Story Planning: Based on "The Dog and the Corpse"

I’ve got a couple of different tests this week, so the story planning option is definitely a miracle, and I’m taking advantage of it.

This week, I went with the Russian Folktales Unit for my reading, and it’s probably the best choice I’ve made in this class so far. It’s the one unit I’ve read where I actually enjoyed every single story, and each of those stories had the right genre elements and twists to be right up my alley. (Even the titles were all perfect.) There’s a lot of supernatural and monster elements at play here, which means there’s a lot to love.

That said, one of the stories stuck out to me above all the others—“The Dog and the Corpse.” In that one, a man and his dog are attacked by a waiting corpse, which is apparently a regular Tuesday night in Russia. The dog rushes to bite at the corpse and protect its master, but the master ditches it as soon as it buys him an opening. When the dog escapes and finally catches up to its master, it’s furious that he left it to die, and it tries to attack the master now. The man’s family chains the dog up for a year, but any chance it gets, it still tries to break loose and kill the man. So eventually, the family is forced to kill it.

As I initially read through this, I was thinking it could be a good empty frame for a loosely interpreted revenge story—and yeah, it still could be. But I also think it could be something more. The dog’s fate reminded me of a darker version of Old Yeller, and I think it has loads of potential if adapted to a story about people instead.

At this point, my plan is to feature a protagonist with an ex-best friend (or just someone she used to be really close to) who’s somehow undergone some kind of brainwashing. Probably a magical variation of brainwashing, because my brain slants more fantasy than sci-fi, but we’ll see. Anyways, the ex-friend has been reprogrammed to hate and attack the protagonist, and it’s gotten to the point that the main character realizes she needs to put the ex-friend down. There’s some nice internal struggle and a window with a view of how things used to be, just to make the potential death and the old friendship meaningful. And then the protag goes to put the old friend down, in a more danger-heavy take on the Old Yeller tale. But in the end, I think she can’t follow through with it, and she ends up letting the friend live—even though that means she herself will get infected, or (probably better yet) they’ll both die together.

I’m still working out the kinks and details, but I think it has potential, so this is probably what I’ll wind up going with.

Bibliography: Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore by W. R. S. Ralston. Source: Mythology and Folklore UN-Textbook.

Image Credit: "Vintage Photo of Exposed Wooden Coffin and Cross" by Rhode Elaine B. Source: Wikimedia Commons.