What I prefer are writers like
Robert Aickman, Thomas Tessier, John Crowley, and Jonathan Carroll, who are
after larger game. (My own efforts at deliberate indirection have led to
indictments on several counts of Unnecessary Obfuscation, Aggravated Slowness,
Assault With Intent to Stupefy, Irresponsible Neglect of Reader, and so on, all
cases currently under appeal.)
Sides by
Peter Straub (1943-2022) is a brief - too brief - 2007 collection of occasional
prose. When I tell you it is dedicated to John Clute, you'll know questions are
going to be explored at a very high level.
The introductions and prefaces
to classic and contemporary fiction in the collection are fascinating. To give
one example, the way Straub takes apart The Stepford Wives and explains
how it achieves its effects is dazzling. Writings about Stephen King, Caitlin
Kiernan, and Lawrence Block have a contagious enthusiasm: Straub has read,
reread, and thought deeply about these writers' fictions, and explains his
thinking with care and clarity.
Below, a few of my underpinnings
and marginal notes.
The Stepford Wives: Introduction
to the Perennial Edition
I share Straub's surprise that
it is necessary to remind readers Levin's novel is not a satire of wives and
their values.
[....] this book, resembles a bird in flight, a haiku, a
Chinese calligrapher’s brushstroke. With no wasted motion, it gets precisely
where it wants to go.
[....] If The Stepford Wives were the easy satire on the
banality of suburban housewives that it is commonly taken to be—a misconception
that has installed its title in our language as shorthand for those homemakers
who affect an uncanny perfection—this humor would seem wildly out of place. Yet
it fits the moment so accurately that it slips by almost unnoticed, for it is
the same subversive humor that shapes the entire book. This is a novel that
satirizes its oppressors and their desires, not their victims, within a context
that satirizes its very status as a thriller.
[....]Reading The Stepford Wives, we gradually recognize that
an inexorable internal timetable lies beneath its action, and that each of the
novel’s hints, breakthroughs, and miniclimaxes—the stages of its heroine’s
progress toward final knowledge—have been exquisitely timed against the
imperatives of that underlying schedule. It is like a great clock, ticking away
from September 4 to just before Christmas.
[....] Reading The Stepford Wives, we gradually recognize
that an inexorable internal timetable lies beneath its action, and that each of
the novel’s hints, breakthroughs, and miniclimaxes—the stages of its heroine’s
progress toward final knowledge—have been exquisitely timed against the
imperatives of that underlying schedule. It is like a great clock, ticking away
from September 4 to just before Christmas.
[....] Levin’s prose is clean, precise, and unfussy
specifically in order to be as transparent as possible: he wishes to place no
verbal static between the words on the page and the events they depict.
[....] its very efficiency deflects attention from the
controlled composure of its prose and the jewel-like perfection of its
structure.
[....] The Stepford Wives, along with almost everything else
written by the admirable Ira Levin, does honor to a demanding literary
aesthetic that has gone generally unremarked due to its custom of concealing
itself, like the Purloined Letter, in plain view. Polished and formal at its
core, the aesthetic can be seen in James Joyce’s Dubliners, the novels of Ivy
Compton-Burnett, the work of California Gothic writers like Richard Matheson
and William F. Nolan, and in Brian Moore’s last, drastically underappreciated
six novels. Clearly adaptable over a wide range of style, manner, and content,
it emphasizes concision, efficiency, observation, accuracy, effect, speed, and
the illusion of simplicity. Fiction of this kind rigorously suppresses
authorial commentary and reflection in its direct progress from moment to
moment. This emphasis on a drastic concision brings with it a certain
necessary, if often underplayed, artificiality that always implies an
underlying wit, although the individual works themselves may have no other
connection to humor. Such fiction possesses the built-in appeal of appearing to
be extremely easy to read, since the reader need do no more than float along on
the current, moving from a paragraph centered around a sharp visual detail to a
passage of dialogue, thence on to another telling detail followed by another
brief bit of dialogue, and so on.
*
The Siege of Leningrad: An
Introduction to Lenningrad Nights by Graham Joyce
[....] English writers—more accurately, writers from
throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland—have enriched and expanded the
central definitions of horror, a literary category particularly, maybe even
uniquely, open to the erasure of its own boundaries.
