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by Jay Lake
My first review of an Adam Castro story was "Sunday Night Yams at Minnie
and Earl's" in the Analog of June, 2001. I really liked that story, a humanistic
portrait of space colonization and the profound loneliness of pioneers, so I leapt
at the chance to review this collection. This is a different Adam Castro. He's
still the first recipient of the Jerry Oltion Really Good Story Award. He's still
the elegantly economical stylist, the empathic observer of human pain and failure,
and the possessor of a skewed sense of humor. A Desperate, Decaying Darkness shows
Castro's horrific side. The humanism is here, camouflaged by all sorts of bloody
shenanigans. But so is the blood, both literal and metaphorical. There are a couple
of humorous pieces, horror as high camp, and a couple of shaggy dog stories, and
then some bleak bitterness -- just for contrast, I suppose. This is a great collection,
worth reading at a good long sit. Stick a marker at "From Hell It Came" and come back to it some day when you're in a crummy mood -- it will reward you.
"Locusts" (F&SF, 1996) is an interesting story with which to start this volume. Much of Castro's horror as showcased here has a note of hopefulness within, sometimes even joy. Not "Locusts," which is a nasty story about nasty people meeting a nasty end courtesy of a nasty universe. Even the hope that is found instory by Stu is either false or grim, or both. The descriptions are horrifying and elegant -- Jane's five mouths haunted me all through the book -- and the characters are that sort of nasty that one finds on any suburban street. It is perhaps this contrast of ordinary social venality with the beautiful, frightening, supernatural locusts, which are essentially flying Barbie dolls with poisoned buzzsaw tails, that drives its power and gives it pride of place at the beginning of the collection.
After the emotional shambles of "Locusts," the collection moves on to "Metastasis" (Pulphouse, 1993), a story about a woman whose fatal tumor speaks to her. Castro portrays the bleak inner landscape of the final stages of painful death with a loving care that bespeaks life experience, or at the least, profound empathy. The storyscape reflects the bleakness of Wendy's eroding life. I found the cancer's dialog a bit stranger than perhaps it needed to be to support the story, but all quarrels with the story are voided by the blindingly powerful end. Wendy's inevitable death arrives without any dei ex machinae, and is yet stunning.
Some bottles carry gin, some carry messages. Tricia, a woman damaged by life beyond reasonable repair, receives one from the sea that contains an entire messenger. "Messenger" (Return to the Twilight Zone, 1994) tells how the messenger grew from his glassy vessel into a young man, to bespeak Tricia before dissolving beneath the waves once again. Castro has the gift of destroying the lives of his characters, without mercy, without pity, without giving them anything back but the dubious privilege of being a character in his stories. Tricia is one of those people, a pitiless victim too fearful to even listen to her message. No gentle givebacks here.
"Toy" is a nasty, short and brutish take on the psycho killer trope. Except he's not a killer, and the take goes somewhere that doesn't bear thinking about. Until Castro makes you think about, in only a few hundred words. A very long few hundred words.
"Masterpiece" (Buried Treasures, 1996) is an extended metaphor on the process of writing, the wellsprings of creativity. And I'm not talking about one of those tiresomely self-referential "author in his study" things. Castro casually rolls up his sleeves and lays into his characters with handcuffs and beatings, and "a few centuries in hell." This is a strong, suspenseful story that doesn't end where you tell yourself it will. Every writer dies by degrees for art. Castro just took it literally.
Castro must have spat out "Curse of the Phlegmpire" (Buried Treasures, 1996) one very short, punishing day. That's all I'll say.
Speaking of life-destroying experiences, in "The Last Straw" (Tampa Tribune-Times Fiction Quarterly, 1997) Castro shows us the bitter Nietzschean truths behind the life of a single mother. Every possible thing that can go wrong, and then some, does so one Monday in Jane Watson's life. I cringed while reading the story, almost whimpering in sympathetic agony. Castro strode on with pitiless abandon, rendering Jane down well past the breaking point. He shows us where the story is going early on, but when we get there, oh boy, watch out for that camel's spine.
"Trouble with Eyeballs" falls in that category of maternal warnings about lost toes from riding barefoot on your bicycle. It is one of the several shaggy dog stories in this volume, although one with a sharp point.
My favorite story in this volume is "From Hell It Came" (published simultaneously with this appearance in Mondo Zombie). The adventures of Martin LeBeau and a roaming zombie dick in the Romeroan "Dead" universe had me laughing fit to bust a gut on a flight from Omaha to Phoenix. Not recommended airline behavior (or reading). "...only to come within inches of being sliced in half by a chainsaw mounted to the side of a passing bubblegum-pink RV. Even in the world after the Plague, this was not the kind of thing one encountered every day." Skewed humor, a skewed plot, a skewed author. Oh crap, just read it.
"Dead Like Me" (published simultaneously with this appearance in Mondo Zombie) was more interesting than its preceding companion piece from a literary point of view, but pales in comparison to the sheer entertainment value of "From Hell It Came." Told in the second person present, its an unusual form that's hard to succeed with. Castro succeeds, and this piece can be viewed as a thought-provoking meditation on the stultification of conformity. Of course, it could just be ass-kicking zombie horror.
Another short-short, "Field Trip" (SFSFS Shuttle, 1999) recounts the adventures of souls briefly furloughed from Hell. One suspects that most of them would have preferred to keep shoveling lava or whatever they had been doing. I would.
In an everyday sense, "The Pussy Expert" (Lost in Booth Nine, 1993) is the most unpleasant story in this volume. Castro says in his afterward that it is based on a real-life encounter with a cab driver. There's no exploding heads or zombie genitalia or metastatic cancers, just two men in a cab. It's horrifying at a lot of levels (not to mention a really weird airplane read when you're in the middle seat), but "The Pussy Expert" does offer a sense of redemption from the filth wallow that the story is for both narrator and reader.
The final story in this collection, "The Juggler," is very different
from its opening companion, "Locusts." But there are also parallels
-- while "The Juggler" is a plague of one, afflicting a town, "Locusts"
are a plague of infinites affecting all of earth. Both pieces come down to the
life of one person, and how it is moved by this invasion; in the case of "The
Juggler," the young Billy Robillard, afflicted by fundamentalist grandparents
and the narrowest small town since Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."
Castro's descriptive skills are at their finest, but so are his empathic skills.
There is no rhyme or reason to the Juggler, but he has a mission, and he has
logic. Near the beginning of the story, he asks Billy, "Have you ever carried
more than you could hold?" By the end of the story, this question has been
violently asked of the entire town. Billy challenges the Juggler's town-killing
assault in the invader's own terms, and solves some of the problems of his own
life, specifically the bitter custody dispute between his lesbian mother and
his straight-laced grandparents. This is a moving, powerful story, marred only
by the narrow dimensionality of the characters. Only Billy grows beyond his
label, in a context and with an author who could have driven them all to greater
heights and depths.
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