Pursued by a Bear: Horror and Speculative Fiction That Would Surprisingly Make Great Stage Plays - Pt.1
Thanks to several members of my family who worked in various theaters around the world scooping the contingencies of free tickets for family and friends, I have been lucky enough to have free access to watch as many theater plays as I want, whenever I happened to live or stay in the same city with them. As it is with everything that you do often from an early age on, watching lots of stage plays has left its mark on me - not only am I hopelessly enchanted by the performative side - stage, backstage, costumes, props, atmosphere -, I am also completely fascinated, on a pure textual, dramaturgical level, by the immediacy, as Oscar Wilde put it, this art form conveys. A text that needs to transmit whole universes in an hour or two, a text relying on the spoken word and gestural implications, without narration, needs to compulsorily rely on a stripped, archetypical presentation and a very precise, concentrated sense of aim. There is something fascinating to that on an almost primordial level.*
Although I don't visit the theater as much as I would like to anymore, even under normal circumstances, I often find myself ponder on the drama-bility of the books I read - basically thinking about how a story would look on stage. I have recently come across quite a few of those with a high dramability, maybe because many books are written in the hopes of being filmed? I don't know. But I will make this an open series and add parts to it since I'm sure there will be many more books to come that I would love to see performed on stage. And who knows, some day maybe I will... Exit, -**
*I am very aware that there are monumental exceptions to this; Castorf productions of six plus hours that you literally need to visit with a picnic basket in order not to starve, plays meant to be read and not staged, le théâtre de l'absurde whose whole point is pointlessnes etc. But I hope you get the sense of what I mean.
**Take note, my opinions and suggestions are highly amateur and I have no professional claim whatsoever!
The Return by Rachel Harrison
Honestly, the reviews for Rachel Harrison's debut weren't that good and I let myself get biased because of that... because otherwise I would have read this super entertaining book that had me turning pages past my bedtime much, much earlier. Although... I see why some people rated it low, The Return certainly isn't perfect, but, pictured from the right angle, it can be a nice story about friendship that can subtly amuse you while keeping you under suspense.
Dramatis Personae:
Elise, lead girl, her life sucks: is out of a blotched relationship to a married man, has a bad job in a city she doesn't like, not much money.
Julie, Lise's best friend, went missing for two years during a hiking trip, bit of an attention seeker, married to Tristan.
Molly, "the funny one", misses one leg beneath the knee, child of immigrants.
Mae, elegant, upper crust from an incredibly wealthy family, center of attention because is an albino of Asian origin.
Setting: A remote, luxurious hotel with themed rooms.
Scene: Four friends who live scattered around the US meet for a weekend getaway to celebrate the reemerging of their friend Julie, who has been missing for the past two years, but has returned without any memory or explanation as to where she has been.
A deep, uncomfortable awkwardness so unnerving it borders on funny is what best characterizes the overall atmosphere of The Return. The four friends arrive and settle in this incredibly eerie hotel, a place where each one of them feels uneasy or even threatened. Apart from the oldness and creepiness of the overall building, the use of intense individual colors in each room, like in the magenta pink that is nicely depicted on the cover art, is an interesting device that Harrison uses to magnify the discomfort. Another interesting device abundantly used in The Return to push the plot ahead is asides. I'm not talking about ordinary monologues or dialogues, I'm talking about shameless gossiping every character does with every other character when one of them, but especially Julie is not present. Gossip on Julie and what happened to her, or the wonder, curiosity and speculations of the remaining three friends about what happened to her is how this book precedes and there is a clear pattern to this precession: a meeting takes place, let's say, the friends meet for dinner, or a drink at the bar, Julie excuses herself to use the bathroom or call her husband or just get a rest. Finding themselves in a situation of temporally limited but highly enticing intimacy in their threesomness, Lise, Mae and Molly seize the chance for a short but intense tittle-tattle. This skindering can take place on many different levels too - not always are all three characters involved, Molly and Lise retreating to a corner to have an extensive aside, even secretly dm'ing while in the company of other and finally Molly and Mae are talking among themselves too, especially about Lise's past relationship to a married man. But we readers find out about that only cursorily.
To be fair to these colorful and chatty characters, it is worth noting that Julie did return looking not quite "normal". For the sake of non-spoilery I will not detail her appearance, but she is clearly mutating into something. This drives the conversations of the other three, or their visibly difficult attempts to not talk about her disgusting appearance, progressively more and more absurd and I found myself chuckling more than once at the grotesqueness of certain situations.
Don't be fooled though; despite all the comical situations, The Return is indeed a horror book. A horror book that, in my opinion, reflects a fresh and brilliant approach to storytelling, worthy of praise. I still have an only, very little, critique point/wish; I would have supported it heartily if Harrison had highlighted, emphasized her unique approach even further and had left most running text out, conveying their content through more dialogues and even more shameless gossip. Surely something that can be done while converting the book into a screenplay.
Where, Otessa Moshfegh, where have you been all my life? I am totally awestruck with Moshfegh's work that I discovered as late as this year only having read My Year of Rest and Relaxation during the first lockdown and instantly becoming as addicted to that book as the protagonist is addicted to her drugs and sleeping pills, with the help of which she intends to sleep the most part of a whole year to cure her depressions(!). Back then I thought I could learn a lot from a protagonist as self focused and determined to push through such a crazy plan, especially in a time where self focused isolation was what we needed. Death in Her Hands has a narrator equally self-reliant, but who is considerably lonelier due to her age and living conditions and arguably, equally crazy, if not more. These aren't the only parallels though, as far as I understand most of Moshfegh's work holds certain common features: profound psychological analyses of very fleshed out, very flawed and lonely female characters, extremely well-crafted language and finally sarcasm, black humor creeping through even the most tragic circumstances. Despite these blatant similarities and despite my admiration for My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands has touched me on a whole different level.
Death in Her Hands revolves around an aged widow, Vesta, who moves to a remote cabin in the woods after the death of her husband with her dog Charlie, and whose quiet life consists of "walk, breakfast, garden, lunch, boat, hammock, wine, puzzle, bath, dinner, read, bed". Literally. That's her to-do-list. Charlie is the only distraction in her very lonely life until, during one of her walks, she finds a note saying "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." From this point on Vesta's life first gains pace and color before quickly turning into a bewildered nightmare.
There is a game you can best play sitting in a restaurant or café, waiting for your order - let's just pretend you forgot to take a book with you or have no desire to eyeball your cell phone. You check out people around you and try to guess what their lives might be like, making up little stories about them - the more absurd and supernatural, the better. Like, that gentleman in the dark brown overcoat is in fact an alien spy from the planet Skrov 216 and the chewing motion he does is actually a form of communication - he's fighting with his partner at home who threatens to leave him because he's never there. That game, taken to the next level and driven to the point of insanity, is Death in Her Hand. After finding the note, Vesta's whole world revolves around working out who Magda was, what has happened to her and who her murderers are. Passing a certain tipping point, she gets so carried away by her insights that the border between reality and invention start to blur in a very intense way, leaving the reader seriously wondering if the game Vesta was playing, was in fact a game at all. This story, tangled up in a very tragic downward spiral, grows gradually crazier, more intimate, demented, uncomfortable, showing us what a class A unreliable narrator is.
My throat clenched, and I choked and coughed as I put on my coat and got my purse and keys and shut the cabin door. I locked it. I didn’t want anyone coming in, burying severed hands in my couch, or worse—burying severed hands in my couch, and then removing them, so that I’d never know. But I’d want to know if someone came and tried to bury hands. I’d never know, unless I left the door open.
There are so many inner thoughts, so many tiny ponderings, interesting reflections and deliberations in Death in Her Hands, that I think as a play it would best develop its effect in a long monologue, broken by scenes from Magda's imagined fate. Since a two hour show of one big monologue, combined with the severity of the subject matter, would be a too drastic kind of entertainment, it would be best to let it run parallel to scenes of a character as refreshingly snappy and direct as Magda. The minimalist and scarce setup of the acting cast can be mirrored in the actual setup, not necessitating more than a few props - a table, a window overlooking a forest and lake etc. for the Vesta and in fact nest to no requisities at all for the remaining scenes.
As for the tragic end that awaits Vesta, it might indeed be represented by a bear; since the true nature of the beast attacking her remains unclear, though imaginable. This would not only give Death in Her Hands a worthily absurd ending, but also the chance to pay tribute to old Bill's most famous stage directions. And close the cycle by alluding to the title of this first writing about novels, that would make great theater plays.
I hope you enjoyed this new format, I tried not to neglect the review parts so you can still decide if you might enjoy reading the books mentioned. Next time I'll throw in some movies too!
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