[....]Because it is rooted in an apprehension of the unknown
and thrives on detail-by-detail representations of contexts which imply other,
wider contexts, horror is always resisting its own tendencies toward the kinds
of narrative conventions that irrevocably determine the structure of mystery
novels.
[....] The first thing I noticed was that Joyce paid
attention to the shape of his sentences, their cadences and rhythms, and that
the details he selected always contained an emotional message that moved the
scene forward. He was a direct, plain-style, presentational writer....
[....] novellas grant enough room to stretch out one’s arms
and breathe, to execute a couple of hand-springs if one likes, while being
brief enough to avoid the dutiful, long-term, developmental necessities that
come into play the moment a story declares the intention of meandering on for
more than 50,000, 75,000, 100,000 words.
[....] the novella’s unique mixture of liberating length and
liberating brevity
[....] In our world, literary expressions of loving and
forbearing thoughts generally appear within the direly sentimental fantasies
written by self-deluded frauds like Robert James Waller and Alice Walker, which
are quickly translated into filmic buttermilk by ‘sincere’, ‘thoughtful’ uplift
merchants like Stephen Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis.
[....] our literary culture.... has been so debased by....
social and intellectual contexts that an astonishing number of people imagine
that if Dickens were living now he would be writing screenplays and directing
blockbuster movies.
[....] Horror, ‘horror’, a remarkably expansive category
willing at any time to erase its own hypothetical boundaries....
*
Tales of Pain and Wonder By
Caitlin R. Kiernan
[....] shoring fragments against the widespread ruin,
bringing into being a condemned universe shot through with golden threads.
[....] Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Eliot’s “The Waste
Land,” and the poetry of Yeats float beneath the surface of the prose, their
resonant summations of lost faith, lost coherence, lost innocence in a
fragmented, brutally degraded world with “neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor
certitude, nor peace” invoking the painful recognition of their own lost
usefulness. Only a very few of the characters in these stories call upon the
resources of art, and those that do meet with frustration. Here, a deeply
literary sensibility seems to turn against itself and declare its own central
touchstones no longer valid. Salmagundi Desvernine, who escapes the
self-imprisonment of the typical Kiernan protagonist by fleeing from ruined Pollepel
to San Francisco and becoming an avant-garde artist, laments the death of
poetry—and, by extension, all of literature—in two of the collection’s most
finely developed stories, “Salmagundi” and “…Between the Gargoyle Trees.” On
both occasions, she uses the same words, condemns the same villain, and refers
to the same iconic figure of now-unattainable verbal authenticity, William
Butler Yeats.
[....] We have arrived at a point not far from Rilke and the
visionary insights at the beginning of the first Duino Elegy:
[....] (For beauty is nothing/ but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,)
[....] (“Every angel is terrifying.”)
[....] Nothing could be further from the reassuring New Age
oatmeal ladled out by beloved “uplift” merchants like Marianne Williamson,
Deepak Chopra, and their myriad clones, who want us to know that if only we
were to cast off our negativity we would wake up mystically fulfilled in a
paradisal garden. A search for “Angels” in any on-line bookstore turns up an
endless list of books about personal encounters with warm-hearted celestial
beings always prepared to step in and offer assistance, as Della Reese does
every Sunday evening, right after “60 Minutes.” (Ms. Reese and her
fellow-angels are terrifying, all right, but not in the way Rilke meant.
Television angels, and the ones in cuddly best-sellers, behave like the
know-it-all relatives you dread seeing at Thanksgiving.) The kind of people who
benignly think of themselves as “spiritual” never understand this, but
sublimity incorporates a substantial quantity of terror, and mystery, being by
definition inhuman, ruthlessly violates rational order. Violence shares a
border with the sacred. Mystery accommodates awe and fear, emotional majesty
and emotional devastation. Kiernan’s title, Tales of Pain and Wonder, instantly
locates us within an educated point of view, one which has been defined by her
responses to both personal experience and the experience of literature.
[....] fractured coherence speaks of a larger, genuine
coherence existing either in memory or immediately beyond human apprehension.
Uniquely qualified for the role, Kiernan’s characters are led to their moment
of witness—their perception of alien Otherness—and find in it an enigmatic but
persuasive transcendence. Certain scholarly or scientifically-disposed
characters, collectors of oddities preserved in glass jars and fishtanks, have
devoted themselves to research into explanatory Otherness; the rest, aided or
not by the efforts of the former, stumble upon it. In both cases, revelation
typically occurs in the rich psychic terrain invoked by journey downward and
inward, movement beneath the earth’s crust, movement into secret passages,
mineshafts, hidden realms.
