The night had almost gone. The sky was turning above him. Soon he would hear the stirring of the men as they woke.
So close. We were so damn close.
From about twenty-five yards away a Ker began to approach. Arthur saw the movement and felt fear flush through him. Then terror took hold and shook him. He didn't want to die.
"No,” he whispered. “Go away."
The Ker drifted closer. Arthur could make out the shredded, blood stained robes, the wild tangle of hair that writhed like snakes around the dead and blackened flesh of its face, and, most horrid of all, the lifeless shark's eyes, black and merciless and filled with an unearthly cold that froze Arthur's spirit.
"Leave me alone,” Arthur sobbed. He didn't deserve this. He deserved to live and grow old. He wanted to see his Lillian again, wanted to hold her in his arms and kiss her. He wanted children with her, to see them grow up and have children of their own. For God's sake, this wasn't right. He had tried to be a good man. “No, God damn it!” He wouldn't let those bitches have him. He would not go to hell. That would not be his fate. He wouldn't allow it. If it was his time and he had to die, then he wanted to spend eternity with his Lillian.
Arthur tore his arm free.
The captain had escaped. He was gone from the horror. Arthur clawed for the pistol holstered at the man's hip. He unsnapped the clasp and pulled the Webley free. He could feel his strength draining away, but he would fight until the end.
He had to believe there was more to life. It couldn't end like this. He had lived with courage and honesty and faith and, if he had to, he would die the same way. He would not give into cowardice and despair and end up cowering like some whipped cur. He would not dishonour Lillian with his last acts upon this earth. He would be true to who he was and who he had been.
The dread that had gripped him lessened. Arthur lifted up the pistol and watched as the Ker came closer. It seemed to float above the ground. He could see the hunger and lust in its face. He aimed the pistol and pulled the trigger.
The shot rang out. The Ker continued towards him unharmed. Arthur fired again. The bullets should have hit. They should have struck the woman dead centre.
Lowering the Webley to his lap, Arthur resigned himself to fact he was done for. This was not surrender, but realising it was over meant he would at least be able to meet his fate with equanimity.
All life was choice and he chose to accept his life for what it was. He had made a difference, maybe only in small ways, but a difference all the same. His life had been full and rich. Lillian had filled it with love and hope and laughter. They had had good times and bad, but the good far outweighed the bad, and those were what he chose to remember. If he were to only have the time he had already lived, then he would be content. He would not give in to fear.
If life was choice, then he could choose the way he faced his death.
He would see Lillian again.
The Ker was mere feet away now and as Arthur looked up he realised the captain had been wrong. He had been wrong. The rumours were true. They were not stories made up by the men and they were not lies.
The woman had changed. The dirt, blood and grime had faded from view; the tattered shroud had become a gown of white, pure and unstained, the darkness replaced by light and the wildness tamed. Her eyes, so hateful before, were now full of warmth and love and succour; the talons outstretched to rend, were manicured, slender and delicate; and the face of horror, of fanged terror, was now the face of his love.
He was going home.
Copyright © 2008 Ian R. Faulkner
[Back to Table of Contents]
CASE NOTES—Peter Tennant
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Sarah Langan
(photo courtesty of Ellen Datlow)
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OUTBREAK: A SARAH LANGAN FEATURETTE
Sarah Langan's 2006 debut novel The Keeper was nominated for a Stoker Award and had the likes of Peter Straub and Jack Ketchum applauding the rise of a new star in the horror firmament. Set in the rundown Maine town of Bedford, it told the story of Susan Marley, a young woman whose death is the catalyst for a chain of supernatural events that culminate in the most spectacular and comprehensive trashing of a town since Stephen King last kicked the crap out of Castle Rock.
