Joe Gores (1931-2011) was an American noir author whose work is markedly influenced by Dashiell Hammett. The novel entitled Hammettwhere Gores revives the author of The Maltese Falcon turning him into a character in a story that Wim Wenders brought to the cinema. Here, in Spain, the film was distributed with this title The Man from Chinatown.
This American author is part of a select group of cult storytellers together with Joe R. Landsdale and Harlan Ellison, an author we already talked about a few weeks ago. Joe Gores’ stories are sprinkled with black and macabre humor, like the one that brings us here today. This is a story titled The Second Coming and in it appear a couple of snobbish characters who visit San Quentin with the intention of witnessing the spectacle of a death in the gas chamber.
If there is something that stands out in this story, it is that Gores spares no detail when it comes to describing the execution in the gas chamber with the macabre chair under which they had placed “a bucket containing hydrochloric acid”, one of the elements that are part of the deadly cocktail. The other element to take into consideration is sodium cyanide, the “pills of which would make the executioner fall” into a pipe that reaches the aforementioned bucket. In this way, explains Gores, “hydrocyanic acid is formed which dissolves the intestines until they become a red-hot soup” as soon as it is inhaled. Thus they spent their time in the gas chamber of San Quentin, nicknamed “the smokehouse” by the prisoners.
We know that sodium cyanide is a white powder that resembles table salt and has a faint bitter almond odor. This poison with culinary properties is deadly when it reaches the stomach and comes into contact with hydrochloric acid in gastric juice. Our hydrochloric acid is present in a sufficient percentage to convert cyanide into hydrogen cyanide, a colorless gas and a deadly poison that, in small doses, is fatal. It can kill a person in less than half a minute. However, what happens in Joe Gores’ story is that the condemned man does not die in this short period of time, but rather the scene of agony is lengthened down to the smallest details.
Joe Gores specifies every second and causes the hydrochloric acid in our gastric juices to rise to the roof of our palate and make us bitter, for a long time. It is what has the strength of fiction which, when effective, reaches the so-called gut-brain axis; a bidirectional connection in which neurotransmitters are involved, chemical messengers that excite or relax, and which take us and take us through the corridors of memory. Authors like Joe Gores manage to hit the exact button so that the aforementioned axis is set in motion and we experience what is narrated as if it were a reality. It is then that the insides begin to rumble and the fiction remains rooted forever in the closet of our unconscious.
The stone axe It’s a section where I will mount Glezwith a desire for prose, he exercises his particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
