"Agate Way" (2025) by Laird Barron reviewed

Agate Way" (2025) by Laird Barron reviewed:
https://substack.com/@jayrothermel/note/c-96111726?r=1vg2di

Six stories from Screams from the Dark, Edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Nightfire, 2022)

Readers who are unfamiliar with the anthology Screams from the Dark may prefer to read these notes only after reading the stories.

*   *   *

         "The British saw the Hudson as key to their strategy. If they could control it, they could split the colonies, divide and conquer them. As plans go, it wasn't a bad one. It failed because their army was defeated at Saratoga, which initiated a series of events leading to them losing all of the state down to the City, where they remained until the end of the war. Before news of the loss at Saratoga spread, the British had sent thirty ships sailing up the Hudson. There were a few thousand soldiers on them. The idea was for these men to meet up with the British forces marching south along the river from their presumed victory at Saratoga. On their way, the British ships would create a diversion and perhaps more. They got off to a promising start, destroying a couple of colonial forts on the lower Hudson, capturing one right across from West Point. A little bit below Wiltwyck, the fleet received word of the defeat at Saratoga. With this message, their mission became pointless. To say the least, they were not pleased. Since Wiltwyck was the closest settlement, they visited their displeasure on the city. First, they subjected what was then the state capital to bombardment by their ships' cannons. Last I heard, one of the older buildings uptown still has a cannonball lodged in its basement wall. Fortunately, the city's residents had gotten wind of the ships' approach and had largely abandoned it. Once the cannons were done, the fleet sent several landing boats full of soldiers to shore. Reports vary as to how many redcoats set foot on Wiltwyck Point, with some claiming six hundred, others a thousand, and others still more. For the purposes of this story, the exact number doesn't matter. What does is there were at minimum hundreds of them marching on the city, which was lightly defended, most of the able-bodied men off fighting. The British shot at the handful who showed up to confront them, then set fire to the city. Over three hundred buildings, houses, barns, businesses, and places of worship burned down. The soldiers retreated to their boats, returned to their ships, and sailed for Manhattan, thus concluding their final, spiteful military success in this part of the Hudson Valley.

     "Among the soldiers who came ashore that day was a captain, Amos Black. He brought with him a pair of diminutive figures, whom the other troops referred to as Captain Black's little gray fellows. They were part of a group of five such fellows under the captain's command. As soon as it had become clear to the British that the battle against the colonists was not going to be over soon, they had sent across the Atlantic for Black, who was housed with his gray fellows separately from the rest of his regiment. Upon their arrival in New York, the six of them were billeted in a repurposed barn not far from Harlem Heights. From there, they were deployed on select missions, most of which were secret. None of the regular soldiers cared for the captain and his associates.

     "As the British troops fired on Wiltwyck's defenders and set torch to its buildings, Black and his two companions kept to the rear. He was a striking figure, a small, narrow man dressed not in the scarlet and white of a regular soldier, but entirely in black, with the exception of an emerald neckerchief. It was as if he was wearing his name, the troops joked. Only when the British were climbing back into their boats did Black take action. Before joining the rest of the landing party, he turned to his undersized companions, uttered words no one could make out, and pointed at the burning city. The little gray fellows turned and sprinted toward it. According to one observer, they ran more like dogs, or wolves, than men.

     "In the following days, there were a series of terrible murders in and around Wiltwyck's smoldering remains. Men, women, children, old, young, all were victims. They were killed sorting through the charred wreckage of their homes and businesses. They died attempting to recover what vegetables were left in their fields. They met their end on the road out of Wiltwyck to Hurley, where the majority of the city's residents had relocated. These were savage acts, bodies torn open, entrails strewn around them. Popular suspicion fell on wild animals, a pack of wolves, drawn to the devastated city and made bold by its ruin. There were organs missing from some of the victims, but what was remarkable was the lack of any substantial amount of blood at the sites of the crimes, which pointed to creatures other than wolves. A couple of young men who had spied on Captain Black ordering his undersized companions to remain behind made the connection between those strange figures and the outbreak of murders. The young men—they were boys, really—assembled a group to locate the little gray fellows and put a halt to their attacks. Its numbers consisted of men too old, too young, and too unwell to fight in the Continental Army, as well as a pair of ministers and a widow who had assumed the running of her farm after her husband had been struck down by a British musket ball at the Battle of Long Island.

     "Together, these men and women tracked the gray fellows to a barn on the road to Hurley. They circled the barn and attacked. A ferocious fight ensued. Although bloated with blood, the gray fellows were fearsome contestants, terrifically strong, inflicting horrific damage on their assailants with the fangs filling their wide mouths, the claws on their long hands and feet. They killed a full third of the party, and of the rest, no one went uninjured. Finally, the widow—whose name was Emma Dearborn—struck the head from one of the creatures with an axe. For a short while thereafter, his companion continued the fight, then leapt through the ranks of the attackers and fled. The group bound up their injuries, burned the remains of their foe, and set off in pursuit of his fellow.

     "For six days, they chased him through the Catskills, occasionally drawing within sight of the gray fellow, though never close enough to do more than waste a musket ball on him. At last, his trail disappeared on the shore of a lake. Assuming he'd hidden beneath the water, the members of the party stationed themselves around the lake and waited for their quarry to emerge. Another four days passed, at the end of which, they decided the gray fellow had either drowned or escaped. A careful search of the surrounding woods failed to turn up any sign the creature had slipped out of the water and through their ranks, so they concluded he had chosen his end in the water rather than at the edges of their knives and axes. They warned the few people living near the lake of what they had pursued into it, advised them to keep an eye out for anything unusual, then returned to Wiltwyck and their separate homes."

     "How did your grandmother know this?" I said. "I'm familiar with the burning of Wiltwyck; they reenact it every other Fourth of July. But the rest of it…"

     "She'd read about it," Doris said, "at the Woodstock library. One of her responsibilities was the local history section, whose shelves contained all sorts of things, personal journals, albums of old newspapers, unpublished manuscripts. She read all of them, in part to figure out how to catalogue the holdings and in part to learn more about the place she and Morfa had chosen to call home. Among the papers she examined was a handwritten document titled Concerning the Terrible and Strange Events of October 18–November 2, 1777. Fifty-six pages long, it was the work of Emma Dearborn, the widow who'd beheaded one of the gray fellows. During the winter after the battle with the creatures, she set down her account of it. There was no record of the means by which the manuscript found its way to the library.

