Enter, Night: Reader Review by Cody Skillen

 [When I was in Winnipeg this past December for a book signing at my favourite bookstore, McNally Robinson, in the week following the launch of Wild Fell, I was fortunate enough to meet a university student and military man named Cody Skillen, who has since become a "friend of the work" as well as a new friend. He recently took the time to jot down some of his thoughts on my first novel, Enter, Night in the form of this review. With his permission, I'm republishing it and sharing it here on Forever October.]

Enter, Night Review

by Cody Skillen

 This is perhaps the most interesting vampire book I've read in several years. The vampires do not sparkle, they do not engage in absurd romances, they do vampire things. Drinking blood and killing people has apparently gone out of style for the mythological undead, and in that way they've become quite defanged.

            
The opening chapters demonstrate the kind of tale you're in for, and lead to my personal favorite scene. There is a kind of mastery over the social and personal struggle that grabbed me immediately and infected me with the kind of  nostalgia-for-something-unexperienced that we've never quite developed a word for in English. The bus scene was the defining moment for me, the point at which I knew I was on board with what was going to happen. It latched onto my subconscious with such force that I even had a dream about it. Scary in its own right.

            
The rest of the story mostly focuses on a family adjusting to life in a small town in 70's, and really that's the major strength of it. The vampires are really less of the focus, and like good monsters primarily avoid hogging the limelight. They are definitely there, but they aren't the point, which I guess in a way is the point.

            
So what is the story about on a deeper than surface level? It feels too easy for me to say something like 'the vampires are religion'. That seems to specific for the surprisingly complex character relationships. Just as each character has a different struggle the vampires mean something different from each perspective.

            
For Jeremy for example, they could represent the stigma of mainstream culture towards homosexuals, especially Elliot. The pressures of 'what is normal' transform the cop from a past love interest into a manipulative bloodthirsty monster who destroys everyone he comes into contact with.

            
Then there is the situation with Adeline Parr and just about everyone else. It is clear that she has infested the town like a parasite abusing her position of authority for decades. There is a special type of evil in the way she self-righteously abuses the people closest to her. Yet at some point it is hinted at that she's suffered her own abuses, in a way mirroring the supernatural infection that seeks to self replicate. While she herself was married into the family she cannot accept Christina into the family. In a way she too is the embodiment of the mining industry that wastes itself away even as it grows rich, replacing value with something counterfeit, something hollow.

            
Billy Lightning's version of the vampire revolves around the cultural persecution of Aboriginals under the Canadian government, and cultural prejudice in general. Despite being a doctor he is constantly harassed by the authority figures and his personal achievements are constantly attributed to anything but his personal capabilities, with a few exceptions.

            
With Finn and Sadie the infection is of the world in general. They suffer a death of innocence and are transformed into something that is not fully living and not fully dead, not unlike the average cubicle caged desk slave of today.

            
Really the vampirism is more of a metaphor for the world itself, for all the cultural norms that press you into a narrow band of existence that is easily categorized and neatly labeled in all it's bland mediocrity. Once the disease takes root they begin to behave as the soulless parodies of people handed to them. Sure religion can serve that purpose, but so can fashion magazines and corporate culture, I think the important part is that they don't have to do that to us, but if we let them hold too much sway over us, they would all be happy to dictate our roles to us.

I really liked the story overall, but my personal taste in blood sucking undead tends a little more towards the folklore side, and there were aspects that drifted more into the vein of Hammer films. While this is perfectly fine, and it was handled well, it was a bit of a shock when the vampires burst into flame and flee from crosses. I guess that juxtaposition between expectation and execution kind of created a bit of humour for me but beyond the initial jolt of recognition flowed well with the narrative. I'm always a sucker for the ancient evil calling out to be released kind of setup and this had an excellent payoff. I'd like to think that there is still a town full of evil somewhere in northern Ontario where they're still wearing their awesome 70's attire.

            
The case file at the end was one of the more interesting aspects to me, since I was really interested in how this situation started up in the first place, and there are a couple seemingly impossible aspects. How does a vampire who appears to be a priest avoid crosses and holy water for example? How did he end up where he was? Really this is the kind of story I love, lots of isolation, fear and strange circumstances. Kind of like a compressed version of Heart of Darkness condensed and sprinkled with demons.

Overall it was well written with interesting characters, and at the same time it had some depth. Not the kind that beats you over the head with a silver platter of morality until blood comes out, just enough to leave a bruise and make you think about it. This is probably my favourite recent vampire book, and that's despite my normal aversion to vampires that combust in sunlight. (Perhaps they should switch to Gain or something)

Collinwood: My First Haunted House

Haunted houses are very much on my mind this evening as I pack for the World Horror Convention 2013 in New Orleans, a city I've wanted to visit since the first time I read Anne Rice's brilliant novel The Witching Hour, to which I lost an entire weekend in 1990.

