Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Pooka Valley was named for the impish streak of its original Anglo settlers, and that tradition continues with its annual Halloween celebration, Books Valley. The town streets are all “renamed” with temporary overlays containing scary puns (Main Street becomes Bane Street, for instance). Bales of hay are brought in and stacked for the “Baleful Maze” in the town common. Bickerwood Manor is redressed as a haunted house, and the largest pumpkins from surrounding farms are brought in for a “pumpkin patch” that serves as both contest and commerce. Any unsold gourds are bought by the city and used in the “great gourd chuck” on Halloween Day. If H’ween falls on a weekday, school is canceled for that day and November 1, if that is also a weekday. This serves to allow the school to be cleaned, as well, since it is invariably egged and TP’d back to the Stone Age.

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Head woman’s counselor Marion Russell and head men’s counselor Mitchum Bottoms run this YMCA-affiliated summer camp despite their mutual loathing of one another. As the YMCA movement has gradually faded, the camp has been increasingly forced to take on business from church groups, scouting, and other special and often esoteric interest groups. Often at the same time, since there were few groups that could occupy all twelve campsites anymore. In addition to bible campers and scouts, Camp Merrydale has hosted a Coven Camp for Wiccans, Survival Camp for the county Republican Party, Earth Camp for the national Save the Nematodes campaign, and even a Crypto Camp for the Young Investors outfit. Despite attempts to keep disparate groups apart, tensions are often high and the counseling staff, mostly high schoolers working summer jobs, largely have no affiliation or affection for any of the groups, leaving it to their adult volunteers to vociferously complain to the management. The County Youth Orchestra retreat is coming up, in fact, which is sure to create friction with another group scheduled over the same week, nuns of the Holy Order of Our Lady of Quietude.

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Clark Quitman was the first to loudly remind anyone who would listen that he was not a quitter, or lazy. He’d thunder on, with little to no provocation, that ‘quit’ just meant ‘leave’ when his ancestors took on the name, and that its association with bitter failure was a modern invention. He’d then assail listeners with notable Quitmans, from Sheriff Quitman who plied the law trade in the 1920s to Quitman County in Mississippi. Some locals were heard to say that it was his way of compensating for being a meter reader for the county water department, which he clearly felt represented a step down from his father’s job as a postal sorter. This imperious attitude carried over to his presidency of the local philately group, having inherited his father’s impressive stamp collection and built it up to even greater heights. Quitman has been able to harangue the city into giving the stamp club both a budget and a weekly meeting space, as well as a float in the annual Memorial Day parade, with the free food and free stamps serving to attract folks once Quitman’s attitude had driven others away.

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Early advertisements for Loxley Mobile Home Court proclaimed it as “stealing housing from the rich and giving it to the poor” with an overall chintz medieval theme to the central building and signage (“Ye court” and whatnot). What seemed mildly chintzy in those days has decayed to full-on camp in the modern day, with the stained and fading signs and the sad plywood battlements of the central “castle” crumbling, Loxley has been a pilgrimage site for conessieurs of roadside kitsch of late, much to the annoyance of residents. But with the recent death of William Cost Jr., the “Sheriff of Cottingham,” rumors are afoot that Loxley will be sold out from under its long-term residents and redeveloped into a strip mall.

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Despite being a scion of the Fairhope Lumber Company, a family-owned clearcutting business that aided and abetted in the extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Daphne’s interests turned to nature and the earth early. Cast out and partly disinherited after a logging protest led to the destruction of three logging trucks, she now spends her time living on a “landslip” house on a private Maine island, running a surprisingly successful mail-order wildflower business, FlowahPowah. She often has a protegé, but has left a trail of broken and exiled protegés who were cast off for being insufficiently committed to the environment. The irony of this situation seems entirely lost on her. With her second cousin J. Winthrope Fairhope in ill health and childless, there is a very real possibility that she might inherit what remains of the Fairhope empire upon his expiry.

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The chow-chow with the distinction of taking best in show at the county dog fair for an unprecedented 5 years running, Shubuta was also canine non grata at every boarder and groomer within a 50-mile radius due to his aggressive behavior and tendency to bite anyone other than his owner. Dog show judges were apparently temporarily exempt, but everyone else was cruising for a biting if Shubuta wasn’t firmly clutched (or firmly in his traveling clutch). Attempts to put him out to stud had also repeatedly failed due to his attacks on would-be paramours. He had made a little bit of stud money as a mail-order dad, but when the resulting puppies had exhibited his tendency toward mastication, that avenue too had dried up. Speculation remains rampant about whether Shubuta will extend his reign as county dog champion or be forced into retirement as controversy swirls around his unruly personal behavior.

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Despite his nickname, Scooba Schuqualak couldn’t swim and in fact hated the water. The name came, instead, from a youthful attempt to pronounce his own long and galumphing last name, which came out as “Scoobalack” until he was in middle school. He was an amateur health nut, known locally for his herbal teas, homemade kombucha, and other substances of questionable purity and efficacy that some locals nevertheless swore by. Attempts to turn his hobby into a business were frustrated by his paternal cousins who owned Schuqualak Car Wash and were militantly protective of the name, especially with the watery implications that came with the name “Scooba.”

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The patriarch of the Aberdeen clan, W. Houston Aberdeen had planned for his local empire of farms and ranches, which he had worked up from lands inherited from his grandfather Colonel Houston, to be distributed among his sons. “In the traditional Anglo-Saxon style,” as he was fond of saying. He and Mrs. Aberdeen then proceeded to have five daughters, much to Houston’s consternation. Rumor had it that he begat male bastards by the bushel, but after the fifth and final Aberdeen girl resulted in an emergency hysterectomy, Houston resolved to play the hand he was dealt and train up his girls to run his divided empire. Netty got the ranch, Shannon the farm, Kathy the grain elevator, Rowena the storefront, and Missy the farmhouse and garden plot. Within five years after old Houston’s death, though, everyone had gone bust (literally, in the case of the poor late Kathy) or sold out…except Netty and Shannon.

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“The Corn Stalks at Midnight” was a middling success for Egypt, Iowa native son J. Cooper Hawk. It sold about a hundred thousand copies, made it to trade paperback, and was adapted as a Science Fantasy Channel Original Thriller™ in 1996. Not exactly the Great American Novel, but it was enough for him to have a full-on museum in town stocked with remaindered copies of the novel and stacks of VHS tapes of the movie. Folks curious for a copy represented just about the only tourists that Egypt got, and the local public library proudly proclaimed that it had Mr. Hawk’s papers, even though said papers consisted of about forty messy and unfinished drafts for horror potboilers.

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Town was too small to have proper goths; you had to go to Altman or even Tilmitt for that, but Amory Oklona did her best with the tools and materials available. She had to get by with dark grey and navy when black was too hard to come by, and Sharpie tanked from the middle school stood in for nail polish. HughesNet only allowed for a few minutes of download late each night, so the death metal and grunge was low-bitrate and high-virus. The nightly download was a welcome sanctuary from watching her four younger brothers as an unpaid babysitter-serf, and although she thought the theme songs to the kids shows that lulled the little rugrats to sleep were kind of catchy, she’d never admit it even under thumbscrews.

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