Dabbling With Diabelli, by D.F. Lewis

9781908125880
Eibonvale, 2020
277 pp

hardcover

"...human histories and emotions could never be encompassed by one person. You needed different viewpoints ... to obtain as true a picture as possible." 



On page 225 I found the perfect words to describe the content of this book, as these thirty stories take both characters and reader into

"... an alternate world beyond fiction itself into a realm that was even realler than reality..."

with the power to leave the reader shaken, unsettled, thrown off kilter and majorly disturbed. That was my experience anyway -- more than once I found myself having to put this book down before starting it again as I stopped to think about what I'd just read and then to regroup.  Here the space between writer and the reader tends to shrink or fold in on itself, making for a jolting reading experience.  That is a positive thing, as it is becoming ever more rare readingwise in my case these days, and it is what I look for in a well-written collection of weird stories, which Dabbling With Diabelli most certainly is.


Because there are thirty of them, and because of the involvement on the part of the reader, I won't be going through any of these stories in detail, but I will say that throughout this collection, what starts out as ordinary quickly moves into what I can only describe as fringe territory as the weirdness slowly moves in.   A visit to a fair or to a museum, for example,  are normal activities for most people, as is a trip to the seaside or a boat trip down a river,  but it soon becomes apparent that the author has other things in mind.  Unexpected shifting points of view startle and jar any hint of reader complacency.    Dreamers dream other people's dreams.  Time moves in and out of sync in many cases or has no meaning in others.  Unexpected others pop up.  Stories shift gears out of nowhere.  Benign objects become symbols with particular meaning to the observer.   The characters meander through "mental spaces" as they look back, reflect, reminisce, engage in their respective nostalgias,  dream or write of their lives.

In sitting down to read Dabbling With Diabelli, be warned:  the reader becomes a "full-blooded stalker" and "real participant" in this "experiment in the human art of fiction, " and  I found that as such, some mental-rebalancing time was necessary after reading a few stories, or in some cases, after only one.    Having said that however,  my humble reader's gut feeling is that we're meant to be, as the author says in one of these tales,

"cohering the disparate widepread elements into a composite whole; gaining an organic gestalt of plot from the broadcast kaleidoscope of printed appearances,"

 with an eye to examining our own often illogical, absurd and fully human selves and the world in which we live  through this collection of "human histories and emotions."

The stories in this book highlight the author's offbeat (verging on the avant-garde), often-hallucinatory prose style, which invites you in and then often  leaves you scrambling for sanity.  That is not something I say idly -- it's days later and I'm still caught up in the mental wake left behind after reading.   It is a book not to be missed by readers of the weird -- this is my first experience with D.F. Lewis, but I can easily see that the author is a genuine master of this territory.

Close encounters indeed.

***

My many thanks once again to Alice and to David Rix at Eibonvale for my copy.  I loved every second of it. 

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

9780525620785
Del Rey, 2020
298 pp

hardcover

"We thought monsters and ghosts were found in books, but they're real, you know?"


 It was actually the blurb that led me to preorder this novel eons ago:

"After receiving a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside, unsure what she will find. Noemí is an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamourous debutante, more suited to cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough, smart, and not afraid: not of her cousin's new English husband, a stranger who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems fascinated by Noemí, and not even of the house itself, which begins to unearth stories of violence and madness ... there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place, as Noemí discovers when she begins to unearth stories of violence and madness," 

and the clincher was the back-cover blurb from author Yangsze Choo which noted that "Readers who love old houses and family secrets will devour this book..."  Oh, that is so me.


Very briefly, because here to tell is to definitely spoil, we're in Mexico in the early 1950s, and when Noemí Taboada's  father receives a letter from his niece Catalina, he becomes alarmed and consults his daughter. He's convinced after reading it that Catalina needs psychiatric help because of her insistence that she is being poisoned, and that "they" will not let her go. She also mentions seeing the "restless dead, these ghosts," and "fleshless things," and begs Noemí to rescue her, "For God's sake," because she cannot save herself.     He wants Noemí to go to Catalina and try to decide whether or not Catalina neeeds to be moved to Mexico City and to convince her husband Virgil that it would be the smart thing to do if that is the case.   In return, he will allow his somewhat "flighty" and spoiled (but hugely intelligent) daughter  to enroll at the National University to study anthropology (which her dad had deemed "waste of time and unsuitable," an offer she couldn't refuse.  At the same time, she wants to succeed in this mission to make a point to her father.

