Not exactly a “redo” of the previous post, but I didn’t read much else this past week that really jumped out at me, and mulling over what I’d like to write about, what angle I’m trying to capture here, I see no reason to not just re-explore a thing that’s sat with me for a while just to share some things I appreciated about it.
Right after I wrote about how the secret main character of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is actually the concept of violence (nebulous!), I hit a stretch where for the first time in a while the main character was actually just the initial main character again. The kid gets separated from the larger group most of the book takes place with, and he has a harrowing little adventure in the wilderness catching up with them again. It reminded me a bit of what grabbed me about All The Pretty Horses, the first Cormac McCarthy novel I read and the one that he wrote after this one; passages where someone is just traversing a hostile environment that feel physically and mentally exhausting to just read, but through how they mirror the setting this happens in a weirdly satisfying way.
In the distance before him a fire burned on the prairie, a solitary flame frayed by the wind that freshened and faded and shed scattered sparks down the storm like hot scurf blown from some unreckonable forge howling in the waste. He sat and watched it. He could not judge how far it was. He lay on his stomach to skylight the terrain to see what men were there but there was no sky and no light. He lay for a long time watching but he saw nothing more.
When he went on again the fire seemed to recede before him. A troop of figures passed between him and the light. Then again. Wolves perhaps. He went on.
It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.
Which I suppose doesn’t exactly address my “I’m having a hard time following this because the characters aren’t the important part” issue from last time, but here we are. Wolves again.
Skimming through the opening pages of Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya’s Helen House again curious about how that book so instantly grabbed me, I guess the boring answer is that sometimes a high degree of detail slows down the pacing, like when you zero in on the sound of every tick of the second hand of a clock. The opening scene of Helen House probably only lasts a minute or two if you were to step back and take account of it, but the detail slows it down, weighs down the silence of the incredibly awkward moment where the girlfriend tells the narrator about her dead sister.
It was, to say the least, strange timing. She was topless. I was still tightly wound with arousal. You might think a dead sister is an instant mood killer, but I’m always at my stupidest when horny, and my mind was slow to shift gears in that bizarre and decidedly unsexy moment. She’d delivered the words as if they were scripted: carefully memorized and rote.
And what’s fun about doing this in fiction is the reader isn’t sure yet if the clock is a time bomb.
There in the mouth of my bedroom, I tried to think back to how she’d reacted, but I hadn’t really given her time to react, had I? Again, I remembered what Amber wore: dark jeans and a green sweater. I remembered how she ate some pieces of her trout with her fingers and how I wanted to suck them. But I couldn’t remember how she responded when I told her my sister was dead, if she’d said any of the things people say like sorry or if she’d placed a hand over mine. It wouldn’t have been the kind of touch I was looking for.
Blood Meridian stays firmly in the exact present (mostly), will let time pass abruptly with a simple “They rode all the rest of that day” and never look back; it will journey on rotely, purposefully. Helen House will stretch out a moment by reaching back into the past, unpacking what this moment brings up and haunts the present. This obviously makes sense for each of them. Helen House is a horror story, thus more concerned about how the past affects the future. Blood Meridian is more one of those “the unchanging nature of man” stories, and its only diversions from the present are into the future, with the occasional brief passage unceremoniously informing the reader that in the coming month a town with be massacred. The haunting Blood Meridian is concerned with is the inevitability and predictability of humanity on the future.
Worth noting since this is My Thing, Helen House is also darkly funny:
I’d written a list in my journal quite literally labeled Reasons I’m A Bad Girlfriend. A past therapist had gotten me in the habit of making lists, though to be fair, I think she had intended for it to be more of a grounding technique than an exercise in self-loathing.
“My parents are going to talk about it when you see them,” Amber said. She spoke softly to the wall in front of us, and I watched her lips. “I had to tell you before our trip.”
“Okay,” I said.
At the top of the list: I don’t know if I love her
Under that, in smaller script: haha what IS love?
Wolves! Again!
I’m probably still mulling over Helen House a bit because it didn’t quite stick the landing, but the setup was delightful enough where I don’t particularly care. I’m impressed how effortlessly it flit between a sort of clinical approach to horniness, actual horniness, difficulty with relationships, trauma-induced difficulty with relationships, humor, and ramping up the ghost story to come. What a delightful deranged set of legos to pour all over the floor and watch someone build with.
Standard plugs zone:
Over on Trash Garbage, we posted a new free jazz, jazz fusion, & avant garde jazz playlist jokingly titled THIS JAZZ KILLS FASCISTS. acab.
Did you know I’m a copy editor for The NYC Thorn, the NYC-DSA’s weekly roundup newsletter of local political news? If you live in NYC, essential reading imo; I’d been reading it for years before I joined!