Riding Shotgun with THE SPEED QUEEN

There are stories that are such clear distillations of a time and place and experience that one can’t picture them happening anywhere else or to anyone else. Not all works are of such a singular nature--one can pluck Juliet or Hamlet from Verona or Denmark and slap them down in south Florida or behind the handlebars of a Harley, and we’ve got a new, fresh take on the source material. The magic of Stewart O’Nan’s The Speed Queen is of an opposite but perhaps equal variety. Though elements of their story are absolutely universal, Marjorie, Natalie, and Lamont cannot exist anywhere but 1980s Oklahoma, and the specificity of their story is what is so appealing.

Before I begin to wax on about muscle cars and fast food drive-thrus[1], a few words must be said about the literary device O’Nan employs to tell Marjorie’s story. The book is written in the first person, but the conceit is that Marjorie is sitting on death row the day before her execution, recording tapes that will be used by none other than Stephen King to write a book about the Mach 6 killers from her perspective. This device is brilliant on several levels.

First, the device provides a clear motivation for Marjorie to tell the story of her life, from her childhood dog Jody-Jo to that last police chase. Never once do we question why Marjorie’s talking about some aspect of her upbringing, because we know she’s been given a set of questions from Mr. King himself that she’s supposed to be answering, and her answers become even more introspective, and revealing, due to this conceit. In fact listening to her wrestle with the questions, in her own words, does a gorgeously subtle job of painting her as an unreliable narrator (as when she calls her high school experience “pretty normal” and then proceeds to talk about her experiences with drink and drugs, or when she states emphatically she never got drunk while pregnant and then tells a story about being drunk while pregnant).

Second, Marjorie’s story is occasionally interrupted by a guard coming by, or someone yelling from another cell. Not only does this serve to put the reader right behind bars with her, it gives us all sorts of interesting background details on what life is like for four women on death row.

Third, the conceit provides further grounding in time and place because of the implication that Stephen King is trying his hand at a crime novel. Stephen King is still a genre giant today, but he was both absolutely massive in the ‘80s and still relatively new.. O’Nan could have made the author on the other end anonymous or pseudonymous, but simply the mention of Stephen King helps to call to mind the era. Plus, it’s fun.

Why does this story need to be set in the midwest in the 1980s? It’s ultimately a story about boredom that never manages to be boring, a cautionary tale about the dangers of under-stimulation to a restless populace. Boredom is a theme that comes up again and again while Marjorie relates her tale, from the highways of Oklahoma to death row, a place where the women’s efforts to occupy themselves until the end dovetail nicely with the youthful  ennui that landed at least Marjorie, and probably most of her compatriots, there. While boredom might be a universal impulse that manifests itself in diverse populations in every variation from 4H club membership to suicide bombings, the ‘80s in the midwest offers up a particularly peculiar cocktail of sources of boredom and antidotes.

There’s the landscape, of course. Vast, unending, and pretty damned flat. When the very earth beneath your feet is boring, it’s hard for anything particularly interesting to grow in that soil, thus you have a series of small towns without a lot going on, populated by people without a lot going on, either. And then there’s the decade itself. ‘80s nostalgia aside, the turbulence of the sixties and seventies led to a bit of a cultural hangover that lasted all the way up until 9/11. All those factors conspire to induce a special kind of boredom in everyone we meet, with deadly consequences.

Marjorie has little in the way of opportunity or stimulation available to her. No Internet, or course, and few activities other than driving around and doing drugs. While she clearly has an innate predilection towards addiction, it’s hard to imagine her running quite so headlong into the arms of drink and drugs, and at such an early age, if she were born into a more fascinating region or decade. Drugs and boredom are a powerful combination. Throw cars into the mix and things get quite combustible.

Being given a powerful machine and nothing to do is much like hitting puberty. All of a sudden you’ve got 400 horses under the hood and nowhere to turn it loose. The American muscle car represents a certain kind of freedom, sure, but also a certain kind of entertainment. Much of Marjorie and Lamont’s lives revolve around cars. Fixing cars, finding car parts, driving to car shows. Going out on the town and meeting up with a bunch of other gearheads at the malt shop. Again, O’Nan conjures up a special kind of geographical and temporal magic here, confirming once more why this story must take place in ‘80s Oklahoma. Unlike the sixties, these machines are now old enough to be mythologized. To be collector’s items. To empower and sustain a subculture. And since there aren’t gas shortages, there’s nothing stopping anyone from swallowing a few Black Beauties, popping in a Ramones 8-track, and driving all night.

The Speed Queen idles quite comfortably at the intersection of universality and specificity. We can identify with Marjorie, surely. But her life is only one we can sympathize with, not quite live for ourselves, the same way she drives with a finger and an atlas while waiting for the executioner. And the care taken to create this paradigm is something authors of crime fiction, and indeed any writer looking to solidly ground their novel in time and place, to the extent the story cannot happen anywhere else, should note.

[1] Only footnote, I promise--how brilliant an analogue for Sonic-style restaurants is O’Nan’s Mach 6? As someone who sends his hungry characters to their local Fasmart for a Pizza Pouch on occasion, I’m jealous.