     "When she reached the description of Captain Black's little gray fellows, she recognized the pair as blodsuger. How was that possible, right?"

     I nodded.

     "Mormor's grandmother had come to Denmark from Finland, Lapland, where she had been what the Danes called a heks, the Finns a noita, a witch. She had taught Mormor about the nisse, how to distinguish among them, the proper ways for dealing with the more dangerous varieties. Of course, my grandmother didn't imagine the lake behind her and Morfa's house was the lake from Emma Dearborn's story. It would have been too great a coincidence. But she shared the details of the widow's narrative with my grandfather. His father, a blacksmith, had passed along the same and similar folklore to him. As the one who went off fishing, he was more likely to encounter the remaining blodsuger, assuming there was any truth to the tale she had read and the creature had remained in its watery hiding place. Telling him was a precaution of the same order as reminding him to keep an eye out for rattlesnakes when he went hiking on Overlook Mountain. She didn't expect he would meet any of the reptiles on the paths he followed, but better to be prepared for something that never came than surprised by it shaking its rattle at your feet. The only thing neither of them had anticipated was discovering the blodsuger in the middle of such a ferocious storm. It was the way of life: you made your plans, and God chuckled at them…."

"Blodsuger" by John Langan

*   *   *

Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous Edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Nightfire, 2022) is an ambitious attempt at a state-of-the-art horror fiction anthology. It includes over two dozen original short stories and novellas of high quality. 

I have already blogged about two stories that demanded my undivided attention:

My notes on the sublime "The Ghost of a Flea" by Priya Sharma can be found here.

An initial response to the gruesome, non-supernatural "'The Father of Modern Gynecology': J. Marion Syms, M.D. (1813–1883)" by Joyce Carol Oates is here.

The reader will find my thoughts on six other stories below.

*   *   *

"Children of the Night" by Stephen Graham Jones is an amusing joke. Tol, the organizer of a Montana cryptid group searching for Bigfoot, gets his prayer answered.

In The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, John Clute reminds the horror reader that answered prayers are "wishes which are fulfilled in a fashion which punishes the wisher, the biter bit...."

While no sardonic genie or monkey's paw grants protagonist Tol's wish, there might as well have been.

The Bigfoot in question has been killed by a big rig on a lonely mountain highway. Tol  single handedly gets it into the back of the family minivan. (It never occurs to him to alert fellow team members.) Then he begins examining the body.

The author's droll conceit turns out to be that creatures of the night might wisely go in disguise on their errands. When Tol begins to "peel the onion," the reader knows it will all end in tears.

*   *   *

"Three Mothers Mountain" by Nathan Ballingrud also deals with the cost of answered prayers. Tom and his younger brother Scotty lose their father in a car accident. Maddened by grief, their mother mails his wedding ring to the three mountain witches who live above their North Carolina town, Toad Springs. There the ring is planted in a garden. The boys do not get their father back. They get a father-thing instead, a physically corrupt simulacra that wins their mother's single-minded devotion.

So one day Tom and Scotty set out for the witches' mountain cabin, determined to wreck everything.

     The path darkened as they walked. Tom no longer had a sense of what time it was, and he felt a flutter of fear in his gut. Common sense told him it couldn't be any later than two o'clock, two thirty at most. And yet the light filtering through the trees seemed diffuse and weak. This might have been due to the sun pursuing its course above them, and it might have had something to do with the heavy tangle of branches crowding them from either side, but he knew instinctively that the cause was something else: they were entering the Witch Wood. Darkness was an animal, and this is where it lived.

Ballingrud's craft is faultless in "Three Mothers Mountain." The emotional eloquence allowed to each character, the meticulous scene-building orchestrated at kitchen tables in two very different houses, the stoicism ultimately displayed by Tom when facing the consequences of his path, are testament to a writer able to convey every shade of horror. 

     The witches whispered, and then Mother Ingrid said, "Well, perhaps we can do something. Your mother paid. Will you?"

     Thank God, at last, a window. Yes, he would pay. Yes. "Yes."

     "You'll have to make friends with the dark," Mother Margaret said. "Do you have the heart for it?"

     He nodded.

     "We'll see."

     "Don't fret," said Mother Agnes, staring at his little brother. "The sweetest things grow in the dark."

*   *   *

As it begins, "Sweet Potato" sounds like another Joe R. Lansdale organ solo. 

....Though he had a good retirement plan, Tyler hadn't expected his job to end so abruptly, the boss having gone to prison for ass-fondling and grubbing money from the public trust. But there it was. She went and the business went, and now here he was, out in the wilds of unemployment, living off his considerable savings (thank goodness), and submerged way down deep in the cold-ass nothing.

     Dreaming for a while was so fine. No alarm clock, living in pajamas. What he liked best, at first, was that things that seemed silly in real life seemed fine in the dream world. He could be an old-fashioned hero in his dreams. Much younger, washboard abs, a baseball-bat dick, and balls like grapefruits. Carrying a sword, brave and relentless, six foot five and forever young. And then, one night, down in a dream, there was a soundless shift.

But after the early jokiness, a barbed and complicated tale unfolds. Tyler, unemployed and dangerously idle, figures out his increasingly strange waking and sleeping life is the product of something that finds him of use.

"Sweet Potato" carries a warning for men uninterested in the everyday world and its responsibilities.

     Visiting a friend from work, who was also out of a job with time for the coffee shop, Tyler said, after their conversation began to falter, "Have you ever had a dream that seemed real?"

     The friend, gray and heavy with lips like two red earthworms, rocked back in the booth and sipped his coffee before answering.

     "Of course. Though mostly they don't make sense when I wake up. But now and again, they feel real, could be real. Some of the most outlandish dreams seem real at the time."

     "Just for curiosity's sake. Have you ever felt something in a dream come back with you, being there when you woke up?"

     "No. Though I've heard of it. Some people believe your soul lets go sometimes and comes right out of you when you breathe awake. One moment you're breathing asleep, the next, you're breathing awake."

