Even by King’s standards, Lisey’s Story is a remarkably quick follow-up to Cell, his recent fast-paced techno thriller which delivered the same kind of thrills and spills as a Michael Crichton novel with an overt (and explicit) horror aesthetic, handled in King’s trademark creepy fashion. This latest novel is its polar opposite. Opening this rather weighty tome reveals that King has chosen to use the subtitle ‘A Novel’. This is indeed a novel; almost six hundred pages long, King uses the space to draw out the character of Lisa “Lisey” Landon, delving deep into her psyche as well as multifarious aspects of domestic life. Although Lisey is the protagonist of the novel, the plot revolves around the death of her husband Scott, a famous writer (surprise, surprise, King fans...) and all-round enigmatic individual. Through exploring her own memories Lisey discovers the dark otherworld of “Boo’ya Moon” where Scott (like all writers, King suggests) went to get his ideas.
The first thing to make clear about this novel is that unlike Cell, this is largely a chore to read. To be fair, the point is that Lisey’s Story is full of experimentation with language, and displays a love of the quirky ways that we humans use words, but sadly not all experiments are a success; it’s just that King’s get published. Probably the main flaw is that King has clearly been inspired by the private language that people in long-term relationships tend to develop with each other. This is indeed a topic which potentially evokes deeply personal emotion, but as anyone who has overheard a couple’s private conversation knows (and there are always certain couples who can’t seem to keep these things private), the usual reaction involves a great deal of cringing. Here the chief culprits include Lisey’s use of the word “smuck” (yes, for fuck), “SOWISA” (her mantra of courage: “Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate”), “African” (for Afghan, as in rug), and “bad-gunky” (Scott’s word for evil). Expressions such as these are repeated ad nauseum during Lisey’s frequent stream-of-consciousness rants. The intention is presumably, by giving access to “their marriage’s interior language” (71) to make the reader feel like they are part of Lisey and Scott’s private world, but we are never given a good reason to want to be.
Lisey herself is the kind of character King would usually admit to having problems writing. The figure of a fifty year-old widow dealing with the emotional repercussions of having had a famous husband, while working out her feelings towards her sisters, might come alive in the hands of someone like Joyce Carol Oates, but this is clearly not King’s comfort zone. The positive potential of this choice as a feminist move is swept away by Lisey’s reliance on her husband and her general uselessness: “Two years, and she still hadn’t quite got used to the idea that there was no man around to read the instructions and puzzle out the meaning of Fig 1 and Fig 2” (220-221). She is also sorely lacking in linguistic skills, as demonstrated in a conversation with Scott:
Not only does this portray her as a dumb broad, but a limited vocabulary is not what one generally wants from a narrative focaliser. Although Scott is dead, his presence looms large throughout the novel, the strength of his personality dominating Lisey’s actions and very thoughts. Despite the fact that this is clearly the point, it doesn’t take away from the disappointment of not being given a believable female protagonist who we can identify or sympathise with.
Such ideological considerations aside, we are forcibly removed at times from the believability of Lisey’s character by some shockingly awful turns of phrase. Take for example her description of Scott:
This is surely taking the holistic approach too far. The frustrating thing is that in between wincing with embarrassment it is possible to see what King was trying to do. The novel is filled with descriptions of peculiar thoughts and habits the likes of which everyone has, but crucially not these specific ones. Just as the most hysterically funny private jokes are utterly uninteresting to outsiders, Lisey’s way of seeing things comes across as simply annoying more often than it achieves the intended emotional intensity.
As far as plot is concerned, it is difficult to wonder whether King has taken the theme of creativity itself as far as he can take it. Much of his work deals explicitly with the notion of authorship, and this has produced at least two excellent novels in the form of The Shining (1977), and Misery (1987). To this we could certainly add ‘Secret Window, Secret Garden’, from Four Past Midnight (1990), a short story 'from which King unashamedly reuses a major plot device, in that the character of Dooley seems to be a mutation of the menacing “John Shooter” from his earlier story (the redneck who turns up on the main character’s door step and accuses him of plagiarism). Yet there is only so much self-indulgence a reader can take, especially when King has recently shown, with Cell, that he can turn his hand to external issues to such enjoyable effect. Enjoyable is an appropriate word, as King frequently (and indeed here) protests against academic snobbery and literary pretensions in favour of a model of fiction that puts storytelling at its heart, yet Lisey’s Story does not satisfy on this level. The pace of plot advancement is glacial, yet the tone is rarely compellingly contemplative either. Instead, Lisey rants and raves, switching constantly between her inner thoughts and mundane everyday concerns like finding headache tablets. We are confronted throughout with a scattergun assortment of italics and brackets, breaking up the flow of the story and serving only to frustrate.
What seems to be the essential problem with Lisey’s Story is a failure to execute a potentially fascinating premise. It takes as its central conceit the concept of a world beyond our own - a premise from the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft, or perhaps more directly Arthur Machen - and spins it out within the context of a domestic drama. Although King has shown himself to be the master of juxtaposing such horrors with the everyday, Lisey’s Story does not match up to the imaginative efforts of, say, Clive Barker, who manages to juggle the demands of realism and fantasy without resorting to a ridiculous invented vocabulary. More damning still is a comparison with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), likewise a novel about death, marriage, memory and the act of storytelling. Although House of Leaves is clearly in debt to King’s past work, Danielewski combines moments of terror with the kind of literary merit that Lisey’s Story aspires to but fails to achieve. Despite all this, there are hints of King’s proven ability to write horror here, such as the following description of a creature in Boo’ya Moon:
The story of Scott Landon’s childhood, when uncovered, is likewise brutally compelling. Such moments, however, are few and far between, and overall we are confronted not so much with a sense of horror at the darkness that lurks inside the human imagination, but with a prevailing sense of disenchantment that King is not, it transpires, at his best when he lets his own imagination run completely wild into these dark recesses.
