The Route of Ice and Salt, by José Luis Zaraté, transl. David Bowles (1998)

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 4.1.2023
Book from: Library

The Route of Ice and Salt is a dark reverie written from the perspective of the captain of the Demeter, the doomed schooner that transports Dracula and his crates of Transylvanian earth to the English coast. José Luis Zaraté, a prominent Mexican writer of the fantastic, imagines the captain as a secret homosexual, haunted equally by his desire for his men, his memories of his old lover, and the apparitions of white rats and a lean dark man that afflict his final voyage.

The novella is liquid, intensely intimate and erotic, tortured, tragic. Zaraté plunges us into the consciousness of a profoundly lonely, guilty, and unhappy man, where he brews heady metaphysical reflections on desire, the ocean, and absence. The captain, his crew, their ship, and the ocean form a sort of queasy, viscous superorganism: porous, turbulent, saturated with saltwater and bad dreams. The captain explores the salt-crusted skin of his men inch by inch in his imagination, averts his gaze vehemently in reality. The crew dwell in an uneasy realm of half-articulated suspicions, their glances and resentment touching off further ripples of shame in the captain. As the voyage proceeds, crew members disappear one by one, but their presences linger, negative shapes invested with fear and dread.

The story beats may be familiar to Dracula aficionados, but Zaraté supercharges them with emotion and sensuality. The pages echo with the captain’s fearful heartbeat, the roar of the ocean, and the chittering teeth of rats; they stink of sweat and semen.

Most of the novella is so elemental, so simultaneously animalistic and dreamlike, that it comes as a surprise when the captain finally articulates an ethic in defiance of his own guilt—which Dracula has happily played upon. “Hunger is not a sin,” the captain declares, “nor is Necessity or Appetite. What matters, I repeat, is what we are willing to do to satisfy them. My ephemeral pleasures are not a stain; the fact that he sacrifices others, anyone and everyone else, just to satisfy his Thirst… most certainly is.” This passage is one of the only ones where David Bowles’ sinuous translation seems to betray a trace of stiffness or self-consciousness, but maybe that’s appropriate, or deliberate. The captain, whose lynched lover’s corpse was desecrated like that of a vampire, is trying on a dangerously novel thought: maybe he isn’t a monster. This flicker of higher humanity lights the last few pages of the novella with a brief, proud flash, before receding into the words of Stoker’s captain’s log: “Still fog, which the sunrise cannot pierce… I am growing weaker, and the night is coming on.”

Recommended for fans of Angela Carter (for the digging into the marrow of old tales; for the feral sensuality) and The Terror (for homosocial nautical horrors).

My great thanks to R. for the recommendation, and to the Innsmouth Free Press for making this work available to readers in English.

The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty (1971) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 11.27.2021
Book from: Library

Well, this was disappointing! I maintain that The Exorcist has one of the most compelling moral/existential conflicts of any work of media: a priest of failing faith is called in to deal with a horrifying case of putative possession, which may therefore prove the existence of the Devil… and of God?

However, the novel has all the failings that I think screenwriter-novelists are prone to: the descriptions are embarrassingly hammy, the dialogue contorts itself into the appearance of cleverness (Chris’ breathless, gee-whiz slanginess may be the worst), characters repeatedly declare their own identities (“As a Jesuit, I…”), there’s an excess of melodramatic sentence fragments and one-sentence paragraphs, etc. Blatty is also unusually attached to the rhetorical device of zeugma (“He lowered his face into his hand, and self-doubt”), which, again, draws excessive attention to itself given the frequency with which he uses it. So, speaking of lowering faces into hands… this book induced many facepalms.

The first sentence of the first chapter (after the prologue) is characteristically bad: “Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.” As a friend who’s also reading the book remarked, “Oh yeah, just like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns, plural.”

I got a bit of a thrill from how tense, well-paced, and procedurally absorbing the book can be – Blatty’s research into psychology, medicine, and paranormal history is admirable – but it wasn’t the terrifying, exalted experience I was hoping for. I do still admire The Exorcist as a historically important and in many ways ingeniously crafted horror novel, and it was fascinating to evaluate in light of the numerous podcast episodes I’ve been listening to about the Satanic Panic in the 70s and 80s. A salient point made by Sarah Marshall in the podcast You’re Wrong About is that horror media and news coverage of purported Satanic cases actually drove a public appetite for exorcisms (previously obscure as a Catholic ritual). Quite interesting to think about in light of the fact that The Exorcist is a blatantly pro-Catholic/Christian novel.

