Tripping Dead
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Excerpt
Shael is smiling stars and laughing when the plastic goes over her head. It’s one of those clear bags, so we can see her face. She’s still smiling even as Doc stretches the rubber band over her forehead.
As he works it down, the rubber band gets stuck on her nose and the others laugh. Shael, too, her laugh making the plastic fast-flutter. Doc gets the rubber band under her chin and lets it snap around her neck. She flinches a little then, and her laugh kind of gulps. The rubber band seals the bag tight and I watch as every breath sucks the plastic to her face—out and in, out and in.
She’s cool for a minute, maybe two, then she’s not. She kicks her legs, slamming against the redwood coffee table and sending a bowl of Cheetos flying. We all step back as she starts to shake, but Doc holds her arms. Shael’s mouth opens large, sucking the bag to her teeth, her tongue pressing against the plastic like some weird slug.
She’s not smiling anymore. She’s thrashing, kicking. Staring at us through the plastic. Then she slows, twitching weird. And, finally, nothing. Not moving. Not breathing. Not anything. We’re all kind of quiet, breathing like she can’t.
Owen Egerton
Novelist and filmmaker Owen Egerton is the author of The Book of Harold, How Best to Avoid Dying, Everyone Says That at the End of the World, and the PEN Southwest Book Award winner Hollow, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017. He also co-wrote the creativity guide This Word Now with his wife, Jodi Egerton. He’s also written and directed several films including Mercy Black and Blood Fest, and most recently the Corin Hardy–helmed thriller Whistle. He currently teaches screenwriting at Emerson College.
Manuel Gonzales on “Tripping Dead”
The first time I read the latest offering from One Story, Owen Egerton’s “Tripping Dead,” I found myself at once laughing and breathless—with anticipation, fear, heartache. It is a fast-paced, funny and dark and, at times, frightening story, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Egerton’s work, as a novelist, story writer, screenwriter, performer, and filmmaker. Across all his creative work, Egerton imbues his characters and his fictions with the perfect blend of humor and tragedy, love and heartbreak, hope and horror.
“Tripping Dead” comes at us with the simplest of setups—teenage friends about to leave high school, about to jump into college and careers and whatever else lies in wait beyond, run off to a cabin in the woods for one last week of debauchery, drinking, and drugs, armed with little more than their unshakeable (and youthful) belief that not only can they defy death itself but that doing so—with everyone’s favorite new party drug—comes with maybe the best, cleanest high you could possibly imagine.
From there, Egerton brings us a singular voice in Ori, a hesitant observer, unwilling to test his own fate, shouldering a horrifying past trauma, uncertain what life holds in store for him as he and his friends are all about to step off the ledge of childhood and into the vast abyss of adulthood. Will he push against the boundaries of his own past trauma, skirt across the thin scrim between life and death to find out for himself what waits on the other side? We can’t wait for you to read it and find out as you dive into Egerton’s moving and funny and unsettling and sometimes terrifying story, “Tripping Dead.”
Q&A by Manuel Gonzales
- MG: We get a lot of great classic horror tropes in this short story—high school friends on the cusp of big change (graduation, college), alone in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, debauchery of booze and drugs and Cheetos, painful backstories, innocence lost—and yet they all come together to create something that feels both intimate and new—can you talk about your own history with horror as a genre and then the ways in which you lean into or hope to subvert the genre?
- OE: Honest to god, I’m answering these questions while sitting in a remote cabin deep in the mountains with my wife Jodi. It even has a hot tub. I don’t plan on dying here, but it wouldn’t be a bad place to do it. It has a great view…which is also what I hope for the experience of dying. An excellent view.
I once had a life-altering dream of my own death. I’ll save that for another conversation.
I adore horror. I have since sneaking thrill-glances at the covers of my mum’s embossed covers of Flowers in the Attic paperbacks and catching old monochromatic zombies chewing the gristle of the living on after-midnight television. I loved renting cheap horror sequels to movies I hadn’t seen and asking my dad to tell me the weirder storylines of Stephen King novels.
I was a teenager in the 1980s, which meant I could consume slasher films like whales swallow krill. Halloween 4, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sleepaway Camp, April Fool’s Day, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, any and all Friday the 13th films. I love the chills, the laughs, the ongoing reminder that we are mortal and a personified image of death is stalking us and no matter how fast we run, no matter how wisely we plan—death gets us. If not this one, then in the sequel.
For me, the tropes are less cliches and more notes available for a melody I’m composing.
A bunch of young people escaping to a place of play and pleasure has been the setting of stories for centuries. The rural cottage in The Decameron, the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, Hårga in Midsommar—there’s a magic to those time-places where the rules bend, identities shift, and what can be imagined can also be. (Jodi and I had whiskey and chocolate for lunch. We don’t usually do that.)
