Literary Horror discussion

Our first monthly read of 2024 will be Lisa Tuttle's novella My Death.

It's recently reissued by NYRB press, and available on paper and as an ebook.

Some reviews:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...
https://biblioklept.org/2023/09/20/th...

Let's start close to next weekend!

Sweet! I just received this book as a gift. I interpret this as a sign from the gods that I should participate in this month's read.

This looks great, excellent choice!

Oh good. Around p 30 things start to get weird. I was worried we were just going to be nibbling on salads and biscuits the whole time.

Nathanimal wrote: "I was worried we were just going to be nibbling on salads and biscuits the whole time."

Wait, I thought rabbits were fine with a lot of nibbling on salads. But yeah, this does take awhile to get going. I have a soft spot for literary/art sleuthing, so the early pace only bothered me a little. The protagonist's quietly melancholic voice is nicely rendered. And yes, it does get weird. I'm really enjoying the protagonist's reading of Helen Ralston's life in Logan's biography, and the various stories jostling for position as we find out more about what really happened.

I started wondering early on whether Helen Ralston was a real person. I don't think so, but I'm highly amused that popular google searches are "helen ralston circe" and "helen ralston in troy". Apologies to the real Helen Ralstons!

Where's everyone on this? I just finished (yup, hard to put down near the end), but will be coy about details until I hear updates.

I must admit I'm not a big Lisa Tuttle fan. (We read two of her collections as monthly books a few years ago.) Her writing always seemed a bit old-fashioned to me, though there are interesting ideas.

For some reason, I don't mind the writing so much here, as My Death continues to burrow down that delirious rabbit hole. (Was the protagonist ever named? I don't think so, and it's not that important.) Tuttle just quietly sets us up for the first major weird event (view spoiler)[the shared childhood memories (hide spoiler)], and down the slippery slope we go.

I also really liked the elderly mother-daughter interactions. Having spent some weeks with my elderly parents, I can totally relate.

So what actually happened on the island? I'm not sure I understand, but it's not important. What's important is it was beautifully disorienting and magical.

I just finished it this evening, but I'm going to have to nibble on this salad for a bit. Maybe read that ending again because Huh?

I finished the book, too. I really liked it. I'd read some of Tuttle's short stories before and had a mixed response to them. But I thought this was very well done. I agree about the slow beginning, but I thought it definitely enhanced the weirdness once it began. The transition into the narrator's unsettled state felt very natural to me, like how it would be if it happened in real life.

Bill, are you wondering about what happened on the island originally (between Helen and Willy) or when Helen returns with her daughter and the narrator?

S̶e̶a̶n̶ wrote: "Bill, are you wondering about what happened on the island originally (between Helen and Willy) or when Helen returns with her daughter and the narrator?"

I was wondering about the later visit. I was expecting a significantly different type of resolution, so the transformation took me by surprise.

I didn't get started until today and only read a little bit while in a waiting room. I'm at 40%, and things haven't really gotten going yet. One thing that I am liking so far is how naturally basic information about Helen was delivered.

Bill wrote: "I was wondering about the later visit. I was expecting a significantly different type of resolution, so the transformation took me by surprise."

I was expecting something like the resolution of the penultimate chapter. Then the final chapter threw everything into an awesome uncertainty again. I love how that final chapter pulls the rug out from under the reader.

To previous comment, yes, the narrator remains unnamed.

My initial reaction to Tuttle’s novella is one of slight disappointment. Unlike some here, I wasn’t bothered by the slow build-up. I quite enjoyed the “literary sleuthing” (as Bill refers to it) and the slow accretion of information. What I found underwhelming was the payoff. (view spoiler)[I had hoped that Tuttle was setting the stage for something more interesting than merely a transposition of characters. (hide spoiler)]. Overall, a fine effort, but I had hoped for more.

I guess I really didn't mind the more domestic details of the "build up." Actually I found the incongruity between the mundane and the building supernatural somewhat captivating. In general it was an enjoyable short read, but I do find myself reaching for some deeper reading, something to linger on the back palate.

The island was mysterious, and even though I like that much went unexplained about the island, I would've liked it if we could've spent more time in the occult ambiguity it brought to the story. And the "transposition" (Thank you, Canavan) was interesting enough, the slow accretion of coincidences that made the book more and more supernatural, but I'm left wondering why. To what effect? Why is it meaningful that these two characters are tangled up in this way?

I'm not saying there wasn't a why here. There's maybe something about the way the writers of the past live on in the writers of the present. Orrr, I dunno, a kind of archetypal experience of women and women writers being explored. I never felt, while reading, that I was really living inside any question like this, though.

I'm torn. I like a book that draws me back to it and I am drawn back in some ways. I'm just not sure if there's much of a reason to return to this book beyond enjoying the capably written unfolding of coincidence.

What do we make of the painting? Why is it important? Any theories?

Nathanimal said: What do we make of the painting? Why is it important? Any theories?

On a surface level I see it as expressing the connection between Helen Ralston and the narrator, but beyond that my thinking on the painting gets pretty fuzzy. The copyright page attributes the painting, titled Hekas, Hekas, to Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel. The title might (or might not) derive from the phrase “Hekas, hekas, este bebeloi”, which, according to some sources (e.g., the Golden Dawn crowd), was some sort of ritual incantation. It supposedly translates to “Far, far be removed the profane.” What exactly any of this has to do with Lisa Tuttle’s story I have no idea. Probably nothing. There are hints scattered within the text of My Death about the mystical and ritualistic, but nothing is very fleshed out.