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Follow-up novel Virus (Headline paperback, 436pp, 6.99 pounds), published in the States with the title The Missing, takes the story a few miles up the road to Bedford's affluent neighbour Corpus Christi, though even here there are signs that the economic complacency of the past is no longer justified. On a school trip to the environs of Bedford, a ghost town in the wake of The Keeper's climax and where rumours persist of unknown toxins in the air and ground, a young boy goes missing. An embryonic psychopath, James Walker is a wilful child whose only intention is to get his teacher in trouble, but alone in the woods he digs up some long buried bones and feels compelled to gnaw on them, becoming infected with an ancient virus, one that had lain dormant for centuries until sulphur from a fire at Bedford's paper mill reactivated it. During the night James returns to Corpus Christi and infects others with his bite.
While, unlike The Keeper, Langan's second novel presents the reader with a material threat, one derived from science and toxicology, there is more than a suggestion of the supernatural about the form this virus takes. The victims take on some of the characteristics of classic horror archetypes—they are transformed into sleeker, more efficient predator forms reminiscent of werewolves, eat flesh like zombies and can only come out at night like vampires—and there is the hint, with references to previous outbreaks bringing down the Mayan and other civilisations, that this virus is the truth at back of all the tales of night monsters. The virus also appears to have intelligence of a kind, creating a gestalt among its victims, a hive mind of sorts so that they can act in concert.
With the infection of schoolteacher Lois Larkin the threat escalates. She is an ideal host for the virus’ controlling intelligence, able to formulate the plans and strategies that will ensure this time it does not simply glut itself on human flesh and then subside for lack of lebensraum. Larkin offers a vision of virus victims ruling the States and keeping the human population as cattle. And so the battle is on in deadly earnest, as Corpus Christi tears itself apart and the authorities fight to contain the menace within its borders.
So far, so good, and as a chronicler of small town America in peril, like King before her, Langan seldom puts a foot wrong. She brings her setting to vivid life, so that there is the sense for the reader of many stories interweaving, a vast cast of characters shuffling about in the ruins of the American dream, and pretending that everything is going to be all right, even as it falls down around their ears. Her novel has all the pace, excitement, bravura excesses and gore (though never gratuitous) of the better zombie movies, and as pure adventure in a horror mode it works superbly well, giving us the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and a growing feeling of hopelessness as options are exhausted and loved ones die.
But of course there is more to it than that. The use of a virus as the central conceit here ties the story in to one of the great bogeymen of our modern world, provides a touchstone for the imagination in all the health scares and warnings that flood out of our television sets on an almost daily basis. Yes, it is highly unlikely that a virus like this would ever occur, but in the stringent measures taken against its spread—the medical facilities that are so easily overwhelmed, the shoot to kill border guards, the men in hazmat suits, the collapsing infrastructure—we recognise all our worst fears of what the future may hold. This adds an extra frisson and makes it doubly hard to sanitise what Langan has to tell us, to put the book aside at the end of the day and go to sleep with the conviction that it was just a story, an entertainment, and not something that could ever actually happen.
Langan has many strengths as a writer: assured plotting, an elegant prose style,
the ability to depict events on a grand scale, an eye for telling details and, for want of a better term, an appetite for destruction, a willingness to tear down what she has so painstakingly constructed. However it is the characterisation, the flair with which she creates compelling and contradictory individuals with whom we can identify, that makes her work stand out.
James Walker is a case in point. His importance to the plot is minimal. He is there simply to get the virus out of the ground and into the body politic, and a lesser writer would have left him as only a cipher, a plot convenience, but Langan invests time in giving the boy a back story. She tells us about his history of abusing pet rabbits, the ambivalent feelings he has, his isolation within the family unit, and by doing this she pulls off the difficult task of creating a child psychopath, chilling and disturbing for the reader, and thoroughly credible. Similarly with teacher Lois Larkin, Langan adds depth to the story by revealing her accident strewn past, the financial and romantic failures that have stripped this young woman with so much to live for of hope, showing how an ordinary, good person can be driven so far off course that she is willing to embrace an entity inimical to human life, to become the very means through which its goals are achieved. Larkin throws in her lot with the virus not because she is an evil person, but because she is weak and needs the validation its power can provide, the attendant sense of importance and inclusion.
