Solander's Radio Tomb — A Closer Reading

The Perils of Radio Enthusiasm

The narrator's devotion to radio is portrayed as a social liability. He notes that his friends gave him “startled looks” and fled across vacant lots. Only Murchison, himself a radio fan, will engage—and their conversations consist of insults. The narrator's internal monologue reveals a desire to choke Murchison and throw his body from the train. This hyperbolic hostility underscores the story's comic tone: radio fandom is a battlefield where reason is absent and only brand loyalty matters. The narrator's inability to discuss anything else isolates him, making Solander's invitation to talk radio an irresistible lure.

A Tomb Equipped for Broadcasting

Solander's plan is to have a radio loudspeaker installed in his granite tomb, so that after death he can continue to enjoy programs. The narrator, as a trustee of the cemetery, helps arrange this. But the scheme backfires when the station assigned to Solander's tomb begins broadcasting jazz and vaudeville routines—including a joke about a Swede and an Irishman. The narrator describes the programs as “not the sort of programs to loud-speak from a tomb.” The result is scandal: newspapers run headlines like “Remington Solander's Jazz Tomb” and “Westcote's Two-Step Cemetery.” The dead begin to move out, their families relocating remains and monuments, leaving the cemetery a field of shell-holes.

A Deserted Cemetery and a Groaning Trustee

Within a month, every occupant except Solander has been exhumed and moved. The narrator, as the trustee who approved the installation, is blamed. He describes his daily ritual: grabbing the newspaper, checking the PKX program, and groaning. The story ends with the narrator's lament that Solander is the lucky one—he's dead. The humor derives from the absurd inversion: a man's attempt to extend his hobby beyond the grave results in the literal evacuation of a cemetery. The narrator's helplessness and the dead's silent protest (voting with their feet, so to speak) create a satire of technological overreach and the social costs of obsession.

The story's premise—a radio-equipped tomb—is treated with deadpan logic, amplifying its absurdity. Butler uses the narrator's fanatical voice to critique the single-mindedness of hobbyists, while the cemetery's abandonment literalizes the idea that some interests can drive people away. Readers may note how the tale anticipates modern concerns about technology's intrusion into sacred spaces, all within a brisk, comic frame.

Reading about Solander’s radio tomb, I kept thinking how his obsessive broadcast became a sort of final, unintended architecture—walls of static and offended silence. It reminded me of the quieter strangeness in Montezuma's Castle, and Other Weird Tales — Edition Insights, where houses and histories refuse to stay put, their interpretations shifting like graves in moonlight. Both feel less like stories and more like odd, patient memories of place.