J.G. Ballard, "Now: Zero"

The credit for this goes to emblem, who found it. I'm just the person who had to immediately order it from amazon and pay the extra $2 for it to be delivered overnight.

...The package I mentioned in my last post was J.G. Ballard's The Venus Hunters, a short story collection which combines stories from 1967's The Overloaded Man with stories from 1969, 1976, and 1978. Now: Zero is the first story in the collection; it's eleven pages long. Genre-wise, it's a horror story told from the first-person perspective of that creepy guy at your office who doesn't say anything when you mistreat him, but who secretly keeps a record of every abuse (real or imagined) he's ever suffered at your hands, and who you'd be afraid was going to murder you in your sleep if you didn't know for a fact that he was a total coward and would never dare.

Yes, all that in just eleven pages. ^^; Though I might be projecting some of it. In any case, Now: Zero takes that person, and gives him an old notebook that seems entirely ordinary, except that the day after he, in a fit of sudden rage, writes down the name and fantasized death of his boss at the office, his boss dies at the time and in the manner specified in the notebook.

Wait! It gets better. You see, not only does the main character in this story possess a Death Notebook (you see what I did there? XD), he also determines (through trial-and-error: no instructions for this one, I'm afraid) that there are several conditions, or rules, under which the notebook operates. The first is that the manner of death must be feasible. For instance, he determines that whatever the "militarists" of the country say about the ever-present threat of nuclear attack, it is not feasible for every inhabitant of a disliked neighboring town to suddenly drop dead at noon.

The second rule is that only the events surrounding a death can be controlled by the notebook. He can't, for instance, change the weather, or effect the stock market. (However, it doesn't seem to occur to him that he can accomplish many more things besides death by including those things as a condition of death. If Ohba read this story (and I really think he did -- you'll see why in a moment), this may have been one of the points that set him off thinking about how much more could have been done with the premise, and wouldn't it be interesting if...? But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

( spoilers for Now: Zero & implied spoilers for Death Note )

The only review of this story I found online described it as "inconsequential," ahaha. I can sort of see why. Despite a very strong beginning, Now: Zero doesn't quite succeed as a horror story -- that is, while you're reading it, you are profoundly horrified, but once you've gotten to the end...once you've reached the last line...once the moment has passed...reality once again asserts itself (STRONGLY, in this case). The horror doesn't linger, like it does in truly great horror stories. Now: Zero combines truly excellent ideas with great writing, but just misses coming together in a really effective way.

It's of such situations that fanfiction is born, as they say. XD

Background on JG Ballard: He's very influential, cited in some places as the forebear of cyberpunk. According to emblem who's been reading other J.G. Ballard words his stories are heavily laced with a feeling of impending doom, which sometimes arrives by the end of the story. One of the websites I was reading observes that Ballard was an alcoholic and that this is reflected in his characters' relationships, which are generally "pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night." (See EDIT4, below.)

Ballard is 77 now. Growing up, he spent two years in a Japanese interment camp in Shanghai. He wrote a novel about it, later made into an Oscar-winning film which was directed by Steven Speilberg, written by Tom Stoppard, and starred John Malcovich and Christian Bale (who debuted). *_* <-- wants to see this so bad.

EDIT: See this comment for a way in which this story is *not* like Death Note.
EDIT2: See this comment for similarities between the story and the Death Note pilot.
EDIT3: "Now: Zero" was published in Japanese. Recently, in fact. Apparently, the connection between it and Death Note is not unknown to Japanese fans. There go my dreams of groundbreaking investigative journalism.

EDIT4: At Ballardian, Simon Sellers read the Death Note pilot and isn't convinced that similarities between it and Now: Zero are conclusive evidence that the one was inspired by the other. And I have to say, after finishing The Venvus Hunters and the stories collected in The Best of JG Ballard, that I can see his point: a LOT of these short stories remind me of something else. So maybe Ballard is like Philip K. Dick, one of those visionaries who got it so right that we are still seeing resonances everywhere.

On the other hand, I am still bitter enough about the way Death Note ended, and about the manga's total failure to explore ANY of the deeper themes the set-up promised (or seemed to), to believe that Ohba's initial inspiration was "found" rather than intuited.

Lastly, Simon also points out that I had JG Ballard confused with crime writer Jim Thompson: it's Thompson, not Ballard, who's the alcoholic. Acccccccck. Thanks for the catch, Simon!