“Strange characters” appear-a human flotsam that comes out of nowhere to plague society. Fedka, the escaped convict, a former serf who was sold into the army, many years before, in order to pay his master’s gambling debt, roams the countryside committing crimes-not just robbery but arson and murder as well. (They are called the Jeerers or the Tormentors.) The historic Church of the Nativity of Our Lady is plundered and a live mouse left behind the broken glass of the icon. The manager of a factory in the town of Shpigulin has shamelessly cheated the workers, and working conditions are very poor subversive leaflets have appeared, urging the overthrow of the existing order the idle, prankish company that routinely gathers in the Governor’s mansion is becoming involved in adventures of an increasingly reckless kind. Arsonists’ fires have ravaged towns and villages, and in some places there is even disease: plague, and the threat of a cholera epidemic. Somehow it has happened-no one knows quite how, or why-that the incidence of violence and robbery has doubled. Originally published in The Georgia Review, Fall 1978 Reprinted in Contraries. Smith Reviews Robert Frost Shakespeare Shirley Jackson short stories Sylvia Plath Tawana Brawley Ted Kennedy The Accursed The Brothers Karamazov them The Poisoned Kiss The Possessed Troilus and Cressida twitter Ulysses Where Are You Going Where Have You Been? Wuthering Heights young adult & children's Zombie Lawrence Dostoevsky drama Edgar Allan Poe Edward Kennedy Elaine Showalter Ellen Datlow Emily Brontë Emily Dickinson featured fiction film films France Gloria Vanderbilt gothic Greg Johnson grotesque Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque horror Interviews James Joyce Jane Eyre JonBenet Ramsey Joyce Carol Oates King Lear Literary Awards Lovely Dark Deep Marilyn Monroe Mary Jo Kopechne Memoir Michael Krasny Mike Tyson My Sister My Love Nonfiction novellas novels Ontario Review photography plays poetry Rape: A Love Story Raymond J. Tags Anthologies Antony and Cleopatra Arnold Friend A Widow's Story Bearing Witness Bellefleur Biography boxing Chappaquiddick Charles Dickens Charles Gross Charlotte Brontë D.H.
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