​ LULLABIES FOR SUFFERING, EDITED AND COMPILED BY MARK MATTHEWS.

I'll admit to being massively apprehensive when asked to review this volume's predecessor, Garden of Fiends. Short story anthologies that revolve around specific themes are often problematic, even moreso when those themes are so contentious as chemical addiction.
 
It was therefore a sincere pleasure to discover that the stories within Garden of Fiends were universally sincere, heartfelt and resounded with a powerful legitimacy, a sense of earnestness that clearly derived from the writer's own experiences, either in their own lives or through those of friends and family. The anthology proved not only a superbly affecting read, but a profound one, that treated its subject with respect and acknowledged the complexities inherent to the situations it drew.

That, more than anything, is an essential factor when it comes to exploring such subjects in fiction; the writer's inclination to not rely on reduction or stereotyping, to put aside factors such as judgement, personal morality etc and explore the circumstances for what they are, in all of their hideousness, delirium, profundity and trauma.
 
Garden of Fiends succeeded beautifully in that regard, leaving its spiritual successor, Lullabies for Suffering, with something of a legacy to live up to.
 
From the first page, it's clear that this is a product of quality. Once again, there's a severe immediacy to the writing, a sense of legitimacy that, given the often squalid, abusive situations drawn, makes for some highly disturbing moments. It's very clear that the writers universally draw upon -often traumatic- personal experience to fuel these stories, which renders them far more than merely “horror stories about subject X.”
 
The phenomena and experience of addiction is explored from myriad different angles, often within the pages of the same story: those suffering from addiction, those traumatised by its ripples or after-effects, those forced to witness the slow decline it brings about. The stories delve deep into the circumstances and situations that facilitate chemical dependency, often with a level of intimacy that is quietly shocking. There is no attempt to judge or justify, here -another very impressive element-, rather, the anthology provides the reader windows into other lives; lives that they may or may not find familiar, lives that are often in states of flux or disintegration, that are even, in some notable instances, at their nadirs.
 
The purpose here is not to be didactic or judgemental; this is no screed against the addicted or the broken, nor is it a shrieking piece of activisim against societies that facilitate and allow for them: the anthology is universally more complex than that, and far stronger for it. It invites the reader in, regardless of what their political persuasions or personal biases might be, gently drawing them into worlds that are fractured, dirty, dark and disturbing, but worlds that are their world; the world just down the street or the house next door, in the apartment above or below. Whilst the reader might find themselves internally railing against some characters for their apparent weakness or stupidity, for their lack of resolve or concern, the stories actively refute those kinds of judgements by attempting to convey how powerful, how manipulative and cunning addiction itself is, many characters going so far as to personify it as a conscious and malevolent force within their lives.
 
The stories as a whole refuse to rely on simplicity or stereotype; there are no cartoon distortions of addiction or of its fallout here. Rather, there are accounts that sometimes are so uncomfortably detailed and earnest as to feel firsthand, more like confessions or journals than stories, wrapped up with imagery and inspirations that are at once familiar to horror fans yet reinvented for this particular milieu.
 
As a result, the anthology is phenomenally distressing on a number of levels, arguably even moreso than contemporaries that focus on more traditionally mythic or narrative subjects. Here, we see through the eyes and experience through the ravaged senses of the addict, we taste the depths of emotion and condition that drive people to addiction or keep them sealed in cultures and psychological states that facilitate it. We walk in the shoes of those who have come to the ends of their lives in their own minds; who are steps away from suicide, who self-harm in numerous ways and means to provide themselves some release from undeniable, rapacious despair.
 
More than anything, these stories focus on the emotional and psychological circumstances that facilitate addiction: the stories are generally complex and considered enough that they acknowledge drug culture and addiction as expressions of something deeper, of both personal and societal sickness. Mental health is an enormous and recurrent theme, here: despair, depression, suicidal tendencies and more all recur throughout, as do subjects such as parental neglect, child abuse etc.
 
