Behind the Story: The Club

The Club was the first short story I ever submitted to a venue that got a personal response. I got an encouraging note back from Charlie Finlay at F&SF. He didn't take the story, but some of that was because it really isn't a proper fantasy story.

I considered it speculative fiction in that the setup of the town is fantastical: a modern Vermont town in which there is rampant criminality supported by the police chief, the judges, and all the town elders. I felt that the setup pushed reality so hard that it simply had to be called fantasy. Now, some years later, I see that for the weak rationale it was.

There is one sci-fi element to it: the "hive" that the Club's chief geek uses to spy on the FBI agent. The thing is, even that bit is too close to what modern tech will be doing any day now. So it's also a stretch to call it sci-fi.

The idea behind The Club is fairly simple: you can't be prosecuted after you're dead.  I've always thought that suicidal people were an untapped resource in that respect. A younger, less compassionate me always wondered why suicidal people didn't take a bad preson with them when they left. But the idea of turning someone suicidal into a murderer didn't sound like the start of any story I wanted to read or write.

Still, that discontinuity of responsibility at death intrigued me. Euthanasia rights were slowly manifesting in America at the time, but helping someone to die is still a crime in most jurisdictions. So, it occurred to me that the only "good" crime at the end of life was euthanasia. That's still pretty dark, but it was the kernel for the setup.

It quickly occurred to me that it'd be fun having people get away with "good" stuff. Once I flashed on a club of dying people getting their acts together before they died, I was hooked. This became a setup that flowed out of me without much prompting.

Because it's about suffering, death, and the end of life, it had to be funny. I love that kind of counterpoint. I love to mine humor where it is unexpected. The only problem I had was that I was enthused about the idea but had no proper story to tell. I had all these elements of the club itself to show off, but no story to show them off in.

So I fell back on that old sci-fi expositional standard: the newbie. You throw a new character into a strange situation, and the audience learns with that character. For, The Club, I figured the best way to elucidate the workings of it was to induct someone into it, but to add extra interest, I made it an FBI agent.

And nothing breaks verisimilitude like presenting polished perfection, so I broke things. The FBI agent is not comfortable with what he sees going on. The so-called helping of people to face their ends actually included a bit of municipal corruption from time to time. Some of the catharsis that members achieve is not wrapped in nice ethics. There's a lot of gray in this story.

I like the final result because it essentially presents humanity in all its messiness using a sense of humor and compassion.
The problem was that it didn't easily fall into fantasy or science fiction, so none of the genre mags wanted it.

I just hope that you folks like it. I liked that story so much that I used the club's manager, Ted, to hilarious effect, in chapter two of my novel Bootstrap the Far Side.