[....] The human body, formerly an emblem of value, has
become deeply distasteful, a revulsion, an object best treated with mutilation,
injury, deliberate wounding.
[....] the stories themselves echo the condition of the
characters within them. Only a handful—“Breakfast in the House of the Rising
Sun,” “In the Water Works,” “San Andreas” and perhaps “Estate”—unfold in the
manner common to short stories from Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, by suspending
details and events along a narrative arc like that of a novel in miniature.
Kiernan can martial her material into that kind of form whenever she feels like
loosening up and getting expansive, but the nature of her vision customarily
demands a more compressed, elided and enigmatic narrative technique. Cinematic
pans and jump-cuts from character to character are cut to the bone, along with
back-story explanations; plot has been distilled down to movement toward
encounter and encounter; in the absence of familiar narrative comforts, details
take on a surreal glow, and the trappings of rationality evaporate; a
fetishistic, entranced eroticism prevails; meaning is devoured by mystery, and
coherence can be glimpsed only in terrifying, myth-like fragments.
[....] no matter where they travel none of them ever change
or grow. Moving around is merely a literalization of the aimlessness and
passivity that render them suitable for their essential task. They are to serve
as witnesses. In story after story, Kiernan’s protagonists are led into
variations on the theme of a shattering encounter with profound Otherness, a
revelation of hideous and seductive powers which enforce an increased
helplessness and passivity upon those with whom they come into contact.
[....] A symbiotic connection between revelation and
alienated protagonists in ill health resonates throughout the Romantic
tradition. (More about this later. Kiernan’s attachment to the essentially
Romantic, early-Modernist poets William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot adds
another, extremely interesting, layer to these stories.) This connection, long
ago became so thematic as to be nearly reflexive, can these days be found in
the work of M. John Harrison, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Tessier, Poppy Z. Brite,
and plenty of others, including me. For writers, who always feel marginalized,
the notion that wounded outcasts are uniquely equipped to receive deep-level
transmissions cannot help but be seductive. (There’s some truth in it, as the
lives of many gifted writers, musicians and other artists indicate. Think of
Harte Crane and Poe, think of Charlie Parker.) Kiernan’s remarkable
contribution to our literature has been to mold this theme into an expressive
vehicle by embedding it within her narrative technique, thereby creating the
aesthetic which gives these stories their expressive and individual form.
[....] Lost and passive, the affectless boys and girls who
populate these stories, too childish to be called men and women even when they
are approaching thirty, unquestioningly accept the hopelessness of their
surroundings and live within its paralyzing terms. All but three of these
characters seem to have entered the world unburdened by the presence of mothers
and fathers, and for an excellent reason: Were we to be introduced to their
parents, the larger, more explanatory psychological framework in which we would
instantly begin to locate Deacon, Magwitch, Rabbit, Glitch, Erica, Lark and
Crispin is utterly irrelevant to Kiernan’s concerns. Psychological insight,
which permits a kind of description in fact detached from judgement, is
none-the-less often experienced as judgmental, as are other neutral forms of
description. Even the hint of conventional judgement, however misapplied, would
interfere with our appreciation of these stories. We must take Kiernan’s
disenfranchised protagonists on their own terms, as her fiction presents them
to us. Once we have done so, we are free to notice what matters, what is
important about them.
[....] Caitlín Kiernan is first of all a writer distinguished
by certain unique gifts; from that everything else flows. Like all worthwhile
writers of fiction, she is in urgent possession of a vision, a point of view
communicable only through representation in an ongoing series of short stories
and novels. For those who find themselves under this obligation, fiction
presents itself as a kind of aperture. The aperture provides a means of both
expression and focus, but it is narrow and infinitely difficult to negotiate. Supple,
exploratory access to its resources is given only to those whose internal
structures render such access crucial to psychic survival, and in most cases
the discovery of how best to use it arrives after years of unrewarding slog. No
one unaffected by this weird process could be expected to understand it, a
matter which results in a widespread delusion amongst the civilian populace.
