Books are Food for the Soul

I am adding my favorite short stories to my shelves and am amazed to find zero reviews for this tight little horror story that is really a riff on the poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from “Alice Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll. Wilson is a prolific writer, essayist and cartoonist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Omni, Playboy and numerous collections. He is listed in http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/07/101-weird-writers-28-gahan-wilson/.

“The Sea as Wet as Wet as Wet Could Be” first appeared in Playboy magazine in the middle 60’s. On the surface the story follows a group of jaded partiers as they drink and interact though the night on a beach. In the morning, still feeling high, they decide to have a picnic and in the course the morning they meet up with two very odd, charismatic characters. What happens next has stayed with me for years and one reason this is true is because as a child, I was more frightened than entertained by the Alice books. Reading this story is like sitting on your porch watching storm clouds. You know something bad is coming but you don’t know when or what. Note, the date read is just a guess.