Short story that led to the bigger novel being written later on, Lisey’s Story

Each long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret.

Only 33 pages long, the story covers the pictorial in the newspaper covering the shooting of a famous writer and how his wife, Lisey, responded by smashing his head in with a shovel. It all comes from a newspaper clipping showing an image with the caption HEROIC GRADUATE STUDENT SAVES FAMOUS WRITER.

This one shows a man in his early twenties holding the handle of a shovel that looks almost small enough to be a toy. The young fellow is peering at it, and by his foozled expression the viewer might infer he has no idea at all of what he’s looking at. It could be an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for nickel, It could be a whang-dang-doodle, a cloche hat made out of coyote fur, or a phylactery testifying to the pompatus of love.

If you look closely (a magnifying glass helps in this regard) you’ll see half a shoe. Half a brown loafer.