*
Secret Windows Introduction
[....] The truth inside the lie, a phrase Stephen King
carried around within himself during the twelve years between these speaking
engagements, can be found only in fiction, which is the best reason for reading
it. Since his adolescence, King has understood that fiction’s enthralling
tissue of lies represents one of mankind’s surest paths to the spiritual
windows which look out onto the specific, soul-enlarging realities of our
shared humanity.
[....]he writes, “You keep pretty regular hours—that is, if
you want to get anything done.” The fundamental assumption of this dead-level
remark is that writing fiction is a job like any other, and must be done
honestly and well. And the basis of any such conviction is that writing done
honestly and well carries its own weight, regardless of genre or (vulgar)
popularity. Quietly, at the level of the lowest frequencies, King is offering
an implicit rebuttal to a notion he finds elitist, absurd, and insulting, that
successful commercial fiction by definition must be inferior to fiction of
other sorts. Truthfulness—truthfulness of a specific kind—grants any work of
fiction authenticity, strength, and dignity, King believes, and a popular
commercial writer faces a greater temptation to fudge than his more “literary”
colleagues, due to his consciousness of how an artificial turn or change of
direction would gratify his audience, should he impose it upon the living
story.
[....]In the arts, commercial popularity has no direct
bearing on quality, but neither, despite all evidence to the contrary, does it
guarantee inferiority. This assumption, that success = meretriciousness, has
dogged King all of his writing life and lies behind much of the Aw Shucks
attitude he expresses....
[....]Success is a validation second to none, a proposition
that holds true everywhere except in artistic circles.
[....]story, the meat and potatoes of fiction’s meat and
potatoes, radically democratizes all it touches.
[....] King has always been after bigger game than Clancy,
Grisham, or any other bestselling brand-name author, and he moved on from
writing immediately classifiable horror fiction two decades ago, with The
Dead Zone.
*
Hope to Die An Appreciation of
the Scudder Series
[....]Scudder’s progress [in Hope to Die] towards
identifying the preening villain takes the form of a deeply satisfying mystery
novel that is nearly meta-fictional in its self-awareness. Block establishes
false leads that culminate in a classic locked-room puzzle; Scudder’s elaborate
explanation of the puzzle reads like the denouement of an old-fashioned murder
mystery. Red herrings abound. Minor characters float in and out of view,
suggestively. In a nice inversion of convention, our detective clings to a
logical but false solution until a homicide cop persuades him otherwise.
[....]the most serious task presented to genre writers, one
most of his colleagues decline even to contemplate, that of reshaping their
chosen field to their own design, and that his work had become canonical
[....] Alone in American crime fiction, I think, the Scudder
series from Out on the Cutting Edge through A Walk Among the
Tombstones presents violence in its most ideologically troubling form, as a
variety of ecstasy. Though you would never guess it from reading the average
crime novel, violence and the sacred share a common seam, they walk hand in
hand, for both invoke the ultimate things. At its heart, the ultimate is that
which overwhelms our capacity to categorize, classify, comprehend. Here, rage
for the lost self and its lost world, too destructive, too great, to be
acknowledged directly, converts the massive sorrow of the two preceding books
into perfectly cathartic, deeply satisfying, because actually transcendent,
violence.
[....] the spirit of the dilettante. He wants to know how it
feels to commit these acts, but in no way supposes that they will mark him
permanently.
[....]Seen this way, murder itself becomes aestheticized
[....]A stunningly amoral darkness speaks from them, and
Block’s instinctive readiness to violate the conventions of his genre is a
large part of what makes them so good.
[....]a vehicle to express the rage aroused by everything
that has been lost. (This comfort food comes laced with razor blades.)
[....]a vehicle to express the rage aroused by everything
that has been lost. (This comfort food comes laced with razor blades.)
[....]Every contemporary detective series I can think of
involves an ongoing cast of supporting players who re-enact their essential
roles in book after book. As well as serving as foils to the hero, these
characters provide a reassuring continuity to the reader. Like members of a
family, they continually reiterate their primary traits; because they are not
members of the reader’s family, these traits work like comfort food. When
Scudder’s drinking buddies fall away, Block replaces them with three primary
recurring characters, Mick Ballou, Elaine Mardell, and T. J. That is, in
Blockian fashion: with a homicidal gangster, a whore, and a black teenage
hustler from Times Square.
