7. Animal Farm

By George Orwell

 

6. Rebecca

By Daphne Du Maurier

 

 

5. House of Leaves

By Mark Z. Danielewski

I requested Hubs to get me House of Leaves last Xmas and got the Remastered Full Color Edition (2000).  Apparently, the Remastered edition gives a “fuller” experience and adds another layer of meaning.   

 

In Remastered Full Color Edition edition:

• Any iteration of the word "house" appears in blue, even in the blurbs section and the publication page where it mentions “Random House, Inc."
• The word "minotaur" and all crossed-out passages appear in red.
• There is one line written in purple, which is important because of what the color implies for the story.
• The pictures in the appendices are full color.
• There's a bit in the book written in braille with a translation in the footnotes.

 

In the two-color edition (with the doorknob cover):

• EITHER "house" appears in blue OR "minotaur"/crossed out passages appear in red. One or the other, not both. It's a gamble which you'll get.
• The line that is purple in the full color is not written in purple.
• The braille bit doesn't appear.
• The pictures in the appendices might be color or they might be black and white. Again, it's a gamble.

 

I’ve been curious about House of Leaves for some years, but its ambitious density and heft had seemed somewhat daunting.  As I delved more into horror fiction over the past few years, it was becoming apparent that House of Leaves was required reading if I was to be a true fan of the genre.  It’s got a bit of everything:  a 'haunted' house, super-natural horror, mystery, psychological thriller, unreliable narrator(s)… there’s even a love story.

 

If you get past the multi-layered experimental meta-fiction and epistolary complexity, there’s a very simple story at heart.  Johnny Truant, a disaffected 25 yr old in LA, discovers a chest full of scribbled notes and an unfinished manuscript left by his friend’s blind and elderly neighbour, Zampanò, who died of mysterious circumstances.  The manuscript focuses on "The Navidson Record", a documentary film directed by acclaimed photojournalist, Will Navidson.

 

"The Navidson Record" documents how Navidson and his family move into their new home in the Virginia suburbs.  They soon discover that their house is not normal, at least physically.  It started off as a puzzle - why was there a discrepancy of 3/4 of an inch between the inside and outside measurements of the house?  This seemingly small difference triggers Navidson's obsessive tendencies to find an explanation for these spatial discrepancies and sets in motion a series of increasingly unsettling events. The house then exhibits further anomalies, like a closet appearing where there was previously a blank wall.  A door appears in the living room revealing a dark and vast liminal space that is not physically possible if you stand outside the house.  When the house reveals itself to contain a seemingly endless labyrinth, Navidson contacts his estranged brother Tom and an old friend Reson to mount an exploration of its hidden dimensions. Navidson's obsession with the labyrinth leads him and his family into increasingly terrifying situations.

 

Navidson, Tom and Reston soon realize they are way in over their heads when the walls of the labyrinth start to shift and they barely find their way back “home” inside the “normal” confines of the house.  They hire a professional explorer, Holloway Roberts, and his two assistants, Kirby “Wax” Hook and Jed Leeder to mount a proper expedition armed with gear and camera equipment.  Needless to say, the expedition goes awry as the men get lost and Holloway goes crazy, a la Jack Torrance and goes on a bit of a rampage. 

 

House of Leaves is a bit of a sausage fest, but there are some sections devoted to Navidson’s long-time partner Karen and their strained relationship.

 

Zampanò's claims that "The Navidson Record" :

became an American cultural phenomenon upon its theatrical release in 1993, generating volumes of multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture. In support, Zampanò cites or quotes articles, journals, symposia, books, magazines, TV programs, and interviews, many supposedly dedicated to this film. Zampanò discusses not only Navidson's filmmaking techniques, but also segues into topics such as photography, architecture, Biblical studies, and radiometric dating, often interspersing overwhelmingly esoteric tangents, several of which devolve into nonsensical, page-long lists of only superficially relevant items. Though many of the academic works Zampanò cites appear to analyze The Navidson Record purely as a work of found-footage horror fiction, Zampanò's writing remains adamant as to its authenticity.

(from Wikipedia)

It should be noted that in the flyleaf, House of Leaves is authored by Zampanò with the Introduction and Notes by Johnny Truant.  There’s a contrast in mood and style between the Navidson and Johnny Truant sections.  There are the obvious tonal differences between the strained domesticity inside the house on Ash Tree Lane Virginia (portrayed via various media) versus Zampanò's dry academic writing style versus the slacker lifestyle of an assistant tattooist in an urban metropolis. 

