found in translation

FOUND IN TRANSLATION
B
of, I don’t know, arrested development? The problem with viewing true literature through this
restrictive lens is what to do with works such as Great Expectations or The Catcher in the
Rye – are they just for teens because they happen to feature young people as first-person
protagonists? It’s a lofty comparison, I realize, to extend this observation to Daniel Kraus’ Rotters, but there you go. For the horror genre it just might be the
coming-of-age novel of our young century.
From its opening line – “This is the day my mother dies” –
Rotters retreats into deep shadows and pretty much stays there.
When brilliant student Joey Crouch moves from Chicago to rural
Iowa to live with the dad he’s never known, we have a classic
thematic set-up: new kid must navigate an unfriendly school and
a problematic father-son relationship. As it turns out, the townsfolk barely know his father, a foul-smelling recluse nicknamed
“The Garbage Man,” better than he does. As Joey comes to learn
about the clandestine brotherhood of grave-robbers to which he
belongs, and in which he himself soon becomes a fledgling
member, the parallels between these ultimate social outsiders
and Joey’s status as high-school pariah become both clear
and compelling.
Yet Kraus’ narrative doesn’t take on a John-Hughes-only-darker predictability. Instead,
Joey, packing on wiry muscle from his midnight digs, embarks on a cross-country
odyssey to avenge an act that I shouldn’t describe, except to say that it’s suitably horrific.
Along the way, the author elevates grave-robbing to the point where it clearly deserves
its own subgenre. He accomplishes this through a Chuck Palahniuk-like skill at researching and then riffing on all the fascinating details of his topic.
But is this novel really horror? Let’s put it this way: there’s cascades of gore, and
enough overall morbidity and cemetery chic to help Rotters qualify as a selection in the
Goth Book-of-the-Month Club.
eing the unrepentant genre bibliophile that I am, I
know with a sick certainty that there are shockingly original, boundary-pushing works of literary
horror out there that I’ll only get to experience if someone someday sees fit to translate them.
One such mind-boggling, how-did-I-not-know-aboutthis book recently landed on my desk. The first page had
me hooked. It was, and I’m not aggrandizing here, unlike
anything I had ever read.
Le Nécrophile (a.k.a. The Necrophiliac) is a French-language novella
penned in 1972 by Gabrielle Wittkop
(1920 – 2002), a writer who was born
in France but spent much of her adult
life in Germany. By most accounts,
Wittkop was an unapologetic eccentric with an anti-social streak who
chose to live life on her own terms.
She also had a long-held fascination
with death, sexual deviation and the
macabre that found its way into much of her fiction,
though perhaps never more so than in The Necrophiliac
(translation by Don Bapst out now from ECW Press). As
the title implies, this is a book about loving the dead –
literally. But I’m pretty much willing to guarantee that it
is also the most poetic book you will ever read about
graphic necrophilia. And it’s endlessly fascinating for
that very reason, as well as for its ruminations on mortality and the complex, isolating nature of our protagonist’s sexual inclinations.
The 92-page volume takes the form of an illicit diary,
covering just over two years in the life of Lucien, a passionate bisexual necrophiliac. The entries are singularly
concerned with his acquisition of corpses (primarily by
grave-robbing, though on occasion more devious means
are employed), the act of pleasuring oneself with the
dead, the specifics of human decay and the ways of
temporarily arresting it. Crass content, sure, but approached using the lyrical language of elegant erotic fiction, making it simultaneously beautiful and grotesque
– almost like a highly romanticized counterpart to
Japan’s Ero guro (erotic grotesque) movement. Lucien
has great emotion for his deceased companions, viewing them as compliant lovers, even as he commits undeniably uncomfortable (horrifying? icky?) acts upon
them, such as when he gratifies himself with a still-born
infant.
Even now, nearly 40 years after its initial publication,
it feels a bit taboo to read it. Here, at last, is a boundary
that few dare cross, an element of the macabre that has
not been played out in a thousand similar iterations already, and it’s been kept secret from me by the barrier
of language my entire life. Of course, now I can’t help
but fret over what other weird and terrifying foreign fiction I’ve been missing out on all these years.
Okay, stop me if any of this sounds familiar: a couple moves to the country with their two
daughters after their young son goes missing, in hopes that their creepy new rental property
will give them a fresh start; soon they are hearing knocks in the night, seeing apparitions and
experiencing cold spots; they soon learn the house was the scene of scandalous child abuse
and a terrible accident 60-some years earlier that left a bunch of orphans dead; as the forces
within the house grow more powerful, a malevolent former
resident returns for closure, a secret is revealed and spectral justice is served.
Author James Herbert has been writing horror professionally for nearly forty years, and this is borne out in the
fact that The Secret of Crickley Hall is a perfectly serviceable haunted house story – the writing is elegant, the
characters compelling, the setting palpable, and the selfflagellating evil entity suitably deranged. All the elements
of a successful ghost story are here, but the one thing it
lacks overshadows the rest of its otherwise quality parts.
In its 640 pages, there is nary a fresh plot twist to be
found, and so it all too quickly becomes far too easy to
predict what is going to happen next.
It also proves to be a profoundly “safe” read: the events
of the past may be cruel, salacious and deadly, but the
present-day characters, while frequently threatened, never
suffer any greater injury than a hard crack on the head or a dislocated shoulder. There are no
shocking deaths to throw the reader off balance; the only people who meet their maker are
those who you expect to. And then it’s neatly wrapped up with a Steven Spielberg-esque Hollywood ending.
While all this makes it difficult to recommend to voracious horror fans, who’d likely deem
Crickley Hall predictable and trite, it’s still polished enough to be a worthwhile read for more
occasional dabblers in genre fiction who are less likely to know all the conventions by rote.
MONICA S. KUEBLER
MONICA S. KUEBLER
R M 56
THE NINTH CIRCLE
PETER GUTIÉRREZ
THE SECRET OF CRICKLEY HALL