Monstrous Affections

It’s a truism that horror cannot exist separate from comfort,
safety, and love. It is impossible to experience horror — which is a
destination, not a departure point — without first experiencing the
security of a place, literal or conceptual, from which the ground will
fall away, revealing a vast, awful blackness of terrible possibility;
a cold lightless country of sharp teeth and claws. An eternally
rediscovered country where pain is the default national condition,
and terror is the gross national product.

The stories in
Monstrous Affections
are indeed horror stories by
any objective standard, and they are superlative horror stories — the
work of a scrupulous and demanding writer who would wrestle the
Devil himself for a the perfect word. Within these pages you will
meet a variety of monsters, including a Cyclops, a family of mutants
with a terrible gift for love, and yet another family with harsh ideas
about generational hierarchies and the price of defiance. But they
are also first-rate short stories of high literary quality. No less
an authority than Peter Straub has written of the entirely
ersatz
classification system that keeps certain stories, and certain writers,
outside the velvet ropes of the self-perpetuating bookish elite no
matter how excellent, how transcendent, the writing is.

There is writing of that calibre among the short stories in
Monstrous Affections
.

The term “Canadian gothic” is an overused one, and it has come
to mean many things to many people — readers, critics, academics,
and students — over the course of the development of Canadian
literature as a self-conscious literary school. It’s not often applied to
horror fiction, largely because of unfortunately persistent literary
prejudices and stereotypes. But I would say that, first and foremost,
the Canadian gothic literary canon is where I would place the
speculative fiction work of David Nickle.

The majority of his work is set unapologetically in Canada, his
homeland. For a speculative fiction writer, that has traditionally
been a challenge due to a perception that American editors and
readers will not take horror fiction seriously with a Canadian
setting.

On the other hand, this is one of the areas where, among
horror writers who are also serious literary writers, the men are
separated from the boys (and indeed the women from the girls —
to wit, the blood-ruby short fiction of International Horror Guild
Award-winner Gemma Files). Nickle’s vision of Canada will be a
revelation to any reader who might be expecting the round-edged,
inoffensive, long-suffering Canada of legend. His literary road trip
along the moonlit country roads of the various small towns that
dot the farmland outside the cities (especially the town of Fenlan,
his particular corner of the dark universe) will be, simultaneously,
immediately recognizable to anyone who is familiar with small
towns, and dreadfully disorienting in the way a dream gone terribly
wrong is disorienting, especially when you try to wake up, and
realize you can’t. I dislike clichéd terms like “national treasure,” but
David Nickle is a succinct answer to the endless gripe about why
Canada hasn’t produced more horror stars.

He knows the undertaste of familial relationships — for instance,
in “The Sloan Men,” the time-honoured rite-of-supplication of
meeting your true love’s mother for the first time — and how they
can be pushed to the literal edge of madness. He understands, as
in “Polyphemus’ Cave,” exactly what love and loyalty cost, and that
sometimes all it takes is a little nudge to the brink of darkness to
turn the process of growth into a scarlet, blood-soaked scream.

But mostly, he understands that horror really can’t exist separate
from comfort, safety, and love — or friendship. My personal favourite
in this collection is “The Webley,” a story marked by a singular
absence of the supernatural or the paranormal. The monsters in “The Webley” live in the most spectral realm of existence extant,
the human mind. It’s a story that contains an essential quality of
heartbreak and poisoned nostalgia that will haunt you, and follow
you like the sound of breathing in a dark room. Breathing you know
isn’t your own. His monsters can, on occasion, be quite genial. But
make no mistake; they are monsters in every sense of the word.

What to say of David Nickle personally? How to separate the
dancer from the dance? If we must, here’s a sketch: He’s a good and
loyal friend. He’s fiercely intelligent and kind. He’s a gentleman
around women (and around men too, for that matter) and he can hold
his liquor. He’s affable about giving rides home from conventions to
friends without cars. He’s dry, funny as hell, and generous to a fault.
Also, he’s not bad looking, to be honest.

OK, enough?