 

Johnny Truant reminded me of the protagonist in The Cipher.  Within Nicholas, there already existed an existential emptiness when he came upon The Funhole in the dingey basement of his apartment building.  Nicholas hopelessly pined after the cold-hearted Nakota while Truant kept hooking up with Zampanò’s former readers and they all happen to be physically attractive.  Johnny became obsessed with Zampanò’s manuscript soon after he discovered the box full of his notebooks.  As he immersed himself in Zampanò’s world, it was akin to going down a rabbit hole, or the Funhole for Nicholas.  Both characters began to change (for the worse) as their obsession started taking over their lives, exerting a destructive toll on their mental and physically health.  

 

The book interweaves the text written by Zampanò and Truant.  There's also a third party, the “Editors”.  Visually and structurally, there's intertextual playfulness and cleverness aplenty.  It also plays heavily with footnotes.  Sometimes the footnotes take over the pages and there are even footnotes for the footnotes.

 

With an ever-present tension between what was supposed to real or fabricated, it seemed a given that the author must create a book where the text reflected this interplay, as well as the impossibility of the house on Ash Tree Lane.  At certain points, the text became moving pieces.  Some pages had only a few sentences while a page was completely blank except for one innocuous word.  When the labyrinth suddenly expanded, the text expanded with it, or contracted, etc.  At another point, you had to read the text backwards.  It was pretty neat.

In terms of conventional genres, there were elements of horror, mystery, and psychological thriller.  Most of that narrative was found in "The Navidson Record" (the text by Zampanò).  For me, those sections about the house on Ash Tree Lane were the most riveting parts from House of Leaves.  

 

I don’t think I’m alone in that the Truant sections were the least-liked in House of Leaves.  In one forum, a reader asked if they could skip over some of the more indulgent passages and someone else said that you should really try to stick through it and read everything. 

 

The narrative that was woven through "The Navidson Record" was a mixed bag.  The horror wasn’t really all that scary, though there were sections that were definitely peculiar or uncanny.  The love story was meh.  Some say, at its heart, House of Leaves was a love story.  But narrative mostly portrayed the strained relationship between Will and Karen, the typical famous artist/intrepid adventurer who cannot stay within the confines of domesticity for stretches of time. I really thought Navidson was going to fulfill his death-wish and be lost inside the house forever, but Karen finds Navidson in the end, his body weak and broken.  It made me think of Rochester in Jane Eyre.  The only way Karen & Navidson could be together was if Navidson was so crippled, he could not on any more adventures.

 

The mystery was the most gripping part for me, at least in the beginning, as I was wondered what the fuck was up with that house?  But I quickly realized the mystery of the house was the mystery of human nature externalized as a familiar structure.  And how the author was toying with his reader right from the start.

About a quarter into the book (not counting the appendices and index which also takes up a quarter of the book’s thickness), Navidson mentioned someone in his past named Delial.  The reader soon learns that Navidson became famous for a photo he took called “The Vulture and the Little Girl”.
Serendipitously, a couple of days before, I had learned about this very photo in my FB feed, a “real” photo taken by real-life photojournalist, Kevin Carter.  I even googled him so his story was fresh on my mind.
 
So right away I knew Navidson was based on Kevin Carter who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his a photo of a skeletal child stopping to rest while a vulture watched nearby, taken while he was documenting the 1993 famine in Sudan.  Even though the photo was known as “TheVulture and the Little Girl”, the child was later revealed to be a boy. In House of Leaves, the child was always a girl.
 
Four months after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, Carter died by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1994 at age 33.  Apparently, Carter received a lot of criticism about that award-winning photograph, but it seemed like PTSD, poverty and despair were also contributing factors to his suicide. His suicide note read:

I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken (a deceased colleague) if I am that lucky.

Although the text reveals that Navidson was based on a real-life person (another “proof” that Zampano had fabricated "The Navidson Record"), I found the Kevin Carter reference to be rather heavy-handed and almost in poor taste, as it exploited someone’s real-life tragedy.  There was a letter that Navidson wrote to Karen in Chapter XVII that made reference to Delial and tried to capture the deep pain he must have felt being complacent in the face of human suffering.  It echoed Carter's suicide note, felt phony and was the only big misstep (though I was only half-way through) in my immersion into House of Leaves.

