“I was not actively seeking out blood and gore,” clarifies Mohan Menon about his short story collection Nail in the pillow . “I was not trying to write a Robin Cook type of book.” Having said that, he also readily agrees that his stories have more than a touch of the macabre.
Menon — who was one of the members of the board at Ogilvy and retired as its Director (South) after 32 years with the firm — has peppered his tales with the kind of characters you are likely to meet in everyday life: students, professors, homemakers and shopkeepers. Their relationships are the usual ones of parent, spouse, friend, and colleague. They crack lame jokes, harbour secret whims and yell crude cuss words, but they also grapple with pressures — and horrors — that you would not expect to encounter in their simple city lives. More than once, they are uprooted and thrown into worlds so dark that they seem unreal. This suddenness is sometimes drastic, and often makes for an abrupt, disorienting conclusion right where you would expect the story’s conflict to escalate.
For Menon, this is an inevitable part of the very style of these tales. Tales that he had been waiting to tell for a while. “These stories had been crowding my mind, choking me, for a year. The only way to be free of them was to put them down on paper. Once I did, they were all out. Now, I don’t even think of them any more,” he says.
Indeed, Menon has moved on fast. He is currently 5,000 words into his new novel, which he says will be different from the short stories in Nail in the pillow . But while the premise and the content are different, one of his biggest challenges remains the same. “In advertising, we had to create as much as we could, in as few words as possible. So for me, fleshing out a story idea was a huge challenge.” So much so, that even his short stories felt too short, and he had to expand upon a few.
“I changed the endings for a few of them, too. They were just too gruesome,” he laughs. But for the most part, for this writer, relieving these stories and these people from mind to paper was what made the darker parts of their lives a shade darker. As Menon puts it, “It was a bit like opening Pandora’s box. By opening it up, all those evil-minded people took wing.”
The book is available at all major bookstores in Chennai.
