Terror Rises from Within: A Review of Glen Hirschberg's The Two Sams
Hirshburg, Glen. The Two Sams. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003.
by Scott Gage
The past is central to Glen Hirschberg's work. In The Snowmans Children, Hirschberg's first novel, Mattie Rhodes returns to his hometown to make sense of the past. This interest in what we have done and where we have been persists in The Two Sams, Hirschberg's latest collection of stories. In The Two Sams, the past haunts the characters as they struggle to come to terms with actions that shadow their conscience. Murder, suicide, and miscarriage are among the horrors with which they contend.
The collection includes five stories. The first, "Struwwelpeter," introduces readers to Peter Andersz, an angst-ridden teen whose best friend, Andrew, returns to the location of a ghostly occurrence on the same night that Peter's violent tendencies reach a murderous head. "Shipwreck Beach" is the story of a guilty young man who faces his past on the deck of a mysterious ship. "Mr. Dark's Carnival" depicts a professor's journey through a haunted house that brims with mythology and spectral figures. In "Dancing Men," a boy visits his dying grandfather and experiences a rite of passage through which he learns the family's connection to the Holocaust. And finally, "The Two Sams" shows a man's struggle to cope with the loss of two unborn children and the relationship he develops with their nightly presence.
Reading Hirschberg's book is a cerebral experience. Each story features careful examinations of who the characters are as people and who they are to each other; they are not expendable victims of the supernatural. In fact, the supernatural, as it exists in this collection, is often an understated appendage to the characters mental worlds or is so entwined in the characterization that there is little distinction between the characters emotional states and the ghosts that haunt them. As Hirshberg writes in "Shipwreck Beach," "We go where our ghosts lead us."
The combination of character and horror "of psychology and the supernatural" is one of the book's strongest attributes. It destroys the separation between haunter and haunted and shows that true horror lies in reality, a concept more horrifying that any external bump in the night. Unfortunately, Hirshberg does not always succeed in ridding the genre of this separation. "Struwwelpeter" is the most obvious example of this failure, for the characters' abnormal experience only functions as an illustration of who Peter is; it is not organic to who he is. In other words, the horror is not entangled in the central character's conflict as it is in "Mr. Dark's Carnival" and "The Two Sams," the two most effective stories in the collection. These tales are the most extraordinary, especially the book's title story, because Hirshberg manifests the characters psychological reactions to the past in ghosts that are terrifying byproducts of their experiences. For example, you can't stop yourself from cringing at the image of ghostly babies whispering evil words over the belly of a pregnant woman.
I am not claiming that the supernatural doesn't exist unless it rests within the characters psychologies. In fact, Hirshberg possesses a great talent for introducing a sense of otherworldliness into our reality. He does so through settings that feature houses that are eerily dilapidated as in "Struwwelpeter" and those that feature odd natural phenomenon such as thunderstorms that chase characters into the desert as in "Dancing Men." Hirschberg's paranormal descriptions of the natural world act as another way by which he succeeds in blurring the line between normality and anomaly.
Hirschberg's ability to obscure that line rests in his use of language. Hirshberg uses strong, lucid prose that adds tangibility to his descriptions. However, his use of cold wind and the color black often border on the cliché. For example, when "Struwwelpeter" takes a turn in the direction of the supernatural, Hirshberg writes, "The night nailed itself down and the dark billowed around us in the gusts of wind like the sides of a tent. In the roiling trees, black birds perched on the branches, silent as gargoyles. When evil creeps to the forefront of Hirschberg's stories, readers can be assured that similar descriptions will indicate it. Despite the predictability of these images, their inclusion does not detract from the reading experience.
Hirschberg's use of simile is the only aspect of his prose that does. First, Hirshberg often overuses simile as in the collection's first story, when it seems as though each paragraph contains two or three. Second, his similes often clutter up his writing. For example, Hirshberg writes, "And we'd toss in stuff: pencils, a tinfoil ball, a plastic cup, and once a broken old 45 which formed blisters on its surface and then spit black goo into the air like a fleeing octopus dumping ink before it slid into a notch in the logs to melt" Finally, the figurative language is inconsistent with each other; Hirshberg never uses simile to create motifs or thematic parallels.
My greatest criticism of The Two Sams is an extension of its strongest aspect. The book's combination of psychology and the supernatural sometimes makes the reading experience so cerebral that some of the stories lack a sense of horror and dread. "Shipwreck Beach" is the clearest example of this.
Regardless of ineffective similes and stories that lean more in the direction of the characters attempts to confront the past, The Two Sams is a worthwhile contribution to the genre. Hirschberg's storytelling recalls the likes of Peter Straub, and his ability to entwine reality with abnormality allows the collection to succeed in a powerful way. It shows that our ghosts are internal "that they manifest themselves in our emotions and experiences" and they are inescapable unless we face them.