Michael Bishop - Who Made Stevie Crye

WHOMADE STEVIE CRYE? byMichael Bishop Flyleaf:
THE HORROR!
THE HORROR!
For Mary Stevenson Crye, a beautiful young housewife, life hadbeen wonderful.Loving husband, two delightful children, meaningful existence in a smallsouthern community. Then it fell apart: with the sudden, unexpected deathof her husband, Stevie must struggle to earn a living as a free-lance writer.When her typewriter -- the sole economic support for her surviving family-- breaks down, Stevie begins to receive demonic messages through the machine,the prelude to a living nightmare of satanic emissaries, ghouls from beyondthe grave, and the revelation of an unrequited curse over the Crye household.For Mary Stevenson Crye, the nightmare is about to begin....
_Mrs. Crye looked at ther husband, a resurrected corpse whosefeatures slidabout in the same discouraging way they did in her memory. His breathwas odorless,antiseptic. Mrs. Mrs.

Crye closed her eyes, twisted in the corpse's grasp,and began to scream. Her screams were high-pitched, piercing, and numerous.... As she screamed, a creature like an enormous white-throated capuchincrept up the length of the treatment couch, lifting the hem of her skirtas it approached her face...._
In this unforgettable tale of a young woman harassed by demonsfrom hell,Michael Bishop has created a masterpiece of occult fiction -- a bloodcurdlingnovel of satanism, illicit lust, and supernatural horror.
_Who Made Stevie Crye?_ is Michael Bishop's tenth, eleventh, ortwelfth publishedbook of fiction, depending upon how one counts a thoroughgoing revisionof his first novel and a full-length collaboration with the British writerIan Watson. With Watson he has edited the anthology _Changes_ and on hisown a large anthology entitled _Light Years and Dark_. He has also publishedcriticism and poetry in a variety of outlets.

Twice he has won NebulaAwards, for his story "The Quickening" and for the novel_No Enemy But Time_,and his poem "For the Lady of a Physicist" received the1979 Rhysling Awardfrom the Science Fiction Poetry Association. For the past ten years a residentof Pine Mountain, Georgia, Bishop clearly has forsaken the peripateticlife of an Air Force brat for the more settled but no less precariousexistence of a free-lancing Southern belletrist. The author has a passionfor fried catfish and hush puppies, he believes that history will be kindto the presidency of Jimmy Carter, and his favorite writers include TennesseeWilliams and Flannery O'Connor. Michael Bishop is married and has twochildren. WHOMADE STEVIE CRYE? ANOVEL OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH BY MichaelBishop WITHPHOTOGRAPHIC ILLUSTRATIONS BY JeffreyK. Potter ARKHAMHOUSE PUBLISHERS, INC.

Copyright 1984 by Michael Bishop
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced inany form withoutthe permission of Arkham House Publishers, Inc., Sauk City,Wisconsin. Libraryof Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bishop,Michael.
Who made Stevie Crye?
I. Title. PS3552.I772W51984 813'.54 84-9251 ISBN0-87054-099-8
This novel is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, places, and incidentsare either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living ordead, is entirely coincidental. Printedin the United States of America FirstEdition
For Jim Turner
Seeking to contrive a way both to have one's cake andto eat it is undubitably a shameful activity; buthuman, too, I fear, so very, very human. --A. H. H. LIPSCOMBE WHOMADE STEVIE CRYE? I
Stevenson Crye -- her friends called her Stevie -- was nearingthe end ofher feature story on detection-and-diagnosis procedures at the WestGeorgia CancerClinic in Ladysmith when a cable inside her typewriter snapped andthe machinebegan emitting a sound like an amplified raspberry.

The disc on which thetype characters were embossed refused to advance, and the angryblatting ofthe stalled element grew perilously louder. The typewriter seemed tobe threateningto blow apart, a seven-hundred-dollar time bomb.
Stevie jabbed the on/off key and pushed her folding chair awayfrom the desk,her entire body trembling as if the scream of an emergency vehiclehad rivenher peace of mind. She wanted to scream herself.
Instead she murmured, "Shit," and exhaled a despairingsigh. Although thatword was forbidden the lips of thirteen-year-old Ted, Jr., and eight-year-oldMarella (the penalty for bad language being the forfeiture of a week'sallowance), ever since her husband's death in the hospital next doorto theclinic about which she had just been writing, Stevie had found plentyof occasionsto use the word herself.

Bills falling due, deadlines missed, and nowher expensive PDE "Exceleriter" breaking down andproclaiming its failure witha mechanical Bronx cheer. Shit. Thank God the kids were still atschool.
Stevie went to the window of her second-floor study and leanedher face againstthe cold glass. The naked limbs of cork elms and dogwoods could not concealthe silver struts and lofty unpainted belly of Barclay's water tower fourblocks away. The town looked uninhabited.

Who did you turn to on ableak Februaryafternoon when the instrument you and your children depended on for nearlyevery necessity went on the fritz? Dr. Elsa was fine at setting bones andincinerating warts, but probably not so handy at doctoring broken typewriters.You could romanticize small towns all you liked, but sometimes theywere pretty damned inconvenient. Lots of work for a plumber and electricianlike Ted, though. He had loved this place....
The Exceleriter, meanwhile, reposed in the middle of Stevie'srolltop as ifnothing much were wrong.
Her cheek still against the glass, Stevie stared at it.

Thetyping elementwas canted at an unfamiliar angle, but otherwise the machine looked okay.Ted had given it to her for her birthday two and a half years ago,not longafter she had decided to develop her latent writing talent andshortly beforeDr. Elsa had diagnosed his gastrointestinal cancer. Ted was gone, but hisgift remained, providential and indispensable. Maybe if she switchedit on again,the type disc would click back into place and the machine obediently resumeits lovely rotary-engine purr.
Worth a try, Stevie thought, leaving the window.
The typewriter, however, responded to her touch with a voicelike a robotmagpie's.

In self-defense she gouged the on/off control. In helpless angershe pounded the machine's dark-blue hood. When she had finished, the onlysound in the world seemed to be the propane hiss of her Dearbornspace heater,that and the faint mockery of the winter wind clicking the leafless branchesof the trees.
"Shit!" cried Stevenson Crye. "Shit! Shit! Shit!" II
Downstairs, her tantrum spent, Stevie sought to remedy thesituation in arational way. When a problem presented itself, Ted had alwayscautioned her, youdidn't spout curses, pound inanimate objects, or tear your hair.

No,of coursenot. You made a list of possible solutions, either on paper or inyour head,and you tried each of these solutions in turn until everything was hunky-doryagain. Otherwise, according to this consummate handyman-for-hire, youwent rapidly and counter-productively bonkers.
So be it. She would take her late husband's advice.
Too bad you didn't practice what you preached in bookkeepingand financialmatters, thought Stevie involuntarily, with a twinge of the old resentmentshe had been trying to exorcise for months.

She administered a reprovingslap to her own forehead and put the thought out of her mind.
What to do about the broken Exceleriter? First, Stevie decided,she wouldtry to borrow the clunky old Smith-Corona at the Barclay medicalcenter tofinish her article. So that she need not transport the typewriterback and forthin her van, Dr. Elsa would probably agree to let her work in an empty examinationroom. It might even be fun to turn out a story in a building where youcould hear other human beings moving about.