Rice is an author whose gifts I have cherished since Interview With The Vampire first came out, but the book that made the list of my all-time favourite supernatural novels (and the list of my all-time favourite historical novels as well) was—is—The Witching Hour, which Rice set in her then-home on First Street. The notion of setting a story in one's own home had not occurred to me in 1990, and it struck me as a particular bit of witchcraft, for lack of a better word. And the book was (and remains) completely and utterly gorgeous.

Consider this description, from the first part of the novel:

"The doctor had never been inside an antebellum mansion until that spring in New Orleans. And the old house really did have white fluted columns on the front, though the paint was peeling away. Greek Revival style they called it—a long violet-gray town house on a dark shady corner in the Garden District, its front gate guarded it seemed by two enormous oaks. The iron lace railings were made in a rose pattern and much festooned with vines—purple wisteria, the yellow Virginia creeper, and bougainvillea of a dark, incandescent pink."

Inside, "[he] smelled that smell again of a New Orleans house in the summer, heat and old wood."

By the time Rice describes the inside, everything from the shadowed coolness to the scent of camphor and genteel rot had imprinted itself on my imagination, and the process of reading the novel had moved beyond the experience of reading it and well into the experience of living it. There are ghosts aplenty in The Witching Hour, as well as witches, of course, and more. But twenty-three years after first reading the novel, what has stayed with me more than anything else is the First Street mansion itself.

I will very likely take a stroll past the house while I'm in New Orleans in the same way I visited Hemingway's house in Key West in the 1980s (sweet-talking my way into a private tour at dawn, culminating an invitation to come behind the ropes to touch Hemingway's typewriter) but I suspect it'll be anticlimactic, because I've already been inside that haunted house, in my imagination, courtesy of Mrs. Rice's prodigious literary gifts.

The house on First Street may be my favourite haunted house, but it wasn't my first. And you never forget your first.

My first haunted house was Collinwood, the 40-room mansion from Dark Shadows, the American gothic television series starring Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, the morose New England vampire who became an improbable teen idol, festooning the covers of Tiger Beat and 16 along the way. The series ran between 1966-1971, spawning two full-length motion pictures, a series of paperback novels, a 1990s series reboot, and culminating in the Tim Burton film version starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas. My thoughts on Mr. Depp as Mr. Collins belong elsewhere than this blog post, so we'll set them aside for now. 

Unlike my American contemporaries, I didn't come to this love via the television series, which I hadn't seen in April, 1972 when I first discovered the Dark Shadows comic book series from Gold Key.

I was ten, and that issue, complete with the cover image of a young woman being chased through Hell (never called that in the story, interestingly enough) by the dark suited man with the silver wolf's head cane was the most lurid, exciting, creepy thing I'd ever seen. I'd already been primed for a gothic imagination through the Brothers Grimm and the darker fairy tales to which I was as naturally drawn as other children are to bright colours and sunshine.

Barnabas was also my first vampire, but even as a later writer of vampire fiction, that wasn't the most important thing for me. No, it was the house itself, Collinwood, all 40 shadow-filled rooms full of magic and horror and every manner of ghosts. That, and the imaginative possibilities presented by the stories themselves.

"Hellfire" tells the story of a young Collins cousin, Constance, who survives a near-attack by Barnabas, who realizes he can't drink the blood of a member of his own family. It's never explained why, exactly, but ultimately it doesn't matter. There are bigger threats on the horizon, including a mysterious, hypnotic "hellfire" that appears suddenly in the house—a cold fire that doesn't consume, but eventually lures Constance Collins into "the Dark Pit," from which Barnabas must rescue her. The  hellfire appears because of the presence of evil. Not only is Collinwood a locus of evil, but Barnabas's presence itself is apparently evil enough to summon the hellfire.

I began to consume every issue of Dark Shadows I could lay my hands on. My friend Gordie Brown was a Dark Shadows fanatic, I discovered, and he had all the back issues. As I said, I still hadn't seen the series, but I was in love with the stories already. I knew the characters' names, I knew the locale, Maine, which seemed to me a magical, wondrous place of nothing but cliffs and mansions, rocky shores, vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, diarists and letter-writers—and this later preoccupation had already become mine, as I had begun keeping a journal of sorts at nine.

A few years later, we were living in Geneva, Switzerland in a gloomy old villa up on a hill on the outskirts of a country town. My beloved American babysitter, Nancy, a seventeen year old girl of seemingly impossible sophistication and glamour, gave me my first gothic romance novel, bringing my love affair with Collinwood to the next level with the great gift of Barnabas Collins and the Gypsy Witch. I barely remember the storyline, but I remember being riveted to the corner of the couch, bathed in words and colours and images, in a novelist's way that no mere comic book, however glorious, could ever have bestowed.

