Vicken is a worn down, disenchanted EMT who wants to end his life by drowning in the Saint Lawrence river. After years of depression, he has decided to take the Montreal metro to the final stop, walk to the river and throw himself in. He believes it is the only way to end his pain, having tried everything else, having reached this final stage of desperation. But when he steps off the subway train and tries to leave the metro station, he finds he is trapped in a never-ending maze of rooms, corridors, underground caverns and spaces with no sign of an exit at all. Has reality suddenly altered? Is he still alive? Has he died and come here? Is this purgatory or is this hell?
Or is this all in his head? But then, isn’t everything important?
In their first novel, Coup de Grâce, multi-disciplinary artist and editor of Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror, Sofia Ajram has created an incredibly powerful brutalist, labyrinthine subterranean world that acts as a physical manifestation of protagonist Vicken’s depression. The architecture of the train station is of “ludicrous proportions,” in that way that brutalism is: “monolithic in its oppression. Heavy. A series of underground interiors with atriums so tall as to give simultaneous cases of claustrophobia and agoraphobia.” Ajram has also created an equally powerful story of the struggles against suicidal ideation, and the utter loneliness of modern day existence.
Coup de Grâce feels like a Piranesi for the hopeful but depressed, medicated but painfully aware of late stage capitalist greed millennial age.
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Coup de Grâce
Depression can be a transitional place, much like train stations. Neither is a place anyone wants to be trapped in; neither is a space that allows for growth or light. In Vicken’s world, neither is a place that he can escape. Loneliness, alienation, the feeling of being caged with your demons permeates the narrative, with Vicken telling us clearly that a “sickness in the mind is… poisonous, can devour the body the same as a cancer. Trauma does not always carry big battle wounds. Sometimes it appears in the broad daylight of cold wars fought in silence.” And sometimes it appears in concrete, solid and unyielding and barring you from moving on as much as you may want to, even if you are given the necessary tools: “With a bit of radical acceptance/ self compassion/behavioural therapy/mindfulness medication and the right combination of diet and pills, you, too, can find the fucking exit to this place! Are you buying any of this shit?”
As Vicken wanders the nightmare of the metro station, with no sign of light, no sense of time or location, he realises that there is something or someone else in there with him. A presence, that makes itself felt as a “distorted wail… a whisper. Tickling my brain…[it] can’t possibly be something human; a persistent susurrant sound of some mighty engine with no breath, boring into my brain like a drill gun.” Is this a sentient being, a consciousness of some sort, or the low decibel thrum of anxiety, fear, existential dread? He is forced to contend with his nightmares, survive his anxieties, though he knows how ironic this is, given he had set out to end his life.
Ajram’s writing skills are perfect to tell this story. Lush, dark, striking and (absolutely appropriately) overwrought at times, the language perfectly encapsulates the cynicism of Vicken, his intelligence and understanding of the modern world. Sardonic and poetic at the same time, the entire narrative is ripe with both metaphor and mood. “Insomnia pulses … like jet lag, like an unspeakably large hunger that no feast could ever satiate.” The infinite spaces of the station and Vicken’s brain are a “maze to go mad in,” an “endless enfilade of rooms come, cells branching off halls. Straight and clean as open wrists.” The landscape inspires fear and wonder as “awe and overwhelm kiss each of [his] eyelids.”
The use of liminal spaces in horror, particularly abandoned places of transition, be they corridors or elevators or train stations, is a trope frequently seen in visual mediums—cinema, TV, games—but not often written about to the extent that Ajram has done in Coup de Grâce. The constant feeling of unease that comes with being trapped underground, with having no sense of time or direction or any understanding of why you are where you are, is in itself enough to create anxiety and fear. But Ajram takes it further by adding in a mix of cosmic body horror as well. In one instance, Vicken encounters a cavern which he describes as a “deathbed hallucination,” a spectacle that makes him feel “the creeping fingers of insanity across [his] skull because, along with everything else [he] can see… in a confusing ever-shifting kaleidoscopic acid trip—the impossible” exists.
Ajram plays with form, too, placing the onus on the reader, in a way that makes the reading of the text as immersive as possible. The fourth wall is broken multiple times, with Vicken directly talking to the reader, acknowledging us into existence, drawing us further into the narrative.
I feel like I’ve completely lost my compass. I don’t know what to trust anymore.
You? Sure.
Grant me that palliative cocktail of words. Go on, then. We’ll violate performance
convention and, for good measure, I’ll even try to believe you.
Without any spoilers, the final chapters have certain elements of the Choose Your Own Adventure format that mean we have an impact on Vicken, that the space between the story and the reader also become porous, liminal in its own way. As readers, we are complicit in Vicken’s fate, just as we are in the systems that bind us, the society that creates us, nurtures us, destroys us.
Coup de Grâce translates to deathblow, the final shot that ends the suffering of someone who is mortally wounded, a decisive action that finishing something that has progressively got worse, which is exactly what we are forced to do, as we watch this fever dream of a novel unfold. In under 150 pages, Sofia Ajram has created a poignant, frightening wonder of a narrative, one that forces the reader to bear witness to the unbearable heartbreaking beauty and fragility of the human experience.
Coup de Grâce is published by Titan Books.
