Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Jul 13, 2009, 09:54AM

Maybe we'd all be better off without you

The case of Sebastian Addledodge-Cuttlefish, among others.

Born in Stoke in 1914 at the outbreak of WWI, the youngest of four Cuttlefish siblings began writing spicy detective stories for pulp magazines such as "Zounds!" at the age of 6. At 8 his right eye was pecked out by an enraged Peacock for reasons unknown. Though initially hailed as a prodigy, Sebastian's decision to collaborate with Ralph Sterback for much of his career somewhat inevitably led to him being labelled a hack. After the suspicious deaths of his three Dadaist brothers in the early 1920's (two of them were apparently eaten by a shark whilst on dry land and the last was found mauled by a red Bear in a blue hotel room), Sebastian became the sole heir to his family's custard fortune. Disinterested in money as a result of being independently wealthy and suffering from a brain worm, as a young man Sebastian was motivated purely by a desire for his writing to achieve some measure of critical redemption. Such recognition would evade him for the rest of his life. Sebastian eventually became jaded from the endless unfavourable reviews his work received and began to blame Sterback. This resentment gave way to simmering impotent rage in the Summer of 1950, when Sterback altered the ending to Sebastian's stage play "The Prodigious Ghost Weeps". Nevertheless, Sebastian continued the collaboration. His prolific output never faltered, though his atomic age work (movies "Bride of The Bomb", the prequel "A Desert of Glass Tears" and the meditative Barnabus Harbleby novella "Temporal Requiem In Sector ZZ41X") is of incontestably poor quality. Sebastian was supposedly killed in an explosion at the Cuttlefish Custard plant in 1957, though no body was ever recovered. Sightings continued for many years and ghost stories began to circulate around Stoke. Years later, conspiracy theories abound online concerning Sebastian's vendetta against Sterback and some paranoid souls have conjectured that it was Sebastian himself who throttled the life out of Sterback in 1983. If this were true, Sebastian would have spent more of his life as a vengeful 'ghost' than as himself. To this day, Sebastian Addledodge-Cuttlefish remains an enduring, if unutterably pitiful, enigma.

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