Who Goes There?

Joyce Carol Oates is the kind of author who quite possibly would never have appeared in the genre magazines if not for F&SF, what with its classy exterior and appeal with non-genre writers. Indeed Oates is one of the most celebrated living non-genre writers, having won the National Book Award for her novel them, as well as the O. Henry Award multiple times for her short fiction. More relevant to this blog is that a surprisingly large portion of her output is horror, especially at short length. She’s been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award multiple times and even won the Stoker for her non-supernatural horror novel Zombie. Even perhaps her most controversial novel, Blonde, whilst ostensibly historical fiction, could be classified as horror. She’s one of only two female contributors to the seminal horror anthology Dark Forces. “In Shock” is one of Oates’s horror short stories, and is arguably supernatural, although it doesn’t so much delve into the supernatural as strongly allude to it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 2000 issue of F&SF, which is on the Archive. Despite getting a Stoker nomination, this story doesn’t seem to have been reprinted anywhere, at least if ISFDB is being accurate; with a mostly non-genre author like Oates it can be hard to tell.

Enhancing Image

Rachael is a divorcee in her mid-thirties who has lost a husband as well as a child. She got married to L_ (we’re only told the first letter of his name, as seems to be the case with all the men in Rachael’s life) and got pregnant when she was about 25, which in those days was not unusual. Unfortunately Rachael miscarried some months into her pregnancy and her relationship with L_ deteriorated—not that their relationship would’ve necessarily worked out had the child lived. Anyway, it’s been about a decade since then and she at least tries to think she’s moved on from all that. “She was a poet and a translator and she traveled a good deal and she’d ceased grieving for what was lost, and irretrievable, as she’d ceased being a woman, a wife, a mother-to-be.” Despite the third-person narration telling us Rachael had moved on, this is pretty obviously not true; if anything her past trauma seems to be the only thing she’s capable of thinking about, if dips into her stream of consciousness are anything to go by. Stream-of-consciousness narration is a pretty unusual technique in the realm of genre fiction, but it’s something Oates has a penchant for; more specifically it very much reads as Modernist in the Faulkner mode, in that we have italicized and unpunctuated bursts of thought that come and go without warning. The result is a bodyless and relatively sober narrator clashing with a delirious internal monologue. Get ready for a lot of sentence fragments.

This is essentially a story about a woman who’s become trapped in her own past. Rachael’s sense of identity has been stripped by her trauma to the point where she doesn’t even perceive herself as really a woman (a kind of insecurity that’s sadly a real-life phenomenon for women who have had miscarriages), such that her gender becomes almost arbitrary. The irony is that because she has lost so much faith in her value as a woman her gender has become a fixation; she doesn’t believe in her own womanhood, yet can’t stop thinking about it. This all comes to a head when she sees a preteen boy bicycling in the wake of a storm, the boy narrowly avoiding crashing because of tree debris, and she sees the boy about to bike over a pole wire that’s been knocked out, such that if the boy made contact with it he could be electrocuted and killed. Rachael stops this would-be accident, but in the process is electrocuted herself and knocked unconscious. She’s taken to the hospital where she’s told she’s lucky to be in alive, only coming out of it with some bruises and a case of shock. She’s told she had gone into shock, but the symptoms should wear off. Little does she know these symptoms are about to get much worse. The most disconcerting thing is that she asks hospital staff if there was a boy at the scene, only to be told there was no boy and no bike; yet she’s convinced she must’ve seen him. It was such a vivid sight, yet nobody who was around recalls there being a boy.

There are a few plausible options here, although Oates doesn’t give us an easy answer that would indicate any of them. It’s possible that Rachael had experienced a vivid visual hallucination and had imagined the boy; that the boy is a ghost, maybe even a manifestation of the Rachael’s unborn child (the boy is about as old as the child would’ve been); or that Rachael really did see a boy, save him, but then died in the process, in which case we have a nightmarish afterlife scenario. At the very least the boy is obviously meant to represent the child Rachael had lost symbolically. The accident is also undoubtedly a turning point in Rachael’s life, since she’s recovering from shock and the world around her seems to have gotten stranger since before the accident. Her trauma, which previously was kept internal, has been driven into the outside world, either literally or as a result of her mental illness. She meets up with some elderly neighbors of hers, the Chathams, asking if they’d seen the boy that day, and of course Mrs. Chatham says she didn’t. Mr. Chatham is an invalid, groaning loudly in another room, but Mrs. Chatham ignores this, as if her husband were not casually in pain. “How was it possible that Mrs. Chatham didn’t hear him?” Even by the standards of the elderly, Mrs. Chatham is an odd one, in that she’s oddly detached from everything. She might be a manifestation of what Rachael could become in a few decades: a jaded old lady.