     "Your soul?"

     "If you believe in that sort of thing. Maybe a piece of your soul. Or something worse. A demon. A succubus, which is a kind of sex demon that rides in and out on your essence while you dream, fucks the shit out of you and takes your energy, borrows your soul, and finally keeps it. They can be created by your subconscious, or they can be night riders."

     "What's that?"

     "Loose souls looking for a place to light. A place to suck the energy out of. Men can be incubuses, you know."

     "I don't know."

     "Male sex demons. The succubus in reverse. I think succubuses and incubuses can switch-hit when it comes to sexual matters. You might even have to put Scotch tape over your dog's asshole if one of them is around."

     "I don't have a dog."

     "That's one less worry, then."

     "How do you know all of this?"

     "I read a lot. I found golf too tiring."

     "Well, I could use a sex demon actually," Tyler said.

     "I wouldn't mind one either. But it might be like that old saying about how you have to be careful what you wish for."

*   *   *

"Knock, Knock" by Brian Evenson is a story about two moral monsters, uncle and nephew, pitted against each other over ownership of a house and its land. In their contest, murder does not resolve conflict, it simply raises the stakes and increases the horror.

....You killed the bastard once, he told himself. Now all you have to do is kill him again.

*   *   *

"Bitten by Himself" by Laird Barron is a perfunctory story. It begins in a 

promising mode: a North American frontier scout and mountain man named Chick Poe, prone to wallowing in his own crapulence as a way of life, stumbles upon his doppelganger in a forest clearing one night. They fight and he is bitten, infected with rabies.

From there the tale's missteps and wrong turns commenced. Rather than pursue the rich potential in the story's historical setting, Barron decided to pad the remainder with solipsistic winks, smirks, and reverses.

This is a disappointment for readers who appreciated the riveting if uneven 2013 story "The Beatification of Custer Poe."

But it is an even greater disappointment for readers who thrilled to the sheer storytelling skill seen in stories like "Mysterium Tremendum" (2010), "The Men from Porlock" (2011), and "In a Cavern, in a Canyon" (2015). (Speaking for myself, I found it hard to sleep the first night after I read "Porlock.")

Compared to those sublime stories, "Bitten by Himself" is dully soporific.

*   *   *

"Blodsuger" by John Langan is about the longest story in Screams from the Dark, and is probably the most satisfying. The story's formal elegance is admirable: two people meet at a community social event in the Catskill mountains of New York state. The older protagonist, Doris, tells the narrator the beautifully articulated story of a horror from her adolescence. Langan tells the entire story in dialogue between these two people at a picnic table in a barn. 

"Blodsuger" places horror outdoors, on the land and imbricated in the region's history. Doris is not the victim of answered prayers; she tells the story of her "attempted rescue" of herself, and the way the outcome taught her to know better in future.

The excellence and eloquence of "Blodsuger" is staggering. It reminded me of several earlier Langan stories that have rewarded rereading: "On Skua Island" (2001), "Mr. Gaunt" (2002), and "What Is Lost, What Is Given Away" (2016). 

Langan's stories allow the reader to luxuriate in a horror-filled region made strange by narrative distance.

Jay

4 July 2022

Four stories from The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius (2013) Edited by John Joseph Adam

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius (2013)

Edited by John Joseph Adam 

* * *

"Mofongo Knows" by Grady Hendrix recalls some of Kim Newman's early stories: "Famous Monsters" (1988), "The Original Dr Shade" (1990), and "The Pierce Arrow Stalled, And... " (1995). It's an elegant exercise in poignant belatedness, coolly clocking the afterlives of adventurers.

      It's been thirty years without a whiff of Theresa Savage, yet here's her smell again like a golden oldie.    "We need to talk," she says, standing outside Mofongo's cage with three men in dark suits.

    "Let me guess," Mofongo says, sitting up. He is excited to have some new playmates, especially ones who wear suits. None of his visitors ever wear suits, and he hasn't seen a human being in forty hours. He can mentally dampen his hunger and thirst but his boredom knows no bounds. He points to them in order. "CIA, FBI, NSA."

    "CIA, FBI, and Animal Control," the youngest suit man says to him.

    "I am not an animal," Mofongo says.

    "You're not exactly human, either," the man says.

    Mofongo's nostrils flare.

    "What is this, Theresa?" he asks. "Why did you come back?"

    "Dad's dead," she says.

    "What?"

    "He's dead," she repeats.

    "Who did it?"

    "A bottle of Southern Comfort and a handful of Vicodin," she says. "Day before yesterday."

    "Wrong," Mofongo says. "One of his enemies, returned for revenge."

    "Mo, I appreciate that you're upset but this isn't part of you guys' soap opera. He killed himself."

    "No," Mofongo says, and he feels fear because he really does not know who did it. Old allies can turn into new enemies, old friends can become new foes. Men of Adventure are no stranger to psychosis. "One of his enemies is here. I may also be in danger. You must free me so I can defend myself."

    "I can't let you come to the funeral," she says, ignoring him. "People will want to know why a talking ape is there and you're kind of hard to explain."

    "I don't want to go to his funeral," Mofongo snarls. "I want to defend myself!"

    "I'm sorry," Theresa says. "I really am. On the plus side, we're getting you out of here."

    "Yes, free to defend myself. Free to destroy my enemies."

    "There's a Primate Refuge outside Austin," the Animal Control man says. "They've agreed to take you. You'll fit right in. That chimpanzee who did all those Geico ads is there."

    "Chimpanzees? Chimpanzees! Masturbating, shit-flinging, pants-wearing attention whores! I am Mofongo: Gorilla of the Mind. I am a threat to mankind! I'm on the UN watch list!"

    "You've been off that list for twenty-six years," the CIA agent says. "No one remembers you anymore."

    "If men do not still feel fear," Mofongo snarls, "why do they send the CIA? Why the FBI?"

    The FBI agent shrugs. "I just wanted to see a talking gorilla," he says.

* * *

"Blood & Stardust" by Laird Barron

     "Mary," he says. "You double-checked the array, I presume?" He scarcely acknowledges my answer; his mind is already three jumps ahead, and besides, my loyalty is unquestioned. "One of my specimens expired last night— but all is not lost. My revivification project awaits!"

