'A Drowning Incident' - Real Horror

'The Drowning Incident' is a fascinating little story which is also quite disturbing. It begins quite innocuously, with a boy exploring an old dilapidated building, disrupting the progress of a black widow spider who is attempting to eat a grass hopper - which ended up in the web, interestingly enough, because of the boy's actions. Might we assume the boy later blames himself, similarly, for the fate of the puppies? It is clear he did not know the puppies were drowned, and his 'hollow feeling' is replaced by a 'sense of outrage' (4), directed (I would think) at his father. After all, at the end of the story, we are told he 'is waiting for him to come home' (4). What will the boy say in this confrontation?

But this does not answer our questions about why the boy does what he does with the decomposing puppy's body. The narrator tells us that this action is 'the culmination of all the schemes' formed since 'the moment the baby arrived' (4). In other words, this shock of finding the puppies has caused the boy to finally take action. In my opinion, the lie told to him about the puppies represents a severe blow to the boy's understanding of the adult world, just as the baby no doubt represented a severe blow to his understanding of his own world. Perhaps because of these similar shocks to his world view, the boy decides to put them together in the most literal way - to conflate the two betrayals into one.

Or perhaps, by the same token, this action should be taken as a threat. Perhaps he is telling his parents - though I imagine, most specifically, his father - that since he had the puppies taken away from him, he could take away the new child as vengeance. Who could say for sure?

This is a very disturbing story, in my opinion, and also a 'horror' story. It is horror in a deeper sense than vampires or werewolves, because these monstrosities - actions committed without care and without any human decency - occur in the real world every day.