It’s the darkest place I know, and a theme I’ve returned to repeatedly in my writing: the horror of being trapped in a starless confinement crowded with monsters.
Just about every story I’ve published has found itself in that place. In Residuum a group of characters awaken in its prison. In Slow Wilhelm Exit my protagonist is gradually reduced to its fastness. It’s the pit in which people attempt to scratch a life in A Thousand Years Of Nanking and Poems Found In The Wreckage Of A Multi-Generational Spaceship. It’s the terrifying loop in which Angie finds herself repeating the worst moment of her life in ‘Crossing The River’ (in Born From Ash). It’s even there, signaled by the title, in the story ‘Empty Box’ published on Daily Science Fiction last year.
It’s what I call the bone room, and it’s transparently an analogy for the human skull.
In novels written under my own name, the bone room must be rationalized — that’s the point of the Robert Maas universe. So those characters in Residuum are caught in a skull for a reason, the seeping madness of Biome is there for a reason, there’s a reason for the way people are reduced to oubliettes, real and figurative, in Hemisphere.
Even the most extreme of these novels, Grand Funk Central, rationalizes its madness. As time skids to a halt in the Manhattan Bubble (an outer skull), Michael Lourekas risks becoming trapped forever in a bone room of his own, much like the survivors of the mosh he encounters, trapped half in a tree that had somehow fused into their bodies.
Throughout the novel, Michael is assaulted by ever-darkening hallucinations as he slips toward the ultimate bad trip, the one that is fixed forever in a moment of time and hence can never end.
But nothing in Grand Funk Central exists outside the laws of physics. For example, you can read the sequence in the Natural History Museum as an LSD delusion or as an account of the museum itself, case by case, exhibit by exhibit, diorama by diorama. Not only is there not an ounce of magic in the book, but the lack of magic is the entire point.
Rather than a constriction that shutters your view of the chaos of the universe, the Bubble is a method of unleashing all that incomprehensible torrent of existence, all at once, and with no means of categorizing any of it. The labels are missing. Someone’s stolen all the handles.
This is the very epitome of the bone room.
My Robert Maas works might rationalize their madness, but in The Music Of The Rending Of The Night (published under the pseudonym Kare Mois) I preferred to let the horror pile up without any attempt to categorize what’s actually happening so that the reader could feel more at ease with the story.
Michael Lourekas is a faulty narrator who views the world through the funhouse mirror of drugs. His language is gauche, unformed, the halting words of the child whose body he inhabits. But he has none of Winnie’s sense of horrified beauty expressed as tumbling, sensual metaphor. Winnie’s story is told in snatches of hyper-real eloquence and poetic whimsy. Music is a novel that foregrounds its language.
Her descent into hell is organized intentionally into a series of random glimpses at ten year intervals, seen by a flickering light down the far end of a long dark corridor, much like the memories those men of Residuum feel itching in the back of their own psyches.
If you did need a handle on things, you could categorize The Music Of The Rending Of The Night as a form of urban fantasy or magic reality, though I myself reject both except as useful labels for potential readers. Music isn’t fantasy or unreality. It takes place in a world divested of magic, like Grand Funk Central, like our own.
The trouble is that you view the novel through layers of distorting glass. Not just because Winnie in another faulty narrator, but because of her ever-worsening drug experiences that obfuscate everything she describes. It soon becomes unclear whether her world is real, and the more comfortable option is to assume it is not:
We stalk the camp like devils. The dead lie everywhere, bodies torn apart, faces twisted in agony, the earth around them soaked in blood. The sun brings the trees to life, draped with glistening fruit. Heads and severed limbs sprout like toadstools among the litter of mugs, coke cans, empty hypodermic syringes and cigarette butts.
Did I do this?
There’s something hysterical about the air, an inaudible screeching rending apart the hill, registering somewhere in the backs of our brains. We move through the camp, through the junkies’ den of the camp, at the tail of a gangland massacre. There are no weapons. The camp has destroyed itself under the influence of powerful drugs.
Little by little, Winnie backs herself into the eternal bad trip of the bone room. The phrase is used explicitly in the novel. It’s the title of the fourth and final chapter. In the second chapter ‘We Move Like A Virus Through The Deep Drugged Dawn’ a stripper is abducted by locals and force-fed their appalling sacred mushroom.
“The whole thing turned,” her friend Domino explains. “You know how it turns when you let it? Then it gets bad. Then it disintegrates. The thorns take over, the weeds take over, and you’re trussed up, and you’re caught utterly. The bad thirty seconds, remember that, and how you’d fight them and start laughing? Down it all went, down to hell, down to the bone room.”
In the third chapter, ‘A Hundred Years Of Nanking,’ Winnie’s brother seems to awaken briefly from the nightmare they’ve let consume them. “Has it really been ten years?” he asks her. “Ten years in the bone room?”
Contrasted with the room is the garden, a place of redemption, regrowth, and peace. The very last word in The Music Of The Rending Of The Night is ‘garden.’ But even gardens can have thorns, and they rarely turn out to be the Eden you long for.
Both Biome and Grand Funk Central place the garden inside the bone room, and show how thoroughly it can be corrupted. In Michael Lourekas’s garden of paradise, here a symbolic refraction of Central Park, anything he desires is permitted, but everything he experiences will be tainted with horror.
The central image of Hemisphere is of fecund, unstoppable growth from a twisted garden of the mind. Humanity reacts by building a wall to contain it, effectively creating my biggest bone room to date — except, of course, for the one that contains them all.
Photo of Rikugi-en, Tokyo, taken by Robert Maas.
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