Synopsis:
What if every terrible thing imagined came true? Every fleeting, nightmarish thought a reality? For grief-stricken Karina, her newfound ability to turn her worst daydreams into palpable truths has sent her into a downward spiral of depression and guilt. Coupled with the appearance of an enigmatic shadow figure and visions of her dead family, she grapples to maintain her sanity while desperately attempting to harness her abilities and reunite with her loved ones.
Review:
Amongst the ranks of horror writers, there’s a clichéd sentiment that floats about that horror writers, despite their often disturbing or even stomach-turning storylines, are collectively a group of the nicest, most supportive people you’ll meet. Even in this statement is the implication that to live with those kinds of ideas in your head must make you a bit disturbed, maybe even a bit dangerous.
Red Lagoe’s new novella, In Excess of Dark, leans into this question, creating a startling allegory for the relationship between the artist, her trauma, and the dark visions that live within.
Karina has dark thoughts. Always has. Her name for these startlingly violent intrusive thoughts is “daydreams,” and she has self-diagnosed herself as a depressive, haunted by unbidden visions of horror and violence, often focused on those she loves. Most would say that there’s no reason to feel guilty about thoughts, but Karina’s mother disagrees. She sees not only the danger in these daydreams but a familiar pattern. It seems Karina’s father lived with similar thoughts, spending most of his life channeling them into a reasonably successful carreer as a painter of horror scenes.
That “channeling” is key here. With her mother’s judgements and Karina’s refusal to talk about the darkness within, In Excess of Dark does what horror literature does best: it makes the implicit explicit, and brings Karina’s inner darkness to life.
Karina is on a camping trip with her family when one of her disturbing daydreams comes shoving it sway in, and the following day, that daydream comes true, down to the last detail, as she loses her husband and son in a terrible car accident. And now she is haunted by a dark shape that lingers at the corner of her vision.
At first, I thought In Excess of Dark was going to be a straightforward Grief Horror exercise, and it does some of that work, but there’s nothing straightforward about this story. Grief is, if anything, secondary to the story’s concerns. Instead, it becomes an investigation into how one deals with that internal darkness, how one chooses to bottle it up or channel it, and how art can and cannot resolve this question.
There was a way in which In Excess of Dark might have found a pat answer to all of this, and even a way in which it might have been uplifting, reveling in the cathartic nature of art, an ode to Freud’s concept of sublimation or Jung’s shadow work. But this is a horror story, kids, and it refuses any comforting conclusions, instead, as the title suggests, going even darker.
Leave a Reply