Fear and Liquor
Fear is one of the most prevalent aspects in the fiction of Cornell Woolrich. His stories and novels examine the effect and consequences of fear from just about every perspective imaginable. Liquor flows throughout these stories to almost an equal degree and to serve myriad purposes; fear drives one to drink, apparently. But it is in a story titled “New York Blues” that he really settles in for a deep metaphorical analysis of how the two work together:
“I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It takes sand, in the literal and the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that is fear. And if you're out of sand, then you must burn up.”
Death
The fear of death accounts for much of the dread in a Woolrich story. And like fear (and liquor), death seems to always lurk nearby, ready to intrude when necessary. In the story “Marihuana” he comes close to make this symbolic presence literal; as close as one can get, at any rate:
“There were three of them in the room now, where only two had first come in. Death was in the room with the two of them.”
Darkness
Darkness is also a major factor in the author’s story. After all, Woolrich was one of the progenitors of noir fiction. In “I’m Dangerous Tonight” he comes close to explaining exactly what it is about the darkness that draws him and why so many of his stories take place there:
“the ribbon of darkness between the false dawn and the true, always blacker than all the rest of the night has been before it. Criminals break down and confess at that hour; suicides nerve themselves for their attempts; mists swirl in the sky; and—according to the old books of the monks and the hermits—strange, unholy shapes brood over the sleeping rooftops.”
The Evil Eye
Though not situated so explicitly, the concept of an evil eye keeping watch over human beings and their inability to control fear or any other emotion is another constant that stretches across Woolrich’s canon from his fantasy horror stories to his crime noir. He saved his finest talent for metaphor to describe this usually unacknowledged symbol for the last story published while he was still alive, “For the Rest of Her Life.” It is a bit of descriptive prose that would feel at home in nearly every other story he wrote:
“It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.”
Cars
Woolrich was writing in the middle of the last century at a time when the automobile was becoming something more than just a means of transportation. Cars do not figure prominently in his work in the sense of plots revolving around them, but some of the most significant actions and twists and turns in the narrative take place inside them. “The Number’s Up” might sound like it is a story distinctly about a vehicle from this excerpt, but the imagery used here is distinctly metaphorical:
“It was like a ghost-car in every attribute but the visual one. In its trancelike approach and halt, in its lightlessness, in its enshrouded interior, which made it impossible to determine (at least without lowering one's head directly outside the windows and peering in at nose-tip range) if it were even occupied at all, and if so by whom and by how many.”