    "Remember not to talk on the phone during the storm," I say. "I just saw an account of a woman who was fried doing dishes. Ball lightning exploded from the sink and set her on fire. It traveled through the pipes."

    Dr. Kob stares at me, his beady eyes narrowed. He rubs his temples as if experiencing a migraine. "You're watching the talk shows again. You know how I frown upon that, my dear. Less daydreaming, more physical exertion. Remind me to have Pelt assign you additional duties. Idle hands and all that."

    "Sure, gimme a pitchfork and I'll swamp out the stables."

    "Never mention pitchforks again!"

    "Or torches."

    "Out! Before I lose patience for your belligerence. And tomorrow, take the rod into our lovely village for quality-assurance testing. I've altered the design. It possesses more jolt than ever."

    "As you command," I say sweetly. After he wanders off, I chew my cup and swallow it piece by piece. It kind of frightens me that my Pavlovian dread of the Doctor has ebbed, replaced by an abiding irritation. This is very dangerous. He's a middle-aged megalomaniacal child— an L'enfant Terrible. We know what rotten children do with their toys, right?

    He gave me a puppy, once. I loved her, and often imagined how she had crept into the caves of my ancestors to escape the cold and the dark. I accidentally broke the puppy's neck. It's probably a good thing he didn't hand me the little brother I always wanted.

Lab assistant Mary turns the tables on her employer, then finds a circus to join. Barron is at his ease with the material, calm and in control, far away from Universal Studios clichés. The tone is slangy, first-person, and assured.

Readers curious about subtle handling of sex and gender roles will appreciate the human sympathies the story portrays.

* * *

"Rural Singularity" by Alan Dean Foster is a droll story about a smalltown reporter following-up on a two-headed chicken story. He meets the farmer and the farmer's precocious daughter, Suzie.

     She showed him the antigravity projector the size of a cell phone, just like the one in her pocket that had kept the miniature solar system hovering above her palm. She showed him the homunculus Santa and elves that she only animated at Christmas. Showed him the robot cat that kept the barn free of rats and mice, and the extractor that drew water from the seemingly desiccated air, and the candy maker that spun elaborate gourmet treats out of plain sugar and simple flavorings. She showed him the small thermonuclear device.

     "But I can't get enough radium or tritium out of the old watches dad buys for me a flea markets so I'm gonna try and build my own centrifuges to concentrate enough U-235 to ninety percent from the ore in the hills around here." She eyed her father. "For my next birthday dad promised me enough lead to make some shielding."

     Gilcrease looked at his host. Parker shrugged. "It's harmless, I'm sure. Another one of her toys."

     "Yeah," Gilcrease mumbled. "Harmless." He was eyeing the girl not just out of curiosity now, but warily. "Suzie, some of these things, some of your toys— aren't you afraid they might be a little bit dangerous?"

* * *

"Ancient Equations" by L. A. Banks

Ernest Lassiter, engineering genius with access to the "Akashic records," gets ready to work a spell to save the world:

[....]There was nothing wrong with his mind and he was no extremist, no matter what the psychiatrists had said. He did not have a breakdown. Thinking differently than the zombified public did not mean he'd gone around the bend. He'd had an awakening on the job, is all . . . one that brought him clarity!

It's the usual mishmash of self-righteous social-misfit moralizing:

[....]The Bildebergers and the Illuminati still ran the entire fucking world. They were the devil, and they got regular people to buy into being blind consumers, suckered them into debt, poisoned them for profit, made them so unhappy with their lives, their looks, their bodies, their families that they had to spend money— somehow, somewhere in the food chain of greed— to make themselves feel better.

     Somebody needed to do something. Somebody really smart could fuck up their decadent Roman orgy party forever....

It's remarkable that a story by a professional writer,  selected for a professional anthology, cannot do more than spin its wheels for nineteen pages.

Jay

7 December 2021

Three grawlix stories from The Saga Anthology of the Monstrous and the Macabre (2016)

"As Jacques Derrida reminds us [Mémoires: for Paul de Man], 'a title is always a promise'. As such it is characterized by a certain excess, hanging over the text and our reading, as we wait in some hope and expectancy of discovering why the work has the title it has."

- Veering: A Theory of Literature by Nicholas Royle (2011)

 

What the #@&% Is That?: The Saga Anthology of the Monstrous and the Macabre (2016, Saga Press)

Edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen

* * *

Les trois rois

As to What the #@&% Is That? as a story criteria, I can only say that many horror tales in the last two centuries would qualify. Evaluating each of this collection's stories would require the judgment of someone who has read the book cover to cover.

Reader, I am not that reader. 

With anthologies, my first pass is the big name pass: reading stories by the two or three dynamos that never disappoint. (Usually this amounts to Ramsey Cambell and Reggie Oliver). After that, it might be years before I crack the covers and work another layer.

* * *

"The House That Love Built" by Grady Hendrix is a dark high-speed domestic comedy. The narrator lives with two wives. One wife is a ghost; each wife knows she is being haunted. Both blame our narrator, the husband. 

At first we think we know which wife is the ghost. Then we begin to revise our understanding of the term. Hendrix dizzies us: pushing dialogue and scene transitions like a carny running a midway merry-go-round.

     Karen says the kitchen table is the best place to Ouija since it's in the physical center of the house. The edges of her speech are softened by a beery slur.

     "So, now what?" I ask, looking at her over the Parker Brothers board.

     "Now we empty our minds," she says, placing her fingers on the planchette.

     "Shouldn't be hard for you," I say.

     She shoots me the bird. Somehow, I knew she was going to do that. I put my fingers on the planchette and nothing happens. Fifteen minutes of nothing happening later, she breaks out the vodka. I tell her I don't want any.

     "Your ghost showing up anytime soon?" I say. "I want to get to a meeting tonight."

     "Maybe he's busy," Karen slurs. "Maybe he's hauling a big load of sanctimonious bullshit to his wife in North Dakota."

     "Hand me that bottle," I say.

     I'll do anything to keep the peace.

     Another fifteen minutes pass and nothing happens unless you count getting drunk.

     "Let's call it a night," I tell her.

     "In a hurry to go hang with your crackhead buddies at AA?" she asks.

