Fiction

“How Deep the Abyss Really Is”: A Quick Review of Anders Fager’s “Swedish Cults”

/ chloebd1031 / Leave a comment

Anders Fager’s creeping, ichor-sticky collection, Swedish Cults, begins with a story about, well… a cult. But it’s the kind of cult action I absolutely love, in which there is no great fanfare about all this ritual business, and the cult itself sits almost comfortably in plain sight, a set of practices and traditions that everyone in a community more or less acknowledges as having always been there. “The Furies of Boras” sees a modern set of teenage girls out at a dancehall, at a place where there has always been dancing, and as perennial as teenage girl politics and concerns, as perennial as the dancing, is the thing in the bog waiting for its due.

“Anna closes her eyes, sees primeval swamps behind her eyelids. Swamps and rain and kisses. The Pussycat Dolls’ ‘Don’t Cha’ blares through the speakers. Sofie scans the place. She’s thinking about her history project. There’s a lot going on in your head your final year. Industrialism in the Vastergotland region and bogs and kisses. … Stares at the girls and stares at a telephone pole of a tentacle less than a meter from her forehead. A twitch and she’s dead. Not much fun. And on top of everything she has an essay to hand in.”

All of Fager’s stories have this matter-of-factness, a sense of brains skipping a beat when forced up against the incomprehensible, sliding over hysteria and protest directly into a kind of shock of acceptance. There is something indelibly human about a high schooler in a cannibalistic orgy, watching the lumbering, eldritch swamp-beast she and her cohorts are petitioning, worrying about a history essay she has to write. Such a detail might seem farcical in the hands of a less-keen observer, but Fager knows how to fit the mundane against the outlandish pretty seamlessly.1 His Lovecraftian horrors are glimpsed rather than belabored, appearing obliquely in conversations between two old friends, in the subtle changes in a boyfriend returning from abroad, in a name uttered into the winter air. In his precisely-drawn characters, appearing as sharp as miniatures in the brief space they occupy, we feel lives proceeding mostly normally until, inexorably, they slip into the uncanny; as with Laird Barron’s horror fiction, much of the impact of Fager’s work lies in this dread as things slip away from the familiar with no hope of getting back to the right path.

Valancourt Press, which published this for American audiences, has been doing a lot for weird fiction both vintage and contemporary; their republishing of many of the luridly great titles featured in Grady Hendrix’s delightful Paperbacks from Hell is a tremendous service to an all-too-ephemeral age of horror fiction. I’m really looking forward to checking out many more of their offerings based on the strength of this title alone. 

  1. Definitely to be credited here, too, are his very capable translators, Ian Lemke and Henning Koch. ↩︎

A Grain of Salt and a Shovelful of Earth: On The “Twilight Zone,” “The Grave,” and a Lack of Western Ghosts

/ Meghan / Leave a comment

My favorite episode of The Twilight Zone opens with a scene that even the narration admits ought to be the end. The audience sees a desolate, windswept village, one that the imagery of westerns has trained us to understand is somewhere in the Southwest, likely New Mexico. A man is gunned down in the middle of the dusty street, the shots fired by several of the village men hiding in doorways. After he falls, his body is carried into the jail, and a witness is sent to fetch the wounded man’s father and sister to be with him before he dies.

All of this happens in just a few moments, and is merely the prologue. As Rod Serling says in introduction:

Normally … this would be the end of the story. We’ve had the traditional shoot-out on the street and the Bad Man will soon be dead. But some men of legend and folk tale have been known to continue having their way even after death. The outlaw and killer Pinto Sykes was such a person, and shortly we’ll see how he introduces the town, and a man named Conny Miller in particular, to the Twilight Zone.

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“If I could name the nameless thing”- A Review of “The Monstrumologist”

/ chloebd1031 / Leave a comment

With no small bit of surprise, I recently realized that one of my very favorite novels of Gothic horror, Rick Yancey’s utterly excellent The Monstrumologist, turned ten this September. This was unnerving because ten years can slip by awfully fast, and I really hadn’t perceived that it had been that long, but also because this book, and its three equally superlative sequels, doesn’t feel only ten years old. In recommending The Monstrumologist to people, which I do, emphatically and to anyone who even half-admits to sort of liking horror, I use Yancey’s brilliant sense of time-specific language as part of my sales pitch. It’s not a simple thing to recreate the tones of late 19th century fiction, and yet that’s exactly what Yancey does so well in these books. The effect goes beyond mere pastiche; The Monstrumologist trades on its author’s seamless feel for late Victorian mores, fears, attitudes, and weaknesses to construct a story which reads like something old and feels bracingly fresh. The Monstrumologist can claim descent from the grim offerings of Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, but at a remove of a century or so, Yancey’s free to spiral into even deeper and darker terrain than did his forerunners. It’s the most satisfying sustained horror series I’ve met. 