Having been his editor over the course of three original horror
fiction anthologies, I can say without reservation that he is one
of the most professional authors I’ve ever worked with. He’s a
courageous writer who isn’t afraid to step outside his comfort zone
in the service of his fiction, and a deadly serious one when it comes
to pushing himself and his material through however many drafts
it takes till the story is as close to perfect as he feels it can be, a fact
I see amply reiterated in this first, stellar collection of his best short
stories.

This closed book is — or was — that comfortable place I spoke
of earlier, the aforementioned place of comfort, safety and love,
the border between safety and a world tilted into chaos. The act
of opening the covers has set horrible, efficient machinery into
motion. And you are solely responsible for what you have released
into the world by starting it up. When you close your eyes tonight,
your dreams will serve as a subterranean passageway for any of the
monsters, which had previously been safely contained within the
pages of this book, to tunnel their way out into the world.

Your world. Our world.
My
world.

Thank you
so
very much for that, my dear. It isn’t as if we don’t all
have nightmares of our own to contend with, without you dreaming
your own into existence — with David Nickle, the author of this
collection, as your medium.

The Farmhouse, Toronto

Summer 2009

Mrs. Sloan had only three fingers on her left hand, but when she
drummed them against the countertop, the tiny polished bones at
the end of the fourth and fifth stumps clattered like fingernails.
If Judith hadn’t been looking, she wouldn’t have noticed anything
strange about Mrs. Sloan’s hand.

“Tell me how you met Herman,” said Mrs. Sloan. She turned away
from Judith as she spoke, to look out the kitchen window where
Herman and his father were getting into Mr. Sloan’s black pickup
truck. Seeing Herman and Mr. Sloan together was a welcome distraction for Judith. She was afraid Herman’s stepmother would catch her
staring at the hand. Judith didn’t know how she would explain that
with any grace:
Things are off to a bad enough start as it is
.

Outside, Herman wiped his sleeve across his pale, hairless
scalp and, seeing Judith watching from the window, turned the
gesture into an exaggerated wave. He grinned wetly through the
late afternoon sun. Judith felt a little grin of her own growing and
waved back, fingers waggling an infantile bye-bye.
Hurry home
,
she mouthed through the glass. Herman stared back blandly, not
understanding.

“Did you meet him at school?”

Judith flinched. The drumming had stopped, and when she
looked, Mrs. Sloan was leaning against the counter with her
mutilated hand hidden in the crook of crossed arms. Judith hadn’t
even seen the woman move.

“No,” Judith finally answered. “Herman doesn’t go to school.
Neither do I.”

Mrs. Sloan smiled. She had obviously been a beautiful woman in
her youth — in most ways she still was. Mrs. Sloan’s hair was auburn
and it played over her eyes mysteriously, like a movie star’s. She had
cheekbones that Judith’s ex-boss Talia would have called sculpted,
and the only signs of her age were the tiny crow’s feet at her eyes and
harsh little lines at the corners of her mouth.

“I didn’t mean to imply anything,” said Mrs. Sloan. “Sometimes
he goes to school, sometimes museums, sometimes just shopping
plazas. That’s Herman.”

Judith expected Mrs. Sloan’s smile to turn into a laugh,
underscoring the low mockery she had directed towards Herman
since he and Judith had arrived that morning. But the woman kept
quiet, and the smile dissolved over her straight white teeth. She
regarded Judith thoughtfully.

“I’d thought it might be school because you don’t seem that old,”
said Mrs. Sloan. “Of course I don’t usually have an opportunity to
meet Herman’s lady friends, so I suppose I really can’t say.”

“I met Herman on a tour. I was on vacation in Portugal, I
went there with a girl I used to work with, and when we were in
Lisbon — ”

“ — Herman appeared on the same tour as you. Did your girlfriend
join you on that outing, or were you alone?”

“Stacey got food poisoning.”
As I was about to say
. “It was a rotten
day, humid and muggy.” Judith wanted to tell the story the way she’d
told it to her own family and friends, countless times. It had its own
rhythm; her fateful meeting with Herman Sloan in the roped-off
scriptorium of the monastery outside Lisbon, dinner that night in
a vast, empty restaurant deserted in the off-season. In the face of
Mrs. Sloan, though, the rhythm of that telling was somehow lost.
Judith told it as best she could.