mirrors showing us our narcissistic nightmares

After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

Dark House Press ($15.95)

Let’s face it: the subject matter, situations, and themes that characterize the genre of horror fiction are nonsensical. Readers who come to literature looking for philosophical sophistication and insight into the human condition either stay away from the ghetto of horror, or visit it as if going on a safari. Stephen Graham Jones, author of the collection, After the People Lights Have Gone Off, knows and anticipates these stereotypes. Sometimes, it seems as if he’s embracing them, as seen in several of the first lines of selected stories in the collection: “My grandfather was a werewolf,” “If his own wife Marissa hadn’t been dying, Sai would never have seen the aliens,” and “It must have been just about the very last thing Teresa ordered before she died.”

As a fulltime reader, I’ve been conditioned to presume that if the content of a claim or statement doesn’t bear a direct correlation to reality, it is, by default, ironic. But I have no reason to believe Jones’s first lines are a wink-wink to the reader, a detached request to laugh along because we all know aliens and werewolves are beneath us. After becoming intimate with these stories, I sense that Jones’s first lines function as his own challenge to himself to redeem horror from its stereotypes, and as a proposition to the reader: “I dare you to continue reading, because I’m going to show you how serious I am.”

About redemption: I cannot know Jones’s motivation, nor should it be considered a decisive factor in determining the reader’s experience. Whether he’s truly attempting to redeem the ridiculous or not doesn’t matter because, in the end, Jones has proven that the genre of horror, with its decades of countless recirculation of storylines, clichés, and archetypes, hasn’t yet exhausted itself. The werewolf story isn’t dead—it just depends on who’s telling it.

As I referenced earlier, “Doc’s Story,” begins with, “My grandfather was a werewolf.” Jones immediately draws upon the familiar, and arouses certain expectations: If you’ve read one or two werewolf stories or, more likely, have seen Teen Wolf, The Wolfman, or An American Werewolf in London, you know what you’re going to get. Jones gives you just enough of that—he offers the satisfaction of familiarity from the outset, then carefully violates the conceits he’s established by steadily shifting the predictable toward incongruity. The aesthetic term for this technique is defamiliarization—Jones gives us the familiar, then alters, embellishes, or eradicates its defining characteristics. Presumably, Jones does this not because he’s intent on exposing the architecture of clichés—this isn’t mockery or vandalism—rather, Jones wants us to see and experience just how rich in possibility and these readymade tropes are. In Jones’s hands, the werewolf story is alive, fresh, and new. Stephen King says, “Horror is a cold touch in the midst of the familiar, and good horror fiction applies this cold touch with sudden, unexpected pressure” (89). It’s the “sudden, unexpected pressure,” or Jones’s touch that fascinates me—he applies pressure, first gentle, and then with fierce passion, to the genre’s defining conventions.

Almost all of the stories in the collection rely on surprises and plot twists, so I’d rather not deprive you of the thrills by giving them away, but I would like to paraphrase some of the questions Jones asks in “Doc’s Story,” in order to articulate Jones’s inventiveness: What happens to werewolves when they’re senior citizens? (From the outset, the narrator says, “…transforming at his age would have been a death sentence.”) What happens when an elderly werewolf gets a deer tick, or suffers from arthritis, glaucoma? What kinds of stores do werewolves tell at family gatherings? What happens when a human marries a werewolf?

I’m giving you the impression that a central concern of “Doc’s Story” is physical limitation, but these aspects of the story are peripheral—they’re details which help make the fantastic seem real. “Doc’s Story” is about family stories told and retold over generations (and in this case, a family of werewolves), and about how these stories can transform into something beautiful or horrific, depending on the teller’s motive. In questioning the nature of family stories, Jones writes from the protagonist’s first person perspective, “Aunt Libby’d told me once that all of Grandpa’s stories, they were really complicated apologies. Most times to people who weren’t even alive anymore. That’s how it is when you get old.” Grandpa tells the eight-year-old protagonist a story about the fate of what was once the family dog, Doc. And the question here is, if the story is a metaphorical apology for some other, real event, what secret transgression is Grandpa referring to? One thing’s for sure: the protagonist has heard several conflicting accounts of his mother’s death. Perhaps the real story—the one that hasn’t been altered or transformed—is embedded in Grandpa’s tale of Doc.

The theme of narcissism ties together many of the stories in this collection. A werewolf is a narcissist’s nightmare; the werewolf archetype taps into the narcissist’s fear of transformation and change. While the protagonist of “Doc’s Story” is too young to be a full-fledged narcissist, at least from the story’s outset, he is bound to discover of the truth behind Grandpa’s story, and that truth will affect him. Depending on what it is, it could transform him or further preserve the family’s status quo. In any case, it is a story that forces him to look inward—it is his narcissistic moment, his narcissistic nightmare, one that doesn’t depend on discovering whether or not he’s got werewolf blood. The nightmare is an inevitable transformation of identity, one that doesn’t necessarily have to involve becoming a werewolf.

In Secret Windows, Stephen King identifies four major archetypes that routinely appear in horror fiction: the Vampire, the Werewolf, “The Thing Without a Name,” and the Ghost. He also notes that “we may also find that narcissism is the major difference between old horror fiction and the new; that the monsters are no longer just due on Maple Street, but may pop up in our own mirrors—at any time.” I take this as gospel, and King’s claim offers a useful way to look at horror.

