The ‘Geisters by David Nickle
My rating: 4/5 cats
Was it terror, or was it love? It would be a long time before Ann LeSage could decide. For most of her life, the two feelings were so similar as to be indistinguishable.
It was easy to mix them up.
now that is how you open a book. those are the kind of lines my beloved jonathan carroll tends to open with, and while the opening chapter reminded me of carroll, with its date night whimsically impinged-upon by the supernatural, at some point this changes and becomes a much darker tale than he would write, full of psychosexual violence, control, and intimidation.
ann’s ideas of love and terror are all awry because of her experiences as a young girl, when a poltergeist she named “the insect” was seemingly attached to her, and was responsible for horrific acts of violence affecting her family. she eventually learned to develop the mental strength to contain it in a prison of her own imagining, but now, as she is about to marry a man she thinks she loves, the insect is starting to reassert its presence, and terror-love is about to erupt into her life once more.
the story is told through events in ann’s present-day situation interspersed with her childhood memories of the insect and her family life: a carefully-teetering collage of betrayal, misperception, vulnerability, and greed.
i don’t know how much to say about this book, which always seems like a cop-out when i say it in a review, but i really mean it. i will say it involves a shadowy group of men with sexual desires well beyond the norm looking for the ultimate transgressive sexual high, and the ends they will go to to satisfy their dark erotic urges.
it’s kind of like monsterporn all grown up. BUT WAIT! before you dismiss it on those grounds – i just mean it shows what literary monsterporn would look like if it weren’t about detailing the act itself, but exploring the impulse behind it. and if it were horrible and terrifying instead of silly.
that’s all.
it’s really very good – it is a slow building tale with many small reveals along the way which culminates into a final scene of “yes.”:
you’ll never look at dungeons and dragons the same way again, i can tell you that much.