 

Apparently, it took Danielewski a good ten years to write House of Leaves, and it shows in the denseness and complexity of the text.  But with such an ambitious scope, it was also uneven and unwieldy in parts.  

 

When I was close to finishing H of L, I was also looking at the colour printed end paper of the book and read the note apparently written by Zampano:

Appendix C:

Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children. Murder is a better word. Chad is scrambling to escape, almost making it to the front door where Karen waits, until a barrier in the foyer suddenly leaps forward and hews the boy in half. At the same time Navidson, by the kitchen reaches for Daisy only to arrive a fraction of a second too late, his fingers finding air, his eyes scratching after Daisy as she falls to her death. Let both parents experience. Let their narcissism find a new object to wither by. Douse them in infanticide. Drown them in blood.

Apparently, this is another clue that "The Navidson Record" was fabricated by Zampano/Danielewski.

Another head-slapping moment for me was on p.465 when Navidson was on his last Exploration #5.  His batteries and flares were dwindling and he had only one book with him to pass the time.  Guess which book it was. Fucking House of Leaves!  OMG.  When Navidson had no more light source, he started lighting matches so he could keep reading.  Before his last match burned out, he lit the pages from the book he had just finished reading...  You can’t get any more meta than this.  It's beyond meta - it’s the snake eating itself.  And it confirmed for me that House of Leaves was not only an elaborate exercise in meta-ness, but also an elaborate gimmick.

 

Overall, HoL was still a wonderfully layered and immersive book. It was clever, even brilliant in its playfulness and experimentation.  Without a doubt, it pushed the boundaries of print, text, structure, time, space, and fictional meta-ness.  The book itself was about the nature of our perceptions.  What was also brilliant was that House of Leaves itself, like "The Navidson Record", had generated its own amount of “multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture.”

 

There’s a reddit forum for House of Leaves fans.  One person has even compiled a list of all work, real and fake, referenced in House of Leaves.

 

My only disappointment was at some of the content, which was not as original as its format and execution.  Using Kevin Carter’s story and his photograph kind of cheapened the experience for me.  Johnny Truant reminded me too much of Nicholas in The Cipher. Kathe Koja's novel was published in 1991, so it's very possible that Danielewski would’ve been inspired by it when he was working on House of Leaves.

 

I even asked Google: Did The Cipher influence House of Leaves?

AI Overview:  The Cipher by Kathe Koja and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski share thematic similarities, particularly in their exploration of "malicious non-space". Both novels feature uncanny spaces that are not easily explained by traditional horror tropes of violation or wrongdoing. House of Leaves incorporates ciphers and codes, both within the text and in in the physical layout, mirroring the coded messages in Koja's The Cipher. 

 

Although I wouldn’t call myself a fan, I was without a doubt glad I got to experience House of Leaves.  It only took me two months and one week to finish it. 

 

4. Julia

By Peter Straub

I had assumed the 1975 film, The Haunting of Julia, would be hard to find, but to my surprise it appeared on Tubi last autumn.  I really liked it.  The opening credits revealed that it was adapted from a novel by Peter Straub, which I promptly ordered (to arrive at my MILs as it’s much easier to find vintage books in the US).  Even Olman remarked on the cool cover.  Turned out this was Peter Straub’s first novel.  I had read Ghost Story a long time ago, so long ago that it didn’t even have its own entry.

I can see how Straub had perfected his craft after he had published Julia because I found Ghost Story to be a very effective supernatural horror novel.

 

Julia is modern gothic with a major slathering of maternal horror (right up my alley).  There’s even a séance as Julia’s sister-in-law Lily belongs to an informal spiritualist group.  Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

The titular character is an American heiress in London who has been struggling with the aftermath of her daughter’s death. The novel begins with Julia shortly after being released from hospital (we later learn her husband Magnus had committed her).  Julia has just purchased an expensive house near Holland Park in Kensington and is about to move in.. without Magnus. There's a lot of unresolved issues in their marriage, to say the least. For one, Julia blames Magnus for the death of their nine year old daughter, Kate.  She views her leaving him as a separation while Magnus has never given his blessing on the matter and tries to convince her to come back.

