The Skeleton Melodies Clint Smith (Hippocampus Press, pb, 324pp, $20.00) Review by Mike O’Driscoll Of the thirteen stories—two of them previously unpublished—that make up The Skeleton Melodies, Clint Smith’s second collection, there are a handful that come close to being compelling examples of a particular kind of contemporary horror, one in which, whatever the central conceit, the narrative is underpinned by the failure of the protagonists either to know themselves or to escape the sins of the past. A couple of stories—‘Details that would Otherwise Be Lost to Shadow’ and ‘The Undertow, and They that Dwell Therein’—stand head and shoulders above the rest, demonstrating his skill in depicting people damaged by their inability to make sense of their own memories, and thus left susceptible to all manner of nightmarish fantasia. At the beginning of ‘Details that would be Otherwise Lost to Shadow’, the narrator, Tara Keltz, stands at an upper storey window watching as her husband gets out of his car with their daughter and a woman who seems like an awkward, jilted mockery of herself. The house from which Tara watches her family enter their own house, is itself a parody, one she calls the ‘Motley House’, describing it as schizophrenic, as though built by “four or five capable craftsmen”, each of whom had contributed their own “inimitable elements,” no matter how discordant it made the whole. From the day they moved into their own home seven months prior, Tara, an interior designer, is intrigued by the house across the street, and finally gets the chance to satisfy her curiosity when a ‘for sale’ sign appears in the front yard. It is in the course of this first visit—or perhaps ‘intrusion’ is the more correct word—that Tara catches that unsettling glimpse of her alternative self. The scene feels almost Lynchian in its depiction of a distorted reality, of a world turned inside out. It’s as though Tara has stumbled into Lynch’s mysterious red room, or perhaps the house’s designers were familiar with the peculiar geometries of Hill House. Afterwards, she realises she’s experienced a dislocation of both time and self. Nine years earlier, she had almost been killed after being hit by a car while out for her morning run. Is this apparition she encounters a version of herself, one where that ‘almost’ doesn’t apply? Subsequent trips to the second floor room seem to suggest that this grey, decaying zombie-like Tara, has become the repository of the physical pain the living Tara was left with after the accident, pain that she had, for professional and personal reasons, worked hard to suppress. What Tara witnesses from the window, and what is made clear in the disturbing climax, is that this broken, shadow creature is trying to usurp the life that Tara has. Smith’s rendering of this eerie confrontation is skilfully done, and the story’s understated coda feels right, leaving Tara as one of the few characters in the collection, to achieve some measure of reconciliation with the past. Gwen, the central character of ‘The Undertow, and They that Dwell Within’, is coming to terms with the end of her marriage, and with trying to console her mother, Kathy, grieving the recent loss of her father. As a distraction, the two agree on a road trip from rural Tennessee to the Florida coast for a short beach vacation with Gwen’s two kids. Throughout the journey, Gwen reflects on the causes of the slow dissolution of her relationship with Sean, not caused by any infidelity—unlike her mother’s marriage—but rather the gradual abdication of responsibility, the realisation that long before their break-up, she was living the role of single parent. She also has to contend with her mother’s search for consolation, found in a hybrid of religion and self-help texts, and perhaps an over-idealisation of her recently dead father. The friction between the two is palpable, and is underscored by TV reports of mass shark attacks along the coast, reports that appear to both fascinate and scare Gwen’s kids. An explicit reference to the cross country road trip undertaken in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’, adds to the sense of foreboding, of the family blundering toward some existential threat. Two further incidents ramp up the anxiety: an accident in their motel room involving her young daughter Abbi; and a dream Kathy relates to her about a vision she has of her father standing in a field surrounded by forest, dressed in his old rail-man’s uniform. Elements of the dream disturb her—old cornstalks snap beneath her feet as she runs toward him; his lips are withered and he has no teeth, his voice seems to go backward, as if “looping down his throat”; as he talks, seeming to warn her about shells, black hair dye runs down his face like blood. Despite the strangeness of the dream, Kathy consoles herself with the claim that he’s “safe in Heaven.” Later, alone, Gwen interprets the dream far more ominously, imagining her grandfather was speaking about Hell. The increasingly hysterical tone of the media reports about the shark attacks also begins to seep into her consciousness, causing her to envision herself being eaten alive—the “paramount horror.” By the time the family reach their rented beach house, even the idyllic scene—the “twilight tinge” of the sky, and the soft powdery sand—can’t quite dispel the feeling of unease. In a sense, it’s the dreadful power of Kathy’s dream, coupled with the more widespread sense of mass anxiety about sharks, that triggers the startling, nightmarish apparition that engulfs the family at the end. Again, Smith paints a vivid and surreal picture of horror manifesting out of the collision of sensationalism and petty human anxieties. It’s a bold and memorable story. Another of the more successful stories is ‘Fiending Apophenia’, a cloying, almost suffocating tale, that, on the surface, is about two young men, small time cannabis peddlers, paying the consequences for failing to adhere to that most basic