Ruptures
I’m very happy to report that my story “Nixie,” which originally appeared last year in Terror Tales of Chaos, edited by Paul Finch, has been selected for reprint in The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, vol. 2, edited by Michael Kelly! You can pre-order a copy of the book here.
She hung the two dresses side by side on the outside of the closet door and opened the glass doors carefully closed upon the small closet that was her kitchenette. She turned on the burner under the coffeepot, and went to the window; it was sunny. When the coffeepot began to crackle she came back and poured herself coffee, into a clean cup. I’ll have a headache if I don’t get some food soon, she thought, all this coffee, smoking too much, no real breakfast. A headache on her wedding day; she went and got the tin box of aspirin from the bathroom closet and slipped it into her blue pocketbook. She’d have to change to a brown pocketbook if she wore the print dress, and the only brown pocketbook she had was shabby.
Shirley Jackson, “The Daemon Lover”
There is a moment in the TV show The Handmaid’s Tale where the world changes, or, more accurately, where the characters onscreen realize that the world has changed, that the rules they thought governed their world no longer apply. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the entire run of one of my favorite shows, set against the classic 1978 Blondie disco hit “Heart of Glass” remixed with composer Philip Glass to a profoundly eerie, unsettling effect, the distortion matching the increasingly irreality of the scene it scores. There is no dialogue. You see the characters’ thoughts unfolding across their faces as the scene carries on: This cannot be. Time distorts; we shift from stark realism into a realm of nightmare slomo with little awareness of when exactly the shift occurred. It is a masterful piece of—I know it’s a TV show but I’m going to say filmmaking—three minutes of heart-not-of-glass-but-heart-in-throat imitation cinema-verite that says everything that the show spends six more seasons unspooling. The look on the face of the man at the 48 second mark haunts me as persistently as if this had been actual newsreel footage. Click on it below even if you don’t usually click on videos; it’s a brilliant little film in three minutes. This is how the world changes. This is how the world ruptures.
The episode aired in 2017, a time when the scene might have recalled National Guardsmen at Kent State opening fire on students in 1970. Rewatching it in 2026, it takes on a different timbre, recalling with a sickening familiarity the earlier months of this year, wintry Minneapolis streets and government troops permitted to fire on protesting citizens at will. Rupture.
But watching it again for the purposes of writing this, I thought of Haskell Wexler’s classic 1969 film Medium Cool,1 in which Wexler, his actors, and his crew waded into the riots around the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, mixing fact and fiction (as we all do, all the time, without even realizing we’re doing it), and the famous scene in which the police deploy tear gas and a crew member can be heard shouting, “Look out, Haskell, it’s real!”
Look out! It’s real! It might have happened that way. Ruptures: the fourth wall comes down. Only it isn’t quite the fourth wall we thought it was the first time we all saw it as eager young cinephiles but, apparently, a bit of dialogue added in post-production.
The entirety of the sixties in America was a rupture. Were the Tate-La Bianca murders in 1969 the closing of that rupture, or the opening of a new one? In 1992 Trent Reznor moved into the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, perhaps hoping to find a rupture of his own, and recorded the bleak, brutal, industrial classic The Downward Spiral, an album that more than thirty years on still feels revolutionary, and as though it can hurt you;2 as though the world has split open and something terrible has come through. Reznor had both a shock and a revelation when he met Sharon Tate’s sister and realized that the site, its bloody history, wasn’t just a pop culture punchline but a place of genuinely unimaginable horrors where people, who loved and who were loved, suffered unspeakably and died. Reznor moved out and the house was destroyed, as it should have been decades earlier.
The funny thing about ruptures is how we simultaneously crave and resist them. Endlessly popular so-called portal fantasies, after all, are all about ruptures, from Narnia and the wardrobe to a diner pantry in Stephen King’s 11/22/63—for time travel stories are also portals. Daphne Du Maurier’s The House on the Strand. Jack Finney’s Time and Again. Name your favorite. I think what I like best is when the rupture is the other way round though: young Jane, Simon, and Barney Drew catching glimpses of the eternal, cosmic battle between the Dark and the Light playing out in a Cornish seaside village in Over Sea, Under Stone. The opaque reverberations of lives across centuries existing in Cheshire, England in Alan Garner’s Red Shift. The haunted students of M. John Harrison’s “The Great God Pan.”
But when ruptures actually occur we don’t believe in them. We tell ourselves they didn’t happen. What happened next in the story of The Handmaid’s Tale was not that June and Moira and June’s husband Luke and their daughter Hannah and Moira’s wife Odette all got in a car together and drove like hell north and across the Canadian border, because then there would not be a TV show but also because that’s not what people do. Even when the world cracks open in front of us, we tell ourselves that everything is still normal and that we can carry on as always. Sometimes we call it “being in shock.” Is this our monkey brain, or something even older, the reptile brain, this conservative, safety-seeking instinct, this clinging to what-no-longer-is at all costs? If I just don’t move, it won’t see me.