Nonetheless: so far, I’m not doing so great with the classic horror novel reads, between this and ‘Salem’s Lot

Those Who Hunt the Night, by Barbara Hambly (1988) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 11.21.2021
Book from: Library

James Asher, a retired member of the Queen’s secret service in Edwardian England, has settled into quietude as an Oxford professor of philology with his physician wife, Lydia. But his peace is shattered when he’s confronted by a pale aristocratic Spaniard named Don Simon Ysidro, who makes an outlandish claim that someone is killing his fellow vampires of London, and he needs James’s help to ferret the culprit out. The request comes with a threatening ultimatum: Should James fail, both he and his wife will die.

Those Who Hunt the Night is dark, exciting, full of intriguing historical detail, intelligently written, character-driven, and yet ultimately a little vapid. It does exactly what it says on the box—Edwardian vampire murder detective novel!!!—and doesn’t exceed. I couldn’t stop reading it, and I was thrilled when I realized that it’s a full series of (so far) eight novels, but it wears its indulgent nature both a little too openly—and yet not flagrantly enough. It’s like… tame pulp? Tidy pulp?

The first couple of chapters are weighed down with brow-furrowing exposition, and the character descriptions throughout are several shades too affectionate and repetitive. Red-headed Lydia is almost always described as “waifish” or “deer-like;” I swear there isn’t a single line about Ysidro that doesn’t mention how pale and remote he is; etc. At the same time, it’s not so indulgent that it tips over into the deliciously campy realm of something like Anne Rice’s vampire novels, so it ends up feeling prim. I suppose that suits the scholarly nature of the novel’s protagonist.

The closest comparison that I can draw is to Kage Baker’s steampunk novella series The Women of Nell Gwynne’s: adventurous, socially aware, biased towards bookish characters, and ultimately a little light and silly despite ostensibly dark subject matter. This may be exactly what some readers are looking for, of course; I would have loved something wilder and meatier.

Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones (2016) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 9.11.2021
Book from: Library

Bloody, meaty, funny, sly, dreamy, sad, longing, gonzo, dirtbaggy. What Kathryn Bigelow’s Western horror movie Near Dark did for vampires, Stephen Graham Jones’ novel Mongrels does for werewolves. (I was delighted and unsurprised to see Jones citing Near Dark as a foundational influence in the afterword.) I treasured reencountering that texture of gritty, snappish, road-tripping familial love. This novel also captures the anxious, dreamy awkwardness of alienated adolescence through a tone that’s very similar to Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: both books have that curious way of looking at things so hard, with such a burning desire to understand, that the gaze splits or slides off to the side, becomes strange and oblique.

So many parts of this book are so nakedly about growing up poor and unwelcome and not-white in the American South that it tugs at your heart. At the same time, the werewolf mythos serves as a kind of appetizing cover story, an exciting distraction—just as it did for the teenaged Jones, who is Blackfeet. (Jones is calculatedly coy as to the werewolf family’s physical appearance, but there are a couple references to black hair, and an unpleasant high school classmate once asks the narrator if he’s “Mexican or something.”) It’s deeply touching to me to honor your sustaining childhood fantasy by turning it into a full novel, and a novel that’s vividly charged with its own darkly joyful mythos: Jones clearly revels in the frequently gory elaborations that he brings to werewolf biology and lifeways.

I couldn’t get enough of the episodic, almost diaristic storytelling, the plangent fragments of memory and the macabrely superheroic exploits. (The more outrageously superheroic bits are explained in a brief exchange of dialogue in the last chapter.) All of this is run through with the anxiety and dread that shape the lives of the impoverished and vulnerable.

In short: consumed with fascination and dread, I read this book way too fast. Sadly, this may have resulted in my breaking its spell more abruptly than would have been ideal. After I finished, the content and style dissociated in my head, and it became too easy to remember the book’s more absurd, cartoonish bits, and less so its quietly fierce, tender tone or earthy, sweaty textures.

In the long run, though, what will stick with me is the way that Jones turned a fantasy into a novel in a way that inevitably points back at the real life that gave birth to the fantasy—and in a way that cries out for readers to recognize and value the loving, chaotic lives of the poor and dispossessed.

