Take Another Look At It

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: A brand new visitor to the Reds' world today–and we are so thrilled to welcome her! And  the amazing Rhodi Hawk is asking a very provocative question–see what you think at the end.


“When the Mirror Hangs Upside-Down”

by Rhodi Hawk


On a snowy Colorado night in the 1970s, I tore up the stairs, screaming, to escape my aunt’s basement. You’d think my sister and I had found a man wielding a bag of bones down there. But no. We had merely watched something scary on TV.

The thing is, it felt like something had happened to us. The terror burned its brand onto my psyche. Forty years later, I remember every detail. The red and gold weave of the sofa as I hid my eyes. The scent of coffee, cigarettes, and heating oil. The way my sister finally burst from her seat in a dash for the stairs, which mobilized me from frozen terror to galloping terror. I can feel the imprint of the textured linoleum beneath my fingers as I clawed stair treads, vaulting up to safety with hands and feet.

Fast forward twenty years to the 1990s. That same show came up again in the TV listings, and I resolved to face my fear with a friend, this time in my sunny living room. I warned her it was going to be terrifying.

Well. The show was ridiculous. Pure camp. In the climax, a cursed broach comes to life as a rat the size of a Mastiff, but it just looks like a big stuffed animal. My friend and I were palsied with laughter. Also, I was mystified by my little-girl terror, which made no sense in my new reality twenty years later.

The show was called Night Gallery, an anthology like The Twilight Zone. Both featured Rod Serling. The name of the episode was “A Feast of Blood,” based on the short story by mystery writer Dulcie Gray.

Now, in the 2020s, three more decades have passed, and I have yet another perspective. I see that the writing was actually quite good—it’s just that the monstery climax fell victim to cinematic limitations of the day. And it starred Sondra Locke—something even my twentysomething self didn’t pick up on despite having seen her in several Clint Eastwood movies.

It amazes me how our perceptions change over time. Sometimes there’s contrast even in the short term. 

After a neurological disease put me in a wheelchair, I gained a new delight in small things. 

An enlargement of matters I’d previously breezed past. Favorite old novels inverted themselves to reveal fresh layers.

Even new novels: I read Lisa Jewell’s None of This Is True twice in three months, and the second reading felt like an entirely different book. A straight murder suspense became an investigation into vagaries of intense relationships. Though I clocked these things in both readings, they morphed in detail and emotion. I understand, of course, that the change in me informed the change in what I read. It was as if the mirror had been hanging upside down, then got flipped.

In my new novel This Town Won’t Tell, a roadhouse waitress perceives herself as a lone wolf in her snowy mountain town. That perception changes after she is preyed upon by dangerous people, forcing her to reach out to the townsfolk who have always been

waiting for her to let them in.

Have you ever read something, only to re-read it later with an entirely different experience?

I’ll confess something to you. For all my maturing, and despite my newly evolved analytical lens, as I typed the words “A Feast of Blood” just now, I still felt a whole-body tension—coupled with giddy hysterics.

HANK: SO interesting!~ I am not much of a re-reader, I have to admit, but I saw the musical Miss Saigon many many years ago, and thought, yes, fine, this is fine. And then last year-ish, I saw it again, and was knocked out with the depth of it. Certainly the show had not changed–but I had.

And in high school they forced me to read Our Town, the play by Thornton Wilder, when I was in high school and I thought it was so silly and melodramatic. Now I cannot even think about it without crying.

How about you, Reds and Readers?


Rhodi Hawk is the International Thriller Writers award-winning author of several novels, including her latest, This Town Won’t Tell. In recent years, a motor neuron disease has left Rhodi a wheelchair warrior with impaired cognitive ability. That neurodivergence informs Janey’s struggle with reading in This Town Won’t Tell. Devoted to wildlife and the natural world, Rhodi lives in piney woods with a pair of vultures, her dog, Frankie, her cat, Pumpkin, and her husband, thriller writer Hank Schwaeble.


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