What!

 
Note: this entry contains major spoilers.

 
With two stories left in this collection, I don’t know that I’ve got much to say that I haven’t been saying over and over (and over)1 in these entries. As I said at the outset, I’m a regular reader of Wrath’s work, and although it’s uneven at the best of times, I find his ideas and point of view generally compelling. So a collection like this, that is so weak and sloppy, is a big disappointment.

For the sake of completeness, though, let’s push on to the end!

“Pressure” is a slight story without much plot — just a gooey gorefest. A Mafia hood is strapped to a table and tortured; the torturer is a woman, Maria, who’s a former lover of the hood. Various body parts are removed or unkindly treated. As it happens, the (formerly) incredibly handsome but faithless Vincento dumped the woman and denies that her child (who she brings to her torture sessions) is his progeny. We don’t know at first why Vincento’s being tortured, but soon discover that Maria wants him to say that he loves her, and to admit that her child is his son. After much Aaaaaaaaaagh!!!-ing and Noooooooooo!!!-ing, he relents. Maria decides she doesn’t love Vincento anymore. She cuts off his dick and eats it. The end.

For a story without much apparent purpose other than a good old wallow in body horror, “Pressure” isn’t bad — just kind of routine. There’s some novelty in the idea of a female torturer — she apprenticed under her dad — and the imagery is effective (“With slow, deliberate, almost tender care, she sliced off his lower lip with the scalpel.”) But it’s undone by a frankly stupid ending in which, after pretty much tearing the guy to pieces, she realizes she doesn’t love him anymore because he’s no longer beautiful. Well, yeah, I guess that’s what happens when you cut off a guy’s lip, poke out his eye, and bite off his nose.2

The final story, “Talent Does What It Can,” has an intriguing premise: a young girl, a musical prodigy, composes and performs on the piano music that is so exquisite that she actually draws demons out from Hell and starts a demonic apocalypse. Everyone’s horribly killed except her, since she’s a big hit with the demons — as long as she keeps playing. She plays for so long, and so passionately, that her fingers bleed and break, but she doesn’t quit. She keeps playing, to the point where her music destroys Hell, breaks up the Earth’s crust, and oceans of lava consume the world. The end.

If I were bothering with involved reflection at this point, I’d say something about how, the more improbable a story is, the more care you need to take to make it convincing to the reader. This story fails, on this basic level. Wrath may well be knowledgeable about classical music, and people who write, study and/or play classical music, but he doesn’t convince me of it here, so there’s no basis of believability that can withstand the crazy events that he piles on top of it. It just comes across as a story by some guy who said, Hey, how about a story about a girl who plays piano so well that demons come out of Hell to listen to her? Sick!!! ‘S fucked up!!!

Which I suppose is what happened.

Little dumb details abound. The little girl opens a fortune cookie and notes that the fortune is in Courier font (WHY???) She’s accepted to “Juliard.”3 She plays music by Carl “Orf.”4 Her mother tells her a story about a jazz musician who sold his soul to the devil, and could “evoke”5 Satan with his music. Her spirit “soured,”6 “bourne”7 aloft on the powerful notes.

And so we reach the end of the book. It’s been a tough road, and I can’t say I’m not glad it’s over. I’ve enjoyed Wrath’s work in the past, but Scabs was a massive disappointment, that I couldn’t in good faith recommend to anyone. It’s too bad that the collection stumbles so badly on the writing, because otherwise this would have been a tight, powerful set of stories, linked by the themes of guilty self-loathing and passion pushed beyond the capacity of human endurance.

When I started this series of posts, I said that Wrath James White was a writer of integrity. I think he believes in his work. I think he’s passionate about it. He’s serious. I like that. Those are rare qualities in a field that’s littered with barely-competent hacks, and that’s why I’ll continue to check out Wrath’s writing. I don’t know that he’s produced anything worse than Scabs, but he has done better.

 
Note: this entry contains major spoilers.

