Thoughts on "Interior Darkness" by Peter Straub

For many readers, Peter Straub is to horror fiction what John le Carré is to spy fiction: the genre’s greatest, most ambitious, writer, one who deepens and enriches an often-disdained literature with talent, skill and daring vision. Straub takes the horror genre’s old tropes and enlivens them, turns them inside out and upside down without ever demeaning them. He not only makes them seem new, he makes them new. Peter Straub’s eighteen novels may vary, inevitably, in their success, but his energy, intelligence, and ambition are always on display.

When I finished reading his classic Ghost Story in 1980, I knew I’d actually read a good book--enormously entertaining but written in a high literary style, its roots deep in American and world literature. It worked on multiple levels, as college professors like to say. At the time, I firmly believed in that ten-foot high, three-foot thick wall between art and entertainment, between literature and genre fiction. Ghost Story cracked that wall, made it crumble. I was driven to press it into the hands of everyone I knew, especially sniffy reactionary skeptics: “Oh, that stuff? That’s junk!”

But they were wrong then. And they’re wrong now.

There is one area, however, where I dissent from Straub’s other admirers. It’s commonly said among horror fans that the best stuff is found in short fiction. I believe that can be said of Straub’s work: Most of his best work is in his novellas and stories.

To demonstrate my thesis, I happily point you to his latest collection, Interior Darkness: Selected Stories.

Interior Darkness is a gift, a sampler not only for Straub’s longtime admirers, but also for readers who may be new to—or still suspicious of—the horror genre.

Interior Darkness draws from all of Straub’s collections over the years, starting with Houses Without Doors (1991) and ending with The Juniper Tree and Other Stories (2010).

I read most of the stories when they first appeared. The second and third time through brought more rewards, delight streaming after delight. Though I knew them, many felt new to me, bursting and bristling with surprises I’d missed the first time through.

Interior Darkness opens with the classic “Blue Rose,” a hidden room in the Straub literary universe that began with his award-winning suspense novel Koko. It’s a harrowing tale of sibling cruelty that is both wrenching and beautiful as Straub leads us through the surreal hallways of family abuse, all the way up to a very grim attic.

Also exceptional is “The Juniper Tree,” about a young boy in the 1950s who encounters evil in the local movie house while trying escape a miserable home life, a kind of No Exit scenario.

“The Buffalo Hunter” (probably my favorite) is a rich compelling portrait of a lonely man’s mind crumbling away as the border between the pulp novels he reads and the dreary world he lives in starts melting away, causing him to sink into decadent infantilism, involving, among many strange things, baby bottles.

“A Short Guide to the City” another longtime favorite, remains one of the most formally daring stories I’ve ever read as Straub refashions a typical Chamber of Commerce tour guide, turning it from boosterism into a brooding atmospheric portrait a Midwestern city sinking into decline as it suffers under the terror of a serial killer.

Too much is going on in Interior Darkness to capture it all in this pixillated transitory space. Straub writes in a strong high literary style, rich with metaphors, allusions and elaborate, often mystifying, scenarios. The tendency toward sentimentality I find in some of his novels is happily, to me at least, missing here.

Among the strangest tales is “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” a very black comedy about a double team of professional hit men whose ambitions extend beyond doing their job and collecting their fee. As one of their clients discovers to his ruin, there really is no getting away with murder. It’s the funniest story in the collection.

Straub draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including Henry James (for whom he’s had a lifelong passion.) “Ashputtle” seems inspired, in part, by Charlotte Gilman’s classic “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Music is also a major fount of inspiration, especially blues and jazz, captured in such excellent tales as “Pork Pie Hat” and “Little Red’s Tango,” both dealing with lost young men seeking to plumb the mysteries of creative passion, both their own and that of the mysterious musicians they love.

Straub’s portrayal of the spirit world—the place we glimpse only through the cracks—is more allusive and indirect than most other horror writers. The Beyond rarely shows its scorched face, but peers from under the thin ice upon which we all skate. Sometimes it eats its characters from within, enveloping them in smoldering decadence and bitter isolation. (Bunting, the protagonist in “The Buffalo Hunter” seems especially gripped by these forces.)

Of course, not all the stories succeed. “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” a Lovecraftian tale set on in the Amazon Basin remains static and unsatisfying despite its humid jungle atmosphere, and several “bridge” tales seem to have little effect.

But these small matters fail to dent the overall power of this collection. This is a worthy monument to Peter Straub’s work. It is so far and by far, the best new book I’ve read this year.

