Books: Skrik sisters

13 July 2014 - 02:03 By Michele Magwood and Diane Awerbuck
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The King has spoken - Stephen King, that is, who has doled out praise to both Lauren Beukes and Sarah Lotz for their outstanding labours in the fields of the horror thriller. It's a rare thing for an SA writer to receive a shout from the master storyteller. It's only happened twice, in fact. Michele Magwood and Diane Awerbuck review two books that double as lightning bolts

Broken Monsters *****

Lauren Beukes (Umuzi, R200)

Coming off the blazing success of The Shining Girls, this one adds gasoline.

When the night lies heavy on the empty streets, "that's when the borders are the most porous between the worlds, and unnatural things leak out of people's heads and move freely".

The streets in Lauren Beukes's compulsive new hybrid horror mystery are the decrepit byways of that corroded Motortown, Detroit, a city oxidised by recession and gouged out by foreclosures. A perfect setting for unnatural things.

Beukes has a way of inhaling cityscapes and breathing them onto the page: the chaotic streets of Johannesburg in Zoo City, the haunting tangle of Chicago in The Shining Girls. "Detroit's like Hillbrow in a way," she says when I point this out, "all those boarded-up buildings and ruin and poverty and people holding them up as symbols of Everything That's Wrong With This Country. But I like real, I like gritty, to me it's the truth. And people are living there".

And what people they are, in this creaking, screeching city. There's the amiable homeless man TK, who scrabbles for a living by stealing stuff from abandoned houses; bone-weary single mom Detective Gabi Versado and her teenaged daughter Layla; blow-in journo Jonno, who's desperate to make a mark, somehow, anyhow.

There are pompous art curators, sweaty paedo-philes, outsider artists, smarmy meatpackers, social media millionaires, shills and strippers and Santeria priestesses. All swirling like motes around the humming psychosis of The Detroit Monster.

The story opens with his first victim, a young boy whose torso has been joined, Pan-like, onto the hind legs of a faun. Detective Versado is called in to investigate it, peering through a veneer of cynicism. "This one is Yoo-neeq," she thinks. "Which happens to be the name of a sex worker she let off with a warning last weekend."

Though the exoskeleton of Broken Monsters is that of a thriller, with its harassed cops, its clever reveals, its unrelenting pace and chase, within it Beukes syncopates some significant themes.

In her work, hidden, fantastical worlds co-exist with the real one, sharing a thin and permeable membrane. "I'm interested in the subconscious, in the darkness that lies beneath," she explains. "and in what happens when barriers mingle."

As distressing as the crimes as they play out - if not more - is the subject of social media and the online world. It's introduced mainly by Versado's daughter Layla and her friend, Cas, who play in a world of click baiting and cyber-bullying, of a queasy pastime called SpinChat that invites strangers to peer into people's rooms the world over. The girls take it upon themselves to bust an online paedophile. Of course, things go badly wrong. Everything now is public, Beukes warns, you have to find a way to live with it. "It raises the old saying 'All the world's a stage.' But now we're living life in the wings, putting out a carefully curated self onto that stage."

As well as an eye for the city, Beukes has an unerring ear for voices. She spent weeks in Detroit researching the novel, hanging out with groups of teens, working in a soup kitchen, walking the blighted streets. She converts her experience into vivid, fluent storytelling, breaking it up with online transcripts, conversations and 911 calls.

The images from Broken Monsters are hard to shake, intensely, viscously wrought as they are. Does she ever scare herself with her imaginings? "No. I can close my computer. Reality scares me. Real serial killers, domestic violence, a friend having a gun held to his head in a robbery? That's what frightens me." - Michele Magwood @michelemagwood

The Three ****

Sarah Lotz (Hodder & Stoughton, R285)

The philosopher Aristotle thought that the imitation of life - the sort that writers do when they write - was superior to history, which was a mere record of events. The spectators were to feel pity and fear as they watched characters succumb inevitably to their destinies. Readers of Sarah Lotz's new novel will feel the same.

Labelling a novel "horror" is one way for it not to be taken seriously, and this is a mistake. True, The Three is a slick - and serious - homage to all the creepy books and B-grade flicks in which Lotz has ever immersed herself. But it is also a structurally impeccable rendering of ordinary humans flailing in confusion at the fates which have been forced upon them.

Elspeth Martins is the unifying character, a journalist investigating the fallout after several planes crash almost simultaneously in different countries. When the obvious bogeyman of terrorism is ruled out, we follow the fortunes of the three (or is it four?) miracle children who've survived - and the increasing desperation of their relatives, who are interviewed by Martins or record their own experiences. In other words, like Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novel is epistolary, and the first-person dispatches carry with them the wonder and fright that contact with the infinite brings with it.

Lotz's narrators are North American, British, South African, Japanese, and that range is deliberately global for a book that deals with the Apocalypse. Her themes are also universal, and the teasing out of our (quite rational) fear of flying, with all the attached spiritual sensibilities, hits home.

But Lotz's question is not: what if the plane crashes? It is: what if the crash is only the beginning of the terror?

She is skilled at hole-free plots and believable characterisation - the two most important aspects of tragedy. There are some stylistic moments that don't ring true, but if that's the filthiest criticism a novel gets, it has done what it came to do.

Most interesting - and most convincing - are Lotz's Japanese sections. Narrated by the pathologically shy Ryu Takami, who thinks of himself as existing only online as Orz Man, it is also populated with automatons ("surrabots") and the ominously named Ice Princess, Chiyoko Kamamoto. It uses the real location of Aokigahara, a forest in Japan where the hopeless go to kill themselves. Lotz's visit to the site imbues these pages with the real pathos and horror of the book, and it is where she is most fully ensouled as a writer.

If Aristotle were still alive (and if Lotz's major premise is anything to go by, he may well be), he'd recognise the mastery of form here. The Three links Lotz to a long, ancestral line of writers and performers who meant to leave their audiences feeling cleansed and enlightened. She ends up siding with Shakespeare, in fact, who said that we are to the gods as flies are to cruel boys: They kill us for their sport.

- Diane Awerbuck #STBooks

 

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