Peter Straub, Jonathan Carroll, and the Sadness of Detail

{Photo by rocketlass.}

If you’re looking for scary stories to get you through this last week before Halloween, you could do far worse than let Peter Straub be your guide. In the past two years, Straub has edited two anthologies of supernatural stories--the two-volume American Fantastic Tales (2009) from the Library of America, and Poe’s Children (2008) from Doubleday--that are incredibly good. Tastes in terror vary like any preferences, so no anthology is going to be perfect; there will be a few stories in any collection that don’t work for some readers. But in the 2,000 pages of Straub’s anthologies, I found that number to be vanishingly small--and even the few stories that weren’t to my taste offered something, a new angle or idea or point of view, that made me at least understand why they were included.

I wrote about American Fantastic Tales a bit last October; if you want to know more about that set, you can start there, or with an interview of Straub at the Library of America’s site. Poe’s Children serves perfectly as a contemporary companion to the long history offered by those volumes: it serves up twenty-five stories of wildly varying styles from currently active writers, most familiar names to readers of fantastic fiction of any sort, including Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, John Crowley, Kelly Link, and Elizabeth Hand.

The best story in the bunch, however--the one I still find myself thinking of regularly more than a year after I first read it--is Jonathan Carroll’s “The Sadness of Detail.” The story opens with a tired mother taking a quiet break in a cafe on

a late November afternoon when the whole town seemed one liquid glaze of reflected light and rain. A day when the rain is colder than snow and everything feels meaner, harder edged.

It’s a prosaic scene--the mother has escaped her daily routine for a few minutes of peace--but, as in the above description, Carroll invests it from the start with just the tiniest hints of menace. The mother is worn out, and her narration of the scene hints at resentment of her duties, perhaps even of her life.

And then the scene take a turn. A stranger at the next table complains about her humming, then:

I made an “excuse me” face and was about to turn around again when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a number of photographs he had spread out on the table in front of him. Most of the pictures were of my family and me.

“Where did you get those?”

He reached behind him and, picking one up, handed it to me. Not looking at it, he said, “That is your son in nine years. He’s wearing a patch because he lost that eye in an automobile accident. He wanted to be a pilot, as you know, but one needs good eyesight for that, so he paints houses instead and drinks a lot .The girl in the picture is the one he lives with. She takes heroin.”

And with that moment of what, for any parent, would surely be pure horror, even as they fought to disbelieve, the woman’s ordinary day is gone, derailed by the sinister intrusion, by a man who knows her family and their future so well that he can pick up a photo more or less at random and use it to tell her exactly how everything is going to start falling apart.

I won’t tell you anything more about the story except that it more than lives up to the promise of that moment of surprising terror--and that it manages to bring the fantastic into the story without ever severing its connections to the everyday world. In fact, the creepy messenger in the cafe seems to represent a supernatural world whose squalor is equal to that of our own world, and he brings, not peace or hope or even perhaps true knowledge, but need, temptation, and moral obscurity. In a mere dozen pages, Carroll surprises, scares, and convinces us--then leaves us with far more questions than answers.

“The Sadness of Detail” alone is worth picking up Poe’s Children for. And once you’ve read and digested it, you’ll still have twenty-four more stories to keep you up nights until Halloween.

"It would have been a sure way to invite demons to the party," or, Subtle connections

Autumnal bread baking has won out over blogging this afternoon, so rather than a proper post I have merely two passages to share. They have no explicit commonalities, but when I read the second this afternoon it called to mind the first. See what you think.

The first passage comes from "Little Red's Tango," a strange, elliptical, atmospheric story by Peter Straub (which is collected in a stunning anthology he edited last year, Poe's Children: The New Horror) that reads like the offspring of Steven Millhauser and Kelly Link. The title character, Little Red, is a jazz record collector and friend to a certain subset of those in need; he is spoken of only in vague terms, for though it seems clear that he has some unusual powers, their nature is elusive, even to him.

He will not remind you of anyone you know. Little Red is not a type.

The closest you will come to thinking that someone has reminded you of Little Red will occur in the midst of a movie seen late in a summer afternoon on which you have decided to use a darkened theater to walk away from your troubles for a couple of hours. As you sit surrounded by empty seats in the pleasant murk, watching a scene depicting a lavish party or a crowded restaurant, an unnamed extra will move through the door and depart, and at first you will feel no more than a mild tingle of recognition all the more compelling for having no obvious referent. Someone is going, someone has gone, that is all you will know. Then the tilt of the departing head or the negligent gesture of a hand will return to you a quality more closely akin to the emotional context of memory than to memory itself, and with the image of Little Red rising into your mind, you will find yourself pierced by a sense of loss, longing, and sweetness, as if someone had just spoken the name of a long-vanished, once-dear childhood friend.

