THE DEEP ONES: "Feeders and Eaters" by Neil Gaiman

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THE DEEP ONES: "Feeders and Eaters" by Neil Gaiman

2housefulofpaper
Sept. 13, 2021, 7:03 pm

Back to The Weird for this one.

3AndreasJ
Sept. 15, 2021, 7:06 am

Also read it from the Weird. I rather liked this understated sort of body horror.

Did feeding on a human rejuvenate her, or did he find a new younger eater?

4paradoxosalpha
Sept. 15, 2021, 10:42 am

I think we're supposed to understand that Miss Corvier's been rejuvenated by her new, more suitable diet of Eddie hand. This one was good and creepy; Gaiman did a good job of building the atmosphere, and the foreshadowing didn't quite give the game away.

Having established Eddie's perennial attractions for the ladies, and then making him room next to "Miss" Corvier sets up an expectation that is immediately deflated when he explains that she's an old woman. When the speaker worked with Eddie, women used to feed him, rather than the other way around. Did they all like him because he was essentially a "feeder"?

And what's with that final paragraph??? OK, lady carrying a baby. Oh, dead baby in a jar! Does it relate to the "Feeders and Eaters" theme somehow?

5AndreasJ
Sept. 15, 2021, 10:56 am

Part of the reason I wondered about whether he'd found a new eater is the plural forms in the title - if the woman is Miss Corvier, there's only one eater in the story.

The final paragraph puzzled me too.

6housefulofpaper
Sept. 15, 2021, 6:26 pm

Eddie Barrow's reference to "the lad at the poly" dates his anecdote to the 1980s, I think. I've got to Wikipedia yet again, in order to get terminology and dates right: "Under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 they {polytechnics} became fully fledged universities. After 1992, the former polytechnics ("new universities") awarded their own degrees. Most sub-degree BTEC qualifications have been phased out of the new universities, and transferred to colleges of further education."

The all-night café also seems something fading into the recent past as well. A recent Guardian article lamented the closing of a landmark one in Central London. And I can't remember seeing a big Pepsi sign anywhere for years, or the squeezable plastic tomatoes full of ketchup, with something always encrusted around the nozzle.

I think the chronology just about fits this being presented as an anecdote from Neil Gaiman himself rather than by an unnamed narrator - in the way a writer such as Somerset Maugham (or indeed, Arthur Machen) would present things as having happened to them the course of their day-to-day lives, whether it be a colourful life in the tropics or trudging around the UK trying to find a story. Gaiman was working as a journalist in the mid '80s, so being in a strange (or unfriendly) town at night, living a slightly louche or dangerous life - so things can happen to the narrator/Neil like they happen to a Chandleresque private eye - it's not wildly out of character or improbable.

The story itself is a kind of vampire story, or maybe a ghoul story. I read in the Miscellany links that this was a dream that got written up many years later, so there's little point analysing the thinking behind it. As far as the title goes, I think it can be read, with hindsight, as meaning that the feeder is also an eater.

That final scene on the train. I think it works as a weird unsettling coda to let us know that Eddie's experience wasn't a one-off. The world is full of strangeness. This one could even have a completely rational explanation. I'm sure medical specimens like that were (maybe still are) in private hands. I can imagine it being passed down since Victorian times, inherited with the family home.



7elenchus
Bearbeitet: Sept. 16, 2021, 11:40 pm

Gaiman gets the conversational attraction right, the gravity of Eddie's banter that draws the listener in despite his better judgment. I admired that the story worked like that on me, too. Some of the filler words or inflections I wasn't sure I had right, given it's British dialect, but my inner voice put them in a mild Cockney and whether or not it's how people actually talked, it all worked for me.

The final paragraph also makes me hesitate. I agree it is a "weird unsettling coda" but it left me thinking it was not only that, that I was missing some reference more directly linked to the vampirism. And just now, trying to puzzle out or put into words the feeling I was having, the nature of that cerebral itch as I type this out, I put my finger on it:

The direct link is the notion that the center of the strangeness here is not the storyteller, Eddie (the feeder), but the narrator (the eater) who's listening and relaying Eddie's story. Because along comes another storyteller, the woman on the train, relaying another wack-job tale that no-one would expect to encounter, yet our narrator ran across two such stories in one night ... he's the center of gravity, in a chain of feeders and eaters.

Which makes us part of the chain, too. More eaters, which flips the script and turns the narrator into another feeder.

ETA I suppose strictly speaking it's not a chain, more like a net or matrix, different nodes playing different parts depending upon the connections being traced.

8paradoxosalpha
Sept. 17, 2021, 12:15 am

9housefulofpaper
Sept. 17, 2021, 8:46 am

>7 elenchus:

A persuasive reading (said he, pretending to be an intellectual...)

10elenchus
Sept. 17, 2021, 9:16 am

Puts me in mind of another story we read, "Professor Pownall's Oversight". Of course I don't know what Gaiman intended, but from Sandman I know he's quite capable of this sort of deliberate metafictional play.

11AndreasJ
Sept. 17, 2021, 4:07 pm

>7 elenchus:

So our narrator is a weirdness magnet.