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.
Happy Women in Horror Month—it’s time to talk about Joyce Carol Oates.
Joyce Carol Oates is something of a controversial figure these days. In the present moment, she’s known mainly for her infamous social media posts. For this reason, it’s difficult to reconcile the feminist author who expanded literary fiction immensely with the unfettered id she unleashes into the online arena. In fairness to Oates, her work doesn’t usually reflect the unfortunate tendencies of her Twitter account. She’s one of the elder stateswomen of horror, and has even edited American Gothic Tales, an anthology of gothic work through a much more modern and American lens. Her bibliography even includes some classic works in transgressive and gothic horror, like Zombie and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Over her career she’s had a penchant for crafting literary works that wear their influences on their sleeves while also making them her own, refusing to confine herself to a single genre or idea.
The contradictions of its author aside, “Night-Side” remains a fascinating work in continuance of this vein—a dark and existential epistolary story dealing with trauma, guilt, and dread. Its use of the diary format channels the older gothic horror tradition while offering a fascinating illustration of inner landscapes, ending on an ambiguous note that manages to stick the landing by not trailing off midsentence or ending on what one fellow critic called the “now I must” ending frequently found in more ambiguous epistolary stories. Instead, Oates opts for a more disquieting ending—in her tale of the parapsychologist Jarvis and his sneering skeptical friend Perry Moore, and their horrifying encounters with the Quincy-based medium Mrs. A—, the answers are concrete, but ultimately shadowy. It’s clear there’s something beyond death that horrifies the two protagonists, even if it’s not clear what that something is.
“Night-Side” is downright brutal in the way it explores the pursuit of its existential questions. While ambiguous, the central premise told through its tale of spirit mediums and spiritual researchers essentially boils down to two men’s spiraling guilt and existential collapse because it turns out that the afterlife might be just an endless void of the unconscious where the dead call out to the living through mediums. It takes the premise of “what if the spiritualists and mediums were right” and turns it into a work of existential horror that foreshadows a similar idea Stephen King took up in his novel Revival (though King’s story leans more toward cosmic horror with its eldritch Mother and her sacrifices). “Night-side” presupposes that the afterlife is further torment with no relief; grappling with one’s mortality and place in the universe is framed as a path to constant existential dread.
This is further illustrated by the breakdown of Jarvis’ friend and colleague Perry Moore, whose implied romantic relationship with one of his male students, Brandon—and Moore’s subsequent coverup of his role in Brandon’s suicide (Moore destroyed the suicide note implicating him in Brandon’s downfall)—eventually lead to madness and death. Unable to process the fact that the young man he led on to the point of despair and self-destruction is out there in the dark, crying out for him in “a universe of strangers,” Moore snaps, seeing this as incontrovertible evidence of the beyond. Eventually, Moore spirals so far that he becomes disheveled, frequently breaks down during meetings of the Society, and finally dies of a stroke caused by this extreme mental and emotional strain. Unable to understand the kind of man he was, and unable to forgive himself for the damage he’d wrought due to his internalized homophobia, the knowledge that “there is no death, there are no dead” sends him screaming over the edge. It’s an internal collapse framed existentially—Moore’s deeds, grief, internalized homophobia, and guilt are his problems, but the fact that he condemned someone to eternal torment is what kills him.
Jarvis deals with the existential crisis in an entirely different way: by seeking rational explanations for the evidence their spiritual research has uncovered. While his attempts to hold on to his sanity by way of increasingly tenuous explanations for the things he witnesses (he’s prepared to believe in telepathy) are ultimately found wanting, it’s a way to find comfort in the physical world and attempt to understand the spiritual world rather than abandon himself to it entirely. His horror at Moore’s downfall infects him with Moore’s existential paranoia, but desperately clinging to rationality and the ensuing jargon-laden conversations he engages in seems to offer him some protection from the terrifying land of spirits floating outside the realm of the conscious. When he slams face-first into a haunting, in the form of Moore visiting him as a sleep paralysis demon, Jarvis’ first instinct is to run away with his family to Maine, fearing a psychological episode. While he refuses to believe Moore is right, the sleep paralysis haunting, Mrs. A—’s uncanny accuracy, and the recurring nightmares involving swimming through a sea of mud give enough weight to the claims of Moore and Jarvis’ philosopher colleague that he’s forced to allow doubt to creep in.
Ultimately, “Night-Side” uses the gothic to illustrate how these two men deal with their burgeoning existential crises and the aspects of themselves they seek to repress. Moore’s closely guarded homosexuality and the ensuing guilt over Brandon’s death eventually lead him to abandon everything (even his rightful skepticism of obvious frauds) to spirituality, and eventually to die of a stroke when his brain gives out under the strain. Meanwhile, Jarvis’ repression and drive to seek scientific answers lead him to an equally terrifying place when Moore’s ghost starts barging into every open mind he can find looking for Jarvis, causing collateral damage even before his former friend and colleague refuses to acknowledge his spirit. In the end, neither of them end up being correct—the “night-side” full of the dead is too vast, too unknowable, and simply too much for either of them to come to grips with. Their rigid sense of belief eventually destroys them both in their own unique ways. It’s a reminder that one should not try to force every aspect of reality and experience to conform to one’s set of rigid beliefs and assumptions, and that people contain multitudes out there beyond the boundaries of conscious thought.
And now to turn it over to you. For those of you who’ve read the story, is Mrs. A— a real medium or a fraud, and does it matter? Have any of you ever attended a séance? And for those who’ve read the full Oates oeuvre, what’s your favorite of her short stories? (I personally recommend (blank), Oates’ contribution to the anthology Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow.)
And please join us in two weeks when we explore further unsettlement with Walter de la Mare and “Seaton’s Aunt.”
