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Peter Straub’s body of fiction is noteworthy for, among other strengths, its combination of coherence and development from work to work. Previously, I have looked at this coherence and maturation in terms of the structure of his novels, his handling of metafiction, genre creation and reframing, and themes such as personal and socio-political guilt. Here, I’ll continue this exploration by examining the specific tropes of the bad place—a location where evil things are done or have been done that continues to resonate with horror—and the secret place, of which the bad place is often an example. These tropes have continued to develop in Straub’s fiction, in ways corresponding very roughly to the time and genre of each work so far. Specifically, I’ll examine the appearance of the bad place as an underground site, primarily in the Blue Rose books and how this transforms into two different places in Straub’s more recent fiction.
The Blue Rose stories often include underground spaces, locations that embody guilt but also the possibility of the numinous. These places are further buried by futile attempts to forget what happened there; digging up this place or going there, mentally or physically, is dangerous but potentially healing. I call this trope, variously, “the cave,” “the grave,” and “the labyrinth.” More recently than the Blue Rose stories, climaxing in The Skylark/A Dark Matter the secret place is split into two. One type of secret place is a room, often underground, set apart for the enjoyment of evil. These locations are hidden not out of shame but for protection, and I call this specific trope “the lair.” The other secret space in the most recent novels is any place or no place, indoors or out, where humans encounter numinous powers that are dangerous but beyond good or evil; I call this “the meeting place.” Straub’s novels lost boy, lost girl and In the Night Room are pivotal books between these two approaches.
Underground bad places abound in the Blue Rose stories, especially in Koko, The Throat, and “The Ghost Village.” These secret locations include, first, the cave in Ia Thuc, mentioned in all three of those works. During the Vietnam War, U.S. soldier Harry Beevers kills a group of 30 Vietnamese children there, traumatizing two other soldiers, in ways that make one soldier even more of a murderer than Beevers. Another secret location in the Blue Rose stories is an underground room in the hamlet of Bong To, the eponymous “ghost village.” There, soldier and writer Tim Underhill encounters the chamber, which stands as a witness to the violent deaths of many children and of the village chief who tortured and molested them. Finally, The Throat features an underground room in an arcade in New York City’s Chinatown decades after the Vietnam War, where Underhill and Beevers finally confront one of their fellow soldiers who has become a serial killer. This third underground room is an echo of the others; it is proof of the persistence of the past and its power in and over the present.
The natural cave in Ia Thuc and the man-made cave in Bong To are graves, sites where human evil has left a palpable presence. In “The Ghost Village,” narrator Tim Underhill mentions Ia Thuc: Underhill and Poole “went into that cave and knew that something obscene had happened there. We smelled evil, we touched its wings with our hands” (68). When Underhill encounters Bong To, it is a ghost village in both senses. First, it is abandoned and “too still, completely without noise or movement” in a way Underhill has never experienced elsewhere in Vietnam (69). More literally, Underhill sees ghosts while he is there, not only a “Vietnamese boy of seven or eight”—a spirit that Underhill immediately knows was killed in the underground room—but also two dead soldiers from his platoon (74–75). Later, he is told that the village was abandoned because the atrocities caused the dead to appear, until the inhabitants “were seeing ghosts all the time. They had crossed a kind of border” (94).
These underground places form a perfect metaphor for trauma, in that they both hide traumatic violence and memorialize it. Here Straub’s work is completely in keeping with what is called trauma theory. Michelle Balaev writes, after the approach of Cathy Caruth and others, “The origin of traumatic response is forever unknown and unintegrated; yet, the ambiguous, literal event is ever-present and intrusive” (7). The underground bad place is always in the present, whether literally or in memory, and it is always about the past. As John Ransom explains to Underhill about Bong To, “that village is supposed to be like a kind of monument.... To shame” (90). The room still smells of blood, and the walls are covered with the names of the victims: Underhill first thinks that the writing looks “like poetry” (72). The sections in Koko from the serial murderer’s point of view show that Ia Thuc and other ghostly graves are preserved in his psyche just as thoroughly as the ghost village is physically preserved (343–45). He thinks of his underground room in New York as “his room, his cell, his egg, his cave” that “caged all the light and let none of it escape” (502). That is an amazing accumulation of images of permanence, stasis, and entrapment.
