OF ONE PURE WILL BY FARAH ROSE SMITH - BOOK REVIEW

You know how you can tell a horror book is going to give you more to chew on than the usual assortment of ghoulies, ghosties, and long-legged beasties? When the introduction reads like a college study guide.
 
In the foreword to Farah Rose Smith’s first short story collection, Of One Pure Will (published by Egaeus Press in a hardcover edition limited to 325 copies), Fiona Maeve Geist doesn’t just ponder what it is that makes Smith’s fiction so special, she challenges us to ponder it as well. In the process, Geist brings up more questions than answers. Fitting, as Smith herself does much the same.
 
It is tempting to describe many of the stories in Of One Pure Will as plotless, but that’s not strictly true. There are no shortage of discernable plots: An avian enthusiast receives an unexpected gift of rare birds from a hated rival, but the creatures quickly taunt him to madness. A conflict between a pair of sisters—one fascinated by a twisted black tree in the nearby swampland, the other disdainful of her sibling’s “eerie nonsense”—ends in tragedy, with suggestions of an even darker history written in the earth. A woman’s lover leaves her for someone who looks just like her, acts just like her, maybe even is… her.
 
Plot, however, not a central element in many of these stories. Indeed, it is often obscured beneath lush, swirling layers of hyper-stylized surrealism. Smith’s voice takes more from poetry than traditional prose; it begs to be read aloud in order to fully savor its musicality. A few short examples:
 
“The faeries of nature know no lesser landscape than this. They crave the rainbow soil, rearing o’er the moonbeams. Not this muck, this gloom. Without wings, they strut with a measure of grief, the Eternity worm gauging their anguish, weaving frenzied fortunes through mortal horns.” (from “Of Marble and Mud”)
 
“I watched her face and saw only a shriveled garden. Dandelions growing out of crumbling granite. Weeds aplenty from the toppled tombstones. A graveyard, then.” (from “As Unbreakable as the World”)
 
“To watch such wheeling, turns, and terrors, Marchand, was a warning of such hellish tidings. The swaying flesh of harridans, unsightly, always naked at hours never slept upon… and children’s filth so thick, their form is indecipherable. Everywhere these low and lilac-scented devils attempt to steal my light, but they won’t have it. Not on this day, when I will tell you who came to see me after so many years.” (from “An Account above Burnside Park”)
 
Smith’s most profound power is in secrecy, in her willingness to withhold information from the reader. We’re not just talking minor details either but great swaths of backstory and even present action. Smith’s emphasis is often more on mood, emotion, and imagery, with precise meaning left open to interpretation. Much of the context that would allow Smith’s narratives to make “rational” sense is only vaguely hinted at, with the interest instead on capturing the grief and confusion internalized inside her characters. It’s not the world around these people that is most important, not the specific things they do or that are done to them, but rather the worlds within their sick, suffering, shadow-haunted psyches.
 
To wit, “Time Disease (In the Waking City)” is a nightmarish account of a man lost in labyrinthine metropolis of loneliness and faded memories. “The Land of Other” is a meditation on the indignities of old age as experienced by a woman whose bedridden final years are interrupted only by glimpses of a dreamlike alternate reality. “Rithenslofer (The Corpses of Mer)” is an almost apocalyptic vision of death and disaster forged in one sailor’s realization of human insignificance at the wrathful whims of a pitiless sea. Perhaps most effective of all is the collection’s title story, a heartbreaking confession about the revenants (real or metaphorical?) which torment a former family man struggling to find meaning now that he has no family.
 
Of course, not everything in Of One Pure Will is so intensely interior. “Sorcerer Machine” and “The Visitor” are among the collection’s more traditional offerings. In the former, a man staying with his recently widowed sister spends his days translating the letters of his Polish grandfather, a scientist who left behind an unearthly mechanical contraption locked away in an ominous black cabinet. In the latter, a musician dreams of songs that would change the face of rock ‘n’ roll itself… if only she could remember them once awake. One night, in that place where souls go while their bodies sleep, the musician meets a being who says he can help bring her dream-songs into the real world, if only she will help bring him there too.
 
Such tales may lack the timeless quality evident in the rest of the author’s work but they show that, when she wants to, Smith can deliver more commercial horror fare without diminishing the elegant and enigmatic qualities of her unique voice. Indeed, some readers will likely prefer the accessibility of these stories to the rest. Such offerings nevertheless prove to be the exception far more than the rule.
 
As much as Smith generally shies away from narrative explication, it’s notable that she never shies from mature treatments of heavy theme. Even at their most hallucinogenic, the tales in Of One Pure Will maintain a firm grounding in human psychology. Refer to the aforementioned deathbed degradation at the heart of “The Land of Other,” or the suicidal prostration of the protagonist in “As Unbreakable as the World.” Common across all of Smith’s work is an intense darkness, and not merely in a fantastical sense. The darkness in Smith’s fiction is the all-too-real darkness of broken hearts, of lost loved ones, of trauma and abuse and self-loathing depression.
 
And yet, it never feels nihilistic. Here, there is value in facing darkness, win or lose. Not all of Smith’s protagonists overcome the demons that plague them, but their struggles represent an unwavering drive to be heard, to matter, to love and be loved, to live.
 
“Even dark and dangerous things may be precious.” So says the narrator of the very story from which Of One Pure Will takes its name. “They instruct us as no being of light can.”

Copies can be purchased from Egaeus Press by clicking here ​

Read William Tea's fascinating interview with Farah Rise Smith here