| | Rambles: Peter Straub, Pork Pie Hat (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-07) |
 | | He goes to the club, and is mesmerized by the way Hat improvises simple melodies into haunting sonnets of love and grief. |
 | | But Hat is not the most reality-based person and improvises the scene into a rambling narrative of an extraordinary and terrifying event that occurred when Hat, then age 11, celebrated Halloween by going with a friend into the backwoods of Mississippi, to an area frequented by prostitutes, moonshiners, drug users and other dangerous types. |
 | | The story related by Hat is distorted both by the fear he felt at 11 and by the old man's desire to maintain some privacy and distance from his own past. |
| www.rambles.net /straub_porkpie99.html (301 words) |