Laird Barron Read-along 67: "Gamma"
Note 1: This is part of the Laird Barron Read-along project found on the Laird Barron Subreddit.
Note 2: A Little Brown Book of Burials appears to no longer be in print even on amazon. Still I think it's an important collection to cover and "Gamma" can still be found in the anthology Fungi. I've left a link to it below. If you are reading this on my blog it is an Affiliate Link. However if you are reading this on reddit, it isn't.
A Little Brown Book of Burials is the smallest of Lairds collections and the one with the thinnest of thru-lines. Going by the cover, it's a collection about burials and death, and in some ways that's an accurate description. However, practically speaking, these stories are here because they don't fit in the other collections. Imago Sequence has a very insectile theme of metamorphosis and forced evolution running through it. Occultation is about the things we keep hidden, from ourselves and others. The Beautiful Thing that Awaits Us All is about death and oblivion.
If Little Brown Book has a thematic through line, it isn’t burials. Its hell, both the hell we put ourselves through, and the hells we are put through by others. But it's also a place for all the stories that either don't fit anywhere else, or didn't fit anywhere else at the time. The collection as a whole has three stories and a essay. One of the stories, The Man With No Name, I've already covered. "DT" will be covered by u/Rustin_Swole in a couple of weeks. This weeks story though, is "Gamma".
"Gamma" was originally published in Fungi in 2012 and on it's face serves as a kind of proto-story for "Nemesis." That isn't to say that they aren't distinct entities, but there is a lot of shared DNA. For one both are smaller, darkly comedic tales that heavily feature nonlinear storytelling, breezy prose, and apocalypses. While "Nemesis" refines the ideas and is more thematically consistent, "Gamma" manages to feel more raw, and lingers more in horror rather than WTF.
Small size or no, I can't do this summary in the way I normally would. Gamma is written in blocks of a few hundred words apiece and in a nonlinear order. Any summary of these events in the order presented would be unreadable. Believe me, I made a few attempts at it, none of which were any good. So, instead, I've ordered things in what I believe to be a semi-chronological order so that it is comprehensible. Despite the difficulties I had summarizing this story, it is actually very readable, and in my opinion, one of Lairds best.
Summary
Gamma is a story from the near future, told about the distant past. In the beginning, there was the worm that encircles all creation. Sometime after that, fungi from outer space landed on earth. Most of it landed in Antarctica where it froze beneath the cold polar lakes. Most, but critically not all. The mycelium that didn't land in Antarctica settled in, hidden away until the time was right.
A couple hundred thousand years ago, the story of Cain and Able played out, and the murdered corpse was left for the mushrooms. In more modern times, a horse named Gamma is overburdened by the narrator's father and slips, falls, before it's corpse is disposed of in the same fields. The narrator, a boy then, is forced to listen as his father kills the horse, and later to see the body of the dead animal as it is left to molder. The boy goes on to live, and to love. The world moves on, but the horse remains in his memories, it's death impacting him in... unexpected ways.
It's the 1950s. The CIA definitely isn't experimenting with psychedelics. They definitely don't poison a french town in an attempt at mind control. The US government would never conspire with aliens to experiment of foreign nationals. No. Never.
During the Cold War, the Soviets built a base of Lake Vostok in the Antarctic. Later when the Soviets became Russians again, they didn't keep experimenting there. There's no way they could find strange fungi there and potentially spread them across the planet. No way. Never happened.
Experiments with cordycesps don't go anywhere. Ever. Right? Right?
Meanwhile the narrator and his love fall out of love. She leaves him for an English teacher so he goes back home, to the fields where they left Gamma. He kills himself there, with a spear made of spruce, and falls into the mushroom pit. There it subsumed him, swallowed him whole, but he didn't die. He watches and remembers, as the Russian's accidentally set off an apocalypse and fungal growths swallow the world. There he sits, in hell, remembering how his father placed the barrel of the rifle against his skull, how the spear he made tore through his chest, how he was killed by his brother. When aliens arrive, they won't even realize they aren't looking at a grave. They're looking at hell.
