Monsters as People

Nearly a week has passed, everything slow and languid, like all things in a heavy Canadian winter, including reading. As only a Canadian ought to in winter, I have just finished reading the Governor General's Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize nominated novel The Immaculate Conception by Gaétan Soucy, translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler. To everything there is a season, and especially when it comes to reading Canadian Literature, that spirit of pathetic fallacy borne in the Canadian-born reader seems to have an affinity for winter, inwardly. Reading Todd Swift's dark and stormy description of Soucy's novel from his article "Monsters as People" in the January/February 2007 issue of Books in Canada: The Canadian Review of Books opened a window to the possibility of Great Can Lit for me:

Nothing had prepared me for the novel The Immaculate Conception by French Quebec author, Gaétan Soucy--nothing, that is, other than the works of de Sade, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Kafka, and a host of other writers; tormented by the nearly impossible promises of God (or Good), they make elaborate work of the Devil (or Evil), and in the process, bring into the world the very suffering they would quarrel with.

"It Was Like A Tentacle But Not Exactly..."

Coming to the end of Darkfall, I was surprised to find Koontz acknowledging homage in this story to another earlier influential pulp writer. The secret cognate of Darkfall's "police procedural" plot may be William Hjortsberg's 1978 novel Falling Angel, but Koontz leaves no question in this great libation poured to the gods of genre that Howard Philip Lovecraft is the Zeus of the "horror novel." After thwarting the Bocor Lavelle's attempt to slaughter his children, Lieutenant Jack Dawson watches with craven horror as the voodoo spirits of evil come to claim their holocaust from the depths of Hell:

Something snaked up from the depths. It was like a tentacle but not exactly a tentacle, like a chitinous insect leg but not exactly an insect leg, sharply jointed in several places and yet as sinuous as a serpent. It soared up to a height of fifteen feet. The tip of the thing was equipped with long whiplike appendages that writhed around a loose, drooling, toothless mouth large enough to swallow a man whole. Worse, it was in some ways exceedingly clear that this was only a minor feature of the huge beast rising from the Gates; it was as small, proportionately, as a human finger compared to an entire human body. Perhaps this was the only thing that the escaping Lovecraftian entity had thus far been able to extrude between the opening Gates--this one finger.

The direct source for Koontz's beast from the depths of Hell is a short story ("The Call of Cthulhu") written in 1926 by Lovecraft. Above, Koontz condenses three separate accounts presented by several characters in Lovecraft's narrative into his own allusive though Christianized passage:

It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died...hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

the newly opened depths...It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway.... The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

The slight difference: Lovecraft's Old Ones (Cthulhu) are based on his own skeptical evolutionary universe, whereas Koontz translates his Ancient Ones into his own hopeful modern anthropological and/or Christianized vision.

What can be said about Darkfall by Dean Koontz is this: it is an imaginative study in (pulp) influences.

A Study In Darkfall

A novel as circuitous as Darkfall by Dean Koontz, although awkwardly tawdry in terms of mechanics, is best understood as a fusebox of literary conventions. The afterword written by Koontz himself added to the end of the newest 2007 edition of this novel, which was originally published in 1984 , is telling:

I do not rate Darkfall among my best work, but I'll be immodest enough to say that I think it's a fun read. The only ambition here was to produce a page-turning entertainment; I wanted to cross the horror novel with the police procedural, while mixing a love story and a measure of comic dialogue.

Koontz is accurate when he describes his novel as a cross of the "horror novel with the police procedural." He makes no bones about his plot in Darkfall being overly conventional and thus seemingly mechanical. This is a fair description of the literary vision of Dean Koontz: always hinged on past conventions and stories.

But Koontz is a poetically crafty writer in Darkfall. To make up for mechanical plots he hot-wires his reader using po etically-loaded words into an underlying circuit board of familiar literary conventions. His words are electric in the sense that they spark "pure information" in the reader which can feel like literary deja vu. Consider your reponse to the following passage:

"Look, Rebecca, I'm not saying it's voodoo or anything the least bit supernatural. I'm not a particularly superstitious man. My point is that these murders might be the work of someone who does believe in voodoo, that there is something ritualistic about them. The condition of the corpses certainly points in that direction. I didn't say voodoo works. I'm only suggesting that the killer might think it works, and his belief in voodoo might lead us to him and give us some of the evidence we need to convict him."

