In Review: Corpsemouth by John Langan
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Reviewing an anthology is, in many ways, more difficult than reviewing a novel, because it requires more decisions to be made at the outset. Do you review each story, one by one in lesser detail? Do you pick out a few stories that you feel are the most indicative of the collection's themes and focus on them, treating the others as fringe pieces? Or do you review the collection as a unified whole? Something similar to a novel, if perhaps, a little more disjointed? There is no "right" answer. Instead, each new decision spirals out until the various possible reviews look and feel wildly different from each other. However, in all of the possible reviews I could have written for this collection, all them would have to say "I loved this book." In fact, I'll go even further: this book is in the running for the best anthology I've read this year and it is by far the most impactful. Similarly, it's in my top five favorite books of the year, regardless of genre.
This begs the question of how? How did Corpsemouth pull this off? It's not like it was facing easy competition. I read all of Laird Barron's collections this year. I read four of Thomas Ligotti's. I read Lovedeath by Dan Simmons, and Memory's Legion by James S. A. Corey. The last collection of Langan's that I read, The Wide Carnivorous Sky, had it's moments, but as a whole it wouldn't have beaten out any of the other anthologies I read this year. Don't get me wrong, I was expecting a good read, Langan is an excellent writer but I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, and I'm left flabbergasted at his achievement.
I admit that a lot of this comes down to taste. Not a Speck of Light was more experimental than I would have preferred. While I enjoyed and even loved many of the stories in that collection, most didn't tug at my deepest emotions. Lairds worlds are too nihilistic, an it is hard to manipulate emotions from a place of nihilism. Similarly, Ligotti's work can occasionally come across as sterile and flat. This is not a knock against them, this is part of what makes them so effective. Barron's experimentation keeps his readers on their toes and displays his versatility. Ligotti's emotional distance is used to build an unsettling atmosphere. Langan's work, (at least in Corpsemouth) is neither experimental, nor is its emotionally distant. Instead the collection focuses on complicated relationships and familiar surroundings. The uncanny, the strange, the weird, is only introduced when it can do the most emotional damage.
This pairs well with Langan's prose style which is deliberate, but meandering. The slower pacing and longer word count allow readers to settle into each story, marinating in the atmosphere. That atmosphere is further enhanced by the familiarity of the surroundings. Each story begins at a point that most readers will have experienced. Almost everyone has had a strained relationship with a parent, or indulged in acts of teenage rebellion. Similarly, most can probably relate to being alone in a room with an older girl or boy you have a crush on. These mundane foundations are the perfect places for Langan to build his stories on. Each one feels intimate, honest, and real, well before the horrific nature of the world comes into focus. From there Langan uses that horror to twist and tug at our deepest emotions by accentuating the strains already present in a character's relationships.
What form that strain takes varies across the stories, and the emotions that strain evokes are equally varied. Sometimes these emotions are painful, But it always results in a story that is strangely, hauntingly, beautiful. These aren't stories about monsters, they are stories about relationships, about the passing of time, about growth and change. The monsters merely force us to explore those relationships more deeply. To engage with them in a level that we otherwise wouldn't. The universe related to us isn't the nihilistic, cyclical hell of Laird Barron, or the nightmarish dreamscapes of Ligotti. There's room for comfort here, for closure, for hope. These are worlds of horror, sure, but these are also worlds of melancholy. Not despair. After all, if everything is hopeless, what is there to expect but the worst?