How Do You Desire to Be Haunted?
Reviews
By Corey Farrenkopf
Story collections like Midnight Self by Adrian Van Young are rare and not easy to categorize. The book blurs the lines between genres, mixing historical fiction with cosmic horror, zombie narratives with surrealist humor, Saunders-like critiques of society with ill-fated space travel. Van Young sits somewhere on a sliding scale between Brian Evenson and Kelly Link, Karen Russell and Nathan Ballingrud. Most of the stories are slow burns. Many will leave you with that feeling of someone standing over your shoulder when no one’s really there. In other words, they haunt you in the best possible way.
The collection opens with “Hammer,” a story dealing with the horror of the unsaid and the deep chasm between what you know about a person and what you don’t. The story is set on a chore-obsessed commune, with an unreliable narrator who is quite good at doing those chores . . . until he isn’t. The story also asks us to think differently about tools—how they can be used both for utility, and possibly for murder, and the difference between those options. Think Chekhov’s gun, but with a hammer.
“The Burial Party” builds slowly toward this statement: “Someone is meant to go in there. Someone is meant to not come out.” A nurse, a drunken private, and a disgruntled quartermaster are tasked with gathering the names of the Civil War dead and honoring them with a fitting burial. All three are haunted by what they’ve seen during the war, and each one begins to unravel as the supernatural worms its way into the narrative. The private pursues the limbless, naked body of a soldier through a train car, eventually following him to a dark-awe-inducing cavern at the story’s climax, where the three characters stumble on their combined fate. Who are they going to be on the other side of this experience with all-devouring terror . . . if they continue to exist at all? This is a question we’re asked again and again throughout the collection.
“The Skin Thing” is a satisfying meld of cosmic horror and folk horror. In this story, a failing planetary settlement only capable of farming onions has to deal with this guy:
The Skin Thing dragged itself along on two great stalks that looked like elbows. Imagine a person, out prone on the ground, that drags himself by fits and starts. . . . Its head stuck out eyeless, oblong as a horse’s. Behind the elbow-things it used to drag itself across the ground there stretched, like a laundry sheet strung out for drying, a tensile wall of thick pink skin.
And every harvest season, the settlement selects the farmer who grew the fewest onions to sacrifice to the creature. It reads a bit like “The Lottery,” if Shirley Jackson had gone full monster movie.
In “The Bachelor’s Tale,” the narrator arrives at an auction where a family is selling off its heirlooms and the auctioneer has fled the front gates. There’s a dry moat around the estate. The rooms are swelteringly hot, the off-putting scent of citrus lingers in the air, and the hostess chugs black ichor from oddly placed vents in the walls. All that’s to say something is wrong at this Gothic mansion, because something is always wrong when there’s a Gothic mansion.
The title story, “Midnight Self,” deals with a young mother who keeps seeing another woman enter her child’s nursery on the baby monitor, but when she hurries down the hall, she finds no one there. Her husband waves it off as the signal getting tangled with the neighbors’ monitors, but when the couple upgrades their system, the woman is still there, leering over their child with an eyeless face and twisting tail. Whereas many of this collection’s stories rely on a broader sense of cosmic horror, “Midnight Self” anchors the reader by channeling those fears into a single parental nightmare.
The best of the bunch might be “The Case of the Air Dancer.” The story is told through a series of interviews with different townspeople, all of whom are being questioned about the mysterious deaths of three high school bullies. The main character, Devin, is an LGBTQ kid who is mercilessly picked on and starts to worship an inflatable “Air Dancer” at a local used-car lot. When the bullying gets out of hand, Devin, along with his best friend, Melissa, ask the Air Dancer to curse the three boys . . . and curse them he does.
This collection is a must-read for anyone who loves dark, mixed-genre work. Van Young plays with almost every aspect of horror fiction and never misses a beat. The language is beautiful. The characters are moving. The humor never fails to land. Occasionally, the slow-burn quality of a story might drive you a little insane, because you really need to know what happens at the end, but the wait is always worthwhile. Reading these stories is like setting foot in a haunted house, or a resurrected battlefield, or a cursed car lot. Who knows how you will emerge, if you emerge at all.
Just kidding, you will emerge, and you’ll be glad you read these ten tales and praying for Van Young’s next book to come out soon.
Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Gabrielle, and works as a librarian. His work has been published in Vastarian, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, SmokeLong Quarterly, Reckoning, Bourbon Penn, Tiny Nightmares, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere.
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