My response to this passage is literary: I see Koontz pointing to Harry Angel and the unconventional series of bizarre and occult investigations from William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel. Reading this excerpt I got the sense of imitation or conventionality because the words and implied plot sounded like something fantastic out of a '50s pot-boiler detective movie or novel. Only later did I associate these words, allegorically-speaking, with Hjortsberg's original 1978 noir detective thriller: "A spellbinding novel of murder, mystery, and the occult, Falling Angel pits a tough New York private eye against the most fearsome adversary a detective ever faced. For Harry Angel, a routine missing-persons case soon turns into a fiendish nightmare of voodoo and black magic, of dizzying peril and violent death -- a world in which the shadow he chases seems to be the shadow he casts."

This is why I enjoy Dean Koontz: his plots are mechanical, but his words electric.

The New Pathetic Fallacy

Caspar David Friedrich, Cloister Cemetary in the Snow

I offer this inconsequential thought after reading Dean Koontz's Darkfall:

The new pathetic fallacy of literature ( "the lights went out"), which one experiences reading weird, suspense and horror stories, is a simple inversion of the old imaginative ideal of Romanticism: it is claustrophobic, technological and introverted, instead of uplifting, natural and extroverted. Howard Philip Lovecraft, the father of modern horror, first established this in his 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. It was the first complete historical and critical effort to establish the whole new tradition and poetics of a modern pulp genre: Weird Literature. He wrote about a dark primal vision for supernatural horror in literature based on a deeper cosmic and evolutionary vision: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." His novel evolutionary perspective caught on later with modern-day writers like Dean Koontz, Stephen King, etc. because it was imaginatively compatible with the unconscious experience of modern electric society. As Marshall McLuhan described in Understanding Media: "With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no loner depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism." When electricity fails, as we experienced a few years ago during the blackout in Ontario, our nerves begin to fail. The dangerous potential for the human being of the electric age is to regress into a catatonic, tribal shellshock described by McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy: "unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once moved into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence."

The Point of Confession

I was reading Heart-Shaped Box earlier, admitting as I was reading that I didn't possess a half-decent command of a technical poetic vocabulary to describe the cadences of prose. Are there any critics who have written about the pulse of a sentence, or a paragraph, or a chapter, or a section? Who has described - a writer - about the rhetorical significance of a run-on sentence, or vernacular speech, or dashes, or commas, or epigraphs, or section titles, or picto-graphic icons spread across a book, like the drawing of a heart in Heart-Shaped Box with each section number etched into its own heart?

Who can I read to understand better?

Heart-Broken

Just pausing, while I read Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, to try and put something thoughful into writing about this strange book.

When I was a university student - just a few months ago - it was easier taking that first brazen step and translating a single, or jumble of thoughts from my mind into words on the page. Today, I miss the attention of the teacher and classroom - the crowds of diverse people and opinions - where someone paid attention to what I had to say or write about a poem, novel, short story, or theory even if they didn't share my perspective, opinion or bias. I want to write something great and inspired about the books I read, like Heart-Shaped Box, but in the end I come home to my rented room after work to read as escape from the "demonic, disorderly, and depressing" vexations of making a living, to recover from being run downhill every day. I realize University was my Eden: I can't go back, I can only remember.

I want to write something about Heart-Shaped Box but I can't seem to pull my thoughts together without a literary audience.

Bat Out of Hell

Just a short update for now:

No joke . . . there's a bat in the house where I live. After arriving home from work tonight, I was notified by my soon-to-be-departing fellow tenant of today's mid-day appearance of the terrorizing bat in the house. The result: my bedroom door is firmly closed and locked, just to be sure. I have a leftover cup or two of coffee, water and orange juice, as well as a stash of two unopened bags of chips - Sweet Chili Heat and Black Pepper Jack - which I purposely left in a closet in my room, for the night.

As for books: tonight, I'm finishing John Webster's The White Devil. Tomorrow, I pick up my long awaited copy of Stephen King's son, Joe Hill's first novel, Heart-Shaped Box. And yesterday, I was reading Austin Clarke's The Question.

Addendum: I found the bat in the upstairs washroom near to my room, by accident. Just a little thing. Opened the downstairs door, caught the bat in a towel and tossed the towel outside. Good riddance.

The Deadly Percheron

After months of positioning my laptop at or above head-level, precipitously on dressers, or cardboard boxes or miscellaneous objects, near the window in my room, just to tap into the free neighbourhood wireless broadband signal, I discover I can sit with my computer, back to the window by the edge of my bed, and still pick up the signal. The trade off: I couldn't watch the movie The Illusionist, which I had borrowed from my fiancée, because the volume of dialogue plays too low to hear capably with some DVDs on this computer. I was disappointed severely, considering I watched Salton Sea a few weeks ago without any troubles from the audio department.

I haven't slept tonight but I kept awake reading John Franklin Bardin's 1946 novel, The Deadly Percheron, from start to finish. The day before, I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men after a week's worth of time. What's next? Perhaps a Mario Puzo novel.