The main character in this story is a young
boy whose personality has been shaped by an
overly protective mother and a father who has dis-
tanced himself from them both. He spends most of
his life in fear, frightened of the other kids at
school, of hurting himself while playing, of
strangers, and of many other things both innocu-
ous and genuinely dangerous. Although his mother
reinforces his nervousness, even she is not aware of
the one thing that terrifies him the most, the
chimney that runs up through his bedroom and
that he believes to be the home of some unseen,
unknown, and unfriendly creature. Over the
course of time, he grows out of many of these fears
despite his mother’s coddling and lives a fairly nor-
mal life, but he continues to be nervous about the
chimney. The climax of his terror comes when he
becomes confused over the story of Father Christ-
mas emerging from the chimney with presents, as-
suming that he lives there all the time. This new
misapprehension and his old fantasy merge, and
one night he does, in fact, see a shadowy figure in
his room, which he perceives as horribly burned,
deformed, and covered with soot. The crisis is re-
solved for the moment when the intruder turns out
to be his father dressed as Father Christmas.
What might have been just an interesting inci-
dent acquires a new dimension when Campbell
moves us forward a few years. A fire breaks out in
the house, and although the protagonist survives, his
father is killed in horrible fashion. When his body is
brought out of the ruined building, the boy recog-
nizes the same horribly mutilated figure he had only
imagined—or did he?—years previously. Campbell
never clears up the ambiguity, leaving the reader as
well as the main character with an acute sense of un-
certainty about what is real and what is not.
“The Chop Girl” Ian R. MacLeod(1999)
Superstition is a powerful force in human life. Even
people who scoff at the ideas are often secret be-
lievers, going out of their way to avoid “unlucky”
objects or situations “just in case.” Superstition
seems particularly prevalent in situations in which
there is overt, even violent, competition, such as
in many sports events and even more significantly
during wartime. The British writer MacLeod in-
vokes this concept in this fairly long story set dur-
ing the latter days of World War II. The blitz is
over, and allied bombers are pounding the German-
held cities in Europe. Even though they control the
skies, the toll among bomber crews is terrific. Less
than half the airmen will live through their re-
quired number of tours, and each of the enclosed
cultures of the British airbases has developed an
elaborate series of superstitions, charms for both
good luck and bad.
The worst of the latter is the “chop girl,”
whose company means bad luck. The narrator be-
comes the chop girl for her base after three inci-
dents in which she became close to a pilot, each of
whom died or disappeared on his very next mis-
sion. Although no one is openly impolite to her,
the others begin to avoid her company, particularly
the airmen, and she becomes increasingly isolated.
In contrast to her is Walt Williams, a pilot with
such great good luck that it seems—and eventually
proves to be—a magical quality. Walt is charming
and competent and leads an obviously charmed
life. He can even walk across an icy puddle with-
out getting his feet wet. Walt never gambles or
wastes his good luck on anything trivial, and once
in the sky he is never in any danger.
The gift does not come without a price, which
he reveals only when he and the chop girl run into
each other one night and discover that they are
mutually lonely. There had been stories about him
crying out in the night, perhaps caught up in a
nightmare, but the truth is even worse. Walt is
troubled by visions. When he sleeps he witnesses
the bad luck of others, their terrible deaths and
mutilations, and his visions are not confined to the
English, or the Allies, or even to the current day.
He recoils in horror from the aftermath of Hi-
roshima and the fall of Berlin, even though neither
event has yet taken place. During their first night
together bad and good luck merge, but Walt tells
her that he is confident that he is safe and is, in
fact, resigned to a life he cannot escape. But the
truth is that he longs for death, and this is a part of
his plan to achieve it, for on his very next mission
he is lost, and investigators discover that he delib-
erately disconnected his parachute.
“The Chop Girl,” which won the World Fan-
tasy Award, is a particularly moving and subtle56 “The Chop Girl”