Bottled Up

Darkness at the Edge of Town by Brian Keene (2010): Enjoyable but slighter and less juicily pulpy novel from the reliable Keene, who's made a fascinating career out of combining cosmic horror with splatterpunky, visceral violence. 

Walden, Virginia wakes up one morning to find itself surrounded on all sides by an almost solid darkness. Some people drive to work. Some stay home. Landlines and cellphones won't connect to anything. All the utilities are out. And when you walk up to the darkness, you start to hear voices and see visions of your loved ones. This is only the beginning.

While not part of one of Keene's acknowledged series, Darkness at the Edge of Town nonetheless fits into the larger schemata of most of Keene's novels, which deal with one or more cosmic threats to life on Earth. Well, life on Earths: each Earth is part of a larger multiverse. While one novel may depict the destruction of all life on one Earth by, say, giant earthworms, another novel may depict the salvation of another Earth by a recurring character such as Keene's Amish magician, Levi. And Levi, too, is duplicated across countless Earths.

Mysterious symbols drawn at points along Walden's town boundary coincide with the line where the darkness stopped. A mysterious homeless man -- Walden's only homeless man -- may have something to do with the symbols. Or did he summon the darkness? Our narrator, an underemployed pizza delivery guy in his 20's, will try to find out. Because the darkness very rapidly starts to make people more and more violent and crazy.

There are elements of metatext here -- a character notes at one point that our narrator's plan to explore the darkness comes right out of Stephen King's The Mist and should thus be avoided because of the dire results of the tactic in both novella and movie. The title comes from a Springsteen song. Many of the group dynamics are reminiscent of both The Mist and King's Under the Dome, though any resemblances to the latter would simply be a case of shared sub-genre, as the two novels came out within a handful of months of one another. 

The dire violence and madness that quickly infect the town are solidly depicted, with several stand-out moments of gross-out horror. The cosmic elements don't work so well, in part because Keene's narrator simply isn't written as a character capable of describing dread or terror. Dez, the homeless madman, manages to Basil Exposition us for several pages near the end, but this seems both too little and much too late. We've seen towns disintegrate under crisis in horror novels before. What makes this narrative different?

Well, utter helplessness, a well Keene goes to repeatedly in his novels, though it's usually leavened with a group of characters doing their best to stave off the apocalypse, even if they fail utterly. Here, though, our narrator and his friends just aren't up to taking on the darkness. And they seem to miss one glaringly obvious thing that a competent person might at least try, given that we're stuck inside the bottle of this narrative for what the narrator estimates is at least a month. I don't need a Heinlein hero in my horror, but the readerly frustration that attends the nihilistic helplessness and pettiness and dim-bulbedness of our heroes leaves one longing for death after awhile. Their death, that is. Go darkness!

Now, this frustration seems to me to perhaps be the point. Keene has given us a novel with an even less bright, less competent, less heroic cast than usual, and has set them against an unbeatable foe. But it's all too much. As T.E.D. Klein noted, himself quoting another critic, I don't see what the point of the point is. Lightly recommended.

Nihilist Spasms

The Museum of Dr. Moses by Joyce Carol Oates (collected 2008): As prolific as a pulp writer, Oates has been lauded again and again for the quality of her prose. She is a fine writer, but don't go to her work to feel good. Or even to experience catharsis. There aren't any conventional happy endings here in these dozen or so stories and novellas.

The title novella deals with family secrets and long-standing conflicts, as do most of the other stories -- the heart in conflict with both itself and other hearts. There's suspense here, though it's of a peculiar sort, as one generally waits to see what horrors will unfold by the end of a story. Oates is a witty writer, but I wouldn't call her funny. Frankly, her fiction is mostly humourless. "The Twins: A Mystery" has wit to spare but unlike, say, Kafka or Thomas Ligotti, Oates doesn't generate absurdity that can be laughed at despite its attendant horrors.

The grimness can wear a bit. A lot, sometimes. One story, told from the POV of a serial killer, is a small gem of characterization that nonetheless casts no light -- human cruelty has been so well-documented in fiction and fact that the story seems to have been rendered superfluous by the weight of its antecedents. It's a perfectly rendered, perfectly hollow bit of nihilism.

Other stories let enough light in to succeed, though. "Feral", ostensibly fantasy, devastates on a number of levels with its tale of a child gone horribly wrong. "The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza" allows Oates to indulge her love of boxing within the context of a family drama, though the final revelation of the story doesn't shock. The aforementioned "The Twins: A Mystery" strives mightily for some sort of absurdist effect, but it just sorta sits there -- the shock ending in this case undone by the absurdity of the protagonists. Three stories are essentially static depictions of the thoughts of serial killers and/or child murderers: more gestural than narrative, and even one is almost too many.

Overall, Oates is fine writer, and one well worth reading. One's reaction to her will depend on one's tolerance for a universe without much light, and a writer who can't be light without the effort showing. More light! Recommended.

Work Sucks

My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror by Thomas Ligotti containing "My Work Is Not Yet Done", "I Have a Special Plan for the World", and "The Nightmare Network" (2007): Frank Dominio is a team supervisor at a corporation called New Product. On his own initiative, he comes up with, well, a new product, and briefly presents his idea to his fellow supervisors and their boss, Richard (nicknamed "The Doctor" for initially unknown-to-Frank reasons).

And here Frank's troubles begin in the lengthy titular novella.

Thomas Ligotti gets to be described as a unique voice in horror because he really is a unique voice in horror. He can be approximated by imagining some bizarre mash-up of two or three or four other writers (for the record, I'd go with Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Clark Ashton Smith, and Roald Dahl) , but there's no single writer who's truly like him. He's an American original, writer of some of the bleakest, bleakly funniest horror stories of the past thirty years.

His take on corporate horror is singular and tricky. The novella initially seems to exist in the realm of the workplace revenge fantasy, something we've all seen. But the means of Frank's revenge are extraordinarily odd, and become odder as that revenge progresses. This is not Office Space With Ghosts.

People who've read other Ligotti stories may realize around the halfway mark that "My Work Is Not Yet Done" takes place in the same bleak universe as 1999's "The Shadow, The Darkness." One doesn't need to know this to understand what's going on, but it does deepen the experience as we plunge into the Magical Nihilism that is Ligotti's dominant mode of discourse.

But the novella is also horribly funny, as are the two short stories that complete this triptych. Frank Dominio begins the novella with a bleak outlook on humanity in general and his co-workers in particular, and the events of the story show that bleakness to not be enough. The world is much worse than Dominio ever imagined. The revenge scenarios initially carry a certain grotesque zing, but they quickly lose their enjoyability for Frank as he realizes who and what he's up against -- or working for.

Ligotti's fiction can truly unnerve one (as S.T. Joshi has observed), leading one to question the parameters of one's own existence, and the meaning of existence itself. But it's strangely, blackly refreshing because if one rejects the nihilistic cosmos of many of Ligotti's stories, one finds one's own cosmos to be that much more welcoming and benign by comparison. Highest recommendation.