Introduction

Sometimes when I’m asked to account for my weirdness—by those sympathetic enough to have not given up on me—I remember that Edward Gorey responded to the same request by remarking that the first two books he remembered reading as a child were Alice in Wonderland and Dracula, and so I offer my own origins story, which involves having been left at the age of six in front of the TV by an insufficiently alert babysitter. In those days, PBS screened something every weekend from the Janus film catalog. I loved monster movies and scoured the TV Guide for any sign of them, and that night up popped, on PBS of all places, something called Nosferatu, which I think was described simply as an early vampire chiller. I watched it alone, in the dark. I still haven’t fully recovered. I’d seen a lot of the Universal horror movies by that point, but none of them were particularly adept at tone, and none were even remotely as unsettlingly strange as Nosferatu was. I was imprinted by it, like a baby duck. I don’t think I was even able to call out to the babysitter.

That imprinting was probably reactivated in some way when I got to graduate school and my thesis adviser, John Hawkes, persistently reminded me to search for and interrogate the weirdness in my work, no matter how blandly naturalistic such work might first appear, since that was nearly always where the most important and intractable emotional conflicts resided, usually in buried form. Jack was wonderful, in other words, on the way in which the uncanny lurked within and beneath the everyday. And the way in which that understanding animated our ongoing negotiation of the world.

It turned out that what had floored me most about Nosferatu was not only what you’d expect—yes, the filmmakers had apparently rummaged around in their psychic basements to turn Max Schreck, who played the vampire, into something conversation-stopping in its sinister and dignified repulsiveness—but also one of the movie’s more startling implications: that the pure at heart were as much on the vampire’s wavelength as those already given over to perdition. The vampire’s satanic assistant and the virtuous heroine were both sensitized, across continents, to Nosferatu’s approach. Over and over again, the heroine and the vampire seemed to be reaching out to one another.

And Nosferatu not only infected the world with his strangeness as he moved through it, but the world he invaded seemed to make him more and more oddly ordinary. Sure, he disembarked from a rat-infested ship in Bremen. But then there he was, trooping along the street, the only one around to lug his coffin, balanced on his hip, all the way to his lair.

Then there was the ending, in which the heroine finally acknowledged her handy Book of the Vampires’ recipe for purging her community of the undead: that only a woman who was pure at heart and would offer her blood freely to the malign could destroy the malign. She gave herself over to the vampire, he died, and then she died. And then with her death, the intertitle announced that the shadow of evil had passed from their land. And six-year-old me was left with the perversity of the movie’s insistence on the necessity of destroying what it claimed it valued most.

Anyway: you get the idea. From start to finish it was a crash course in how divided against ourselves we really are—even those of us we consider to be the good guys, and even those we believe to have very clear agendas. Ever since, I’ve been drawn to protagonists who are geniuses at knitting together self-indictment and self-exoneration in ways that are both unconscious and calculated. Protagonists who leave us to sort through what they’ve figured out, what they can’t figure out, and what they won’t try to figure out about themselves. I’m drawn to such stories and to subjects like the attractions of ethical passivity and the heartbreak of knowing that we can’t be all we want or need to be for those we love.

And while we’re on the subject of the indivisibility of the personal and the political, what’s that famous line of Edmund Burke’s? All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. I’ve always been fascinated by the ease with which we find ourselves sliding into complicity with people who have active and terrible agendas. By the ease with which we decide that what we’ve already tried to accomplish, in terms of empathy and altruism, is enough. I’ve always been drawn, in other words, to stories like those you’ll find collected here. So here’s the good news: the introduction is over and there’s nothing but excellent reading ahead.