“Welcome to scenic Dunwich!”
Welcome to the August 2015 Literary Meeting!
The most recent literary theme has been “Spooky small town America.” This is a topic for which there is an abundant supply of literary material, so the theme ran for two months rather that one. Our goal was to examine what constituted Spooky small town America throughout literature in the past three centuries or so. As always, I’ve made informal references in text, with full references listed at the end (I wasn’t very consistent this time with what I cited as a reference; sometimes I cited the publication we actually read from, while for others I did not).
Aromatic Accompaniment: Black Birch by Chesapeake Bay Candle.
Gustatory Accompaniment: Moscato D’Asti, Ruffino (2013) and Huckleberry D’Latah, Latah Creek.
Puritans and Southern Gothic
We began with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” This story was actually a favorite of my undergraduate faculty advisor, and I am prepared to shamefully admit that even though she assigned it to us right around Halloween time so that we’d have something “suitably Spooky,” I did not read it at the time, and somehow bluffed my way through that particular section of the midterm. After reading it with the Society, I wish I had read it sooner. (My exam score was fine, so I hadn’t had much occasion to reflect upon my dereliction before now). A full literary analysis of “Young Goodman Brown” is beyond the scope of a Society Minutes post, but suffice it to say that Hawthorne’s use of allegory throughout the story is delicious. Like most of his work, “Young Goodman Brown” showcases Hawthorne’s ability to gently show us that people are people, full of their own quiet hypocrisies and contradictions.
The story is about a young Puritan settler who goes for a walk at night to keep an appointment, and meets the Devil in the forest. Young Goodman Brown tells the Devil that he wants no part of his wickedness, and hides every time he thinks someone might see them together, but the Devil assures him that he has no reason to shrink away, as everyone Brown knows is already a dear friend of his (the Devil’s). What follows is the crushing of Brown’s understanding of the nature of the community he lives in, as the Devil is proved right at every turn. At the risk of spoiling the ending (you read it already, right?), the story jumps from good (perhaps even Spooky, what with the secret rites toward the end and all) to Hawthorneian when Brown ultimately isn’t sure if the entire night was merely a dream, and thus doesn’t know if he can trust the people around him to be showing him their true selves. It is this mistrust which ultimately ensures that “his dying hour was gloom.” To my advisor, who will surely read these words eventually, I’m sorry I deceived you. I hope this makes up for telling you I’d read what you assigned.
Next we turned to small town America as it appeared in the Reconstruction Era onward. For this we turned to William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” whose ending I will not spoil, but I will tell you that this story contains one of the most chilling final sentences in American fiction, and certainly the most disturbing strand of silver hair I’ve ever read about. “A Rose for Emily” is one of the earliest and most well-known examples of Southern Gothic, a favorite genre of mine. The story is about a lot of things. One of those things is Emily Grierson, but in my opinion the story is really about the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. A full literary analysis of “A Rose for Emily” is also beyond the scope of a Society Minutes post, but, as luck would have it, I was assigned a paper on the subject of insiders, outsiders, and community in a Freshman English class several years ago, and “Emily” was one of the two stories I looked at. I am assured that for a Freshman paper it was excellent, but I leave the objective evaluation of its merits to you.
“A Rose for Emily” is one of those stories that becomes more interesting with additional readings spaced out over a span of years. Actions that seem puzzling or simply odd on the first or second reading might make your eyes widen in horrified understanding on subsequent readings, which makes it excellent source material for the Society—those who have read it before might grant me the privilege of seeing one of those awful realizations occur around my table, and those who haven’t might think back to their Society days of yore at such a time as they do experience it.
The plot centers on Jefferson’s interactions with Emily Grierson, an elderly Southern spinster whose behavior becomes increasingly erratic in her old age. It is quite clear from what the narrator chooses to say—and how—that despite the exasperation she causes the town as it attempts to grow past Reconstruction there is a great deal of respect and admiration for Emily, who “ha[s] no taxes in Jefferson.” All I can say is good on you, Emily. Just…don’t invite me in for tea.
Lovecraft Country
From the post-Reconstruction South we moved to Lovecraftian New England, known also as Lovecraft Country. Both Wikipedia’s and TV Tropes’ entries on the subject are worth reading in their entirety, and we in fact prefaced our H.P. Lovecraft story, “The Picture in the House,” with a reading of each. Courtesy of TV Tropes, a brief definition of Lovecraft Country:
“Lovecraft Country is a dark, twisted version of rural New England as used as a setting for horror fiction. Named for the author HP Lovecraft — a native of Rhode Island — who wrote a number of tales set in a New England milieu, usually small isolated towns that look boring and mediocre at first but are actually dark and foreboding on the inside, populated by hostile and corrupt (in several ways) hicks that often are not quite human, twisted by the influence of ancient horrors and extradimensional aliens (and generations of inbreeding).”
