Midnight PicnicBy Nick AntoscaWord Riot Press |
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Reviewed by John Madera
Sometimes you just want to be scared to death. So you might freak yourself out with the occasional walk in some dark abandoned lot, in some woods silvered by a reluctant moon, or with a rickety roller coaster ride toward an uncertain end. Myself, I usually like to take a safer route, so a Japanese or Swedish horror film will usually do the trick, but there’s something about a scary book that especially chills the spine, that doubly disrupts any kind of equanimity. And just imagine: it all happens with the light on.
Read for this purpose, Nick Antosca’s Midnight Picnic certainly delivers. Not only is it a riveting story intertwined with malaise, anxiety, and terror, it’s also a layered narrative probing of the consciousness of at least three deeply troubled characters: Bram, Adam Dovey, and Jacob Bunny. And Antosca’s sparklingly precise prose runs in perfect counterpoint with each surprising narrative turn.
Bram, the novel’s hero, bears the burden of his namesake well. With his “hulking, hairy, dough-pale body, his mountain-man hair,” Bram lumbers along like some kind of “Appalachian monster.” We meet him backing up his car into an unfortunate dog named Baby. He loses the dog somehow after trying to help it. Then his car refuses to start. After a short time, he has a sad conversation with a suicidal ex-lover who lives down the hall. By morning’s end, a retarded man hands a murdered child’s bones to him. Bram is truly born under a bad sign, and it only gets worse from there.
Antosca’s prose style is the perfect vehicle for this image-drenched story, a story whose imaginative leaps could easily slip into ambiguity if not for Antosca’s stripping it of hyperbole, histrionics, and gratuitous violence. Every sentence here is honed, whittled down, appropriately enough, to the bone. Parataxis prevails, as do sentence fragments. You get the sense that Antosca (as George Orwell once wrote) lets “the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around,” leading him to such turns of phrase as a peeled orange’s “tang muscling into the air,” or the gothic woods turning “a cadaverous white-grey, like cauliflower or brains.”
One of the novel’s most luminous passages comes after Adam, the ghost of a dead child, grabs Bram’s arm:
Something hits him, a wave… His mouth falls open. He can see something behind the world. It’s like two channels playing on the same station. There is a thing happening under the almost full moon; the moon is fractured by skinny naked tree branches; there is a sweet, stinging taste of blackberries; there is comfort, there is reassurance, a wistful voice from just above his head and a little to the side; someone is holding his hand; there is moonlight, like smeared pearls, on a body of water.
Adam’s touch enables Bram to be in “both places,” with the living and the dead. It is an afterworld not unlike the one in Etgar Keret’s short story “Kneller’s Happy Campers," except that instead of being a place where suicides are condemned to live without ever being able to smile or laugh, this is a kind of limbo where even the living, “moored to nothing,” can “drift into and out of…the long shadow of the afterlife,” where everything “is saturated with traumatic memory,” where one’s “experiences have been jarred loose from time,” where daylight and twilight seem “laid upon each other like sheets of transparent paper,” and where the sky contains “neither stars nor moon.”
Ironically, it’s from one of the novel’s most despicable characters that we learn what is perhaps Midnight Picnic’s central premise: “Your life…is what you love and what you fear.” Jacob Bunny, Adam’s murderer, loved “his father and alcohol.” And he suffers from innumerable fears. Not being able to readjust to life outside of prison, days crept by “like beetles, slow and beyond morality,” days from which there is no escape, only “shame and nightmares…The horror of other people, having to function among them when you are broken and unfixable.” And each of Midnight Picnic’s main characters has his own matched set of love and fear: Bram is equally driven by both his love for his father and his fear of intimacy, of being abandoned, of being uncared for, while Adam is driven by revenge, really an obsessive kind of love for it that compels him to continually feed it, fan its flame while also fearing that the score will never be properly settled.
Midnight Picnic is equal parts M. Night Shyamalan and Stephen King, or rather, it is these popular purveyors of horror and suspense distilled, since it disposes of all of their work’s triteness, emotional pandering, and shoddiness while maintaining all of their darkness, violence, and terror. Not to be glib, but you might think of Antosca’s novel as a blend of Brian Evenson and Peter Straub’s work, once you’ve condensed their layered prose down to their essences. As you explore West Virginia’s backwater in this peripatetic page-turner, follow a young obsessive and a dead boy’s ghost, and enter the mind of an alcoholic and murderer, you will find yourself sufficiently frightened. Just remember to keep the light on.