Wetbones Review

If the subject of modern horror is damnation, then the city is its Dantean Eighth Circle. Against a backdrop of detritic tenements, the protagonist of urban splatterpunk descends into worsening neighborhoods until s/he reaches the Ninth Circle of the damned: the subway, where stair and rail lead to shadow, and sharpened intensities of torture and disgust build to an intolerable pitch. Once s/he has penetrated to the subway's depths, there is only redemption or death. S/he has followed the frozen river of Cocytus to Lucifer's three mouths. S/he recognizes her condition in the faces of the damned, who, in the Kierkegaardian phrase of W. H. Auden, "must love one another or die."

Though damnation's locus is chiefly urban, its origins are less distinct. From early Barker to later Lansdale, modern horror shows damnation to be precipitated by jadedness: people grow numb and hardened as time runs down. But what motivates this change--a spiritual malaise? On this subject, the Barkers and Schows equivocate, wanting neither to be identified as Christian nor to avoid Christianity's rictus style.

In his earlier horror novels, notably the ground-breaking Cellars (Avon, 1982), a subterraneous Grand Guignol which preceded Skipp and Spector's The Light At The End (Bantam, 1986) by four years and Barker's "Midnight Meat Train" (Book of Blood, Sphere Books, 1984) by two, Shirley explored the Ninth Circle of urban Hell without admitting the possibility of redemption: he did not indicate the reason behind man's despair. But in his fourth and newest horror novel,Wetbones, John Shirley attempts to answer that question directly. Despair, he maintains, is the result of man's essential weakness. Despair is a kind of addiction.

The opening paragraph of Wetbones states this theme succinctly: the protagonist, Tom Prentice, watches helplessly as his wife, Amy, slides in front of him on a morgue drawer. His breath, like his attachment to her, floats above the body, vanishing into insignificance.

Prentice is the survivor of addiction, Amy is its casualty. He feels helpless because he is under addiction's grip. And the horror comes from what addiction does to lover and beloved. His body shrivels to impotence as hers is corrupted, eaten away.

The occult sources of addiction are explicated later. The Akishra, astral worms which take possession of human hosts, are the etheric manifestations of addiction itself; they descend on each kind of addict--smoker, drunk, junkie, sexaholic--with infinite particularity. Humans, according to the Akishra's victims, are subject to parasitical possession because they are weakened by urge and demiurge,

warring temperaments locked in an endless tergiversation.

Shirley's use of allegory is surreally explicit: the flatness of the prose heightens the satirical intent, and the procession of etheric parasites has the simplicity of a medieval triptych. The technique seems borrowed from C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet (1938), the fruit of the Cambridge scholar's studies in medieval literature (notably Allegory of Love (1936)): the message is so obvious that the story becomes transparent. Narrative acquires the rumble of prophesy and the grace of artifice.

Interestingly enough, the central idea of the plot--warring temperaments--informs the novel's style and tone as well. One finds two conflicting impulses on virtually every page: the suicidal impulse--an almost Edwardian luxuriating in physical/spiritual deterioration--and fear of death.

You got stoned and everyone could see it: could see your highbeams on, your eyes and mouth gaping, your exposed brain with a smoking hole in it...

Whatever indignity crack left him open for--every indignity, ultimately--it did one thing for him in exchange: crack totally and entirely occupied his mind. It pushed out even visions of Constance shoved alive into a crushing machine...

The urge toward self-destruction is tempered only by the fear of self-negation.

In the ephemeral flare of a Bic he glimpsed the place they dragged him to. It was a basement of the Projects. A furnace room, strewn with trash. Something moved sinuously in one corner. All thoughts of self destruction vanished in the prospect opening before him: he wanted to get away before they did what this room and this time and these people promised they could do.

Wetbones is extremely graphic in its depictions of sex and violence. But so, for that matter, are the novels of Dennis Cooper. The difference is that Cooper is gay and Shirley is straight: male-to-male, female-to-male, and female-to-male B & D are tolerated in PC fiction, but the male-to-female kind is reviled. The PC rationale is this: straight men may not indulge in violent fantasy because they lack the perspective of the disempowered, but oppressed sexual minorities--ie, gays and women--may. This is the same sort of reasoning which argues that a black person can't be racist because African Americans are too oppressed to be in a racist position or, alternately, that a poor person can't be a thief because the poor are too economically exploited to be threatening.

Horror's gospel, according to splatterpunk, is this: violence fuels revelation's rocket. In all of Shirley's later parables, the red oneiromancy of Dario Argento is reified by the allegory of Lewis: a burning hallucinogen rushes through the arteries of artifice. But in Shirley's new novel, the Blakean paranoia has found its ultimate subject--the bondage of habit--and stylistic breakthroughs are apparent on every page. Wetbones is a non-Cartesian bloodstone cut with a neoclassicist's chisel.