I highly recommend this book for people who like horror stories that build gradually and deliver their punch through atmosphere and character rather than gore. It also makes very good use of mythology; if “Lady Midday” is not an actual folklore deity, She should be. The book reminds me strongly of Elizabeth Hand’s stories, particularly Waking the Moon, which also features a malevolent goddess. As anyone who has read Hand’s novels knows, that comparison is high praise for Files.
The book draws its special strength from the mystique of early film, those old black-and-white tales that manage, obviously-fake (yet somehow very effective) fog and all, to be scarier to many of us than most modern CGI-enhanced full-color bloodfests. A quote from Maxim Gorky that opens the novel says it all: “Last evening I was in the Kingdom of the Shadows. If one could only convey the strangeness of this world. A world without colour and sound. Everything here—the earth, water and air, the trees, the people—everything is made of a monotone grey. Grey rays of sunlight in a grey sky, grey eyes in a grey face, leaves as grey as cinder. Not life, but the shadow of life. Not life’s movement, but a sort of mute spectre.” In addition, the film in this story is made on silver nitrate stock, which apparently burns explosively if you so much as look at it crossways—a quality that proves to be central to the plot.
A third virtue is the complex personality of Lois Cairns, the main character/narrator. It is clear from the beginning that she is not a healthy or a happy woman—though just how unhealthy and unhappy do not become apparent until later. She certainly has a lot on her plate: a job (as a local film critic) that is marginal in both pay and fulfillment, migraines and several other physical problems, and an autistic son. She is not particularly saintly about any of these, which makes her easy to sympathize with, if not necessarily to like. As she says at one point, “I’m a lot of things…. None of them are ‘nice.’” However, this description by her friend and former student, Sophie Hewson, is also accurate: “She’s weird, that’s for sure; always has been. But weird in a good way. Like she cares too much.” An important part of the story involves ways in which Cairns’s life and personality become entangled with, and echo, those of Iris Whitcomb, the enigmatic woman whose early films and disappearance she is investigating. Another thread, partly motivating Cairns’s persistent attempts to solve the mysteries surrounding Whitcomb and her work, is her hope that making a documentary about Whitcomb will add meaning to her own life.
Files’s writing is also excellent, without being obtrusive. For example, this is her description of an art installation in which Cairns temporarily becomes trapped: “It wasn’t music, exactly. Just tones and drones and spatters of muffled dialogue; conversations filtered through the walls, noise and effects overlaid to create some sort of ever-moving internal landscape of almost-glimpsed sequences. And when the passage finally widened, giving way to a room beyond, things didn’t much improve: the blackness was total, womblike, with no hint of which direction to turn. I stumbled with hands out, feeling my way, constantly afraid that I was going to encounter something else that would grip me and pull me into… what, I don’t even know. Another dimension, some dreadful night-time abyss. The silent, dust-piled bottom of some long-dried ocean full of skeleton fish and glowing, floating jellies, blind seekers with mouths open wide, waiting to bite down and swallow.”
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Top reviews from other countries
ArtyParky
An excellent novel. However ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 11, 2023
