The best-written horror novel of the year
Read the opening pages from our pick below ^ Plus Part 19 of The Demon Inside David Lynch
Photo by Pierry Oliveira
In today’s issue
—’The reason Toby’s pretty sure it was a transplant who came up with the game is that, if you’d lived through that night, then the whole Lake Witch thing isn’t just a fun costume. But it is, too, which is what the transplants, who had no parents dead in those waters, figured out’: the opening pages of the best-written book on the shortlist for this year’s Bram Stoker Award for best horror novel, the winner of which will be announced tomorrow. We’ll soon publish a masterclass on prose style by its author, and we have masterclasses coming up by many more of the world’s greatest writers.
On Tuesday we picked John Langan’s The Fisherman as the best-written previous winner of the award, part of our project to find the most stylishly novel of the century in any genre.
—‘In their usual bleary-eyed half-baked drowsy way, that’s what they vaguely reckon might see them through life’s trials, the wisdom and life-tools on offer from directors, choreographers, violinists, and conceptual artists who went straight from relatively cushy upbringings to arts careers and have seldom if ever worked outside the field’: Part 19 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have already shown this series.
You can also browse our author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
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THE BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR BEST HORROR NOVEL
This year’s shortlist:
Tananarive Due The Reformatory (Gallery/Saga Press/Titan)
Grady Hendrix How to Sell a Haunted House (Berkley/Titan)
Stephen Graham Jones Don’t Fear the Reaper (Gallery/Saga Press/Titan)
Victor LaValle Lone Women (One World)
Chuck Tingle Camp Damascus (Tor Nightfire/MacMillan/Titan)
Chuck Wendig Black River Orchard (Del Rey/Penguin Random House)
The best-written of these is
MOTEL HELL
It’s not really cool to play Lake Witch anymore, but that doesn’t mean Toby doesn’t remember how to play.
It started the year after the killings, when he was a sophomore, and it wasn’t a lifer who came up with it, he’s pretty sure, but one of the transplants—in the halls of Henderson High, those are the two main divisions, the question you always start with: “So… you from here, or you’d just get here?” Did you grow up here, or did you move here just to graduate from Henderson High and cash in on that sweet sweet free college?
If it turns out you’re from Proofrock, then either you were almost killed in the water watching Jaws, or you knew somebody who was. Your dad, say, in Toby’s case. And if you’re the one asking that question? Then you’re a transplant, obviously.
The reason Toby’s pretty sure it was a transplant who came up with the game is that, if you’d lived through that night, then the whole Lake Witch thing isn’t just a fun costume.
But it is, too, which is what the transplants, who had no parents dead in those waters, figured out.
The game’s simple. Little Galatea Pangborne—the freshman who writes like she’s in college—even won an award for her paper on the Lake Witch game, which the new history teacher submitted to some national competition. Good for her. Except part of the celebration was her reading it at assembly. Not just some of it, but all of it.
Her thesis was that this Lake Witch game that had sprung up “more or less on its own” was inevitable, really: teenagers are going to engage in courting rituals, that’s hardwired in, is “biology expressing itself through social interaction”—this is how she talks. What makes Proofrock unique, though, is that those same teenagers are also dealing with the grief and trauma of the Independence Day Massacre. So, Galatea said into the mic in her flat academic voice, it’s completely natural that these teens’ courting rituals and their trauma recovery process became “intertwined.” Probably because if life’s the Wheel of Fortune, then she can afford all the letters she wants.
What she said did make sense, though, Toby has to admit.
The game is all about getting some, if you’re willing to put in the legwork. And, as Galatea said to assembly, the elegance is the game’s simplicity: if you’re into someone, then you do a two-handed knock on their front door or the side window of their car or wherever you’ve decided this starts. You have to really machine-gun knock, so you can be sure they get the message, and will definitely be the one to open that door. Also, knocking like that means you’re standing there longer than you really want, so you might be about to get caught already.
But, no, you’re already running.
And?
Under your black robe, you’re either naked or down to next to nothing, as the big important part of the game is you leave your clothes piled in front of the door. Galatea called this the “lure and the promise.” Toby just calls it “pretty damn interesting.”
Which is to say, just moments ago he got up from the ratty, sweated-up queen bed at the Trail’s End Motel at the top end of Main Street, his index finger across his lips to Gwen, and pulled the dull red door in to find a pair of neatly folded yoga pants and, beside them, one of those pricey-thin t-shirts that probably go for ninety bucks down the mountain.