Strange Tales, ed. Rosalie Parker (North Yorkshire: Tartarus, 2003)
&
Wormwood: Literature of the Fantastic, Supernatural & Decadent, 1-6, 2003-2006
Dara Downey
When King is at his best, he can be remarkably adept at cutting to the core of the genre of which he is the self-proclaimed “King”. Nevertheless, however astute such isolated observations as the above comment might be, it is always possible to find another, equally astute observation, that both contradicts what he is saying and undermines whatever favourable impression of his analytical skills we may have. Elsewhere in Danse Macabre, for example, King states confidently that Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw, with its elegant drawing-room prose and its tightly woven psychological logic, has had very little influence on the American masscult” of mainstream horror (Danse Macabre, 66). What this suggests is that the flexibility which he sees as the defining characteristic of horror has (for him at any rate) a breaking point, a suggestion well in line with his near-hysterical insistence that aesthetic values and intellectual rigour are antithetical to the aims and effects of the genre.
It is precisely this sort of inverted snobbery that Tartarus Press are striving to overthrow. Their journal, Wormwood, includes articles on Algernon Blackwood and Oliver Onions in the same context as studies of Ray Bradbury and Joyce Carol Oates. It also includes authors more accurately categorised as “decadent”, but who, through this juxtaposition, are revealed as indispensable to an understanding of horror in general. In a somewhat different manner, Tartarus’ collection of new short stories, Strange Tales, is a timely reminder that “elegant drawing-room prose” and “tightly woven psychological logic” are perfect vehicles for the peculiar amorphousness of twenty-first century fear, ranging as it does from nameless dread to physical revulsion, and encompassing everything in between - much like the volume itself. Both Wormwood and Strange Tales make perfectly clear what King - despite, or perhaps because of his currently status within horror fiction - seems to have forgotten. When Gothic and horror narratives are most successful, it is due primarily to their power to unsettle their readers profoundly, whatever their content, approach or style. Wormwood and Strange Tales, as I shall argue, reinstate one of the most central aspects of “traditional”, Radcliffean Gothic - the realisation that, in order to give shape and voice to the fears of the present, we must plunder and rework the images and terrors of the past. In this way, Tartarus Press’ oeuvre seems both more modern and more radical than most of King’s writing (and certainly more so than much of his recent work), unafraid as Tartarus is of finding horror in unlikely places.
Far from being confined to simply trawling the back catalogue of August Derleth and William Hope Hodgson, in search of something other than blood, guts and psycho-murderer types, Wormwood, subtitled Literature of the Fantastic, Supernatural & Decadent, is admirably capacious. Reviewing and critiquing thrillers and mysteries alongside works that fit neatly under the heading of “fantastic and supernatural” fiction, this biannual journal shows up as arbitrary and even damaging the strict enforcement of such categorisations; and indirectly hints that, by refusing and undermining them, a better understanding can be gained of fiction in general. This is achieved primarily through three forms of articles - literary biographies of little-known writers; scholarly articles on specific texts or authors; and reprints of obscure stories and other writings. In my opinion, it is in the area of literary biography that Wormwood most fully succeeds. Wormwood 5, from Autumn 2005, for example, features a fascinating article on the life and work of Victor Benjamin Neuberg, who is described by Richard Neff as follows:
The assured and fluid quality of the writing here, along with careful research and the insightful but by no means reverential reading of Neuberg’s own writings with which the article concludes, far from being isolated to this particular article, characterise Wormwood as a whole. Notable examples include Jeff Gardiner’s plangent piece on forgotten fantasist Francis Stevens, who influenced H.P. Lovecraft, among others (No. 2, Spring 2004); and Brian R. Banks’ massively detailed and philosophically complex ‘Trajectory of a Comet: Poland’s Arch-Decadent, Stansilaw Przybyszewski’ (No. 6, Spring 2006). My personal favourite is Adam Daly’s essay on Lionel Erskine Britton, whose 1984-esque Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (1930) comes across as pleasantly surreal and radical, the kind of angry science fiction that doesn’t seem to get written any more. All three articles are poignant reminders of how easily an author, however famous during his or her own lifetime, can slip into the murky waters of the great unread (Mr. King take note). At the same time, and for this reason, they constitute a call to arms for academics, and in particular those who see the very purpose of studying supernatural, Gothic and horror fiction to be to expand and even dismantle the concept of a canon. If this is the case, then surely it is to authors such as those featured in Wormwood that we should be turning in order to get beyond the notion of the genre as monolithic - indeed, as an unproblematically coherent genre at all.
The quality, however, is not always so high, primarily due to the fact that (surprisingly for a journal so very dedicated to the recreation of the milieux in which authors lived) many of the articles offering readings of texts rather than of writers are characterised by a somewhat unexamined, not to mention outmoded, acceptance of psychoanalysis as an ideal tool for “demystifying” supernatural fiction. In particular, Stephen Sennitt’s article ‘Phantom Doubles: A Freudian Reading of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Hoffman’s “The Sandman”’ (No. 5, Autunm 2005) is at once naïve and commonplace, as well as being exemplary of the kind of laziness that characterises so many commentators on horror and the fantastic. Apart from any other possible objections to such a reading, Freud himself has already read ‘The Sandman’ in this manner in his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’, and to do so again only serves to repeat the tendency of critics, uncomfortable with the implications of horror and Gothic fiction, to confine these tales firmly within the individual psyche, thereby denying whatever potentially subversive comments they might make about society, culture and hegemonic power. Along the same lines, only much better, is Jeff Gardiner’s ‘Some Dark Ancestral Sense: Awe in the Work of Algernon Blackwood’ (No. 5, Autunm 2005), which has some interesting things to say about the supernatural origins of fear. Similar concerns underlie Jyri-Pekka Luoma’s ‘Phantasmagoria & Psyche in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde,’ (No. 2, Spring 2004) which displays considerable critical daring and subtlety, an impressive feat in the face of well-worn material.
