Darkness on the valley’s edge
Something dreadful is going on in Aro Valley, and we’re all in on the joke, says Philip Matthews.
‘‘Hapless’’ is such a great word. You never hear it in everyday conversation: it’s a word writers and critics use, mostly when they want to say ‘‘loser’’.
The hapless hero of Danyl McLauchlan’s second novel Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley is named Danyl.
In Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley, Danyl thought he had uncovered a Da Vinci Code-like occult conspiracy in Wellington’s bohemian student enclave.
In the sequel, Danyl returns to Aro Valley after a spell in a psychiatric institution. He has so many questions. What happened to his girlfriend Verity? What happened to the manuscript of the book he was writing? Why are residents of the valley disappearing? Would it be a good idea if he went off his meds?
I enjoyed the first novel as a send-up of Aro Valley’s right-on progressive culture that doubled as an informed satire of sensationalist occult literature. McLauchlan’s second novel is more accomplished, more complex and, surprisingly given the comic tone and hectic farce, romantic and almost mature.
Aro Valley is more than just a place, it is a state of mind. But what kind of mind? ‘‘Te Aro, where nothing was as it seemed,’’ Danyl muses. ‘‘Beneath the valley’s superficial charm lurked depths of madness.’’
The deep, reality-threatening madness that Danyl stumbles upon is Lovecraftian in its scale. There are rogue mathematicians, a radical bookshop, a powerful hallucinogen, tunnels beneath the streets, and a chase down an underground stream that made me think, not for the first time, that McLauchlan is also sending up Wellington’s leading creative industry, Tolkienism.
But his orgy scene is very un Tolkien.
Anyone who has tried to read Lovecraft will know that the ideas are fascinating but the prose is often terrible. You could say the same about the much less ambitious writing of Dan Brown, who synthesised other people’s po-faced ideas about deceptive realities and ancient beings into readable bestsellers.
McLauchlan knows that a little bit of humour goes a long way, and his jokes are at the expense of the hapless hero, the muchmaligned setting, and the creaky rules of paranoid horror stories.
The humour is flippant and selfdeprecating: ‘‘Danyl had never been so happy to find a vast room filled with blindfolded comatose bodies.’’ Or when Danyl’s sidekick Steve is running for local council: ‘‘Decency. Family. Values. These were things that mattered to voters, even in Te Aro.’’
As in a Dan Brown novel, characters have to stop every so often to remind us and each other of the story. This helps during a climax that threatens to become too busy, before McLauchlan rewards us with one heck of a twist.
Danyl McLauchlan’s jokes are at the expense of the hapless hero, the much-maligned setting, and the creaky rules of paranoid horror stories.