Thomas Burchfield’s latest novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up, due later this year. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and the upcoming Dracula: A Tale of Power. (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work online at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Thoughts on "Perdido: A Fragment " by Peter Straub

Imagine you find the remains of a shattered window on the sidewalk outside your door. One shard in particular intrigues you, a large trapezoid. It draws your eye as would a strange precious jewel. Pick it up easy, because it’s sharp. Ah, there’s your reflection, but no details. It’s not a mirror backed with reflective material, just a piece of broken glass. You should be able to see right through, say to the sidewalk you stand on. Your hand starts to tremble. Because instead of sidewalk, you see another world bound by that fragment, neither a view of the world in front of nor a reflection of the world behind you.  The fragment is a portal, like the broken lens of a camera staring into part of another world. You shudder with fear and sorrow at the wrongness of it.

You might get that feeling, as I did, from Peter Straub’s Peridido: a Fragment, (Subterranean Press, 2015), a slender but dense and atmospheric excerpt from a novel that was originally written and then left to lie in 2001.

We meet Carver and his wife, Margie, as they’re climbing toward Perdido, a resort located high and deep in the rugged mountains of Norway. The vacation was suggested to them by a periodontal friend of Carver’s, Silsbee, a man whom Margie despises. Perdido, he promises, is a resort like no other, “a place for people who don’t mind the unexpected.” The idea sounds intriguing to Carver, but almost revolting to Margie.

But as they reach their destination and start their long climb up the mountain, their attitudes toward their strange vacation reverse as Margie almost flies up the mountainside, leaving her husband behind. Their vacation has just begun. And a traumatic one it will be.

From here, we discover that we’re being told this story at one remove, years later, by their son, who seeks to uncover the truth of what happened to his parents on their strange journey that drove them apart and made them into such different people when they finally came home, their marriage broken for good, both of them made strangers to him as well.

What remains is chilling, riveting and intriguing. Our glimpse of the Perdido resort shows a ghostly ruin, wreathed in eerie fog, an act of epic seduction into a malicious warped reality.

There are many questions raised and left unanswered: the details of a game called “Murder Among Friends,” for one. And just who is Silsbee and why does there seem to be two of him? An author’s natural indecision in the early stages of creation? Or something more intriguing. And disturbing.

In an afterword, Straub explains how the idea for Perdido emerged from a dream. And.that he abandoned the project once he realized it might turn into “a kind of metafictional whimsy” he felt disinclined to pursue. Perhaps some post-modern game, amusing, even hilarious, the first read through, but as thin as tissue on reflection, the kind of book that reads like plastic wrap when read again, no new secrets to find.

Still, like anything from this master of modern terror, the author of the indomitable Ghost Story, it you makes you wonder what lies outside everyday vision. It makes you want to wander beyond what you know. To reach through that fragment of broken window.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Strong Opinion

I guess I won’t be moving into that chateau on Lake Como next door to George Clooney anytime soon.

I mean, I’d sure love to have genre writer James Patterson’s money. But I doubt I’d enjoy having to keep up his fertility rate. When I think about his huge output, I hearken back to my early years spent lugging fifty-pound boxes of paper around San Francisco law firms. O simple joys of youth!

Those of you who read The New York Times may have seen the article last week describing the new paradigm for ultra-super-bestselling genre authors like Patterson. Nowadays, writers are now being pressed to produce—I might not call it writing, precisely—two books a year. Plus short stories.

“The culture is a great big hungry maw,” said Lisa Scottoline, another mega-best-selling thriller writer, “and you have to feed it.”

(Full disclosure: I haven’t read either Mr. Patterson’s or Ms. Scottoline’s work.)

This requirement is said to be a feature of the e-book era. With readers now able to download anything, anytime they want, it’s believed that an author has to stay in the reading public’s pupil 24/7. This is based on the theory of signal-to-noise ratio, which, in a certain frame, makes a good deal of sense, at least economically.

This has led me to think again about what kind of readers I want to reach.

Most habitual genre fiction readers want escape, clean and simple. Perhaps they’ll tolerate a thematic nod to their value systems, whether “conservative” or “liberal,” and some pop-psychobabble, but beyond that, the vast majority of genre fiction readers want nothing thematically challenging, innovative, or overly offbeat, no matter how entertaining it might otherwise be.

Then, there is an apparent minority of picky readers, like me. As someone said to me, there’s reading to escape and there’s reading to grow. And while I prefer novels that take me into other worlds, I like it when the journey not only alters my sight and gives me new perspectives, it illuminates the world I’m in now, that touches on the “human condition.” I read to both grow and be entertained.