[....] A novelist’s moral sensibility tends to embed itself
in his style, helplessly, and a style as chaste and conversational as Block’s
announces its aestheticism immediately. A morality grounded in aesthetics
ignores conventional social judgments and classifications, so much so that it
may appear perverse, topsy-turvy, and amoral. (On his American lecture tour,
Oscar Wilde delighted his audiences because they thought his epigrams were
ironic—which they were, but not in the way the silver miners in Leadville
imagined.) Keller, after all, murders people for a living, and Bernie
Rhodenbarr swipes trinkets from other people’s houses. Their jobs are presented
so neutrally that assassination and burglary become vehicles for the rebuke or
condemnation of hypocrites, fools, poseurs, pretenders: the second-rate
[....]Alcohol is both an occupation and a preoccupation. It
is a therapeutic tool, a kind of medicine, a mystery, a sacrament. Its proper
measure is the overdose.
[....]As Hemingway’s first, radical stories famously made
clear, stylistic simplicity is capable of communicating extremely powerful
emotional states almost without reference to their causes. In Block’s case, the
march of declarative sentences in their journey down the page carries with it a
freight of melancholy. The melancholy is unstated, but a lambent sadness colors
every phrase, giving an emotional topspin to the pervasive sense of detachment.
[....] Now we are faced with an odd paradox, that crime
novels distinguished by a singular degree of detachment should take on an
emotional resonance attained only very seldom—as in The Long Good-Bye—in
this kind of fiction. One explanation lies in Block’s prose style, which seems
effortless in its deliberate restraint. A quiet, nearly transparent voice is
speaking, generally in simple declarative sentences.
[....] Keller, the meditative hit man, exists primarily as a
tool for scraping away preconceptions about the moral lives of professional
killers, also for indulging in a sort of pastel Blockian whimsy. (Because it’s
Blockian, the whimsy often opens its mouth to reveal alarmingly pointed teeth
in jagged rows, like a shark’s.)
[....] The Scudder novels contain a dozen or more passages in
which the prose warms up momentarily, and for the space of a paragraph or two,
and lifts itself out of context. Yet the customary ambient weather of a Scudder
novel is cool and dry, and the customary attitude is one of observant,
live-and-let-live detachment.
[....]Raymond Chandler addressed his growing dissatisfaction
with Philip Marlowe by means of a magisterial act of imagination: while writing
The Long Good-Bye, Chandler vaulted over his self-imposed limitations
and gave Marlowe a greater depth of emotion than ever before, and his world a
far richer and sadder palette. A brutal sense of loneliness spun out over a
series of escalating betrayals elevates the book to that plateau where genre
fiction and literature breathe the same air.
The most beautiful, most heartbreaking paragraph Chandler
ever wrote is in The Long Good-Bye; it can be found on page 645 of the
Library of America’s Chandler: Later Novels & Other Writing and
begins with Philip Marlowe feeling “as hollow and empty as the spaces between
the stars.”
*
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Foreword
[....]it seems like nothing so much as a boy’s adventure
novel adapted to the field of science fiction, a then-infant genre invented at
least in part by its author, H. G. Wells.
[....]For the most part, the tone of the narrative is that of
reliability and assurance, blandly professional in its assumptions about the
contract between reader and writer.
[....]To Wells’s enormous credit, they did not find anything
so reassuring. On publication in 1896, reviewers recoiled from the book as if
it carried a contagious disease, excoriating Wells for the horrors to which he
had exposed the tender reader, the chief among them being blasphemy.
[....]what outraged Wells’s reviewers was his refusal to
honor conventional distinctions between human beings and beasts and his inability,
it seems to me despite himself, to suppress his own perception of the absolute
partiality and fragility of all human knowledge, especially that version of
knowledge produced by rational thought.
[....]Wells was educated as a scientist under the influence
of T. H. Huxley.... the most prominent English Darwinist of his day, who
proposed that evolution was an upward progress. Blessed with an ethical sense
unknown to animals, mankind was destined ever more increasingly to conquer
nature with civilization as it marched toward that ideal truth embodied in the
scientific method.
[....]Wells was a natural candidate to support these
assumptions, rather avant-garde for their day, and cloaked in the brisk
unassailability of science.
[....]but a fable in which religion appears to be a
manipulative sham, science a poisonous threat, and mankind in general so
thoroughly implicated in a Mad Vivisectionist’s savagery that man himself is a
ravening beast was another matter.