He looked out into the parking lot but it was all just swirling snow and the dull shapes of his Camry and Gwen’s mom’s truck. Idaho in December, surprise. One in the afternoon and it’s already a blizzard.
“Who is it?” Gwen creaked from the bed, holding the sheets up to her throat just like women on television shows do. Toby’s always wondered about that.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire.
Unyoung Nathan Barleys
The kind of men who applaud the rampant cheesiness, ultimate kookiness, the retcon, and the giggly climax to the The Return’s BOB storyline, and plenty such cultists exist—César called the latter his favourite moment in screen history because it’s so punk—these men have been numbed and beguiled by their Master so far out into the wilfully perverse periphery that they’ve lost their moorings.
Talking about the original Twin Peaks was sometimes a good way to click with new people you met socially, but the same is unlikely to be true of chat about the comic value of The Return’s worst transgressions. Anyone who doesn’t have a problem with these, let alone praises them, is a lost cause and best avoided until they come to their senses. Picture timeworn Nathan Barleys in low-bummed, cropped drainpipes, and greying manbuns as these boulevardiers snort with 4channish laughter and joyfully squeal along to the banal ‘Charmaine’ and the dozens of repetitions of ‘Hello Johnny. How are you today?’ while he experiences suffering beyond most people’s imaginings. These boulevardiers don’t just have a niche sensibility. They are at best victims of cult propaganda and at worst repugnant.
Despite his curiously young looks, enhanced by his pageboy haircut, Les has pretty much seen it all—Kirkdale childhood with violence from both parents, months of the DTs, struggles with overeating, gambling, hookers and porn, hospitalised several times for acid overdoses and nervous breakdowns, jailed several times for fraud and sudden grappling, years in the Army in Derry, Amarah and Basra, plus brothers, sisters, wives and children who haven’t spoken to him for decades, and dozens of friends’ suicides and relapse deaths throughout the eighteen years he was sober and nonwrestling until the abomination came along.
He’s also one of the laziest people I’ve known, and probably the soundest, the nearest I’ve come to a hero I actually know. And I have seldom met anybody so unwilling to make even the slightest attempt to fake interest in worldly matters like work or romantic intrigues, gridlock and call centres, that have other people in tizzies.
Nonetheless, this chilled-going-on-lackadaisical Grapplers Anonymous sponsor despised The Return more than I ever did (he has arthritis as well, which the show’s many toe-curlers and ankle-curlers weren’t helping). Not once did he hit me with the abuse Ella later did about my obsession with it, because in contrast to Ella at that time he knew not to underestimate the horror we were facing. Even the normally placid Stanley was traumatised by the show, often barking his big head off when the Demonic Twin, or Mr Lynch as we believed, appeared onscreen as Gordon Cole.
Les will sponsor anybody no matter their personality or background, and encouraged me to stick by Trinna despite her politics and Satan-worship. But even Les’s patience can run out with bohemian blokes in recovery, who have among the highest rates of relapse of any social group.
One reason for this is they believe, many of them, that the best preparation for life’s toughest tests is the arts. Novels, films, TV shows, gigs, recitals, albums, and installations are where they believe the world’s really helpful wisdom lies. In their usual bleary-eyed half-baked drowsy way, that’s what they vaguely reckon might see them through life’s trials, the wisdom and life-tools on offer from directors, choreographers, violinists, and conceptual artists who went straight from relatively cushy upbringings to arts careers and have seldom if ever worked outside the field.
A curious feature of most films, TV dramas, and many novels is that they revolve around tough moral quandaries, despite how irrelevant these are, largely speaking, to their audience. The people I know, addicts or not, have a genuinely crucial moral quandary to weigh up a couple of times a decade tops. Their primary problem has not been quandaries, having to choose between similarly compelling courses of action, but instead two opposite forms of certainty: the full-steam-ahead blind lunacy of denial, as in a supervisor who complains about climate-change denial but denies there’s anything wrong with spitting near his colleagues’ faces, or as in a boulevardier hooked on meth; or the dismal stuckness when you know fine well the right course of action but just can’t take it, as in a boulevardier desperate to stop doing meth, or as in most people faced with climate breakdown. Yet you see works with these two issues far less often in the mainstream arts than those with protagonists torn between e.g. saving their marriage and saving the world, which are as relevant to the people watching or reading as quandaries about whether or not disabled men’s degradation is amusing.