Or we move, but only because we think, insanely, we can still fix things: see Jackie Kennedy crawling across the back of the presidential limousine to retrieve bits of her husband’s brains and blasted-off skull.
Night before last I sat on the front porch listening to that weird remix of “Heart of Glass” and wondered how my own world had ruptured so. How do you have a life that feels real and suddenly not have it? How can something that feels earned and substantial turn out to be as solid and reliable as the wind in the trees? And where does the life you had go when you’re no longer living it?
Weird fiction is of course all about ruptures. I have always said that for this reason, it feels realer to me than realist fiction—and I say this as someone who enjoys realist fiction a great deal—because it captures that absurd aspect of life, whether it is the moment that we glimpse something so strange, so inexplicable and outside of our frame of reference that we file it away and only ever think of it again perhaps during a night terror, or because it understands the madness of those seconds when the world falls away from us entirely, when something happens—a death, or the realization of the depths of a loss, or, as in the Handmaid’s clip, the moment when people whose country has undergone a revolution understand that—and suddenly nothing is familiar any longer.
I have always believed as well that this mode of fiction has more in common with realism than with fantasy or science fiction. For one, because the weird in fantasy and science fiction has to make sense, but in this other type of fiction, the senselessness is the very point. Yet it’s also because in order for these stories to work, a believable, even banal world must first exist so that the strangeness can operate as its foil. Shirley Jackson was the absolute master of establishing this mundanity, perhaps nowhere displayed quite so starkly as in the short story “The Daemon Lover” that I began this piece with, along with the quietly nightmarish “The Summer People”, a story in which nothing and everything is askew, and by the end of which, absolutely nothing, and everything, has occurred. Like “The Daemon Lover,” the story on its surface appears for almost all of it to be nothing more than the most careful catalogue of a quotidian day:
Mrs. Allison hurried with her pie. Twice she went to the window to glance at the sky, to see if there were clouds coming up. The room seemed unexpectedly dark, and she herself felt in the state of tension that precedes a thunderstorm, but both times when she looked the sky was clear and serene, smiling indifferently down on the Allisons’ summer cottage as well as on the rest of the world. When Mrs. Allison, her pie ready for the oven, went a third time to look outside, she saw her husband coming up the path; he seemed more cheerful, and when he saw her, he waved eagerly and held a letter in the air.
Stories like this ask: What if that niggling feeling that something is wrong actually means that something is terribly, catastrophically, irreparably wrong? Stories like this remind us that we are always with one foot over the abyss. Nothing is solid. Not really.
It was something I worked hard at in my early, unpublished fiction, spinning out that mundane world and trying to bring in that rupture as catalyst, and I would get rejections back saying things like “This isn’t horror” or “The ending didn’t make sense” or nothing at all; in part the problem was that I wasn’t very good at what I was doing yet, that sleight of hand that takes you from the known to the unknown, but the problem was also the editors, who had the wrong sensibility for the stories I was writing. Two things can be true: my writing needed work, and those editors would not have known what to do with Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover” had it landed on their desks.
But you cannot simply drop the weird into an otherwise painstakingly realistic story. It has to grow even when the reader doesn’t think they see it growing, or perhaps only sees it out of the corner of their eye. And most importantly of all, it has to be true to the story you are telling. As I gained better control of this kind of writing, I also began to find the similarly-minded editors, the ones who “got” what I was trying to do in those early days: first Andy Cox, then Mick Sims and the late Len Maynard, then Stephen Jones, David Longhorn, and a little bit later, Michael Kelly. It is no exaggeration to say that were it not for these six editors and their early support and encouragement, you would not be reading stories from me at all. It helped, too, that the world changed—this time in a good way—that it turned out there were quite a few people wanting to write and read and publish this type of fiction that existed in the no-man’s-land between litfic and commercial genre storytelling, these sorts of dark, aching stories that didn’t even try to make sense of it all.
If ruptures are a shock, they are also expected. Deep down, we know they are coming. It’s there in the expression about waiting for the other shoe to drop. I often think, too, of a story by the Finnish-Swedish writer Tove Jansson, “The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters,” in which a house-proud fillyjonk frets endlessly about what might be, but when a tornado actually destroys her home, she is euphoric:
. . . she thought ecstatically: How very, very wonderful! What can I do, a poor little fillyjonk, against the great powers of nature? What is there to mend and repair now? Nothing! All is washed clean and swept away! The tornado went solemnly wandering off over the fields, and she saw it taper off, break and disperse. It wasn’t needed any more. The fillyjonk drew a deep breath. Now I’ll never be afraid again, she said to herself. Now I’m free.