 
In chronological order, the lines from Wrath’s story “Best Friends” that caused me to place my palm upon my face.

“My heart drumrolled in my chest”

“fear sent a surge of adrenaline through my nervous system and shot up my pulse rate somewhere around one hundred and fifty beats per minute”

“Slowly a distinctly human silhouette emerged before me, taking on more anthropomorphic features as it drew closer.”

“nebulous penumbra”

“Sorrow so deep that it had literally become her

“the worse thing I could imagine”

“It felt like I had just awaken from a dream”

 
I feel kind of bad about making fun of “Best Friends,” because it actually is, or tries to be, a poignant, painful story. In more capable hands it would have left me devastated. And most of these examples appear early on — it does get better later.

But this is a lousy story. There’s no way around it. Like the preceding stories, it reads like it was written in a blind rush, and Wrath couldn’t be bothered to do even a nominal skim for basic spelling errors.

Crap like this makes me angry. What it says to me, as a reader, is that the author doesn’t respect me or my time enough to put even a little effort into putting out a polished product. If there were as many fuckups on his job resumes as there are in these stories, Wrath wouldn’t get hired as a 7-11 cashier. Even the best writers make mistakes, but when they’re as routine as they are in these stories, they’re not mistakes, they’re evidence of not giving a shit.

Wrath doesn’t have to be James Joyce to satisfy me. He just has to respect me, the craft, and himself enough to put in the time and effort to produce a competently executed piece of writing.

So, the story is about a young man who — I guess this is the theme of this collection — is haunted by a horrible thing he’s done. In high school, he befriended a classmate, a girl who was taunted as a freak because of her frail, emaciated appearance and lack of hair. The girl had a crush on him, but he, ashamed of being thought of as uncool, spurned her attentions, and eventually cruelly repudiated their friendship. The girl died soon after, and it was revealed that she had terminal cancer.

The boy, guilt-ridden, begins to see the apparition of the dead girl following him everywhere. It appears to him regularly, up to the point where the story begins, with the young man on his deathbed. Like the girl, he’s dying of cancer — we find that the girl isn’t haunting him out of vengeance, but because she senses the cancer growing in him and wants to comfort him.

The basic story is powerful stuff — it starts out as if it’s going to be a routine ghost story, but becomes something more compelling. But that’s what’s so exasperating about this, and Wrath in general. There are some terrific ideas for stories in this collection, but they’re crippled by poor execution and a general thoughtlessness.

For example, the story opens with the guy being terrified to the point of an unrealistically astronomical heart rate (it starts out at 150, and we’re told that it then skyrockets to over 300) at the apparition moving towards him in the night. What the heck is it? What’s happening? He’s confused and scared, as anyone would be if some ghost appeared in their bedroom. But later in the story we find that this thing has been visiting him every single night, that he knows exactly who and what it is, and that it doesn’t mean him any harm whatsoever. So why the fuck is he bewildered and panicked when it shows up?

The answer, of course, is that Wrath wanted a spooky opening to the story, wanted the reader to be mystified and full of dread, and either forgot or didn’t give a shit that the guy’s reaction made absolutely no sense whatsoever in context of the whole story.

Argh.

Also, when I saw the title of this story, I immediately thought of the Perry Bible Fellowship comic strip below, so I don’t think it really had much of a chance with me to begin with.

 
I guess it’s a reflection of my disappointment with the writing in this collection that, when Wrath writes “shadowy creatures lunged at me baring saber-like fangs and long gnarled claws,” I’m actually impressed that he didn’t spell it “bearing.”1

What I’ve come to realize about Wrath’s stories, though, is that I’m missing the point if I’m focusing on trivialities like grammar, spelling, characterization, or story construction. These stories aren’t really even about people, except maybe for Wrath himself. They’re just embodiments of Wrath’s pain. They’re screams in the night — they don’t have to be coherent or sensible.

