Setting the mood for home-grown fiction
We meet at the Flying Saucer Restaurant, right across from the Blue Lagoon.
The kind of place that fills in the cracks of ordinary life with colour and kitsch so it becomes something more, something with possibilities — something, perhaps, a little magical.
As it is, tourists crowd at the front door, waiting to get in.
I go through the takeout entrance and there, having managed to grab a small table right across from the stairs to the washrooms, is Craig Davidson.
He’s taking me on a road trip, a tour of his Niagara Falls — the
place he grew up in, that he returns to and that continues to inspire him in books such as his 2013 Giller-Award-nominated “Cataract City” and his newest, “The Saturday Night Ghost Club.”
In that latter book, Jake Breaker, now a brain surgeon in Toronto, looks back on the summer when he was 12 and his Uncle Calvin suggested they start a Saturday night ghost club.
It’s a coming-of-age novel, marking the time when you realize there’s more going on in life than meets the eye.
“This is where I grew up, and maybe the age that I’m at now things seem to be slipping through my fingers a lot quicker than they used to,” says Davidson, 42.
“You want to go back to times when time was going at a different velocity. These summers felt like they lasted forever.”
Life takes place throughout Niagara Falls and the area around it — areas you can get to by bike if you’re a kid, and some by car. It was also the scene of “Cataract City,” that being the nickname of this place.
Davidson is fascinated by the gritty side, although his life is fairly normal: He grew up upper middle class, his father a banker and his mother a nurse. Now he’s married, living in Toronto, with a son in kindergarten.
He had a summer job working at Marineland — started when he was 14, as a sweeper, moving his way up over the years, and the park appears in both “Cataract City” and “The Saturday Night Ghost Club” where it makes an appearance as Land of Oceans.
We drive up through the back way. “That used to be the employee parking lot,” Davidson says as we pass a grown-over patch of concrete.
We go back out to the main road and to the park’s entrance; the lot is surprisingly full — but even here weeds look ready to reclaim the land and erase time.
“I think with Niagara Falls, for a lot of people it’s a surface city,” Davidson says.
“They come here and they go to Marineland and they go to the Falls and they walk up and down Clifton Hill and then they’re on to the next thing …
“But every city has layers and a lot of people don’t see under the initial surface.”
Quite striking is how quiet the rest of the town is, how still the neighbourhood that lies east of the spine of Clifton Hill.
Rows of white clapboard houses line streets with names like Walnut in a working-class area with the Post cereal plant nearby.
You’re away from the noise and the people and the cars, but the big “Casino” sign, the bright lights and neon haze are never far away, transforming ordinary life into something brasher.
“Here’s where I thought the Occultorium and So Beta! would be,” Davidson says as we turn on to Centre Street. The Occultorium is where, in the book, Jake’s uncle sold snake oil to people who needed a little magic in their lives, to make it bearable — to heal the wounds you can’t make out with the naked eye.
And, hilariously, So Beta!, the shop a guy opened when videotape wars first started. VHS won “but Beta is better,” he kept insisting even as customers failed to darken his door.
We turn onto Clifton Hill. “Wow.” The noise and the lights hit us. We take postcard snapshots.
Davidson also writes horror stories under the name Nick Cutter — “The Deep,” “The Troop,” “Little Heaven” — books Stephen King once called “oldschool horror at its best.”
The fears that haunt the souls he deals with in the Davidson books, though, are more subtle.
In Saturday Night, ghost stories are used to explore how resilient we are, how our mind helps us to survive, and how our memories help us take the horrible things that happen to us and weave them into a life that still has hope. It’s an examination, like most good literature is, of how we live our lives.
“I do think, in some halcyon future day or book, that I’ll find that true middle ground between what I write under my own name and what I write as Cutter,” says Davidson. “I have my obsessions, my sense of human nature in all its prettiness and ugliness, which no doubt expresses itself no matter who I’m writing as.”
We head back up, get a picture in front of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. “Let’s go to the casino,” he says. We do exactly what we’ve been talking about: Look for an artificial thrill to match the big thrill of seeing the Falls. And we find it.
He and his buddies come down for a guy’s weekend, sometimes, bet on sports and play some poker. “As much as I enjoy it, I’m scared of it, too,” Davidson says. “I watch guys who just lose … there’s a certain glaze-eyed (look), just a robot counting out money. There doesn’t seem to be any joy in either the wins or the losses.”
We walk through the lights and sounds and sensory overload of the slots room and into the poker room — it doesn’t look like much fun, truth be told. Mostly guys around a few tables, shorts and fanny packs, topped with baseball caps. But roulette is real gambling. Basically a coin toss, a 48-52 chance.
“What colour?” he asks me. “Red.” I say. “Red?” I wouldn’t make a good gambler, can’t take a stand.
“Red it is. It’s good,” he reassures.
Round and round and round the wheel goes and where it stops … I cover my eyes. “It’s OK,” Davidson laughs. The croupier tosses a matching chip on the table. “Good choice.” “Red again?” he asks. “Nope, we’re going to cash out,” says Davidson. I squeal: “I can’t believe it. Doubled our money, just like that.”
That thrill wasn’t artificial, it was too real. And too easy. “You can see how lives go down the drain, right?” Davidson notes. But the money gets us to America.
For Niagara Falls kids, the border was always a fluid idea.
Back in the day, Davidson says, when the bars in Ontario closed at 1 a.m., he and his friends would walk across the bridge to the U.S. where the bars would stay open later. “All we needed was a driver’s licence.”
He has used both sides of the border in his books, including “Cataract City.” As we pass over the gorge he notes that the place he envisioned the smugglers crossing was “just around the bend near Goat Island and up a bit.”
These days when he crosses the border it’s often to talk about his book, “Precious Cargo” — about his time driving a school bus for special-needs kids.
The neighbourhood around Sammy’s is marked by the same sort of white clapboard houses that populate the streets of Niagara Falls, Ont.
The kind that imply hope, family, a little place to call your own but, talking earlier, Davidson said “there’s a lot of desperate people here.”
Davidson points out the beer bottles on the curb; this street is surely sadder than the ones on the Canadian side. Still, dreams live as evidenced by the American flags in front of these houses.
Our final stop is the Screaming Tunnel. Just out of town, it’s one of the few places in the book that exactly matches up in fact and fiction.
It’s where, in “The Saturday Night Ghost Club,” Jake and Uncle C go at midnight, thinking they might see the ghost of a girl who was violently killed.
On the way out there we pass Lundy’s Lane cemetery, sundappled, looking leafy and peaceful, hardly scary at all.
Yet it’s the place where, in Jake’s imagination, a tree branch against his window “was the fingernail of a vampire roused from the catacombs beneath (the cemetery).”
An exit or two down the QEW and we turn onto Mountain Road. We make a couple of rights and come to a looped end.
“This is our best haunted spot, “says Davidson. “It’s got the best legend ... the best ambience.
Even just optically the way it sets up to the eye, immediately it innately kicks off something in the human brain that’s like ‘there’s something not cricket about that.’”
It’s true.
Even as the sun beams down, throwing dappled shadows around us, the tunnel is evocative. It’s covered with graffiti at the entrance; as we head through to the other side it’s dark and damp and hollow and echoey.
“For as long as I write books under my own name,” says Davidson, referring to the Niagara Falls area, “if it’s just people and characters and situation, the setting is going to be this.”
A place which, through the grit and the neon and the kitsch and the desperation, makes a connection deep within us, with whatever lies between the surface and the dark recesses within.