Night Music (49 page)

Scientifically,
Frankenstein
is indebted to the flourishing study of medicine, and in particular the fascination with the inner workings of the human body that would ultimately lead to the practice of “burking,” the commission of murders in order to secure bodies for the dissection tables. Burking takes its name from William Burke who, with his accomplice William Hare, killed sixteen people in the vicinity of Edinburgh in 1828 and sold the corpses to Dr. Robert Knox for dissection. Burke was hanged for his crimes, while Hare was released after turning King's evidence, after which little is known about him. Burke was publicly dissected following his execution, and his skeleton is now displayed in the Anatomy Museum of the University of Edinburgh Medical School.

Stevenson's novel, meanwhile, takes its cue from a neo-Darwinian theory of degeneration: that civilization contains within itself the seeds of its own decay. While examining the duality of man it suggests that, having evolved from primitive beings, their violent atavistic urges remain part of our makeup, waiting for a catalyst to cause them to emerge. It was a tenet of the earliest works of criminal anthropology, among them those of Cesare Lombroso, who took the view that “the germs of moral insanity and criminality are found normally in mankind in the first stages of his existence.”

Although Stevenson also nods to the epistolary tradition by using letters to impart knowledge to the reader, they're simply part of a larger narrative. What struck me most forcibly when rereading
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
was how slowly the nature of the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde is made apparent. We are by now familiar with the basic thrust of the story—scientist experiments with a potion to unleash his inner primitive in order to separate it from his higher being:

If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

But a contemporary reader approaching the story for the first time would have done so with little or no idea of what linked Jekyll to Hyde, and it's really only in “Henry Jekyll's First Statement of the Case,” which closes the book, that the truth is revealed. The rest is given to us in flashes, and accounts from a number of narrators and witnesses, each of whom can, of necessity, supply only an incomplete version of events. It's a classic slow reveal.

In 1888, Jekyll and Hyde found their way to the London stage, and the performances at the Lyceum Theatre coincided with the Whitechapel murders of prostitutes committed between August and November of that year, five of which were attributed to the killer known as Jack the Ripper. Suddenly Stevenson's work took on a chilling relevance, with an editorial in the
Pall Mall Gazette
noting that “There certainly appears to be a tolerably realistic impersonification of Mr. Hyde at large in Whitechapel.”

While it was initially assumed that someone capable of committing crimes of such barbarity had to be of a coarse and impoverished nature
⁸
—“we should not be surprised if the murderer in the present case should not be slum bred,” the editorial harrumphed—it didn't take long for the flaws in that reasoning to be questioned, with the
Pall Mall Gazette
backpedaling furiously just a few days later, suggesting helpfully that “The Marquis de Sade, who died in a lunatic asylum at the age of seventy-four . . . was an amiable-looking gentleman, and, so, possibly enough, may be the Whitechapel murderer.”

So just as the outwardly respectable Henry Jekyll housed within him the murderous Edward Hyde, it now entered the realms of possibility that Jack the Ripper might be a man of some sophistication and breeding. This has given rise to an entire industry devoted to speculation about suspects as diverse as Sir John Williams, Queen Victoria's surgeon, named as the killer as recently as 2013 by an author claiming to be the descendant of his final victim, Mary Kelly; and, perhaps most spectacularly and wrongheadedly, the artist Walter Sickert, who, in 2001, was fingered by the mystery writer Patricia Cornwell as the culprit largely on the basis that his paintings were kind of sleazy. Cornwell was duly accused of “monstrous stupidity” for tearing apart a Sickert canvas in order to prove her theory, although not being much of a fan of Sickert's work myself—I know what I like, wouldn't have it on the wall at home, etc.—the only good thing that can be said to have come out of Cornwell's efforts is that there is one less Sickert painting in the world.

And thus it is that from the
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
—and the image of the Ripper as a savage hiding behind the facade of a gentleman—we can trace a slightly wavy line to Thomas Harris, and the creation of the cannibal psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, he of
Silence of the Lambs
and making-this-author-cry fame. As it happens, Anthony Hopkins was the first actor to win the Best Actor Oscar for a horror film since Fredric March, who won the award in 1932 for the lead role in—yes, you guessed it—
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
.

Sorry, that was rather a long digression, and we're now back at my childhood bookshelves. The Poe anthology is, I think, one of only two books that I salvaged from my grandmother's house in Kerry before it was sold and demolished after her death. The other is a paperback copy of
Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man
(1972), the first Ed McBain book I ever encountered and also, I believe, the first mystery novel I ever read.
⁹
I have a strong suspicion that Poe may have been my introduction to more grown-up supernatural storytelling, as I have a memory of struggling as a child with his prose style. My grandmother's library thus provided the genesis of my literary career, as right from my first novel,
Every Dead Thing
, I was fascinated by the possibility of combining the rationalist traditions of the mystery novel with the antirationalist underpinnings of supernatural fiction.

Of course, this didn't entirely meet with the favor of mystery fiction's more conservative rump. The mystery community—readers, writers, critics—has its own equivalent of those people who instinctively file objections to planning permission on the grounds that they would very much prefer things in general to remain the same, regardless of whether or not the proposed changes might actually be for the better. It's not even true to say that they have a definition of what mystery fiction is; instead, they simply know what it isn't. They have always had a particular hatred for the mixing of genres, to the extent that a mystery novel set, say, in the Old West, will automatically be categorized as a Western, while a mystery set in the future is science fiction. English historical settings seem to be okay, presumably on the grounds that the glories of the Empire appeal to their natural conservatism.

