David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

It’s a truism that horror cannot exist separate from comfort, safety, and love. It is impossible to experience horror — which is a destination, not a departure point — without first experiencing the security of a place, literal or conceptual, from which the ground will fall away, revealing a vast, awful blackness of terrible possibility; a cold lightless country of sharp teeth and claws. An eternally rediscovered country where pain is the default national condition, and terror is the gross national product.

The stories in Monstrous Affections are indeed horror stories by any objective standard, and they are superlative horror stories — the work of a scrupulous and demanding writer who would wrestle the Devil himself for a the perfect word. Within these pages you will meet a variety of monsters, including a Cyclops, a family of mutants with a terrible gift for love, and yet another family with harsh ideas about generational hierarchies and the price of defiance. But they are also first-rate short stories of high literary quality. No less an authority than Peter Straub has written of the entirely ersatz classification system that keeps certain stories, and certain writers, outside the velvet ropes of the self-perpetuating bookish elite no matter how excellent, how transcendent, the writing is.

There is writing of that calibre among the short stories in Monstrous Affections .

The term “Canadian gothic” is an overused one, and it has come to mean many things to many people — readers, critics, academics, and students — over the course of the development of Canadian literature as a self-conscious literary school. It’s not often applied to horror fiction, largely because of unfortunately persistent literary prejudices and stereotypes. But I would say that, first and foremost, the Canadian gothic literary canon is where I would place the speculative fiction work of David Nickle.

The majority of his work is set unapologetically in Canada, his homeland. For a speculative fiction writer, that has traditionally been a challenge due to a perception that American editors and readers will not take horror fiction seriously with a Canadian setting.

On the other hand, this is one of the areas where, among horror writers who are also serious literary writers, the men are separated from the boys (and indeed the women from the girls — to wit, the blood-ruby short fiction of International Horror Guild Award-winner Gemma Files). Nickle’s vision of Canada will be a revelation to any reader who might be expecting the round-edged, inoffensive, long-suffering Canada of legend. His literary road trip along the moonlit country roads of the various small towns that dot the farmland outside the cities (especially the town of Fenlan, his particular corner of the dark universe) will be, simultaneously, immediately recognizable to anyone who is familiar with small towns, and dreadfully disorienting in the way a dream gone terribly wrong is disorienting, especially when you try to wake up, and realize you can’t. I dislike clichéd terms like “national treasure,” but David Nickle is a succinct answer to the endless gripe about why Canada hasn’t produced more horror stars.

He knows the undertaste of familial relationships — for instance, in “The Sloan Men,” the time-honoured rite-of-supplication of meeting your true love’s mother for the first time — and how they can be pushed to the literal edge of madness. He understands, as in “Polyphemus’ Cave,” exactly what love and loyalty cost, and that sometimes all it takes is a little nudge to the brink of darkness to turn the process of growth into a scarlet, blood-soaked scream.

But mostly, he understands that horror really can’t exist separate from comfort, safety, and love — or friendship. My personal favourite in this collection is “The Webley,” a story marked by a singular absence of the supernatural or the paranormal. The monsters in “The Webley” live in the most spectral realm of existence extant, the human mind. It’s a story that contains an essential quality of heartbreak and poisoned nostalgia that will haunt you, and follow you like the sound of breathing in a dark room. Breathing you know isn’t your own. His monsters can, on occasion, be quite genial. But make no mistake; they are monsters in every sense of the word.

What to say of David Nickle personally? How to separate the dancer from the dance? If we must, here’s a sketch: He’s a good and loyal friend. He’s fiercely intelligent and kind. He’s a gentleman around women (and around men too, for that matter) and he can hold his liquor. He’s affable about giving rides home from conventions to friends without cars. He’s dry, funny as hell, and generous to a fault. Also, he’s not bad looking, to be honest.

OK, enough?

Having been his editor over the course of three original horror fiction anthologies, I can say without reservation that he is one of the most professional authors I’ve ever worked with. He’s a courageous writer who isn’t afraid to step outside his comfort zone in the service of his fiction, and a deadly serious one when it comes to pushing himself and his material through however many drafts it takes till the story is as close to perfect as he feels it can be, a fact I see amply reiterated in this first, stellar collection of his best short stories.

This closed book is — or was — that comfortable place I spoke of earlier, the aforementioned place of comfort, safety and love, the border between safety and a world tilted into chaos. The act of opening the covers has set horrible, efficient machinery into motion. And you are solely responsible for what you have released into the world by starting it up. When you close your eyes tonight, your dreams will serve as a subterranean passageway for any of the monsters, which had previously been safely contained within the pages of this book, to tunnel their way out into the world.

Your world. Our world. My world.

Thank you so very much for that, my dear. It isn’t as if we don’t all have nightmares of our own to contend with, without you dreaming your own into existence — with David Nickle, the author of this collection, as your medium.

Mrs. Sloan had only three fingers on her left hand, but when she drummed them against the countertop, the tiny polished bones at the end of the fourth and fifth stumps clattered like fingernails. If Judith hadn’t been looking, she wouldn’t have noticed anything strange about Mrs. Sloan’s hand.

“Tell me how you met Herman,” said Mrs. Sloan. She turned away from Judith as she spoke, to look out the kitchen window where Herman and his father were getting into Mr. Sloan’s black pickup truck. Seeing Herman and Mr. Sloan together was a welcome distraction for Judith. She was afraid Herman’s stepmother would catch her staring at the hand. Judith didn’t know how she would explain that with any grace: Things are off to a bad enough start as it is .

Outside, Herman wiped his sleeve across his pale, hairless scalp and, seeing Judith watching from the window, turned the gesture into an exaggerated wave. He grinned wetly through the late afternoon sun. Judith felt a little grin of her own growing and waved back, fingers waggling an infantile bye-bye. Hurry home , she mouthed through the glass. Herman stared back blandly, not understanding.

“Did you meet him at school?”

Judith flinched. The drumming had stopped, and when she looked, Mrs. Sloan was leaning against the counter with her mutilated hand hidden in the crook of crossed arms. Judith hadn’t even seen the woman move.