Though in themselves these buried sites of violence contain nothing that is healing or joyful, they have a kind of numinous power. Ransom says of Bong To that the villagers left because their “really spectacular sense of shame” created “an even more sacred obligation” than the obligation to stay in the place of their ancestors (92). The serial murderer—clearly insane, yet understanding eternity in a way that sane people do not—thinks, concerning a woman he has just shot in the stomach, “Pain and fear took people in different directions. Anything having to do with eternity made them show you their real selves” (Koko 102). He may also have been speaking about how he himself encompasses both the traumatic and the transcendent. A “jungle” that includes wartime Vietnam, but is much more, is eternally with him, “beneath the sidewalks, behind the windows, on the other sides of doors” (Koko 502). During his experience in the cave at Ia Thuc, “eternity came in a thunderclap, eternity happened all at once, backwards and forwards” (Koko 503).
To those who are linked to it by trauma and other experiences, this underground place in the Blue Rose stories is Bluebeard’s secret room, as tempting as it is forbidden, and in part tempting because it is unimaginably, impossibly horrible. It is a grave or tomb, because it houses death and because it remains buried. Yet especially in The Throat, the underground bad place is reconfigured in ways that further emphasize the numinous and allow for recovery—recovery in the sense of healing and in the sense of unearthing something that is buried. In The Throat, Underhill repeatedly refers to violence or sexual abuse and memories of them as a labyrinth, a significant change from a cave. As a place of entrapment, it is no less horrible. For one thing, there is always the Minotaur, explicitly connected to both sexual abuse and the repression of memory (219, 308, 589–90). Metaphorically describing ongoing sexual abuse, Underhill states,
Reality flattened out under the Minotaur’s instruction—the real feelings aroused by the things he did would tear you into bloody rags, so you forgot it all. You cut up the memory, you buried it in a million different holes. The Minotaur was happy with you, he held you close and his hands crushed against you and the world died. (218)
However, unlike the grave, the labyrinth is not an eternal experience: there is a way out, an exit, although a person has to be very clever, and perhaps have some help, to find it.
In the Blue Rose stories, this exit from the labyrinth is a function of remembering, of capturing the memory and removing it from the permanent absence that repression gives it and the permanent presence that trauma gives it; only with this uncovering can the past be examined and processed. As seen in the above quotation from The Throat, Straub often presents this re-membering as the opposite of dis-memberment. Both The Throat (278–9) and a short story by Straub called “The Juniper Tree” refer to a fairy tale by the latter name, in which a murdered child is reborn when the bones of his severed limbs are buried together and he can rise from them: for dis-covery and re-membering, what is buried has to be unearthed, and what is separate must be joined. The narrator of “The Juniper Tree” says, “Someday ... I will remember this from beginning to end and then I will be free of it” (64).
Thus, the Blue Rose stories feature the trope of the secret place as the grave and cave, but also show it as a labyrinth, an enclosure that a person can move through, as Orpheus does, without actually dying or otherwise being trapped there. In The Throat, Underhill mentions the journey of Orpheus into the underworld but says that instead of “los[ing] everything” if you look back, perhaps “you see the missing, unifying section of the puzzle, the secret filled with archaic and godlike terror, you have kept from yourself” (79).
Straub’s novels lost boy, lost girl and In the Night Room examine the underground secret place in a way that combines these versions and reaches beyond them, indicating that the novels both are part of the Blue Rose stories as well as standing alone as a diptych that tackles grief, denial, and healing in a new way. Both of the more recent novels feature Tim Underhill as both character and writer, as the Blue Rose stories often do. However, rather than the recovery of and (hence) from decades-old afflictions shown in the earlier works, the books concern Underhill’s flight from and then peace with two much more current afflictions, the suicide of his sister-in-law Nancy and the murder of his nephew Mark.
