Today marks the debut of another new feature here at Macabre Republic. Anatomy of a Weird Tale (vs. the more review-oriented Short Story Spotlight) delves into literary analysis of standout works of contemporary weird fiction. First up, a 2007 novelette reprinted in last year’s Lovecraft Unbound anthology: Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Houses Under the Sea,” whose story of a bizarre religious cult and monstrous underwater gods riffs brilliantly on the classic Mythos work “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”
Kiernan shifts the setting from remote and moldering Innsmouth, Massachusetts, to the modern, everyday world of left-coast California. Offering no mere pastiche of Lovecraft’s oftentimes-unwieldy prose, Kiernan also performs a stylistic makeover. Boxy, expository paragraphs give way to lines of almost poetic quality. For instance, Kiernan employs the device of anaphora throughout, via the anonymous narrator’s recurring “I close my eyes, and...” construction. The various completions of such lines all involve the narrator’s ex-lover Jacova Angevine, a former Berkeley professor expelled from academia due to her esoteric research interests. Jacova is now presumed dead; as the prophetic head of the Open Door of Night cult (with its return-to-the-sea creed), she led her followers into seeming mass suicide in Monterey Bay. The fact that the narrator can’t help but see her whenever he closes his eyes signals the extent to which Jacova haunts his memories, his dreams.
The narrator realizes that Jacova has become “my ghost, my private haunting” (163), and labels his own narrative as a “ghost story” (179) [in fact, Kiernan’s scenes of an enigmatic female lover gazing raptly out of a bedroom window form striking parallels to Peter Straub’s Ghost Story]. Citing a line he attributes to Joseph Campbell—“Draw a circle around a stone and the stone will become an incarnation of mystery”—the narrator writes that Jacova had “drawn a circle about herself” (183), and (thanks to their short-lived affair) around him as well. Jacova has bewitched him, figuratively speaking, and now he struggles to make sense of her weird beliefs and endeavors. His recollections of the suddenly-infamous figure are disordered, fragmented: “All these divided moments, disconnected, or connected in so many different ways, that I’ll never be able to pull them apart and find a coherent narrative. That’s my folly, my conceit, that I can make a mere story of what has happened” (162).
Just because the narrator’s memories of Jacova are disjointed, though, does not mean that Kiernan’s novelette suffers from a haphazard structure. On the contrary, “Houses Under the Sea” is expertly plotted, the details of its storyline parceled out so as to instill curiosity and build suspense. The reader, for example, wonders how Jacova got those “puckered, circular scars” (163) trailing down her back—wounds reminiscent of the markings left by a tentacle’s suckers. Similarly, Kiernan only gradually reveals the contents of the videotape (underwater footage captured by a remote-operated vehicle in “the black abyss of Monterey Canyon” [161]) that the narrator admittedly can’t bear to watch to its very end again. Kiernan proves a master of abeyance, of forcing readers to hold their collective breaths as she holds back on revelation. Consider the scene where the narrator decides to go back and investigate “the warehouse become a temple to half-remembered gods become a crime scene” (180):
I stood in the doorway a moment or two, thinking of hungry rats and drunken bums, delirious crack addicts wielding lead pipes, the webs of poisonous spiders. Then I took a deep breath and stepped across the threshold, out of the shadows and into a more decided blackness, a more definitive chill, and all those mundane threats dissolved. Everything dropped from my mind except Jacova Angevine, and her followers (if that’s what you’d call them) dressed all in white, and the thing I’d seen on the altar the one time I’d come here when this had been a temple of the Open Door of Night. (181)
From here the narrator flashes back to a discussion he’d had with Jacova regarding the hideousness of the idol, but specific description of what the carving represented is withheld until later in the warehouse scene. In the meantime, the narrator moves deeper into the ominous building. He views the spot on the floor where Jacova had drawn her ritualistic diagram, “the lines that she believed would form a bridge, a conduit” (183). The drawing could be interpreted as “a yantra. A labyrinth. A writhing tangled mass of sea creatures straining for a distant black sun. Hindi and Mayan and Chinook symbols. The precise contour lines of a topographic map of Monterey Canyon. Each of these things and all of these things, simultaneously” (184). Then suddenly the narrator hears scuffling behind him, and turns to find a strange child (whose dialogue suggests she is a young version of Jacova), a revenant-like figure with “barnacles and sea lice nestled in the raw flesh of her palm” (186). As the two converse, the narrator hears a wet, dragging sound off in the shadows and thinks of the “thing from the altar” in explicit detail: “Jacova’s Mother Hydra, that corrupt and bloated Madonna of the abyss, its tentacles and anemone tendrils and black, bulging squid eyes, the tubeworm proboscis snaking from one of the holes where its face should have been.”
The narrator escapes unscathed but determines soon thereafter to watch the videotape to its feared conclusion (since now he has “no reasonable excuse for looking away, because there can’t be anything left that’s more terrible than what has come before” [187]). First, he tells of the submersible’s recording of a stone monolith that has to be a cultural artifact: its carvings “cannot be the result of any natural geological or biological process.” Then he spies what he at first had mistaken for a piece of broken statue but is in fact that body of Jacova at the bottom of the sea: “She opens her eyes, and they are not her eyes, but the eyes of some marine creature adapted to the perpetual night. The soulless eyes of an anglerfish or gulper eel, eyes like matching pools of ink, and something darts from her parted lips—” (189). But the kicker here—the ultimate, worldview-shattering weirdness—is the fact that the videocassette’s timestamp places this footage the day before Jacova led the Open Door of Night cult into the sea and drowned.