We’ve covered the Werewolf archetype and its connection to narcissism, and I’d like to address how Jones tackles the ghost story. By far, “After the People Lights Have Gone Off” is the most resonant and chilling story in the collection. It’ll move you to tears, and then make you feel like you’re drowning in icy water. Here were have the haunted house trope, but more in the tradition of Edith Wharton and Shirley Jackson—it’s about the questions and not the answers. Were Ghost Hunters to show up in their Roto Rooter van, unpack their Gauss meters and thermal scanners, survey the two floors and third-level loft of Mark and Kelly’s new home, they’d say in their final analysis, “Our equipment shows no evidence of a haunting, but unanimously, we’re absolutely convinced there is something strange and terrifying about this house.”

It’s a new house. Kelly’s father had built it for them. One night, during the construction period, when the house was half-finished, the newlyweds packed an air mattress and got a bottle of wine along with a family meal of chicken, and “broke into” the unfinished house. They wanted to Christian the place, room by room. Late that night, they were up on the third floor study, where the walls hadn’t yet been put up. They’d fallen asleep on the air mattress, and while Mark was in a stupor, “Kelly rolled over, rolled off into open space.” From his narrative distance, sometime in the future, Mark describes the area of impact. In the foyer below, where the stairway starts, there’s a banister that “swirls up into a knob of wood the size of a cantaloupe… On the way down, Kelly’s lower back cracked into that knob of wood.” Mark had remained asleep during and after her fall from the third floor. He wakes up to sunlight, and assumes Kelly is downstairs, doing something. He recalls how all night, a squirrel was making noise, a “distinctive rattling screech.” And now, sunlight coming down upon him as he lay “up in the loft with a hard-on,” he can still hear the squirrel’s chatter.

From his distant perspective, Mark confesses, “Kelly’d been making that noise all night, the way she tells it. It was all she could do, all she had left. The only way she could scream.”

Kelly must live the rest of her life in a wheelchair; she’s lost her ability to walk. They remain married, stay in the house, and during their struggles to live according to life’s new terms, a series of “paranormal” events escalates.

For the record, the house is haunted, but the “ghost’s” malevolence is born of and empowered by what Mark and Kelly try not to speak about (besides the accident, there are many other forbidden topics, like the story of Kelly’s mother’s death). Jones relies on ambiguity to provide amble space for our imaginations to create the nature of the ghost—it could have autonomy, or it might be more of poltergeist, that is, psychokinetic energy arising from Mark and Kelly’s interior struggles. I tend toward the later: Our own reflections, especially when they contain and communicate all that we try to repress, can be much more frightening than an autonomous spirit. What makes “After the People Lights Have Gone Out” a beautifully complex story is Jones’s refusal to locate exactly where (or from whom) the evil arises. Furthermore, Jones will not offer a polarized portrayal of the subsequent events in the story—you will not find clear distinctions between good and evil. What he does give is an escalation of surprises, some of the so heartbreaking you want to hug the page, some so frightening you want to close the book. The build-up of psychic energies—produced by Mark’s guilt, Kelly’s family secrets, Kelly’s mysterious post-accident behaviors, Mark and Kelly’s domestic power struggles (coupled with their sincere desire to love and forgive)—coalesce near the end and manifest in the form of another horror archetype (of which I won’t reveal). In other words, the story changes into something wildly different on the surface. Very few writers would succeed in creating a surprise of this caliber without it coming off like cheap gimmick, imposed upon the story for the writer’s convenience. With Jones, the fantastic is feasible precisely because it’s rooted subtly in his characters’ complicated psyches; it works because it’s inherent, it’s organic, it’s real.

Common to all the stories in the collection—most notably “The Black Sleeve Of Destiny” (there’s a title that presumes irony, but a page in, you know Jones is serious), “The Dead are Not Dead,” and “This Is Love”—is an undercurrent of inevitability, yet there’s something mysterious and particular about Jones’s world view that negates an oppressive affect of determinism. Jones avoids absolutes—like poetic justice, fate, social naturalism, and individuals’ unbreakable will-to-power—unless absolutes are used to complicate rather than assure. I’m motioning back toward making speculations about the author. One of the reasons why Jones is an expert at handling the paranormal is that it’s impossible for readers to know what his stance is—whether he’s agnostic, a hard-lined skeptic, a fanatical believer, and so on. Whatever his beliefs, he keeps it out of his fiction. The fact that his stories aren’t propaganda disguised in fiction, meant to scare readers into morality or existentialism is exactly what makes them so frightening. In every sense, they are mirrors showing us our narcissistic nightmares.

Don Peteroy is the author of the novella Wally (Burrow Press 2012). His story “The Circuit Builders” won the 2012 Playboy Magazine College Fiction Contest. His stories have appeared and are forthcoming in The Florida Review, Arcadia, Eleven Eleven, Short Story America, Cream City Review, Chattahoochee Review, Permafrost, Yemasssee, and others. He is a PhD. student at the University of Cincinnati, and serves on the editorial staff at the Cincinnati Review. He blogs at www.letterstojamesfranco.com. You can purchase Wally here.

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