It is a rare thing in American fiction for the countryside—a region itself—to be the unsettling force in our minds. Just as the American West garners romantic notions of Cowboys and Freedom, New England is associated among connoisseurs of the Spooky with decadence, decay, and remoteness. It is one of the few places in America whose history goes back far enough for things to have disappeared into the fog of the time. In New England, as in Appalachia, it’s conceivable that there might be things and people and places accessible only by back country roads that you really would be best served by avoiding. One of Stephen King’s characters once declared that if there are power lines on the side of the road, everything’s probably okay.
There are no power lines in Lovecraft Country.
We selected “The Picture in the House” because it is one of the earliest—if not the earliest—tale which Lovecraft used to establish the setting and tone that came to be known as Lovecraft Country; indeed, it is in “The Picture in the House” that Arkham and the Miskatonic Valley are first introduced. The story is a simple one, and the plot itself is enjoyable but unremarkable by modern standards. The story’s merits lie mostly in its setting, and for its use of the the Antiquarian Horror style which shares similarities to the works of M.R. James. As for Lovecraft Country, everything you could ever conceivably need to know about it is contained in the opening paragraph of “The Picture in the House”:
“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.”
Some friendly advice, Dear Reader? Stick to roads with power lines along them.
Everywhere & Nowhere, USA
Up to now, all the stories in this theme have drawn their power from their specific sense of place. We also read a story which, rather than hail from specific small town America, hail simultaneously from Nowhere, America and Everywhere, America; they could be about a town a friend of a friend grew up in, or they could take place right in your backyard. The only way to tell is to consult your local newspaper archives and start digging.
The first of this series of stories is called “The Yarnwood Ripper,” by /u/AtomicMantaRay, courtesy of /NoSleep. It’s about a seeming Devil-child who murders his abusive parent and step parent, escapes into the woods, and brutally murders several people. This story is great because it has all the characteristics of an urban legend: the tale is originally told to the narrator by his sister, he retells it years later to great effect…only, after an adult hears him retell it, he’s then told “We don’t talk about that.” The narrator then asks his teacher, who may be the coolest teacher ever, who rather than brushing him off (or sending him to the principal’s office) gives him only the following cryptic advice: “September through December of 1975, if you’re curious. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The narrator spends the fall of his Junior year of high school searching the archives for the truth about the Yarnwood Ripper.
This is the first line of the eventual fruits of his discovery: “Holly Abel was the first to go.”
Intrigued? You should be. And remember, if the Yarnwood Ripper was born in the not-quite-so-Andy-Griffith fifties, he could still be alive today. So don’t go out into the woods alone, and check your local atlas to see if Yarnwood is anywhere near you. After all, it could be anywhere. Or it could just be a paper town.
Our final reading was “Goatman’s Bridge, 1991,” by Lee Tyler Williams. This story is creepy. It touches on the terrors of childhood, both from the outside world and from other children. It deals with bullying. It deals with rumors. It deals with…the Goatman’s Bridge. Suffice it to say, the bus route in this story has to be one of the creepiest I’ve ever heard of. But do you want to know what makes this story so cool? Goatman’s Bridge could be anywhere, or nowhere, just like Yarnwood, but it isn’t. It turns out it’s a real bridge (be warned that this site’s advertising partners are NSFW), and it’s within half an hour of DFW. It’s purported to be “haunted as fuck” (my words).
I’m going there, next week.
Radio Small Town USA
We finished our evening with some easy listening, courtesy of Radio Small Town America: King Falls AM and Welcome to Nightvale. Both shows are featured in our suggested reading, watching, and listening page. Nightvale is far more absurd, whereas King Falls is extremely down-to-Earth, more of a local-guys-run-this type of deal. We’ve listened to all of King Falls at one time or another here at the Society, and suggest that you do the same. This week, we listened to Nightvale #39: The Woman from Italy. If you’ve never listened to Nightvale before, that’s an excellent representative episode. It turned out one of the members in attendance who I thought would be most likely to already be familiar with the show was not, and he enjoyed it. You probably will too.
Content References from the August 2015 Literary Meeting (in the order in which they were read)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” The Bedford Anthology of American Literature Volume One: Beginnings to 1865. Ed. Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson. Boston: Bedfort/St. Martin’s Press, 2008. 987-996. Print.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Shorter Eleventh edition. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2013. 516-22. Print.
Lovecraft, H.P. “The Picture in the House.” H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction. Barnes & Noble, Inc. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2011. 124-130. Print.
/u/AtomicMantaRay. “The Yarnwood Ripper.” /r/NoSleep. Reddit.com, 2 Jul. 2015. Web. 13 Aug. 2015. <https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/3bwl0q/the_yarnwood_ripper/>
Williams, Lee Tyler. “Goatman’s Bridge, 1991.” Fiddleblack 18 (29 Jan. 2015): n. pag. Web. 13 Aug. 2015. <https://fiddleblack.org/journal/issue-18/goatmans-bridge-1991>
King Falls AM. np. nd. Podcast. <http://www.kingfallsam.com/>
Fink, Joseph. “The Woman From Italy.” Welcome to Nightvale 39. Commonplace Books, 15 Jan. 2014. Podcast. 13 Aug. 2015. <https://soundcloud.com/nightvaleradio/39-the-woman-from-italy>
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