Brain Damage/Eclipse: Dark Side of the Mind

by Tony Fonseca

01/22/2007

Waggoner, Tim. Darkness Wakes. New York: Leisure, 2006. 321 p.

Well, somebody finally gets it.

It seems that the wait between novels or stories where evil triumphs—not only because it is more powerful than good but ultimately because it is more interesting—is getting longer and longer, both in literature and in film. The typical formula of virtually all horror novels it seems is as follows: human meets supposedly invincible monster, people die, human teams up with others to fight monster, more people die, someone sacrifices him or herself, human team (or what is left of it) defeats monster (or at least imprisons or exiles it so a sequel can be made), all live happily ever after in some kind of epilogue. This is becoming not only repetitive and predictable, but stagnant. Unfortunately for horror fans who like reading more than viewing, the formulaic seems to be the case in literature than in film, as modern classics like The Ring and The Descent hearken back to the horror flicks of the 1970s, when good did not always prevail and the line between it and evil was grey, not black and white.

Thank the dark gods for Tim Waggoner’s Darkness Wakes, a psychosexual romp through the shady recesses of hetero fantasy if there ever was one. Indeed, the sex scenes both in and out of Waggoner’s completely discrete, members only sex club are indeed decadent, sometimes bordering on “steamy,” but being that card has been played so often by others like John Shirley, Charlee Jacob, Poppy Z. Brite and Joe R. Lansdale, I pretty much got through those with a poker (rather than a poke her) face. In short, I’d have to say that if graphic depictions of depraved sexuality were considered the strong point of this novel, I would give it at best a lukewarm review. But Waggoner’s strength is his overall concept and the professionalism with which he turns those ideas into a story. The major appeal of Darkness Wakes is that it goes where few have gone before, creating a new mythology (in this case, of the Dark Forces behind decadence).

Chronologically speaking, the story begins in the sixties, when a stereotypically hippie couple meet a mysterious man in a white suit. The stranger has blank eyes and exudes darkness, and what he offers the couple is ultimate pleasure in the form of a miniature shapeless daemon that seems to seep out of the palm of his hand. He explains that this daemon will give ultimate pleasure, providing it is fed with a living being first. What the couple discovers is that the creature will indeed reward its benefactors with bliss, by using its tendrils to directly stimulate the pleasure areas of the brain.

Flash forward some forty years to where the novel begins and we meet a veterinarian named Aaron, a rather meek middle-aged man whose desires greatly outweigh his capacity for achieving them. Married with two children, he lives a sexless middle class existence, with his only escape being his fantasies for a sexy female neighbor named Caroline. As it turns out, Caroline is the daughter of the couple that “adopted” the pleasure daemon, but as the times have changed, the drug culture of the sixties was been replaced by a sex and alcohol culture, and the creature is now the secret behind an exclusive sex club which is housed in a run down strip mall building.

In one of the novel’s early scenes, Aaron accidentally spies Caroline going into an unmarked building with a man who he recognizes as definitely not her husband. He deduces this building to be a sex club—one of those places which he has heard about but which a mediocre man like himself would never be asked to attend. However, during a chance encounter with Caroline while she is jogging in the neighborhood, she recognizes in Aaron something which she realizes makes him an excellent candidate for the club, which we come to learn is named Penumbra. She tests his uninhibitedness at his vet clinic, and after he passes her test, she invites him to the club.

What he discovers there is that the members first engage in a wild orgy, and then they go into a dark back room to sacrifice something to what they consider is a god, an eight foot tall shapeless daemon that reaches into their minds and activates the  pleasure parts of the brain. For Aaron, this serves a multiple purpose as it both fulfills him sexually and fills his deep seeded needed to be appreciated as a success (his father, a recurring “ghost” in the novel, always made him feel inadequate and purposeless). However, this sense of complete happiness is not without its price to the members of the club: they all become addicted, and some of them develop physical deformities (hair loss, bleeding scalps, blood red eyes, twitches, etc.), as well as become insane. Those that cannot handle the pleasure daemon becoming strung out addicts, and are banned from the club.

Ultimately, Aaron finds himself caught between the members of Penumbra, led by Caroline, and the exiled members, who have holed themselves up in a farmhouse on the edge of town—and who have been waiting and planning to retake the club, to once more bask in the presence of their “god.”

Where a lesser novelist might find him or herself looking for ways to get the protagonist out of this situation, using what would amount to a deus-ex-machina technique to kill off all the evil doers, defeat the shadowy demon, and renew the middle class existence of the hero, Waggoner does not take the formulaic way out. Not only does the dark side of pleasure manage to win out, but innocent people are killed and the lives of all the main characters—and their families—have been changed. On top of that, Darkness Wakes comes full circle as we are re-introduced to the man in the white suit, only this time we have a context for this mysterious character, as well as a sense that a new horror myth has been born.

The novel ends with an ironic “riding off into the sunset” scene, and a promise that what readers just witnessed in this small Ohio town was just the tip of the iceberg, that Darkness Wakes is merely the beginning of a story that will get darker, and creepier, as it progresses in sequels.