A couple of years ago my way to work passed through the so-called "Pissallee" behind the Berlin train station Zoologischer Garten - a terrible, derogatory name for a street in Charlottenburg inhabited by homeless people, the walkway usually packed with tents, makeshift beds, blankets, shopping carts and bags full of stuff to live on scattered all around, so much so that sometimes you didn't really have space to walk. One evening on my way to the train station I saw from the corner of my eye a sleeping bag - nothing unusual in this street - which looked empty to me the way it was thinly spread across the floor. Just as I was passing, it started moving and wriggling around like an earth worm, giving me for a split second the impression the empty sleeping bag is doing this eerie squirmy dance. In that split second I felt such a dread in me, felt my stomach drop and my spine chill with such a force that it threw me off for a moment and I felt the need to first collect myself, to realize and convince myself it's just a person trying to rest under dire conditions, nothing unusual, nothing uncanny.
And ever since that day, if you asked what my biggest fear is, it's not some kind of vampire or zombie or serial killer or insect, but things that aren't supposed to move, moving. Some might see in it the fear of the unknown, or maybe a fear of the abysmally abnormal, the impossible or even the unscientific.
This fear is in me magnified when the movement in question is an object that in its very nature is supposed to imitate an animate object. The movement then becomes some kind of grotesque travesty of itself, a contradiction but at the same time an adherence to its very nature, if that makes sense. Visual art is art as long as it imitates, represents, feigns, symbolizes but for it to actually move would be to cross a certain border between good and bad taste.
As horror very often is about crossing borders and very often deliberately written in bad taste, it is easy to find this trope, visual artworks in horror literature, aplenty - the horror of art, and not the art of horror. From Oscar Wilde's hedonistic, never aging Dorian Gray and his infamous portrait, to M. R. James' creepy depiction of a ghostly kidnapping in Mezzotint, to various representations of golems, statues, handmade dolls coming to life, creepy family portraits watching you with their uncanny eyes - there are many facets in which art can scare with movement. If we include films there's even a richer variety of materials to be found with wonderfully terrifying examples like Sean Byrne's The Devil's Candy in which a tormented painter paints of and with dead children; a scene missing in Stephen King's IT, but was added to Muschietti's film adaptation IT Chapter One in which Stanley Uris encounters the picture of the woman with several rows of teeth or Gilroy's excellent Velvet Buzzsaw which sees mean chimpanzees pulling a guy into the picture they are forever trapped in, and so on and so forth... All works that either tacitly or explicitly attribute a preternatural power to the handcrafted artwork, its creator and occasionally to that creation process.
Andy Marino's It Rides A Pale Horse is not only the latest addition to the list of horror works that uses art as the envoy of evil, it also took the throne and crown of art horror by storm. We have, in front of us, a book very much about creation and creator: starting with art, the artist, touching upon family and the lengths we would go for them, stretching it as far as religion and religious thought ending in a huge "fuck you".
A struggle to understand these creatures, to place them in an appropriate setting.
Let us start by citing the obvious, the art and artistic side of Pale Horse. We are following the artist siblings Peter and Betsy Larkin who live in the small-town Wofford Falls. They both lead a life very much focused on their crafts; Peter (called 'Lark' by everyone) as a sculptor who has gone to the big city to make a name for himself, but returned and Betsy, a reclusive painter. The preternatural powers given to the artist I mentioned above very much prevail in Betsy; her art affects people in a way deemed unnatural and even dangerous in that she can control reality in a very specific way, and after a case of a minor catastrophe she is only allowed to paint reproductions and spends her days painting the works of other artists.
On their birthday, Lark is invited to a business meeting with a very loaded client, Gumley, who shows Lark during their very meeting a video of Betsy being kidnapped in that moment. Gumley and his affluent employers obviously don't want money, they want Lark to make a very specific kind of artwork using rituals that are described in a macabre book. The chapters of Lark and his best friend Krupp trying to assemble the materials and shape this sculpture in a crazy adventure are interrupted by little interludes entitled "Museum Interludes" in which we switch to a completely different point of view, and when I say completely different, I mean it that way. I won't say more about this because this character is a pleasure to discover, to slowly unveil. These interludes follow the kidnapping of Betsy, who is in a sort of museum, as you can guess from the title, being held captive by Gumley's contractees, the insanely rich art patrons Griffin and Helena Belmont, who obviously have ulterior motives. These extracts provide the reader a sort of backstory about the Belmont siblings and their shady deeds.
What lies beyond despair?
The second level of creation Pale Horse makes use of is that of family, of parents, the people who created us physically and those who shaped us into who we are. Specifically the father plays a significant role here, which, in turn, has a special importance, not the least because of the bridge it builds between the two elements family and the Christian religion.
A genuinely fascinating detail in Pale Horse is that we have two pairs of siblings counteracting, mirror imaging each other in a crooked parallel; Lark and Betsy versus Griffin and Helena. On both sides there is no presence worth mentioning of the mother (who in fact is conventionally the key symbol for creation. But focusing on "the father" Marino probably wanted to maintain the connection to religion.), both sides have been raised by fathers who are perceived differently by each pair of siblings. While the Belmonts act on their yearning for their father, the Larkins rather react in self-defense. In Lark, we have a person who stood up against his emotionally absent, neglectful and borderline abusive father in a quiet way, by doing his best to keep himself and his sister alive. He even gave up his art career in the big city, sacrificed himself in order to make sure Betsy is doing well. By discarding their father from their lives, Lark so-to-say kills his creator - a motive, which will keep on resurfacing throughout the book. As to the nature of both figures of authority, god and parent, it is worth noting that a parent leaving his creation to carelessness, neglect and misery can arguably be seen on par with a malignant god.
All these more or less religious connotations of self-sacrifice, the father (there is also a son and a pretty holy ghost in this story), prophetic powers that manifest in art, a holy book, are not coincidental.
A desperate craving for solace comes and goes, and hot on its heels a lust for a second god to rise and grant him salvation.
Thirdly the religious aspect. It all starts with a book, of course it does.
The artwork required from Lark is a sculpture consisting of two parts, "The Insomniack" and "The Worm & The Dogsbody" and the instructions to the shaping of both parts are described in an ancient,
human skin-bound book entitled "A Panoply of Silent Hymns for the New World or
a Non-liturgical Psalter Relating to the Sculpting of Paeans to
Geographical Dislocation and the Relief of Burdensome Obstacles to
Resurrection". As Lark and Krupp make progress in the creation of the works and the world around them changes, things get a little off, a little psychedelic even. Especially enjoyable was the interaction between the two best friends during this wonky adventure, slowly realizing they're actually not only saving Betsy, they are part of something bigger, unlocking something surpassing their own imagination and perception. I'm not even mentioning the obvious cult-like quality of the book and its owners, the darkness that marks them.
A sudden wrongness in the composition of the world.
Finally, Pale Horse is visually out of this world. Descriptions of the working, shaping, assembling, thinking of an artist; scenes depicted in brush strokes, in colors; a language so vivid, metaphorical, polished, artful that the prose of this book is art itself - as it should be... Honestly, I'm completely smitten with it. It doesn't even stop at the visuality, Pale Horse goes beyond that and speaks to all your senses, descriptions of smells, of sounds are so visceral that the whole composition of the book, including the cover art and the title, goes under your skin.
Definitely one of the top books I have read this year that will make it among the top five in the end of the year list. Stop everything you're doing and read it immediately!
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