[....]The text often seems at war with itself. Some of its
bleakest overtones appear to have leaked out of the pen while the busy author
was thinking of something else. The resulting tension makes of the book a more
complex, layered, and irresolute performance than Wells ever intended
[....]at least to some extent science-fantasy tales must have
appealed to him because they represented a poke in the eye to the notion of
literary seriousness.
[....]James wrote back, “I live, live intensely and am fed by
life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that.
Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance…”
[....]Here we reckon with a writer of tremendous will and
ability, in sometimes imperfect command of his imaginative and emotional
impulses, prone to trusting that his assertions will be taken at face value and
subject to the tendency, calamitous in daily life but fruitful in novels, of
saying more than he knew.
[....]what the artist in Wells smuggled into the novel is a
pattern of confusion and uncertainty which undermines its gestures toward
resolution, generic satisfactions, and narrative confidence.
[....]Certainties of every sort dwindle into hopeful
suppositions when a shared language, consensual history, and common belief
systems are undermined
[....]when authority is seen as a despotic sham,
authoritative statement turns hollow and empty; under these circumstances the
nature of fact, the very fact of “fact,” becomes fluid and mysterious,
threatening and open to the suggestion of the uncanny
[....]Dr. Moreau, for whom science is an obscenely lunatic
religion
[....]Language expresses accurate meaning in its passing from
hand to hand like a coin, its nuances of weight and value instantly
comprehended; and as soon as Prendick enters the world of Dr. Moreau we meet
hints of the unreadable and obscure, suggestions of impenetrable meaning.
[....]Everything surrounding the narrator is like a language
imperfectly and partially understood
[....]speech in which all content is untranslatable and
opaque, locked firmly behind an unbreachable door
[....] Moreau’s “explanation.” Though cogent, his
self-justification, being insane, is no less a form of gibberish than the
utterances of the Swine People
[....]although narrator and author both draw back numbed from
the abyss, they share Moreau’s sense of an absolute distinction between man and
beast which apportions bravery and self-respect to mankind, the humiliations of
fear, servility, and credulity to brutes
[....]dread lays its cold hand on those men who witness the
corruption of human capacities into hideous travesties.
[....]He lost faith in the sanity of the world. Here,
already, is a mind at the end of its tether, moving toward the tragic
conclusion
[....]Prendick clasps whip and revolver to his bosom,
re-invents Christianity in Moreau’s image, and thunders his mock-sermon to the
bestial flock. In doing so he performs a bold self-rescue entirely appropriate
to the heroic narrator of an adventure tale, supplants the Mad Scientist, and
submits to the transformation of his own language into gibberish
[....]Wells’s great triumph lies in his courageous reversal
of these valences. In the novel’s most beautiful and imaginative passages—those
concerning what ordinarily would be the resolution of homecoming—the
implications of the “strange” insight that the Leopard Man’s gleaming eyes
reveal its humanity render the narrator unfit for society: he cannot escape the
perception that civilization is but a larger version of the island.
[....]The optimistic Edwardian world softens and gutters into
fresh horrors, gibberish, and intimations of death. Author and narrator have
come to the heart of darkness, and it is…London.
[....]In fiction, the energy, conviction, and heat of the words
on the page always speak for themselves, rebelliously subverting the intentions
of any mere misguided author trying to pull rhetorical wool over his own eyes.
[....] These dumb animals, wounded, hungry, unappeasable, are
what he secretly knows himself to be. This abhorrent, unacceptable knowledge is
the source of the recurring sense of the uncanny which haunts Prendick’s every
step on Moreau’s island, for the uncanny is what reminds us of what we wish not
to know.
*
Dracula: Introduction
[....] One of the things I most admire about Dracula
has to do with the relationship between the dramatic tension aroused by this
unseen threat and the novel’s triangular structure. A three-part structure is a
sturdy armature for any genre of fiction, and it is especially suited to horror
fiction, which tends naturally to divide itself into a first section that sets
up the particular nature of the disorder to be faced by the protagonists, a
second, exploratory section in which the protagonists cope with the spread of that
disorder, and a third section in which order is restored wholly, partially, or
not at all.
