Nightsiders by Gary McMahon
My rating: 3/5 cats
i don’t think this is the most successful piece of writing i have ever read, but i think it is worth checking out because 1) it is very short, so it won’t take up too much of your life, and 2) it puts an interesting spin on the horror genre, specifically the revenge-porn genre where you find things like i spit on your grave, straw dogs, and the last house on the left.
in the afterword, mcmahon claims that it is more like funny games, and in a way, that’s true, but only in its violence and in that one scene in the movie where the fourth wall is breached, and there is that little wink of complicity. whereas this story turns from a straightahead horror story to a sort of exercise in metafiction.
and i think that’s where it stayed for me: a fun writing exercise, but something that still needed a little polish.
the story starts out really fun, or “fun”—an english family, in order to escape a trauma they endured in the city, moves to a house in the country, “away from it all.” however, they had already scheduled a family vacation, so after moving in all their stuff, they go away together, and upon their return, they find that another family has moved in in their absence. a very baaaad family. and they seem to have the police and real estate law on their side. violence ensues.
it is all very horrifying. but slowly, slyly, other elements start creeping in, the center cannot hold. what is real, what is construct? what is story, what are characters? what is really at work here? it becomes something other than a typical horror story.
from the afterword:
…as I sat down to write, something peculiar happened. The story refused to bend to my will. It began to twist and turn in my grasp, taking on a new shape, becoming something entirely different from what I’d originally envisaged. So now, rather than a tough, noirish thriller with sociopolitical overtones, I was dealing with something much more ambitious and problematic.
and i totally agree—what it turns into is much more interesting than its origins, but it does get a little muzzy there at the end. i see what he was working towards, but i don’t think it quite got there.
That was when I decided to hand everything over to my muse and just go with it, and it led to the strangest writing experience of my life. The story basically told itself, with no apparent gap between thought and page, no room to react to what was forming in my brain before I saw it on the laptop screen. It was (as) if I were simply transcribing the words being whispered in my ear by a particularly giddy psychopath…
and this is what i was thinking about specifically, when i sat own to write this review, and i have been racking my brain (and google’s brain) for that quote, the one i thought was from one of those transcendentalists about creativity being a violent outpouring of emotion, tempered by time. and had i actually been able to find that quote, which i swear i am not making up, i would point out that the most important part of it (if it does in fact exist) is the phrase “tempered by time,” because letting the muse take over is all well and good, but sometimes even the muse needs an editor to clean up some of the ambiguities or tighten some of the scenes; a moment to step back and understand what the material is aching to become. THANK GOODNESS FOR MADELINE who reminded me that i was, in fact, thinking of wordsworth, who claimed that poetry was “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in tranquility.”
because i am too dumb to remember things.
i will say that most of it is great—i loved the tension, and the way it just built and built and the reader was completely caught up in the events. the only problems i had were with 1) the believability of the characters, and 2) once the story made its “turn,” i think it got really exciting and promising, but then just cut off too quickly, before the idea had really ripened fully.
but, since 2) negates 1), because of the nature of the turn, i guess i just have a little disappointment with the end. metafiction is tough to pull off, and i applaud the idea of it here, i just wish he had stuck the landing a little better.
but read it, it is a clever idea, if you are someone who can handle a lot of blood on the walls and stuff.
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