I don’t really have a hope to subvert the genre of horror. But I do hope to keep the stories fresh. Or perhaps a better way to put it: I am most satisfied with a story when I feel only I could have written it. That it possesses traits—even flaws—that only I could provide. So the tropes mix with my own nightmares and obsessions and, hopefully, something weird and moving emerges. - MG: What I also find excellent in this piece of writing is your attention to the details of this world you bring us into—not just the cabin in the woods, the hot tub, the made-up science of Nyx, but also the emotional details of Ori and his brother running across the frozen lake, the remnants of the ice-fishing hut, the bent, ruined ice-pick, the bullet-pocked sign, Ori’s deep sadness and guilt carried with him all these years. This kind of writing is key to making good literary fiction work and I wonder if you could talk, too, about the ways in which you beg, borrow, or steal from a literary background to complement your genre touches.?
- OE: Jodi and I have a little fireplace in our cabin. Last night it was just cool enough to excuse an attempt at lighting a fire to cuddle up beside. I had all the ingredients—kindling, logs, a lighter. But for some god-only-knows reason the thing would not light. I tried, oh, how I tried, but for a few licks and die-out spurts the fire would not catch. I’m looking at it now in the daylight, across the room. A stack of unharmed logs barely smudged by my attempts.
I have stories with similar outcomes.
I have the idea. I gather the images that feel ready to ignite with emotion and meaning. I stack the characters and voice and narrative beats to the best of my ability. But the pages remain cold and the typing does nothing but frustrate my fingers.
Why is that? Why do some stories catch and others don’t?
Sometimes—looking back—I get it. I understand, at least in part, why a story works or fails.
“Tripping Dead” started with an idea. Kids tripping on the experience of dying. But an idea is not a story and often an idea is a horrible way to start a story. The characters and images too often become servants of the idea. There’s no heat there.
What allowed me to write this story was the voice and character. Once I let Ori start talking, I saw where he was sitting in that room of kids as they suffocated their friend. I saw the bullet-riddled “No Trespassing” sign. I saw those remains of the ice-fishing camp and the coffee table in the cabin. In any one location, there are countless details a writer could note. But a character notices specific things, things that matter to them. So the details they choose to mention describe the place and describe the person.
I don’t think much about what techniques I’m using as I’m using them, but looking back, the voice was the spark that let this particular fire catch. I'm a fan of Jack Kerouac. Maybe it’s because English was his second language (he spoke only French until age six). Or the speed of his marathon typing sessions. Or perhaps his practice of what Allen Ginsberg called “First thought, best thought.” Whatever it is, I love his writing voice. Sal Paradise’s language in On the Road is striving, reaching, and failing gloriously. His emotions and passions are outrunning his language. So his language is always racing to keep up—to catch up to what he’s feeling. He combines words, he uses mad dashes, and his voice tumbles forward in a dance of voice.
Ori is no Sal Paradise, but I like how he talks. How he’s trying to describe what he doesn’t quite have the words for. There’s this restless beating teenage heart trying to tell us this story—trying to confess and explain and understand. And his words fail. And as George Saunders remarks, “That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world.” - MG: The pacing in this story moves beautifully and what’s more even though Ori says early on there’s no way he’s going to try tripping Nyx, or tripping dead, we know he’s going to—it’s practically inevitable. But then, still, when he gives in to the light amount of pressure, it felt to me like both a relief—finally!—tinged with disappointment—come on, Ori, you know it’s gonna go bad for you! How do you approach character in such a way that you manage to build in a reader such a complicated, conflicted, but ultimately true relationship to who they are, they bad choices they make?
- OE: I love how a reader participates with a story. Not only observes, but actively walks with the character—wants for them, fears for them, urges them to make the mistake they’ve promised not to make because we understand in our gut that just past that mistake the map gets weird and reads, Here lies dragons.
So the story seduces both the character and the reader. You make the reader wait. Make the reader want. You get the bread baking so the whole house smells delicious—and then you tell your reader there’s no bread for them. Listen to their stomachs grumble. Now they want that bread so much more than if you had served it up on page one.
“Tripping Dead” is told in first person point-of-view so we only see what Ori sees. So we the reader are being denied the experience of Nyx right along with Ori. We hear the others talking about it, we watch them—but we are forbidden a taste.
An actor once told me watching someone cry is fine. But watching someone trying not to cry is heart-wrenching.
There’s something to that. The restraint highlights the reward. Think how dull Genesis would have been if God had said, “Try the fruit. It’s cool.” There’s no story there. But the wanting of something forbidden or being tempted to do what we’ve promised ourselves we’d never do—that’s story. - MG: Let’s talk about the arrogance of youth, which is a trope that runs rampant through not just the horror genre but practically all genres. Kids, amirite? Always they are never going to die. And here you have them not just tempting fate but poking their fingers right in fate’s fat eyeball, killing themselves simply for the high of dying. What about you, Egerton—say Nyx is a reality, and you can trip death, would you? If not, why not?
