A New Voice in the Worldwide Weird
Reviews
By Adrian Van Young
In the ever-expanding world of the weird tale, of which Bernardo Esquinca, author of The Secret Life of Insects (Esquinca’s second collection in English translation), is a lively practitioner, there is often so much emphasis placed on the idea of story conceit, the attention-getting narrative set piece that gives so many tales of the supernatural and the grotesque their unique sense of purpose—for instance, the transient shape-shifting entity at the center of Nathan Ballingrud’s “You Go Where It Takes You” or the demon-possessed orphans that anchor Alice Sola Kim’s “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They’re Terrifying.” And often there is so little emphasis placed on the elemental, seemingly ineffable practice of weird storytelling itself, the process by which a writer is able to arrest a reader’s consciousness beyond any resistance, in the face of any distraction, in the compulsive act of turning one page after another, conjuring a narrative edifice where before there was nothing and coaxing a reader to wander its halls.
Novelist and short-story writer Esquinca, part Roberto Bolaño and part Mariana Enríquez, with a deep undercurrent of Edgar Allan Poe, is just such a writer, capable of immobilizing a reader with narrative in the course of a few direct, unfussy sentences, conjuring stories that are so packed with anecdote and atmosphere and psychological gravity as to rival most novels. Esquinca evokes this authority as a storyteller not only through his measured, pithy openings—“Two items of interest: (1) Today I’m going to talk to my wife for the first time in two years. (2) My wife is dead” (“The Secret Life of Insects”); or, “ ‘Long for him with all your soul,’ the witch doctor had told her, and Laurinda had done just that” (“Come to Me”)—but also through a stately critical intelligence, often leveraged through the minds of reliably unreliable narrators, that permeates these tales of the macabre and the unseemly, making those echoes of Poe undeniable.
In “Señor Ligotti”—a presumably intentional nod to celebrated American cosmic pessimist writer Thomas Ligotti, and Mexico’s official selection for The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories—a young writer in financial straits moves with his pregnant wife into a Mexico City apartment well beyond their means at the behest of a wealthy admirer (the story’s titular character), who claims he will donate it free of charge to the young couple if only the writer will indulge him, time to time, as a conversationalist and confidant. However, this patron of the arts soon reveals himself as an opportunistic, boundary-flouting pest—before morphing into a worrying stalker. The storytelling in “Señor Ligotti” takes a masterfully disorienting turn when the old man resolves into something even more sinister about a third of the way through, with Ligotti unceremoniously and unaccountably showing up around the apartment before “[vanishing] . . . just like a ghost.” As the couple’s situation in the gifted apartment deteriorates, the revelation comes to Esteban, the protagonist, that “Señor Ligotti was not a phantom. He was something worse: a dangerous madman.” Until, near the story’s genuinely disquieting and obscurely funny denouement, Esquinca writes: “A lightning flash illuminated the old man’s face. In that final moment, Esteban understood. Señor Ligotti looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and impatience, the same way a human observes the slow movements of a mollusk. He wasn’t a madman: he was a higher being. A god who was toying with him, like a boy plays with ants.”
Esquinca’s storytelling is accomplished by degrees, a steadily widening bloom of heat making his characters struggle, react. But the harder they try to get out of the pot, the deeper down they tend to sink.
“The Wizard’s Hour,” another tale about a young father beset by supernatural forces, opens with the following terrific, Poe-for-the-Playskool-Age salvo: “At first, Dragan didn’t connect what was happening with the baby chair.” The storytelling advances, brisker here, but still with the same preternatural control, a graduated measuring of the reader’s unease, not to mention their investment in the plight of a character for whom all will turn out extremely not well. The aforementioned baby chair emits soothing noises, one of which the protagonist associates inexplicably, yet also decisively, with “an act he’d seen at a circus when was he was kid, which he named ‘The Wizard’s Hour.’” But, as with the old man in “Señor Ligotti,” “The Wizard’s Hour” is so much more. This is titrated dread that Esquinca pours on us, never so fast as to soak us entirely, but never so slow as to let disbelief dry us.
“Everything was going fine until Dragan started experiencing the Episodes,” Esquinca writes. “He was just putting [his baby daughter] in the chair when suddenly he found himself in the hardware section at a department store, holding a drill. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten there, nor why he was standing there holding a tool he didn’t need. . . . Like many people who find themselves caught up in a strange and inexplicable event, he acted like nothing had happened and trusted that it wouldn’t happen again. But he was wrong.”
Elsewhere in The Secret Life of Insects a lone driver picks up a self-styled bounty-hunting cave spelunker only to uncover a noirish plot whose grisly events implicate the hitchhiker (“Where I’m Going, It’s Always Night”). A grieving woman hires a witch doctor to summon the spirit of her dead husband without ever stopping to consider that the occult realm of the dead is as prone to human error as her own (“Come to Me”). In the collection’s pruriently minded and cleverly structured novella set piece, “Demoness,” a group of high school friends reunite for a few nights of fond reminiscence at a Jesuit complex in the mountains where they discover that one of the most tragic and traumatized among them is possessed by a psychotic entity. And in “Sea of Tranquility, Ocean of Storms,” a journalist’s disturbed cousin tells him a preposterous story of lunar music emitting from the moon’s shadow side just before his suicide—but the journalist will encounter his cousin again, a shrine to the mysteries he once failed to credit.
All of these are Insects’ standouts.
Which doesn’t mean there aren’t some missteps. Toward the second half of the collection especially, in stories like “Pan’s Noontide” or “Manuscript Found in an Empty Apartment,” the conceits of the stories as well as the process by which those conceits are explicated take on a lulling sameness that even the lovely directness of Esquinca’s sentence craft or the characteristic nimbleness of his narration isn’t always able to punch up: a (reliably male) protagonist living a troubled, circumscribed existence finds the seam of the known world flayed away, peeks past the edge, unleashes hell. But what might’ve been ameliorated by a bit of last-minute table-of-contents reordering ultimately matters little. The Secret Life of Insects stands as an entertaining and technically accomplished introduction to an essential new voice in the worldwide weird.
Adrian Van Young is the author of three books of fiction: the story collection, The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press), the novel, Shadows in Summerland (Open Road Media), and the collection, Midnight Self (Black Lawrence Press). His fiction, non-fiction, and criticism have been published or are forthcoming in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, Slate, BOMB, Granta, McSweeney’s and The New Yorker online, among others.
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