Her arrival at the rather isolated house known as High Place, "an old house atop a hill, with mist and moonlight, like an etching out of a Gothic novel," was not met with the warmest of welcomes by the Doyle family.  People in the house insist on quiet, even at dinner where the rare family meals are generally eaten in complete silence, an atmosphere Noemí likens to "a dress lined with lead."  Her first visit with the once vibrant Catalina, whom she finds somewhat fragile and not herself, is short and controlled by Florence, the niece of the head of the Doyle household, but when they next meet, Catalina reveals that the walls talk to her.  She warns Noemí that there are "ghosts" and that she'll "see them eventually."  It doesn't take long for Catalina's warning to become reality -- first come strange dreams, then visions of a woman "in a dress in yellowed antique lace," which intensify as time goes on, followed by sleepwalking before things get even stranger and become even more grotesque.  Aside from Catalina, her only friend at High Place is Virgil's younger brother Francis, who tells her that "it's the house" that has made Catalina so miserable and that Noemí needs to leave.  She will absolutely not go without her cousin, but once she realizes the secrets that High Place holds, it may be too late.

I made the mistake of starting Mexican Gothic at about 10 p.m. a few nights ago; needless to say I finished it in one sitting which meant another sleepless night.   Nearly every Gothic trope there is can be found here, which made for quick turning of pages.  Regular readers of Gothic novels will pick them up, and will also notice that into the familiar structure the author has woven quite a bit of social commentary, bringing out issues of class, race, inequality, and most especially the vulnerability of many women at this time, who for one reason or another find themselves trapped.   As it happens, women in 1950s Mexico didn't even have the right to vote, and married women were largely under the control of their husbands;  Mexican Gothic reveals the underlying strength that women command when it comes down to survival.

The combination of ever-mounting suspense, the creepy, gloomy atmosphere, the sheer villainy and the concern for the main characters that made me want to go to the end at one point to make sure things came out okay (I didn't) that kept me flipping pages should have made me love this book, but I had some issues.  The day after finishing the novel, I read a review at Kirkus that kind of summed it up:

"Fans of gothic classics like Rebecca will be enthralled as long as they don't mind a heaping dose of all-out horror." 

While I love weird fiction and ghost stories, "a heaping dose of all-out horror" isn't quite my thing, which is what this story turned out to be.  Even then,  I might have been willing to overlook it had it not also been for the fact that long before we got to the horror elements I had figured out the main elements of the central plot around which this novel is built. (And just as an aside here, Mexican Gothic is not at all Du Maurier's Rebecca -- don't go there.)  The basic meat and bones of what was to come were sort of telegraphed very, very early on; I even marked the spot and wrote my ideas on a post-it I'd put on the page where I guessed what was going to happen.  Obviously, I couldn't have known everything, but I was so close to the mark that I ended up being somewhat disappointed.  I run into this phenomenon sometimes (usually in a mystery/crime novel),  and then all I can do is let the  story unfold, knowing what's going to happen and waiting for things to play out, and it does not make me a happy reader.

In this case, it was more that I loved the messages delivered here but wasn't a huge fan of the delivery.  I liked it, didn't love it, preferring the sort of puzzling strange stories that tend to leave me off-kilter, jittery and pondering rather than the "heaping dose of all-out horror" mentioned above.  However, everyone is LOVING this novel, so once again it's probably me.

Unholy Tales, by Tod Robbins

9781912586189
Tartarus Press, 2020
291 pp

hardcover

I don't know what inspired the powers that be at Tartarus Press to put out this volume featuring stories written by Tod Robbins, but it was more than a great idea.  Megacheers to you.

Robbins' work may not be familiar to everyone (it certainly wasn't to me before reading Unholy Tales) but the 1932 film Freaks directed by Tod Browning, based on Robbins' short story "Spurs," is  a movie which is regarded "as a classic, or at least a cult favorite."   And speaking of movies, another Robbins story in this volume, The Unholy Three was made into two different film versions:  a silent (also directed by Browning) in 1925 and a 1930 remake which was, as Jeff Stafford notes at TCM, Lon Chaney's "talking picture debut, and ironically, what would prove to be his final film." 

