Hybrids
Not the cars. Here's a thought, though: take one part of a story, and insert it in another.
Examples:
Clyde from An American Tragedy goes to England, and meets Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice. She gets pregnant, and he pushes her out of a canoe to her drowning death.
Captain Ahab visits Mary Austin in Land of Little Rain. They wander the desert together, and Ahab attempts to destroy the Grand Canyon by filling it in. He dies flinging himself into it. Alternate: Moby Dick visits Mary Austin in Land of Little Rain and dies promptly, filling the desert with the smell of a rotting albino whale corpse.
A slight shift:
Environmentalists and Pentecostals exchange epistemologies. Pentecostals oppose dancing because there is a global shortage of it, and it is contributing to climate change. Environmentalists oppose SUVs because God might.
Any more ideas?
4 Comments:
Sort of like if Pooh Bear was thinking about the front lines and had cocktails with Eeyore in the vein of Nick Adams? Like
in this post?
Yeah, weird.
After Rhett leaves her, Scarlet changes her mind about going to Tara and decides to vacation in Monte Carlo instead. While there, she meets and marries Maxim de Winter (from Du Marier's Rebecca)and returns with him to Manderley. She immediately dismisses Mrs. Danvers and sends for Mammy. She soon gets fed up with Max's depression and, since, frankly, she doesn't really give a d#*& about him, one night she dresses up in Rebecca's old clothes and scares him into a heart attack. For months, she revels in her ownership of an English estate AND a Southern plantation, but the evil Mrs. Danvers returns and sets the house on fire. Scarlett wakes up but thinks she's just having a nightmare about the seige of Atlanta. She goes back to sleep and perishes in the fire, leaving both estates to Mammy.
Nathan Zuckerman of My Life as a Man (1974), The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Counterlife (1986), Operation Shylock (1993), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000), and Exit Ghost (2007) retreats from the intelligentsia of the City to the backwoods of Mississippi in a rare fit of common sense. There, with the last royalties of his best-selling but poorly acclaimed novels, he buys a great tract of uncut wilderness. For sport, he routinely runs the trespassers, a strange mix of McCaslins and Snopes, with a large pack of blue-tick coonhounds. Eventually, however, he tires of hunting the hunters, and in an effort to avoid another story about self-discovery in the woods, he convinces all the deer to give up grazing and open their own general store with an attached blacksmith shop. It is wildly successful, and several of the deer move into town. In the meantime, Zuckerman and a huge black bear hop an old-fashioned steamship heading north on the Mississippi River. After many adventures on and off the river, they arrive in Cairo, where the two part ways. The bear will press on to Canada, where he has hopes of becoming, at last, a free bear. Zuckerman, disgusted with discovering himself once again returns to New York, where he immediately submits a novel that poorly chronicles the events. Despite the fact that a few advance copies receive rave reviews from the New York literati, the project is shelved. Devastated, Zuckerman becomes impotent once again. He dies alone in his apartment surrounded by a case of Viagra and stack upon stack of Playboy and the New Yorker.
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