Take “Run Away,” for instance. Here’s a story where the (once again unnamed) protagonist is, literally, running from his past, chased by his personal demons that have taken earthly form as hideous Lovecraftian monsters. The world has been overrun with everyone’s personal demons, that come alive in the night.

The protagonist is a former crack addict and gang banger, who, before the apocalyptic event, got himself cleaned up, went into rehab, and took up running. It’s his training as a marathon runner that has allowed him to survive, but he spends his nights in constant motion, running for miles and miles, always just a few steps ahead of his demons.

As he runs, he remembers the people whose lives he’s destroyed, whose spirits are now in pursuit: girls he turned into crack whores and abandoned; a child he accidentally shot to death during a drive-by; other gang members he’s murdered. When the story begins, he’s already been running for days, and his body’s reaching its breaking point.

Everything about this story is pretty much right up front. It’s a story about a guy haunted by his past, running from his demons, who’s actually haunted by his past and running from his demons. It’s pretty much the same sort of story as “Perdition’s Flame” — a man tormented by, and eventually destroyed by, his guilt.

There’s some vivid, horrific imagery in “Run Away” that makes it basically work as a nightmare vision — almost more like a prose poem, really, than a short story. For White, stories are about effect rather than coherence, so there are some basic mechanics issues, like when the guy runs past a car, and sees/hears way too much about what’s going on in the car for someone who’s probably spent about a half-second in its vicinity.2 But basically, the story works.

 
“Perpetual Motion” begins with a poem that turns out to be kind of an overture to the story, about a man reflecting on his past (and future) lovers. Until the very end, it isn’t really a horror story so much as a romantic reverie with fantastical elements. The man wakes up in bed, a poem by Lord Byron1 in his head, his eyes dry and crusted. Next to him he sees a beautiful naked woman. He doesn’t know who she is, is pretty sure he’s never seen her before now, yet at the same time does remember her, and in fact knows their entire history together. His eyes itch. He blinks. When he opens his eyes again, the woman is replaced by a different woman. We learn their history. He blinks again, and it’s a different woman again. And so on over a few iterations, until we reach a gruesome ending that was probably foregone, but which I was hoping he wouldn’t go to.

This actually might be the most effective of the stories I’ve read so far in this collection. The women he encounters resemble actual human beings, and most of their interactions seem like conversations actual people might have with each other. While the whole thing comes off as a bit of a humblebrag (“Will I never find lasting love, but be doomed to seduce and abandon — or be abandoned by — hundreds upon hundreds of sexy, beautiful women who can’t resist my ripped bod and razor-sharp intellect?”),2 it feels like a sincere, poignant effort at a portrait of a man consumed with regret, disappointment, and loss, for whom true love has always dangled just out of reach, occasionally brushing against his fingertips before swinging away.

“I wonder if this is the answer? Just getting married? I wonder if this will stop the carrousel? The rotation of the earth? End the infinite loop? No. No. It wouldn’t…it couldn’t be that easy. Ain’t shit ever that easy. The merry-go-round ain’t ever going to stop. It just keeps going and no little ring is going to stop it. No vow of fidelity, no fucking ’til death do us part is going to freeze its gears. It just keeps going ’round grinding my sorry black ass into the dust!”

But of course, the story’s ragged around the edges, and needs an editor, like every other story in the collection so far. There weren’t very many eye-rolling moments in this one, although it appears that Wrath, for a guy who concocts all manner of human violation and dismantling with a surgeon’s anatomical expertise, isn’t totally clear on how eyes work. The retina, for instance, lines the inside of the back of the eye, so it’s doubtful that the protagonist can actually “feel the gummy film that has formed on my retinas.” There are also a couple of times when his eyes dry up with a salty crust, then he cries, and then suddenly they’re all crusted up again. This guy has the worst case of dry-eye…ever.

With four stories left to go, I’m a little over the halfway mark. I’m confident that I’ll make it all the way through, but man, it is tough sledding. I feel like I’m back in a college creative writing workshop.3