Poison Pen Mail

Poison Pen Mail

05/02/2006

Little, Bentley. Dispatch. New York: Penguin, 2005. 386 p.

One of the things I like best about Bentley Little’s writing is that his monsters aren’t the usual vampires, mummies, ghosts and serial killers (though he has written an excellent and original vampire novel, The Summoning). Instead, his best monsters are thought-provoking in that their manifestation demonstrates an understanding of the subtle and invisible manifestations of power. The Store, The Policy and The Association are particular examples of Little’s ability to produce a literature of the contemporary uncanny where large corporations and faceless organizations that we’ve all dealt with have an insidious ability to influence multiple and seemingly unrelated aspects of our lives. Dispatch is Little’s latest example of his post-modern brand of horror. Here, he explores a more general connection between the written word and power.

As a child, Jason Hansford is one of those faceless kids who does not stand out as the class brain, bully or clown, and his home life, where he is sandwiched between two abusive parents and a completely unsympathetic big brother, offers no compensation. But when Jason agrees to participate in a school pen pal program for extra credit, he soon discovers that writing conveys a power denied to him in other arenas of life. When Jason corresponds with Kyoko, a girl his age in Japan, he can represent himself as a completely different person—respected and popular at school, the child of a loving middle class family. The correspondence opens a whole new world to Jason, one with a relationship more real and satisfying than his everyday life. And soon Jason learns to what degree he can manipulate others when he is able to get Kyoko to send him nude photographs of herself.

Jason’ success with Kyoko leads him to begin composing letters to others. He writes to local businesses in order to express his displeasure with their products and services, only to be showered with coupons and free passes. He writes letters to the editor about local issues, prompting greater political discussion in the community, and also some physical violence from his father, who disagrees with his son’s opinions. Soon Jason realizes that he doesn’t literally have to be himself in his letters and so assumes whole new identities of respected community members who have never actually been seen by anyone, but are nevertheless believed to exist by all because Jason’s prose manages to give them life. These “community leaders” write letters to the editor and to public officials and are subsequently able to transform public policy. This success convinces Jason to use his talents to get real and fictitious people to recommend him for college scholarships.

But Jason’s prowess as a letter writer also has a dark side, enabling him to literally dispatch individuals who are on to his secret and threaten to expose him or who just plain annoy him. And worse still, in the fullness of time a mysterious corporation becomes aware of Jason’s dark gifts and recruits him to work for their firm of letter writers. Unlike with other fictitious companies created by Little, it’s not clear who the customer base for this company is or how it makes its money. All we know is that this organization pays employees to write letters–praising obscure small business for their services, complaining about an entertainment magazine’s coverage of a particular band, taking to task bureaucrats, anonymously threatening individuals. But what is clear is that the more Jason writes, the less connected he is with reality–with old friends, family, anyone really outside of the company. Even his house is no longer located in the ordinary dimension of reality, but rather, some reasonable facsimile thereof.

Eventually, Jason wants out of his job, which means that he will have to meet the monster. And here we get to Little’s weakness as a writer. After establishing an uncanny universe where the smallest acts such as sending a letter or shopping at Wal-Mart really do have the horrifying consequences we always suspected they did, the denouement is almost always a silly disappointment. The corporeal form of the monster is often laughable, a comic book parody of the devil or some other sort of misshapen creature from a B movie. Two exceptions would be with the conclusions of The Summoning and The Store. But to be fair, the pervasive evil atmosphere that Little builds up in his novels is of the sort that I can’t begin to imagine what kind of a monster would be fitting—perhaps something that instructed me to ignore that very ordinary man behind the curtain?

But maybe this weakness of Little’s is in some ways a strength as well in that it demonstrates an understanding of how horror functions. A more traditional story, such as Elizabeth Massie’s novel Sineater or Gore Verbinski’s film The Ring have denouements that are terrifying because the reader/viewer didn’t see them coming and so can be completely absorbed into the dark universe spun by the author/director. But Little’s endings demonstrate an awareness of how the reader/viewer participates in manufacturing this illusion. Similar to Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, his monsters derive their powers not through some outside force, but rather, through the belief of humans they terrify. So when it is eventually revealed that the monster is animated by Little’s characters and also by his readers, it stands to reason that that creature must appear almost ridiculous in comparison to how it was previously built up as something supremely terrifying.