Giving the Term Organ Grinder a New Meaning

by Tony Fonseca

07/31/2006

Nassise, Joseph. More than Life Itself. Tolworth, Surrey: Telos, 2006. 74 p.

In an interview posted to the ezine flamesrising.com by Matt M.  McElroy, former President of The Horror Writers Association Joseph Nassise explains the reasons he much prefers writing novels to short fiction. “Writing short fiction is far harder than writing a novel for me,” he notes, adding that “writing short fiction takes me almost as long as it takes to write a novel so I'd rather go for the bigger bang for my buck.”

From a reader's point of view, I have to agree with Nassise¹, that novels are indeed a better bang for the buck. The problem with shorter fiction is that there is little time to create an entire fictional world. In addition, characterization often suffers in the sense that motivation is seemingly left out of short fiction. Readers usually do not find out why a killer murders, or what could lead a normal human being to become a torturing monster. The novella presents an idiosyncratic problem in that its length leads readers to expect the calculated plot construction and careful characterization of a novel, more so than would a short story or horror poem, yet there is little room in such a compact format to do so. This is the problem with Nassise's most recent work, a Telos original novella titled More than Life Itself.

According to the author, the story behind More than Life Itself came from a personal experience. His second daughter was rushed to ICU immediately after her birth. Nassise states that “Writing it [the novella] was a way of exorcising some demons and taking a long look at what a person might do when faced with a situation that they simply refuse to accept. It is the darkest work I've written to date.”

The novella examines the darker side of the human psyche, more specifically the survival instinct, from both the point of view of a parent who must help a child survive, as well as from that of a child who lies on Death's Bed. The protagonist, an average man named Sam Dalton, has already witnessed the bizarre death of his wife due to a hit and run, and now he watches as his four-year-old daughter Jessica contracts a mysterious, life-threatening disease whereby her internal organs are slowly shutting down, one by one. Doctors are of no help whatsoever. They basically just write her off as being terminal.

In the best scenes in the story, Sam finds himself walking aimlessly into the seedier parts of town, where he sees a strange vision: a vagrant “prophet” of doom suddenly turns into an eyeless, totally blind demonic presence which offers Sam the solution to his daughter's illness in the form of an ancient book. In essence Sam sells his soul when he eventually decides to follow the book's instructions, which involve killing innocent strangers and harvesting their organs, then feeding the harvested organs to his (as he discovers) ravenous daughter.

While this is not a badly contrived plot line (in fact, in some respects it is ingenious in its execution), the fact that Nassise chooses such a brief format for the tale makes it virtually ineffective. Not only is characterization weak, as we never find out enough about Sam or Jessica to account for their actions and the doctors are nothing more than cardboard cut-outs, but the prose actually suffers terribly. After the second killing or so, the narrative simply runs through the remainder of Sam's seven murders and harvests, seemingly dismissing them as unimportant to the story. Nothing could be farther from the truth, however. Seeing Sam evolve as a remorseful serial killer is one of the main appeals of this tale. To put it bluntly, this never comes close to happening. As one reviewer so aptly comments, “Sam turns from dotting father to rampant killer in a very short period and it's difficult to quite believe that he would have taken such a drastic road.”

The other big problem with the fact that this story was executed as a novella rather than a full-length novel is in its ending. Nassise had apparently decided that the tale would have a surprise ending, one that would go beyond a simple twist such as Sam's saving his daughter but then finding himself on death row. The lack of development undermines Nassise's particular choice for plot twist. After finishing More than Life Itself I kept thinking that little clues could have very easily been placed throughout the story that would have foreshadowed the ending without giving it away, thus making for a more enjoyable read. As is, the final scene is almost a non sequitur, making sense only if the reader gives the author the benefit of the doubt.

This is not to say that this novella is a complete waste of one's time. After all, Nassise has been nominated in the same year for both the International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award, and has been recognized by his peers by winning election as President of the Horror Writers Association in 2001 (he served in that position until November 2005), so the man has some considerable writing talent. However, I do not believe that this format was the best choice for such an involved story. I would like to think that Nassise will realize this as well, and rework the tale into a complete novel—one which this reviewer would personally look forward to reading. 

¹Nassise is the author of Riverwatch, one of my ten favorite non-psychological horror novels.