Deus Not Machina: Resounding Horror in Southern Gods

One of the oldest tricks in the horror playbook is the final scene that tells us that nope, the horror isn’t over, the good guys didn’t quite win, and all this is going to play out again. John Hornor Jacobs’ Southern Gods features an ending that might be fanciful and saccharine, if not for one tiny wrinkle. Leading man Bull Ingram dies while retrieving Franny from the Hellion, a diabolical vessel captained by her grand-uncle. Franny herself is murdered in a most heinous way, but comes back to life at the end. While reading, I thought this might be evidence of Jacobs losing his nerve, giving in to some base desire (or perhaps insistent editor) and pulling back at the last minute.

But it’s not.

Read all the way to the end. Jacobs doesn’t just wave a magic wand and reset the table exactly how it was before Franny was butchered. And in a way, Jacobs does something worse than just letting her stay dead.

In most non-extreme horror circles, it’s taboo to kill a child. Jacobs breaks this taboo with panache--Bull Ingram and Sarah finally reach the top of the boat where she’s being held, but to their dismay she’s already dead, split open and used in a ritual to bring forth the Prodigium, Lovecraftian Elder Gods. Immediately this subverts reader expectation. We ask ourselves if this can possibly be true, or if it’s some kind of illusion conjured up by the godling Hastur. But it’s not an illusion. It’s real. But through sacrifice and heroics, Franny is returned to life, and with the exception of Bull’s more permanent death, all is well.

Except it’s not.

In the closing scene, Sarah watches her child swim with her friends, trying to slide back into normalcy after what she’s experienced. And we learn that she remembers all of it. Being violated and butchered, the sort of trauma that no other person could possibly have a memory of. The natural question of whether it might have been better if she’d died arises, and there’s no good answer. But I’m generally an optimist about human resilience if not human nature, so here’s hoping Franny gets through it all okay.

The fact that Jacobs has Franny remember what happened to her means he didn’t pull back after all, he went through with what he meant to do. Which gives the ending a power and a resonance it would not have otherwise, if Franny had been restored to life without any memory of what happened. That would have cheapened the events.

To use this technique, the reminder that the horror continues need not be Jason Voorhees’ hand arising from a lake, or a haunted totem being passed to a new owner, but simply an intimation that inside the minds of the characters we’ve grown to love, the horror is decidedly not over. While the events themselves might not literally recur, for the rest of their lives the events will play out over and over again in the heads of the characters. Which is where all horror stories really take place, after all.

Books without Anchors

I just finished Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show, after a little over a month (granted, I snuck Ray Cluely's Water for Drowning in there, in addition to many, many slush pile stories). This is unusual for me. My average pace is probably about a book every week or so, unless it's a Sanderson-size tome and then I'm looking at two-ish. The Barker book is a long one, weighing in at nearly seven hundred pages, so I could be excused for taking so long to finish it. But the fact is that until the last two hundred-odd pages, I just couldn't get into it. I'm a stubborn sumbitch, and so I pushed through. But I finished it, having mostly enjoyed the third act of the book, and asked myself why didn't this book click for me?

Two reasons, I think, one minor, and one major. The first is there are moments that are so Clive Barkery they actually read more like a parody of Clive Barker (similar to Stephen King's Lamp Monstery moments). The bit about the guy who creates snake monsters by having insects manually masturbate him until he ejaculates on his own shit was particularly ridiculous. But when you open up a book by the bondage demon guy you have to expect a bit of that. The major reason I couldn't get into the book is that as a reader, I didn't have an emotional anchor until more than halfway through the novel.

When do you usually meet a protagonist? In the case of The Hobbit, in the very first line. In the case of The Shining, in the second chapter. Even in works like A Song of Ice and Fire, with huge casts of characters and multiple points of view, we meet all three of our true protagonists (Dany, Jon, and Tyrion) within the first hundred pages of the first novel (I actually love how the first two POV characters both get their heads chopped off; nice touch, that). But in The Great and Secret Show, we don't meet anything resembling a traditional protagonist until a third of the way through the book when Tesla Bombeck is introduced, and she's a tertiary character up until the halfway point.

In fact, Barker plays kind of a shell game with the protagonists up until Fletcher's self-immolation at the Palomo Grove Mall. Part one focuses on Randolph Jaffe, who we think is going to be our protagonist, albeit a seriously flawed one, until Fletcher and Raul are introduced. Then part two shifts focus to four teenage girls (and a pre-teen peeper), whose main purpose in the novel is to give birth to children who will be the catalyst for later events. In part three we settle in with Jo-Beth and Howie, who ultimately prove kind of useless to the resolution of the plot, while simultaneously meeting Tesla, who proves to be our actual protagonist.

Tesla is the character we really care about. She's the one who undergoes the hero's journey, she's the one who rises to the occasion when called upon, and she's the one who ultimately triumphs over evil. Plus she's snarky and fun. So why the hell don't we meet her earlier?

For half its length, the book floats from character to character without ever settling on one. And this illustrates for me the stark difference between what an established author and an unestablished one can get away with. A guy like Clive Barker can structure a book like this, in what I'd argue is a borderline experimental form. For someone who hasn't had a string of NYT bestselling novels, it's a much harder sell. Both for publishers, and for readers.

Like I said, I'm stubborn, and I would have kept reading anyway.

But not everyone is. Until I've sold a few million copies and feel like I've built up sufficient trust to get weird with things, my aim is to make things as easy on my readers as possible. That's not to say I won't produce complex or challenging stories (or stories I'd like to think are complex and challenging but are in reality obvious and banal); rather, I'll try to craft stories that honor the contract between the writer and the reader. The one that promises to give them certain things when they crack a book cover.

Like an anchor. Or at least a life preserver.