Related reviews:
Alabaster, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2006)

The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 10.19.2021
Book from: Library

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides is one of the most ecstatically beautiful, dream-like, and mournful books I’ve ever read, up next to Lolita. The two work together well in so many ways: the cuttingly yet not wholly satirical paean to the promise of America; the drenching languor and lust; the pathological yet resplendent objectification of beautiful, inaccessible girls. There’s a bit of Poe in there, too: the Gothic obsessiveness, the unreliable narrators.

The novel centers on many of the same themes as Eugenides’ Middlesex, but it’s much tighter, less sprawling, less broadly tragicomic. The single bullet in a revolver loaded for Russian roulette seems like an appropriate metaphor—elusive yet potent.

From a craft perspective, there was so much I admired about this book: sentence after sentence that floats and twists with metamorphic elegance and surprise; image after image of nightmare-dreamish beauty and suffering. (The final paragraph of the book gives me a wave of goosebumps every time I read it.) There were moments where Eugenides’ fabulist or magical-realist leanings put me in the same space as the horror movie It Follows. The queasy, desperate image of Lux Lisbon copulating on the roof of her parents’ house, night after night, blended in my mind with the scene in It Follows where the entity stands naked on a neighborhood rooftop, looming and improbable. The shadow of sex, death, and disorder falls over suburbia.

The book’s narrative technique, Eugenides’ choice of a “we” perspective (whose identity and role become clearer and clearer over the course of the novel) is quietly astonishing, hypnotic, and unnerving. It might be this choice that does the most work to lend the book its ineffable quality. We hear the story of a neighborhood as filtered through a shifting surveillance network, an aggregate view that is ultimately fallible, individual, and selfish, yet by assuming the status of “we” insists on a semblance of omniscience and authority.

This paradox of collective identity seems like the crux of the novel, and Eugenides plays on it in several configurations: through the narrating “we;” through the despairing alliance of the Lisbon sisters; and through the social landscape that surrounds them, the tidy suburbia crumbling at the edges, where the decay and racial tension of neighboring Detroit seep through. Every union is imperfect; everything contains the seeds of entropy.

Related reviews:
Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay (1967)

Desultory Annotations for Gerald Durrell’s “The Entrance” (1980)

Gerald Durrell’s infamous Gothic horror story “The Entrance” is the final story in his collection The Picnic and Other Inimitable Stories (1980), which otherwise comprises a series of arch, Wodehousian, semi-autobiographical comedies, centering on absurd mishaps that beset Durrell’s family outings and European travels. (“The Havoc of Havelock” is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.) I got turned on to “The Entrance” after seeing a number of remarks about it on the Internet along the lines of, “Durrell, why would you do that to us?!” Obviously I couldn’t pass up experiencing the tonal whiplash for myself.

Whiplash there was! Although, warned in advance, I couldn’t help noting the morbid humor that crops up in his comedies, too—in particular, “The Michelin Man” is highly reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s horror/comedy fiction for adults. (“Lamb to the Slaughter,” anyone?) Durrell himself tries to give ample warning for “The Entrance”: he cushions our arrival with a typically cozy frame story where he arrives at the cottage of a couple of bohemian friends in the south of France, complete with loving descriptions of the wine and truffles they consume. But then—amid an evening storm, the friends produce “a very curious manuscript” whose contents are promised to be “horrid.” There we enter into “The Entrance.”

I was delighted, disturbed, and baffled by the story: so here are my notes and attempts at analysis. Page numbers are from the 1980 Simon & Schuster edition. I welcome any contributions, corrections, and alternative interpretations.

Continue reading Desultory Annotations for Gerald Durrell’s “The Entrance” (1980)

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2015) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 9.28.2020
Book from: Personal collection

In post-Arthurian Britain, the wars that once raged between the Saxons and the Britons have finally ceased. Axl and Beatrice, an elderly British couple, set off to visit their son, whom they haven’t seen in years. And, because a strange mist has caused mass amnesia throughout the land, they can scarcely remember anything about him. As they are joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and an illustrious knight, Axl and Beatrice slowly begin to remember the dark and troubled past they all share.

