I finished a book last night that I'm going to need to expound upon. A collection of short horror stories by Lawrence Santoro, it's intriguingly and even poetically titled Drink for the Thirst to Come. This is a book that jumped out at me from the endless conveyor belt of social network promotions we are subjected to at every turn, for two reasons: the aforementioned lyrical title, and a cover picture for which "creepy" is an altogether inadequate adjective. There is something about the face on that cover—suggestive of a mutant, broken Christ-figure hounded to the world's last margins—which dredges up long-forgotten nightmares and something closer to existential disquiet and an awful pity than out-and-out horror.
And for the most part, the stories themselves operate in a similar vein.
But let me rewind. For far too long, certainly since reading John Claude Smith's The Dark is Light Enough for Me, I've been looking for a collection that might scratch a certain maddening itch: it would need to be dark, very dark, but written by someone fully in control of their narrative and characters, adept in the language of unease. Outright gore is fine, even familiar tropes of the horror genre, but I want to get below the surface, take a peek at the stuff that fills me with a disturbance that won't dissipate. I suppose I've been foraging for sickening, shuddering nightmares to prove to me I'm not alone in my own. A twisted kindred impulse. So I downloaded Santoro's collection to my Kindle and left it there a while, savouring the anticipation.
Until one day, the urge to open it finally arrived.
And I began to read...
...and was hit with the most profound sense of disappointment. This wasn't the sobbing monstrosity I was expecting. For starters, the font/typeface was beyond ugly, bordering on the unreadable. And I was immediately disoriented by the opening story for which the volume is named. The tone of the narrative was like nothing I've read in a long while. Phrases seemed strange, hyphen-heavy (oh, enough, David!) and awkward: "the green-forever", "just-up corn", "down-rushing mud." Already, from this vantage point, I can see I was reacting to my own shattered expectations and allowing the admittedly awful font to influence my overall response to the words on the page.
Let me just say this: I am more than glad I persevered.
This first story takes an age to get going, coughing and rattling like an ancient jalopy before roaring into unexpected life. Okay, the font doesn't get better, but the sense of reading something truly worthwhile sure does. It is a quest story set in a post-apocalyptic world, but that description is like saying Riddley Walker's about some weird kid in a Kent of the future. And returning to those opening passages now, I see something I completely missed first time around: Santoro's writing style itself is a comet that comes closest to being captured by the orbit of a star named Bradbury than anything I've read in a long, long time. Yeah, go back and read that slightly awkward sentence again. I mean it. And because on this occasion I had been looking for a Barker or possibly even a Ligotti, I almost missed out on the equally dark treats that followed.
I don't want this post to get out of hand, so I'll resist a blow-by-blow account of each individual story. Suffice it to say, there is plenty here to creep you out, all the way down to the follicles, to turn your stomach, to genuinely frighten you enough to want the lights turned back on for real. Even the stock monsters of horrordom appear in altered form, disguised enough to terrify anew via the delayed shock of recognition. The voice is often perfect for each story. Gruff, strange, foreign, familiar. Settings and mood are never repeated one story to the next. New Orleans here. Chicago there. 1940s England elsewhere. The most common theme is one of haunting. Again, not ghosts per se, but something cold and spectral seen through dirty gauze in an infected room. A feeling we ourselves are the ghosts trying and mostly failing to engage with the world within these pages just out of reach. A world we might be better off avoiding, all the same. Speaking of which, I have encountered many an atrocity, both in fiction and in real life, sadly, but there's one story here I would seriously hesitate to recommend to anyone with even the slightest tenderness in his or her heart. I'll merely describe "Little Girl Down the Way" as one of the most harrowing horror stories I never want to read again. It is vile and yet it is brilliant. And I almost hate myself for even admitting that.
Alongside the frankly bizarre font issues throughout, let me issue one more word of warning: these stories, almost without exception, are long. They occasionally ramble and twist, taking tangents that occasionally work and that sometimes don't. But sit with them, stay with them, prop them up when they flag, let them reciprocate, and as Santoro suggests in his foreword, read them aloud. Taste the writhing sounds of life itself trying to make sense of the darkness, defining its own opposition to that negation of all things.
No doubt there's some moral here, something along the lines of the serendipitous defiance of expectations, but, whatever, I'm glad I pushed through and found myself in a very odd and eldritch dimension indeed, perhaps not the one I was expecting, but one that scratched another itch—a crawling, anxiety-ridden itch—I didn't even know I had.