Nocturnes', a short story and novella anthology by British author John Connolly, is a skillfully written collection of gory supernatural tales, elegantly paced and with a tone that invokes dark nights and stories told low to the light of a campfire. Connolly's work truly does epitomize the horror genre. Underneath the pulpy exterior of the stories, though, lie clues to Connolly's psyche as seen through the subject matter he covers, time and again. By writing material to thrill and scare other people, John Connolly reveals his own personal fears and aversions.
John Connolly writes extensively on his fear of women. In 'The Underbury Witches', a pair of London detectives investigate a mysterious death in a sleepy English town. It is revealed that the murder was committed by a revived coven of witches and the vengeful ghost of a convicted witch. The specter's form is repeatedly described as "womanly", with "wide hips and a swell of breasts": all hallmarks of femininity turned sinister. A telling quote from the text is found in the brief history of the European witch trials; "Kramer and Sprenger pinpointed the seed of witchcraft in the very nature of the female species. Women were spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally weak, and motivated primarily by carnal lust. These fundamental flaws found their most potent expression in witchery." This gives insight into where Connolly's fear of women stems from: lust. Indeed, the women comprising the coven are beautiful, comfortable with their sexualities, and ultimately murderous. This isn't an isolated idea, either. In 'Deep, Dark Green', an adolescent boy is taken for a sexual escapade near a lake by his older, infinitely more mature girlfriend, and she ends up getting murdered by a beast living at the bottom of the lake that preys upon lust. A woman's sexual appetites literally get her killed. He mentions directly in this text a fear of women's carnal urges. “Oh, such promises we make in the heat of our passion, when the breath catches in the throat and the belly trembles. Lured by the warmth of another - the scent of her, the strength of him - our tongues betray us and the words come tumbling from our mouths. The act becomes indistinguishable from the intent, and the truth is confused with lies, even to ourselves." The list goes on. In 'Miss Froom, Vampire', a hapless young man is preyed upon an older, supernaturally attractive vampire. She plays off of his good-natured disposition and attraction to her, and uses them as means to trick him into letting her suck him dry. In all of these stories, men are portrayed as victims and heros in turn, and women as wicked temptresses and manipulative sexpots.
Another prevalent theme in Connolly's writing is abduction of children. Scarcely a story passes in this anthology that doesn't involve the kidnapping and/or murdering of a child. The child is usually female, which ties into the idea that John Connolly values a woman's innocence and abhors their carnal desires. In 'Nocturne', a child dies. In 'The New Daughter', a man's daughter is taken and his son is threatened with the same fate. In 'The Erkling', a monster with pedophilic undertones lures children into the forest and kills them.
All of these stories are told from the perspective of a father who has lost a child or is in the process of losing one, a perspective that Connolly seems to be rather familiar with. It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that Connolly has lost a child in the past, perhaps a daughter, and this is what's manifesting in his stories. In 'The Reflecting Eye', the main villain is a man who's 'appetites' cause him to kidnap and kill children. Again, pedophilic undertones. Again, the detective who serves as the protagonist has lost a daughter in an ambiguous accident. It is human nature to value children; perhaps Connolly is letting some primal, elemental fear manifest itself by writing again and again of children being stolen.
To conclude, in subject matter and in the way he handles those subjects in his anthology 'Nocturnes', we can gather information on the kind of man John Connolly is and the experiences he may have had in lif
No comments:
Post a Comment