Iterstitial Horror

The journey begins so promisingly, with main man Harry fleeing his particular hauntings, his horror, and embarking once more for a "city where he had once spent a few happy months"; his flight is inhabited by people and things that seem to be ominous objective correlatives for Harry's odyssey. There is a hipsterish woman's book on the Black Dahlia murder's uncanny resemblance to surrealist artists' experimentation with formal dismemberment (by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, to give credit where it's due), mention of Harry's own restless leg syndrome, blood relation to phantom limb symptoms that will later be referenced, and a male passenger's chatter about his golf game perfection (how can the utter banality of golf not invoke the unfathomably sinister, in the same way that Mr. Rogers's cardigans and beautiful neighborhood suggest a Sadian depravity?)

Do artistic and amorous passion also always imply a violation, an incursion, a defacing of the love object, even when the agent is not a serial murderer but just a "Harry"? Does the "connoisseur"—a term that designates figures who later surface to haunt Harry—inevitably destroy the object of his affections? Are homage to and remembrance of the beloved also macabre embalming of bits and pieces? Certainly all meaty questions that the novel starts to pose.

And what of narratives that explore these issues by revealing travel not only as a process of disorientation and dislocation but also of epiphany, alternately terrifying and exhilarating unveilings of the lie of the coherent self, Beckettian challenges to the fiction of reliable domesticity? Narrative journeys that place the "un" before the "heimlich," that remind us that the trip we're taking is only ever back to the gothic horror within? Well, we have Barbara Hodgson's The Sensualist (1998), whose protagonist slowly starts to acquire the limbs of somebody else; H. P. Lovecraft's sojourners through New England, including its universities' libraries (and the good goddess knows that Widener is as unfathomable, as spell purveying a landscape as Dunwich County). Or Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), whose mortally unsettling ghost story permanently altered the DNA of experimental narratives of domesticity gone awry, featuring mutually referencing bodily and architectonic topographies where what shouldn't be there is and what should be isn't.

Such schizoid and disjointed texts are aesthetically painstaking performances of interstitial horror—how language can't but carve itself up, how it falters as flawed transmission between equally flawed interlocutors, in the same way that loved ones (Harry's "darlings," in this novel) are carved up by time, or by dumb lucklessness, sins of commission or omission—what we didn't do or say as pernicious as what we did—to remind us of the bloody thing on the couch, the blood and guts at the core.

But as Harry arrives at the Barcelona-esque urb, with its stand-in Ramblas boulevards bustling with mimes and flower vendors, its medieval quarters, the text can't seem to decide whether it wants to be more fey and whimsical, more congenial fraternity euro-romp (à la the Merde series [2004–2008]), or more Cortázarian 62/Modelo para armar (2004) (whose uncanny ambience cum experimentalism are terrifying and transcendent). Encounters with wacky people and places are characterized in ways uncomfortably close to the observations found on now ubiquitous blogs of post-grad Americans cavorting in Europe. Harry becomes enamored of Solange, a woman performing as a silvery angel amidst the row of live statues. Sol-ange, sun angel; hélas! If only the man/lady-angel relationship didn't come so heavily freighted with a millennia worth of ontoepistemological asymmetry. Household angel, muse, underwear model, beauty queen, so often signified with Frenchy-type name/gear/maid's attire. So many angel/muses for so many men—her motionlessness, on a pedestal, seems to mime the seemingly eternal self-other tableau of milady as a stilled, lovely inspiration for a male agent, even if said male agent is confused in his own right. Holy temple...