Dark Entries: A Review of Dead Writers
In every man's memory, there are things he won't reveal to others, except, perhaps, to friends. And there are things he won't reveal even to friends, only, perhaps, to himself, and then, too, in secret. And finally, there are things he is afraid to reveal even to himself, and every decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort.—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Dead Writers is a series of literary case studies in the lies we tell ourselves in order to go on living. The collaborative fiction project by Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Michael LaPointe, Cassidy McFadzean, and Naben Ruthnum is made up of four novella-length stories that range from minimalist realism to baroque slipstream, reflecting each author’s unique approach to style. These horror-tinged tales apply an atmosphere of dread and unease to pressing questions of moral uncertainty, exploring the things we hide, even—perhaps especially—from ourselves. The stories embed us deeply, even uncomfortably, in the unreliable psyches of their protagonists, each featuring a first-person narrator who struggles to locate their place in our rapidly changing world.
These horror-tinged tales apply an atmosphere of dread and unease to pressing questions of moral uncertainty, exploring the things we hide, even—perhaps especially—from ourselves.
In Naben Ruthnum’s “Placeless Delights,” professional writer Katherine Faber faces the challenge of documenting the life of Mushtaq Kabir, a failed author and family friend. In the wake of Mushtaq’s suicide, his mother begs Katherine to write about his life in exchange for a six-month salary and a space to work: access to Mushtaq’s vacant rooms inside the family’s “swirling mansion warren” which have been “forensically scrubbed” of his presence. The catch? Mushtaq was not only a terrible writer; he was also, by most accounts, a terrible person. Katherine, who shares a cramped condo with her somewhat abrasive partner, ultimately accepts the offer. She attempts to channel his spirit, but the young man’s ghost proves to be elusive. His rooms are devoid of phantasmal presence. Although he was a prolific shit-poster in life, the internet has been mysteriously wiped of his various profiles and personas. “Mushtaq would have been an ideal ghost,” muses Katherine, “but he wasn’t there.”
“Placeless Delights” abounds with gothic elements, including spectral strangers, family secrets, and references to a text-within-a-text. Mushtaq’s only novel, the eponymous A Life of Placeless Delights, is referred to as an “incel's picaresque,” featuring dark incidents of familial trauma remixed into fiction. Whereas this shadow text is described as a mess of unimaginative prose and hackneyed plot devices, Ruthnum’s own writing is masterfully controlled. His combination of gothic conventions with a chilling, detached style creates an atmosphere of eerie dissonance reminiscent of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill.
The story confronts our collective and myriad anxieties surrounding death and memory. What traces of our lives persist after we’re gone? And how do we speak of the problematic dead? Mushtaq’s mother chooses Katherine to write the biography based on her supposed objectivity: “You didn’t like the book, you didn’t like Mushtaq,” she says. “You didn’t pretend then, and you won’t now.” But is our flawed first-person narrator qualified for the task? Ruthnum’s slanted, prismatic narrative illustrates that people are complicated, and truth is elusive.
Canadian works of fiction ought to reckon with the unceded and unsurrendered soil upon which they are set, which is exactly what LaPointe undertakes in “The Events at X.”
Continuing in the vein of complicated people grappling with harsh truths, Michael LaPointe’s “The Events at X” takes the form of a Department of Indian Affairs report facsimile from 1922. The metafictional narrative’s fictional author, lauded Canadian poet Sidney Lawrence, recounts canoeing through the bucolic waters that run through Upper Canada, accompanying a painter friend of his on a mission to capture the natural landscape. Lawrence is anxious to immerse himself in his own anachronistic fantasy of terra nullius: his indulgent solipsism mediates a phantasmagoric vision of a North American landscape “as primeval as the day after creation.” Lawrence’s uncanny travelogue evokes the eerie naturalism of early colonial settler narratives, which recklessly portrayed the stolen land of Turtle Island as a lapsed Eden.
Canadian works of fiction ought to reckon with the unceded and unsurrendered soil upon which they are set, which is exactly what LaPointe undertakes in “The Events at X.” The narrator meditates on what it means to be a Canadian poet—“Could a poet’s mind ever gain dominion over such a country?” he wonders—while being forcefully confronted with the atrocities of the Indian Residential School system. His intention to contribute to the literary annals of Canadiana becomes a dark night of the soul when he is called to investigate a “strange outbreak” among the students at a nearby Residential School. There, he finds himself embroiled in a coverup of horrifying colonial evils.
LaPointe’s eerie slow burn leaps off the page and into our lives. The story opens with a frame narrative written by a character with LaPointe’s own name, who writes from Toronto in 2021, explaining his decision to publish Sidney Lawrence’s report as his great grandson. Despite the objection of this fictional LaPointe’s family, he brings the report to light based on Lawrence’s reputation in the Canadian imaginary (he tells the reader that the poet’s face adorns a ten cent stamp). This unsettling echo of ongoing CanLit complicity produces haunting resonances.
McFadzean’s trippy, psychedelic prose generates an uneasily pulsating sense of discombobulation.
