And Coming Out the Other Side

Passing Through Veils a novel of dread by John Harrison.  WordFire Press.  229 pp.  *****

Psychologist B.F. Skinner said there are three things human beings fear: death, their own minds, and other people.  That seems to cover the ground.  But I sometimes think our mind is what we’re most afraid of.  Meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg once said that when people came to him with their fears, death wasn’t at the top of the list.  Their greatest fear was dementia.  They were afraid of losing their minds.

Kathryn Fields—in John Harrison’s new novel—has a fear about her mind that is beyond that.  She was a high-priced, hard charging, and successful attorney who was involved in a case in South Korea when she made a gaffe that was almost international in scope, so she had to return in disgrace.  She consoled herself with alcohol, not the best idea under the circumstances—especially because too much alcohol was involved in the gaffe—and wound up having a psychotic break where she was completely out of control, eventually had to be institutionalized.  On the one hand, she was a victim of the high-pressure world she was working in.  On the other—as we eventually discover—there is a trauma from her teenage years that she never really absorbed.  There seem to be various reasons she might have flipped out (she also has a controlling mother who would drive anyone bananas) and flip out she did.

Now she’s slowly, tentatively, trying to recover.  An old friend from college has given her a new job (also, unfortunately, at a high-pressure law firm).  She’s found a place in Georgetown that has plenty of charm but is in need of repair (just like her).  She’s seeing a shrink, and she’s learned to tell her mother to butt out.  Things are looking up.

Then she gets in the house and starts to hear unexplained sounds, a persistent clicking, music playing.  Soon she’s having visions.  She’s taking some kind of mind-soothing drug, mixing it with alcohol (!).  She also doesn’t stick to a prescribed dosage, just grabs a pill when she needs it.  But there seem to be spooks in the house; what’s going on has no rational explanation.  And it has uncanny echoes of something that we, as readers, know to have happened there thirty years before, because we’ve read the prologue.

What I’ve just described doesn’t begin to suggest the complications of the plot that eventually unfolds.  As in a good horror movie (no surprise, because Harrison has worked in both film and television, writing scripts and directing), things are only going to get worse.  The author describes this as a novel of dread; there’s plenty of that to go around.

The epigraph, from C.G. Jung, seems entirely apt: “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of others.”

I’ve never had much interest in the horror genre.  I dropped out after seeing a few great classics from my youth, and never read the fiction.  I am interested in the human mind.  Harrison obviously shares that interest.

He also knows the conventions of the genre.  The prologue tells us that a grisly murder occurred just outside the townhouse that Kathryn now occupies.  It looked to the police like a mugging and robbery—the killer was never found—but we suspect there was more to it than that (muggers don’t slit a woman’s throat).  The one-year-old boy who witnessed his mother’s murder from the front window of the townhouse now owns the place, and the uncle who eventually raised him—twin brother to the boy’s father—is also around.  The deaf woman who lived next door at the time of the murder still occupies that place, along with her weird, boorish and overly protective housekeeper.

The son and uncle are vastly wealthy because they own a drug company (at least their name isn’t Purdue) that Kathryn’s new law firm is defending in a suit.  The pills that Kathryn takes so cavalierly are the product of that company.  All these things could be sheer coincidence, of course (like Kathryn’s weird resemblance to the woman who was murdered), or this could be the most diabolical scheme in the history of horror (how could they possibly have done this? you’re thinking, at the same time you’re thinking, well, they could have).

The novel is as visual as a good movie; we physically see everything that unfolds.  It could easily be a movie, except that then we wouldn’t have the enjoyment of the prose, which is first rate.  One thing that especially impressed me was Harrison’s knowledge of the things of this world, the clothes, furniture, cars, living spaces, even the gun that Kathryn hopes will protect her (though a gun can’t protect a mind as it comes unhinged).  Men, women, things, were Balzac’s subject through life, and I was especially impressed by Harrison’s knowledge of things.

But also the plot.  Where in the hell did he come up with that?  It’s not convoluted or hard to follow, but there’s one shock after another, including a big one, for me, at the end.  This novel was fun throughout.  Except when I was scared to death.

But that was part of the fun.