In our latest review for the Countdown to Hallowe’en 2016, Randy reviews a fairly recent ‘experimental’ novel:
In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.
Lois Cairns is a Canadian film critic, especially passionate about the Canadian experimental film but down on her luck since the Toronto Film Faculty was defunded by the government and she lost her job. That was 2009, the same year her son, Clark, was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and she and Simon, her husband, became Clark’s intermediaries with the world. She has continued writing, though, mainly film reviews for low circulation, niche venues specializing in the discussion of Canadian experimental films. Feeling ineffective and inadequate as a mother and unsure of how Clark feels about her, her passion for film acts as an outlet for her creative energy and also a distraction from and evasion of the pressures of coping with Clark’s condition.
Invited to its premiere, Lois sees a short film by Wrob Barney, a filmmaker whose past work she found derivative and trite. Barney makes extensive use of clips from other movies and in this film he incorporates scenes that startle Lois; she is positive they come from an older film maker, someone from the silent era, possibly the first woman director of Canadian film; a potentially historic find. Further, something about the ghostly imagery of a towering woman in white sliding into an outdoor scene from nowhere fascinates Lois and is even somehow familiar.
Both obsessive and an insomniac, that night as her family sleeps Lois digs through her belongings until she uncovers an old textbook. The book falls open to the spot she’s read most, “Lady Midday : A Fairy Tale of the Wends” collected and translated by A. Macalla Whitcomb. The fairy tale tells of a boy visited by Lady Midday, who arrives between the minute and the hour of noon, and how the boy through diligence at his work and courtesy toward her evades her displeasure while a man who shows neither has his head lopped off by her blazing sword.
Lois is consumed by the mystery behind these clips. As her health deteriorates under an onslaught of migraines, she digs for information to find where Barney uncovered the footage, and the history of A. Macalla Whitcomb, writer, filmmaker, occultist, wife of a doting millionaire who financed her creative endeavors even after leaving her, and whose disappearance remains unsolved, a disappearance from a moving train while watching one of her own films leaving behind a scorched sleeping cab.
I doubt there’s a bigger cliché in reviewing than, “compulsively readable,” but every so often a book fits the phrase. Granted, stories about films and film-making are catnip to me, there is also a mystery to solve, breathless moments offered in compact, focused scenes and a gradually developed evocation of a force that desires entry into the world, and whose entry portends disaster for anyone involved. But what makes this an exceptional novel of the supernatural is the focus on family, which grounds the story in the reality of a household under stress and presents a son, a husband and a mother who revolve around the narrator, Lois, whose insecurities both drive and undermine her as she tries to accept that she is loved and supported even when she can’t quite grasp why. Lois’ interaction with Clark and Simon, and the prickly moments with her own mother lend the novel a lightly worn gravity that gives the threat to the family and particularly to Lois’ weight and importance.
Other film-related horror:
Flicker by Theodore Roszak
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
(haven’t read these two, but both have been critically acclaimed and fan praised)
The Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell
Shadow of the Vampire, 2000, dir. E. Elias Merhige; starring John Malkovich, Willem Defoe
Hell Train by Christopher Fowler
“Whitstable” by Steven Volk
[I originally wrote on this, “If you only read one horror novel this year …” but I have to amend that to, “If you only read two horror novels this year, this should be one of them” because as good as this is, the next one I’ll bring up is at least as good and I think maybe a bit better.]
EXPERIMENTAL FILM by Gemma Files (2015, ChiZine Publications)
312 pages
ISBN: 978-1771483490