Most genre novels and stories aren’t nearly so ambitious as to bridge those two landfalls, but a remarkable number can. I count John le Carrê, Peter Straub, among others, as examples. It takes time to write books like these. That’s the table I want to sit at as a writer. And so, I can’t hope to write two books a year. At least good ones, as I understand them.

Back in the old days, of paperback originals and hardcover novels that would made their real big score in paperback editions, genre masters like Rex Stout and Luke Short would craft a book a year, maybe two if they were feeling frisky or the butcher was giving them the hairy eyeball. Maybe they weren’t Hammett-level innovators, but they were unmistakably talented, gifted writers, who nevertheless, must have grown bored churning out the same book with the same formula or characters year after year.

Believe me, at times, I can hear Rex Stout’s fingers falling like a lead hammer on the typewriter keys and his heavy sighs as he types “The doorbell rang” for the one-thousandth time; I can sense when the champagne rapport between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin loses its fizz; or I’m almost sure that Stout used almost the exact same mystery plot ten books ago, except the murder weapon was a pitchfork instead of a harpoon and . . .  well . . . .

After a while, an understanding develops. No writer—literary or genre--writes only good books. All my favorite writers have written novels that fall short for me.

One critic—I think a New Yorker writer--recently wrote that when we say we love a writer, what we mean is that we love, at most, fifty percent of his work. So long as you sense an author’s always striving to be his Best Self, that other fifty percent--well, no one’s a genius all the time and those valleys can make the peaks look all the grander. And if that fifty percent dross starts drifting toward ninety, you gently close the door and search elsewhere.

Snobby as I am, I’m also a literary anarchist. By this I mean, I can like anything . . . so long as it’s good, whether it’s the best Luke Short western or the eye of Vladimir Nabokov’s young poet opening to the world while gazing out over 1930s Berlin. The reality is that there are more good books than I will ever be able to read.

So, I’m wondering, just what is it that fans of Mr. Patterson and Ms. Scottoline expect to get with their high productivity demands? I’m not talking about literature, either. Having to grind out two full novels a year, means there’s hardly enough time or space for craft or professionalism. Whether you’re Lee Child or Thomas Pynchon, it takes time to write a decent book. Followed by a nice vacation.

Remember the hubbub over the length of time George R.R. Martin took to finish his latest Song of Ice and Fire epic, Dance of Thrones? Some of Martin’s “fans” were--no “upset” is too mild a word—pissed off with scalding, flaming vomit that the next book had failed to be completed by their timetable. “We demand that you pander to us! We demand a stinking, unreadable tower of shit!”

Neil Gaiman was right: “George Martin is not your bitch!” I second that motion, as do most of us writers. The only sin is writing lazily, writing badly (and releasing it), writing like you don’t care, writing to keep your “fans” from condemning you on Facebook.

Now, James Patterson fanboy, come sit on my knee so ol’ Grandpa can dispense some advice: You know, while waiting a year or so for Mr. Patterson to write and publish another novel, why don’t you take a breath, broaden the ol’ horizons and read some other genre writers?

There are plenty of worthwhile books worth your time. I will even boldly suggest you read my (IPPY prizewinning) Dragon’s Ark, while you wait for Mr. Patterson to write a good book. I mean that’s what you really want, isn’t it? A good James Patterson book?

I know I don’t want, for example, a bad Peter Straub book. I know that if I start sleeping on the doorstep of his Manhattan brownstone and fire-bombing his Twitter account with demands for Ghost Story XXII, he’d be well within his right to tell me to go have airborne relations with rolling holed pastry.

I don’t say this because I worship the dust around Mr. Straub’s feet. I say this because I do what he does. And it’s hard to do well. I can do it badly, I can publish a napkin a day, but I don’t want to and the kind of readers I want—those fussy readers--don’t want me to either. They’ll want the best I have to give and that’s what I’ll try to do, even though I fully know I won’t always be able to.

I took four years to write (IPPY Award Winning) Dragon’s Ark. I’m first to admit that’s too much time for such a book. Happily, I’ve absorbed the lessons I learned so that my next book Butchertown, started in August of last year, is galloping like a thoroughbred and should be out by the end of this year—a little more than a year and, even more importantly, done with my very best effort.

While you’re waiting, look at that long list of writers on the side of this page. They’re good writers, all of them. Some of them are Olympian highbrows, some of them first-rate entertainers, writing artful, sophisticated tales of adventure, suspense, and hair-raising horror and thrills. New or old, they deserve your valuable reading time. There’s no hurry. You’ll never read all their work and you don’t need to.

As for James Patterson and Lisa Scottoline, I hope they have time to enjoy their chateaus, wherever they are.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.