     "If you're not careful, I'm going to start taking your comments personally," I say.

     "Oh, no," she says. "I'd better watch out or the big pussy might actually do something."

     We both have a couple of drinks from the bottle while we consider the implications of her comment.

     "It's ten o'clock," I say, taking the high road. "We can watch The Daily Show and go to bed. Nothing good is going to happen tonight."

     "Is that a Christian thing?" she says. "Early to bed, early to rise?"

     "Actually," I say, trying to keep things light, "Benjamin Franklin said that."

     "Judge not," she says, "lest ye be judged. And all you do is judge, you sanctimonious prick."

     "All you do is drink," I say.

     Karen and I sit there hating each other until Angela comes in and freezes in the doorway, purse over one shoulder, keys in her hand.

     "What is that thing doing in my house?" she asks.

     The vodka's got me foggy, so it takes a minute to realize she isn't talking about Karen.

     "I'm just playing," I say.

     "Playing, my ass," Karen says. "You've been judging me for years with your AA, your church, all your shit."

     "It's a tool of the Devil," Angela says, her eyes glued to the Ouija board.

     "What is it you're scared of?" I ask.

     "You're changing," Karen says, and the bottom of her eyes get wet. "And when you realize I'm not changing too, you're going to ditch me for another woman."

     "You're inviting evil into this house," Angela says.

     "That's not on the menu," I say to both of them. "This is the house that love built. We have our problems, sure, but nothing bad is going to happen."

     "You've been drinking," Angela says, noticing the vodka.

     "You're full of shit," Karen says.

     "Come on," I say. "Let's play. Let's play Ouija together and you'll see there's no call to be scared."

     Karen makes a dismissive sound and stands up. Angela turns to go. Sometimes, it's more than I can take.

     "Sit right down right this fucking minute!" I shout. "You're going to sit the fuck down and play the fucking Ouija with me and we're going to have a nice fucking time."

     Karen freezes. Angela stops. They both look at me scared.

     "Please," I say. "Sit down."

     Angela and Karen sit down next to each other.

     "I don't want to do this," Angela says. "Please don't make me do this."

     I look at my two wives sitting across the table from me, their four eyes red and wet.

     "It's okay to be scared," I say. "But you have to push past your fear."

     Putting my fingers on the planchette, I nod at it encouragingly. Karen crosses her arms. Angela raises her hands, then lowers them.

     "Don't be like that," I say, then I raise my eyebrows to let them both know I am not to be fucked with right now.

     In one of those beautiful moments of synchronicity, they place their fingertips on the planchette simultaneously.

     "Now what?" Angela asks.

     "Let's ask the spirit if it has a name," I say.

     "No," Angela says.

     "Spirit, what is your name?" Karen asks.

     The planchette slides around the board on its little felt feet and I can't tell which one of us is steering. It stops on A, then it stops on N, then it stops on G, then it keeps on stopping until it spells a name.

     "Who the fuck is Angela?" Karen asks.

     "How does it know my name?" Angela asks.

     "Ask it," I say.

     "Who's Angela?" Karen asks.

     The planchette burns up the board, and together Karen and Angela spell out two words:

     HIS WIFE.

     "What the fuck?" Karen asks the board. "What the fuck?" she asks me.

     Angela is pale and her lips are trembling. I hate seeing Angela upset. Karen, on the other hand, she can go fuck herself.

     "It's just the subconscious mind of the people playing," I reassure them. "That's all it is. You aren't even aware you're doing it, but your subconscious mind spells out what you're thinking with involuntary muscle contractions. So, if you're scared of something, you spell out what you're scared of."

     Karen stands up.

     "Your fingers are on it," she says. "Your fingers are on it, so why the fuck are you thinking about some wife named Angela?"

     I wish she could be quiet for one minute.

     "That's not true," Angela says. "I didn't do that. I didn't move it. Someone else was moving that thing."

     "Answer me!" Karen screams.

     They're talking too fast for me to figure out a response that'll suit both of them.

     "It's just a game," I say. "We don't have to play."

     "I always thought something was fucked up," Karen says. "What man lives in an empty house with no furniture? What man doesn't have any friends and is either in his truck or sitting on the sofa reading a fucking book all the time? Did you kill Angela? Was she your first wife? Or just some truck-stop whore you picked up? Don't tell me I'm lying. There's a female presence in this house. I been feeling it for weeks!"

     "There are no evil presences," I say. "There's no one here but us."

     "You invited something in here," Angela says. "Your self-pleasure, and your drinking, and I know you haven't been faithful to me. You let something dark in here with us. You've let a demon of lust and addiction into our home."

     These two start carrying on and they have no idea of the pressure I'm under. They have no idea what it feels like to be pulled in two different directions all the time. They have no idea what it's like to watch every word you say.

     "Pray with me," Angela says, reaching across the table and gripping my wrists while Karen stalks the kitchen, ranting. "Pray with me. There's something in this house. We'll pray, then we'll burn this thing in the backyard."

     "Think I'm stupid?" Karen shouts. "Think I've bought your bullshit? I know you been cheating on me from day one, but so fucking what? I can cheat on you anytime I want. You murdered your first wife? I'll put your ass in prison if you so much as touch a hair on my head. I'll lock you up, motherfucker!"

     Finally, it all gets to be too much.

     "I didn't kill Angela!" I shout.

     And I know I've made a mistake. Angela's face crumples, Karen's eyes light up.

     "Why would you say that?" Angela asks. "Why would you say that about me?"

     "Then why do you keep talking about her?" Karen asks, and storms out of the room.

     I hear Karen slam the door of the downstairs bathroom. Angela jumps.

     "What was that?" she asks.

     "Wait here," I say.

     I check the bathroom door in the front hall, but Karen's locked it from the inside. Angela stands in the living room doorway, watching me.

     "It's jammed," I explain.

     "It's locked, you bastard," Karen shouts from behind the door.

     "I'm leaving this dark place," Angela says.

As the reader approaches the end of "The House That Love Built," identifying spectral protagonists starts to look like navigating a funhouse. The authorial control Hendrix demonstrates is chilling: such competence, we realize with growing excitement, is not a lost art.

