Creepy Foliage, Creepy Story

By Tony Fonseca

01/17/2005

Dansky, Richard E. Shadows in Green. Alma, AR: Yard Dog Press, 2004. 36 p.

Yard Dog Press has published some very good writers in the last few years. Their big gun, Selina Rosen, is becoming well known for her lesbian psychic detective fiction, as well as for her priceless Bubba Chronicles and Bubbas of the Apocalypse series. Yard Dog has also acquainted readers with the likes of John Urbancik, Mark Shepherd, Laura J. Underwood, James K. Burk, Brian A. Hopkins, Lee Martindale and recently, J. F. Gonzalez (see review in this issue).

Shadows in Green, by relative newcomer Richard Dansky, is the best Yard Dog title I have yet to come across. This Southern Gothic novella may begin like many a tale of Yankees visiting a small town southern location, but Dansky is clever and professional enough to realize that rather than plot his story into already chartered waters, he can create a much more memorable product by allowing it to drift into unchartered areas. And so he does. With the exception of The Changeling Garden by Winifred Elze and Ordinary Horror by David Searcy, very few longer contemporary works of fiction address the fears humans have of the plant world. In Dansky's novella, creeping kudzu vines become evil, reaching tree braches seem deadly, and a ground cleared of all vegetation is ominous and sickening.

The story begins when the narrator, Ben, along with three friends from the office, travels to a remote South Carolina on a company retreat. The friends, the pixie-like Ellie, with whom Ben is seriously infatuated; Harris Brahms, an accountant who likes to kick back with a joint now and then; and Felix, a rather large man who insists on being called the Cat, find themselves going off the beaten track when they leave the company's rented cottages one night to go exploring in the woods, looking for an old plantation home. The four find a deserted graveyard at night, but only Ben and Ellie are brave enough to venture into it. Dansky turns the genre on its head, though: the graveyard turns out to be a red herring, for the true horror lies in the woods that surround it. The two men who stay behind run off, stranding the couple, and later explain their cowardly actions by stating that something weird happened. It seemed that the kudzu, as well as the trees themselves, had begun to reach out into the road, to blot out the sky--threatening to trap them.

Ellie, the most adventurous of the troop, is unimpressed, thinking that the Harris and The Cat just got scared or bored, and decides that she wants to go back out the next night to do some rubbings from the tombstones. In some of the best exchanges in the story, Ben and Felix discuss the folly of this idea:

"If you'd seen what we'd seen, you wouldn't be making fun." The Cat's tone was dead serious, and I looked at him, surprised. Normally he couldn't keep a joke going for longer than your average commercial, but this time he seemed absolutely sincere. "You should probably tell Ellie to hold off on poking around in the woods tonight," he added, a trifle hesitantly. "She'll listen to you."

I laughed softly. "She won't listen to me, even if I felt like telling her something like that, which I don't. You know how it is, man. You just get caught up in whatever she's doing, and go along for the ride ."

He didn't laugh, instead poking me in the ribs with his elbow. "She will listen to you, man. She always does when it counts, whether you notice or not. And this counts. It really does .That means it's on you if you don't."

Of course, when the chips are down, Ben cannot bring himself to question Ellie's judgment, and as he rationalizes once they get into the woods, "I thought about Felix's warning for a moment, then dismissed it. Trees do not lean forward to eat pedestrians, even stoned ones, even in South Carolina." And this is the power of Dansky's tale. His characters talk like real people. They act like real people. And they react the way most of us would react when faced with an impossibility, or with a reality that is not within our realm of understanding, like potentially murderous foliage. As any reader might expect, this rationalization is ultimately the downfall of one of the characters.

But Dansky does not settle on a pat ending, on anything that comes across as too fabricated or formulaic. Although he allows the main character Ben to flirt with the idea, when he has Ben come to the realization that he may not make it back to the road and safety, that perhaps the natural world wants to ensnare him, take over his body, and then send him on to infect his comrades, Dansky does not go this predictable route. Granted, the trees do manage to hone in on Ben and Ellie while they are doing their rubbings, in a creepy scene that contains a wonderful line by Ellie, frozen in terror, spoken to Ben, who is facing her but busy doing a rubbing. Ellie's voice gets shrill: "Could you tell me? Could you tell me what you see behind me? Please? I thought I heard something." What Ben sees when he looks up is worthy of our best writers in the genre. But what the trees eventually do, and how the novel ultimately ends comes as a surprise. 

Ultimately, Shadows in Green works because it has depth. It isn't just a tale meant to be told with a flashlight held below the chin. It turns out to be a gothic love story, more akin to the fiction of Oliver Onions and Robert Aickman than to the novels of King or Straub. But don't get me wrong: like the kudzu which supply the story's main image, it is really, really creepy.