The second passage comes from Joscelyn Godwin's fascinating Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World (2009), from a brief aside explaining Kircher's relationship to magic:

Kircher was not a magician like Marsilio Ficino, who summoned the planetary influences with Orphic songs and perfumes. He is never known to have drawn up horoscopes, like Johann Kepler or Jerome Cardan. Unlike Tommaso Campanella, he did not perform ceremonies of astrological magic for his patron Pope Urban VIII. Nor had he any respect for alchemy, either physical or spiritual. He despised all forms of divination, especially the geomancy that infatuated Robert Fludd. One cannot be sure that he never indulged in erotically energized meditations, like Giordano Bruno, but it seems unlikely. He never, ever summoned spirits or attempted to converse with angels, like John Dee and Edward Kelley; it would have been a sure way to invite demons to the party. . . . While he wrote unhesitatingly about magnetic magic, musical magic, hieroglyphic magic, and many other magics, the only ones Kircher considered licit were natural. That is, they were based on the knowledge and exploitation of nature's hidden laws, which not even angels and demons were free to disobey. That these laws included correspondences between entities on the different planes of being (planets, plants, parts of the body, etc.) was not supernatural: it was simply the way the natural universe was put together, "bound by secret knots."

In typing these out, I think I've discovered why they linked themselves in my mind: the urgent whisper of that Someone is going, someone is gone in the Straub excerpt feels very much like stumbling across one of Kircher's "secret knots," the hint of an order that we're too small, too finite in our understanding, to fully grasp; though Straub tied this particular knot himself, it has the authentic feel of something ancient and strange, the shadowy glimpse of magic that gives a good uncanny story its power.

On Doubles

In the newest volume of The Paris Review Interviews, Haruki Murakami offers an interesting analysis of his relationship to his protagonists:

INTERVIEWER

Your protagonists often seem to serve as projections of your own point of view into the fantastic world of your narratives--the dreamer in the dream.

MURAKAMI

Please think about it this way: I have a twin brother. And when I was two years old, one of us--the other one--was kidnapped. He was brought to a faraway place and we haven't seen each other since. I think my protagonist is him. A part of myself, but not me, and we haven't seen each other for a long time. It's a kind of alternative form of myself. In terms of DNA we are the same, but our environment has been different, so our way of thinking would be different.

That description is sure to resonate with longtime readers of Murakami--though when I think of his obsession with doubling and twinning, I tend to think not of his mid-30s male protagonists but of the young, attractive women who enter their lives. The interviewer, too, picks up on that, and later asks Murakami about it:

INTERVIEWER

There seem to be two distinct types of women in your novels: those with whom the protagonist has a fundamentally serious relationship--often this is the woman who disappears and whose memory haunts him--and the other kind of woman, who comes later and helps him in his search, or to do to the opposite--to forget. This second type of woman tends to be outspoken, eccentric, and sexually frank, and the protagonist interacts with her in a much warmer and more humorous way than he had with the missing woman, with whom he never quite connected. What purpose do these two archetypes serve?

MURAKAMI

My protagonist is almost always caught between the spiritual world and the real world. In the spiritual world, the women--or men--are quiet, intelligent, modest. Wise. In the realistic world, as you say, the women are very active, comic, positive. They have a sense of humor. The protagonist's mind is split between these totally different worlds and he cannot choose which to take. I think that's one of the main motifs in my work. It's very apparent in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, in which his mind is actually, physically split. In Norwegian Wood, as well, there are two girls and he cannot decide between them, from the beginning to the end.

"Split," though Murakami is applying it here to his male characters, seems the appropriate description: to my mind, it's less that Murakami's offering polarities than that he's sorting the elements that make up one person into two different characters, as if his protagonists' understanding of the ultimate complexity of others is fundamentally limited, affecting his ideas of how to relate to them--and, perhaps, even precipitating the losses he endures.

Soon after reading that interview, I read Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem's fantastic, creepy story "The Man on the Ceiling," which is included in Poe's Children: The New Horror (2008, edited by Peter Straub), and this passage, written in Steve's voice, jumped out at me for obvious reasons:

As a child I was a persistent liar. I lied slyly, I lied innocently, and I lied enthusiastically. I lied out of confusion and I lied out of a profound disappointment. One of my more elaborate lies took shape during the 1960 presidential election. While the rest of the country was debating the relative merits of Kennedy and Nixon, I was explaining to my friends how I had been half of a pair of Siamese twins, and how my brother had tragically died during the separation.

This was, perhaps, my most heartfelt lie to date, because in telling this tale I found myself grieving over the loss of my brother, my twin. I had created my first believable character, and my character had hurt me.

Later I came to recognize that about that time (I was ten), the self I had been was dying, and that I was slowly becoming the twin who had died and gone off to some other, better fiction.

What's particularly fascinating about this--in light of Murakami's talk of a twinned self and intentionally doubled or split characters--is that "The Man on the Ceiling" is written by a husband-and-wife team, authors of many books, who are working together for the first time, telling a story about the fears, nightmares, and strengths of their marriage and their family. Steve Tem may have lost his imaginary twin, but as becomes apparent in the story, in his wife he has found, if not a replacement, then at least a reflection; the story's honest appraisal of the odd combination of intimacy, trust, fear, and ultimate separateness that turns a pair into a couple is moving and unforgettable.