 

We learn later how Kate died – from choking on a piece of meat and from Julia’s desperate attempt at a botched tracheostomy.  It's interesting to note that the Heimlich maneuver may not have been common knowledge at that time (the novel was published in 1975). 

 

Right away, there's something off about the house on 25 Ilchester Place. Even though London was experiencing an unusually hot summer, the heat is always cranked way up, even though Julia was sure she had turned it off.  Later in the narrative, as the crazy shit ramps up, the wallpaper starts peeling and the furniture begin to warp under the stifling heat, which I thought was a nice touch.

 

But at the start, the strange occurrences are very minimal, ie. Julia keeps seeing a girl who looks so much like her dead daughter, hearing strange sounds in the night, etc. That is, until the fateful night of the séance, when the medium Mrs Fludd detects a malevolent entity in Julia’s house.  Mrs Fludd tells Julia she must leave the house, move back to the States even, though she won’t say why -- a convenient plot device as this prompts Julia to investigate the history of the house, and she discovers some terrible things.  Of course, no one else believes an evil entity is haunting Julia and whoever does simply ends up getting killed!

 

The book makes a connection between Julia and the previous homeowner, Heather Rudge, which was omitted in the film adaptation.  Both women are American, and both had daughters who died by their mother’s hand.  Julia and Kate had a loving relationship while Heather’s relationship with Olivia was somewhat fraught, shall we way, due to the kid being a sadistic psychopath!  This explains Julia’s inexplicable desire to purchase the house (the malevolent spirit of Olivia was exerting its influence on her).  In the film, Julia's impulsive purchase of the house was a way to liberate herself from her controlling husband.

 

There’s also another connection in the novel that's not covered in the film.  When Magnus was a young bachelor, he was Heather’s lover, and the book strongly implies that Magnus had fathered Olivia.  This makes sense in terms of a motive to explain why the vengeful spirit of Olivia has set her sights on Julia (and why Kate and Olivia look so much alike). In the movie, the spirit was simply evil because Olivia was a psychopathic bitch who enjoyed torturing little kids when she was alive and now it wants to drive Julia insane.

 

Some other creative differences between movie vs book:

 

The movie is called The Haunting of Julia (or Full Circle in the UK) – both of which are better titles than the one given to the novel.

 

In the movie, Mark is a working-class hipster who’s been friend-zoned by Julia (not the adopted black-sheep brother of Magnus and Lily).  In the movie, Mark is an ally of Julia and ends up being electrocuted by an antique lamp while he’s taking a bath.  In the book, Julia harbors an attraction to Mark, her brother-in-law, and turns to him for refuge when she finds out that the middle-aged members of Olivia’s old gang have been murdered.  Mark ends up leaving Julia in an even more fragile mental state after he rapes her and leaves her alone in his shabby apartment.  The Lofting siblings are a rather despicable lot.

 

The movie also sets the narrative during autumn/winter, which I found much more fitting in terms of a modern gothic atmosphere (and I loved how Mia Farrow wore lots of woolens).  I can see why Straub wanted an unusually hot summer with the heat, like the entity, exerting an oppressive force on Julia, but I prefer a more chilly autumnal setting. 

The movie had an ambiguous ending (spoiler alert!).  Was Julia really haunted, or was it all due to mental deterioration? I really thought that when Julia opened her arms, Olivia was going to possess her, as the film seemed to be setting it up for that. Seeing Julia dead with her throat slit and the credits rolling with her slumped in the armchair, I didn't know what to think. Who ended her life? Was it the ghost or Julia herself?

According to Kier-La Janisse, "the ghost's murderous hands are in actuality the protagonist's own". So was it Julia who had killed her husband then, because she blamed him for their daughter's death? Did Julia really kill herself out of guilt and grief? The lack of historical context between Julia and Olivia in the film made it seem that Julia’s demise was mainly due to her mental disintegration.

In the book, we see how Olivia’s power over Julia grows and as Julia comes to the dawning realization that she was the one who killed Kate, she climbs to the roof of the house on 25 Ilchester Place and plummets to her death.  The ending of the novel was rather sudden and disappointing (see next paragraph), so I much prefer the film’s ambigious ending over the book.