Central to the narrative are the Wintrobs, husband Fenstad, wife Meg and their daughter Madeline. Psychiatrist Fenstad is daunted by his job and angry at his wife's past infidelity. Librarian Meg feels that her husband is a cold fish and wishes he would be more demonstrative. Teenager Maddie is an idealist, aware of social and environmental issues, wanting to make a difference, and believing that her parents are intolerant of her Hispanic boyfriend. It's the textbook dysfunctional family given a face and a name, and while outside events act as a catalyst for the inevitable meltdown you get the sense that what happens, with people who so obviously care about each other and yet seem hell bent on their own destruction, was always on the cards, albeit not quite so dramatically. Langan is adept at portraying the swings and roundabouts of emotion within the family unit, the ways we use guilt and sex against each other, how people can get haunted by their pasts, and she is cannily ambivalent about how much of this, if any, is down to the virus and what is hardwired into the characters’ identities.
The Wintrobs are the solid bedrock on which the rest is built, all the horrors and hallucinations of Corpus Christi's unravelling. They are the still beating heart of an achingly good novel, one that demands to be read and provides proof that Langan is more than capable of living up to, and perhaps even surpassing, the expectations raised by The Keeper.
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Sarah Langan featurette continued overleaf
SOME QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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While they can be read independently there is a degree of overlap between THE KEEPER and *Virus*, with events in the former setting in motion the plot of the latter, and also a strong contrast between the two towns, rundown Bedford and the more affluent Corpus Christi, so they can almost be read as a diptych. I'm wondering if this was your intention all along, or if it was something that just developed as you worked on the second book?
The synchronicity between the two novels happened naturally. I wrote the first book in the throes of my early twenties, bursting with angst and idealism. Hopefully, I've held onto at least a little of that passion, because it's important. Anyway, The Keeper comes from the perspective of the kids who inherited a flawed world. They're enraged, and hurt, and striving for something better. Virus is, in a way, The Keeper's opposite. It comes from the perspective of the grown-ups who've become complicit members of the bourgeois. They strive for paid bills, mowed lawns, college funds, and a tonic for their ennui in the form of affairs, or drugs, or work. It's like that wonderful line from Lawrence of Arabia: “Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage, and hope for the future. The old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution.” I can see both sides, though I think if you've read both books, you know with whom I sympathize. Or, more aptly put, would like to be.
The Keeper and Virus, to me, aren't sequels, but the same story, told two different ways.
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The Keeper clearly has a supernatural rationale behind what takes place, whereas in Virus the explanation for what is taking place is scientific in nature. What made you decide to adopt this more ‘realistic’ approach?
I don't think the decision was conscious. It just suited the form. The Keeper is, in a way, an allegory about capitalism, and its effects on people not born under lucky stars. The supernatural stuff is the embodiment of those horrors. They live in the shadow of a paper mill that has closed, and they can still smell the sulphur in the air and water and grass.
When I wrote Virus, I was studying toxicology and thermodynamics as they relate to global warming, and it seemed to me that some very scary, non-supernatural stuff was on the horizon of human existence. You don't need ghosts when reality is scarier.
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In more general terms, how do you feel about the use of the supernatural in fiction?
Supernatural fiction gets negative press because, when it's bad, it's not just boring or unskilled, like in other genres; it's gross and inappropriate. But the corollary is also true: when supernatural fiction works, it's stunning, and beautiful, and hopefully terrifying. It's all in the execution, and a writer should and must write what compels them. Anything else dies on the page, or worse, is dishonest.
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Could you tell us a bit about why toxicology interests you and how studying it helped with the research for Virus?
