall.