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BLACK HORSE and Other Strange Stories – by Jason A. Wyckoff

REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE.

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The Mauve Blot

“Every hundred yards one or two or more would appear in the outer cone of the car’s headlights, silvered silhouettes turning their heads away from the glare.”

This is a compelling page-turner and, in contrast to the previous story, consuming time with linear and family-domestic and ostensibly unabsurd directness, as we follow a woman (possibly the other half of that earlier “honey-do” marital relationship with her (newly estranged) husband addictively gambling for real) – while we gradually (authorially very gradual and skilful) learn that she is not necessarily the injured party (as we cumulatively see her through the ‘eyes’ of others: human, spectral or neither): fled here with her two kids to the inherited Lake House in a completely new area to which to acclimatise, as she begins to sneak a renewed sporadic relationship with cigarettes (an area where she can resume her work as an estate agent)… And, really, this ‘mauve blot’ of which I shall tell you nothing because it seems to demand that I tell you nothing about it resides, for me, where the ‘dying fall’ I perceived earlier becomes poetically and hauntingly wrought as essentially fiction-proof (if I may coin a tentative phrase). It makes sense of the reader rather than the other way about: the only way I can explain it. And if I could explain it better to you, I may then be guilty of spoilers. Meanwhile, through it all, the linear unabsurdness prevails, against all the odds, possibly because the woman’s children are so well-characterised as real human beings, and the suspense builds around an incident with the son that made me cringe with referred physical pain. This story’s ‘mauve blot’, I tentatively sense, is the tenuous hub of this book, from which much else (literally) radiates … “through the dome of deepening blue“? (5 Mar 12 – four and half hours later)

Black Horse

“Peter mimicked something he’d seen on a cop show – he held the flashlight in his left hand with the handle pointing back towards his body from between thumb and forefinger and the heel of his palm tight against the cone, while across his wrist he rested the rifle’s stock. He swivelled slowly, casting the meagre pool of light out into the yard,…”

[On a personal note, one of the stock books every child was given to read in the UK in the 1950s was ‘Black Beauty’ by Anna Sewell (about a horse and her only published work: as written during the 1870s) – and I did read it, with some enjoyment I vaguely recall; and from my early teenage years till the present day I’ve banked with Lloyds Bank (latterly Lloyds TSB) whose logo or symbol is ‘Black Horse’; how relevant these things are perhaps only time will tell.] — This story is of Peter – single and self-effacing – who inherits Blackie as an enforced part of a farm following his uncle’s death – but with innuendos of things are not quite what they seem. The existence of such a horse tempting his cousins’ children to want to ride it and Peter’s teenage help-hand to show it off in front of his girl-friend as a sort of potential ‘motorbike’ ride… I don’t wish to imply that the ‘dying fall’ theme I’ve traced so far should now be taken literally, but really one can imagine that being the case. Indeed, the straightforward elements of this story do shade off into things akin to TS Eliot’s ‘objective correlatives’ imbued  with things akin to Aickman’s disarming strangenesses: a story that is a truly haunting experience of things-animate and things-inanimate that stickily cling to the story’s enthralling real events when harvested as meaning-burls or burrs: before becoming evanescent but still durable……. Not a children’s nostalgic adventure story but there are children in it: a definition of life?  If so, makes me want to cry. “…Peter cast his pastoral silence into the depths of the horse’s opal stare.” (5 Mar 12 – another 4 hours later)

I don’t think I got across yesterday how poignant are the characters of both Peter and Blackie, sympathetic…as well as all those other things that continue to reverberate today.

Someone I know has reminded me today of this quote from TS Eliot:
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
   So how should I presume? (6 Mar 12 – 11.00 am gmt)

Raise  Up the Serpent

This is essentially a workmanlike bloody tale of Satanism: blending features of the child in ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘Lord of the Flies’. Social workers are investigating the child refugees from recent police-condoned Christian vigilante violence against a Satanic cult that seems concerned with the equivocations of ambivalent Biblical texts regarding worship of the snake. I sense undercurrents of ‘who or what possesses whom or what?’ in such a symbiosis which may shed light on the moral tussle I mentioned in accordance with ‘The Walk Home’ and ‘Intermediary’. Despite that, so far I am left rather cold by this story. (6 Mar 12 – five hours later)

The Trucker’s Story

“I took a ten foot bronze crucifix across two time zones once.”

…which seems  obliquely connected with the previous story, but I’m not sure why!  Meanwhile, ‘The Trucker’s Story’ as a whole is a satisfyingly quirky fable within a fable, with an end moral that is stunningly resonant with life, the universe, everything – but would be a spoiler to divulge here.  The Trucker’s tall tale is wonderful, strangely credible as advertised by its prelude: the huge skeletons from a museum that they need to transport: particularly that of the sloth.  I just watched a reality documentary on TV where someone said “we must all pull together”. That could be another – unofficial – moral for this story.  Something to do with puppets? — [Brainstorming-: There are objects that recur similarly in Wyckoff fiction, I’m learning to recognise, ornaments (like trinkets, burrs, harnesses, a cone with a ball on that erstwhile island etc etc) that shimmer with only tantalising meaninglessness on the surface but deep somewhere within me continue to resonate maddeningly. Not an Aickman ‘disarming strangeness’. Not a TS Eliot ‘objective correlative’. But a Wyckoff ‘dying fall’: or a harvest festival from an as yet unknown, unnamed religion, but deeply stringed, harnessed, snaked, relaxingly aglow with Ellyn’s “wash of light”, a gift-wrapped sculpture, ethereally mauve vestments: threaded in and out of the religious texture disguised as fiction…] (6 Mar 12 – another six hours later)

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Just dawned on me that the ‘tugged eye-paths’ I identified in ‘Panorama’ are significant to the Trucker’s Story… (7 Mar 12 – 6.35 am gmt)

THIS REAL-TIME REVIEW IS NOW CONTINED HERE

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