Promises, Promises . . . Two Novels Have Potential, But Ultimately Disappoint

Promises, Promises . . . Two Novels Have Potential But Ultimately Disappoint

01/03/2006

Rhodes, Evie. Expired. New York: Dafina Books. 2005. 304 p.

Lee, Edward. Flesh Gothic. New York: Leisure, 2005. 404 p.

Sometimes a writer can have a great idea, and even begin a novel or short story with a bang, only to find him or herself unable to finish the job of creating a memorable work of literature. Recently, I received two titles for review which both showed great potential, so I was excited about the prospect of reviewing them, hoping to turn Necropsy readers onto some new prose they could sink their teeth into. Alas, both Evie Rhodes' Expired and Edward Lee's Flesh Gothic ultimately disappointed me on some level.

Expired is the more original of the two, and I really wanted to like it for that, if for no other reason. It has a potentially interesting plot: some sort of demon, a creature called Me, is stalking talented black youth in Harlem and sucking from their brains the potential to draw, make music, write, or even play basketball. It then kills them, thereby stunting the development of this community. In some instances, Me is even capable of removing the words from books while leaving the pages intact, or melting the images on a canvas without destroying it, all in the name of eradicating a group of people by erasing their culture and history. Anyone familiar with my reviews will know that I value originality of theme, and appreciate it when a writer takes an old myth and imbues it with a new twist. Rhodes attempts to do this with the vampire myth, and seems to be aiming for something similar to Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort.

Another potentially interesting feature of Expired is Rhodes’ use of religion. Me is a minion of Satan serving in a war of good against evil. And her tormented protagonist, Tracie Burlingame, is a single mother who has already lost two sons to Meand must learn to reconnect with the faith of her childhood and pray before she will be saved. This she will do with the help of a black minister, who possesses arcane spiritual knowledge and who fasts and prays for Tracie’s soul while robed in sackcloth and ashes.

But a new sort of vampire and a battle of good against evil are not enough to make a superior work of horror. For a piece of writing to be successful, characters must be fully developed, and the prose must transcend the mundane. These things are also necessary if a writer is to successfully tap into the uncanny, that ineffable element of horror borne of a culture’s collective nightmares. While Rhodes’ plot was potentially interesting, I found myself greatly annoyed with her characters, particularly her beleaguered protagonist, who was still a stranger to me even after reading 200 pages. Rhodes relies too much on type and doesn’t do enough to develop the people who populate her fictional universe. While I could tell you that Tracie was born in the projects, and that her eye color was changeable, I could not tell you what sort of clothing she wore, what she liked to cook for supper, or even that much about her own spirituality, something vital to this novel. This lack of development was also apparent in her description of Harlem. For a piece of writing to be truly successful, the reader must become completely absorbed in the author’s fictional universe so that when characters are menaced or die, to quote another famous Harlem resident, we feel their pain. Expired didn’t evoke that sort of reaction from me.

Edward Lee’s Flesh Gothic was also disappointing. I picked up Flesh Gothic hoping that it would be as good as his very original City Infernal, which presented a modern version of Bocaccio’s Hell: hot, hot, hot, populated by Goths and full of pollution and demons. Alas, Flesh Gothic is sort of a cross between Shirley Jackson’s wonderful The Haunting of Hill House and the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, in my opinion one of the most boring pieces of pornography ever written, and the combination just doesn’t work.

Reginald Hildrith, Satanist and decadent billionaire, buys a porno film production company, complete with its stable of well-endowed stars, and moves them to his creepy 66 room Florida mansion. The company stops making or distributing films, and instead Hildrith and his actors indulge in drug-laced orgies with crack whores, culminating in a gory massacre of all during sex. Reginald Hildrith is presumed to be one of the victims in the carnage, and the official story is that no one knows who was behind this heinous crime. However, Hildrith’s widow Vivica is convinced that her husband has faked his own death and is alive somewhere, in some form, as the massacre was more than likely some sort of transformation ritual. Thus, she hires a team of psychics, paranormal investigators, and investigative reporters to stay in the mansion and discover what really happened to Reginald Hildrith. During the next three hundred pages or so, there’s lots of graphic sex, particularly with horny demons, who are either discorporeal or particularly disgusting manifestations of the flesh. Of course, the investigators discover that Hildreth has passed into an infernal region where inhabitants revel in sadistic and gory sex.

I guess this should be interesting, but it’s not really. One of the occupational hazards of being a fan and scholar of horror fiction is that it’s pretty difficult for me to be shocked or frightened. I’ve read and seen too much for some beheadings, kinky sex, or misshapen genitals to disturb me in the slightest. The mere existence of these things just isn’t scary anymore. As well, the Satanist angle was particularly tedious, since demons and the devil have gotten so boring lately. Plots are so predictable, and in this case, I’m not even sure what these characters are rebelling against.

However, Flesh Gothic is populated with some potentially interesting characters. The various psychics had tremendous promise. It was refreshing that not all of them had the same worldview—there were Christian and non-Christian psychics. But even more interesting was what each psychic did to make a living before Vivicia lured them to Hildreth House with obscene amounts of money. They go to conferences and share ideas. They work for the military, having out of body experiences in an attempt to help locate Osama bin Laden. In fact, this last back story about one of the psychics would have made an original tale itself.

But unfortunately, what this novel ultimately lacked was a good and compelling plot. I felt sorry for the characters, as they struck me as similar to good actors stuck in a bad film, where one’s acting abilities are not enough to compensate for poor direction and a weak script. Although Lee seems to have gone back to his original vision of Hell in Flesh Gothic, this time all of its excesses are mere tepid transgressions, in part, because we’ve seen them all before, but also because the characters are not sufficiently developed. So we do not care whether or not they’re sodomized by demons and made into Satan’s poolboys or left to shamble through this world and tell stories that no one wants to hear.