* * *

"Mobility" by Laird Barron made me reflect on many things. One is this: Freud, Fort, and Barron might be said to share a theme: We are cattle.

"Mobility" may be a narrative, a case history, or a time-bending mindscrew. For its protagonist, those are the least unpleasant options.

As a child, did Bryan shoot a squirrel with a BB gun? Has he been visited by the shape-changer Mr. Mandibole at different times in his life? Why have Bryan's insides liquified, and why has his body been reshaped into a gangrenous trunk?

Mandibole takes him to a family cottage to recuperate. But:

     The house seemed much cheerier by daylight. Its crooked edges were blunted, its remnant shadows less sinister. In some respects, the place reminded him of his childhood home—Mom in her flour-dusted apron, Pastor Tallen on the step wagging his finger, and the serial puppy murders, ritual suicides, and forced sodomy. Reminded him of how Dad sometimes hid under the bed while wearing Mom's nylon stocking over his face, and the homemade blood transfusion kit he unpacked when they played Something Scary.

Bryan is not the first Barron character to grow up with a dad like that. 

     A dark-haired toddler pedaled a red tricycle into the room. The child wheeled close to the couch and stopped. His shiny hair and plastic features glowed with roly-poly good health.

     "I know you," Bryan said in a perfectly clear voice. His breathing came easily. Still woozy, still full of pustulant anxiety (and pus), yet he grudgingly admitted that the compulsory mutilation had alleviated the worst symptoms of whatever disease gripped him. "Yes, you were there. I know you."

     "As I know you," the child said.

     "Wait. Who are you?"

     "But you know. Feel better?"

     "Yes. It's a miracle."

     "Leeching is good for the soul. You aren't really better. Daddy said it's only temporary. You've got the gang-green."

     The putrefaction of Bryan's hands had corrupted his arms to the elbows. He'd done his best to ignore this latest incursion of rot and enjoy the cartoons. Now the meddling kid had ruined everything. "What am I supposed to do? It's in my arms, for fuck's sake."

     "Everything must go." The boy rolled over to the couch and handed Bryan a serrated penknife. "Daddy says to do a good job. Bye!"

     The sky darkened and clotted and the windows became opaque with purple. Bryan sniffled bitter tears. He gripped the toy knife between his thumb and index finger and made the first, tiny cut. Better still.

     Months oozed past. Years. Once his traitorous limb was severed, he dropped the knife and took a few breaths. Yes, better. Lighter. Addition by subtraction made increasing sense with a come-to-Jesus shock of epiphany. The next stage presented a challenge to his transcendence. Not wildly intelligent, but plenty clever, went Bryan's family motto as mumbled by drunk Dad.

Bryan's nightmarish slide into dissolution begins with loss of professional identity, then romantic identity, then the remainder of conscious personality, before his status as Homo sapiens is scrapped. Barron is a genius at showing how tenuous such layers of human veneer may be.

* * *

If I were updating Philip Rahv's 1939 article "Paleface and Redskin" [Kenyon Review, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Summer, 1939), pp. 251-256] for the horror genre today, John Langan would definitely be in my paleface top five. That is not a put-down or dismissal; quite the contrary, since I myself am constitutionally a paleface and a reader of palefaces.

"What Is Lost, What Is Given Away" is an outstanding example of the mode, and one of Langan's best stories. His use of tonal and chronological distancing gives a twice-told flavor to the narrator's account of protagonist Joel Martin's doom. And it's beautifully structured with a high school reunion plot. 

When the narrator meets Martin at a mixer the night before the reunion, memories of the man's misfortunes come back.

     To my left, a voice said my name. Mood instantly lightened, I turned on my stool, and saw Joel Martin—Mr. Martin, I couldn't help thinking. Junior year chemistry, senior year physics, assistant coach of the boys' junior varsity football and varsity basketball teams. Disgraced in the closing days of my senior year for an affair with Sinead McGahern, one of my classmates, which left her pregnant and him out of a job at which he had been a favorite. He looked terrible. His hair, thinning when I had sat in his classroom, had largely deserted his head, except for a few spots here and there where he had allowed it to grow long. The lenses of his glasses were scratched and scored, opaque in some places. The heavy five o'clock shadow that had always darkened his jaw had thickened to a heavy beard, which he appeared to have maintained without the benefit of a mirror. Never a big man to begin with—I would have put his height at 5'5", his weight at one forty—he seemed smaller inside his shapeless black suit, shrunken. A martini glass, full, stood on the bar in front of him.

     I was stunned. In the weeks and months after graduation, Joel Martin's situation had gone from scandal to ongoing catastrophe, ending with him in jail, first in Argentina, then locally. During my first couple of years of college, when I still met some of my high school friends at winter and summer breaks, the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Mr. Martin and Sinead McGahern was among our immediate topics of conversation. As his actions had progressed—or declined—from the questionable to the out-and-out criminal, so had my mental image of him transformed from intense, affable science teacher to something darker, a seducer, a humiliated and desperate father. To encounter him here, looking different, yes, yet more threadbare than sinister, was a scenario I would not have anticipated. Which may have been why, when he held out his hand, I took it. His flesh was gritty, as if he had come directly from the beach without washing. I wondered if anyone else had identified him. Was Sinead here? I wasn't sure. I hadn't seen her, but had I seen everyone?

     "How've you been?" he said.

     "Good," I said. It was the answer I would have given had any of the people I'd tried to talk to posed the question....

     With sudden and uncanny certainty, I knew that the man who had gotten me through both Regents Chemistry and Regents Physics was on the verge of broaching topics I had no desire to discuss. An emotion halfway to panic gripped me. I decided to forego finishing my beer and depart the reunion early. I was pretty much done already, wasn't I? Joel Martin saw me withdrawing a ten from my pocket to cover my drink and tip. His eyes widened, but before he could open his mouth, I said, "I have to go. Have a good night," and slid off my stool....

Recollections of Joel Martin multiply; the next night the narrator recapitulates them to his date Linda, a pal and old flame. 

After Joel Martin and his student Sinead McGahern had their son, distance between them blossomed into acrimony, divorce, and more acrimony. To get custody, Joel tried framing Sinead for drug possession and quickly lost weekly visitation of Sean. Joel then decided to kidnap Sean and flee to South America.

