Contemporary Gothic
by WJ Davies
Nightjar Press, 12pp, ISBN 9781917965019, £3.00
Leila Martin, Kodavision,
Nightjar Press, 15pp, ISBN 9781917965026, £3.00
Joe Stretch, This Area Only,
Nightjar Press, 10pp, ISBN 9781917965002, £3.00
David Gaffney, Flight Paths,
Nightjar Press, 10pp, ISBN 9781917965019, £3.00
Nightjars are a family of birds that have conjured a foreboding image in literary and folkloric imaginations. Thomas Hardy in his poem ‘Afterwards’ imagined them carrying his soul away ‘in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink, / The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades’ (‘dewfall-hawk’ is a Dorset name for the bird). Their nicknames include ‘corpse fowl’ and ‘goatsucker,’ the latter from the belief that they are vampiric, feeding on goats and poisoning them in the process. Pliny the Elder wrote:
those called goatsuckers, which resemble a rather large blackbird, are night thieves. They enter the shepherds’ stalls and fly to the goats’ udders in order to suck their milk, which injures the udder and makes it perish, and the goats they have milked in this way gradually go blind.
What thought is more chilling for a lonely shepherd than a fanged bird silently stalking the countryside? And what to do if there are none around to sate the bird’s appetite? The myth has purpose besides embodying fear, of course. It explains flickering shadows and sick animals. It provides the shepherd with something to blame when he counts his losses.
In fact, the nightjar is a beguiling creature that is famously hard to spot given their flight patterns and camouflage, rewarding luck rather than skill for most birdwatchers. I am fond of Charles Waterton’s spirited, slightly satirical defence of them from an 1826 issue of The Quarterly Review.
Poor injured little bird of night, how sadly hast thou suffered, and how foul a stain has inattention to facts put upon thy character! Thou hast never robbed man of any part of his property nor deprives the kid a drop of milk.
Sylvia Plath called them ‘devil-bird’ in ‘Goatsucker,’ but in the end the poem is about reputations versus reality. ‘Well-named, ill-famed a knavish fly-by-night, / Yet it never milked any goat, nor dealt cow death.’ The truth is that nightjars became feared because of poorly timed habits – they prefer dusk and dawn to fly softly over grasslands — and eating insects which herds tend to attract. Still, once a bird is called a ‘goatsucker,’ it is hard to shake the image from your mind.
Nightjar Press, founded in 2009 by Nicolas Royle, which publishes limited-edition chapbooks of single stories, leans into the more gothic reputation of the ‘goatsucker.’ It favours weird, sometimes experimental fiction that, like the nightjar, creeps up on you long after reading. The press published four new chapbooks earlier this year by RL Summerling, Leila Martin, Joe Stretch and David Gaffney. They all share the ominous atmospheres and themes of death, loss and haunting that are classic tropes of the Gothic, using them to make strange the anxieties of modern life which plague us, above all the rates of inequality and isolation that continue to grow despite the hyper-connectivity technology has promised.
RL Summerling’s Through Narrowing Veins begins ‘after the end of things’ with a man dealing with the death of his wife following a brief but devastating illness. In this tragedy’s aftermath, his world has entered a kind of stasis. The living room bed, installed so his wife did not have to use the stairs, has yet to be removed. Their final chess game remains in its ‘perpetual state of endgame,’ she ‘three moves away from victory.’
As a bitter winter sets in, the narrator begins his own decline. Yet various oddities punctuate this otherwise expected plot trajectory, chiefly the narrator hearing coded messages in the hum of electronic devices and glimpsing a mysterious woman pointing at the sky. He soon stops being able to see people around him, catching their presence only in surface reflections. Later, he receives a letter telling him to travel to Limehouse in East London where he finds a flat prepared for him. The codes he deciphered seem to be the key once he is there, but to what exactly remains unclear.
Who is sending the narrator these mysterious communications? Are they posthumous threads left by his wife to follow? Is she haunting him with more hostile motives? Or are these simply random events with meaning layered on them by grief? These enigmas, which feel both supernatural and conspiratorial, entwine with the narrator’s own diminishing health and the degree to which he depended on his wife to organise their daily lives. He takes early retirement, for example, and needs his national insurance number which he automatically assumes his wife will have recorded for him. He finds her diary with a page full of all his vital information and quickly realises how much of her shortened life was wasted doing something he should have taken responsibility for. Underneath the story’s strangeness is a bracing take on social isolation and the seemingly benign habits that relationships can enforce through ingrained norms and routines.
Leila Martin’s Kodavision is also about the journey of a character in mourning, this one set entirely on a train travelling across the Pennines. Written in the second person, the story follows the idle but anxious thoughts of a protagonist going home to see his family after his mother’s death. The ‘drunkenly’ rocking carriage passing through an imposing landscape of ‘sagging’ clouds and rain sodden livestock reminded me of Arthur Kipps’ first trip to Crythin Gifford in Susan Hills’ The Woman in Black, in which the insular safety of a train is contrasted with the mounting dread of an imposing countryside.
Instead of a Samuel Daily figure to chat to, though, there is a silent young woman sitting opposite on whom the protagonist imprints thoughts and judgements, betraying a nervous mind trying to find a foothold in the exterior world. It is easy to see why. His mother clearly tormented him, such that it informs even the choice to go home for her funeral (‘why are you making this journey? Why are you so pathetic?’, he hears her saying). He also dwells on his brother Leo’s incessant admiration of the woman, which ‘always made you queasy’ and clearly set the siblings in a sad rivalry.
