Gothic

“It’s like Christine… but wood!”

So remarks a character in Philip Fracassi’s meta horror novel about a haunted desk. And while the statement is true per se, it doesn’t do justice to Fracassi’s work, which proves far leaner and meaner than King’s.

The plot follows horror author Tyson Parks. Decades prior, he rose to the top of the publishing world with a string of best-sellers. But his last few books have flopped and writing has become a gruelling endeavor.

For his upcoming 59th birthday, his live-in girlfriend buys him an antique desk.

Soon Tyson is cranking out a new novel. Marathon sessions at a finger-bleeding pace leave him exhausted with no memory of what he’s written, as though he were scrambling to take dictation instead of crafting the story himself. The novel proves a huge hit, vaulting him back into the publishing stratosphere.

But this success comes with a cost. The desk demands a terrible price and Tyson will have to decide how much he’s willing to pay.

Indeed, this setup proves reminiscent of Stephen King’s Christine. But Fracassi’s narrative proves more streamlined.

Consider the opening. Tyson meets his agent Harry to present his latest manuscript.

“Come on, man,” he says, reaching a hand toward his once-prized cash cow. “Let me see the goods.”

It’s an anxiety-filled sequence brimming with an awkward tension that conveys Tyson’s status as a borderline has-been with minimal exposition.

Fracassi also delivers more subtext. Consider when Tyson returns home, nerves jangling:

He walks to the kitchen, pours himself a scotch—hesitates a fraction of a second—then pours himself some more.

Two fingers is a handshake, buddy. I need a hug.

He smiles, recalling the line from a short story he’d written a few years ago as the scotch gurgles into the glass.

Besides the terrific line, Fracassi meta-contextualizes Tyson’s inner-monologue to a story-within-the-story, foreshadowing the novel’s reference to other contemporary horror authors and works.

Besides the aforementioned reference to Christine, Fracassi later describes a sound as:

As if she’d heard it through the thin walls of an old house, the kind you might find in a John Saul novel, where whispered secrets are carried to prying ears through antiquated ventilation shafts.

And later a character’s appearance as:

He reminds Tyson of a zombie. And not the fast Max Brooks World War Z-type, but more the old George Romero, shuffle-and-groan, brain-eating variety.

And in a reference that elicited a broad smile from your reviewer, there’s this bit of dialog:

“Second, to be blunt, it’s sexist. Completely tone-deaf. Describing a woman’s breasts for a paragraph may have flown in the ’80s and ’90s, Mr. Parks, but in today’s society we’ll get crucified for this stuff. I won’t even get into the extreme sexual violence. I mean, there’s a reason Richard Laymon’s novels were exiled to the UK.”

Most of these name drops allow Fracassi to wink at genre tropes while still exploiting them. But the Laymon scene allows him to poke the bear of political correctness and censorship. The only sexual violence in Gothic occurs “off screen” so to speak, but in referencing Laymon, Fracassi imbues his story with the graphic nature of Laymon’s work without being graphic himself. A deft trick. But by having the publisher berate Tyson, Fracassi can lament the idea of “dangerous” books and publishers getting cancelled for publishing fiction, all while proposing—in the narrative context—a book that is dangerous, thus forcing the reader into an interesting moral dilemma.

Amidst these myriad author references, Clive Barker’s omission surprised me, as this story’s shifting point-of-views and dark-fantasy elements reminded me most of Barker’s early works.

Fracassi brings all this subtext to bear with minimal overhead. The plot races. At 316 pages, act one concludes on page fifty-nine, with Tyson’s birthday party and Fracassi’s trademark sense of dread.

The crowded room cheers once more, the music from the room’s stereo pops on, and Tyson Parks is happier than he will ever be again.

I love lines like this. Foreshadowing that everything will not be okay raises the emotional stakes and resets our expectations.

From here things get mean quick. Veteran horror readers may think characters with their own point-of-view and inner monologue are safe. Fracassi proffers several such narrators, including Tyson’s girlfriend and college-age daughter, both of whom could have served as protagonists in a Laymon novel given their charisma and agency. But Fracassi also channels Laymon’s liberal and abrupt dispatching of his characters. No one is safe.

Indeed, the plot rolls along at such a fast pace it wasn’t until after I’d finished the story that I appreciated how Fracassi resisted the temptation to overwrite. The ending surprises with its abruptness. Readers expect the various plot threads to culminate in a dramatic conclusion. Rather than wrap up every thread, Fracassi cuts several short. These provided false hopes for happier ends. Rather than draw them out, Fracassi abandons them.

It’s only in hindsight that you realize their futility. If Fracassi wrote his version of The Stand, it would be half as long, Flagg would win, and you’d need a stiff hug of a drink afterwards to get to sleep.

That said, part of me yearned for something even darker in Gothic. While Fracassi delivers a visceral set-piece involving the desk mangling a character’s hand, the sequence didn’t make me squirm the way I suspect Fracassi intended. He’s mastered the ability to manufacture dread, but his graphic violence lacks the uncomfortable punch of a Chuck Palahniuk or a Bret Easton Ellis.

Still, Fracassi’s still growing as a talent. As the desk’s influence grows on Tyson, he becomes more cynical, and Fracassi delivers lines like:

He’s nothing but regret in a nice suit, Tyson thinks.

Which make me think he could write a Dashiell Hammett-esque detective story with aplomb. Indeed, his detective character here intrigues, and Fracassi invites the comparison by having him quote a line from Hammett’s The Thin Man.

Fracassi is fast becoming a favorite author of mine. I love how all of his works feel part of a shared universe without referencing each other. His brand of horror blends the existential dread of Lovecraft, the brisk narrative of Hammett, and the anxiety of Laymon, resulting in a gripping, dread-filled ride tinged with bits of black humor (Gothic’s penultimate line had me laughing out loud). Recommended for horror fans, with the caveat that splatter-punk fans may lament the lack of explicit gore.