Once they reach the reunion, the narrator has another meeting with Joel Martin. The man's desperation, and his need to communicate it to the narrator, are palpable. Ultimately his motive is  revealed.

     "I guess you heard about my . . . troubles," he said. "Yeah, you did. Who didn't? Especially after they were all over the front page of the Goddamned papers."

     He was right; there was no point denying it. I nodded. "I did."

     "Do you have any kids of your own?"

     "No."

     "Let me tell you, once you do, you will not believe you could love anyone that much. You look at this little wrinkled creature, its arms and legs still tucked up from being in the womb, and it is love at first sight. There is nothing you will not do for this kid. Your entire focus shifts from whatever bullshit you thought was important to making sure this child—your child—is okay. All the things you couldn't imagine doing—changing dirty diapers, dealing with spit-up, waking up in the middle of the night to rock them back to sleep—become the order of the day. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?"

     "I do."

     "Everything I did, every last bit of it, was for my son, to keep him safe, to give him the kind of life he deserved. I have always wanted what was best for him. Always. I never stopped wanting that, even when I was locked up in Argentina, or when I came back here so they could lock me up some more. My son's mother had taken him and left. She didn't leave word where. Didn't ask for child support from me, in case it allowed me to trace them. Was that fair? I ask you, was any of that fair?"

     "I don't know," I said. "I guess she felt—"

     "It doesn't matter," Joel Martin said. "While I was in prison in Buenos Aires, I met a guy who let me in on something that is going to get my son back and make certain no one takes him from me again."

     "I'm not—"

     "Do you know who Borges was?"

     "The writer?"

     "This guy I met was a friend of his. That's what they called him, the other prisoners, the Friend of Borges, el amigo de Borges. He'd hung out with Borges when he was younger, at university. He was a mathematician, into some pretty exotic stuff. There was this one story Borges had written, 'The Aleph'—have you read it?"

     "The one about the point that lets you see all other points in space and time."

     "Exactly. The guy was fascinated by that story, by the math underlying it. Poincaré theory—how well do you remember physics class?"

     "Not at all."

     "That's disappointing," he said, "but it isn't important. The conversations with Borges took the guy only so far, but the writer put him in touch with one of his friends at the university, who gave him the name of another person, and so on, until he met with a group who were familiar with the theory underlying the aleph, and a lot more besides."

     "Okay."

     "You don't get it. That's all right. Do you recall me telling you guys that everything was just math?"

     "Yes."

     "You thought I was talking figuratively—if you gave it any thought at all. I wasn't. The group the Friend of Borges met understood this. They comprehended it. They were part of a . . . tradition of scholars who had been working with this exotic math for a long time. Like, longer than you'd believe."

     "I'm not—"

     "These scholars had figured out all kinds of applications for the material they were studying. They had worked out how to employ it, using combinations of words and sounds and . . . mental images, you could call them."

     "It sounds like you're talking about magic."

     "What you call it isn't important. What's important is that it works."

     "Then why was this guy—the Friend of Borges—in prison? Couldn't he just magic his way out of there, teleport or something?"

     "He was in hiding," Joel Martin said. "Or, that's not it, exactly. He'd had a falling-out with the other members of his lodge, and he had decided to secure himself within Unit 1."

     "Couldn't he have found a better place to hide out?"

     "That doesn't matter!" he shouted. "You're missing the Goddamned forest for the trees. I'm telling you I met the modern-day equivalent of fucking Merlin, and you want to know why he isn't staying at the Hilton. Jesus!"

     There was no doubt in my mind that my former teacher had traveled far, far around the proverbial bend. I raised my hands, palms out. "Okay. I'm sorry. You met the Friend of Borges, and he told you about this weird math. Did he teach any of it to you?"

     "A little. You can appreciate, the conditions weren't ideal for this kind of instruction. What he did was to tell me where I needed to go once I was free to travel again. Which took a while, and I had to work a bunch of shit jobs to save up the money, but in the end, I got there."

     I couldn't help myself. "Where was it?"

     "Quebec."

     "Quebec?"

     "Quebec City. That's where the nearest lodge—the nearest school is."

     "And they took you in—accepted you as their student."

     "They did."

     "So now you're one of them, a . . . mathematician."

     "Basically."

     "But—why are you here? If you have access to the aleph, or whatever, shouldn't you be using it to track down your son?"

     Joel Martin's face drew in on itself, to an expression it took me a moment to name: embarrassment. He looked down at his shoes, stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. "There's been a slight complication."

     Here it comes, I thought, the escape hatch, the detail that allows the fantasy to exist yet remain ineffectual. "Oh? What kind of complication?"

     "I'm imprisoned. The master of the lodge guards his knowledge jealously. He doesn't introduce you to new material until he's satisfied that you're ready for it. I had passed all the basic tests with flying colors. Everyone said I was one of the best students they'd taught in years. They—the master wanted me to wait before studying anything more advanced. I was sure I didn't need to. I was eager—I could feel time slipping away from me. Every day, and my son is getting older, whatever memories he has of me growing fainter. Have no doubt, his mother and whoever she's with are doing all they can to erase me from his life. I needed access to the aleph now. I pressed the matter with the master. He wouldn't budge. Things got heated between us. I made some . . . intemperate remarks. The master invited me to act on them. I did. It didn't go well. When the dust settled, he trapped me in a place . . . It's kind of a place between places. He said if I could figure my way out of it, I might be ready to start learning again."

     "You're in prison," I said.

     "Imprisoned," he said. "Again. It's more complicated than the other lockups I've been in. There's a limited amount of energy sustaining the cell. I can draw on it, but every time I do, the space constricts. If I had accepted my sentence, I could remain here indefinitely. But I told you I can't do that. I have to get out of here. I tried reaching out to one of the other students at the lodge, someone I thought was sympathetic to me. I was wrong, and I shrank the prison. I decided I had to think more creatively—outside the box, ha-ha. It occurred to me that your ten-year reunion was coming up. I was able to find out the times and locations without making the cell too much smaller."

     "Wait," I said. "You're in this cell."

     "Correct."

     "Yet you're standing here talking to me."

     "This," he said, removing his hands from his pockets to gesture at himself, "is a simulacrum. It's as if you're talking to me on a videophone."