Presumably one reason these works lack such issues is that they’re usually made by multimillionaires with support networks that help them avoid wrecking their lives and careers in the insanity of denial or pathological sloth. Which is nice for them, obviously, but it hardly equips them as guides to living for the rest of us.
‘Pain is concentrated information,’ as Les puts it, ‘and hardship can breed wisdom, and is among the very few things which can do this, meaning folk that have seldom struggled often aren’t much help to them that have.’ (Obviously Les is generalising here. As we’ll soon see, a multimillionaire long-term hermit globally fêted and squiring the likes of Isabella Rossellini since his thirties can offer relevant, hardearned wisdom and encouragement to folk dithering over sex with someone incapable of consent).
The narrative arts aren’t a lot of use, then, for the worst problems facing boulevardiers, mondains, twinks, and nor are even the best concertos or pop music, to say nothing of sculpture and installations. You yourself know all this stuff, of course, but plenty of boulevardiers don’t.
Like everyone when they first go to recovery meetings, they have a God they worship and obey, but that God is their own thoughts, the very addict’s thinking that brought them so low they have to attend these meetings alongside the grossly unhip. But most of these mondains have defined themselves at some point as unshiftable secularists, i.e. the one and only Almighty God they’ll ever allow themselves is whatever incandesces in their own mind, and are therefore more hesitant than many other recovery types about finding a higher power healthier than their addict’s thoughts, and so they often relapse again and again, each time justified by yet more addict’s thoughts. It was because their wife left them, because their wife returned, because their football team lost, because they won, because of Covid-19, because a vaccine was successful, because Ukraine was invaded, because of Gaza, Trump, The Uninhabitable Earth, because the recycling bank’s too far away, because a Unionist’s dandruff dropped into their coffee. That last one’s mine, I’m afraid. Wrestling relapse, early October 2014.
‘Some bohemians,’ Les would say, ‘will actually turn up at their first-ever meeting after years of pandemonium and try to tell us how we should run our groups and lives. A good number of them are trustfunders too, meaning that following relapses they often get bailed out by their loaded parents. Meaning they’re never able to hit a rock bottom so scary it scares them into the humility needed to see that their very best thinking’s brought them to this low point of their lives. To see that they cannot solve this problem using the head which not only caused the problem but is the fucking problem.’
Meaning they struggle to remain sober long enough to become useful to others—the very thing that might overcome their egomania and therefore sort their head out—such as that fellow mondain who’s just swaggered into his first meeting sneering to hide the fact he’s utterly bewildered about drink or drugs or wrestling and recovery, e.g. believing its founder being a proctologist augurs AA poking around your bottom.
One of many ways you see life’s usual rules turned upside-down in recovery is attractive newcomers hitting on less attractive but long-term-sober members who then spurn them as potential serenity-wreckers and relapse-catalysers due to their looks, so that knockouts who seek partners in recovery who’ll understand their addiction can sometimes be left at the mercy of those who value people for their looks alone, and that frequently includes the mondains.
The problem with so-called 13th Stepping, more experienced and predominantly male addicts who hit on vulnerable newcomers and thereby jeopardise their recovery, which in GA/AA is viewed as seriously as rape, is particularly acute in groups dominated by mondains because many of them believe their tastes in documentaries and manga make them special and that suggestions like Don’t be a life-wrecking predator with newcomers therefore never apply to them. And also to be fair because those who attend hip meetings tend to be more attractive than the GA/AA average. If you walk into an unfamiliar meeting and find you’re surrounded by people with perfect teeth and adroitly strategised hair, you gird yourself for relapse stories, whines about jobs or partners or parents, whines about others’ shares, and wisecracks to impress the women, including those you make yourself, all of which seldom occurs if the people there look like the Uruk-hai.
Eventually the relapse rates at groups dominated by mondains, among newcomers who’ve been 13th Stepped, among the mondains themselves, and among anyone else infected by the refusal to change mindset or behaviour, get so bad that other groups have to knock some sense into these poor throbbers with oblique takes on smoothies and the Moog to stop them destroying the lives of newbies.
When told their God is their own thoughts the standard mondain response is to squint, blink, give a bun-adjacent insane-thoughts-containing cranial area a Stan Laurel scratch and ask, ‘Well, what else is there?’
To which Les’s response is to grab his dog-lead, propose a walk round some local park, and say, ‘Let’s find out.’
Though it may take the blinkers-binning ordeal of enduring our planet’s worst artwork to come close to finding any kind of answer.