Books: Dogs of varying ages attempt to learn tricks of diverse vintage.

The origin-story of Peter Straub's latest novel, A Dark Matter, can be profitably compared to the origin story of Stephen King's latest novel, The Dome.

King's "new" book is actual a manuscript from the '70s that he decided to dust off, unaware that its basic premise was the central gag of The Simpsons Movie. Despite King's interest in format exploration (from the serial publication of The Green Mile to pioneer efforts at electronic publishing), there's something telling that he's pushing 30-year-old work out now, and that sits just fine with everybody. It seems appropriate, fitting even for an author who famously revisited his own masterworks again and again, who dredged up his early career nom de plume to produce a work two decades later.

By contrast, Straub's new novel owes a debt to the work of Brian Evenson, a genre warping author whose sadly under-recognized work sits at the weird intersection of pulp and experimental art. And I don't mean this in some "I saw some similarities" clever critic way: Straub's introduction not only thanks Evenson for the inspiration, but mentions that one specific scene in the novel is modeled off a scene in Evenson's own The Open Curtain.

When King needs inspiration, he looks back. When Straub needs inspiration he finds it in the work of a guy who not only wrote one of the definitive texts on the mindbending prose of Robert Coover, but who also contributed a story to a collection of stories that takes place in the Halo game universe.

This is not to say that one approach is necessarily better than the other. In fact, there's a sort of quality assurance that comes with King's approach. Like a top level athlete, King has perfected his performance in a highly specific and limited field. The pleasure of King is the pleasure of knowing that you're in the hands of a master, and that mastery is predicated on the idea of him doing the very thing he's mastered. When I was young, I remember people who weren't particularly into boxing making jokes about how upset they would be if they bought the pay-per-view Tyson fight and Tyson ended it in a minute and some change. But these were the folks who never bought in to a fight. The people who paid to see Tyson do his thing never complained. That was the point of seeing Tyson. Reading King's like that.

Straub's something different. The pleasure of reading Straub is the pleasure of watching a master restlessly push himself to find the limits of his own talent. Straub's interest in the New Weird, that liminal genre of fantasy and postmodern lit, which Straub dubbed "the New Horror" in a recent anthology he edited, has kept him on the vanguard of his chosen field, but that comes with a price. King's like early career Tyson: the result is rarely in doubt. Struab's newest work is more like a tightrope act. It requires skill and training and the careful dexterity of a master, but it still courts disaster. And whatever the outcome, it's interesting.

I wish I could say that A Dark Matter was a triumph, but it's more interesting than successful.

Yet another autopsy of the '60s, A Dark Matter plays with shades of understanding. It's a tragedy about the inability to communicate wearing the Halloween mask of a horror novel. At its core is story of a group of friends who, in their youth, were pulled into the orbit of a somewhat sinister, but mostly pathetic guru. Their cult of personality disintegrated when a black magic ritual when awry and one of their number died in the process. The novel follows the one friend who didn't attend the ceremony - now an adult who made his fame and fortune writing a thinly veiled fictional treatment of the event - as he tries to piece together what actually happened that day.

The curious thing about A Dark Matter is that is isn't exactly Rashmon-like: Nobody disagrees about the most significant details of the event, so the event in question is never really a mystery. (To be fair, Rashmon isn't very Rashmon-like either - like the term "Kafkaesque," which is used when things are Orwellean, the adjectival form of the proper noun has proved more useful in day-to-day conversation and has long since overwhelmed the details of the real; which is, perhaps, the most Rashmon-like thing about Rashmon.) The result is a spiral narrative structure. With each retelling, the events of the disastrous ceremony are fleshed out and told with greater nuance or given a slightly different spin. The pattern is pleasurable, but the major downside is that there's no dramatic tension. We know, from the start, who survived, what happened, and who paid for it. It's a novel that begins by telling you exactly how it all ends.

The spiral structure of A Dark Matter is a bold move. It basically throws down the gauntlet. It disarms the most obvious and powerful weapon a genre writer's got in his arsenal: plot. Sadly, it's a bold move that Straub can't quite pull off. Wrapped in the familiar trappings of a "what happened" '60s tale, the narrative innovation seems oddly out of place; like a 2D movie shoehorned into 3D, the novel feels like a story he had on hand that he then forced into the this curious structure.

Still the spectacle of a master who could have phoned it in trying a trick that undermines one of his greatest strengths is bracing. It's the kind of no-net risk taking that should be encouraged. By incorporating the innovations of the New Weird, and doing so on such a broad and deep level, Straub hits the reset button on his writing development. He reverts back to novice level and pulls off a noteworthy debut. Is it polished, perfect? Far from it. But it has the energy of an explorer behind it. It's a hell of a trick.