The highlight of the whole journal, however (for me at any rate) is the inclusion in Wormwood 5 of Robert Aikman’s previously unpublished short tale ‘The Fully Conducted Story’. Recounting the narrator/protagonist’s strange experience at a stately home while on holiday in Tuscany, the story begins as he leaves his ailing wife alone at their hotel. It is only at the very close of the tale itself we discover that she in fact dies soon after they have left Italy. This chilling little aside suggests a comparison with Ray Bradbury’s sublime ‘The Next in Line’ (a tale Joel Lane praises repeatedly in his two-part article on Bradbury, which appears in Wormwood 5 & 6). While it may not quite live up to such a comparison, Aikman’s offering is certainly a satisfyingly creepy little tale unmarred by cheap explanations or gaudy special effects. What raises it to the level of greatness, however, is Glen Cavaliero’s stunning reading of the story which follows. Somewhat chary of Aikman’s quality as a writer, Cavaliero nonetheless praises where praise is due, and asserts astutely:
Not only does this neatly sidestep the ho-hum conventionality of a cheap Freudian reading, it does so while still focusing on the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind. Cavaliero carries off the tricky feat of problematising the superficially self-effacing first-person narrator, who initially appears to be Aikman himself, but who, in Cavaliero’s hands, becomes a slippery customer whose narrative strategies and callous attitude towards his wife collude in a complex act of dissembling and omission. When considered together with Douglas A. Anderson’s introduction to William Hope Hodgson’s pseudo-scientific piece ‘The Psychology of Species’ in No. 6 (Spring 2006), which displays a similar lack of reverence and cutting but insightful analysis, it becomes clear that this is certainly where Wormwood’s talents lie - in close readings of obscure texts, informed by detailed knowledge of the authors and their work. By printing the texts themselves alongside masterly interpretations, the reader is invited to do likewise, thereby encouraging new scholarship and iconoclasm.
Hopefully, this may also prove to be the case with Strange Tales. Few of the contributions to Rosalie Parker’s beautifully presented collection of new short stories fail to unsettle or disturb, and yet, as a whole, the volume’s success can be attributed to the sheer variety of tone, effect and subject matter. The blurb on the inside dust-cover (made of a lovely creamy vellum, complete with a suggestively sinister line drawing) is commendably reluctant to place the stories under a single defining banner, stating only that they belong to “the fields of supernatural, fantasy, and horror, [and that] they will entertain, chill, and delight in equal measure.”
What Strange Tales does in particular is not only pay frequent homage to the kind of stories discussed in the journal - evoking a sense of creeping dread that can frequently (if not always) prove more effective than quantities of gore - but also make use of the violence and viscerality so central to twenty-first century conceptions of horror (and even of Gothic) and do so well. In particular, I refer to Adam Daly’s six-page exercise in testing the limits of what a reader can stand, ‘The Self-Eater’ which does exactly what its title promises (or threatens). It recounts how a man, out of little more than curiosity and a desire for power, very calmly and methodically consumes his own body. The process is described in excruciating but exquisite detail and, as far as sheer “gross-out” factor goes, gives Chuck Palahnuik’s story ‘Guts’ (from his novel Haunted) more than a run for its money, primarily as a result of the eerie detachment of the narrator’s tone, and the undeniable quality of the writing. Somewhat less obviously graphic but far more suggestively so is Len Maynard and Mick Sims’ ‘Between the Dead Men and the Blind’, the disordered notes of an equally disordered mind. Yet another first-person narrator begins by telling us in a somewhat desultory manner of his unsuccessful relationship with his father and his sense of having been denied maternal affection, particularly in the form of breast feeding. The story ends with the appalling suggestion that he cannibalises the women he sleeps with while actually making love to them. Equally horrific is David Rix’s “Number 18”, the story of a young girl haunted - and eventually, or so it seems, consumed body and soul - by the face of the man who has sexually abused her. Less graphic again is the opening story, Quentin S. Crisp’s ‘Cousin X’, a deeply atmospheric piece most of which is devoted to detailing the growing bond between a little girl and her mentally disturbed cousin, who enjoys taking apart radios and watches so that he can put them back together. Creating an enchanted world around the two of them, he leads her to believe that he has power over the physical and indeed the spiritual universe, culminating in an intense experience when they seem to float out of their bodies. The idyll is shattered, however, when he does to a small animal what he has been doing to mechanical objects, and the little girl, who can’t stop screaming, is forbidden by her parents ever to see Cousin X again. Years later, however, they meet at a wedding, their bond seemingly unbroken by the childhood trauma; the girl isolated from life and wishing for escape, and the all-too-inevitable result of this meeting is at once horrifying and oddly touching.
Inevitably, in a collection of fourteen tales, there will be a certain unevenness of quality, and I would not wish to suggest that this is not the case here. In particular, Mark Valentine and John Howard’s ‘The Descent of the Fire’, a fairly straightforward M.R. James homage, leaves the reader somewhat unsatisfied. This initially promising tale of an elderly (and, unusually, female) academic’s obsession with studying a peculiar roof ornament she encounters in the usual secretive small town unfortunately breaks apart on the narrative level as events come to a climax. I suspect that this is because the narrative fails to establish enough hints for the dénouement to make sense - at any rate, the ending feels rushed and sketchily conceived. That said, this was certainly enjoyable, particularly for the gentle fun that it pokes at academic pretensions.
