Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
Thomas Disch is a name which looms large over genre fiction. His bleak (and bleakly comic) novels and short stories carved a unique path through the more experimental frontiers of science fiction and horror. His willingness to push boundaries with queer and transgressive content, a cynical worldview, and occasional twisted humor added a much-needed dash of spice to several genres. While his horror work might not be as well-known as his sci-fi (or The Brave Little Toaster, the animated movie based on one of his novellas), it’s every bit as essential. “The Roaches” marries a science fiction premise (telepathic communication with roaches) and a paranoid horror premise to explore a darkly comic fable of toxic self-acceptance and self-affirmation.
Marcia Kenwell lives a mediocre life in New York City, where she has an utter horror of roaches. She sees them everywhere, whether it’s in the basement stockroom of a job she hates, in the wake of the loathsome people around her, or lurking in the apartments she visits. It’s a feature of the horribly filthy city with its filthy people, with Marcia’s only solace being her own apartment, two cozy rooms bastioned and fortified with Black Flag and potato wedges laced with roach poison, cleaned compulsively so no bugs could survive. Her peace and solace are interrupted when the Shchapalovs, a family of immigrants, move in next to her. As her isolation crumbles, she finds an unexpected power in the ability to telepathically communicate with the hated insects, using it to lash out at everyone who annoys her.
Can self-affirmation be a toxic thing? It usually isn’t presented as such, with a lot of fiction viewing self-discovery and self-acceptance as positive. Finding out more about yourself, accepting yourself as a whole person, is usually seen as a good thing, after all. Even in horror, how many novels and short stories end with the main character finally accepting their monster-hood, something framed as a happy ending? We’re encouraged to embrace the scarier parts of ourselves, the stranger aspects of our lives, because while they may scare others, they feel lovely and natural to us. Disch, meanwhile, explores the possibility in “The Roaches” that there are elements of our personalities that perhaps deserve to be worked on, interrogated, and perhaps not integrated with one’s life.
Which brings us to Marcia. Marcia reaches the darkly comic end of “The Roaches” having tried to murder the Shchapalovs using her telepathic control over cockroaches (she relents at the last possible second and settles for getting them evicted) and inviting roaches to writhe and surge over her body. Her repulsion became an obsession, and that obsession became a thing she loved. It’s hard to miss the self-acceptance narrative here, with Marcia spending most of the short story utterly horrified by cockroaches only to become their queen and mother as she happily lets them crawl all over her. It doesn’t feel affirming, as it comes after she tries to murder people just because she saw them as loud foreigners who didn’t clean their apartment properly. After watching a deeply unsympathetic person forcing someone to suffocate on roaches, it’s difficult to turn around and applaud them for finally embracing their essential awfulness.
Further illustrating the issue is where and when the roaches start popping up: Whenever Marcia feels repulsed or sickened by something, she sees cockroaches. Within moments of describing New York apartments as filthy, roach-infested holes in the wall, Marcia wonders why people can’t just keep their apartments clean and follows this up with the statement that “they must be Puerto Rican.” It’s clear she also reads a ton of tabloids, as her rant in the paragraphs following her racist comment about Puerto Ricans mentions that every day she reads in the paper about women getting stabbed or mutilated, a tactic long used by papers like the New York Post to drive sales by publishing lurid stories about women getting murdered so they could also sell their conservative worldview that New York was a filthy crime-ridden hellhole that needed a “cleanup.” Her “favorite aunt” sees her off from the small hometown from with the parting declaration that New York is a filthy place full of cockroaches, something that probably leaves Marcia subconsciously looking for the insects at every turn.
That dichotomy between filth and cleanliness is also present in Marcia’s internal monologue. She wonders why people “don’t just clean up after themselves,” and sees her apartment as a clean and cozy space. It’s interesting that her space is suddenly invaded by roaches the day her physical space is suddenly invaded by the Shchapalovs. Suddenly her apartment building is playing host to a bunch of people she finds repulsive and foreign, and the roaches come flooding in. The roaches are the parts of Marcia she shouldn’t embrace, the repulsive aspects of her personality and tendency to look down on others (including her own landlady) that make her a worse human being. It’s no surprise that by the end, she’s fully embraced her own repugnancy. In a way, it’s a common theme in urban horror—the city is a hellhole that grinds you down until you accept it, it crushes you to death, or you become one with the awful parts of it and perpetuate them on others.
By framing this downward spiral as a self-affirmation story, Disch pokes fun at both the idea of “city as relentless hellhole” and the idea of “embracing monster-hood.” “The Roaches” even has aspects of more self-affirming stories, with Marcia first experiencing revulsion, only to have the revulsion turn to obsession and finally love and acceptance. She does learn to accept the parts of herself that scare her, it’s just those parts really should scare her, since she uses them to drive people she hates out of her building via attempted murder. Rather than find positive aspects within herself, Marcia instead embraces her negative aspects, reveling in them and placing herself above others because of them. That personal metamorphosis is the “horrible thing” that the narrator alludes to happening at the beginning of the story, rather than being covered by a living, breathing carpet of roaches. Marcia is clearly happy and comfortable by the ending. The reader shouldn’t be.
That discomfort is essential to “The Roaches.” Everyone has things they can work on; there are always toxic traits that need to be addressed and unlearned. It’s easy to think “this is who I am,” or “if people can’t handle me, then that’s their problem,” but some attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors do need to change in order to coexist with others. Some individuals revel in their awfulness. Many even go on to harm others, just like Marcia does. By twisting the self-acceptance narrative to show the birth of a truly repulsive person, Disch uses his dark horror-comedy to show that even the worst people are capable of misguided self-affirmation instead of necessary change, to the detriment of everyone around them.
And now to turn it over to you: What was your first brush with Thomas M. Disch? Was Marcia’s journey of self-acceptance as awful as it seemed? Is this truly a story about toxic traits, or is there another possible meaning? (Also, has anyone played Amnesia: The Dark Descent before?) Please join us next time when we’ll be discussing “Bright Segment” by science fiction luminary, coiner of Sturgeon’s revelation, and “Killdozer!” author Theodore Sturgeon.
