THE RIVER THROUGH THE TREES BY DAVID PEAK

The River Through the Trees By David Peak

18/3/2022

The River Through the Trees By David Peak
Reviewed by David Z. Morris

I don’t know if The River Through the Trees is David Peak’s finest work. I don’t even know if it’s representative of his broader project. I’m writing this review because I came across this 2013 book almost at random, as a discount offer in one of those dangerously addictive ebooks-on-sale newsletters. This nags at me as a personal failure, given that I’m such an afficianado of the style he works here with such elegance, which I would call “post-industrial cosmic realism.”

This is a nominally Lovecraftian strain of horror, dealing with cults and deep time and dark gods – but those tropes are put in service to a deeply grounded recognition that the famously indifferent and all-destroying threat of the Old Gods is not so different from the bleakness of the world we pass through every day. That abstraction is done with such subtlety that the book could be fully enjoyed as a cosmic-horror-cultist romp, but a broader reading shows it has just as much in common with the street-level wallowing of Charles Bukowski (though minus the humor).

Peak, for reasons that can’t have anything to do with the taut-wire skill on display here, still seems shadowy in the mind of the same reading public (itself pitifully small and misanthropic) that laps up similar Galenic diagnoses by Matthew Bartlett or Laird Barron or Blake Butler or, dark daddy of them all, Thomas Ligotti. These talespinners create deliriously awful visions of the pedestrian overtaken by bad humours, of the degenerate ascended, within a frame of real-world decline. The essence of what they do has been captured in the terrifying sixty seconds of the infamous “dumpster monster” scene of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, but their work dives even deeper into the utter degeneracy that lurks just beneath the surface of our pantomime of normality.

Peak’s iteration of these themes is distinctive most of all for its restraint. I doubt it’s accidental that his title lightly echoes The Place Beyond the Pines, a film released the year before this book and sharing much of its fallen-rustic setting, meticulous pacing, and threat of violence held mostly off-page. Peak’s fringe characters are part of a cult whose practices draw with brutal directness from the drug-addled reality of many former East Coast or North Country mill towns gone to seed.

But in contrast to the bloodthirsty punk ciphers that move like interchangeable shadows through Blake Butler’s 300,000,000, these cultists are resolutely real people, flawed and thoughtful and – a move that amps up the book’s anxiety considerably – only violent with a human eye to the same necessity we all weigh before taking extreme actions. In short, their actions make a degree of sense that only turns proceedings even more nightmarish.

That realism grounds the book’s core creative turn, one that I’m increasingly personally fond of. While the book’s characters constantly gesture at the occult, and ultimately create the evil they believe they desire, the book never truly tips its hand to any supernatural event whatsoever. In this, it seems to bring the delirious nihilism of Lovecraft home: the signature conceit of the Old Man of Providence was that the universe is uncaring and indifferent. The River Through the Trees strikes just enough notes of cosmic horror in the course of its tale of nightmarishly human trauma to drive home the point that we all carry more than a little of the Old Gods’ indifference within us. If there is a better potential basis for a slow, atmospheric, A24-style cinematic take on the Lovecraftian ethos and mythos, I haven’t read it.

That cosmic indifference, and its deep rootedness within humanity, is represented here by Bicycle Bob, a half-mythological figure believed to lurk in the woods and kidnap children. At the heart of the book is a character who at least believes she has been subject to Bicycle Bob’s worst transgressions, and all the characters constantly swap tales of this dark figure.

But the demon himself never appears directly on the page, and Peak constantly toys with the reader’s understanding of Bob. Does he exist, or is he simply a projected myth? If he exists, is he simply a predatory hermit, or something stranger? Bicycle Bob is, in this and other ways, a clear reference to Lynch’s other BOB. Both are shape-shifting menaces who either plants the seeds of evil, or simply provide a convenient focal imaginary for the evil of the world around his victims – or, the most interesting possiblity of all, both at the same time.

This is really the quandary at the center of The River Through the Trees, probably the quandary of all great horror writing: the oscillation of trauma between circle and line, the pain of its continuation and the impossibility of its ending. The work returns us again and again to the truest and most hackneyed pillar of any horror work that aspires to status as Literature: that man is the real monster. Peak gives us a vision of abandonment and betrayal of the human, and spreads the blame around plenty. There is no monster here, only monsters, plural, all playing out a script that is ultimately more sad than brutal, more neglect than transgression, a retreat into self-interest that is all too familiar.

The River Through The Trees
by David Peak

Decades ago, Dan and Grace Robertson encountered a horror of childhood legend: Bicycle Bob.
Some say he's an insane drifter with a taste for blood.
Others call him evil made flesh and claim his touch will poison your soul.
Some say he’s just another country ghost story.
Now, Dan is a cemetery caretaker and Grace persists as a strung-out addict living on the fringes.
Under the influence of the Newbert brothers, maniac woodsmen prophets who have seen the truth beyond the nighttime stars, she has put a desperate plan in motion.
Her brother Dan is the only one who knows the root of her madness, and he alone can uncover the unholy monstrosity hungering beneath the surface of a dying town.

David Peak's The River through the Trees is a grotesque of impoverished rural life, a life of quiet acceptance broken only by drugs, death metal, desecration, and the teachings of an ancient book. Combining the pacing of Dennis Lehane, the cosmic terror of Lovecraft, and the defunct modernity of Ligotti, it is a taut, disturbing story whose haunting images bring to mind the dark places we do our best to ignore.
Meet Bicycle Bob today!