The Ordinary Made Extraordinary

by Tony Fonseca

10/23/2006

Hirshberg, Glen. American Morons. Northborough, MA: Earthling Publications, 2006. 191 p. (Advance Reading Copy)

If you haven’t read Robert Aickman (or more recently Peter Crowther), Glen Hirshberg may seem completely foreign to you. In the late 1970s, in his preface to Aickman’s The Wine-Dark Sea, Peter Straub coined the term the “strange tale” to describe the marriage of the techniques and conventions of dark fantasy, magical realism and occult fiction. Even given the decades that have passed since then, it isn’t very often that notable writers of this ilk have surfaced. But after reading his first two collections, The Two Sams and American Morons, I am inclined to believe that Hirshberg may be the real deal. In fact, he is arguably the heir apparent to Aickman—an author who could not be categorized at all because, as Straub notes, he “uses almost none of the conventional imagery of horror” and his aim is not to invoke fear of the supernatural, the monstrous, or the unknown, but to show that “. . . ordinary life can be horrific and tedious at once.”

For those of you not familiar with this little known subgenre of horror, all you need know is that these strange tales were the literary descendants of school of the grotesque mastered by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, with a little of the Jamesian psychological horror tale and Hawthornesque romanticism mixed in for good measure. In some ways, these types of stories have as much in common with the Latin American magical realists than they do with the traditionally published horror tale, both American and British. Akin to some of the finest nostalgia penned by the brilliant Rod Serling, they often have as their intention the invocation of a deep sorrow, which comes from an understanding of how all of life is at once both present and past, filled with ghostly images which are within grasp but quickly fading. Here, supernatural creatures, including monsters and grotesques, may be omnipresent; however, where in horror fiction they are seen as unnecessary and Other, in the strange story, they are simply a recognizable, often accepted part of the landscape.

This is not to say that Hirshberg’s stories don’t contain some of the usual horror themes. “Like a Lily in a Flood” is a wonderful revenge tale, where the unsuspecting narrator finds himself being manipulated by an innkeeper who has a centuries old family grudge to settle. “Safety Clowns” ends with a scene straight out of the best imaginings of King or Koontz: “What I’d seen was blood, all right, splashed all over the vans, coating the wheels and even some of the windows. I’d seen doors flung open, some wrenched half off their hinges.” And “The Muldoon” tells of a brother and sister who lie awake at night awaiting the footsteps of the “angel of death.” However, scaring the reader, or even disgusting the reader, is not what these tales are about.

More than anything, they paint a familiar picture of the ordinary world, made a bit more fantastical and grotesque because the reality they portray is a little off kilter. A case in point, and my favorite story in the collection, is “Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air.” Here Hirshberg explores the themes of friendship, love (more specifically, the love triangle), nostalgia and addiction. In this gothic version of You, Me and Dupree, a husband and wife team are visited by a long-lost college friend who has always been somewhat of a fly-by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants slacker. He is the perfect foil for the husband, who is stable, predictable, and logical. The three find an old amusement park which houses what amounts to a cursed Skee Ball machine. Suffice it to say that of the many who walk into the tent where the machine is found, very few manage to walk away. Most get trapped in an infinite childhood. Likewise, “Transitway” takes a familiar California scene—an urban neighborhood which has been decimated by public transportation necessities—and presents a supernatural explanation for depopulation.

From the tales themselves to Hirshberg’s notes on writing them which finishes off the collection, readers will find themselves as entranced by the author’s command, as much as they will find themselves in awe of his subject matter and technique. Hirshberg’s prose has been called “haunting” by some reviewers, and I feel this is an apt description. Even those fans of the genre who may dislike his eschewal of the scare in his horror will find that they cannot but respect, perhaps even admire, his ability to create a story that resonates intellectually and emotionally. For those of us that believe that ghosts and other spirits habitually inhabit the world we call reality, it would not be unlikely to imagine that the ghost of a certain civil servant turned short story author sometimes looks over Hirshberg’s shoulder as he writes, nodding with approval.