"The Toll" by Kealan Patrick Burke
Cemetery Dance's A Halloween Short Story ebook series
Readers unfamiliar with "The Toll" by Kealan Patrick Burke may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
A plutocrat's comeuppance:
....surprise, no more than living under heavy gray clouds for a year only to wake to find it raining. But it was also somewhat disappointing. Whoever his enemy might be, they had chosen to imprison him rather than kill him outright, and not only did this speak to their cowardice and slow-mindedness, it testified to their complete lack of understanding of Camden’s character.
Kealan Patrick Burke buries the reader alive with brazen, crapulent magnate Miles Camden on Halloween night. Camden spends the story using-up his air as he deduces the identity of the revenger. He comes to the conclusion it must be one of his wives.
Camden's minutes of ratiocinative clarity echo Dupin's detections. Poe's story-essay "The Premature Burial" is also an inspiration. But the biter-bit situation, in which Camden revisits his financial immiseration of multitudes, strikes an up to date note: the political economy horror tale.
Halloween, as a night of liminal traffic between mundane and spectral planes, is guyed with the bitter facts of a countdown to physical extinction.
"Foolish old man."
Jay
