Today is February 26, which means it’s the birthday of Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985). I read a great deal of Sturgeon in my teens and early twenties, and over the last few years, I’ve been revisiting some old favorites. “Shottle Bop” is one of those. It’s probably among the top two or three of my favorite stories by him, if not my favorite.

“Shottle Bop” was first published in the February 1942 issue of Unknown. I read it for the first time in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories Volume 3, 1941. It’s one of Sturgeon’s most reprinted stories and is currently available electronically in Microcosmic God: Volume II of the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon. There is a long tradition in fantasy of stories that deal with the magic shop. “Shottle Bop” falls into that category. The narrator is walking along in New York, having been told by his fiance that she can’t marry him because he has no desire to make something of himself, when he passes a sign that says SHOTTLE BOP. Curious, he goes back to take a closer look. In the window is a smaller sign reading We Sell Bottles. And beneath that With Things In Them.

The proprietor is a little old man who gives the unnamed narrator a small bottle to take home and drink. When he does, the contents of the bottle will cure him of whatever he most needs to be cured of.  If he uses the cure to improve himself, good will result. If he uses it for greed, boasting, or revenge, then he will suffer greatly.

The man leaves the shop and goes home with the bottle. Of course when he tries to find the shop later, it isn’t there.

The cure in the bottle allows the man to see ghosts. And not just ghosts of people, but of fungi and animals. At first he uses this gift to help those who have passed on to find some type of closure, if that’s possible. It isn’t always.

This part of the story is quite pleasant as the narrator befriends the ghost of a young girl who died in his apartment some years before and helps a lost ghost find its way home.

Eventually he opens his own business in which he puts people in contact with their departed loved ones and is quite successful. So he decides to return to his old neighborhood and rub is success in the faces of his old associates who never had any respect for him.

This is where things take a darker turn and move from fantasy to horror. To prove he isn’t a fake, he takes his chief antagonist to a haunted house.

How exactly he suffers is left to you to find out when you read the story.

“Shottle Bop” is one of Sturgeon’s early stories, and those are the ones I like best. The story is told in first person and with a compelling voice. If you can find a copy, check it out.