Who Goes There?

Given that his career has stretched over half a century, and that he’s still active in fandom, I feel like I shouldn’t have to go much into Robert Silverberg. Author, editor, and fan personality, he’s one of those names that comes up a lot if you’re really getting into the history of the field. He started out in the ’50s and while he was super-prolific early on, it wasn’t until the late ’60s that his writing ascended to another level, earning him several awards in the process. When people talk about Silverberg they often refer to that late ’60s and early ’70s period, when he was at his most intense and experimental, while still being incredibly productive. Arguably his single finest novel, Dying Inside, came out of that fruitful period, and quite shamefully he did not get a Hugo or Nebula out of it.

As revered as Silverberg’s late ’60s/early ’70s period is, I do have a soft spot for ’80s Silverberg—a time when he took a bit of a break from writing novels and focused his passion more on short fiction, seemingly relaxing after the commercial success of Lord Valentine’s Castle. Genre historians don’t pay as much attention to this era of Silverberg, apparently because it’s not as demanding or anguished as his work from a decade prior, but its maturity and often calm self-assuredness is why I like it. “Not Our Brother” is a tale of terror that probably would’ve been more savage had it been written by a younger Silverberg, but it’s still an effective cautionary tale about the parasitic nature of tourism.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1982 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine, which is on the Archive. If you want a source that’s both more readable and legit then good news, “Not Our Brother” was reprinted in Lightspeed, which you can read online for free. So you have no excuse!

Enhancing Image

Halperin is an independently wealthy man (he says at one point he makes money through “real estate,” although it’s unclear if he’s an agent or struck gold on an investment) who is really into collecting masks from exotic cultures. And I mean really into it. He travels to San Simón, a village in Mexico so obscure that Spanish is not even the villagers’ primary language, on the recommendation of Guzmán López, an antiquities dealer who of course shares Haplerin’s fondness for collecting. Guzmán knows the ways of the land and warns Halperin in advance that while the village’s yearly festivities are well worth observing, the village itself is very much not accustomed to outsiders. “Tourists don’t go there,” he says. “The road is terrible and the only hotel is a Cucaracha Hilton—five rooms, straw mattresses.” There is one other thing about the village that Guzmán is not totally upfront about discussing, but the setup is that Halperin is here for a rather unique festival, around the Day of the Dead.

Even for someone who has traveled a fair bit, the trip is still rough going for our hapless protagonist, who up to this point had stayed in more tourist-friendly (i.e., urban) parts of Mexico. To enter San Simón is almost like entering a dark and undiscovered corner of the world—back even to a Mexico that existed in pre-Christian times. “To come out of the pink-and-manicured Disneyland of plush Acapulco into this primitive wilderness was to make a journey five hundred years back in time.” Something Silverberg and I share is our immense fondness for Joseph Conrad, and it’s here that he evokes the metaphorical journey backward in time as written in Heart of Darkness. Now if you’ve read Heart of Darkness then you know it can certainly be problematic, but it’s also an effective and beautifully written anti-colonial tract. “Not Our Brother” smacks of bring written by a privileged white dude, but it’s also clearly working as criticism—possibly even self-criticism—of the affluent white European mindset that the world is your oyster and you’re free to take what you want.

While reading “Not Our Brother” I kept thinking about how indigenous readers would take it, since it reads as anti-colonial but from the colonizer’s perspective. No doubt in an ideal world such a story about a hidden part of Mexico would be written by a Mexican author, but this was 1982 and what the hell, Jews like Silverberg weren’t even considered “proper” white until a ways into the 20th century. You take what you can get. What makes things more difficult is that while the narration is in third-person, it sort of bleeds into Halperin’s thoughts, or maybe it’s the other way around. When Halperin enters the village and struggles to get even a word out of the locals he at one point thinks of them as “alien as Martians.” Then he corrects himself and considers that in this scenario he would be the Martian—a stranger who has come to Earth, but not bearing gifts. Halperin’s xenophobia is a character flaw, but it’s downplayed and not given as much attention as what turns out to be a kleptomania problem.

Sorry, I’m getting distracted slightly.

Getting used to this village seems like a lost cause, but then suddenly we’re introduced to Ellen Chambers, a fellow tourist. “She was about thirty, with close-cut dark hair and bright, alert eyes, attractive, obviously American,” so the narrator tells us, which is true enough; a Canadian would never have snuck up on Halperin like that. Ellen says the villagers aren’t hostile so much as shy around outsiders, since they come by so rarely. What are the odds then that there would be two Americans in this middle-of-nowhere part of the world? Indeed what are the odds. Halperin is a bit of a fool but he’s not totally blind, as he can sense that there’s something unusual about Ellen, thought he can’t put his finger on it. Like your typical horror protagonist, Halperin is a materialist who believes he lives in a world that is essentially godless and devoid of supernatural shenanigans. I myself am an atheist and you, the reader, are probably more or less in the same boat in the sense that you probably don’t believe in ghosts or demons or anything like that. Yet it’s funny: when we read tales of the supernatural we suddenly become god-fearing people—superstitious without skipping a beat. We can infer that something is wrong with Ellen by her behavior and by how inexplicable her appearance is; the difference between us and the schmuck we’re following is that we know we’re reading fiction.

