Weekly Short Story: Shottle Bop by Theodore Sturgeon

Theodore Sturgeon is another one of those great old science fiction writers of the twentieth century like Robert Sheckley who is often overlooked but has produced a number of great stories.  Shottle Bop is one of his earliest, originally published in 1941 and reproduced in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 3 (1941).  Maybe you're wondering about the meaning of the story's title...sounds a bit nonsensical, doesn't it?  It's an example of "Spoonerism", where the first consonants of two consecutive words are exchanged...I remember that funny old Homer Price series I read as a kid where the sheriff was constantly doing this: so do I, unintentionally of course as I have a tendency to trip over my own tongue sometimes...

Shottle Bop is set in the "current" time around 1941 as a general "loser" character is wondering around the mid-to-lower west side of Manhattan and comes across a strange store with the sign "We Sell Bottles...with things in them".  Intrigued, he goes inside and encounters the cantankerous owner, who seems to already know all about him and his lack of character, liberally insulting him.  He is offered a bottle with some liquid in it, no charge, and told that it will bring him success...but he'd better use it wisely.  Yeah, as if that will happen with this guy.  Anyway, the big loser, who is the unnamed first-person narrator of this story, does just that...and starts to notice the world around him changing to one filled with ghosts.  Of course, instead of using his new ability to "see dead people" for the betterment of others, our hero decides to take advantage of it to set up a lucrative "psychic" business and then lords his sudden affluence over his hoodlum buddies.  You know this is not going to turn out well, but what I didn't expect was the ending...after all, the protagonist is telling the story from the vantage point of looking back on it...

Shottle Bop might have been a good Twilight Zone episode, but in retrospect it's more like a Stephen King horror story with its vivid and disturbing imagery, probably unfit for early 1960's television.  In any event, I liked it chiefly because it set up the narrator as an antihero with all sorts of personality defects...and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for literature like this: The Catcher in the Rye comes to mind.  Theodore Sturgeon has a few more good short stories, and I'm sure his name will come up again on this blog in the not-so-distant future...