Jansson was, of course, writing ostensibly for children in these stories—peculiar, melancholy, existentialist-minded children, sure, but children all the same—so the message of the fillyjonk’s destructive tornado was never going to be something like sometimes ruptures leave you broken. Or: sometimes the rupture is death. Or: nothing will ever be the same again, in a bad way. Kids figure this out anyway, of course. I’d already read The Diary of Anne Frank half a dozen times before I found my way to Jansson. (As the Jewish writer Dara Horn has observed, Anne Frank wrote her famous oft-requoted words “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart” before she met her demise at the hands of people who were very much not good at heart.)3 I still remember the moment when I was ten years old, lying on my stomach in the living room reading a Snoopy book, and my father came in and told me that my grandfather had died. The world fractured. The abyss yawned. We’d had cats and dogs die or disappear, sure, but how could this be? This was impossible. Death was something that happened to other people, not the people I loved. And yet, here we were: not immune after all.
This is the way the world ends…
TS Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” has always been one of my favorite poems, ever since I was a teenager, a time when I firmly believed it to be a poem that tore away the illusions that hid the ruptures of the world, illusions that the adults around me couldn’t see, man! which frankly makes me think it’s a wonder that all parents of teenagers don’t just drop them off the woods and let wolves finish raising them because it’s what the little shits deserve.
The poem still has the power to haunt and intrigue a century after its composition. It still feels very contemporary. I’m one of many, many writers who stole a bit of it for a story title (“In Death’s Other Kingdom”, 2013), and there are passages in it that could come have come straight off a Sisters of Mercy or The Mission lyric sheet, circa 1986:
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
The poem is, among other things, about the emptiness and hypocrisy of modern man, but if I could go back to my teenage self, I would tell her I suspect that by and large, most adults are all too aware of the inherent fragility of the world they have built around themselves. I believe in extending to everyone the basic human dignity of assuming that they have an inner life as rich as my own, but also: You can only be alive on this earth for so long before something comes along to wound you so badly it seems as though you could never recover from it. By the time the midpoint of adulthood rolls around, everyone has a missing limb or two, metaphorically speaking; we are all the walking wounded.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
If they seem like hollow men, these people around you, what a certain segment of the internet calls NPCs, nonplaying characters, perhaps it is only because they are too terrified of ruptures to look on them clearly, and what could be more human than that?
We land back where we began, with Shirley Jackson, a woman who also knew about ruptures, and papering over them, pretending everything was fine. When her story “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker in 1948, readers responded with confusion and outrage. It is a fine little poison pill of a story, its relevancy endlessly recyclable—have you ever gleefully participated in a social media pile-on? Congratulations; you’re one of the villagers in “The Lottery”!—but I don’t think it’s her best short story even if it’s her most famous. In fact, although readers wrote in to ask with alarm where in New England such a horrific ritual was taking place, I have always felt that the story falls down where Jackson normally excels, and that’s in its precision of setting, its establishing of verisimilitude. “The Lottery” is a brilliant idea story, a canny assessment of human nature (three things can be true: people can be largely good at heart, and people can have rich inner lives, and people can be mimetic creatures, desperate to court approval and avoid ostracism) and a perfect exemplar of a story with a twist. But the story and its settings and its characters never came alive for me in the way all those elements did in “The Daemon Lover” and “The Summer People” and certainly not as in her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, not the first time I read it in my seventh-grade English class and not since. And I think if it were the only thing you ever read by Jackson, you would come away knowing that, as a writer, she was a pitilessly accurate assessor of human group psychology, but you might not appreciate her many other gifts as well.
Why do I, along with so many others, love Jackson’s work so much, and The Downward Spiral, and “The Hollow Men”, and that scene from The Handmaid’s Tale? I think making art and engaging with art is one of the most human things that we do, and I suppose I think that there is something inherently sacred in simply being human. And there is something beautiful about making art out of horror. I like the word “testament”, and I like that these works feel like testaments against the darkness even as all of them are steeped in that same darkness. I think we want to be able to say that we know the world will rupture, we know we will lose everything, maybe more than once, maybe over and over again, even though it doesn’t help us be any better prepared when it does happen. The very last thing any of us will do on this earth is lose everything. Debbie Harry’s voice transforms into that of a plaintive ghost in the Philip Glass remix: Once I had a love … Nothing lasts. Yet somehow something remains.
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Wexler’s title is, of course, riffing on the work on Marshall McLuhan, and I cannot help wondering what on earth McLuhan would have made of the internet, and social media, a medium surely both “hot” and “cool” by his categorization, demanding participation yet also requiring absolutely nothing of its audiences but to consume, forever.
The Downward Spiral is a brilliant album but eight years after its release, Johnny Cash, in one of modern musical history’s finest hold-my-beer moments, would, under the genius production of Rick Rubin, answer Reznor’s youthful alienation and rage with an old man’s unforgettable, pain-wracked cover of “Hurt.”
And yet I still think Anne was right.
I used to teach The Lottery to my unwilling students and one thing I will say about that story is that it's really fucking boring right up until the end when everyone suddenly sits up and goes, what the actual fuck?! Haha! It was always a good trigger to get students talking about conformity, tradition, and so on. Congrats on your story, btw!
Beautifully written. Congratulations on the selection!