The Buried Giant has the slow-motion horror of a nightmare: the confused repetitiousness of the dialogue; Axl and Beatrice’s frailty and tentativeness; the blurred, clouded landscape; the increasing sense of building towards a terrible revelation or shattering. As is typical of Ishiguro, the prose is carefully flat and affectless: an acres-wide, inch-deep pool of water, any ripples almost imperceptible. To be blunt, the prose is boring—and yet I also kept thinking that this was the most entrancingly, sublimely boring book I’ve ever read. I felt like Beatrice in the scene where she’s swarmed by rat-like, life-stealing pixies and nearly subsides into death. Slow-motion horror.

I was transfixed by these outbreaks of folk horror: the woman stroking a rabbit’s fur with a knife in a rain-dripping ruin, the underground beast described as looking something like “a large skinless animal,” the tunnels full of infant skeletons. As indelible as these images are—like Symbolist paintings—they become indescribably more disturbing because of the way that Ishiguro doesn’t describe them head-on. He robs us of a sense of clarity, control—the narrator’s vision is always glancing away, blurring at the edges.

The gradual revelation of mass slaughter that arises from these grotesque suggestions, and the slow topple towards renewed slaughter, is almost unbearably tragic, tearing. Ishiguro establishes his main characters as tragicomically human: vulnerable, bumbling, striving, absurd, valiant, kind. Then he shows us that they are walking towards a point of no return. There will be no reconciliation, no peace for the land, once the Buried Giant rises. Saxons will fight Britons once more; Axl and Beatrice fear the permanent oblivion of an afterlife with no kindness toward lovers. Companionship and love, hard-earned, will fade into another generation of helpless loss and strife. Did it all matter, that they loved? Of course it does: over the course of the novel, we see how much it matters to them, and to us, that these characters loved. But in the eyes of history, it does not.

An oil painting of a small boat with a shrouded standing figure approaching a wooded island under a dark skyThe Isle of the Dead, 1880 version, Arnold Böcklin

Related reading:
The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989): review by Emera
The Ballad of Sir Dinadan, by Gerald Morris (2003): review by Emera

Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay (1967) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 7.17.2020
Book from: Library

It was a cloudless summer day in the year 1900. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of the secluded volcanic outcropping. Farther, higher, until at last they disappeared. They never returned… Mysterious and subtly erotic, Picnic at Hanging Rock inspired the iconic 1975 film of the same name by Peter Weir. A beguiling landmark of Australian literature, it stands with Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides as a masterpiece of intrigue.

As expected, this was a delicious summer treat – though it didn’t go down without some misgivings. On the whole, Picnic at Hanging Rock is satirical, dreamy, sensuous, and occasionally quite sinister and chilling—mainly in how Lindsay refers to the dark, inscrutable mass of the Hanging Rock brooding in the metaphysical distance behind or beyond the characters ever after the girls’ disappearance, the source of some kind of alien causality.

The book is also quite, quite gay. I was astonished by how Sapphic the movie is when I saw it back in undergrad, but the book is far more explicit than the movie’s languid, soft-focus erotic glow. The novel opens with five pages of the students and the prettiest teacher fluttering over their Valentine’s Day cards and take turns thinking about how much pleasure they derive from gazing at each other’s curls and bosoms and OH MY. Check it—this is from the perspective of Mademoiselle, the French teacher:

The girl’s voluptuous little breasts, her dimples, full red lips, naughty black eyes, and glossy black ringlets, were a continual source of aesthetic pleasure.

It’s also immensely “interesting” that the book’s only two male characters effectively end up riding into the sunset together. It may be that Lindsay largely intends the spiritual bachelorhood of young, wealthy Michael Fitzhubert as tragic: he’s positioned in a love quadrangle with the vanished Miranda (his true love, seen once and never recovered); Irma, the one returned girl (who regards Michael as her true love, but is spurned); and his best mate, the rough horseman Albert (who, finally, is in love with Irma). I found this love-quadrangulation silly as a romantic device, mainly because I found it hard to take any of the characters seriously – a point to which I’ll return later. I think what’s interesting about it is its alienating, distancing effect, the way that these four young people are strangely offset from one another, incapable of moving in the same space. This heightens, of course, the book’s central element of feminine-as-mystery. At one point, Michael even wonders to himself what “feminine secrets” were shared among the girls before they disappeared. Estranged from these unattainable, sometimes uncanny nymphs, Michael and Albert (hairy, tattooed, streetwise, occasionally lounging naked in Michael’s presence…) ride off into the optimism of undefined masculine adventures together.