Mark Matthew's Lizard takes a rather unusual approach to the subject matter in that it flits between the perceptions of different protagonists at various different times throughout their lives, particular attention paid not to the addicts within the story but the children that suffer as a result of their conditions. Focusing specifically on a girl born to Heroin-addicted parents, the story explores notions of misery spawning misery, of cycles that don't end. Here, the children of addicts become something other; the damage done to them opening up cracks to other states and places, making them monsters comprised of hurt and trauma that even they themselves cannot control. The ultimate implication is that the damage done to children as a result of addiction is profound and ineluctable; not something that can be cured or papered over. Rather, it becomes a potentially cancerous part of the individual, perhaps swelling into something monstrous if allowed to go untreated. The story is perhaps one of the most distressing in the collection, in that it explores addiction from the eyes of children, who lack context for such things but have nevertheless incorporated them into their experience of reality as they might school or TV shows. The hideous normality of what many would consider to be abuse, neglect and atrocity is part of the story's true horror. The more supernatural elements that occur, by contrast, seem almost tame (a very deliberate juxtaposition).
 
The choice to write the story from various different perspectives could have been an alienating one. As is so often the case, it may have robbed the story of clarity or focus. Instead, the contrast between the various different narrators and protagonists helps to embellish and emphasise the situations of the others; were it not for the threads that drawer addict's own points of view (Bethany, Amy), then the story would have been too punitive and unsympathetic; an almost-revenge narrative. However, because of characters such as Bethany, Amy et al, all of whom have moments to express their own drives, desires, motivations, the story is far more complex than that; this is not a shrill cry of “think of the children,” nor is it an emotional manipulation designed to condemn addicts for their conditions.
 
Instead, the story takes a view of the phenomena of addiction through myriad fractured and kaleidoscopic lenses, from those suffering addiction itself to those harmed by their behaviours, their neglect and abuses. It's an uncompromising, distressing and often very, very uncomfortable piece of work that arouses anger and sympathy in equal measure, and is designed to deliberately confuse the reader in that way: it would have been so easy to draw the parents of the eponymous Lizard simply as monsters. But that isn't what they are. What they are, and which the story takes great pains to explore, is extremely sick, extremely broken human beings whose perceptions are so warped by their addictions, they engage in behaviours that are monstrous, particularly with regards to their daughter.
 
The decisions to expand the scope beyond the immediate emotional -and, in this instance, physical- damage done to children who grow up in households where addiction is normalised, to follow Lizard through to adulthood, is also a dangerous one, but one that helps the reader gain some insight into how resonant and profound these traumas are. Despite being a fairly successful, self-composed woman at this point, the traumas still inform so much of who she is, how she responds to the world, and it is horrific, powerful and heartbreaking.
 
By contrast, the anthology also contains stories such as Kealan Patrick Burke's Sometimes They See Me; an entirely different take on the phenomena written from the perspective of a young woman who is not only an inveterate addict but, at the beginning of the tale, at the end of her life. By her own perceptions, she has run out the clock and run out of patience with her existence, the constant need and warring with herself, the hungers and disgraces that define her every waking moment. Encountering a young man on the edge of the same bridge at which she finds herself, she finds some ephemeral reason to forestall the moment, but forestall only. She is aware throughout her activities with the young man -largely expressions of last-moment despair and abandon, in which nothing either of them do truly matters- that she is nearing the end, that the pair of them are simply having one last hurrah before they finally burn one another out. But, as they flit through their varying escapades -sex, drink, getting high, visiting art galleries-, something begins to occur to her and to the man himself; existential revelations that turn their worlds upside down, yet also do nothing to change the circumstances in which they meet.
 
This is an entirely different approach to the subject of addiction than Mark Matthew's Lizard takes; rather than focussing on the second-hand fallout of the phenomena, this is experiential and intimate; it describes in lurid and often distressing detail the sensations of satisfying a craving, the ecstatic highs, the crippling lows, the gnawing agonies of denying it, the slave- mentality that stirs and swells as a result. It also dares to trawl the emotional depths of the condition; that point at which the fight becomes too much, in which surrender is the only option. There are no pat answers or “Miracle on 34th Street” salvations here; this is not a fable or cartoon in which there are always answers to problems, in which all things can be solved.
 
It's a story driven by depression first and foremost; by an existential surrender in which all pretence of a life or identity is abandoned. That is where the protagonist finds herself from the first instance, and the state into which the reader is delivered from the first word; a life that has all but unravelled, whose incumbent no longer wants it or sees any point in sustaining it.
 