I think the painting is also important as an example of the erasure of women's authorship, which is what I think the story is primarily about. Unlike with Willy Logan, the readers see that the characters do not have bad intentions and are doing something reasonable.

Cameron fits the theme of women who were overshadowed by the men in their lives.

I agree with Vanessa about the theme of this book being the erasure of women's authorship. As Amy Gentry discusses in the introduction, the main inspiration for the character of Ralston was Laura Riding. A poet in her own right, Riding is most known for her relation to Robert Graves, and her contributions to art frequently reduced to how she inspired him.

I think the "switcheroo" was a reflection of how much the narrator had come to sympathize with and identify with a woman who's art had been sidelined by those who tell the histories. When reading the biography of Logan, the narrator comments how Helen's experience was nowhere in the book, because the biographer was only interested in Logan's story. Even Ralston's fall out of the window becomes a story of Logan.

I think that the intent is maybe that, as another female artist, the narrator doesn't want to appropriate Ralston's history to serve other's purposes, as so often happens to women artists. So instead, she becomes Ralston's story herself.

If people haven't looked at the comments on this book from GR readers, there's one there from Amy Gentry. Gentry also points to an interview with her, Tuttle, and Kelly Link available on YouTube.

Whitney said: I agree with Vanessa about the theme of this book being the erasure of women's authorship.

(view spoiler)[I agree that this strand of thought continues throughout My Death, being especially prominent during its earlier portions when, for example, the narrator commences background reading in preparation for her projected Ralston biography and sees the extent to which the joint history of Ralston and Logan is almost exclusively about Willy, with Ralston’s role often reduced to the status of footnote.

While that theme never fully evaporates, I think Amy Gentry gets it right in her introduction to the NYRB edition of this book when she notes that the central relationship that Lisa Tuttle comes to focus on over the course of the novella is the one between the narrator and Ralston. Gentry seems to frame this relationship as the narrator somehow being in dialog with herself. “It is the self, not the man, that tantalizes and entraps,” she writes. Tuttle herself may be obliquely confirming this during the on-line discussion Whitney refers to, when she talks at length about how autobiographical many of her fictional characters are.

I also wonder about how best to characterize the transposition that takes between Ralston and the narrator. The narrator doesn’t seem to have much, if any, agency during the events that transpire on the island and the sequence as a whole seemed to me more sinister than benign. But maybe that’s a misreading on my part. I do feel that this is one of those books that would benefit from a re-read. (hide spoiler)]

Whitney wrote: "If people haven't looked at the comments on this book from GR readers, there's one there from Amy Gentry. Gentry also points to an interview with her, Tuttle, and Kelly Link available on YouTube."
Thanks for these resources, Whitney. As usual, I skipped the intro to avoid influencing my reading. I've been too busy with the Ishiguro monthly read (and other stuff), but will get to it and the interview.

Canavan wrote: "The narrator doesn’t seem to have much, if any, agency during the events that transpire on the island and the sequence as a whole seemed to me more sinister than benign."
That was my impression as well.

I was hoping for a less overtly supernatural outcome for the events on the island. But let me try to reread the last section over the weekend.

Thoughts on February's book?
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Sorry to drop off. Ugh. Life.

Whitney said: I agree with Vanessa about the theme of this book being the erasure of women's authorship.

Interesting. While I didn’t sense that the narrator’s connection to Ralston was based on her own erasure (the narrator has not been erased by her husband) the erasure of Helen Ralston is certainly what draws the narrator towards her and what creates the engine of the story.

The narrator is looking for a muse. There’s been a huge interest over recent decades in overshadowed women artists and writers, and every time they are brought out of the shadows they bring some of that shadow with them. They have a mystique, something about their work that is deeply individual and often idiosyncratic. I think of Frida Kahlo’s small dream-like and deeply personal self-portraits compared to Diego Rivera’s universal Marxist murals; or the one-of-a-kind oddness and uncertainty of Jane Bowles’ writing next to the highly proficient and broadly thematic writing of her husband, Paul. Ralston’s mystique, product of erasure, inspires the narrator’s imagination, the way things slightly hidden and occult do.

But though the narrator’s mystique-based connection to Ralston is similar to Logan's, it doesn't remain that way. In trying to answer my own question about the function of the painting, I remembered Logan’s Circe painting at the beginning of the book. The Logan painting and Ralston’s self-portrait contrast each other in some pretty telling ways!

Where Logan’s painting is done in vivid oils and hung in a gallery, Ralston’s is done in etherial watercolors and hidden in an attic. In Logan’s painting Ralston is superimposed with the myth of Circe, the island witch who turns men to pigs and casts them away. (Notice Odysseus watching from behind a rock, as though to emphasize that the audience of this painting is definitely male.) Meanwhile the self-portrait is a reversible illusion where the Ralston is not some mythologized representation of the island: she is the island.

This is a really uncanny set of images. The Logan painting seems to reflect the dissociation of the male lens. The self-portrait seems to represent something more like . . . embodiment. And so goes the storyline, too: the narrator goes from seeing Ralston at a remove, as Logan had, to actually becoming Ralston. She isn’t simply inspired by her muse; she is possessed by her.

Or something like that.

I’m so glad we’ve bookclubbed this. This is precisely the aftertaste I was yearning for in my first comment. I’m bumping this sucker up to four stars.

Last call for nominations for February's monthly book:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

February's poll is up:
https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/2...