These self-appointed guardians of the mystery genre's past, present, and future reserve a particular hatred for any hint of the supernatural, a hostility that finds its most famous expression in the set of ten rules of detective fiction formulated by Father Ronald Knox in 1929, the second of which reads, “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.”
¹⁰

Now I wasn't writing novels in which “the ghost did it,” but was merely trying to explore some of the possibilities inherent in William Gaddis's suggestion that “you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law” (
A Frolic of His Own
, 1994). I was curious about that disparity between law and justice, the difference between our imperfect human system of justice and the possibility of a divine justice, and the implications that the existence of the latter might have for the origins of evil. I was also interested in creating new forms, hybrids of existing traditions, because I believed that in experimentation lay progress.

I was reminded, too, that the little collection of Poe salvaged from my grandmother's house contained stories of both mystery and the supernatural, for
Tales of Mystery & Imagination
housed, in addition to narratives of outright horror, two of the three Dupin mysteries, in which a French amateur detective investigates a number of baffling crimes. The most famous of these remains “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which the solution to a brutal double murder involves—and I'm giving a little away here, but not much—an orangutan, which suggests that even Poe recognized the absurdity of the purely rationalist approach.
¹¹

When I was putting together
Nocturnes
, my first collection of supernatural prose, I tried to write a Poe-esque tale entitled “The Bridal Bed,” but I left it out of the main volume because I discovered that it's a lot harder than it first appears to write like Poe. As with Raymond Chandler, his mood and style are so distinctive that to imitate him risks descending into pastiche. I later relented and included it in the paperback edition, but I think I had the decency to apologize for it.

Poe stood beside a volume of H. P. Lovecraft stories on my grandmother's shelf. I still have no idea how the Lovecraft got there. Poe's presence I could almost understand, as he came in the form of an old hardback and so fit in with the general look of her library, but the Lovecraft was a relatively new Panther paperback edition, possibly of
The Lurking Fear and Other Stories
, although I can't swear to it. I could only assume that one of my older cousins had left it, but I had just two older cousins, neither of whom struck me as the type to bother with Lovecraft. It was, in its way, all very Lovecraftian—or perhaps, more correctly, M. R. Jamesian (of whom more later).

Whatever its origins, I struggled with the Lovecraft even more than I did with the Poe, and I remain a Lovecraft agnostic. It has always seemed to me that Lovecraft's imaginative reach typically exceeds his literary grasp by some distance. Even his most famous novella,
At the Mountains of Madness
, falls down when it comes to putting words to his odd vision of the universe, plagued by gibbering horrors from the beyond. There's far too much “I cannot bring myself to describe the terrible vision that met my eyes . . .” followed by “Oh, all right, I'll have a go” for my liking. As the story's narrator puts it at one point, “I might as well be frank—even if I cannot bear to be quite direct,” ignoring the fact that frankness without directness is like an arrow without a point on the end. I'll grant that his best tales manage to exceed the sum of their parts, although Michel Houellebecq's
H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
(2005), an attempt at reassessment and rehabilitation, left me distinctly cold. Then again, that may just be a natural—and, to my mind, eminently understandable—response to anything Houellebecq writes. Remember: it's not bias if you're right.

•  •  •

As it happens, I'm quite gratified that I took the writing of this piece as an opportunity to return to my childhood home. (My mother is gratified, too, as I'm leaving with a couple of boxes of books, my old teddy bear, and some model cars. Not only is her ceiling now in less danger of collapsing on top of her, but she may also be optimistic about the possibility of my severing the apron strings entirely, and wholeheartedly embracing adult life, bless her.) I was a child who loved books, and I am an adult who is the product of books. There, in my old bedroom, the history of my childhood reading remains in dusty limbo. I really must encourage my mum to think about putting a plaque up on the wall of the house and charging people to visit.

Strangely absent from those shelves, though, was M. R. James, and it is James who remains my favorite writer of supernatural fiction—

But perhaps I should qualify that statement before we go any further.

My first explorations of longer supernatural fiction came in the form of the novels of Stephen King. I started with the aforementioned
Salem's Lot
(1975), followed by
The Shining
(1977), which was given to me by Eamonn Sweeney, the boy I sat next to for one year in primary school, so we're talking about 1979 at the latest. Eamonn Sweeney thought that
The Shining
was the most frightening book ever written. He was wrong, of course: that honor went to
Salem's Lot
, but
The Shining
certainly was interesting, if a little lengthy.
¹²
When I reviewed
Doctor Sleep
, King's sequel to
The Shining
, for
The Irish Times
, I calculated that I had read more than fifty of King's books, which is an awful lot of one writer's work to have consumed.
¹³

I should confess that King and I had a slight parting of the ways around 1986's
It
. It wasn't anything that he had done, and the split wasn't final. I just wanted to see other writers. I would still read the books as soon as they came out, but I did so at one remove. Some point of connection had been lost, and I couldn't understand why.

I think that I may have an answer now. In 1986 I had just turned eighteen, and my relationship with horror as a genre was changing. Horror fiction, when read in adolescence, offers a means of exploring the darkness and complexity of the adult world. It's only superficially about vampires, or werewolves, or ghosts. What it does is enable young people to ascribe a name—zombie, ghoul, monster—to the unnameable, to give form to formless terrors, and in that way come to terms with them.
¹⁴
King's fictions are particularly suited to these explorations, in part because he writes so well about childhood and adolescence (which is not to say that the books themselves are childish or adolescent, not at all.) But once we enter young adulthood, the need for such tools is less pressing. We begin dealing with the reality of sexuality, relationships, compromise, work, responsibility and, far in the distance, the shadow of mortality. As a consequence, horror fiction loses some of its immediacy.