Just because a story is discussed by the Deep Ones group over at LibraryThing or gets included in a gigantic collection called The Weird doesn’t mean it actually is.

This week’s subject of discussion is such a case.

Review: “The End of the Garden”, Michal Ajav, trans. James Naughton, 1991.

The story opens with our narrator hearing cries for help from a ground-floor window of a house in a city. He finds an attractive woman wrestling a Komodo dragon. 

Wrestling it off the woman, he realizes it’s the Komodo that’s been calling for help.

There is an amusing philosophical aside when the narrator recalls Hegel critizing Kant for his “categorical imperative” claiming a universal rule but not addressing specifics. Whom should he aid? Should it always be the human? Or the assaulted? 

The woman takes a book of the shelf, At the End of the Garden. It’s by the narrator. While the narrator has thought about writing a book, what type of book, and fantasized about the process of writing it, he hasn’t writte anything. The one sole idea in the story that might have been a germ for a weird story is when the narrator ponders

Do demons execute for us works we have dreamt of and never created? Do our hidden literary projects ripen in the dark depths of other people’s libraries? 

But answering that question or developing that idea is not what this story is about. 

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