“Houses Under the Sea” evinces a modernist literary aesthetic in both its fractured chronology and its assemblage of fragmentary documents (the narrator interpolates news reports from The San Francisco Chronicle and CNN.com, passages from Jacova’s father’s novels [which speak of “people marching into the sea” (175), “ruined castles beneath the waves and the beautiful, drowned girls with seaweed tangled in their hair” (176)], and quoted commentary from the scholarly books written about Jacova and her cult). But the novelette also takes a distinctly postmodernist turn via its self-consciousness as a piece of writing. The narrator (a veteran journalist commissioned to write an article recounting his relationship with Jacova) repeatedly breaks into the account to editorialize about his own reporting. He grouses about “typing irrelevant words to build meandering sentences” (162), of making the narrative “sound like a goddamn travelogue” (165). He questions his own motivations: “Am I making a confession? Bless me, Father, I can’t forget? Do I believe it’s something I can puke up like a sour belly full of whiskey, that writing it down will make the nightmares stop or make it easier for me to get through the days? [...] Maybe it’s only a very long-winded suicide note” (168). He dismisses “the restrictive illusion of the linear narrative” and theorizes about the art of storytelling, commenting that the true task of the writer is deciding not what details to include but what should be left out: “Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that’s the bastard chimera we call a ‘story.’ I am not building, I am cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truths or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from any objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away” (182). Using her frank narrator as a mouthpiece, Kiernan works like a magician exposing the secrets of her own act—yet still manages to captivate in the process. Take as a perfect example the following passage in which the narrator describes his response to meeting the ghostly child in the abandoned warehouse:
I took one step towards her, then, or maybe two, and stopped. And at that moment, I experienced the sensation or sensations that mystery and horror writers, from Poe on down to Theo Angevine, have labored to convey—the almost painful prickling as the hairs on the back of my neck and along my arms and legs stood erect, the cold knot in the pit of my stomach, the goose across my grave, a loosening in my bowels and bladder, the tightening of my scrotum. My blood ran cold. Drag out all the fucking clichés and there’s still nothing that comes within a mile of what I felt standing there, looking down at that girl, her looking up at me, the feeble light from the windows glinting off her eyes.
Looking into her face, I felt dread as I’d never felt before. (185)One is put in mind here of Lovecraft’s own dictum about the singular “test of the really weird”: “whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and power; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim” (“Supernatural Horror in Literature” 108). Undoubtedly, “Houses Under the Sea” passes such a test, evoking ample dread. Some of its ominous moments include the discovery of the body (suicide or murder victim?) of the robotics technician who sold the narrator a bootleg copy of the videotape: “He was found hanging from the lowest limb of a sycamore tree, not far from the Moss Landing docks, both his wrists slashed nearly to the bone. He was wearing a necklace of Loligo squid strung on baling wire” (188). Also, on the penultimate page of the story, the narrator shares the story of Jacova’s near(?) drowning accident as a child offshore of Moss Landing (the same waters she later leads her followers into). The young Jacova was rescued and resuscitated, and though the incident was chalked up to a strong undertow, the child cried about “mermaids and sea monsters and demons” (192) that tried to drag her down. And then Kiernan offers a final unnerving turn of the screw: on the second night of Jacova’s ensuing hospital stay, two nurses inexplicably turned up dead. As the narrator’s informant relates: “They’d drowned, both of them. Their lungs were full of saltwater. Five miles from the goddamn ocean, but these two women drowned right there in a broom closet” (193).
Yet what truly distinguishes “Houses Under the Sea” is not its aura of dread but its concomitant overtones of remorse, as Kiernan combines the Lovecraftian tale with the tragic love story. The narrator does not merely miss his lost lover; he senses that he’s missed out on a chance for transcendence (paradoxically achieved by a descent into the deep). He has had a brush with the sublime, with the “awful magnificence” (184) of the warehouse floor diagram, with the “divine abomination” the adult Jacova worships, with Jacova herself looking “angry and ecstatic and beautiful—terrible, I think” (190) as she preaches of a postmortem paradise beneath the sea: “In the mansions of Poseidon,” Jacova prophesizes, “she [Mother Hydra] will prepare halls from coral and glass and the bones of whales. [...] Down there, you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils” (163). But now Jacova is gone, and it is “too late” (184) to join her (as the ghostly child in the warehouse intones): “The gates are closed.” The narrator could have learned from Jacova the answers to all the questions that currently bedevil him, if only he’d had the wisdom and courage to seize the opportunity presented to him. And so, at novelette’s end, the narrator is reduced to a state of wistful thinking:
I close my eyes. Oh god, I’ve closed my eyes.
She wraps her strong, suntanned arms tightly around me and takes me down, down, down, like the lifeless body of a child caught in an undertow. And I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel’s sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean. I would go with her, because, like a stone that has become an incarnation of mystery, she has drawn a circle around me. (193)In the same fashion, Kiernan draws a circle around her readers, who are “marked” (187) no less than the narrator by the story of Jacova. Effect perfectly reflects content in this eldritch masterpiece, which haunts the consciousness long after the first encounter with its many mysteries.
WORKS CITED
Kiernan, Caitlin R. “Houses Under the Sea.” Lovecraft Unbound. Ed. Ellen Datlow. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books, 2009. 161-94.
Lovecraft, H.P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. New York: The Modern Library, 2005. 103-182.
No comments:
Post a Comment