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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Our tastes in recreational fear are as idiosyncratic as our tastes in erotica, even if most horror fans probably do prefer the graphic gross-outs of a book like "Dreamcatcher." More literary, less explicit tales of terror are harder to find, perhaps because they're less in demand. But anyone who shuddered at "The Turn of the Screw" or considers the '60s film "The Haunting" to be more frightening than any special-effects-laden gorefest will appreciate "Ordinary Horror," a first novel by David Searcy. Like a King novel written by Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness" is echoed in this novel, too), it's set in a Midwestern suburb where the tract homes, "given twenty or thirty years to mellow, lose none of their bleakness."
Frank Delabano, a widower of about 70, lives in one of these tract houses, devoted to his garden and his solitude. When a bunch of what look like gopher holes show up on his lawn and flower beds, he mail-orders a bunch of spiky bromeliads from an ad in the Sunday paper that promises the plants will chase the pests away. Everything that happens next -- the package on his doorstep with no return address, the terrible-smelling mulch that comes with the plants, the way they grow so darn fast -- spells trouble, of course. But the strange pall that steals over Mr. Delabano and his neighborhood hovers tantalizingly between the ordinary and the uncanny. The streets are remarkably quiet; there seems to be a rash of missing pets; Mr. Delabano finds the corpse of a somehow unidentifiable run-over animal in the middle of the road and occasionally he sees similar creatures -- lost dogs? -- in the distance; flocks of cicadas and grackles visit his yard; and what's that weird smell? The little girl next door keeps drawing the same black scribble in picture after picture. "Do you know what that is?" she demands of Mr. Delabano.
"Yes," says Mr. Delabano after a minute. It's ... densely scribbled with so much pressure there are ridges of crushed crayon; he imagines a little hand pressing down that hard, trying to form such a notion, so violent and obscure it's hard to tell anything's there but there is, buried in the effort, a suggestion of a head and a mouth. Eyes possibly. "Yes," he says again, "I think I do." He's looking at her now. "I think it's a very bad dog."
Why this particular conversation should provoke such a deep shiver is a matter of sheer alchemy. Searcy conjures up an atmosphere in which fog outside a window or shadows against the bedroom curtains seem filled with a formless, almost unbearable significance, a meaning that refuses to solidify and remains all the scarier for that. Mr. Delabano's already living in a kind of dream world, a state of suspension that inevitably raises the question of what he's waiting for. Remember what it felt like to stay home sick on a school day, the strange somnolent quality of a house that would otherwise be empty, a place removed from the world's activities? Sick or not, every one of Mr. Delabano's days is like this, and Searcy meticulously crafts this trancelike mood with long, unspooling sentences about deserted yards, the sound of a car door slamming in the distance and the vast, unnerving prairie at the edge of the subdevelopment.
Theorists have written that horror collects in the space between categories we consider mutually exclusive; all of our favorite monsters are either both living and dead or both human and animal. Perhaps that's why the suburbs -- both country and city -- seem a particularly fertile ground for growing tales of terror. Everything that happens to Mr. Delabano has two possible explanations: one ordinary, the other horrible. And Mr. Delabano himself has become a creature of places in between; he's not quite part of life and not quite departed from it, either. The other horror story in this slim and ominous volume only very rarely seeps into Mr. Delabano's consciousness. It comes in the form of fleeting images of overlit hospital rooms and murky X-rays and in the remembered sweetness of his wife's voice.
