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A Manhattan Ghost Story
by TM Wright
(Telos Press, $10.00, 276 pages, paperback, 2006, ISBN: 1-84583-048-2.)
Review by William P Simmons
 From
its origins in oral folk belief and the quasi-religious story patterns
of cross-comparative mythology, to its subsequent refinement as written
literature (an art form more concerned with refined emotional effect
than the general story patterns of oral lore), the ghost story has long
served as a symbolic vehicle which entertains while reflecting the apprehensions,
secret desires, and nightmares of humankind, regardless of age or era.
Possessing the desire, symbolic language, and themes to explore the
unknown vistas of our exterior worlds as well as our own dark hearts,
the proper supernatural story -- a narrative provoking intellectual/spiritual
inquiry as well as inviting emotional stimuli -- asks readers to question
their individual 'and' cultural beliefs. Rare is the story that employs
character and sense of place, theme and plot to such effect that ghosts
of external nature (and Nature itself) exist side-by-side with the less
palatable, albeit more threatening ghosts of mind. Rarer still is the
author whose approach, themes, and style evoke a sense of wonder found
not outside of parameters of normality but from within them. TM Wright
is such an author, and A Manhattan Ghost Story is perhaps one
of his most tragic yet elegantly written odes to human pain and love.
Traditional supernatural fiction, from JS Le Fanu and MR James to such
modern sensations as Stephen King, often focus on threats from outside
the commonly accepted parameters of logic, science, or the seemingly
'everyday'. First a context of everyday logic and 'reality' is evoked,
captured by realistic setting, characters, and rules of logic. Only
then are elements of the supernatural or fantastic allowed to gradually
slip in, throwing an ordered world into a chaos that is then, predictably
enough, reaffirmed/saved at the story's end. Wright on the other hand,
with all the depth of insight and skill of a true artist, isn't content
to operate along such classical structures. Rather than depict a banal
re-hashing of so-called logical, objective everyday reality his stories
tend instead to question the very emotional, intellectual, and spiritual
definitions of reality in general.
Employing evocative language, subtlety of approach, and a unique sense
of the hidden truths lurking just outside the everyday, Wright's fiction
questions Nature (both our own and the external Nature around us), our
understandings of existence, and the very fragility of the very tool
of perception. To put it another way, physical ghosts may indeed haunt
the shattered worlds of Wright's deeply introspective, empathetic characters,
lending fright and fascination to narratives as grounded in philosophical
speculation as they are in surface terror, but, more frightening (and
certainly more challenging to pull off effectively as a writer), there
is no re-established construct of Reality upon which the supernatural
can intrude -- because there is no single definition or portrait of
reality first maintained.
An economically written and deeply felt nightmare of atmospheric subtlety
and stark spiritual horror, suggesting a refined sense of occult powers
and supernatural mysteries lurking at the very edges -- or, more often,
within -- the fabric of 'reality', Wright's elegant visions expose borderland
moments in the lives of characters who through their own folly or, worse,
through no fault of their own, discover that preconceived notions of
existence are a surface illusion, and that the truth, whatever that
mystifying presence may indeed be, is a thin onion peel away from the
woken mind. Moments of intellect or emotional overflow -- those times
when the supernatural is encountered -- provoke awe and invite a new
sensitivity to the sublime possibilities anchored in the everyday. The
very commonplace if 'hidden' existence of the dead -- and their confused
relationship with/proximity to the living -- infuses Wright's novel
A Manhattan Ghost Story with pathos and tenderness at the very
same time that it frightens. Reprinted in a new attractive edition from
Telos, and featuring an introduction by the author, this is a novel
about ghosts, about us.
Depicting a world full of ghosts -- an everyday reality of various
possible shifting realities --Wright creates in this novel one of his
characteristically subtle yet chilling refutations of logic, evoking
fear not only from a land populated continuously by the dead who don't
realize it, and the living who may just as well be, but also by throwing
into uncertainty the very nature of existence ... and our ability to
perceive it. Abner Cray is one of those shadow-land folks cursed with
the ability to see, feel, and interact with the dead, and is in turn
tormented by both the spirits of the dead and by the constantly shifting
nature of reality -- itself largely a meaningless world when subverted
by Wright. It is this sense of no common ground, no safety zone of logic
or faith, science or meaning, no objective reasoning. This lends Wright's
horror fiction the resonance of absurdism, saying much by seemingly
saying little. The horrible relationships and psychic gifts that Cray
discovers in A Manhattan Ghost Story are nowhere as frightening,
revolutionary, or tragic, as what he shows us about the nature of love.
Not constricted by any one narrative tradition or formula, his characters
take him into realms of the visionary terror story wherein there is
no pre-established order of logic, science, or rationale; no safety
in conventional philosophy or religion. In this novella Wright keeps
his essential mysteries unknowable because the process of 'experiencing'
them is more important, in the end, than deciphering them. Something,
we are assured, waits just outside our five senses and intellectual
capabilities, something outside nature or logic, like a shadow skipping
by the eye on a dark night in your living room, with all the dark miracles
of Hades waiting only inches from your grasp: this is the feeling that
the novel instils, these the songs of the damned and damnable, reaffirming
the importance of structure and originality in a genre softened by slapdash
sensationalism.
Wright's predilection is for scathingly intimate characterization and
evocative atmosphere. His novels are often less about plot than mood,
holding the power and effect -- the dream logic -- of a nightmare. This
is certainly the case in A Manhattan Ghost Story, wherein a man
who discovers he can communicate with the dead who populate our world
although both they (and we) may not recognize them (or, often, ourselves).
Wright is as concerned with the universal and quite terrifying quest
for love as he is with 'supernatural' shades. In Cray's struggle to
come to terms with his ability, himself, and a world whose borders are
shattered, the dead seeping through like murky water, is the even greater
quest to face -- and attempt understanding of -- love. A quest that
is futile, pitiable, and manic. A quest doomed to failure.
Wright's haunting world of pain and loss, redemption and heartache,
is as steeped in the banality of the everyday as it is electrically
charged with the dead. His characters, and the world visited, is neither
one nor the other, but both. Wright's Manhattan is full of dead folk
who don't realize it, and members of the living who may as well be dead;
many are already dead emotionally and spiritually if not physically.
Love-- that central theme in Wright's work -- is shown with the same
terrifying honesty as a cemetery plot, honestly; love is as much a funeral
shroud and beast as it is ecstasy, obsessive and destructive, hungry
and fulfilling. Capable of cutting into the soul no less harsh than
a razor splitting skin. All this makes Wright's frightening, fatalistic
fables undeniably, painfully human. His characters mirror the authenticity
and emotional overflow of Edgar Wallace's prose-poems while going still
further into secret stories of lives lived, lost, and regretted. Lives
haunted. As often as classic revenants stalk street and dream, the primary
specters of this novel masterpiece not only of genre but American literature
are guilt and regret -- internal phantoms that cripple the presents
of people unable to free themselves from the past. Broken futures and
broken promises share the stage with broken hearts.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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