The ’Geisters so desirable, yet uncomfortable
Novel puts reader between what we want and what we find most repulsive
The thing about being haunted is that there is never a moment that you can be at peace. You are either being tormented by a ghost, the unkind spirit that is determined to frighten you into a frail and frothing mess, or you are waiting for them inevitably to appear again with some fresh fear.
Horror is a torturer, and a good one, knowing exactly when to inflict, when to appear to show mercy and when to let the interminable length of anticipation do the work.
The ’Geisters by David Nickle is a haunted and haunting novel in exactly this way, knowing precisely when to gouge away at the reader and when to let long pages of menace build fear to a writhing, wretched fever.
There is not a moment, until the final, world-crashing reveal, that is spared from a sense of creeping dread. In the first three pages, a crystal salt shaker is spinning of its own accord and Ann Le Sage, the young woman whose horror and haunting the reader shares as the novel unfolds, is presented with fresh proof that the Insect, her own personal poltergeist that has been both her companion and her misery since childhood, has escaped the prison that she once bound it in.
Within those same pages, there have also been images of family friction, the fear of sharing too much too soon in a new relationship, and the vivid description of people being placed inside of tires and set on fire.
The ’Geisters is filled with an interminable sense of threat, as though the words could turn on the reader at any moment, and they often do. Ann’s relationship with the Insect is complex, one of mutual restraint and imprisonment.
It has kept Ann isolated due to its potential violence, which claimed the life and health of several family members in the past; she has learned how to bind and restrain it, at least initially, from the worst of its ability to do harm.
The book continually explores and inverts various types of constraint and freedom, and the way each state only exists at the terrible expense of others.
While Ann seeks to control the Insect, to protect herself as well as her new husband Michael Voors, others, including Michael’s mentor and father figure, would control the Insect in a different and more twisted fashion.
If there is one thing that can haunt as well as a ghost, it is desire. Which is fitting, because The ’ Geisters also engages with kink and is at its core a horror novel about perversion. Which is not to say that the novel explores kink in any kind of comfortable or glamorous way, the kind that pops up more and more often in a post-50 Shades of Grey world, a world densely populated with fiction about sparkly vampires who enjoy the occasional romp with a riding crop.
Quite the contrary, The ’Geisters shares a universe with Story of the Eye and Venus in Furs in that it is an exploration of the outer limits of sexual desire, often at its most violent and selfish. Just as Ann is unable to distinguish between fear and love, horror and desire are inextricably bound together here, and the subject of one nightmare can be the very heart of sexual pleasure for another.
The ’Geisters is able to put a cold finger against the treacherous intersection between what we want and what we find most repulsive, and how they can often be one and the same, shading into one another.
The language of The ’Geisters does an exquisite job of capturing the struggle for language in the face of horror and violence, the way that the brain can fail to interpret what the eyes are seeing.
This deliberate, faltering uncertainty toward the right words often becomes grotesquely lovely, turning the fall of shattered glass from a great height into a mistaken hailstorm.
It is this groping toward making sense of what the characters are seeing and experiencing that makes The ’Geisters succeed in its most wrenching and visceral moments, as horror or fractures in logical reality gradually take shape in the mind of the reader and the characters together. .
This is a book that buzzes in your ears, climbs your crawling skin with multiple barbed feet, feeling with exquisitely sensitive antennae for the next new and terrible revelation.