Analysis
Gamma is about a couple of things, but the narrative threads don't really link together as well as some of Laird's other stories. I think that's why it fits so well in something like Little Brown Book of Burials, it's because that book is a place for all the things that hadn't fit up to that point. It's a strange little story, a odd little tale. Of the narrative threads, there are two that I think come through well. Firstly there is the desire for self annihilation. Secondly there is the threat from outside influences.
In the first camp, there's the story from Germany. A depressed man reaches out to a cannibal and offers himself up on the dinner menu. The narrator said that he gets it. "The urge to self-annihilate occasionally overwhelms the best of us. Exhibit A: the atom bomb. Exhibit B: love." The narrator is a little surprised to find himself tearing a spruce branch from a tree and stabbing it into his chest. Both scenarios don't just offer the experience to die, but to die painfully, violently. It doesn't speak (at least in my mind) to depression so much as it does self-hatred and the desire for self-annihilation. This isn't the horror of "Gamma"'s story though. The horror is having all this self hatred, this desire to be done with everything, and instead being forced to live there, stuck in a kind of stasis by an outside force.
The threat from outside influences is far more expansive than the internal struggle. The outside threat amplifies the inner threat, growing more insidious with each retelling. Gamma's death at the hands of the narrators father is almost a kindness. Her death was wasteful, sure, but the death itself spared her further pain. Abel's death is motivated by hatred. The waitress's, presumably by lust. The CIA and Russia run conspiracies and plots against each other. The narrator's wife betrays him for another. These are the threats from outside forces. Even the fungi that consumes the narrator is an outside force, one preventing complete self destruction. It instead holds him in limbo, unable to live, and unable to die until the sun burns out and the universe once more is plunged into darkness.
These are the twin horrors: The horror within, and the horror without. In this framing it's inevitable that one or the other will be what ends humanity. For the narrator, it's the horror within. For humanity as a whole though, it appears to be the horror without. Gamma, to my mind, is a story about the hell we make for each other. Our internal horrors writ large on everyone and everything around us. "Gamma" wouldn't have begun if Cain hadn't killed Able, if the narrators father hadn't overburdened and later killed Gamma, if the narrator’s wife hadn't cheated on him, if the CIA and the Russians hadn't tried to interfere in things they shouldn't. It begs the question, how much misery in the world is due the internal struggles of those around us rather than the forces of nature and darkness?
I think one of the things that makes "Gamma" so compelling is that it uses human evils and strife, to extend the "natural" evil of the fungi. There's no sense that the fungi are plotting anything. They are a tool. Simultaneously beneath us and far beyond us. They don't recognize that they are keeping us trapped in our own torments, forced to share our internal struggles eternally with others, they simply are doing what they do. It's humans that have brought about all the tragedy.
Miscellanea
Like the other stories in this collection, there really isn't that much to tie it to Laird's other works. The fungal growths might be a reference to Black Mountain in the same titled Coleridge novel, or rather the fungus in Black Mountain might be a reference back to this story, given their order.
"Nemesis" is referenced, though as a cyclical doom that is visited on earth every 26 million years or so. Last couple of times it's been an asteroid. This time? Fungal apocalypse.
Note: I won't be covering "DT", the last story in the Little Brown Book of Burials collection as it appears to be based off of a (fictionalized) version of Karl Edward Wagner, someone who I have no familiarity with. Instead that will be covered by u/Rustin_swole in a couple of weeks.
Discussion Questions
1. Is my analysis fair calling this a "simpler story" or have I missed the mark?
Did you spot any references to Laird's other work that I might have missed? It wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong about a Laird Story?
Where in the Laird mythos does this story fall? I personally put it in a pulpwoood adjacent setting, sort of like Nemesis and Fear Sun.
Links
In case you want to read "Gamma" and don't already have a copy it appears the only place to currently find it is the anthology collection Fungi which can be found: here.
Reddit Link to Read Along 49: The Man With No Name
Blog Link to Read Along 49: The Man With No Name