In Darkness Waiting
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John Shirley on IN DARKNESS WAITING:
"In Darkness Waiting was a metaphor about the "insect inside", the purely mechanical, reactive, dehumanizing side of humanity; the part of us that makes racism and torture possible. Just exactly what we are called to transcend...[I was] using supernatural events as allegory, I was portraying the truth by analogy, to the best of my limited abilities."
Aunt June's friend Sandra keeps her mad daughter, Tetty, shackled in the
attic. It's not quite as gothic as it sounds -- June is a psychiatrist
and Tetty is a patient who, because of "Ego Truth" therapy with sinister
Dr. Arthur Rofocale, has violent outbursts and exhibits haihly
destructive behaviour. Perry a young musician who has come to work as
his aunt's assistant, briefly meets Tetty who tells him she will die
before the next day. Both June and Sandra see this as part of her
aberrant pattern, but Tetty is found dead in her bed with her right
eyeball missing.
And there's this buzzing noise...and strange nightmares of monstrous
insects...
But don't expect some tired-assed the-bugs-are-gonna-get-us or
poisoned-by-alien-athropods or even uh-oh-I- turned-into-a-hexapod plot
from John Shirley. Rofocale, through his research into the subconcious,
has discovered what he calls the Lord of Dark Corners and something that
turns people inwards toward their own worst appetites, eliminating all
empathy, all sympathy, all identity with anyone who does directly
benefit their immediate need. It is like an insect inside us all, just
waiting to unleash the lowest, most putrid parts of us. And it gets
worse.
Creepy? You bet -- and Shirley makes it even more frightening with some
incredible writing. There's a scene early on where Wendy, a young
mother, is "liberated" to feel all the anger within her and direct it at
her own baby, a child she now sees only as a parasitic organism, a
"pink, veined, maggot-squirming thing" and her pregnancy as a disease it
has caused that must be destroyed. It's a stunning amplification of
natural negative emotion and immediately convinces the reader of the
reality of the threat. Or this bit of descriptive dark prose:
The finale does not come until after a typically Shirleyesque rendition
of overwhelming carnage and rage, one of his breathtaking scenes that
can only be compared to the art of Hieronymus Bosch for its portrayal of
evil and the social commentary of William Hogarth's etchings of the
topography of 18th century urban decay. It may be text, but In
Darkness Waiting is as vivid as, well, hell.
Interestingly, the novel was originally entitled INSECT INSIDE, which
makes the book's intent far less vague. But publisher Onyx -- while
emphasizing evil bugs in its copy -- went with a more nebulous "horror"
title and an interesting, but just as vague (and not particularly
appropriate), cover.
Its voice was soft, gentle -- but repugnant. Like the breath
of a diseased infant. It was a sound with halitosis...There was only
darkness up there. But is was a coalesced darkness, as if this were a
place where shadows became liquid; as if the attic darkness was draining
into that corner. He felt himself pulled; a lamprey had latched onto his
eyesight and was sucking it. He felt an internal plunge, a fall to
absolute zero. The Lord of Dark Corners crumbled the graven image of his
self-worth, his sense of justified being. The attic was his own skull:
he had crawled into his own skull and found inside, a pocket of living
darkness nesting in the icorner like a web satchel ofspider eggs on a
dusty ceiling.