 

In the movie, Magnus dies when he sneaks into Julia’s house (something causes him to fall down the stairs to the basement and his throat gets cut by a broken bottle).  In the book, Magnus lives.  In fact, Mark takes off for California, while Magnus and Lily end up with Julia’s money after her death and they (and the ghost) get everything they want.  Evil triumphs!

 

Here’s an apt summary of Peter Straub’s Julia which also encapsulates my own feelings about the ending:

Julia is a weak, easily-led heiress (always a good combo) who falls under Magnus’s spell, marries him, and endures a semi-abusive marriage for about 10 years. They both love their daughter, who dies tragically, leaving Julia to run away from the shambles of her life. She buys a house that’s haunted by the spirit of a little girl, and bad things start happening. Magnus’s family is terrible – his brother and sister try to stay on Julia’s good side to stay close to her money. The brother tries to sleep with her, the sister tries to talk her into going back to Magnus. The build-up is great. Things start swirling around, getting more eerie and more dangerous, Julia finally convinced that she’s not losing her mind and there really are spirits in the house. I kept waiting for her to triumph, to stop Magnus, to put the ghosts to rest, to solve the puzzle. Instead, she gets drugged and raped by Magnus’s brother, killed by the ghost, and the in-laws get all her money. WHAT.

I liked the movie better.

 

3. The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

By Kiersten White

A few Goodread reviews mentioned how it was recommended to have some knowledge of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein (2018) has many nods to the original source material. Here's one review: 

“The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein is, essentially, a retelling of Frankenstein from the perspective of Elizabeth - an orphan taken in by the Frankenstein family and later the fiancée of Victor. I think this book will work much better for those familiar with the original as it gives a lot of nods to the story. It's hard to appreciate some of the clever twists the author takes without knowing what it's based on.

 

Through her eyes, the tortured genius of Victor becomes a sometimes frightening thing, and yet nothing is as terrifying as being a woman in 18th Century Europe. The stifling constraints placed on women and their ambitions are palpable as the story unfolds. It was so easy for a woman to be dismissed as whiny or silly, or worse-- mad.

When Victor goes missing in Ingolstadt and writes no letters, Elizabeth begins to track him down. Her investigation leads her down dark paths to charnel houses and secret laboratories. What has Victor been up to? Knowing the truth didn't take anything away from reading. In fact, it made those mysterious dark shadows all the creepier.

This story largely fills in gaps in the original tale, while shedding a completely new light on it. It's smart how Kiersten White has managed to keep a lot the same, while also creating a bigger and very different-looking picture.

The original Frankenstein calls into question what it really means to be a monster and, indeed, who the real monsters are. I think White might have answered that question.”

 

I had read Shelley’s Frankenstein when I was in my late teens/early twenties, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to revisit the classic 1818 novel, so like the lazy, yet resourcefully efficient, reader that I am, I borrowed the graphic novel version to quicky refresh my memory instead! 

 

According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Lavenza and Victor Frankenstein were first cousins in the original edition.  In the revised third edition (1831), Elizabeth was a non-relation adopted by the Frankenstein family.  According to the graphic novel, Elizabeth was portrayed as a saint, a self-sacrificing two-dimensional young woman who was loved by the Frankenstein family.  In The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, she is naturally given much more depth as the Frankenstein narrative is retold entirely from her perspective, and there is a LOT more going on behind her innocent façade.  In fact, she’s a calculating survivor who’s determined to marry Victor, not because of love, but because it was her best option as an orphaned young woman in the 19^th century.

 

I’m going to rely on another Goodreads review to summarize how I felt, as it really does save me a lot of time, and time is precious right now!

“I do not think I expected one of the best books I read this year to be a retelling of Frankenstein where it’s not just about the nature of monstrousness, but about the power of women working together and escaping an abusive relationship, with intoxicating writing and a morally grey lady as the protagonist.

 

I absolutely loved the way Kiersten White wrote the abusive relationship at the heart of this - we see the fucked-up nature of that relationship long before Elizabeth does, but it never feels as if Elizabeth “should’ve known better.” In every moment, she has full audience sympathy - in every moment, even if I hated her actions, I understood her. The narrative puts you so far into her mind that it is impossible to look away and it is glorious.