After the in-depth, not-to-be-missed introduction "Tod Robbins: An Unholy Biography" by a very knowledgeable Jonny Mains,  Unholy Tales brings together  the above-mentioned "Spurs," as well as three of four stories from Robbins' 1920 collection Silent, White and Beautiful: "Silent, White and Beautiful," "Who Wants a Green Bottle?," and "Wild Wullie, The Waster."

original edition, from LW Currey

 Rounding it all off, pretty much the last half of this book is given over to The Unholy Three, published in 1917.

original 1917 edition, from Biblio.com

The Unholy Three is definitely the jewel in this crown.  It is an extraordinary piece of pulpy crime fiction with a supernatural-ish vibe.  I use the term "extraordinary," as I am huge fan of crime fiction from this era and have read (and continue to read) a wide variety of books filled with what I call sweet  pulpy goodness, but never have I come across anything like this story, which sets a new bar for me in that zone.  As with "Spurs,"  Robbins begins The Unholy Three at a circus,  where Tweedledee (in the movie described as "Twenty inches! Twenty years! Twenty pounds!") sits contemplating the day "Men would fear him! and he would read this fear in their eyes." It's his small body,

"this caricature that made him a laughing-stock for the mob to jibber at, that turned his solemnity of soul into a titbit of jest for others, his anger into merriment, his very violence into the mimicry of violence"

that keeps him from being "taken seriously."   But deep within his soul burns an "insatiable fire" that produces "scenes of violence" and visions of a "new transformed self" in which he would be feared, with an audience that would "tremble at his villainy." Along with his fellow circus friends Echo the ventriloquist and Hercules the strong man, he grabs his chance to turn his visions into a reality.  A word of advice: don't watch the movie and think you've read the book.  As much as I enjoyed both versions, neither holds a candle to the original text.

Harry Earles, from Freaks.  Earles also played Tweedledee in both versions of The Unholy Three. From IMDb.

Moving on ever so briefly (so as not to spoil)  to the short stories,  "Spurs" reminds me so much of the French contes cruels that I love.  As in Freaks, a circus love triangle is at the center of this story of revenge.  M. Jacques Courbé, a man of twenty-eight inches,  had fallen in love with Mlle. Jeanne Marie the bareback rider the first time he'd seen her act.  She, however, has eyes for the "Romeo in tights" Simon Lafleur, her partner, and views Courbé's attentions and utterances of love as a "colossal, corset-creaking joke. "  The wheels in her head begin to turn when  Jacques just happens to mention that he has been left a large estate and that he has plans to turn her into a "fine lady" if she will marry him.  Trust me on this one, she should have most definitely said no.   Not quite as grotesque as the fate of Venus in the film, but still beyond bone-chillingly horrific.   "Silent, White and Beautiful" also falls into the realm of the horrific, as an artist returns to France after a depressing attempt at a career in America, where his art fails to sell.  On his return he hits on a solution as to how to make his work as life-like as possible.  After a nonstop reading session of these two stories which open the book, I was very much ready for a wee bit of humor in  "Who Wants a Green Bottle?,"  which examines what happens to the soul of the Lockleavens after they've left this world.  I must say, this is one of the most ingenious and original wee folk stories I've ever read.  Last but definitely not least is "Wild Wullie, The Waster," which is also a story of death and the afterlife but with a twist (or two) I'd not encountered in other ghost stories.

The question that opens this book is this:

"How does an author fêted as equal in genius to Edgar Allan Poe disappear into relative obscurity?"

Unfortunately, that seems to be  very much the case with a number of writers of yesteryear whose work I admire.   Where Tod Robbins is concerned, though,  I've taken the first step onto  that "path to becoming a fervent worshipper of a deliciously twisted writer who knew how to keep his readers more than entertained" mentioned at the end of  Mains' introduction.  Two more books of Robbins work arrived yesterday, I bought and made time to watch all three films I mentioned above, and I am certainly recommending Unholy Tales to anyone who will listen.   Deliciously twisted writer indeed, and I can't get enough.