A Short Guide to the City

"A Short Guide to the City" is a 1990 horror short story by American writer Peter Straub ^[1] collected in Houses Without Doors. It blends and fuses two disparate literary forms: a self-congratulatory travel brochure published by a city's Chamber of Commerce and a news report about the murderous killing spree of the "viaduct killer."

Plot summary

The omniscient narrator moves through the seemingly idyllic Midwestern town relating the surprisingly violent, histories of the various sociological groups that populate the metropolis. He speaks as both a representative of the city, definitively summing up the collective views on life of all, and as a biased observer, subtly commenting on those views. In an indictment on small town life, he points out the city's arrogant insularity and refusal to acknowledge the darker elements of the past. While so doing, he also describes the details of and the resulting city wide interest arising from the "viaduct killer's" murders.

In examining the subsections of the city folk, the identity of the killer is hinted at repeatedly. The affluent are a secretive caste laden down with rituals and untold power, subtly afflicted by inbreeding both literal and figurative. The Eastern Europeans have tightly focused households all routinely verging on the precipice of domestic violence or self-mutilation. Feral children, organized into warring tribes after abandonment by social services, live in ramshackle tree house like structures constructed from garbage and prey on tourists. And finally those who dwell in the ghetto, the city has purposefully remained ignorant of them. Each group and several smaller groups all have evidence brought forth that could solidify each one as the breeding ground for the much sought-after sociopath but the culprit's cultural identity remains unresolved. The final lingering image is of the half completed bridge, "the Broken Span," the iconic symbol of the city.

Reception

The New York Times book critic Walter Kendrick described the piece as Houses Without Doors' "most chilling story" and "its most blatantly artistic one"^[2] while fellow The New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt found it "a shade too vague and portentous to absorb the reader completely."^[3]

References to other works

The description of the Irish children's encounter with a winged elderly man who speaks in a different language is a reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings".

References