Sides by Peter Straub

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