I think there’s a case to be made for Victorian horror pioneering the “found footage” trope, in which a story is presented as merely discovered, not fabricated. Dracula is a series of letters, diary entries, and news items, a novel certainly, but one whose impact can be attributed in part to its delivery as a relation of true events. Though they trend less toward the horrific, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are presented as factual events. We tend to see this motif a lot in contemporary horror films, the most famous example still being “The Blair Witch Project,” but it’s less common now in print. The Monstrumologist, true to its core to its Victorian ancestry, resuscitates found footage in text to wonderful effect. Yancey himself, in the book’s prologue, claims to have been given the folio journals which comprise the bulk of the series, the records being the only personal effects of an elderly man who recently died, unclaimed by any family, in a nursing home. Who this man really was remained unclear to the staff of the facility, and, indeed, Yancey isn’t much enlightened himself by the horrifying contents of the man’s journals. None of this can really have happened, right? Of course not. But the great fun of found footage, when it’s treated as a useful imaginative tool and not merely a cheap way of knocking out a couple lazy movies, is that it allows us the thrill of doubt. Of course monsters aren’t real. But if… 

The journals are those of Will Henry, orphaned in the late 1800s in the New England town of New Jerusalem. After the death of his parents, he’s left in the questionable care of Pellinore Warthrop, who treats the boy less as a foundling and more of a free assistant. Warthrop is a natural philosopher, and his specialty is monsters. Real, honest-to-God monsters. A hardened materialist, Warthrop scoffs at the supernatural; his creatures are flesh and blood, warped relics of evolution which most of humanity has been allowed, mercifully, to forget or ignore. The doctor is as passionate about his subjects as he is callous toward Will Henry, and much of the four books’ emotional fulcrum hinges on their wary, difficult attempts to provide what the other needs. As he ages into a teenager, Will hardens from a grief-stricken child desperate for the approval of the only adult left in his life into a much more worrisome creature indeed, something slightly more akin to the beasts he and Warthrop routinely pursue. It’s a theme which isn’t new- those who hunt monsters should be wary lest they become monsters themselves- but it shifts in unexpected directions; the narrative’s ultimate conclusion is murky and unsettling in the best possible way, leaving you turning back to the beginning in sudden trepidation. Another great trick of a story presented as “true”- you realize you can’t trust your narrator. 

Thematically satisfying, the novels also boast a truly memorable cast. Warthrop’s surprisingly gentle mentor Von Helrung is a more relaxed Van Helsing; the anonymous, ubiquitous, and usually hapless Victorian orphan gets a sharp remake in the vengeful Malachi; John Kearns, a mysterious acquaintance of Warthrop’s, is one of the most memorably charming psychopaths I’ve encountered in fiction. And then there are the monsters. Yancey writes very good monsters. The first book features the anthropophagi, headless, man-eating nightmares with maws in the middle of their abdomens (not many novels reference Herodotus, but really, more should). The amorphous wendigo plagues the second book, a metaphysical nightmare for Warthrop, who doesn’t hold that nature is influenced by the unseen. Mongolian death-worms, parasitic infestations, and primordially massive serpents skulk through the pages, often unseen but always felt, casting the actions of the human players in a disturbingly ambiguous light: in a world which permits human beings to be dismembered and crafted into nests for fledgling monstrosities, what sense does individual morality really hold. It’s a deliciously haunting question, one with which Victorian naturalists, confronted with the irrefutable truth of the theory of Darwinian evolution, absolutely wrestled. Yancey cranks up the intensity of that struggle by contrasting his human characters with not only the bald insensitivity of nature but with the genuinely inhuman, Nature permitting no special pleading for humanity at all. It’s a struggle further tangled by the inhumanity of many of the superficially human characters. The uncovering of evolution by natural selection forced the Victorian mind to fundamentally reconfigure itself to the impersonal reality of a universe which does not particularly care for mankind; Yancey, with both empathy and clear-eyed hindsight, depicts a cast of informed, intelligent men and women wrestling mightily with the knowledge that they are not at the summit of any teleological ladder, and it’s both unnerving (don’t we still think of ourselves at the top of the evolutionary heap?) and affecting. 

The Monstrumologist was never a huge seller, but those who do read it are passionately committed to it. I always encourage readers to give the series a shot, because to know it is to love it. Its cumulative impact is wonderfully grim and lovely, its writing densely grotesque and beautiful. The Monstrumologist looks the unnamable in its hideous face and acknowledges the very human attempt to name it. It’s a series which celebrates our determination to make sense of our world, and one which isn’t afraid to recognize that the effort is poignant, bloody, and, sometimes, very futile indeed.