I Try to Describe Lapvona
An attempt to describe what makes a horror novel scary, and why this one is not.
Review by Charlie Clark
It’s the anti-Laurus. It’s Gilead but by the Marquis de Sade. It’s Harmony Korinne in King Arthur’s court. It’s like if you trained an AI on Candide, but it never learned humor. It’s the junior novelization of a lost Cormac McCarthy. It’s a bedtime story by Ivan Karamazov. It’s Flannery O’Connor with the voice of George R.R. Martin, the theology of Pinkie Brown, and the sexual confidence of Pinkie Brown. It’s a failure, a barely interesting one—but I’ll try to explain.
From time to time, I get asked why I’m attracted to horror. It’s not an obvious fit with my other tastes, literary or otherwise. Horror fans are metalheads are exotic pet owners or something like that. And occasionally, I get objections from fellow Christians; something along the lines of: “You know we actually believe in that stuff, right?” Nonetheless, I find the pull of horror—not true crime or vampire romances, but stories about hauntings and monsters—so compelling.
Over the course of my many attempts to defend this attraction, I’ve landed on a theory that describes me, though perhaps not all fans of the genre. For me, I think it’s about exploring, to paraphrase David D. Friedman, “World Structures Very Different from Our Ours.” I’m bored with our secular age. Horror, especially supernatural horror, is a genre that dares to imagine holes in the bronze overhead (or at least in the iron underfoot) and spectral hands slithering in to catch us if they can.
Lapvona promised to be—maybe not your typical horror story, but—something along the lines of Eggers’s The Witch, a dark folktale that immerses you in another time, another worldview. Lapvona has murderous bandits, plagues, talk of the Devil… I mean, there’s an actual witch: an honest-to-ungoodness, unnaturally lactating, eyeball-stealing witch. And yet for all its trappings, it lacks the respect for its own world that makes horror possible.
It’s ridiculous. It’s juvenile. What it’s not is scary. The best you could call it might be “disturbing,” but again, it’s too predictable to really shock.
A Mary Sue is “inexplicably competent across all domains… unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive.” A Marek, Mosshfegh’s protagonist, is someone so ill-favored by grace and nature that he must have been made up on a dare: “Marek was a small boy and had grown crookedly, his spine twisted in the middle so that the right side of his rib cage protruded from his torso… His legs were bowed. His head was also misshapen.” It’s Murphy’s Physiognomy: “Marek’s face had an unseemly disproportion; the boy’s forehead was high and veiny, his nose bulbous and skewed, his cheeks flat and pale, his lips thin, his chin a stub giving way to a neck that was wrinkled and soft.” Morally speaking, Marek’s bowed legs straddle the golden mean, one foot firmly planted on each vice: he’s stupid yet deceptive, priggish yet susceptible, reckless yet cowardly.
“Coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire,” and the desire behind Lapvona seems to be a world that is maximally, buoyancy-defyingly bad. Yes, the lord of the manor is an idiot, a lunatic, and an invalid, but he is also a puppet master, who secretly controls both the guards and the bandits. When it doesn’t rain for months, half the people starve to death. When it finally does: “The rain fell for too long.” A man seizes a corpse from a mob to prevent it from being cannibalized. Five pages later, he eats it.
Things going from bad to worse is the law of the Lapvonian universe. But Chekhov knew better than to put a gun in every room. I laughed out loud when I read that bit about the rain. It’s ridiculous. It’s juvenile. What it’s not is scary. The best you could call it might be “disturbing,” but again, it’s too predictable to really shock. Oh, there’s a priest character? Let me guess: “He loved not the Christ but himself and the thrill of keeping people in line.” Really, you don’t say?
This book is like drinking perversity from a fire hose. Why is Marek so deformed? Well, his biological father is also his uncle (spoiler: he’s also the bandit who gets executed for murdering “two small children” on page 1; we find this out much later). Marek’s mother had her tongue cut out, but then escaped her rapist brother, only to be kept as a sex slave by Marek’s adoptive father. She repeatedly tried to abort Marek with the help of the witch, but he survived, so then she fled to the convent immediately after giving birth. About Marek’s adoptive father: “Marek thought Jude whipped himself a bit too passionately… as though it pleased him, as though the pain felt good. This frightened Marek because he, too, enjoyed the pain, and he was ashamed of that.”
Someone needs to tell Ottessa Moshfegh that if you want to shock a modern audience, write a flagellant who doesn’t get off on it. That, in a nutshell, is the wasted potential of Lapvona. Horror and historical fiction both are about getting you beyond the pale. The ideal reader of Lapvona is its own terminally decadent Lord Villiam, “so accustomed to being entertained… living in perpetual diversion for so long… Death wasn’t quite real to him.” What kind of story do we want, here inside our safe, modern castles? “I don’t care. Something strange. Something scary. Should we close the curtains?”