[....]Stoker manages his effects here as well as any writer
could, mixing in various complexities (the hunt for Dracula’s bolt-holes, the
discovery of Mina’s hastening peril, the division of the little band of heroes
into smaller units, and a wealth of travel arrangements) and one powerful
countermovement (Mina’s psychic contact with the foe) with the confidence of a
real master. The authority of his narrative technique makes even his occasional
moments of fussiness, such as the long pause for stock-taking at the beginning
of part three, seem vibrant, for they come as welcome breaks in the steadily
intensifying tension.
[....]In utter contrast to his usual methods, Stoker devoted
six years to its creation. He made notes; he did research in the British
Library and the Whitby Library; he created a lengthy outline; he wrote with
unusual care, revising, rewriting, and editing continuously. Along the way,
something unprecedented happened to him: he gave himself to his book. Stoker
opened his internal doors and allowed sexual fears, fantasies, and obsession he
ordinarily kept out of sight to find expression on the page, encoded into the
receptive language of vampiric seductions and penetration. (The child-Stoker
had loved codes and ciphers. At the end of his childhood, he encoded his given
name, Abraham, into Bram, and used it for the rest of his life.)
[....] Nothing ever gripped him as Dracula had, but
another factor also contributed, just as significantly, to his failure. This
factor is centered in the aspect of Stoker’s aesthetic that made his
masterpiece something of an anachronism for the time in which it was published.
[....] the novel looks determinedly backward to the high noon
of the Victorian novel, in particular that subset of Gothic Fiction known as
the Novel of Sensation, which dealt with implausible events and guilty secrets.
It is this literature from which Dracula takes its manner, tone, and
narrative values.
[....]The same adherence to a fading model shaped his career
in the theater.
[....] Unlike other kinds of fiction, horror finds its
successes and achieves its end—the creation in the reader of the emotion that
gives the genre its name—most often by pushing one or another of a specific
culture’s hot buttons.
[....]The effectiveness of most horror novels depends on the
power of their set-piece subclimaxes, which deliver the emotional goods while
preparing the way for the great fireworks displays at their conclusions, and Dracula
is no exception.
[....]applying a debased, parlor version of Freudian analysis
to the novel.... In this drastic misreading, the vampire embodies the erotic,
which threatens the orderly societal fabric woven from premarital chastity,
well-supervised courtships, lengthy engagements and sensible marriages, so the
vampire must be destroyed. Finis.
[....]I want to be clear unto transparency on this point:
horror, at least good horror, horror worthy of the name, never works to such a
reductive template.
[....]The conventional view of Dracula is not merely
reductive, it ignores precisely those psychic distress signals and linguistic
giveaways that represent Stoker’s willingness to surrender to his own text, in
other words, the very passages that elevate Dracula above even the most
skillful examples of “category” horror.
[....]the eroticized vampire certainly does threaten the
civilizing social patterns of gender identification and courtship, but first it
threatens the self. The nature of that threat lies in its sheer enormity of
scale, the depth of its seductiveness regardless of gender, and its presence
throughout the natural but extra-human world. These qualities locate the erotic
within the realm of the supernatural. When the erotic and the supernatural
share a common territory beyond the control of human beings, the erotic cannot
be a simple referent for evil. Instead, sex and horror merge in a way that
joins ecstasy with revulsion, a combination too powerful for the self to
handle. Seen through the lens of horror, sex becomes risky, savage, overloaded
with destructive energy: submission invites destruction; fluids spurt with
elemental avidity; orgasms strike with volcanic force.
[....]Stoker’s vampires are Gothic, and the transgressive,
while immensely seductive, is about as glamorous as a wound.
[....]Doubleness and duality ripely inform the Gothic, which
abounds in lost twins, doppelgangers, secret sharers, and mirrored images.
[....]absence that defines a presence. The doppelganger, the
most psychologically loaded version of duality, is the figure that has stepped
out of the mirror to roam the world, a split-off or denied part of the self
allowed to run rampant by reason of having been defined as the Other. (And the
Other is always that aspect of ourselves we least wish to see in the mirror.)
[....]Each half of a duality shares a deep connection with
its partner, and the only case in which the connection is benign is the last
and least of them.
[....]What I prefer are writers like Robert Aickman, Thomas
Tessier, John Crowley, and Jonathan Carroll, who are after larger game. (My own
efforts at deliberate indirection have led to indictments on several counts of
Unnecessary Obfuscation, Aggravated Slowness, Assault With Intent to Stupefy,
Irresponsible Neglect of Reader, and so on, all cases currently under appeal.)