Somewhat similarly, Brendan Connell’s story ‘The Maker of Fine Instruments’ is a sort of reworking of HP Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model’, in the sense that the musically gifted protagonist is introduced gradually to the full extent of his new teacher’s collection of musical instruments, crafted from the bodies of animals. In the innermost room of Martens’ house he keeps his most precious creations, which are constructed by inserting strings, pipes and so on into the living flesh of various creatures, which, he claims, is the secret of playing truly great music. There is of course (perhaps rather predictably) one final step that can be taken in this direction (I won’t give it away), and take it the central character most certainly does, finally turning what begins as a somewhat derivative and conventional piece of fiction into a nightmare about the limits of post-human physicality. Equally concerned with hybridity is Tina Rath’s ‘Mr. Manpferdit’, an amusing little tale detailing what might have happened had Samuel Johnson and John Boswell gone to see a reputed centaur living in London, a visit which exposes Johnson’s smug pomposity and Boswell’s inner letch. Slight, and hardly the most frightening of stories, this is nonetheless a nice example of what weird fiction can do when it concerns itself with unsettling our sense of what constitutes reality without resorting to outright scare tactics.
This collection is at its best, however, when it wallows unashamedly in the atmospheric and the suggestive. My personal favourites are Rhys Hughes’ ‘The Itchy Skin of Creepy Aplomb’ (because it’s hilarious), Nina Allan’s ‘Terminus’ (because I’m terrified of train stations) and William Charlton’s ‘Grand Hotel’ (because it pits a creepy vampire girl against her lover’s nasty capitalist father). I would not wish to spoil the effect of these excellent stories by further elaboration - you’ll just have to go and read them for yourself. Each serves to demonstrate, I think, the general philosophy of the Tartarus Press as a whole, which seems to adhere to Rosemary Jackson and Tvetzan Todorov’s conception of the fantastic as a genre balancing precariously between the possible and the impossible, between the straightforward supernaturalism of the likes of H.P. Lovecraft and the (to me, rather disappointing) rationality of Ann Radcliffe, who ruthlessly exposed her phantoms as fakes and tricks of the imagination in an effort to evacuate the world of all suggestions that man cannot know everything. The name Tartarus itself is appropriate, recalling the sheer diversity of sins and punishments which the Sybil shows Aeneas in Virgil’s epic The Aeneid. The precursor of Dante’s Inferno, Virgil’s Tartarus acts as a holding cell for the Titans, the defeated gods whom Zeus cast down from Mount Olympus when he seized his father’s throne. In Tartarus, therefore, languishes all that is seen as outmoded, everything that has no place in the new dispensation, which is at once more civilised and more tyrannical than the rule of the Titans.
The subjects which the Tartarus Press see fit to include in both their journal and their collection of short stories serves much the same purpose as Tartarus does for Zeus, and indeed, in much the same way, functions as a testament to the despotism of current definitions of the genre. King’s novels, films such as the Saw franchise, and the cultural miasma surrounding the current Bush administration all see violence and fear as invading the world of the normal from without, dragging people from their everyday lives and plunging them into nightmares of mass death and personal mutilation. Conversely, Tartarus Press’ offerings posit the normal as containing and indeed fostering the horrific. Perhaps more radically, stories such as Charlton’s ‘Grand Hotel’ and Crisp’s ‘Cousin X’ depict individuals and places which ought to evoke dread as the last bastions of resistance and even of sanity in an overly rationalised world. If, as King would have it, some novels and stories, such as those by Henry James, M.R. James and Edith Wharton, are simply too genteel to reside with him in the hallowed halls of the horror canon, then perhaps it’s time that we went back down to Tartarus and got them out.
Independent publishing house Tartarus Press has been undertaking the promotion of supernatural fiction for nearly two decades now, and in that time they have produced a wide array of handsome editions of new fiction and forgotten classics. It is unsurprising, then, that Emma Tennant’s Heathcliff’s Tale should find a home there: it is a new fiction that dramatises the re-appropriation and reconstruction of lost fictions, taking as its premise the possible discovery of a forgotten sequel to (or alternative version of) Wuthering Heights. There is certainly scope here for an interrogation of the processes by which textual and biographical fictions are constructed, and in this respect the novel certainly posits some pertinent questions. What a shame, then, that it ends up tackling that old chestnut that should have been put to bed long before now: that Branwell, not Emily Brontë, may have been the real author of Wuthering Heights.
The premise of the novel is an intriguing one: it is New Year’s Eve, 1848, and “Ellis Bell”, author of Wuthering Heights, has been dead for less than a fortnight. Henry Newby, a young solicitor’s clerk, is dispatched to Haworth by his publisher uncle to retrieve the manuscript of Bell’s second novel. Newby professes that he is not “a literary man”, and so has no prior knowledge of the novel or novelist whose work he has been sent to recover (nor, of course, would a contemporary audience have known that the author was Emily Brontë). Unsurprisingly, he is confused when the directions to the house of “Ellis Bell” bring him to the Haworth Parsonage and the household of Reverend Patrick Brontë and his daughter Charlotte, who are mourning the recent deaths of both Branwell and Emily Brontë (there’s still no room for the “other sister” here, the much-neglected Anne). Luckily, he arrives just in time to rescue some manuscript pages from the fire, which he soon starts to read. So begins his introduction to the brutal and passionate world of Wuthering Heights. The unfortunate Newby, however, is not well-versed in separating fact from fiction, and reads the story (as narrated by Heathcliff) as the true memoirs and confessions of a murderous and treacherous fiend. As he becomes more and more engrossed in the fiction that he is reading, he also becomes haunted by the characters of Wuthering Heights itself and by the ghostly memories of Emily and Branwell Brontë. He then begins the process of turning his impressions into a fiction of his own. Tennant’s novel comprises the fusion of a series of related narratives: Newby’s various attempts at writing his own fictions; the alternative manuscript of Wuthering Heights recovered from the fire at Haworth; the correspondence between Newby and his increasingly-frustrated, profit-hungry uncle; and the editorial hand which collates this mass of information and manuscripts into an account of Newby’s development as an author.
