kmart unrealism

Raymond Carver was a horror author

Not having an MFA, there are some books that I never got around to reading. Although, do people at MFAs actually read even? Haha jk lolsob. This meant that I never deeply read Raymond Carver until fairly recently, poking around bookshelves on my own. Though I get the sense that Carver isn’t as widely read in MFA programs as, say, 20 years ago. The most widely-book that covers similar territory–down-and-out people scraping by in the American hinterlands, doing drugs and working shit jobs–is probably Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, which is admittedly great. There was a time, though, when Carver was perhaps the most influential author in MFA programs, his model of the short story so widely imitated yet never quite produced that the Onion ran a column parodying his style. That’s cultural ubiquity for you. 

So imagine my surprise when I finally read, from front to back, Carver’s 1981 collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and discovered that Carver is not, actually, an author of literary fiction. No, Carver was something else. 

Carver wrote horror fiction.

The famous “dirty realism” issue of Granta, which introduced Carver and a number of other writers to a wide audience. Snagged at a bookstore in my hometown for eight bucks, natch.

 

“Adam, are you saying that Raymond Carver was a horror author in the same sense as his near-contemporary Stephen King? That to write authentically about working class and lower middle class life, as these two authors did, will inevitably result in horror?”

I mean, yeah, kinda? 

Now, there are stories in Carver’s career, especially in the early books, that could fit into an anthology of horror fiction no problem. I’m thinking here of “Tell the Women We’re Going,” which finds two lifelong friends going on a trip into the wilderness. They meet two women at a bar, and invite them back to their cabin. A little extramarital affair, perhaps? The classic feature of the literary short story? But no! One of the friends becomes incandescent with rage and kills the two women with a rock! The other guy looks on helplessly! Horror! Straight-up!

But the sense of horror you get from early Carver ultimately has less to do with plot elements. There is, throughout What We Talk About, an unmistakable sense of dread, of something awful forever on the verge of happening, while never quite coming to pass. Which is worse, somehow. The shoe that never drops. 

The element that produces this sense of dread, ultimately, is language. Carver’s stories, particularly in his first two collections, are written in a clipped, hesitant tone, whether first or third person, suggesting that the characters cannot bear to look at the reality of their worlds head-on. It sounds strange to describe a writing style as ‘mute,’ since writing is the opposite of muteness, yet the voice in Carver’s stories approaches the condition of muteness as closely as possible while still, y’know, writing. It recalls horror movies where the horror comes from the overall atmosphere, the tone and the lighting and the camera angles, more than the actual story elements. 

I’m not the first to notice this. Indeed, my thinking here parrots, more or less, Brian Evenson’s own insights into Carver. Evenson is a true-blue horror author, of course, whose work is full of horror tropes like madness and murderous cults. But what truly makes his work scary–dreadful, you could say–comes from the language. His characters experience horrors and fears and just plain weirdness they don’t understand, only endure, and the language-approaching-muteness recounting their travails is the most unnerving feature of his work. Which is saying something, as the actual plots can get quite gruesome, from mutilation cults to ritual murders. 

Evenson wrote an in-depth look at Carver’s influence. The Bookmarked series of books gives authors the chance to write an in-depth look at one of their own favorite books. (Think 33 ⅓ for albums, or Boss Fight Books for video games.) Evenson chooses Carver’s What We Talk About, finding in the book a kind of Big Bang for his own brand of existential horror fiction. The funny thing, though–if that’s the word for it–is that the voice found in Carver’s early work isn’t quite his own. He was, in a sense, possessed. 

Carver’s early champion was the editor Gordon Lish, fiction editor at Esquire as well as Knopf, where he published early books by many authors, from Barry Hannah to Joy Williams. Lish was well-known for being a hands-on editor, shaping stories and books into his own image, to the point where some of his authors found the results almost unrecognizable. The manuscript for Ray that Hannah turned in was 700 pages long; the resultant book was just over 100 pages long, Lish cutting 6/7ths on the editing room floor. But it was with Carver that Lish arguably asserted his editorial prerogative to the greatest degree. Certain of his stories were practically rewritten from the ground up, with Lish moving around a few paragraphs here and there, even writing some text himself to connect one from to the other. This changed not only the plot of the stories; it changed their character too. That distinctive sense of dread results, in no small part, from Lish’s editorial interventions. 

You can see this in later versions of the same stories, which better preserved Carver’s original drafts. That sense of dread is much less apparent. And they are also, in my opinion, less strong. One of the ironies of Carver’s career is that he produced his best work when he wasn’t quite himself. 

Perhaps that’s where the sense of dread comes from. Carver was possessed by a vengeful spirit in the form of Lish, and his words weren’t quite his own. The author as mute as his characters.