For the Mad and the Made

THE JUDGEMENT SEAT by W. Somerset Maugham
“; but the philosopher, taking perhaps an unfair advantage of the regrettable happenings just then upon Earth, had asked him how, considering them dispassionately, it was possible to reconcile his All-Power with his All-Goodness.”

God in reply uses the example of three people come to the Judgement Seat, John, Mary and Ruth, a love triangle whereby the standard interpretation of this famous fable is that God punishes them for their lack of sincerity and honesty to themselves and for their perseverance of selfish do-gooding that they hoped would get them into Heaven.
Yet, God does not seem to send them to Hell, but expunges all three AB INITIO? As if they are airbrushed from having ever existed. As if, too, God is now finally convinced by the philosopher’s impossible conundrum of His contradictory Nature as God.
God becomes a Ligottian Anti-Natalist with that one fell stroke, and the consequent virus of a happy non-existence spreads therefrom — up and down in space, back and forth in time.
Until eventually its annihilating reach of contagion reaches towards even the author who wrote this fable containing God.
From my review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/short-stories-somerset-maugham/

KINKIES by William Trevor
“She closed her eyes and felt herself moving upwards, floating in the room, with a kaleidoscope in each eyelid.”
I don’t know when this story was first published, but I am sure it could not be published today. A very disturbing appropriation of a woman by a co-working office boss, taken back to his flat upon the duty of sorting out some further work after hours. Both eventually drugged, we have a mix of a bad trip and the man’s prior incest with his mother.
On the other hand this is a very well written horror story, so well written it becomes a necessary blocking or airbrushing of itself. Hence, it is now as if it never existed at all. Tucked away between two stories that somehow hide it. Only Kinkies can now possibly read it into a state of words, I guess or almost believe.
From my review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/01/13/collected-stories-william-trevor/#comment-18463