Let’s return to the problem of how Lindsay handles her characters, generally. I think one of the book’s biggest weaknesses is that Lindsay treats the characters so archly that it comes off as self-satisfaction with her own satirical wit. Any dignity or intelligence the characters might have is often diminished by her heavy-handed descriptions. It doesn’t help that Michael, who is crushingly boring except for how he plays off of Albert, gets to occupy the middle third of the book with an immensely slow, inchoately mopey convalescence sequence. No, thanks. Luckily, Lindsay recovers from there with one of the book’s most climactically disturbing scenes, Irma’s final return to Appleyard College.

Continue reading Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay (1967) E

“The Bear,” by Beulah Amsterdam (2019) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 1.20.2020
Book from: Personal collection

This story appears in the winter 2019 issue of Ploughshares.

In the dim forest cabin, a brown bear stared at me. He sniffed my suitcase. I froze.

The bear looked at me with his deep black eyes. We gazed at each other. No longer afraid of him, I felt a close connection. I watched as he explored the small, rustic room, pawing at the door mat and the bedside rug…

This opening scene is shortly revealed to be a dream, one which conducts the waking narrator to a reminiscence of a past boyfriend, a bearish Communist and fellow college student in 1950’s New York.

I relish, with a kind of voyeuristic hunger, tales of student/bohemian New York life in the 50’s-80’s, and I love the unsettlingly lucid style of this short, regretful story. As those flat yet flowing sentences accumulate, their deadpan tone an imperfect restraint for the off-kilter emotional urgency beneath, it’s impossible to escape a sense of the weight of the narrator’s presence. I could hear her tranced voice in my head, feel unblinking eye contact. I wish I could spend more time with this strange, melancholy, pure narrator, but the story ends painfully soon, after briefly playing out a teasing contrast between different ideas of visions and the miraculous; which brings us back to the dream of the bear.

This story is such an incredible study in tone. I’d love to find more of Amsterdam’s work.

“The Regimental History,” by Andrea Barrett (2019) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 2.15.2020
Read from: Personal collection

This story appears in the 2019 fall edition of Ploughshares.

Dear Maurice, this morning it is raining very hard and the wind is rattling our tent, so we can hardly hear each other. Thanks for the news about Albert’s sister, which cheered him. I’m glad the girl helping Aurie is working out (hello to you, if you are reading this! your handwriting is good but you spelled “tonsillitis” wrong. Also, furlough is not spelled “ferlow.”) Vic has been sick with chills and fever but the doctor claims he’s doing better now – good thing, as we hear rumors that we’ll be moving soon. Ezra, on picket duty last week, says the rebs across the Rappanannock are buzzing about and he thinks we may be marching upriver…

I’ve read a good bit of ruminating about the erasures of history (that is, the writing of history), its inescapably flawed and subjective processes, but nothing has made me feel that fact, that human accumulation of errors and losses and misapprehensions, like this lucent, lovely, mournful novella by Andrea Barrett. I’ve been meaning to read her much-awarded collection of historical fiction, Ship Fever, for years, but still haven’t gotten around to it. This introduction to her work will goad me back to that goal.

Over three parts, Barrett lets us glimpse the lives of a set of Civil War characters who are connected by their desire to write the history of a disgraced Union regiment, in which two beloved brothers served. Izzy returns home disabled and traumatized; Vick disappears, presumed a deserter. Through glimpses of their stories, and of relatives and friends who circle around the voids of the brothers’ lives, we witness not only the physical and emotional depredations of war, but the quieter attrition of simply the passage of time. Men who wanted to tell their war stories die ignominiously in peacetime; newspaper accounts distort facts and then are enshrined as true history by later republication. Letters are lost; transcribed accounts acquire unexplained annotations. Intentions to write, to share, to publish are pushed aside by the demands of daily life, deferred and deferred again. The present continually pulls us away from the past – and yet the past never disappears, it cannot be divided away, only diminished, obscured, distracted from.

All of this, Barrett depicts with graceful, transparent, quietly witty prose. She moves easily among snippets of letters and articles; the practical details of post-war life as, say, a biology teacher or a ceramist; and the characters’ interior lives. Above all, the characters feel so present, so true, and so human. You’d like to be friends with many of them, except that they, too, have slipped away in all the decades between then and now.

Related reading: 
Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier (2009): review by Kakaner