The Artist of the Not-So-Beautiful

By June Pulliam

01/17/2005

The Bone Parade. Mark Nykanen. New York: Hyperion, 2004. 324 p.

Unlike other subgenres of horror, the evolution of the serial killer or maniac tale follows the history of psychological thought. Perhaps this is inevitable, as unlike other types of monsters, the serial killer/maniac does not require the reader to suspend disbelief in order to participate in a plot driven by supernatural agency. Instead, this subgenre delves into the deepest recesses of the human heart, and attempts to explain to the best of a culture's abilities why humans do evil deeds. Early examples of the subgenre, such as many of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories or Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opt for a relatively simple explanation of the maniac's existence. Dr. Jekyll and the protagonists of  "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" are evil because of a sheer perversity of the will.

Later narratives such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (or Robert Bloch's novel of the same name, the basis for Hitchcock's film, if you prefer), ground their maniacs within more a modern, psychological framework. Norman Bates goes on his killing spree not because he is evil, but rather, according to the popular psychology of the day, because his shrew of a mother drove him to it. Later narratives still, products of a world grown jaded by real life maniacs offering tales of child abuse as defenses for their crimes and seemingly avoiding responsibility for their actions, exemplify a modern despair of ever being able to find a cause for the evil that lurks in the hearts of men (or women). Thus the killer is transformed from someone whose free will leads him to evil, to someone shaped wholly by external forces, to someone who just is organically evil in the way that schizophrenia or sexual orientation are now believed to be hardwired into the human brain. Hannibal Lector of Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs Trilogy and Jay Byrne and Andrew Comptom of Poppy Z. Brite's novel Exquisite Corpse fit this mold. All are killers not because of anything that happened to them as children, or from any conscious choice to do evil over good. That's just the way they are.  Mark Nykanen's maniacal sculptor Ashley Stasser fits this mold (pun intended, as you will see).

Ashley Stasser is world renowned for his various Family Planning series of bronze sculptures, each detailed representations of families in agonizing pain. But while Stasser certainly has an eye for composition, the detail in his work does not come wholly from his imagination. Instead, he travels the country and kidnaps individual families, which he brings back to his remote studio.  There he tortures and kills individual family members while making an impression of them during their death throes. Stasser is in fact making a sort of death mask in that he is recording the final features of his victims/subjects. However, whereas death masks were molded after the subject had died, Stasser's death masks record the actual final moments of life. From these molds are made brass sculptures.

Soon after the novel opens, Stasser has gotten himself into a situation where he will eventually be discovered.  His vanity leads him to allow a young female intern to come to his Utah desert studio where eventually, she discovers his secret. Stasser must then make her disappear in order to preserve his secret.  However, unlike the various families that Stasser has kidnapped, the student can be traced to him. Others search for the student, eventually leading to Stasser's downfall.

Nykanen's description of three dimensional art is fascinating. He has a talent for conveying an understanding of both representational and non-representational sculpture. And his portrait of Ashley Stasser is quite compelling. Stasser as artist ultimately works not so much to sculpt with his medium, brass, as he does with his subjects. The unfortunate families he commemorates aren't immediately cast into life-sized bronze figures, but instead, held captive so that Stasser can sculpt them with a regime of enforced diet and exercise calculated to reform their muscles and psychological torture to shape their final perceptions of death. 

Unfortunately, Nykanen's other characters are quite two dimensional, lacking the history or complexity of his villain.  As I read this novel, I found myself continually comparing his characters to Harris's or Brite's, and found them lacking in this regard. Harris and Brite have succeeded in creating complete fictional universes with characters we can know as intimately as our best friends and family members. While Nykanen's villain is memorable and fully developed, his other characters are not fully fleshed, which is a great shortcoming, as these other characters are at least as important as the antagonist.  This is ultimately a fine irony in a novel about a sculptor whose art is representational rather than impressionistic.