{"id":6708,"date":"2022-10-13T04:05:57","date_gmt":"2022-10-13T04:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=6708"},"modified":"2022-10-13T04:07:03","modified_gmt":"2022-10-13T04:07:03","slug":"lapvona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2022\/10\/13\/lapvona\/","title":{"rendered":"Lapvona"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I Try to Describe Lapvona<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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An attempt to describe what makes a horror novel scary, and why this one is not.<\/p>\n

Review by Charlie Clark<\/em><\/h5>

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It\u2019s the anti-Laurus<\/i>. It\u2019s Gilead <\/i>but by the Marquis de Sade. It\u2019s Harmony Korinne in King Arthur\u2019s court. It\u2019s like if you trained an AI on Candide<\/i>, but it never learned humor. It\u2019s the junior novelization of a lost Cormac McCarthy. It\u2019s a bedtime story by Ivan Karamazov. It\u2019s Flannery O\u2019Connor with the voice of George R.R. Martin, the theology of Pinkie Brown, and the sexual confidence of Pinkie Brown. It\u2019s a failure, a barely interesting one\u2014but I\u2019ll try to explain.<\/p>

From time to time, I get asked why I\u2019m attracted to horror. It\u2019s 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: \u201cYou know we actually believe in that stuff, right?\u201d Nonetheless, I find the pull of horror\u2014not true crime or vampire romances, but stories about hauntings and monsters\u2014so compelling.<\/p>

Over the course of my many attempts to defend this attraction, I\u2019ve landed on a theory that describes me, though perhaps not all fans of the genre. For me, I think it\u2019s about exploring, to paraphrase David D. Friedman<\/a>, \u201cWorld Structures Very Different from Our Ours.\u201d I\u2019m 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.<\/p>

Lapvona <\/i>promised to be\u2014maybe not your typical horror story, but\u2014something along the lines of Eggers\u2019s The Witch<\/i>, a dark folktale that immerses you in another time, another worldview. Lapvona<\/i> has murderous bandits, plagues, talk of the Devil… I mean, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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It\u2019s ridiculous. It\u2019s juvenile. What it\u2019s not is scary. The best you could call it might be \u201cdisturbing,\u201d but again, it\u2019s too predictable to really shock.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A Mary Sue<\/a> is \u201cinexplicably competent across all domains\u2026 unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive.\u201d A Marek, Mosshfegh\u2019s protagonist, is someone so ill-favored by grace and nature that he must have been made up on a dare: \u201cMarek 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\u2026 His legs were bowed. His head was also misshapen.\u201d It\u2019s Murphy\u2019s Physiognomy: \u201cMarek\u2019s face had an unseemly disproportion; the boy\u2019s 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.\u201d Morally speaking, Marek\u2019s bowed legs straddle the golden mean, one foot firmly planted on each vice: he\u2019s stupid yet deceptive, priggish yet susceptible, reckless yet cowardly.<\/p>

\u201cCoherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire,\u201d and the desire behind Lapvona <\/i>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\u2019t rain for months, half the people starve to death. When it finally does: \u201cThe rain fell for too long.\u201d A man seizes a corpse from a mob to prevent it from being cannibalized. Five pages later, he eats it.<\/p>

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\u2019s ridiculous. It\u2019s juvenile. What it\u2019s not is scary. The best you could call it might be \u201cdisturbing,\u201d but again, it\u2019s too predictable to really shock. Oh, there\u2019s a priest character? Let me guess: \u201cHe loved not the Christ but himself and the thrill of keeping people in line.\u201d Really, you don\u2019t say?<\/p>

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\u2019s also the bandit who gets executed for murdering \u201ctwo small children\u201d on page 1; we find this out much later). Marek\u2019s mother had her tongue cut out, but then escaped her rapist brother, only to be kept as a sex slave by Marek\u2019s 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\u2019s adoptive father: \u201cMarek thought Jude whipped himself a bit too passionately\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>

Someone needs to tell Ottessa Moshfegh that if you want to shock a modern audience, write a flagellant who doesn\u2019t get off on it. That, in a nutshell, is the wasted potential of Lapvona<\/i>. Horror and historical fiction both are about getting you beyond the pale. The ideal reader of Lapvona<\/i> is its own terminally decadent Lord Villiam, \u201cso accustomed to being entertained\u2026 living in perpetual diversion for so long\u2026 Death wasn\u2019t quite real to him.\u201d What kind of story do we want, here inside our safe, modern castles? \u201cI don\u2019t care. Something strange. Something scary. Should we close the curtains?\u201d<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Charlie Clark<\/b> is a writer and retractor<\/a>. He lives in New Hampshire.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Lapvona: A Novel<\/b> was published by Penguin Press on June 23, 2022. You can purchase a copy at their website here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An attempt to describe what makes a horror novel scary, and why this one is 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