It’s in the confusion of narrative perspectives that the novel best seems to capture the spirit of Brontë’s original: the multiple narrations of Heathcliff’s Tale inevitably recall the dual narration of Wuthering Heights, in which Lockwood narrates Nelly Dean’s story for the reader. In Tennant’s novel, the flurry of perspectives similarly disorients and maroons the reader (along with Newby) in the world of Haworth and its lost manuscripts, and leaves them faced with the desire to establish the relationship between the “facts” of Haworth and the “fiction” of the manuscripts. However, this distinction is deliberately blurred throughout as Newby himself begins to develop into an author and turn his experiences into the stuff of fiction. It is here that the novel starts to unravel somewhat: the reader can no longer identify with Newby as reader of the manuscripts and must now reinterpret him as author of another set of manuscripts. However, this reinterpretation is hindered by the fact that, as an author, Newby’s skills are somewhat limited: he is an apprentice writer, after all, and not quite up to the task of turning his own haunting experiences at Haworth into a successful fiction.
Eventually, the fragmentation of different narrative voices proves a problematic device within the novel as a whole. The awkward epistolary and manuscript style proves increasingly distracting: why, for example, do Newby’s letters to his uncle always end on exquisitely-constructed cliff-hangers? Is the invisible hand of the editor at work here? Perhaps so, but the editorial voice of Heathcliff’s Tale is in itself an ambiguous one: it doesn’t serve to synthesize the various voices and perspectives which jostle for position in Newby’s narrative. Instead, in a satirical swipe at the academic disciplines of Brontë studies and manuscript studies, Tennant deliberately presents a flawed and misguided editorial framework. This is definitely a bold move, and clearly aims to emphasise further the difficulties of establishing an authoritative text within this conglomeration of manuscripts. However, by the time the Freemasons enter the fray and demand that Newby write a biography of Branwell Brontë and prove his identity as the real author of Wuthering Heights, the reader will be crying out for a voice of reason to help decode these fictional experiments.
The multiple narrative and authorial perspectives of Tennant’s novel may not prove entirely successful, but they do at least indicate that Heathcliff’s Tale aims to elevate itself above the status of a straightforward sequel or prequel to a classic text. This is a genre in which Tennant has specialised, as the author of such works as Pemberley, or Pride and Prejudice Continued (and its sequel), Emma in Love, and Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story. By far the least successful portions of Heathcliff’s Tale might be read as examples of these kinds of rewrites: the manuscript rescued from the Haworth fire in which is posited an alternative Wuthering Heights (as narrated by Heathcliff himself to Lockwood), and also Isabella Linton’s story. In these sections, Heathcliff fills the reader in on his ambiguous origins and accounts for his missing three years after overhearing Catherine’s confession that it would degrade her to marry him. Meanwhile, Isabella Linton treats us to such cringe-worthy descriptions of Heathcliff and Catherine’s adulterous couplings as:
Whether “Branwell Brontë” or “Henry Newby” is the author of such passages is of course redundant, because fundamentally Tennant’s novel seems to suggest the need to focus less on the teller and more on the tale itself. Ultimately, the tale told by Henry Newby in Heathcliff’s Tale certainly raises pertinent questions about the ways in which literary works are created; the answers to these questions, however, will probably have to wait for another rewrite.
the horror genre is extremely limber, extremely adaptable, extremely useful; the author or filmmaker can use it as a crowbar to lever open locked doors or a small, slim pick to tease the tumblers into giving. The genre can thus be used to open almost any lock on the fears which lie behind the door […]. (Stephen King, Danse Macabre (1982), 163)
At the age of sixteen he joined the family firm, which imported canes, fibres and rattans, but it quickly became apparent that a conventional life was not for him. He felt the call to be a poet and dabbled with agnosticism and vegetarianism until he settled on the paganism and ritual magic of Aleister Crowley. (33)
the truly frightening thing about Aikman’s best work is that it posits the conclusion that the uncanny intrusions are in fact irruptions, evidences of where we are at, and of what we are producing. His “ghosts” are self-generating elements in a material world that we regard as stable and unchanging. They are demons of matter. (8)
He bursts out laughing. “See? See? A perfect example. You take the holistic approach.”
“I don’t know that word,” she says frowning. (136)
She liked his stories, but she liked how his hair looked in the spill of the lamplight just as much. She thought his hair in the lamplight was its own story, he just didn’t know it. She liked how his skin felt under her hand, too. Forehead or foreskin, both were good. She would not have traded one for the other. What worked for her was the whole package. (71]
Lisey saw an eye, dead yet aware, black as wellwater and as wide as a sinkhole, peering through the foliage. She saw an opening in the meat of its vast questing blunt head and intuited that the things it took in through that vast straw of flesh did not precisely die but lived and screamed ... lived and screamed ... lived and screamed. (493)
Cathy lay on her back on the four-poster bed, her petticoats billowing out around her […] Her cheeks were flushed - that I did see - and her hair as messed as if the moor wind had blown it out forever from the constraints of curlers and fine coiffure […] Heathcliff, naked and brown-skinned as a child that has bathed in rock pools and lain in heather to dry - lay astride her.
