★★★
Synopsis: Gabe, a young lawyer, has a extraordinal libido and fucks around like nothing, impregnates his girlfriends and talks them into illegal abortion. Those babies are just flushed down in a plastic bag into New York’s sewers. One day, his girlfriend forces him to go down into the sewers. There, he finds a city of its own with beggars and alligators roaming the tunnels. On one of the walls, he finds the word “Croatoan”, and shortly after that a colony of fetuses calling him Dad.
Review: Ellison wrote this story after an affair with a woman who told him that she’d contracept. She conceived and had an abortan, shocking Ellison because of her irresponsibility. Two weeks after writing this story, he underwent a vasectomy. Reflecting this experience, Gabe’s character develops from a careless fucker to a mature father mostly in three flashbacks told in Ellison’s typical non-linear style.
The story sounds sternly moralistic, but Ellison wrote an introduction where he declared that he is pro-choice concerning abortion, and of course Ellison is known as a liberal thinker.
Searching for “Croatoan”, I found the story of the 1587 lost colony which Ellison directly referenced in this story – the story’s title was the last evidence which was found from the settlers. This digged deep roots into American folklore, brought up conspiracy theories, and made its way multiple times into weird tales and movies.
Also, Ellison picked up the 1920’s contemporary legend about alligators under the streets of New York. Like the mythic alligators, the fetuses haven’t died, flushing them down didn’t absolve the sin.
The story was way beyond my comfort zone – I could admire the masterful prose, follow the mythical hints, admire the genial combination of two folklores, but my stomach nearly turned not only with the horrific flush-down scene but also with the sewer encounters. If I wouldn’t hate horror stories, I’d give it probably five stars. Normally, I’d DNF such a story or push the one star button at its face. But this story was good, indeed, and I normalized at three stars.
Meta: isfdb. This horror short story appeared May 1975 in The Magazine of Fantasy and SF. It won the Locus Award.
Reißwolf 