Ironically, after forty years of writing, Straub's become a new voice to watch.

By contrast, Sarah Langan's Audrey's Door is firmly in the young novelist's wheelhouse. Returning to the surrealistic supernaturalism of her debut novel, The Keeper, Langan's latest welds a sympathetic drama of damaged, haunted losers to a haunted house plot heavily influenced by landmark works like Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion. There's also hints of Farris's And Then We Came to the End and even satiric evocations of the shallow tropes of post-Sex in the City chick lit.

In this case, the titular heroine, scarred by the insanity of her alternately smothering and negligent madwoman mother, attempts to create a new life in Manhattan. Her reinvention leads her to a eccentric high-rise apartment with a sinister secret. The building, designed by a demon-haunted insane genius, is a conduit for Lovecraft-ish menaces from beyond, and Audrey appears to be the key to unleashing this unnameable horror on the world.

The joy of Aubrey's Door comes chiefly in Langan's specific mastery of a style of horror all her own. Langan's feeling for her protags, the attention she lavishes on the details of their inner lives, is unique among modern horror authors. Often horror characterization is a matter of making characters sympathetic enough to give the horrors that descend upon them some sharpness. Langan, by contrast, relies on the unlikely proposition that a human being, rendered with sufficient honesty, will always become a dramatic locus of sympathy because they will seem alive, and all humans would rather see life prevail over death. Langan's characters don't need to be likable, just real. The confidence Langan places in the empathic capacity is the single greatest act of respect for fans that you'll find in genre lit - any genre - today.

Admittedly, there is a nearly oppressive air of familiarity here. Langan's moved much of the action to an urban setting, but she can't resist a long interlude in a recession ravaged Midwest town that resembles the struggling small towns of her first two works. This interlude serves as an odd allegory for the artistic project of the book; Langan is ready to move on, but still has to wrestle with the material that so strongly defined her early voice. (The mother/daughter relationship at the core of the book is another handy allegory for the creative tug-of-war being worked out in these pages.) There's a familiar shagginess to the end. Endings are the hardest things to pull off and a particular weakness of Langan's, though she gets credit for daring something completely new to her novelistic work: a (qualified) happy ending.

Langan dares less than Straub does with his book, but she gains more from her less ambitious bet. Fans of Langan's previous novels, especially The Keeper, will find much to dig here. Audrey's Door won the Stoker, and with good cause. Still, there's a nervousness about the book that suggests Langan's impatience with her own tools.

With the next novel, I hope Langan pulls a Straub.

Books: We've got belle lettres comin' out the wazoo.

Fellow LoTT-D member and Lawng Islinder Vince Liaguno, of Slasher Speak fame, has posted a link to a neato article by long-time ANTSS fave: the lovely and talented Sarah Langan (shown above). Langan is the author of The Keeper and The Missing. The title of her essay, though less darkly evocative than her novel titles, has the advantage of being extremely straightforward: "Why I Write Horror".

Here's some highlights.

Langan on her adoring public:

Since I began publishing fiction, a pattern has emerged. I'm asked one question above all others, and it happens at readings, at NYU where I go to school for Environmental Science, and when I visit my boyfriend's family in Maryland. Friends and strangers alike narrow their eyes when they learn what my book is about. They wonder if I'm playing a practical joke. Then they ask: Why do you write horror? What they really mean is: Are you mental or something?

Some find my subject matter titillating, but not for the reasons I'd like. I once dated a man who was disappointed to discover that my apartment wasn't filled with candles and S&M sex toys. I was a horror writer, after all; wasn't I supposed to be kinky? And if I wasn't kinky, then why was I slumming in a genre scaffolded by the appetites of freaks?

My first novel was recently published. For a long time I wasn't able to sell it. During those years that I was papering my walls with rejection slips, I was young, single, a graduate of Columbia University's M.F.A. program, and living in New York. Back then, everybody wanted to be the next Candace Bushnell or Melissa Bank. Agents I queried, when they were kind enough to reply, asked: Why are you writing this stuff? Do you have anything satiric or quirky, about dating?

Langan on the use of monsters:

When it works, horror gets as close to the veins of our emotions as any piece of literature is able. The monsters do not exist to frighten us, but to soothe us. Their existence reassures us that we are reading fiction. We've got a lifeline, in case the characters with which we are identifying drag us too far into uncomfortable emotional terrain. Our characters' screams are our own screams, but when we are done, we can relax, because none of it was real, right? Except, we can't stop thinking about the friends we met in those books. We hope that long after the stories ended, they lived happy lives. We hope they are okay. We hope we're okay, too.

As can be expected from Langan, it is good and thoughtful stuff.

But, wait! There's more!

