Granta's latest issue is a collection of fiction, reportage, poetry and evocative art. The subject is horror, and though the name Stephen King on the cover suggests a particular genre, the works in this volume explore a wide range of what is horrifying to us.
In “False Blood”, Will Self writes about his experience with illness, with having too much haemoglobin in his blood. Naturally, being flush with blood, he talks of the vampire angle, but his overall tone is searing honesty. Self thoroughly plumbs the sometimes equal terrors of illness and treatment. Perhaps what most troubles him is that his extended youth of injections and mind-alteration has led to middle-aged consequences. Cancer and death encircle him, and he is truly falling back to earth.
Creepy pronoun
Paul Auster's “Your Birthday Has Come and Gone” seems an odd choice for this volume. The chief horror a reader finds at first is the use of the second person pronoun throughout the narrative. The story is an exhaustive exploration of the mundane. A man in his mid-sixties remembers his mother, her magnetism, her craving for attention, her alcoholism, her fear of going into old age impoverished and alone. There is nothing in all the detail of this woman's life and manners to disturb us, and yet its sheer volume is oppressive and we become uneasy. The effect of enormous paragraphs is that of the very large concrete blocks one finds in basement walls. A feeling of enclosure sets in. That is when the calculated impact of the second person pronoun strikes the reader. When the narrator says “you found it impossible” and “you suggested”, we cannot detach ourselves from this mother. The stomach tenses, and we are ready to curl up into a ball. Indeed, by the end “we” feel a panic attack coming on, at the thought of the dead who will not stay dead.
In Sarah Hall's intriguing little tale, “She Murdered Mortal He”, a woman is rejected by her lover during a holiday at a beach resort. She goes for a long walk, encounters a dog that persistently follows her, and she comes back to her room. During her walk she thinks over her hurt and anger. Is she the agent, somehow, of the beastly attack on her lover in her absence? Is that dog quite real?
Mark Doty's “Insatiable” is an essay on the astonishing correspondence between the sunny Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker, surely one of the darkest writers we know. What the two writers had in common, as we would see if we laid their works side by side, is their frank eroticism. One weaves the erotic with the spiritual. The other weaves the erotic with the ghoulish. But Doty quotes from the actual letters written between the two. Stoker, it appears, based the character of Dracula on Whitman, and Doty takes off from there. It is not an academic essay, and Doty throws in his deeply personal accounts of amorous encounters.
Rajesh Parameswaran, in “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, enters the mind of a tiger in a zoo. It has been done more bloodily and hauntingly by Angela Carter, but perhaps the reader will never again watch a captive tiger feed without remembering Parameswaran's picture of the animal's all-consuming love for its prey.
Then there are the enduring horrors of war. Santiago Roncagliolo reports from Peru and Tom Bamforth from Darfur. Bamforth describes a ride through the desert with aid workers in a convoy of jeeps, fuelled by fear. He describes child soldiers, abandoned elders, a shocking number of people missing in every household. He describes the hopelessness and imbecility of it all, and finally the visceral indifference of those who claim to be on a humanitarian mission in Darfur.
In a magazine of new writing, Stephen King's “The Dune” looks a bit old hat. It has that famous Southern Gothic atmosphere, but King's tale is linear and arid, and a reader can see the end coming from miles away. There is plenty more in this volume, some of it disappointing. Don DeLillo's “The Starveling” and Robert Bolano's “The Colonel's Son” both prove that horror doesn't always hold you on the edge of your seat.
Granta: The Magazine of New Writing, Issue 117: Autumn 2011, Granta Publications, 2011, p.266, Rs. 699.
