The Dark Side of Romance

03/22/2005

By June Pulliam

Collecting Candace. Susan M. Brooks. Seal Beach, CA: Small Dog Press, 2005. 193 p.

Collecting Candace is a love story of sorts--a gothic romance with the romantic trappings stripped away--and what’s left is more similar to Natural Born Killers. It is love at first sight for the nameless narrator when he first lays eyes on Candace one stiflingly hot summer night at 4:00 a.m. in the Hi-n-Dri-24-Hour Liquor and Mart. He thinks to himself that “he didn’t know if she had a husband, but he imagined that if she did, he would like very much at moment to kill him.” And that’s how all the trouble starts.

Candace, for her part, is a good Catholic girl at heart, in spite of her short skirt and mildly obscene tattoo. She carries her Bible with her everywhere she goes. She has never had sex outside of her three marriages. And the lethal road trip she embarks upon with the lovelorn protagonist is overseen by her dashboard Virgin Mary, the figurine carried by her mother until the day she left her young daughter. Having seen better days after falling into a garbage disposal a few years earlier, the statuette now weeps paint from its mangled plastic as it sits on the dashboard of Candace’s Maverick, and is emblematic of Candace herself in how it is has survived after having been transformed by life's vicissitudes.

But the Blessed Virgin Mary is unable to do much more than offer the couple its mute benediction as the protagonist proceeds to “collect” Candace, to reconstruct her as the virgin self he wish he knew before her three husbands, Danny Ray, Bobby Lee, and Joe, Just Plain Joe, were able to touch her, and according to his interpretation of events, scar Candace by spreading her essence more thinly through their touch: “He remembered thinking when he first saw [her], the first thought he had was that he loved her. The second was that he didn’t want to know nothing about her. He wanted to just love her like that, simple- like.” Of course, the narrator’s plan is doomed from the start.

Collecting Candace is a gothic romance in that its protagonist is trapped in a hell of his own making. We know very little about him from the novel, but really, we don’t have to know much about him since we are all acquainted with his type. He is the sort of man often celebrated in mindless pop music, the love obsessed swain more enamored with the concept of the perfect woman than with the flesh and blood beloved herself. And as an obsessed lover, he must commit violence and criminal acts in order to demonstrate his devotion. While this may be a durable, and even moving, trope for a love song, when taken to its logical conclusion as it is in Collecting Candace, it is downright scary. Also not covered in love songs are the consequences of this sort of obsession. The lover will ultimately be disappointed by the beloved, as she is not the static and ideal object of veneration he imagined her to be, but instead, a flawed human being with a will of her own. And Candace, for her part, is far from a helpless gothic heroine or a mute love object. At first, she is predictably pliant, all too willing to be the narrator’s blank slate, but she soon develops her own ideas about what is and is not acceptable and interferes with the narrator’s ability to “collect” her.

Brooks’ brief novel is not one to be skimmed, or even read in one sitting, but savored for her evocative writing.  She creates characters that are believable in spite of the extreme nature of their lives. And her lush prose is particularly adept at recreating images that burn the mind with the desperate heat of a long hot summer night.  More importantly, for horror fans, Collecting Candace is perfect Valentine’s Day reading.