THE DEEP ONES: "Replacements" by Lisa Tuttle

"Replacements" by Lisa Tuttle

Discussion begins September 1, 2021.

First published in Metahorror (1992).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43833

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Best New Horror 4
American Gothic Tales
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/05/replacements-by-lisa-tuttle/

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No usable versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Tuttle
https://theclassicjournal.uga.edu/index.php/2020/04/22/the-weird-replacement-of-...
https://www.tor.com/2015/02/20/evil-eighties-the-paperback-horrors-of-lisa-tuttl...
http://www.adriasnews.com/2013/01/lisa-tuttle-interview.html

I think I'll dig out my Metahorror paperback for this one.

I'll go back to my copy of The Weird for this story.

>3 housefulofpaper: Same.

Read (re-read? seemed awfully familiar) this one last night in The Weird; so glad to finally have my own copy of this book!

Just finished reading it online. Like paradoxosalpha, I thought it seemed familiar, although if I've read it before I can't recall when or where.

I'm rarely if ever actually scared by horror fiction, but this one was genuinely creepy, eliciting an deeper emotional response from me than most things we read.

Yes, this story was quite a roller coaster. Is it an allegory to boot? So very strange. If I were a high school English teacher, I'd totally want to use this, because I'm sure that there would be strong reactions and opinions among the readers, and it opens on to various social and psychological topics.

If this had been written by a man, would it be suspect for misogyny?

An unusual feature for a horror tale is that in the concluding passage, the monster is distressed!

Strange synchronicity: Check out today's post at Good Show Sir.

>7 paradoxosalpha: Strange synchronicity

I'll add to that given the caption there: I mis-read the foreshadowing in the story to infer Jenny was breastfeeding the creature, rather than opening her veins to it.

This is a classic example of my personal definition of Expressionism: an outward manifestation of an inner, subjective truth. When it works (and I think it works well here), there is hyperbole but not distortion, and it helps draw attention to something elsewise vague but nevertheless real and significant. I often find there's a mix of allegory and symbolism, and I like the ambiguity.

Tuttle's approach is as unsettling as the events she tells. Early on, she characterizes Stuart as non-violent and compassionate but ends the paragraph firmly describing his outlook in the opposite terms:

Until that moment, Stuart had never killed anything in his life. Mosquitoes and flies of course, other insects probably, a nest of hornets once, that was all. He had never liked the idea of hunting, never lived in the country. He remembered his father putting out poisoned bait for rats, and he remembered shying bricks at those same vermin on a bit of waste ground where he had played as a boy. But rats weren’t like other animals; they elicited no sympathy. Some things had to be killed if they would not be driven away.

Oh, so some things had to be killed? Okay. Made it hard to settle on where my sympathies should lie.

>8 elenchus: I mis-read the foreshadowing in the story to infer Jenny was breastfeeding the creature, rather than opening her veins to it.

I think that was a deliberate authorial feint, because I had the same anticipation.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

If it's an allegory, it's surely one, as per the 2nd misc. link, about children and the effect they may have on marriages. I prefer to read it at face value, though.

(And I don't think being written by a woman counts as a defense against charges of misogyny these days. Seems like I see a woman accused of internalized misogyny about every week.)

I'm usually the one who (perhaps naively) accepts the face value reading of a weird or supernatural story. And I don't usually like allegory of the "X stands for Y" type. It just seems thin to me, as far as imagination and creativity are concerned.

I didn't think it applies to this story because, first of all, it does work at face value as a vampire story where the vampires seem, in the final scene, seem to be either the victims or the unhappy half of a symbiotic relationship. There's also ambiguity and multiple possible readings.

In @paradoxalpha's proposed English lesson there would be room for the paternal postpartum depression reading per the link in the miscellany (is it fair to expect school kids to be aware of that, though), but also the reading where what is being replaced is not men but human babies. Or (looking at when this story was published and that this was around the time women were expected to "have it all") is it partly a reflection on women's careers being sabotaged by basic biological drives? All the women affected by the replacements are careerwomen. Even the commuters and the tube passenger near the end of the story are plausibly so.

(I know that could read as reactionary, biologically essentialist, or even misogynistic. But it's true for some women, and anyway this is the type of horror story that looks at uncomfortable and painful...half-truths, let's call then.. and "goes there", lifting the rock and looking underneath, probing the wound, and so forth.

Stuart's perceptive gives another yet another layer of ambiguity. All events are filtered through his consciousness. There's that initial killing of the first creature he encounters. I think 1992, although in many ways feeling like the day before yesterday, is far enough in the past for the idea that some things/species are simply "vermin" to be less open to challenge than today. And the story is shaped like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers type narrative where we would expect Stuart to be the one sane voice, the one with the clear view of what's going on. Could his instincts be right and all the women being puppeteered, as it were, by their instincts and hormones? You might think so, until that final image at the window. But what role does that cast the women in? You're left with a satisfying narrative complete with a kind of twist in the tale ending, but one another level nothing but unanswered questions.

I think that if anything’s happened on the “vermin” front, it’s that the boundaries shifted slightly. Killing rats may be less okay know, but nobody cares about tapeworms. Even the most radical animal-rights activists seem in practice to limit their concerns to vertebrates.

>12 AndreasJ: limit their concerns to vertebrates

Right. Not to even mention the plant kingdom.

>11 housefulofpaper: You're left with a satisfying narrative complete with a kind of twist in the tale ending, but one another level nothing but unanswered questions.

I for one reader am satisfied precisely because of the ambiguous and multi-faceted nature of the story. It works as allegory of child-raising, sure. But not only that. The plot also captures a generic form of relationship dynamics, manifesting disagreements (emotional, rational, spiritual) as a thing between people in those relationships ... and sometimes the changing attitudes toward that thing, afterward.

Well, my two interpretations are below, but I am embarrassed that I missed the obvious metaphor for parenting.

You could see this story as a metaphor for misplaced female pity and the need for masculine violence to protect women from their own misplaced impulses. Strengthening this interpretation is an aside, early on, that Jenny asks Stuart to kill bugs for her. However, it seems she is nonchalant a much more plausible threat.

Stuart rather fails the masculine test in this reading. His male protectiveness and impulsive violence show what should be done to the creatures. Even if they have no disease, don’t practice mind control, their taste for human blood is disturbing. But he won’t risk offending Jenny fearing he will lose her, which he might have, but he definitely loses her by too long delaying his assertiveness.

And, while Stuart likes to think of their marriage as having give-and-take, he knows that it’s mostly give on his part given his past arguments with Jenny. He also won’t assert himself in the office because he needs the secretary.

In short, you could argue this story is about the dangers of males relying too much on women to the point where they don’t do what is necessary. On the other hand, is feeding your new pet with your own blood really that bad? (I’d argue, yes, but we see no indication that the creatures’ menace extends beyond that.)

You could also see this story as a commentary on how pet crazy certain people can be in prioritizing pets over human relationships. In this interpretation, the creatures are not just replacements for men but humans in general.

The nice thing about this story is that I think you can support for these interpretations.

>14 RandyStafford: The nice thing about this story

Oh, I think it's all layered in there, and the resulting resonance is all to the good.