It Dwells In Sea Shells By The Sea Shore

10/30/2006

Golden, Christopher. The Shell Collector. Baltimore, MD: Cemetery Dance Publications, 2006. 128 p.

As humans, we live with the illusion that there are strong boundaries that contain us and separate us from what we perceive as distinct from our selves. Our houses, with their locked doors, protect us from the elements and perhaps also from those who covet our material possessions. The ground protects us from the churning magma, radon gasses, and subterranean excavations that lie beneath. And our very skins are more than just organ bags; they serve as boundaries, marking where we end and the rest of the world begins. But these boundaries are permeable, fluid even. Houses can be burglarized. Radon gas seeps from the earth into basements, causing cancer in those who dwell in the buildings where it becomes trapped. Even the cells of our skin are always dying and being sloughed off or excreted, only to be replaced by new cells. One reason that monsters are so frightening is because they can not only breach these boundaries, but they demonstrate to what degree the safety we believe they provide is illusory.

Inhabitants of the coast always understand to what degree the land and the sea are not permanently separate. Hurricanes can quickly put miles of land underwater, sweeping away buildings, even the land itself, forever. Golden’s monster, the shell collector, demonstrates to exactly what degree these boundaries are permeable. In a small fishing village on the coast of Massachusetts, the dead are found disinterred, and parts of them are missing. A small pile of shells is always found near the disturbed graves. Suffice it to say that there is little to help the living when they attempt to stop the creature that is responsible. The shell collector likewise demonstrates what degree the sea and the land are not forever separate. A creature who is seen ashore after a red tide, a type of toxic algae bloom, the Shell Collector is covered in shells and has a humanoid shape. The humans that it touches find that the shells begin to swarm their own flesh, burrowing into it the way they would burrow into decaying matter. But while shells and barnacles generally attach themselves to things and consume them so slowly as to move in a nearly imperceptible manner, the shell collector’s mollusks can scuttle like crabs.

All of this has the makings of a very scary monster, but Golden doesn’t manage to pull it off in this novella format. One-hundred and twenty-eight pages doesn’t allow for much development of either setting or character, so the author is forced to rely on types—the sad old bachelor laborer and his friends who haven’t developed much intellectually since high school, and his middle class brother and his wife who run the family business and see people like Golden’s working class protagonist as a failure due to his lack of material prosperity. While Golden’s characters aren’t reduced to the level of caricature, we also don’t learn much about them either, or the small fishing village they live in, so when the Shell Collector comes ashore and victimizes some of these characters, it’s difficult to care, or be scared.

Still, I thought the story idea had enormous promise. The book itself is a gorgeous artifact. Cemetery Dance produces books that are more than just words on paper with a quickly generated cover that might be cannibalized for use on several other publications (and I’ve seen a mass market publisher do this before for two titles in its horror line). Instead, the book is a well crafted item that gives the reader pleasure to hold in her hand and read. The paper is heavy and textured; the print is large enough to see without reading glasses (so many publishers lately opt to save money, even on hard back books, by shrinking the typeface to fit more words on to the page, much to the detriment of my aging eyesight); and best of all, it is illustrated. Glenn Chadbourne’s black and white pen and ink drawings show what either couldn’t be described in this diminutive format, or as is the case with the Shell Collector, what defies verbal description.

As I looked at these illustrations and read Golden’s prose I couldn’t help but wish that The Shell Collector were a graphic novel rather than a novella. It was gratifying to see via Chadbourne’s drawings the type of houses that inhabit Golden’s Massachusetts fishing village, or the Shell Collector itself, whose very composition makes him/her/it difficult to distinguish from what has been washed up by the sea. The graphic novel format would have completely brought to life the people and place that Golden attempts to conjure in the minds of his readers.