I and My Chimney

A man becomes utterly consumed by his enormous chimney in this eccentric, wildly entertaining short story from the author of Moby-Dick. The narrator speaks with manic intensity about his brick monolith, tracing its history, extolling its virtues, and treating any suggestion of alteration as a personal betrayal. His wife grows exasperated; the reader grows delighted. What begins as a domestic comedy about a stubborn householder and his beloved flue gradually reveals something stranger and darker: a portrait of obsession, of a man whose identity has become fused with an object, and whose grip on the world is slipping into delightful madness. Melville wrote this in his later, less celebrated years, but it shows a writer at play, mining humor from the absurd while quietly asking what it means to be possessed by something whether stone or spirit. It is unlike anything else in American literature: a domestic horror story wearing a comedy mask, and somehow, improbably, a love letter to a chimney.