Cassidy McFadzean’s contribution echoes LaPointe’s indictment of naïve yearnings for perceived authenticity, though hers is of a more darkly comic nature. “Getaway for Peace and Tranquility” is a tantalizing “bad vacation” thriller with whiffs of The White Lotus and The Comfort of Strangers. McFadzean’s narrative follows a North American couple on the final leg of an extended vacation in Sicily. The unnamed narrator and her partner Khosrow are affluent enough to travel abroad, yet spendthrift enough to gamble on a vaguely promising homestay rental. They arrive to find an underwhelming guest house filled with castoff furnishings and an elaborate list of house rules. Just as the dubious “melon-and-almond-milk Welcome Smoothies” leave the narrator with a gritty aftertaste, McFadzean’s trippy, psychedelic prose generates an uneasily pulsating sense of discombobulation.
The couple attempt to make the most of their anticlimactic final destination. They constantly reassure one another that everything is fine. They have routine, preoccupied sex. The narrator balances her desire for an authentic experience with her reluctant awareness of herself as yet another tourist in the crowd. “I felt an affinity with the tourists I was ashamed of admitting to Khosrow,” she admits, “I wanted my own photo of the reconstructed Roman temples, the postcard image with my face planted dead centre, obscuring any architectural detailing.” They visit the area’s medieval centre, where Khosrow drafts architectural sketches while our newly sober narrator takes shy selfies in “a panicked desire to retain everything.” As time goes on in this uncanny Sicilian valley, a menacing undercurrent bubbles ever closer to the surface, threatening to erupt.
McFadzean’s is the collection’s longest entry, and my personal favourite. It borrows beats from the horror playbook, effectively stringing up a slackline between tranquility and dread. “You’ll enjoy the quiet here … There’s no one for miles,” the host’s partner tells the couple, an unsettling line reminiscent of the caretaker in The Haunting of Hill House. What exactly is wrong with this getaway, anyways? Is it the mercurial guesthouse owner? The ominous Madonna statues? The eerie vintage ad suspended above the vacation rental bed? McFadzean’s narrator drifts listlessly through various states of physical and mental unease; all the while one cannot help but wonder if Khosrow is gaslighting her, or if she is gaslighting us. “I worried the source of my anxiety was not traceable to anything external,” she confesses, “but something emanating from within, an inherent distrust of the world that could not be reconciled.” One thing is sure: McFadzean’s creepy story will relax you into your seat with the calming scent of Sicilian citrus peel before revealing the worm concealed within the fruit.
Given its macabre whimsicality and monomaniacal subject matter, the work evokes Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs,” another profile of referential delusions.
The collection’s final story, Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s “Praise Dissection Discussion Doubt,” is an ornately bejewelled monologue in which the bombastic journalist Novalis implores her captive audience to assist her in eradicating a demon. The titular phrase is an extratextual reference to Stephen Potter’s 1947 satirical self-help manual The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship; Or, The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating. This literary curio consumes our unreliable narrator’s feverish thoughts and compels her erratic behaviours. “These words hold an eerie power over me, as shall soon become obvious,” she forebodes.
A kaleidoscopic character study of obsession and paranoia, the story devolves into a series of one-sided conversations between the narrator and a cast of different characters as she oscillates between suspicions of being stalked by a contract killer and delusions of demonic possession. The narrator’s musings are peppered with accounts of her melodramatic romantic escapes and recurring references to a fatal fire at an Algerian olive plantation belonging to one of her companions. Given its macabre whimsicality and monomaniacal subject matter, the work evokes Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs,” another profile of referential delusions. “It’s never a simple question of whether you are in the presence of villainy,” posits Novalis in the opening gambit of her public address. “The luxury of that kind of coherence and intelligibility only occurs with the benefit of hindsight.”
As with the other explorations in moral precarity in Dead Writers, “Praise” urges us to sort through the facts and decide upon our own versions of the truth. While the story effectively emulates a mind warped by the corrosive effects of narcissism, Ah-Sen’s elevated prose often favours the acoustics of language over narrative clarity. He liberally resurrects rare, archaic words on the basis of their aural properties, sacrificing coherency in the process: a Faustian bargain I’ve never been able to get behind.
The collection dramatizes the myriad ways in which the human mind grapples with ethical ambiguities.
The publisher’s synopsis promises to deliver four explorations of “the protean concept of the bargain,” a reference to the ancient Greek sea god Proteus, known for his shapeshifting abilities. Dead Writers is a compellingly variegated Möbius strip, an eternal return of archetypal deals made in the timeless quest for the elusive so-called good life. The collection dramatizes the myriad ways in which the human mind grapples with ethical ambiguities. I found myself thinking time and again of Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism”: that the very things we bargain for are the things that hurt us most, and that this self-inflicted pain is often too uncomfortable to face head-on.
Canadian writer Douglas Glover wrote in Attack of the Copula Spiders: And Other Essays on Writing that “good stories are about obsessive-compulsive characters.” If this is true, then the best writers are those who are willing to spelunk into the darkest recesses of the mind—and that’s exactly where the four stories comprising Dead Writers go. Each narrative finds its own way to blur the line between perception and delusion. In the words of Agent Godfrey from LaPointe’s “The Events at X” as he is convincing the poet Lawrence to turn a blind eye to the horrific events unfolding at the Residential School: “You don’t believe that. You don’t have to.” We are, all of us, navigating a world fraught with incongruent paradoxes and cruel contradictions. When we catch the glimmer of truth, can we return to our states of prelapsarian ignorance?
