Weekly Short Story: Evening Primrose by John Collins

Sometimes a short story makes more sense in the time it was written...the advent of technology can render some scenarios obsolete.  A case in point: John Collier's classic 1940 horror tale Evening Primrose, which I read (a few times) from the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late At Night.  The story begins harmlessly enough...if not more than a little bit goofy...when a young man, fancying himself a bohemian poet of sorts, decides to drop out of worldly society by living hidden within a department store.  He reasons that he would hide and sleep during store hours and then come out later in the night after closing, with only the night watchman to look out for.  Picking the store of his choice, he feels successful as the store closes and he is left alone...and free!  Only he soon discovers the opposite: many other people had already made the same decision and a secret society of store-dwellers is already flourishing, complete with its own rules...and some horrors as well...

Of course, in today's world you can't just hide in a big store like that...everything is now under 24/7 surveillance.  But in 1940 this was an option that people could envision happening, and Collier used it to make a couple of important points, in my opinion.  One is that if you come up with your own "original" way to get around the system, chances are that many, many others have already beaten you to it...trying to get away from it all may only result in being surrounded by others trying to get away from it all.  The second point is the idea of an "underground": it may seem "cool" for a while to be part of a society detached from the mainstream, but all human society is structured and includes rules for its members to abide by.  If one abandons living in the conventional society that employs conventional means of law enforcement...i.e. the police...he or she may instead be subject to some very rough treatment should they be seen by the underground group as straying from their particular laws...check out The Godfather to get another angle on this.  And that's all I'll say about Evening Primrose, a brilliant and unforgettable short story...