That is an unusually brave beginning; one that even those who have no direct experience of addiction will be able to empathise with, especially those that suffer from mental health issues such as depression, anxiety etc. Likewise, given the natural lassitude and lack of engagement that such a situation necessitates, it would have been very easy for the story to lose dynamism or impetus; for the depressive state of the protagonist to inform its ethos. Instead, Burke's prose is elegant enough to paint a rainbow in varying and hideous shades of black, purple and dark grey; the story describes utter, suicidal despair in such a manner that it acknowledges the often florrid states of mind and emotion that accompany it, the heights of revelation that can occur when one has reached the very nadir of one's existence and realised what filth lurks at the bedrock.
 
Monsters, by Caroline Kepnes, is another different take not only on the fallout of addiction, but on how addiction itself squares next to various other forms of damage, trauma, cruelty and abuse inflicted upon children and young people by society at large. Like Mark Matthews' Lizard, this story is written from numerous different perspectives, from that of the lowly Vince, a young man who was brought up by an addict Mother, whose resultant emotional immaturity has left him self-loathing, psychologically self-abusing, uncertain, socially incapacitated, to Ariel, a girl whose sexual abuse by her Father and emotional neglect by her Mother has left her seeking validation in numerous strange and disturbing ways, as broken in her own way as Vince, despite the absence of specific forms of addiction in her life.
 
The story is a fascinating take, in that it dares to suggest that, despite the obvious problems of addiction as a phenomena, it is at least on an equal footing in terms of its potential fallout as other societal ills that culture pays far less attention to or deals with in less judgemental, didactic terms. One of the over-arching themes of the story is the consideration of damage that parents do with the slightest of their actions and decisions regarding their children, whether it's the issues Vince faces with his Mother (a deeply distressing relationship in which the child has been effectively forced into the role of the care-giver, despite his reluctance and resentment of it) or the patently vile neglect Ariel faces from her Mother, who is more concerned over damage to her social reputation than the emotional well-being of her daughter.
 
The story is perhaps amongst the angriest in the collection, seething with a note of -entirely justified- bitterness that takes on an almost activist note at times: unlike Lizard, which is ostensibly similar in terms of theme and structure, Monsters roundly condemns certain characters for their actions and broadens the scope of those criticisms to a much wider attack upon certain cultural hypocrisies. Most notably, the story utterly and absolutely condemns the narcissistic cruelty of Ariel's Mother, who is, the story implies, her own form of addict; one consumed by delusions of status and personality, and as damaging, in her way, than Vince's Mother (if not moreso).
 
Interestingly, for all of the anger boiling beneath the surface, this is also one of the few stories that contains a note of potential redemption. Whilst it makes plain that trauma cannot be undone, that the imperfections of parents reflect in the neuroses their children, Ariel and Vince do find the possibility of salvation in one another, having survived the traumas and tribulations of their childhoods, though not having transcended them. The story ends on a deliberately ambiguous note, the fury and condemnation of its previous chapters ebbing, leaving behind a residue of sorrow for these hurt and blighted children, who may yet find ways of being wiser than their parents can ever dream.
 
These are just a handful of the tales the anthology contains; a sample of myriad ways in which the writers perceive and explore the subject of chemical addiction. Each and every one of them does so in a sincere and highly personal manner, with a fidelity that seethes off of the page, often to such a degree that readers of particular sensitivities or life experiences might find their readings particularly traumatic.
 
The over-arching point here is to arouse emotion and consideration; it would be redundant, given the core subjects, to apply trigger warnings; the anthology is about trauma in its every aspect and manifestation, and examples of practically any and all you might imagine might be found here. Even those of us whose associations are mild will find ourselves gritting our teeth or wincing at particular moments or images (as is entirely the intention).
 
This is in no way a condemnation of the anthology; if anything, it is a heartfelt recommendation. Any piece of media that dares approach these subjects and does so with this degree of respect, consideration and passion deserves notice, especially when it has the power to move or disturb us.
 
Far from being trite or token, disrespectful or simplistically judgemental, this is what horror fiction is ideally for; a means by which we might confront not only our own inner-demons, but those of society itself.
 
Uncomfortable? Certainly. Disturbing? Absolutely. And all the more worthwhile for that. But also beautiful, enlightening, revelatory. Everything that good fiction should be, in a manner that elevates both its chosen genre and the status of discourse on its core subjects.

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