Imagining deep fears through dark horror
Author mines traditional horror to delve into our personal demons
Horror aficionados know that the best way to terrify a reader is to put off the Big Reveal of the monster for as long as possible. That’s because no matter how grotesque and violent the monster, what the reader imagines beforehand is almost always more frightening and more personal. And once the monster is fully revealed and its terrible intentions understood, the rest of the novel is generally a tale of diminishing returns.
With that in mind, readers of Andrew Pyper’s “The Only Child” will probably be surprised when the novel’s monster — a charismatically handsome but psychotic patient at a psychiatric prison — is revealed by page 20, his features and motive exposed in the bright lights of an examining room, no less.
The patient — possessed of almost superhuman strength, high intelligence and a wide streak of psychotic cruelty — claims not only to be nameless, but to have lived more than 200 years. Even more shocking to Lily Dominick, the doctor assigned to his case, is the patient’s claim to have known her mother, who was violently murdered when Lily was a young child. When the patient then claims to be her long-lost f ather, Lily believes she has a classic psychopath on her hands, one whose delusions have focused, before arriving in the clinic, on Lily herself.
Having skilfully set up the reader for a Hannibal Lecter-style duel between brilliant psychopath and troubled interrogator, Pyper upends genre conventions yet again by having the patient, soon named simply as “Michael,” demonstrate genuine supernatural powers by murdering his guard and escaping captivity.
Michael then initiates a deadly cat-and-mouse game with Lily, forcing her to follow him to Hungary, his birth place, by incriminating her in a murder. “Birth place” is a rather elastic term, as Michael claims to have been created from the corpses of several men at a Hungarian insane asylum and brought to life with a mysterious chemical that makes him seemingly immortal.
It’s soon clear that, for all of its gore and Gothic trappings, “The Only Child” is a high-concept dark f antasy novel, a distant cousin to Pyper’s bestselling “The Demonologist”. Like that earlier novel, “The Only Child” features a brilliant, highly educated protagonist who is involuntarily drawn into a supernatural conspiracy that echoes English literature’s darkest imaginative texts.
In “The Demonologist”, a distraught professor tries to track down the location of his missing daughter by sifting through clues from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Here, Lily slowly uncovers the secrets of the man who claims to be her father by reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the unholy trinity of 19th-century horror fiction. Michael claims to have met the three authors and shared parts of his story with them, in the process inspiring the creation of horror’s foundational texts.
By positing Michael as a sort of Ur monster of English literary horror, Pyper is inviting readers to ponder the ways we project our personal demons and deepest fears onto imaginary monsters. It’s an intriguing idea well executed, though I wish Pyper had explored the theme a little deeper.
Michael’s true relationship to Lily and her mother is slowly revealed as she follows him, and a trail of bodies and mysteries within mysteries, across Europe. Lily is both drawn to and repulsed by Michael, who embodies the ruthless power of creation and destruction, his double nature warped by an insatiable need for blood.
The novel also includes a somewhat ill-advised subplot about a shadowy cabal of black-ops assassins whose sole mission is to capture Michael for nefarious reasons never quite revealed. Lily is eventually drawn into the conspiracy, her loyalties torn between protecting her own life, and a desperate need to unravel Michael’s identity and, ultimately, her own. The conspiracy subplot weakens the mood of psychological dread and wonder Pyper generates in the first half of the novel.
Lily’s journeys with a monster who inspired the very literary tradition Pyper so skilfully exploits provides more than enough material for one novel. Luckily for readers, the final stages of that journey deliver the satisfying confrontation with darkness, both personal and mythological, readers expect from the best horror.
James Grainger is the author of Harmless.