of drug business tenets, to not get high on your own supply, or indeed, to not short-change the boss. But the tale morphs into something much weirder as the particular variety of dope that protagonist Wes and his pal Todd smoke—christened Apophenia by their boss—leads Wes, perhaps in a state of heightened paranoia—to perceive a kind of inverted world existing in the shadows of our own. Smith uses a first person framing device that works as a literalisation of the phenomena of apophenia—prompted by news of the discovery of a mutilated body and the disturbing, resonant memory of the number 283, the narrative shifts from first to third person as Wes suffers a dissociation of both time and identity. There’s a sense then that the body of the story is Wes’s attempt to find connections, to see the pattern hidden in the bizarre and violent events of this one night in the past when he caught a revelatory glimpse of something both horrific and impossible, yet at the same time real—“that these things (that both he and Todd would become) were always there--here”. Though Wes escaped that purposeless life, going on to graduate and become a teacher, marry and have a kid, there’s one final reunion with his old drug pals that confirms what he has known all along, that the young man he has seen as a negation of himself, is in fact, inescapably, the real Wes. There’s something of Ligotti in this willing acceptance, this “heaving hunger in these bottomless apertures between who we were and who we will be.” Both the longest story ‘Haunt Me Still’ and opener ‘Lisa’s Pieces’ are about men who return to their home towns—the former for a funeral, the latter for a high school reunion—in what turn out to be doomed attempts, if not to recapture people they had lost, then at least to understand the reasons for that loss. Despite being very different in tone—‘Haunt me Still’ is more reflective and searching, more grounded in reality, while ‘Lisa’s Pieces’ is more vengeful and more firmly located in the grand guignol tradition—both are concerned with guilt and the need to expiate for past mistakes. Though the latter story is indebted to Mary Shelley (and Universal’s Bride of Frankenstein), in its botched attempt to resurrect the title character, Smith loses control of the material and it descends into a luridly over-written and the over-the-top climax, whose impact is dissipated beneath an avalanche of alliterative images and compound modifiers. Colin, the villain of the story, doesn’t simply intuit something, he “cognitively catches” it; the reanimated Lisa is described as draped in a “tangle-swaddled sheet”, and as “a ghastly statue, a vein-rivered Venus from some lurid Louvre”; protagonist Lew “parry-ducked” when defending himself from Colin, and lands a punch that causes a “meaty-moist gasp”. ‘Haunt Me Still’ is less burdened by such over-writing, (though again the occasional sentence is “gilded with gravelly giggles”), and is far more effective for it. Most of the remaining stories suffer from Smith’s tendency to over-elaborate a description, to stretch a metaphor too far, to use words like ‘pate’ or ‘repast’ in place of head and meal. He has a fondness for the word ‘appraise’ which he uses frequently when describing what a character sees, with no sense of assessment or judgement involved. Narratives become bogged down in the clutter of superfluous description, as in the opening of ‘Fingers Laced, as Though in Prayer’, where a stern school bus driver tells off one of her charges, “addressing the boy by way of the rearview reflection in the wide, overhead mirror, ” and a little later, when we’re told that the sunlight accentuates “the cornfields already withered appearance.” The story itself echoes works like T.E.D. Klien’s The Ceremonies, that explore links between nature, harvest, and sacrificial rites, while others deploy familiar tropes like werewolves (‘Animalhouse’), witches (‘By Goats be Guided’), pagan cults (‘The Pecking Order’) and the harvesting of body parts (‘The Rive’). Sometimes, as though unsure of his characters’ motivations, he feels the need to give us details that have little consequence in the story. In ‘The Pecking Order’, we’re told Meg wears her purse strap across her chest as “a habit of mugger deterrence she and many of her female classmates had adopted in college in a self-defense class near her dorm.” I get it, Meg is cautious, but do I need to be told about her classmates, or about the proximity of the self-defense class to her dorm? This is a shame, because such laboured and turgid prose distracts from the inventiveness of Smith’s storytelling. For example, ‘The Fall of Tomlinson Hall: or, The Ballad of the Butcher’s Cart’, is one of the rare stories here that is perhaps underwritten, and is all the better for it. The story nods overtly to Robert Louis Stevenson, as it follows the quest of two cooks to gain ‘leverage’ on their employers at a well-to-do gentleman’s club. The story reworks themes around bodysnatching and cannibalism to offer a glimpse of the not so subtle mechanisms through which social and political elites exploit the underclass. There’s no doubt that, perhaps with the help of a more judicious editor, Smith has the potential to become a very good writer. He has a wild imagination, and the ability to conjure up vividly original metaphors, as when describing a character’s sense of guilt “that worked like an unexpected bruise, one you catch in the mirror—surprised to see it, but unsure of how it had set in so deeply”. At his best, his stories show us ordinary people trying and, more often than not, failing, to make sense of a fucked-up world. No matter how grotesque or unreal the situations in which they find themselves, nor how egregious their mistakes, these are men and women we can empathise with. Suffice to say, Smith himself is not yet the finished article, but a work in progress. Mike O’Driscoll The Skeleton Melodies |
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