Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.
Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”
The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth, The Book of Ruth (all reviewed earlier); The Old Burrill House (reviewed in my science blog); The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith (reviewed here); The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).
This story is actually two stories of faith gone wrong. In the first, a crazy religious man gives all his family’s money to a holy-roller preacher. But the man’s wife comes to the preacher to ask for the money back because her sick son will not survive without it. Even though to the preacher the highest form of religious experience is speaking in tongues, he realizes that mercy is more important than religious signs. In the appendix of the book, Rice explains that this story is true: the crazy man was his grandfather, and the sick child his father.
In the second story, a small fundamentalist congregation consists of just two people: an old man and his wife. The Bible forbids women to have any role in church other than to sing songs selected by the men, that is, the husband. The wife finally gets enough of it and leaves the church. In the appendix of the book, Rice says that this, also, is a true story.
These stories get inside the crazy mindset of fundamentalists. The old man would not attend any church that did not have what he considered a completely Biblical doctrine, and, after his wife left, was willing to drive fifty miles to the next nearest congregation of The True Church. His wife, meanwhile, just went around the corner to another church which was, as far as she could tell, just as good.
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