The protagonist’s moribund thoughts are frequently interrupted by people walking up and down the carriage, all of them moving with ‘unsteady,’ ‘lurching’ and ‘scraping’ footsteps. These are clichés of the Gothic masterfully repurposed to portray the paranoia the character lives with because of his mother’s treatment, a paranoia that also expresses itself in a compulsion to check the time on his phone. All the while, he spends the journey caught out by a sudden ‘wild urge to giggle’ and a recurring fear of urinating himself. ‘For god’s sake, why can’t you grow up?’ Bedwetting becomes a metaphor for a child left without the care and love to normalise their experiences, to reassure them that a difficult phase will pass.
Instead, Kodavision depicts the effect of parenting by shame and severity, and the desperate need for contact and intimacy this creates. The woman opposite becomes an object of desire in this sense, not erotically but for recognition, though all the while the maniacal laughter threatening to come out sets the scene on edge. ‘You sneak another glance at her; she’s staring out of the window, as if pretending you’re not there. [. . .] You could reach out right now and graze her cheek with your fingertips, and she would jump from the shock of contact. You have to smother another grin.’ Martin and Summerling’s stories exemplify the potential the Gothic still has to give shape to the nature of grief and loneliness without allowing them to become settled matters.
Joe Stretch’s This Area Only is also a nostos, about Leah who after a decade in London has gone back to Edgeley in Manchester. ‘The year she left they named it UK Ghost Town of the Year.’ It is a ghost story, but one in which ghosts take many forms. Longing for structure, Leah spends her time on dating apps and the property website Rightmove with searches filtered to the titular restriction. At times she encounters people from her past, but they appear to her as ghosts, as do other figures she notices around town.
Ghosts kept appearing.
Outside Sweet Tooth on Castle Street a crop-haired man in a County away shirt screamed at a small brown dog.
At the Clinique counter at John Lewis a woman in a lab coat called to her.
‘Leah? I didn’t think you’d come back!’
Ghosts are the lingering presence of unfinished business, hinting at what Leah fled when she headed to the metropole. History also provides its ghosts, of generations and places swallowed up by the myth of progress. ‘In the eighties they found Roman coins on land that’s Carphone Warehouse now.’ Stretch’s plain style prose is infused with this dry observational humour that arises from the sheer absurdity of fact — ‘Carphone Warehouse’ is a gift of pure corporate nonsense — but it also captures one among countless instances where local, unique history is paved over by the copy-paste impulse of the franchise model.
The idea of the ‘ghost town’ is also an economic one, and Leah spends more and more time reading up about the ‘regeneration’ of Stockport. Those that have been left behind by progress, one among several conversational themes she endures during an uneasy date, linger over such a project. Yet ‘regeneration’ also has its costs, usually by way of the inevitable gentrification which sends house prices upwards and alienates established communities in the process. The success of Leah’s return will in part be measured by whether she will be able to afford the homes she trawls through on Rightmove, homes which have their own pasts and spectres elided by a website listing.
On the surface, This Area Only is yet another story of someone looking for their place in the world, but Stretch’s wit and artful manipulation of his writing result in one of the more formally ambitious of these Nightjars, deploying repetition and recurrence to achieve the uncanny feeling that Leah is not as in control as she seems. If it is not wholly successful, in part because the story hints at greater experimental risks that could have been taken, it is still compelling. This Area Only ends with a cascade of thoughts and unfinished utterances that spell out a life perilously close to collapse.
Stretch’s is the most stylistically experimental of the four, but David Gaffney’s Flight Paths is the weirdest. It recounts the story of a man meeting up with a woman, Lisa, who funded therapy sessions intended to cure his fear of flying. He also meets with an elderly gentleman from his first flight which seems dreamlike in the retelling.
Flight Paths is full of menace and mystery. The protagonist refers to himself as a dead man; the old man knows him as Roger, but it is not his name; he met Lisa online and was very pleased to discover she lived on a flight path:
[W]hen I saw that Lisa lived in Heald Green, next to the approach, I knew that things were going to fall into place as sweet as pie.
Who says as sweet as pie? No one. But it became part of my online persona and I think it gave me a homely, non-threatening manner.
Don’t worry, Lisa, everything is going to be as sweet as pie.
Not-Roger’s motives are hard to untangle, but he seems too pleased to be found ‘non-threatening.’ ‘You prefer things that are mysterious to actual facts. That’s probably why you are afraid of flying,’ Lisa tells him. How afraid is he really? The place he meets both Lisa and the old man is called the Cracked Actor, which has a laughing harlequin for a sign. Flight Paths is the one I reread the most in search of a handle for its oddness. This is not a negative. It is a gripping and creepy story about the intentions of a character no one should wholly trust.
These chapbooks reveal the ongoing potency of the Gothic, a genre that draws on the logic of folklore as a way of knowing that the things that haunt us — the obligations of care, the death of a loved one, a difficult journey home, the intentions of others — want to be experienced as personal and unique, not flattened by algorithmic or self-help thinking. The Gothic also confirms that modern life is still rife with mysteries. These stories are not full of answers. They are written from inside the mysteries themselves.