Nesting Realities: A Review of In Silent Graves

By Tony Fonseca

06/14/2004

Braunbeck, Gary A. In Silent Graves (Orig. published as The Indifference of Heaven, c.2000). New York: Leisure-Dorchester, 2004. 378 p.

"I had a girl, now she's gone. She left town; town burned down. Nothing left, but the sound of the front door closing, forever. Gentle rain falls on me. All life folds back into the sea. We contemplate eternity, beneath the vast indifference of heaven." --- Warren Zevon, 1993 (Zevon Music BMI)

Gary A. Braunbeck is one of those writers, like relative newcomer Chuck Palahniuk or the great Ramsey Campbell, that makes readers feel like visiting dignitaries, simply by allowing them a visit into a newly created world, not terribly unlike the world with which we are familiar. Granted, all good writers accomplish this task, but few writers do so with such genuine honesty that we feel as though we have taken a trip through a neurological landscape (here I am minded to call forth the opening sequence of David Fincher's movie version of Palahniuk's Fight Club), where all directions necessary are supplied by the writer, with the utmost care.

Braunbeck's fictional realities are slightly disturbing, sometimes illogical, but they always ring true emotionally. In fact, if I were pressed to point out his greatest strength, I would have to say that it is his ability to entertain the deepest abyss of emotional instability, without incorporating some device of ironic detachment. One has to admire an author who ventures out onto this very thin limb and manages to not only avoid plummeting to his or her authorial death, but who manages to also deftly perform feats of literary acrobatics while there. So what could Braunbeck possibly have done to cause a reviewer to wax poetic, you may ask. Well, to put it bluntly, In Silent Graves takes on the unenviable task of making death, not merely in its philosophical sense, but in its most raw, grotesque, decaying physical manifestation, and make it seem acceptable. This would be a tall order for anyone, but Braunbeck handles the subjects of death and deformity so well that he makes them seem beautiful, because he views them through the eyes of the heart. After all, a corpse is a body which was once loved and caressed, and even the most malformed of humans is someone's child.

William Carlos Williams would have been proud.

From the opening "Invocation" of In Silent Graves, Braunbecks mastery of mood, word choice, and emotion draws readers in, as he involves them in a story which his narration assumes they have already seen come to pass. The novel's lens opens on an ambulance leaving a motel, its contents a covered body bound for the morgue. But we are asked, "Most of the world thinks that's where Robert Londrigan's story came to its end, but we know better, don't we? .... Don't be afraid. Remember the words you were taught! They'll protect you, if in your heart you truly believe. Do you remember?"

If this reads a bit like a fairy tale read by an adult to a child to ease him or her into a peaceful sleep, that is because the novel itself ultimately takes the form of a fairy tale, incorporating a physically deformed Pied Piper of Hamlin as one of its main characters. But what is more important than the soothing effect of Braunbeck's narrative, is his sympathetic relationship with his characters. Readers, of course, who often draw their cues from the author, will find themselves similarly sympathetic towards Londrigan, despite the fact that when he is first introduced to us, he is selfish and egotistical. However, considering that In Silent Graves is a story about redemption through sadness, grief, and love, readers soon find themselves in Londrigan's corner, as little by little they watch him shed his vanity, his ambitious nature, and his indifference to the suffering of humanity.

Londrigan's "fairy tale" is a disturbing one. A successful Ohio television news anchor, he returns home on Halloween night (after an all-out argument with his very pregnant wife, Denise), to find himself relegated to a position of utter helplessness, and events quickly lead to his watching Denise and their unborn daughter (who he later names Emily) die in a hospital emergency room. The attendant physician, feeling sorry for Londrigan, allows him one last visit with his family in the hospital morgue, where in a tender scene he takes turns holding the dead bodies:

Next to her [Denise] sat a smaller table, something that reminded him of a hotel room service cart, and on top of that cart was a small plastic bag with a zipper running directly down the center.

He slowly pulled the zipper downward--it stuck only once, until his daughter was revealed to him.

It wasn't until he held her tiny body against his chest that his heart shattered once and for all and he was overwhelmed at the strength of his love for her, this small, cold, dead thing who hadn't lived long enough to receive her name, who'd fought so hard to stay alive these past six months, and who'd been forced out into the hospital-bright sterility of a waiting death.

"She's so tiny," he whispered. "We need to be careful. Oh hon, she's so delicate ... I, uh ... here." And with his free hand he reached under the sheet and grasped Denise's arm, pulling it out and pressing her hand against his heart, holding it there with his own as he'd done so many times while they lay sleeping together. "There, there." He cradled their wondrous child against him, rocking ever so gently from side to side.

His private scene of grief is interrupted, however, when "split face," a mysterious character wearing a hideously deformed mask, attacks him and steals the body of his child, injuring Londrigen (whose face, appropriately, is bruised badly) in the process. "Split face" later introduces himself as Rael, one of the Hallover, the guardian angel offspring of humans and repentant fallen angels. Rael informs Londrigen that the fate of his kind depend on Londrigen's ability to bring his wife back from the dead, for she is also one of the Hallover, whose charge it is to protect children. Robert discovers that indeed he can retrieve her, by interacting with her the many incarnations she has assumed throughout his life. In a sense, he is charged with revisiting the people who have graced his life, and making peace with them.

Londrigan, like most readers of this novel, has to be forced to see reality anew, to see the levels of the real that nest within what we all accept as the world's possibilities. He takes his first steps towards this understanding the night of the morgue incident, when before he goes to bed he finds the body of his stillborn child, Emily, on his couch. He is able to reach inside her chest cavity, for he had given permission for both Emily and Denise to have their organs harvested to benefit others, and massage her heart enough for it to pump once or twice. This small realization of the blurring of lines between the living and the dead (ultimately, the novel argues that there is no distinction other than "locale") starts his process of thinking outside the boundaries that had been set for him by his parents, just as their thought limitations had been set for them by their parents. Londrigan works towards a reality of continuity, where everything exists forever, defeating death.

In this nested reality, even Emily can grow to maturity. And as Londrigen finds out from Rael and Denise, so can all the misshapen, abused, and abandoned children of the world. In some of the most touching scenes of the novel, Londrigen meets these deformed children as adults, and even though he is, like readers, at first repulsed, he realizes that they are just human beings that need to feel accepted, cared for, and loved. Braunbeck, in a Dark Echo interview, characterizes the novel as being part of a larger work, which I think is an accurate description: "it deals in greater depths with themes I've explored in my short fiction--most notably loneliness, grief, the incapacity to express genuine emotion, and child abuse.... I had the feeling that I had just written something that I was *meant* to write, something that is uniquely my own take on some familiar tropes in horror, fantasy, and magic realism."

Certainly in the hands of a lesser writer a novel like this would come across as trite, silly, even disingenuous. But Braunbeck manages to tell this story admirably. A May 2000 Publishers Weekly states it well when it argues that "Braunbeck ... has a knack for summing up in concise images the abstruse concepts he kicks around--for example, the recurring symbol of Denise's matryoshka, or nesting dolls, which eloquently expresses how a part of her invests every person whom Robert has ever loved. The novel bursts with moving insights about grief turning one's world upside down and about the restorative power of love." Or as Jenise Aminoff puts it, "Braunbeck combines brutal, horrific events and incredible tenderness in his character's reactions.... So precious it's painful, so terrible it's glorious, this novel should not be missed."

So terrible it's glorious. I couldn't have said it better myself.