Dominic E. Lacasse - The Sounds Between

It is said that only two children were spared from whatever fate the Piper laid on Hameln that day; one blind, unable to see the children to follow them out of town, the other lame, without the ability to dance along to doom or rebirth with the others. Am I that lame child? ~ Dominic E. Lacasse

"Horror Writing" is a dirty term these days. It brings up images of something studied by undergrads hoping to bullshit through ENG100, writing a paper on Twilight or by Cultural Studies professors hoping to gain some fame, analyzing it from the perspective of psychoanalysis or theories of the carnival.

Something happened somewhere in between Shelly, Stoker, Poe and Lovecraft, and these paperback, New York Times Bestsellers, pulp writers of today. A sweeping claim, I know. As a suggestion, and continuing my "Recommended Blogs by my Peers" theme here at Not by Needs, I suggest the work of Dominic E. Lacasse. Not only is he well read in the classic horror canon, but he is also a student of Classics and mythology. His knowledge of occultism, the ancients and their mythos is daunting. No matter how large or localized the tradition, he’s probably has read the scroll, studied the manuscript or leafed through the book. (Not to mention his knowledge of cartography.)

His blog, which he just started last year and is now adding to again, contains stories, fragments and other experiments of his writing, and what could also be called, in many ways, his analysis, of Horror. It called the The Sounds Between, and I highly recommend it.

This is my own take on it: And, yes, I hear you out there, those repeating echoes from fans screaming out in protest how amazing Stephen King’s characters are, or how you thought that Interview with a Vampire was just “the best” vampire book ever written, and how it influenced both your own writing and your make-up in high school… But, - and I want to be vulgarly general here - what I’m calling “Horror Writing” is not what is used to be. And this isn’t just another kind of literary conservativism: this isn’t an argument denouncing narrative driving, pulp thriller novels. I get my Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston fix like everyone else. What has become misunderstood the nature of the Horrible in what we expect from Horror. Not in the sense of a wrongfully detonated referent, but rather in terms of what might be seen as the deep underbelly of the Tale.

Horror is more like an operation between the mind and its other then a description of an object. And Dominic and I have discussed this point endlessly - it was the context of an interview we did two years ago at CKDU (plug). Lovecraft once said something along these lines: the human minds is incapable of understanding either life or the universe. The latter of which, is fundamentally alien to us and when we are confronted with the ultimate reality of it, whatever form that may take, our psyche itself is ruptured by this encounter. In other words, Horror is not the mind’s finality in imaging how terrible “the monster” it is seeing actually is; it operation between the mind and the unfathomable fact that there the monstrous could exist in the first place. It is a play between possibility and the minds grasp for conclusion.

(As a side note, Levinas' trembling at the term "There is" is congruent with this horror of the "Could there be and there it is.")

The Horror is not in what is alien, foreign, or grotesque (this is where many modern horror films get it wrong), it is in consciousness’ struggle to enframe what is occurring. Horror is primarily phenomenological then.

Dominic has a very proper, Gothic narrative posture, which positions his work in a way that makes it both classically inspired and timely, occurring, almost always, in a past which never occurred. Not an ideal past, but something more like general past or Past, in a sense which the element of its distance is never absent from the atmosphere.

In some cases, this tone deterritorializes the setting, taking the events out of both space and time – something that creates a sense of astrangeness between the reading’s and the narrator’s own localization; a place where events are past, but removed from our past. The relatedness, then, between the two nodes of reader and narrator makes the Horror at once alien and intimate. These two nodes of the alien and intimate struggle to close in on one another, but the exclusivity, with its own vastness, snaps them apart. This too is horror.

This past appears to us as though it were this world, our world, but it cannot be, it must not be. This denouncing, this cannot be, is at an ethical level of discourse which permeates Dominic's Horror: if this world, this event, this incomprehensibility, can exist, here, then the foundations of all morality and humanity would rest on nothing but an abyss, and it is in that thought, not the abyss itself, that Horror activates - this is what Dominic's work tell us.