House of Windows by John Langan (2009): John Langan's first novel is terrific, an erudite ghost story informed by Langan's knowledge of the horror genre and by his experiences in academia. It's a first-person tale within a frame -- a perennial structure in horror. It's a novel of academia. And its main narrator would seem utterly persuasive if it weren't for brief, gem-like moments throughout her narration that seem to highlight a pronounced lack of self-knowledge. Or do they?
Over the course of two long nights, SUNY-Huguenot graduate student and sessional instructor Veronica Croydon tells the story of her husband's mysterious disappearance to a narrator who seems to be John Langan. She does so because Langan writes horror stories and thus may be a good choice to hear the tale. During the day between the two nights, Langan and his wife discuss the possibility that he may also have been chosen for his perceived gullibility when it comes to the supernatural.
Veronica's narrative voice is sharp, self-assured, and intermittently unsympathetic. She's a great creation. Overall, her story of the supernatural seems convincing. It's the sudden revelations of a pronounced lack of self-evaluation spotted throughout the text that raise the possibility that her narration is flawed or possibly confabulated in its entirety. But these moments are few and far between, and subtle enough in most cases to sneak by.
Langan's depiction of academic life rings utterly true to this former academic. Veronica reminds me of a handful of graduate students I've known without in any way being a stereotype. The 40-years-older, married professor she herself marries within about a year of starting her graduate studies is also familiar without being a type. But we learn of him (and everything inside the frame) only from Veronica's point-of-view. Do we trust her? Do we trust any first-person narrator? Do we trust any narrator at all?
I don't know. In general, the discontinuities in the narrative include moments in which Veronica engages in stereotypical gender constructions of the male while at other points bristling at such constructions being attached to the female. She denigrates Herman Melville for being a detail-obsessed windbag while occasionally relating such a list of minutiae that the narrative almost bogs down in soporific descriptions of making dinner or sitting in a living room. She may have become her near-future husband's favourite student in the space of one class, with their out-of-class socializing beginning immediately thereafter, but she doesn't believe in being familiar with her own students. The failure of the earlier marriage was all the fault of the first wife -- but we learn of the first wife only through Veronica's narration. Well, we learn almost everything only through Veronica's narration. And a story that details the tragically flawed relationships of at least two sets of fathers and sons -- as commented upon throughout by Veronica -- also features Veronica's distant, annoyed relationship with a mother with whom she goes years between conversations.
The major characters filling out the novel's pas de quatre are Ted, Roger's 30ish son from his previous marriage, and the house the Croydons have lived in for decades, Belvedere House. It's an old house. And it's about to become haunted. Or something.
Langan's vision of the supernatural in this novel bridges a gap between the cosmic, impersonal, non-traditional horrors of the Lovecraftian and the more traditional wonders and terrors of a ghost story, with psychology hanging over all. It helps to have read Fritz Leiber's great Our Lady of Darkness before reading his novel, but one doesn't need to: Langan lays everything out that the reader needs to know. Knowledge of the Leiber novel enriches one's enjoyment of House of Windows, though. And it's a swell novel.
As is this novel. The horrors here are both gross and subtle, supernatural and strictly human. There may not have ever been a haunting. But whether or not there was, there's a story of a haunting and the haunted -- there's horror and sorrow. Highly recommended.
Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1977): The last of the prolific and long-lived Leiber's truly great horror-dark-fantasy novels, and for my money the best, Our Lady of Darkness plays with themes and concepts Leiber first explored nearly 40 years earlier in his seminal horror story "Smoke Ghost" (1940).
In that dark and terrific story, we discover that the multiplying and expanding urban landscapes of the 20th century breed their own peculiar types of ghosts, spirits, and perhaps even gods. In Our Lady of Darkness, we begin to learn just what sorts of entities may haunt the 20th century, and why, and to what ends. The list of writers who owe a debt to Leiber's concept includes such luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell, and a veritable plethora of others.
Leiber's semi-autobiographical stand-in of a protagonist, writer Franz Westen, is a recovering alcoholic who lives in a somewhat odd, old apartment building in San Francisco in the late 1970's. Two books he purchased while in a near-blackout state several years earlier begin to occupy his mind: a bizarre Depression-era screed about the supernatural dangers posed by the existence of cities, and an unsigned journal from the same time period which Westen comes to believe belonged to (real) horror writer Clark Ashton Smith.
Smith pretty much permanently moved to the country in the late 1930's, avoiding cities thereafter. Why? What did his brief friendship with the writer of the screed reveal? Looking out across San Francisco with his binoculars to the top of Corona Heights, a wooded hill in the middle of developed urban space, Westen sees a strange, brown figure capering and dancing -- and then taking notice of his attention.
And we're off. Leiber blends the real and the fictional into a fascinating mix of horror, dark comedy, and supernatural speculation. Jammed with enough material for a novel ten times its modest length, Our Lady of Darkness remains light on its feet throughout. Spiked with fine and occasionally shocking moments of horror, the novel nevertheless presents a protagonist who never stops trying to think his way through the bizarre events he's been dropped into because of these two books of (seemingly) accidental purchase.
Westen's friends in the hotel are also well-drawn, as is the libertine expert on the supernatural whom Westen turns to for information on San Francisco's occult past. Real-world figures that include H.P. Lovecraft, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce are woven plausibly into the story, their fictions and their lives making the events of the novel seem more plausible in a completely loopy way with each passing page. Leiber's fictional occult speculations become more convincing than most of our world's real occult writings.
Leiber was one of the 20th century's most gifted cross-genre writers. He helped create the sword-and-sorcery genre with his wry and long-running Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series, wrote piercingly good science fiction with his The Big Time, "A Pail of Air," and "Coming Attraction" (to name just three), and helped modernize horror in a way that still hasn't completely taken hold, as the current proliferation of all those tired vampires and werewolves continues to show.
His theatrical background informed works that include "Four Ghosts in Hamlet," while his life-long fascination with chess gave us one of the two or three finest chess-horror pieces ever written, "Midnight by the Morphy Watch." That he could also do pitch-perfect homages to his old pen-pal H.P. Lovecraft or move seemingly effortlessly into post-modern strangeness while already in his 50's with stories that include "The Winter Flies" and "Gonna Roll the Bones" seems almost unfair to other writers. Our Lady of Darkness may be his finest novel -- in any case, it's one of no more than twenty or so of the finest novels ever gifted to the horror genre to call its own. Highly recommended.
