"Something Passed By" (1989) by Robert R. McCammon

Readers unfamiliar with "Something Passed By" may prefer to read the below note only after reading the story.

"Something Passed By" (1989) by Robert R. McCammon can be read online here.

From: https://www.robertmccammon.com/page/18/?cat=-1

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     Brenda sat down on the den's sofa, and Johnny turned on the Sony. Most of the channels showed static, but a few of them still worked: on them you could see the negative images of old shows like "Hawaiian Eye," "My Mother the Car," "Checkmate," and "Amos Burke, Secret Agent." The networks had gone off the air a month or so ago, and Johnny figured these shows were just bouncing around in space, maybe hurled to Earth out of the unknown dimension. Their eyes were used to the negative images by now. It beat listening to the radio, because on the only station they could get, Beatles songs were played backward at half-speed, over and over again.

     Between "Checkmate" and a commercial for Brylcreem Hair Dressing--"A Little Dab'll Do Ya!"--Brenda began to cry. Johnny put his arm around her, and she leaned her head against his shoulder. He smelled J.J. on her: the odor of dry corn husks, burning in the midsummer heat. Except it was almost Christmastime, ho ho ho.

     Something passed by, Johnny thought. That's what the scientists had said, almost six months ago.

     Something passed by.

     That was the headline in the newspapers, and on the cover of every magazine that used to be sold over at Sarrantonio's newsstand on Gresham Street. And what it was that passed by, the scientists didn't know. They took some guesses, though: magnetic storm, black hole, time warp, gas cloud, a comet of some material that kinked the very fabric of physics. A scientist up in Oregon said he thought the universe had just stopped expanding and was now crushing inward on itself. Somebody else said he believed the cosmos was dying of old age. Galactic cancer. A tumor in the brain of Creation. Cosmic AIDS. Whatever. The fact was that things were not what they'd been six months ago, and nobody was saying it was going to get better. Or that six months from now there'd be an Earth, or a universe where it used to hang.

     Something passed by.

     Three words. A death sentence.

     On this asylum planet called Earth, the molecules of matter had warped. Water had a disturbing tendency to explode like nitroglycerine, which had rearranged the intestines of a few hundred thousand people before the scientists figured it out. Gasoline, on the contrary, was now safe to drink, as well as engine oil, furniture polish, hydrochloric acid, and rat poison. Concrete melted into pools of quicksand, the clouds rained stones, and… well, there were other things too terrible to contemplate, like the day Johnny had been with Marty Chesley and Bo Duggan, finishing off a few bottles at one of the bars on Monteleone Street. Bo had complained of a headache, and the next minute his brains had spewed out of his ears like gray soup.

     Something passed by.

     And because of that, anything could happen.

     We made somebody mad, Johnny thought; he watched the negative images of Doug McClure and Sebastian Cabot. We screwed it up, somehow. Walked where we shouldn't have. Done what we didn't need to do. We picked a fruit off a tree we had no business picking, and…

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I found McCammon's Usher's Passing is an evocative autumnal Appalachian horror novel. His other novels and short stories have thus far defeated me. Will Errickson's summation of McCammon is similar to mine:

....I need more from my horror fiction! This stuff's not trashy, it's not particularly well-written, it's not graphic, it's not haunting, it's not dangerous enough.

"Something Passed By" almost changed my mind. It starts out like a snarky exercise in absurdism, but the further the reader goes, the more horrifying and understandable the story's strange earth becomes.

McCammon, sadly, ruined his story by getting cute: every street and store in his little Nebraska town is named after a then-living horror writer. 

....Silva Street ....Straub Street ....Spector Theatre ....Skipp Religious Bookstore ....McDowell Hill ....Barker Promenade ....Streiber Circle, right at the edge of town, where you had a full view of the fields and the stars, and kids used to watch, wishfully, for UFOs.

Yes, it's that puerile.

And a real disservice to McCammon's protagonists, Johnny and Brenda James. They didn't ask to end their fictive lives in the background while McCammon's daemon is yucking it up. 

Jay

3 September 2022