Maddie's fears about global warming and consumption mirror my own, and I learned about those things in graduate school. The virus in the book is an invention, but I wouldn't have devised it without some background in toxicology, along with Jared Diamond's excellent non-fiction book Collapse. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the field of toxicology right now, and it's pretty topical.
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I suspect that *Virus* will strike home with many UK readers, in that it seems we're constantly hearing news stories about foot and mouth, avian flu, blue tongue, hospital super bugs etc. At times it seems like it's not so much a question of if or when the next pandemic will arrive, but which one it will be. I'm wondering if the situation is similar in the US media, and if so how such a backdrop affects the writing of a book like *Virus*?
Sure, everybody's paranoid about the next pandemic, and they're probably right to be. We're global now, and something like the 1916 influenza virus would be a lot harder to contain. Worse, there's not much we can do about it. But such risks are the risks of being alive, and I think most of us have come to terms with them, otherwise we'd be washing our hands ten times a day and boiling the pesticides from our vegetables before eating them. What I was expressing, I think, and what Stephen King was expressing in his disaster novel The Stand, was frustration with an impotent regime. I'm less worried about an epidemic, than how my government would handle it. Scarcity of food, health care, transportation, communication, and, worst of all, an erosion of human kindness. Katrina was a shameful disaster. So is Iraq.
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What strikes me about your fiction is that it seems informed by a mainstream sensibility, and typified by very strong characterisation. What are the advantages of writing in the horror genre for you? What can you say or do that wouldn't be possible in the mainstream or some other genre?
There's more drama in thrillers and supernatural fiction, and I like that. I can bring my characters to a crisis, and use that crisis to unearth subterranean emotions. The Wintrobs, for example, would never have talked about whether they loved each other if the virus hadn't become hot. Liz in The Keeper would never have forgiven herself if she hadn't met her sister's ghost. Then again, there
are drawbacks. Supernatural fiction is taken less seriously, and gets less attention than work that is considered literary. But that's a small complaint. I love ghosts.
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Both books, especially in the end sections, are very visual and fast paced, and reading them I couldn't help thinking what marvellous films they would make. Would you say that cinema is a big influence on your work, and if so which films have inspired you the most?
It's funny, people always say that my books read like movies, but I'm not a very visual person, and I never envision scenes so much as imagine characters. That said, I love all kinds of movies. To name a few: The Deer Hunter, The Changeling, The Departed, The Jerk, Igby Goes Down, City of Lost Children, Night of the Living Dead, Barfly, Brazil, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, everything Hitchcock, The Elephant Man, A Streetcar Named Desire, and on and on. The classic horror movies, but not slashers, or anything in which women wearing bikinis are impaled with sharp objects ... unless it's funny.
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Can you tell us a bit about your future projects?
I'm working on my third novel, Audrey's Door, about a woman living in New York who gets cold feet, and leaves her fiancée. She moves into a haunted apartment building, where her OCD gets the better of her, and in her sleep, she begins to build a door. I've also got about five short stories coming out over the next year, which are listed on my website.
Thanks for the interview! It's been a delight!
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SOME FACTS ABOUT SARAH LANGAN
Sarah Langan was born on 20 October 1974. She grew up on Long Island, went to college in Maine, where her two novels are set, and is currently resident in Brooklyn, New York x She has a MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where one of her instructors was Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham x Since 2005 she has been studying environmental health and toxicology at New York University x Sarah claims, “I'm allergic to animals, but still love them, particularly rabbits.” A fair number of rabbits are slaughtered in Virus x One of the people mentioned in the Acknowledgements at the front of The Keeper is Tim Carroll. The Corpus Christi police chief in Virus is called Tim Carroll x To promote The Missing (US title of Virus) Sarah's publishers held a contest, inviting readers to submit a 30 second trailer for the book. The results can be viewed at www.sarahlangan.com x ‘Fenstad's End', a short story whose main character inspired Virus, is slated to appear in a future issue of Cemetery Dance, who will also be publishing The Lost as a signed, limited edition chapbook.
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