I think the focus on agency within a narrative should be clear, but I really do want to say - this is why retellings are my favorite. Taking a book that is about the essential nature of humanity from the perspective of a man and flipping its themes solidly is something I will always be in full support of - the meta-textuality of the narrative is absolutely brilliant. And it’s not just about one woman - it’s about the relationships between women and the strength found in them. Mary, Justine, and Elizabeth form such fantastic relationships, and each feels so fully-formed in a way they may not have in the original narrative.”

I will add that, although there were plenty of hints revealing what a narcissistic psychopath Victor was, the twist did take me a little by surprise, and I loved that.  I think part of it was due to re-reading the graphic novel that was based on the original novel.  I kept expecting Frankenstein the monster to kill Elizabeth, and I kept thinking that the monster was also responsible for the deaths of Victor’s little brother William and of the servant Justine, but that was not the case at all.   I think if I hadn't read the graphic novel, I might've clued in sooner, but that's fine, I think I preferred being taken by surprise.

 

Kiersten White did an excellent job setting up the plot twist, and not only that, the denouement was really quite exciting and satisfying.  Mary, the daughter of the book shop owner in Ingolstadt, also has a pivotal role in the denouement, and I’m sure her name is a nod to Shelly.  To be sure, The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein was one of my favourite reads of the year so far.  Highly recommended!

 

p.s. This is yet another winner/recommendation from Monster, She Wrote ! 

2. The Cipher

By Kathe Koja

 

Like Elizabeth Engstrom, I first heard of Kathe Koja in Monster, She Wrote where she was featured in the chapter “Kafka of the Weird".   Koja was also mentioned in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell.

 

The Cipher (1991) was Koja’s debut novel and it garnered some praise and awards.  Despite having a cult following, the original Abyss Line (Dell) edition went out of print.  There was an ebook version in 2012, but The Cipher did not get another reprint until 2020 with the Meerkat Press edition, which is what I have pictured.  The Cipher was part of the same book order as Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us, so it made sense that I had to read them back-to-back.

 

 

Behold the Funhole.

 

“Shit,” Nakota said, as she always did, her prayer of wonder. She knelt, bending low and supporting herself on straight-stiff arms, closer than I ever did, staring at it. Into it. It was as if she could kneel there all day, painful position but you knew she didn’t feel it, looking and looking. I took my spot, a little behind her, to the left, my own prayer silence: what to say before the unspeakable?

 

Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some—process. Rabbithole, some strange motherfucking wonderland, you bet. Get somebody named Alice, tie a string to her . . . We’d discussed it all, would discuss it again, probably tonight, and Nakota would sit as she always did, straight-backed as a priestess, me getting ripped and ripping into poetry, writing shit that was worse than unreadable in the morning, when I would wake—more properly afternoon, and she long gone, off to her job, unsmiling barmaid at Club 22 and me late again for the video store. She might not come again for days, or a day, one day maybe never. I knew: friends, yeah, but it was the Funhole she wanted. You can know something and never think about it, if you’re any good at it. Me, now, I’ve been avoiding so much for so long that the real trick becomes thinking straight.

 

Beside me, her whisper: “Look at it.”

 

I sometimes thought it had a smell, that negative place; we’d made the expected nervous fart jokes, the name itself—well, you can guess. But there was some kind of smell, not bad, not even remotely identifiable, but there, oh my yes. I would know that smell forever, know it in the dark (ho-ho) from a city block away. I couldn’t forget something that weird.

 

For the millionth time: “Wouldn’t it be wild to go down there?”

 

And me, on cue and by rote, “Yeah. But we’re not.”

 

I wish I had read The Cipher during my teens or early twenties.  I would’ve loved it, much more than I do now.  It’s nihilistic, angsty, darkly funny and very 90’s in its sordid edginess.  In the Meerkat Press edition, author Maryse Meijer penned a personal and insightful afterword about discovering The Cipher when she was thirteen.

I realized that what I had been looking for all along wasn’t a chainsaw wielding maniac or a tortured vampire or a severely haunted house, but something more existentially threatening: what I needed was a Funhole.

