Something Worse--
As In Very, Very Good
Sarah Langan’s new novel, Audrey’s Door, begins today, October 22, one hundred and forty eight years ago. It’s the birth of New York City as more than a “way station between the wealthy South and Boston’s aristocracy.” In The New York Herald story that opens this novel, Langan aims for the heart of the American dream—something truly new world, something free of old hierarchies and feudalism—and she finds herself with that something worse than a lie that stands as our reality. The decadence that threatens to consume the protagonists of this novel, as it has consumed generation after generation of New York’s most privileged and those who suffer their wrath (and neglect), threatens the ability of everyone here to even dare to dream. On some level, I think that’s what this and every other ghost story is about—the foolishness of hope, yes, but also its necessity.
Langan’s protagonist, Audrey Lucas, has almost no reason to believe she can persevere against the weight of time and history. Sure, she’s a brilliant architect, who recognizes the genius of the maddening apartment building she’s managed to rent for almost nothing. But she’s also obsessive compulsive, and she’s just broken up with a really decent guy, and her mother’s madness threatens to overtake her any hour of any given day. Though ghost stories are, in the end, all about such personal haunts, Langan has done a beautiful job delivering a great big, unique haunted house, a 110th street apartment building called the Breviary, that gives these ghosts room to ramble.
Many things make Langan distinct from any other writer in the horror genre (and I would argue in any genre). Though she writes the wildest kinds of surrealism--and her modernism jumps cliffs that would make Stephen King nervous--she earns it with a remarkable attention to the details of people's lives and exquisite, precise writing. Read the first page or two at the store for a sample of that. Even in the alternative voice of the Herald story, the aside regarding "one of Hearst's Negroes" who "took a bullet to the knee" says volumes about the blind prejudice and recklessness that mark this tainted ground.
When she brightens a mean childhood memory with the line, “On an empty stomach, Ball Park Cheese Dogs make the best meal in the world,” she says way more that ties me to this novel than I can adequately convey. In the same sense, in a particularly horrific revelation, she also finds what's funny about the blind impulses that drive the most malevolent of these characters forward: “In killing the superintendent, they’d murdered the only person willing to take out the trash.”
The opening of this book introduces us to that superintendent, a kind-hearted character named Edgardo who just can’t seem to catch a break in his halting conversation with his new prospective tenant. This is one of those beautifully wrought passages, where nothing should work, but it all does. Audrey Lucas is an almost unlikably round protagonist from the beginning—thinking him alternately clueless and lecherous and cruel, but finally realizing that he’s probably a decent guy. That last impulse is the closest to right. As we all do in life, Lucas struggles with her perspective throughout the novel.
Langan knows what a ghost story is about—isolation and promises doomed by the past—but she also knows what makes such stories haunt deep in the heart. For a ghost story to reach that place, it has to be unflinchingly true in terms of the lives we lead every day.
Langan creates real people who interact in real ways—and Audrey’s boyfriend Saraub; her miserable boss, Jill; and her sad neighbor, Jayne, all ring true. There’s plenty of horror here—both in the real tragedies of these peoples’ lives and in some of the things that happen to them. They certainly all have to face real horror by the time "Audrey’s door" begins to open.
Horror fiction has the potential to do something more—something King can do, as can Joe Hill, and as does Sarah Langan time and again. Horror fiction helps us face places extraordinarily uncomfortable, some part of the psyche more disturbing than the fear of pain or death. Audrey’s Door asks us to contemplate the loss of all sense of order and justice and reason, and to compound that with the threat of the loss of individual integrity. What if the only things that gave life meaning became the most dangerous threat to that meaning? What if the things that make Audrey Lucas special threaten to bring her world, and the worlds of those she loves, to an end?
I can’t say much more without giving away a beautiful, rich and complex story. I will say the book's scary, in that shadows crawling way I most love. I also have to say that Sarah Langan has earned my trust. That’s why I’ll read everything she writes and no doubt blog about it. Like any good horror writer, she does terrible things in her writing, but she also makes sure they're all worthwhile. She cares about the people in her stories, and she cares about the reader. That compassion makes her more than a fine writer; it makes her important.