- OE: This story is all about borders. The border between adolescence and adulthood. The border between friendship and romance. The idea of stepping somewhere you’re not supposed to be, whether it’s a frozen lake or your stepdad’s wine cellar or death itself. It’s tantalizing—the forbidden kiss, the forbidden sip, the forbidden step. Now in all honesty I wasn’t thinking intentionally about these issues as I wrote. I was thinking about trespassing on death but, overall, I was just getting lost in the story and the relationships. The themes bubble up.
There’s a lot of boundaries being crossed in our teenage years. New desires, new frustrations, new complications. It’s often when we discover two fundamental aspects of life: sex and death. When I was a little kid the idea of sex was strange, unbelievable, outrageous. But then I got to an age where I really really really wanted to do that strange, unbelievable, outrageous thing.
Around the same time, I started to figure out that someday I will stop living on this planet. I will die. We get a little high and a lot curious on both these concepts. We flirt with both—play spin the bottle or skinny dip in shark-infested waters. It’s all part of playing with the same delicious thrill of our bodies—the possibilities both beautiful and terrifying that comes along with having flesh.
Would I try Nyx?
Years back, I was traveling across the southwest Nevada desert in an old VW camper van. I was on this stretch of highway surrounded by sand and rock and sky and not a single other person. I saw a sign off the highway for “Flower Springs” and I thought, Well that sounds pleasant. So I turned down an unpaved road and into the desert. It was a bumpy, rocky road and weaved miles and miles from the highway. The further I went the less the road classified as a road and more a path in the rocky sand.
No springs. No buildings. Nothing.
It finally dead-ended at this massive flat-topped boulder—maybe twenty-feet tall. Just sitting there in the desert. And I thought, That looks pleasant. I’ll climb that.
It wasn’t easy, but I started up, searching for footholds. The rock was brittle and difficult. I couldn’t see places to grip. I wasn’t sure how far I’d make it. I was halfway to the top—ten feet up—when I thought, This is stupid. I should turn back. After all, I could easily break a leg falling from here. And if I did make it to the top, how the hell was I going to climb down? There was no cell phone, no people, no passing traffic. I was very, very alone. I felt a cold kind of fear knowing that an injury could prove fatal.
I should turn back now. Scamper down before I get too high.
I didn’t.
Instead, I took my VW camper keys out of my pocket and threw them up on the top of the boulder. Now I had no choice but to climb to the top. I had forced my own hand.
Why did I do this? Why the hell?
Same reason these teenagers try Nyx.
Same reason little kids touch the flame of a candle.
Maybe the same reason we drive too fast or drink too much or say yes when we should say no. Because beyond here lies dragons and part of us wants to see those dragons.
I got to the top. I was trembling. A bit irritated with myself for doing something so unwise. A bit proud, too.
And the view, it was beautiful. - MG: Let’s brass-tacks this: I mean, if you were to take a guess as to what you think happens right after the story ends, like, if we were wondering if Shael or Ori or any of these high school friends makes it out of the cabin alive, would you have any predictions? Does anyone escape PJ’s hellish wrath? ?
- OE: I thought I knew. I really did.
I write screenplays as well as stories and novels. Sometimes my stories are optioned and I get to write the screenplay version of the story. So part of my brain thinks early on—where would this go? What is the three-act expansion of this story?
It feels to me like the beginning of a horror film! The kind I would have ripped off the Video Mart shelf and run home with. PJ and his rusted ice pick hunting down each of the teenagers for trespassing on death. Tasty!
But there are surprises in this story that I haven’t unwrapped. What are the consequences of becoming addicted to dying (like Doc seems to be doing)? What happens when someone who is not clinically dead tries Nyx? What is PJ? Can Ori forgive himself for his brother’s death? Will Shael take any responsibility for the horrors unfolding?
But the story ends where it ends. A mark that confirms to Ori what he’d unknowingly felt for years—he’s doomed to die. Like you. Like me.
Overall the question is not if Ori survives or not but if he wakes up. This is Ori’s challenge. He’s only half-alive. Stuck in his guilt and grief and fear. My hope for him is that this horror will break him free from all that’s restraining him. I want horror stories with as much life as they have death.
Thank you for these questions. It’s been a pleasure answering them. The sun is setting here now. It’s already behind the mountain and the light is changing to a dusky yellow-blue. I think I’ll pour some more whiskey and see if Jodi saved me any chocolate. Maybe I’ll even try and light another fire.