 

The Funhole is not a villain, not a creature, not even a thing, per se, but it is terrifying: perfectly round, absolutely dark, and infinitely deep, anything that goes inside it—or merely near it—is changed: insects grow extra heads, dead flesh comes alive, steel melts and dances and burns.  It’s capable of offering pain and a breed of pleasure beyond the limits of reason; but to receive its gifts one must surrender to the unknown. A journey that doesn’t just offer transformation, but demands it. We know, more or less, what the Funhole does, but not why it does it: the Funhole does not ascribe meaning to itself. That is a job left to Nakota and the Dingbats ad Malcolm and the rest, who scramble to make grand interpretations, all of which are, to varying degrees, bullshit… But nobody in the novel gets what they want, not even the Funhole, as Nicholas is only fleetingly, never lastingly, a willing lover; he remains merely the beloved, as Nakota is beloved by him, as the Funhole is beloved by Nakota. Love, in The Cipher, is never requited; and this is one of the novels’ many horrors, a portrait of desires that are almost always selfish and frustrated, bottomless pits into which each individual pours her darkest wishes for transcendence.

The Cipher reminded me of a more existentially mundane, early Clive Barker.  In spirit, it’s more akin to Charles Burns’ Black Hole, a comic exploring the teenage psyche in 1970's suburban America in an existentially supernatural manner. There's no physical black hole, but rather the Black Hole represents the societal fears of the times, ie. STDs and AIDs.  A mysterious plague disfigures and transforms adolescents into monstrous horrors, the perfect narrative device of externalizing the internal angst of the teenager.

 

Having watched Anora a couple of months ago, I couldn’t help but envision Mikey Madison as ruthless and volatile Nakota. 

Nakota, who saw it first: long spider legs drawn up beneath her ugly skirt, wise mouth pursed into nothing like a smile. Sitting in my dreary third-floor flat, on a dreary thrift-shop chair, the window light behind her dull and gray as dirty fur and she alive, giving off her dark continuous sparks. Around us the remains of this day’s argument, squashed beer cans, stolen bar ashtray sloped full. “You know it,” she said, “the black-hole thing, right? In space? Big dark butthole,” and she laughed, showing those tiny teeth, fox teeth, not white and not ivory yellow either like most people’s, almost bluish as if with some undreamed-of decay beneath them. Nakota would rot differently from other people; she would be the first to admit it.

 

The Cipher was beautifully written as it skillfully balanced the existential horror of an inexplicable black hole in the basement of a seedy residential building and the darkly comic cast of disaffected, deadbeat characters that try to exploit the Funhole for their own benefit.  My main complaint was that the writing got somewhat bogged down and repetitive as it drew out Nicholas’ achingly slow transformation via his disjointed and indulgent internal thought processes.  Nicholas’ emptiness and lack of self-esteem counterpointed with Nakota’s sociopathy and bitchiness did get rather tiresome as I got closer to the end.  The ending was a bit disappointing too.  It was a great premise that didn’t quite deliver but I was still nevertheless immersed in the dark decaying urban microcosm that Koje had conjured up.  The story was unusual, uncanny and uncomfortable.  There wasn’t much in the way of gore or violence, but there was a fair amount of gross-out body horror and depravity.  It definitely was not an easy read as observed by this reddit thread.

But nevertheless I’m glad I read it. 

 

1. When Darkness Loves Us

By Elizabeth Engstrom

I first heard of Elizabeth Engstrom in Monster, She Wrote where she was featured in a chapter titled “Monstrosity in the Mundane".

 

Her bio is interesting. Born Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, Engstrom didn’t start writing seriously until well into her thirties when she signed up for a writing workshop in Hawaii. She had lived a full life – she acquired a Masters degree in applied theology and had her own advertising agency, which she sold to embark on a career in fiction writing.  She was also a wife and mother.

 

I was happy to find a new copy of When Darkness Loves Us when I ordered via Abes Books and didn’t really clue into the fact that it was a special reissue when Olman saw me reading it and asked, is that a Paperbacks from Hell?  Turns out When Darkness Loves Us was featured in Grady Hendrix’s book, Paperbacks from Hell.  Looks like Hendrix has given some forgotten or out of print horror books a second life.

 

The reissue even features the cover art by Jill Bauman that graced the cover of the original 1986 Tor paperback.  After finishing the book, I realize how fitting the illustration was -- an old-fashioned doll with a cracked face and a gaping hole where the nose had been broken off.

 

I found it interesting that in Monster, She Wrote, Kröger and Anderson omitted the fact that before Engstrom became a wife, mother and writer, she was a recovered alcoholic.  In Hendrix’s intro, he simply stated that for ten years, Gutzmer was a drunk.  How Engstrom described her past life gave some interesting insight into the kind of stories she wrote:

“I hung with the underbelly of society”, she says. “And the worse they were, they better I felt about myself. I had friends in really low places, and they were the people I was comfortable with. No real identity, living in the shadows, only coming out at night.”