Halperin’s hesitancy around Ellen that he can barely articulate will ultimately save him, but he’s also too unaware that he’s inside a horror story teo take in all the red flags. For one he should really consider the consequences of stealing decorative masks from the hotel. The funny thing about “Not Our Brother” is that the big reveal is so blatantly telegraphed (to the point where it’s impossible for me to not allude to it, even now) that we start to think the thing with Ellen might be a red herring, and thus we look toward the masks as harbingers of doom. We don’t know if the masks are cursed or what, but Halperin has to try to pretty hard to not, say, steal one of these things from his hotel room. Luckily he has a case of conscience. “He was a collector, not a thief. But these masks were gorgeous.” Silverberg rather implicitly is asking us: What’s the difference between a collector and a thief? Is it ever right to take cultural artifacts and put them in some museum hundreds or thousands of miles away, especially without the owner’s knowledge? Taking one of the masks home as a “souvenir” is a bad idea morally, but because we know we’re dealing with a world that involves vengeful or devious spirits that adds another layer to the tension.

The night of the village festival is approaching, and Guzmán tells our hapless protagonist about “amo tokinwan,” spirits who, depending on their mood, can be either benevolent or mischievous—or worse. These spirits are rather ghoulish, and can take on the form of people for one reason or another, during festivities. We of course expect one of these spirits to show up, assuming one hasn’t already appeared already, but most likely hidden under one of many elaborate masks. Amo tokinwan means “not our brother” in Nahuatl, and it not being Spanish (Nahuatl being the villagers’ primary language) only reinforces the notion that these customs are rooted in something that might be even older than Christianity. I’m not sure how much research Silverberg put into this story and I’m not even slightly an expert on this part of the world, so unfortunately I sort of have to take his work for it. If someone who is accustomed to rural parts of Mexico could hit me up and tell me if Silverberg is full of shit, that’d be cool. But now we’re getting to the climax, and just in time!

There Be Spoilers Here

That Ellen is one of these spirits does not come as a surprise; even the cover for this issue of Twilight Zone Magazine alludes to Ellen’s true nature, with her face being iolated and weirdly artificial-looking as if it were a mask. Which in a sense it is. Ellen’s human form is but a mirage, which Halperin finds out almost too late. The reveal is super-predictable, which is my big criticism of this story and something which stopped me from getting too into it, but it does make ironic sense. Of course the one person who presents a threat to Halperin is someone who doesn’t look like she’s one of the natives; that Halperin takes shelter in the one fellow tourist makes his near-death experience with her almost read as karmic. Lucky for him that he merely get into some hot foreplay because Ellen can really have her way with him (and it is both an erotically charged and hallucinatory scene), as Guzmán and a few villagers arrive just in time to scare off the spirit. Apparently the spirit had sucked out the soul of some American woman who had come to the village before and taken on her likeness.

The ending can almost read like an anti-climax given Halperin comes out of it fine, but it’s also made clear that his brush with the supernatural traumatized him and, perhaps, taught him to not tread where he doesn’t belong. “He buys only through galleries and does not travel much any more,” so the narrator tells us at the very end. I’m sure Silverberg considered killing off Halperin at the end, and had he written the story a decade earlier he probably would’ve gone that route; but that would’ve been even more predictable than what we got. Silverberg is not naturally a horror writer and so “Not Our Brother” reads at times more like a science-fictional anthropological study that one would expect from Ursula Le Guin or Chad Oliver. It’s a short novelette of just over 8,000 words, but Silverberg’s descriptions can be so long-winded and yet so readable that it feels a couple thousand words shorter than that.

A Step Farther Out

Is it scary? Not really. Like I said, Silverberg is not by nature a writer of spooky stories, which makes “Not Our Brother” seem more like testing new ground than a master practicing his craft. On top of the possible racism (I don’t think the story is racist, but it could be reasonably construed as that) there is a bit of misogyny thrown in, which—believe it or not, Silverberg used to be worse about that sort of thing. Go back and read his late ’60s/early ’70s material and you’ll notice a toxic mix of male chauvinism and a recurring distrust of women. The Silverberg of the ’80s that I’ve read is better about dealing with things like race and the relationship between men and woman, but that might be simply a product of Silverberg coming into respectable middle age. Yet it must be said that while “Not Our Brother” is unlikely to impress us, especially those well-acquainted with spooky shit, it’s a very readable and thoughtful work.

See you next time.