Patrick McCabe’s, Winterwood
London: Bloomsbury, 2006
Wading through the first fifty or sixty pages McCabe’s latest novel, Winterwood, my sense of disappointment was acute. Having heard rather good things about it, I was then seduced by its slickly creepy cover and the fact that I had somehow managed to buy a signed copy. Its apparent slavish (and far from original) adherence to notions of some kind of mythic Irish past - where everyone wore tweed caps and spoke like extras from Darby O’Gill & the Little People - was therefore profoundly depressing. As I read on, however, I began to realise, with a deepening sense of unexpected pleasure, that McCabe sets up this atmosphere at the beginning of Winterwood only in order to poke fun (though the word seems massively out of place considering what is to follow) at that most over-exposed of species - the jeep-driving, super-groomed glammy mammy of the post-Celtic Tiger “New Ireland”. The opening sections of the novel are largely devoted to a vicious lampooning of said mummies’ shameless fawning over the walking cliché that is Ned Strange, an aging musician who tells tall tales liberally peppered with quaint old expressions and takes the little darlings of the up-and-coming town of Slievenageeha for organised Irish dancing lessons, thereby helping the nouveaux riches to assuage their cultural guilt and their parental guilt in one fell swoop. McCabe is after bigger fish than this, however, and it isn't long before Redmond Hatch, the often exasperatingly trite first-person narrator, who is just as much under Ned’s spell as everyone else, lets us know (in his own round-about way) that Ned’s picture is splashed all over the newspapers for molesting and murdering a little boy who has been attending his classes.
It is here that Winterwood begins to show its true colours, and the bland predictability of the opening is not merely redeemed but shown to be vital to the unfolding of the plot as a whole. After a lot of moaning about having been cheated on and divorced by his beautiful wife, Redmond (more often known simply as “Red” as the story progresses) eventually remembers to let us know that Ned is found dead, hanging in the men’s shower of the prison where he has been incarcerated. Shockingly, he shows up in Redmond’s hostel room in the middle of the night (or so he tells us) and rapes him, at which point the relative positions which the two men occupy in the narrative begin to come into focus. Indeed, most of the rest of the novel is concerned with making this relationship as clear and uncomfortably sharp as a piece of broken glass. Ned, we begin to understand, is not simply Kurtz to Red’s Marlow, or Gatsby to Red’s Nick Carraway. Apart from the similarity between their first names, their surnames also echo one another in a bilingual pun that is perhaps one of the cleverest aspects of the book. Ned tells Red that his surname, Hatch, comes from the Irish word “ait”, which means both “place” and “strange”. This pivotal confluence of meanings is alluded to time and again to suggest that the two men may somehow be related - something, we are led to believe, not altogether unlikely in the literally inbred backwoods that is Slievenageeha, Red’s home town to which he has returned in an effort, it would appear, to rediscover a lost sense of who he is. If he has succeeded, then the self that he finds there is violent and unstable, a self given horrifying shape through deliberately poorly veiled hints, which he lets slip into his narrative with an increasingly chilling frequency, regarding his obsessive and often brutal behaviour towards his wife and child. Similar hints about Ned’s alleged murder of his wife and other women in America mean that the two men are quickly revealed to be fully-fledged doubles, and quite possibly the same person. McCabe’s novel joins the ranks of such canonical horrors as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson’, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan, James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Chuck Palahnuik’s Fight Club, and the relationship between the narrator and his dead alter ego is just as abusive and destructive as those depicted in its illustrious antecedents.
Above and beyond all of this, however, the complex pun within their names acts as a critique of the ideological foundations upon which the notion of the New Ireland, in all its prosperity and optimism, is built. Since the Anglo-Irish Revival at the beginning of the twentieth century, an emphasis upon the local - exemplified by GAA town rivalries, Patrick Kavanagh’s use of place names in his poetry and the attention to local colour and stable locations in the plays of JM Synge - has been brought to bear on the diversity of Irish culture. This emphasis has as its central impetus the creation of unity through the discovery of an “authentic” Ireland populated by “real people” rather than by types, abstractions or generalisations. The rather faceless folk of Slievenageeha are on a quest not dissimilar to Red’s, seeking to ground the newly mobile and ever-changing Irish landscape in some sort of stable past by allowing Ned to embody all of the “Irishness” to which they are no longer connected and, as is all too clear, in which they have little if any real interest. The pun does not so much undermine these people’s efforts to find a sense of place in a country where such terms are fast becoming meaningless, as expose the superficiality of their efforts. The word “ait” itself is unstable, slipping far too easily from the sense of “place” to that of “strange”, but also into Anglicised versions of itself such as “Hatch” and “Strange”, which are accepted without question simply as surnames, apparently unburdened by meaning or etymology. Moreover, what the pun suggests is that a sense of place in the novel isn’t so much disrupted by a strangeness which comes from without, in the form of child abuse and murder, but itself contains that sense of the strange. The illusion which the novel thoroughly shatters is not simply that golf courses and expensive cars have allowed us to break with the wife-beating darkness of the past, or that it is possible to re-write that past, to turn a social history depicted as steeped in alcoholism, murder, incest and misogyny, into an eternal idyll of love, dancing and fairy-tales. It suggests, more worryingly, that the New Ireland itself has created its own darkness, its own monsters, and that there is little that can be done to exorcise them.
