{"id":284,"date":"2011-02-13T22:26:55","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T03:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/"},"modified":"2011-02-21T14:38:16","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T19:38:16","slug":"the-revenge-of-the-stolen-library-book","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/writing\/short-fiction\/the-revenge-of-the-stolen-library-book\/","title":{"rendered":"The Revenge of the Stolen Library Book"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes, the smallest sins receive the harshest penalties. That&#8217;s what was so pleasing about Stanley Elkin&#8217;s novel <em>The Living En<\/em>d, in which a good man who loves God is still sentenced to be punished forever because he once opened his store on a day of rest.<\/p>\n<p>So it is in this story of mine, printed in <em>Eldritch Tale<\/em>s #29 in 1993. Whatever good my protagonist may have attempted to accomplish in his life is wiped away because of his theft of a library book that he plans to give to his son as a birthday present. Many horrifying things happen in this story, but the unfairness of it all may be the most horrifying.<\/p>\n<p>To those who think that this character&#8217;s fate is out of proportion to his crime, I&#8217;m not sure that the bibliophiles out there would agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes, the smallest sins receive the harshest penalties. That&#8217;s what was so pleasing about Stanley Elkin&#8217;s novel The Living End, in which a good man who loves God is still sentenced to be punished forever because he once opened his store on a day of rest. So it is in this story of mine, printed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":285,"parent":13,"menu_order":32,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-284","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/284\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}