     "Okay," I said. "Couldn't you appear to your son, then? Why waste time with me?"

     "Because I don't know where he is. I was able to draw on your memories—your class's combined memories of me to locate this spot and assemble a version of myself. I reached out to you in particular because we'd gotten along when you were my student. I hoped you would be willing to help me."

     "How could I help you?"

     "I have a storage unit on Route 9, down by the malls. There are a couple of things in there, a book and—"

     "Mr. Martin," I said. "Joel." At the sound of his name, his head jerked, as if I had slapped him. I said, "I don't know what's going on with you, exactly, but I wonder if maybe you need to talk to someone who could help you with all this."

     "What do you mean?" he said. "That's why I'm—oh." His eyes narrowed. "I get it. You think I'm delusional. Paranoid schizophrenia, right?"

     "It sounds as if you've been under a tremendous amount of stress," I said. "Things with your son—"

     "Don't you understand? There are no 'things with my son.' I don't know where he is. As long as I'm stuck in this prison—"

     "Stop. You're in the men's room of the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club. You are not in some kind of magic jail."

     "You have no idea," he said. "You have no Goddamned idea. This place is a blank. It isn't a place, properly speaking. It isn't; do you understand? It's the white between the letters on the page. Most of the time, it's all I can do to keep myself coherent. And on top of that, it's getting smaller. It may have reached its limit. Any more loss of energy, and it's going to collapse and take me with it. I am not shitting you when I say that you are my last chance. I'm doing everything I can to hold on, but time is running out."

     A tremendous pity rose in me. I had been in here much too long. "I have to go," I said. "I'm sorry." I walked toward the bathroom door.

     "What? Hey, hang on." He put his hands up.

     "Please get out of the way."

     "Wait—"

     I was expecting Joel Martin to move to the side. If he didn't, I had a good half a foot and probably seventy-five pounds on him. Should it prove necessary, I had no doubt I'd be able to muscle past him.

     When his outstretched fingers touched me, however, there was a sound like a houseful of windows shattering. Something like a blast of air shoved me across the bathroom, into the wall. Stunned, I looked at Joel Martin. The air around him appeared to have dimmed. He seemed to have lost substance, to have flattened. As I watched, he began to crumple....

Joel Martin compacts in a flashing cloud of dust particles. The narrator, asthma triggered, flees the scene and is driven home by Linda.

We skip forward fifteen years:

[....]old friends sent me a message asking if I'd heard the news about Sean McGahern, the kid of Sinead McGahern and Mr. Martin. I replied that I hadn't. She forwarded me a link to a story about the tragic death of the young singer-songwriter whose first album, Possession with Intent, had won him critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination. The record chronicled his life growing up as the child of a narcissistic mother, an uninterested stepfather, and a father who appeared to have vanished off the face of the Earth. (I thought about that locker on Route 9, the one I'd considered checking into but never had.) Emotional and psychological difficulties had led him to experiment first with pot, then heroin, to which he had become addicted. For a brief period of time, while he was working on his album, he seemed to have put his addiction behind him. The pressures of touring to support it, however, combined with those of producing his follow-up effort, had sent him back to heroin. He had died of an overdose; there was some question whether it was an accident or suicide.

     After closing the link, I had to stand up and walk away from the computer. I had to leave my office, within the buzz of whose fluorescent light I heard another sound, high-pitched, impossibly distant: Joel Martin, screaming—still screaming—for all he had lost, all he had given away.

Langan's nicely balanced use of analepsis and concluding prolepsis (what I would term a slingshot ending) gives the story, and its ending, real emotional force.

What has Joel Martin lost? Career, son, peace of mind, sense of proportion, perhaps sanity, and ultimately life itself. What did he give away? Any chance for a connection with his son when the boy reached adulthood; as parents, it is shocking how easily good sense and patience can go out the window when crises thwart us. Joel Martin epitomizes this.

And what about our unnamed narrator? We get little hints that he has lost something. At the mixer the night before the reunion:

     I had changed more than anyone else there. When I graduated, I was six feet tall, one hundred and fifty or sixty pounds if I was wearing a heavy coat. I had gained another sixty pounds in the intervening years, as well as a beard that was the same light brown my hair had darkened to in my early twenties. None of my old classmates had deviated as dramatically from their former appearances, so it was perhaps to be expected that they would not know me. They were not prepared to.      

     All the same, I found this disconcerting.

The next night:

....After my most recent relationship petered out, Linda had agreed to accompany me to my reunion dinner as, she said, a psychological investigation into the forces that had shaped me.

More than just his "most recent relationship" seems to have petered-out for the narrator. Linda, clearly a woman engaged up to her elbows in life, is curious enough to want to conduct a "psychological investigation into the forces that had shaped me." 

After Joel Martin's death, Linda drives the narrator home.

     By the time Linda pulled into the parking lot in front of my apartment building, the worst of my asthma attack was over. It had prevented much conversation on the ride back, except for me to say that it had been triggered by something in the air in the men's room. As she handed me the keys, Linda said, "Are you going to be okay by yourself? Because I can stay over if you need me to."

     "It's all right," I said. "I'll be fine. Thank you."

     "Call me if you get worse."

     "I will, but really, I'm fine. I'll use my inhaler the second I walk in the door."

     "You'd better."

     I did. And since I knew there was no chance of me falling asleep anytime in what seemed like the next several days, I took down the bottle of Talisker from the top of the refrigerator and poured myself three fingers, whose effects I did not feel. I carried the bottle and glass into the living room, where I set them on the side table and found the TV remote. The nighttime channels were full of all manner of weird and pathetic programming, but together with the scotch, they were almost enough to keep me from dwelling on Joel Martin's expression while his prison crushed him, on his calling his son's name, on his final plea for a reprieve that was not granted. Eventually, I drank enough of the whiskey for it drop me into a black, empty place.

The narrator's obliviousness here is noteworthy. Joel Martin's bizarre death, the asthma attack, and Linda's help and solicitude prompt no desire for human connection; instead, the events are blips before an evening ending in self-induced oblivion.

The reader can only shake his head and ask, What the #@&% is that all about?

Jay

5 December 2021