Langan isn't the only person 'round here with the literary skills that pay the bills. Nosiree Bob! ANTSS is in the near-epileptic throws of a literary contest of titanic, nay, cataclysmic, nay, really big proportions! For those not in the know, get with the program by reading yesterday's post.

Now we've already got a couple of posts in, including one from lovely and talented Absinthe, the blogger extraordinaire behind Gloomy Sunday (see sidebar), that is too good to keep to myself (even though it technically isn't a limerick).

Screamers and Screamettes, I present Absinthe's positively Horacean "Ode to Dawn of the Dead."

I once knew a girl named Fran
She got knocked up one day and then ran
Then the dead came to life
Oh the horror and the strife
And away they went to the shopping center
where they set up house and were much better
Killing zombies with ease by the twos and the threes
Just as cool as you please
Then Roger who had tagged on for the ride - oh my he forgot his bag
Got stuck in the truck with a zombie bad luck
Bitten in the leg
He then had to beg
Please don't resist if I should happen to persist
Just shoot me and be done
Then go and have some fun
Peter agreed
And then did the deed
Then the bikers appeared
And did exactly what they all feared
They ran amok and had very good luck
Stephen got shot right on the spot
Then forgot about the masses of rot
And quickly became zombie chow
Right there in the elevator - wow!
Fran and Peter alone, now on their own, knew that they were prone
So away did they fly so they would not die, waving bye in the sky so high
Onwards they go - where we don't know
Hopefully to some place better
Where they will not fetter
And maybe one day will get a red setter

Two words, my friends: Awe. Some.

Don't be left out of this literary revolution! The contest ends next Wednesday, folks. Chop chop! These limericks ain't going to write themselves!

Books: Missing around.

Et tu, Langan? A zombie story? Is that what we've come to?

Sigh.

Regular readers might remember my gushing review of The Keeper, the debut novel of Sarah Langan. That novel told the tale of the ghost of Susan Marley and the grim fate of Bedford, the blue-collar Maine village that ends up on the business end of her spectral wrath. Langan's ability to intertwine working class desperation with lyrical Gothicism made that first novel one of AANTS' best reads last year.

For her second book, a sequel of sorts to The Keeper, Langan returns to the darkened woods of Maine. This time, the story takes place in Corpus Christi, the affluent hamlet neighboring the now mostly abandoned Bedford. While Bedford's fortunes declined with the retreat of industry, Corpus Christi's hospital became one of the nation's foremost cancer research centers. The influx of grant money and affluent doctors kept Corpus Christi yuppie while Bedford rotted. Before the action begins proper, we learn that the events of The Keeper have turned Bedford into a ghost town. Nobody outside Bedford knows about the sinister events surrounding the death and unlife of Susan Marley, but the lingering environmental fallout of the chemical fire that closed The Keeper is enough to keep most folks away.

Into the ghost town goes a class of school children on a fieldtrip. Seriously. The school approved a field trip into what would rank as America's most famous superfund site. One of the boys on the trip uncovers the remains of some of the Bedford incident's victims. He's quickly infected with a bizarre disease that slowly begins changing him and those he comes into contact with into ravenous cannibals.

It's basically your standard zombie holocaust scenario.

That's not to say that Langan phones the story in. In an unusual twist, the infected aren't utterly mindless. They can talk and communicate with one another. The disease organizes them into a hive-like system with one zombie queen at the top. They can plan and practice deception. And, strangely, they seem capable of limited telepathy. There's also intimations that the virus is an ancient intelligence that's been hunting humans for centuries. Still, despite these innovations, mostly what the infected do is roam the town of Corpus Christi looking for people-meat to chew on.

Despite the reliance on the now relentlessly over-flogged zombie story and its clichés, Langan grew more ambitious with this book. The cast of characters seems larger, but Langan manages her efficient characterizations without losing the focus of the plot or relying heavily on stock characters. Her plot rolls along at a greater clip; Langan trades in the Gothic slow burn for something more like the ever tightening downward spiral of an action/horror tale.

These developments act as much needed counterbalances to the tiredness of the central zombie concept. They also help the reader ignore the confusion that comes from the massive retcon that must be done to shoehorn the Marley ghost story into the new zombie virus framework. Marley wasn't a ghost? She was a psychic zombie? Then why didn't she act like it? Oh well. I think both books would have been better served if they'd just been treated as separate stories.

The Missing isn't a bad book. If you've already read The Keeper and want more of Langan's literate and smart horror, then this is a worthy follow up. If you haven't read The Keeper yet, that's really the place you'll want to start.

Book: Dreaming my life away.