If I have a quibble with this book, it is along the lines of the quibbles which I have with many books - its attitude towards women. On the surface, Winterwood acts as a critique of the kind of attitude which sets women on pedestals, assuming their physical and moral perfection is a given, a form of worship which can lead all too easily to obsessive and possessive violence on the parts of the men whose standards are impossibly high. Ned and Red are equally guilty both of such adoration and of such violence, savagely if not always successfully editing their memories of conversations with their respective beloveds until all that is left are declarations of undying love and enduring happiness, interspersed, occasionally brilliantly on McCabe’s part, with comments about how wrong it is to raise one’s hand to one’s wife and intimations of ongoing arguments and discontent on both sides. Ultimately, this critique breaks apart somewhat when Red’s mental decay; his sense of being haunted by Ned’s insidious voice; his growing obsession with his estranged wife and his daughter’s love of My Little Pony toys and videos coalesce in appalling acts of kidnapping and murder. Here, the book comes close to repeating its characters’ idolatry of women, depicting them as perfect, beautiful, distant statues in need of protection, angelic victims who are possessed of little interiority or agency, somewhere between Helen of Troy and Poe’s Ligeia. The first-person narrative vacillates on the edge of being another “crisis of masculinity” tract, freighted as it is with Red’s self-justifications and plaints for having been beaten down by a hostile world, and recounting how, in the wake of his bitter divorce, he is left to fend for himself in the increasingly unfamiliar and unwelcoming streets of 1990s Dublin. It is important to remember that this is more or less the purpose of the book, and the sheer unlikeableness of Redmond Hatch is proof enough against the reader identifying with him (though perhaps I speak only for myself here). Nonetheless, with none of the women or girls killed by Red and Ned permitted to truly speak, the word “phallocentric” hovers ominously at the back of my mind, no matter how carefully the book tries to undermine and destabilise the narrating male voice and his sense of what it is to be a man.
This aside, however, I would not wish to deny this book its due as the first, in quite some time, to leave me thoroughly spooked. Winterwood, like Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, assaults the reader with a vision of a world and a protagonist that are not simply fallen but irredeemable, crawling with horrors that we refuse to acknowledge. Purely on the level of content, there may be nothing especially new or unusual in McCabe’s book - indeed, the spectre of child abuse has hung all too palpably over Ireland in the past decade or so - but it is this very familiarity, the fact that overexposure to such things has reduced them to the level almost of banality, that makes it such uncomfortable reading.
Brian J. Showers, Literary Walking Tours of Gothic Dublin
Dublin: Nonsuch Publishing, 2006
In this guide to Dublin city’s Gothic literary past, Brian J. Showers focuses on three of the most notable Irish writers of this tradition - Charles Maturin (1782-1824), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) and Bram Stoker (1847-1912). As has been noted by several critics, including Terry Eagleton, W. J. McCormack and Jarlath Killeen, exponents of the Gothic horror tale seem to number highly in any list of important Irish writers, and Showers harnesses this Irish predilection for the supernatural to provide his thematic guide to Dublin’s past. M. R. James, who acknowledged Le Fanu as a key influence in his own writing, noted in a lecture on Le Fanu’s works to the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1923, “[t]he indefinable melancholy which the air of Ireland and its colouring inspire - a melancholy which inspires many Irish writers.” Three complementary versions of this melancholy nineteenth-century Dublin emerge as Showers documents the locations inhabited, and frequently fictionalised, by all three writers throughout their overlapping lifetimes.
Firstly, Showers tracks Maturin’s progress through early-Victorian Dublin and its influence on the macabre and miserable Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and on Maturin’s only known short story “Leixlip Castle” (1825). Next is Le Fanu, whose writing provides a wealth of material, as many of his stories are set in Dublin and contain direct references to several of notable sites, such as Phoenix Park and Trinity College, which Showers describes. Lastly, Stoker’s formative years in late-Victorian Dublin are charted, and their possible influence on his work explored. A representative short story from each writer is also included. Despite its literary theme, the book is not designed to be a work of literary criticism, although its author is plainly well acquainted with his subject. It is instead intended to be a practical aid to exploring the locations it documents, complete with addresses of, and directions to, all the chosen sites, along with other useful information about them. As such, it is an excellent guide both to well-known tourist sites like St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and to more obscure sites such as the Hell-Fire Club Lodge in the Dublin mountains. It is also full of macabre revelations about everyday locations: for instance, St. Stephen’s Green, a well-kept public amenity taken for granted by all Dubliners who might be very surprised to discover that the site of their lunchtime picnic formerly sported stocks and a gallows.
Each of Showers’ three featured writers were members of the Protestant professional classes: consequently, there is a certain degree of overlap in the places they frequented. For example, all three attended Trinity College in Dublin and Showers builds up a picture of the Trinity’s current attractions, and suggested grisly past, in separate sections outlining each writer’s relationship to the College. The grisly past does not extend much beyond the somewhat sensationalised revelation that “mass graves” were uncovered on campus in 1999, with many of the bones featuring saw marks - no doubt the leavings of centuries of medical students…. An additional Gothic feature of the College that Showers uncharacteristically omits to mention is the Department of Anatomy museum which has a small nineteenth-century collection of mounted dissections, including the skeleton of the Irish giant Cornelius McGrath (1736-1760) who reached the then shocking height of 7 feet 2.25 inches.
Another consequence of the analogous Anglo-Irish backgrounds of the three writers was a shared sense of their embattled position in the face of the threat posed by growing demands for Irish nationalism. All, in some way, feared that the Protestant ruling class would be displaced by the burgeoning Catholic middle classes, just as the old Catholic aristocracy itself had originally been dispossessed. Roy Foster, in his 1995 work Paddy and Mr. Punch, posits this threat as the inspiration for their Gothic fiction, where Gothic monsters embodied and gave a materiality (albeit a spectral one) to this growing threat of the Catholic Other. There is a recurrent sense of loss throughout Showers’ book which mirrors this threat: this sense loss is most notable in the disappearance of the old architecture of the city, largely the architecture of the ruling colonial class to which the three writers belonged. Just as the streetscapes of the old city have been destroyed or absorbed into the architecture of the modern city, so too has the old ruling class been submerged first within a re-ascendant Catholic middle class and now within a new “multi-cultural” Ireland. Thus the fears embodied in the texts of each writer were in a certain sense realised.
