OLIVER DEASY
We yearned for the unanswered door.
The source of inspiration for my short story, ‘Magicians And Wizards’, was ‘The Enormous Radio’ by John Cheever, published at the time of the Red Scare in America, and the genre of domestic gothic. Cheever’s key themes are the duality of human nature and inner corruption from which I drew, setting my piece within a dormant suburb where the breakdown of family life and failings of morality are all the more poignant. The smoke which “spiralled into the night sky” is representative of the empty lives of the children; in the same vein, the “bike chain” of the opening is symbolic in its circularity, suggesting entrapment.
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