[....] Whenever a writer of fiction places two elements in
close proximity several times in the course of a single work, those elements are
being associated with each other, indelibly: no matter how disparate they may
seem, they have an intimate relationship, and the qualities of one will inform
the other. Throughout the whole of the second part of Dracula, Stoker
aligns descriptions of ravishing sunsets with revelations of the vampire’s
otherwise unheralded presence.
[....]stunning, seemingly ironic overflow of natural beauty
is the Count in the sense that it would not be present if the bat had flown on,
and it expresses the incalculable range of his powers. What is supernatural
holds dominion over conventional nature, which becomes its silent voice—Stoker
is reaching out into a realm almost expressionistic in the violence of its
transformations. Menace and evil saturate the transformed landscape, painted in
heightened colors by the vampire’s presence.
[....]The point is not that repressive male insecurity cannot
tolerate the spectacle of unfettered female sexuality and must put it to death
to restore the fantasy of female purity. Godalming is an equal partner in this
bloody celebration, and he drives deeper and deeper until the deed is done,
leaving him sweaty and gasping. The real impact of this extraordinary scene,
which is the book’s high point, literally its central moment, depends upon Dracula’s
status as a Gothic novel of supernatural horror. Here the natural
beauty-vampire association comes home to roost where it began, in the realm of
the erotic—in a gesture of absolute trust in his genre, Stoker turns the
conventional paradigm upside down and locates sexuality as an aspect of the
supernatural. Thus located, sexual power and sexual fantasy become terrifying,
capable of animating the dead and coloring the natural landscape.
[....]sexuality has been so completely absorbed into the supernatural
that there is no longer any significant distinction between the two.
[....]In the original manuscript this was followed with six
long sentences Stoker later crossed out.
As we looked there
came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro
and fell to our knees. At the same moment with a roar which seemed to shake the
very heavens the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood
seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments while a mighty cloud of
black and yellow smoke volume on volume in rolling grandeur was shot upwards
with inconceivable rapidity. Then there was a stillness in nature as the echoes
of that thunderous report seemed to come as with the hollow book of a thunder
clap—the long reverberating roll which seems as though the floors of heaven
shook. Then down in a mighty ruin falling whence they rose came the fragments
that had been tossed skyward in the cataclysm. From where we stood it seemed as
though the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that
the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were
so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of
ourselves.
All the sexual
imagery throughout the book informs this passage and culminates in it.
Eroticized by a displaced sexual urgency that has been subsumed into the
supernatural, nature “satisfies the need” to expel all traces of the vampire in
a massive erection and ejaculation, which are followed by a relieved
“detumescence.” Stoker was so insistent on the “grandeur” of the spectacle that
he used the word twice.
And then, before
the manuscript went to the typesetter, Stoker deleted everything after the
first sentence. His biographer, Barbara Belford, suggests two possible reasons
for the deletion: his publishers may have wanted to leave open the option of a
sequel; and Stoker might have been troubled by the resemblance of this scene to
the ending of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It seems likelier that the
scene was cut for more personal reasons. Either Stoker or his publisher could
have found it too much, too graphic, thus unacceptable; and Stoker could have
had second thoughts about having this grandly phallic moment recorded by the
pen of Mina Harker, in whose final journal entry it appears. The Victorians may
have been much more like us than we wish to admit, but on the evidence of Dracula,
they differed in at least one significant way—they took sex and horror far more
seriously than we do.
*
100 Best Books of Horror
Introduction
[....]sprawling, multiform,
definition-shedding field of horror
[....]During the late 1990s,
this wonderful thing happened—it became clear that a number of emerging writers
had figured out how to extend, ignore, or transform horror’s (and dark
fantasy’s) supposed boundaries. By doing so, they were treating it as what at
its best it had aspired to be all along, a kind of literature distinguished
from other kinds chiefly by an angle of vision that, while resisting most
culturally determined forms of denial, celebrated the grotesque, the eccentric,
the marginal, and the magical. This point of view respected the hard facts of
loss, pain, emotional extremity, and grief; mainly, I think, it honored the
capacity of vivid, liberated imagination to discover unexpected and often
unsettling truths.
[....]inherent conservatism
being one of the qualities critics reflexively attribute to horror—
[....]my concept of the genre
(or nongenre) as the essentially boundaryless product of a particular
interpretive stance
*
Jay
9 September 2022