I was to learn in later life that "Marilyn Ross" (whose gothic novels I consumed by the gross, as my teenage years unfolded, at least 30 of the provided by my glamorous benefactor, Nancy) was actually a Canadian writer in the Maritimes, whose name was...Dan Ross. I wish that I had known then that boys could write gothic romances, and that Canadians could, too. But I was already in thrall to Marilyn Ross's books, not only the Dark Shadows series, but others, with names like Satan's Island and Phantom of the 13th Floor. But the Dark Shadows series was my favourite.

In a nearby town, my parents indulgently bought me an antique bamboo walking stick, after extracting a promise that I wouldn't hit my brother with it or poke anyone's eye out. In the early hours of the evening, I would walk the empty country roads under the moon pretending to be Barnabas, or pine in my room pretending to be one of the interchangeable series of governesses and gentlewomen in distress who seemed to wash up at the door of Collinwood as regularly as the tide.

More importantly, I began to crystallize a dream of someday writing books like these: moonlight book, all gaslight and stars and long, empty corridors full of shadows. I wrote what is now called "fan fiction" as a school project for English class: a "novel" of about five pages called Barnabas, Quentin, and the Silver Bat. As I recall, it was a good idea in theory, except for the slavishly aped Marilyn Ross-style writing, and characters that someone else had dreamed up, and the fact that it was five pages long. Today, no one would ever accuse me of underwriting, or minimalism, so perhaps I just hit my Jay McInerney period before hitting puberty.

But let me tell you, there was something to be said for writing it in an upstairs bedroom in a 150+ year-old Swiss villa near the shores of the same lake upon which was perched the Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley had first dreamed of Frankenstein; something to be said for having one's own personal Collinwood, at twelve, in which to dream of becoming a writer.

A lot to be said, actually.

In the same vein, I read Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot in that house during a storm of Frankenstein-level intensity. I cherished the moment when the lightning flashed so brightly that the verandah furniture cast shadows on the wall across from me that seemed almost alive. The borders of children's minds are permeable. This is why they learn languages so easily, and retain them for life. Gothic imagery is it's own language, and those of us who write in the genre often learn it early, and it stays with us long after childhood. Indeed, it's a language we likely never completely forget.

As an adult, I've always cherished old houses.

Our house in Milton, Ontario, where we lived for six years, was over 100 years old. By the time we lived there, I was already a working magazine writer, though I was beginning to dabble in fiction, too. A vampire anthology I edited with Thomas S. Roche, Brothers of the Night, contains my story "The Dead of Winter," which was my experiment with what Anne Rice had so spellbindingly accomplished in The Witching Hour: using one's own house as a setting for a story. I believe it was haunted, too. An incident occurred in that house which provided the seed for my novel Wild Fell, a ghost story of sorts, which is coming out this November from ChiZine Publications.

Our present house in Toronto, on a shady, tree-lined street not far from downtown, is likewise well over a century old, part brick, part clapboard. I write in a gabled study  at the top of the house with a weathervane on the peaked roof. In the introduction to Queer Fear, I wrote of our house that, in summer, you can smell time sleeping in the cool, dim rooms: the smell of old wood, the chill of the odd, unexpected draft, the ghost of woodsmoke from the fireplace.

I've written both Enter, Night and Wild Fell here.

Writing Enter, Night, I was acutely aware of the degree to which Parr House, the mansion of the monstrous matriarch of the town of Parr's Landing, was an homage to Collinwood. This was also noted by my great friend, the novelist and distinguished Hollywood biographer William J. Mann. Bill was, like me, a child of Dark Shadows. At the same time, Parr House also incorporated vistas and memory-views of Villa la Muraz, the house outside Geneva where I lost myself in Marilyn Ross's world. And even though Enter, Night is about vampires, it's also about old houses and what they represent, and what they represented to me.

Among my friends I count some of the finest writers of dark fantasy fiction in print today. The source of other writers' inspiration is for them to share, or at least for another blog post. But I will say that one thing we all have in common is the degree to which where we're from informs the writing we do now—where we're from, and what we took from it. It's like that story of the blind men and the elephant. They all touched different parts of the same animal, but each envisioned a radically different beast based on the part of it they touched. That's at least part of the experience of writing life.

I'm now packed and ready to go. The car is coming for me at a very civilized hour, an hour that will have allowed me a decent breakfast, my essential coffee, and a romp with Beckett in the graveyard near the house.

I've already been warned about the weather in New Orleans—40 degrees Celsius (sorry, Americans, you're on your own, I've forgotten how to do the calculations.) I was in Delhi once, many years ago, and the temperature was something like 43 degrees Celsius, which made me feel microwaved. That said, I've been warned by my friend, writer-director Ron Oliver (who has a fun blog of his own, worth checking out) not to complain on Facebook about the weather every half-hour. Both of us agree, there's nothing more intrinsically Canadian, or maybe Ontarian, than talking about discussing the weather.

That said, if I don't return on Monday, or ever blog again, rest assured I've either gone Angel Heart, or downed in the humidity on Bourbon Street, pumped full of gumbo and liquor.

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