(Safe to say that despite having just turned 86 [happy birthday] Oates is very much not jaded. Have you seen her Twitter?)

“In Shock” starts as realistic, if also Modernist and Faulkneresque as mentioned before, but after the accident it takes a sharp turn towards the mythological. On top of the mystery of the boy Rachael can’t stop thinking about Greek mythology, especially Hades and Cerberus, that three-headed hound who gatekept the underworld. This is what I mean by the story alluding to the supernatural without every unambiguously entering that territory, because of course we never see Hades or enter that gate which Cerberus is protecting; but what we do get is the next best thing. Modern industry, coal and electricity, become symbols of a kind of underworld in the wake of Rachael’s accident, such that she starts imagining herself as living in a kind of purgatory. She’s also into comparative literature and said to be very well-read (not that L_ gave her credit for it), so it makes sense that she would turn to literature as a way of coping with her trauma. There’s another character, Morris B_ (often called just B_), an older man and a professor of antiquity whom Rachael very much likes, possibly even loves. Despite having known each other for years they never entered a relationship, in what you might call a near miss. When they meet again following the accident Rachael is reluctant to tell B_ what had happened to her, and is also repulsed by what she now realizes is his aging body, his skin “appeared finely cracked like the glaze of ancient pottery, and a starburst of a lurid red birthmark was newly visible through his thinning hair.” She almost can’t stand the sight of him. What should be a nice reunion, to take her mind off what she’s just been through, has become rotten.

A possible point of inspiration for this story, although it’s never brought up in the text and I can’t even guarantee Oates has seen it, is the cult horror movie Carnival of Souls. Indeed “In Shock” almost feels like a remake of that movie, although I can’t guarantee this is the case and in all likelihood there’s no correspondence between the two. For those of you who aren’t into micro-budget indie horror movies from the ’60s, Carnival of Souls is about a woman who goes joy-riding with her friends when their car falls off a bridge and she emerges as the sole survivor. She moves, takes up playing the organ for local churches, gets a new apartment, but finds that ghosts are now following her seemingly everywhere she goes. We get many stories about places that are haunted, but only rarely do we get people who are haunted. Rachael, like the doomed heroine of Carnival of Souls, is herself haunted—by symbols if not actual ghosts. She meets up with a friend, Thea, who of course is also an academic, along with Thea’s daughter Cecie, who is also Rachael’s goddaughter. The meeting goes horribly wrong when Rachael sees (or thinks she sees) horrific scars on Cecie’s neck and is understandably (at least from her perspective) panicked about this, only for Thea to deny the scars are even there and kick Rachael out of the house. The true horror of this scene lies not in the child’s possible injury but in Rachael experiencing that which every person living with mental illness must endure: not being believed. The supernatural is more symbolic than literal, a stand-in for some sort of mental distress, like the seemingly unkillable dog in Faulkner’s “The Hound” being a stand-in for the protagonist’s guilt.

There Be Spoilers Here

This is a hard story to spoil since it ends inconclusively; any of semblance of a plot sort of evaporates by the end of it. This is not exactly a negative criticism. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to end this kind of story without giving an answer that would inevitably undermine the mysteriousness of it. Why do you think David Lynch presented us a mystery in Mulholland Drive and then proceeded to never solve it? Joyce probably doesn’t intend for us to solve the mystery but rather to give us an experience—a glimpse into the mind of someone following a near-death experience. I know what that’s like. In March this year I had an accident wherein I seemed to have choked on peanut butter (of all things) and passed out in the kitchen. My throat had cleared but I lost consciousness and landed flat on my face. I must’ve been out for only a minute or less but I had these dreams that were horribly vivid, and which seemed to last much longer than the allotted time. I was driven to the ER and spent a few hours there, where doctors found that aside from the injury to my face (pretty nearly lost a tooth there) and very low blood pressure I was fine to go home. I was, of course, also delirious. I remember almost nothing from that night. I don’t even remember being driven to the ER. I feel like I’ve not been quite the same since then. But then who is, after something like that. It’s that transformative state, of being violently thrown out of normalcy, that the story captures.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry if this seemed less like a review and more like an autobiographical tangent, but for what it’s worth I think Oates would approve of the digressions; after all, they do somewhat relate to the story. Sometimes the story is not really the point; sometimes what matters more is what you bring to the story. Again, apologies I missed this month’s editorial, but luckily I already know what I’ll be writing about next month so keep an eye out for that. As for the Oates, it’s an evocative short story that straddles the line between the psychological and the supernatural, understandably inspiring the Rob Alexander cover for that issue of F&SF. I do sometimes get the impression with Oates’s writing that it can be experimental for the sake of itself, but that’s not the case here.

See you next time.