The Longest Single Note Strikes a Chord

by Tony Fonseca

01/17/2005

Crowther, Peter.  The Longest Single Note.  New York: Leisure, 2003. ¸1999.  368 p.

Okay, I'll admit it.  When reviewing a book, I sometimes don't read it in its entirety, and sometimes I read most of the text, but find myself skimming passages in order to save time.  Predictably, this happens more often when I dislike what I am reading.  Off the bat, I can think of three or four novels I have reviewed for this zine where I chose not to continue reading because the act of reading proved to be painful. 

And then there are the times I like what I'm reading, but am pressed for time because I'm reviewing three or four texts (as I find myself doing more and more frequently).  I wholeheartedly intended to do that with Peter Crowther's The Longest Single Note--not because I hated the collection, but because the quality of the pieces included is so even.  I figured, well I can say only so many good things about any one book.  But then I found myself reading "just one more story," and again "just one more story," and what I came to realize is that the greatest praise I could bestow on any book was this: I thoroughly enjoyed the storyline and the writer's style, so much so that I wanted to read more, even when I did not have to.

Perhaps Crowther, a seasoned editor of horror and dark fantasy anthologies (Mars Probes, Daw, 2002; Tales in Space, White Wolf, 1998; Tales in Time, White Wolf, 1997; Destination Unknown, White Wolf, 1997; Heaven Sent, Signet, 1995; etc.), has internalized a mastery of the short horror tale from working with so many excellent authors. One thing he certainly has learned is how to keep a collection interesting by simply coming up with diverse themes, images, and writing styles.  The twenty-six pieces that make up The Longest Single Note range from a sly, visceral Lovecraftian tale of a young scientist who gets his arm stuck in another dimension ("Gallagher's Arm") to a pensive, charming story of one man's realization that music is what makes life worth living ("The Longest Single Note"), to a melancholic exploration of whether or not vampires can feel, love, and form relationships with humans ("Too Short a Death"). Then there is the stream-of-consciousness technique of "Incident on Bleecker Street," which can be juxtaposed against the objective, over-the-top grotesque violence of "The Visitor" (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Alien on steroids).

But no matter what his subject matter happens to be, no matter what his writing technique entails, Crowther excels at the art of telling a story and involving the reader emotionally. Even the weakest fictions in the text, "All We Know of Heaven," "Cankerman," and "Morning Terrors," which read more like prose images than fleshed out short stories, manage to elicit responses because of Crowther's mastery of the language of description, as in this passage from "All We Know of Heaven":

Still holding his mother's hand tightly in his left hand, Adam reached out his right hand toward her throat. His hand was no longer shaking. Then he took hold of the thick tube, staring wide-eyed at his fingers as they folded around the wide cuff just above the thick patch on Angela Showell's neck.

....

He braced himself and pulled.

The tube offered no resistance and withdrew itself from his mother's neck with an ease that almost made Adam fall from the bed, his foot narrowly missing a small, white pan of strange instruments. Adam checked the door for any sign that somebody heard and then turned back to the bed.

The end of the tube had not come free.

"The tube goes all the way down her throat and into her lung," Bob Wissan had said.

Adam moved away from the bed, now holding the tube with both hands.

He closed his eyes and kept pulling.

Arm over arm he seemed to pull until, at last, the tube came free, squirming across the floor, its end wet and shiny. As he watched, it came to rest and blew a small bubble, which suddenly popped.

No reader can get through such a passage without feeling a uncomfortable. Although it does not aim for what Stephen King once called "the gross out" (for that, read Crowther's "The Visitor," discussed briefly above), this passage does make the spine tingle, and could probably put one off from looking at breathing tubes for quite some time. A writer who can combine that mastery with a brilliant imagination is one who will go far, and Crowther manages to do just that. He introduces readers to intriguing possibilities, like having the poet's Weldon Keyes's Robinson poems being influenced by a friend of his who happened to be a centuries old vampire ("Too Short a Death"). He carries readers into the cruel mind of a Vietnam veteran who has just murdered and mutilated his wife and is now hunting down, accompanied by two dead vet buddies of his, her lover ("In Country"). He makes believable a world where a faerie "sheriff" has to hunt down rogue sprites who have taken over the bodies of mortals ("Stains on the Ether"). In the atmospheric serial killer tale "Rustle," a pile of clothes becomes ominous when it is the sign that a mysterious door will appear out of nowhere, and that the beings which reside in the realm opened by that door want young women as a sacrifice.   

One expects this kind of brilliance from a seasoned professional in the horror genre, and Crowther, no stranger to the art of literature, delivers the expected.  The Longest Single Note almost makes readers wish that Crowther, who enjoyed some modest success in the early 1970s, did not decide to concentrate the following sixteen years of his journalistic life on freelance music and the arts (although he did get to interview Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson).  His return to literature was a slow rebirth, as he became a freelance reviewer, writing columns and interviews with Ramsey Campbell, Patrick McGrath, and Jonathan Carroll. Unfortunately for the genre, it wasn't until 1990 that his first work of fiction in virtually 20 years appeared. The upside of his career, of course, at least for readers, is that over the course of the next seven years, he has sold an average of ten tales annually to anthologies and magazines.