 

According to Hendrix, in Engstrom’s stories, monsters are created, not born.  Monsters also lurk among us and within us.

 

I really wanted to like When Darkness Loves Us.  It was one of the first stories she had developed when she attended Theodore Sturgeon’ workshop.  The premise was interesting, written like a dark fairy tale and barely the length of a novella, it's not more than sixty-odd pages long.  It begins with pregnant sixteen year old Sally Ann, lustfully admiring her young husband from afar while he’s driving a tractor out on their farm.  She decides to explore an abandoned tunnel and ends up being trapped underground for many years.

 

Sally Ann learns to survive in constant darkness, and gives birth to her son (his name is Clint!), who grows up in the cave without ever seeing daylight.  When he’s old enough to be on his own, Sally renews her desire to go to the top, even though her son tries to convince her to stay.  At this point, I stopped reading and tried to imagine where Engstrom was going to go with this.  I imagined Sally would somehow escape and be discovered by her family.  Her reunion with her husband would probably have unexpected consequences, but she would end up abandoning her son.  Even though Clint never wanted to leave the cave, he goes up top in search of his mother.  He becomes the monster in the cave who terrorizes Sally Ann and her family, but only during the night because the sunlight frightens him.

 

But the actual story is much darker and twisted.  The real horror is not being fully welcomed back by your own family because they thought you were dead and have moved on.  On top of that, you’ve become a shrunken twisted version of yourself with missing teeth and blackened lips.

 

I felt that the abrupt shift in POV to Sally’s son when he’s left alone in the darkness didn’t work for me.  Even though it was disturbing to read his innermost thoughts and actions, I felt that this shift was primarily done to shock the viewer with his dark fantasies.  I felt the story would have been stronger had it kept the focus on Sally Ann as it was her story.  Basically, Sally Ann soon learns that she had been gone for twenty years!  So her son wasn't a boy but a man!  Her less attractive sister ended up marrying her husband and they have children of her own.  Sally Ann ends up kidnapping her youngest niece and brings her back to the caves to introduce to her 20 year old son!  

 

The blurb at the back of the book was also terribly written and inaccurate:  Sally Ann and Martha. Two women, searching for love. Finding terror.

 

It made it seem that both Sally Ann and Martha are in the same story.  I thought that Beauty Is… was the name of a new chapter that would continue from When Darkness Loves Us because the last chapter did not have a proper ending.  When I realized it was an entirely different story, I had to re-adjust my expectations.

 

Compared to When Darkness Loves Us, Beauty Is… was 150 pages, more than double the length.

 

Beauty Is… wasn’t as creepy, but it was a good slow-burner and much more effective than When Darkness… I felt that the order should’ve been reversed.  Beauty Is… was the stronger and more developed story.  What they have in common is the rural setting.  Both protagonists grew up on the farm and are either innocent or naïve to the ways of the world before they become damaged by a traumatic event or circumstance.

 

In Beauty Is…, Martha is a middle-aged simpleton living alone in the farmhouse she grew up in.  She goes into town to get some supplies and in her interactions with the townsfolk, it seems that they all look out for her.  The chapters alternate between Martha and her mother Fern, who like Sally Ann, also married a farmer at a young age.  Shortly into her marriage, Fern discovered she has the gift of healing, when she saves the life of a neighbour who had a terrible accident.  Fern soon becomes revered and respected as the town healer, but Harry, her god-fearing husband is suspicious of her gifts, as he thinks that all this good fortune is going to come back and bite them.  Sure enough, their daughter Martha is born without a nose.  Fern loves her anyway but Harry is frightened and disgusted by the sight of his baby.  The real horror is not Martha’s deformity, but how she is treated by her small-minded, heartless father.  As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Martha was not always “simple”.  Something traumatic happened to Martha as a child when Fern had to help someone in an emergency and Martha was left alone with her father.

 

Once you figure out the theme of Beauty Is…, you can see some of the heavy-handedness of the storytelling.  It was still an interesting yet underwhelming read.  Personally, I found the author’s life more fascinating than her works of fiction.