The blurbs on book jackets are almost universally a load of crap. Like some currency with an exchange rate that sucks like a black hole, these plugs are exchanged between authors, agents, and publishers as the smallest denomination of favor, but the value for those wishing to translate them into something useable outside that small circle is virtually nil. Funny thing about this is that I know all this (and now you do too, if you didn't before) and, yet, I can still be dragged into purchasing a book on the basis of blurbs. Though I know on some objective level this is somewhat like thinking you're making out in a deal where you knowingly exchange a fiver for a twenty so poorly counterfeited that it will fool no one, I can't help but be intrigued when the right combo of authors appears on a book, singing the books praises in the generic and shopworn terms otherwise talented wordsmiths dust off for these things. And that's what usually gets me: not what the blurbing authors say, but the combo of authors who have thrown in their semi-compulsorily two cents. Did the publisher go for the shock and awe approach, assembling a sort of Justice League of genre all-stars to overwhelm the consumer? Sometimes authors find a single, famous voice to bestow its blessing on the book. This gives the enterprise an air of ceremony: the legend is passing on the torch. My favorite strategy, or at least the one that makes me actually pay attention and money, involves finding an unusual mix of folks. This suggests that work is complex, appeals to multiple groups, has a little something for everybody.

This is the strategy behind the blurbs on Sarah Langan's debut horror novel The Keeper. The front cover of the mass market paperback from Harper Torch ($6.99) sports a blurb from genre-stalwart Peter Straub, letting horror novel regulars know the new girl's bona fides check out. Meanwhile, on the back, we get indie publishing icon and McSweeney art crowd approved Kelly Link, letting the hipper-than-thou crowd know that it will be okay to be seen with this book even though it isn't a $16 trade paper back and tends to be (gulp) earnest in its efforts to entertain and scare.

In this case, I'm glad I was a sucker. Langan's debut delivers the goods.

The Keeper centers on the town of Bedford, Maine. Bedford has seen better days. The paper mills that once provided the town with a steady source of revenue have shut down. People are out of work. The town is decaying under the weight of this economic draught. To make matters worse, the abandoned mills are toxic disasters, poisoning the forests surrounding Bedford. Facing the slow disintegration of their homes, the residents of Bedford are all feeling the strain of living in a town with no future. The kids dream of escape or simply don't think about the future at all. The adults drink, feud, and pretend their world isn't dying. The misery seems to even taint the weather: Bedford's seasonal rains, which settle in like a Biblical judgment, last for weeks.

To make things worse, the town is host to a frightening and spectral girl whom many believe is a witch. The mute Susan Marley, haunted and insane, stalks through the streets of the town. She's watching and waiting. The town's residents avoid her during the day (exceptin' those men who use the disturbed Susan as an easy lay) only to find that, at night, she finds them in their dreams. These dreams get worse as the flooding rains come and seal the town off from the outside world. The town's slumber becomes increasingly disturbed by nightmarish and apocalyptic visions that warn of a doom coming to Bedford, something even the strongest of them will be powerless to stop. And, when Susan dies in a bizarre accident, the horrible meaning of these dreams becomes clear.

Langan's debut is a genuinely involving portrait of decaying small town America that, even when the supernatural spookshow begins, never loses it emotional realism: depicting with psychological astuteness the fear, guilt, and horror of a way of life in decline. The broad canvas of Langan's sprawling book allows her to sketch vivid portraits of Bedford's residents. We see Susan's mother and sister, paralyzed by the past they share with their otherworldly family member. The inner lives of teens, single mothers, drunks, cops, eccentrics, and everyday working folks are all sketched with careful attention. And the horrors, when they begin to pile on in earnest, come with the dreamlike concreteness of a particularly grim surrealist canvass.

Though her New England setting is well-trodden ground, Langan's novel looks further back than fellow Northeastern horror novelists Lovecraft and King. Instead, Langan taps a deeper source of American horror. She evokes the ancient specters of blood-guilt, the fear of being accursed in a way so primal that your own actions are irrelevant. This is mainstream horror as Nathaniel Hawthorne would have delivered it, though Langan takes that author's witch-haunted New England and injects into its landscape a distinctly modern horror aesthetics.

Langan's fine eye for characterizations sometimes gets the better of her, leading to initial chapters that sometimes seem directionless, fussy, or overly detailed – including at least one incident involving a major scare that is never sufficiently explained in anything that follows. However, when it is time to kick the story into high-gear, Langan's prose becomes focused, taut, precise, and vicious, showing that the earlier meandering was an aesthetic mistake, and not the product of any limitation on the writer's part.

Langan's web site informs me that her next novel with take place in the same Bedford setting as The Keeper. I, for one, am looking forward to revisiting those haunted, poisoned forests.

For a taste of Langan's prose, you can check out the handful of short stories posted on her site.