We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories. By C. Robert Cargill.
Harper Voyager. $26.99.
Give the man credit: he finds weirdness
everywhere and horror just about anyplace. The 10 tales in C. Robert Cargill’s We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other
Stories have settings ranging from Appalachia to Australia to an anteroom
of Hell, with characters from ordinary humans to Cretaceous-era dinosaurs and
things even more outré than that. Not everything in the book works, but even
the stories that do not really gel have their intriguing moments, and Cargill’s
style is both involving enough and variable enough to make it worthwhile to
stay with a narrative that does not quite seem successful – because of the
possibility that he will pull the proverbial rabbit out of the proverbial hat. And
sometimes he does. But it tends to be in small, bloody pieces.
There is plenty of fear and horror in this
book, but most of the stories are not written only to elicit a frisson of terror, and are the better for striving
for something beyond shivers. Take The
Last Job Is Always the Hardest, for example. It is about a man named Brian who
is about to blow up a train and kill 238 people, and who suddenly encounters
someone who knows exactly what he is planning and has no intention of stopping
him because he – the other man – has a job that is “much bigger than that. Much
bigger.” Or Jake and Willy at the End of
the World, in which two stereotypical good ol’ boys contemplate the
incipient apocalypse with banter and beer. Or the title story, which starts
with a little girl entering one of those magical portals so dear to authors of
children’s stories – but not for a grand adventure: “No one talks about the
other children, the children who walk through basement doors and rabbit holes
never to return. …Their adventures are not the things of pageants and matinees.
Rather, they are the things we try not to think of, the things instead we dream
about when we would rather be dreaming of something else.”
Those three stories, packed with eeriness
and oddity, are thoroughly successful by virtue of not pulling out all the traditional stops of horror writing. But
Cargill is quite capable of writing full-fledged terror tales when he wishes: The Town That Wasn’t Anymore is a
genuinely scary ghost/zombie story about angry, vengeance-obsessed dead miners
whose spirits must be contained, whatever the cost – and the cost is very high
indeed. But pulling out all the stops does not always work in this collection: Hell They Call Him, the Screamers, is
intended as a nightmare tale along the lines of Harlan Ellison’s 1967 I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, but
Cargill here lacks Ellison’s horrific élan and makes the mistake of not
actually setting the story anywhere – it becomes a tale of monstrous brutality
without even a soupçon of explanatory justification. And A Clean White Room (co-written with Scott Derrickson), which
strives for depth as well as fright in its portrait of an Iraq war veteran
assigned to punish the damned for a year in order to find his own way to peace,
goes off the rails because it is never quite clear why this punisher has so
much difficulty doling out the suffering that he is required to deliver, yet
that “why” is supposed to be the core of the story’s intended moral complexity.
Other pieces here succeed in some ways and
not in others. As They Continue to Fall
is a rather jaggedly written story about a man who hunts evil angels, unless
everything he does is only happening in his own unbalanced mind. Hell Creek, the dinosaur tale, has a
fascinating concept – an attempt by individual dinosaurs to survive for a bit
longer just as their world is coming to an end – but ultimately founders in its
weak attempt to anthropomorphize the creatures enough to try to elicit empathy
for the unlikely alliance of two herbivores of different species.
And then there are two tales that really work
only for readers of earlier material by Cargill and others. I Am the Night You Never Speak Of is
reprinted from a collection called Midian
Unmade, a group of stories set in the Nightbreed universe created by Clive
Barker. It takes place after the destruction of Midian – and without knowing what
that means, and understanding what the whole Midian concept entails, readers
will find Cargill’s narrative disjointed and puzzling. And The Soul Thief’s Son, a novella that concludes this collection and
is the longest entry in it, is a “further adventures” story focusing on Colby
Stevens, protagonist of Cargill’s Queen
of the Dark Things. It is certainly possible to read this story, and enjoy
parts of it, without knowing much about Colby, but the tale gains immeasurably
for readers familiar with the earlier novel. Cargill himself is clearly aware
of this: he includes a glossary after the story “for those new to Colby’s
adventures or for those in need of a refresher.” But the nine glossary entries
really do not help much and, indeed, raise as many questions as they answer. On
balance, We Are Where the Nightmares Go
and Other Stories is an uneven collection by an author who generally writes
very well even when specifics of his plots are handled in a somewhat-less-than-articulate
way. His style in these stories sometimes underlines and enhances their
effectiveness. At other times, it almost, almost, conceals the tales’ lack of
clarity.
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