While one does not like to join the ranks of the “they-just-don’t-make-them-like-they-used-to” whingers, one cannot read a work like this without lamenting the destruction of so much of the old city. Showers refers to this destruction throughout with admirable restraint, noting remorsefully the levelling of numerous Georgian vistas to make way for functional office blocks. He even refrains from mentioning, in connection with Le Fanu’s ‘The Familiar’, the well-known gripe that the glorious view of the Gandon-designed Custom House (completed in 1791 just three years before the story is set), presumably visible on Captain Barton’s walk home through the initial construction of Gardiner Street, is now obscured by an ugly, utilitarian railway bridge. The decay of old architecture is also a recurrent motif in Le Fanu’s stories: he characteristically laments in ‘Ghost Stories of Chapelizod’ (1851) the “very changed and forlorn condition” of Chapelizod’s great old buildings, “some of them […] superseded, though not obliterated by modern erections […] the rest forsaken by the order who originally raised them, and delivered up to poverty, and in some cases to absolute decay.” In some ways, Showers’ book itself is an attempt to see something that just isn’t there anymore, to force a Gothic character on to a modern city; but in other ways it is an excellent endeavour to note the still-extant markers of this past while they yet survive. Unfortunately, however, this work will probably be of most interest to tourists, primarily because, as Killeen notes regretfully in the conclusion to his article on Irish Gothic in the first issue of this journal, “Gothic Ireland now exists only as a tourist virtual reality.” (Killeen, 2006)
This book is relatively short at 160 pages (including three short stories by Maturin, Le Fanu and Stoker) and it assumes a good deal of familiarity with the authors’ biographies and their works. Neither does it give any but a passing insight into their individual characters. It is also a little light in its analysis of the connections between the locations documented and the texts produced. It does not constitute, therefore, an introduction to the lives and works of any of the writers in question, but it is an excellent guide for anyone wishing to gain an insight into one important aspect of its main subject, the city of Dublin itself. And all criticisms aside, I will certainly be taking my copy in hand and acquainting myself with some of the fascinating and overlooked sites elaborated therein, that, as a Dubliner, I so frequently walk heedlessly by. (Literary Walking Tours of Gothic Dublin is available in Irish book stores and at www.brianjshowers.com)
Arthur Machen, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
Tartarus Press, 2006
Welsh author and journalist Arthur Machen’s (1863-1947) finest tales tend to be in the novella format, and most typically feature protagonists who, either by accident or design, find themselves breaching what he termed the “veil” between this world and the next. This well-presented volume from Tartarus Press is a welcome reprint of the 1946 Knopf edition of Machen’s collected works, and features stories from every stage of his career. Whilst the quality occasionally wavers, particularly in some of the later stories, at his best, Machen captured a sense of the terrifying “otherness” of the supernatural and the otherworldly better than any other horror author except perhaps H.P. Lovecraft, with whom he has much in common. Machen’s effect can probably best be summed up by a well-known exchange from one of his most famous stories, ‘The White People’:
“We have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.”
“And what is sin?” said Cotgrave.
“I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror, I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you had noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning? (M 113)
Sin is therefore, according to Machen, “unnatural in a much deeper sense than good”, as he puts it later in the same story, and it is this sense of acute wrongness which pervades his most powerful tales. In Machen’s frequently disturbing fictional universe even the most harmless-seeming objects and incidental discoveries ultimately have an awful significance which we can only ever begin to truly appreciate. In the first story printed here, ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’, an arrogant academic’s fascination with “a lump of black stone, rudely annotated with queer marks and scratches” is merely the prelude to his death on “a wild and savage hillside” (an appellation which could easily be applied to almost all of Machen’s rural landscapes). Death of an even more unpleasant variety arises in ‘The Novel of the White Powder’ because of a foolish mistake made by a doddery old chemist; while flint stones arranged for some unknown purpose on a patch of grass again lead to strange and shocking revelations in ‘The Shining Pyramid’. As in Lovecraft, in Machen we are often privy to revelations of a highly disturbing nature - but the threat here comes not from cosmic forces beyond rational comprehension, but from a world parallel to this one, a savage realm populated by a degenerate and malevolent civilisation long dismissed as mere myth.
Admittedly, it can take the modern reader a little while to adapt to the generally rather formal, stiff cadences of Machen’s prose. His dialogue often consists of earnest, M.R. James-style discussions on weighty topics between educated gentlemen (often over a glass of port) and tends to bear little resemblance to actual human conversation, whilst his protagonists are generally rather bland. Furthermore, Machen’s tales tend to be quite episodic (although this can often add to their impact) and plotting does not seem to have been his strong point. However, despite a somewhat over-written quality at times, his writing also approaches real beauty in many instances, and few have matched his ability to conjure up scenes of genuine unease and outright revulsion.
Related to us by a “Young Lady of Leicester Square”, ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ gets proceedings off to a fine start. It features the kind of framing narrative so frequent in Machen, whose tales are generally pieced together from letters, old manuscripts and, most commonly, chance conversations on profound issues which are interspersed by recollections of a dreadful and pertinent nature. ‘The Black Seal’ is the story of a young woman, found collapsed in a “thick white fog” (both fog and “whiteness” are frequent danger signs in Machen) by an apparently kind Professor who brings her home to his children and soon employs her as a governess and ad-hoc research assistant. Professor Gregg, her rescuer, is a rather typical Machen protagonist, an academic obsessed with legends of a world existing alongside our own; a world to which the mysterious black seal in his possession seems to be connected. In a bid to further his studies, Gregg moves his household to a remote farm deep in the Welsh countryside, and investigates strong rumours of the so-called “little people” who, as one ancient inscription has it, “dwell in remote and secret places, and celebrate foul mysteries on savage hills.” (M 15) He also