The bad place in these novels is the house of Joseph Kalendar, a serial killer whose work was discovered in the late 1970s and who is Nancy Underhill’s cousin. lost boy, lost girl explains that the house itself is an evil doppelganger of the house owned by Tim’s brother Phillip, with backyards adjoining, although separated by a wall (58). However, Kalendar added a secret room, almost entirely subterranean, and built the wall to hide the addition (113, 122). The house is left empty until it is purchased by Mark’s murderer—Ronnie Lloyd-Jones, a devotee of Kalendar’s killings (262–65)—who buries some of his victims there. Like trauma, the house is always there but always repressed. Nancy tells Mark that people ignore the house because, “Something’s wrong and they smell it. One of these days, the city will knock that place down. Until then, it’s best to forget about it” (88). In this novel, we learn that Kalendar used the hidden room to repeatedly rape his daughter, Lily, and finally to kill her (122–3). Mark’s curiosity about the house, and particularly the hidden room, lead directly to his murder by Lloyd-Jones.
However, in Tim Underhill’s artistic imagination, this grave becomes a site of redemption for both Mark and Lily. In this alternate story, Mark’s death is voluntary, as he and Lily’s ghost “remake” the site of evil by making love there, and then he chooses to join her eternally (lb,lg 254). Tim receives e-mail from the afterlife with a link to an online video that shows the lovers on a tropical beach, “like Adam and Eve,” perhaps threatened “even in that world” but with a shared “joy” that “burned through the image on his ... monitor” (279). Due to the metafictive nature of Straub’s work and his esteem for the power of stories, it would be wrong to dismiss this vision as “just” imaginary. However, in addition the book ends with a real-world image of opening and cleansing: a bulldozer levels the house (279) and Tim and Phillip “looked on as the first of the adolescent dead began their journey upward into daylight” (281).
Also, even if lost boy, lost girl seems to end on a note that separates fantasy and reality, In the Night Room sends the reader whirling back to the metafictive uncertainties of The Throat and then some, as Tim Underhill, now receiving numerous e-mails from dead people he has known, meets Willy Patrick, a character in a novel he is writing. In one way, the secret place hardly appears in this story at all: the title of the novel is the title of Willy’s Newberry Award–winning YA novel, and only at the end does In the Night Room come back to the room in which Joseph Kalendar raped his daughter. In a narrative that may be entirely supernatural or may be entirely imaginary—as if Straub’s fiction from Ghost Story on allows us to maintain that distinction—Underhill discovers that Willy is his fictional version of Lily Kalendar, who is still alive. Tim and Willy see the real Lily through the window of her present home, emotionally scarred and even tainted by her father but, as a pediatrician, “treating children who came to her by giving them the generosity and mercy her childhood had never known” (302–3). Reconciled to her fate, Willy enters Kalendar’s house and joins with the spirit of Tim’s nephew Mark, on whose face Tim had based Willy’s.
Thus, in these two books, repeatedly the secret space is a bad place but also a place of sacrifice and redemption. Unlike in The Throat, this redemption is transpersonal in two important ways. First, the acceptance and healing in the earlier work generally takes place within a single psyche, while that in the two later novels comes from love and understanding between people. (It can be argued that, paradoxically, Underhill in The Throat primarily regards the real serial killer as one of his own personas, while Underhill in In the Night Room engages the perhaps-imaginary Kalendar as a real person with individual flaws and strengths that are in no way extensions of Underhill’s. Certainly, Willy is awed and humbled by Lily’s reality.) Secondly, both novels depend on at least the idea of a possible mode or realm of life beyond that of mortal humans. In that way, they point back to Straub’s supernatural novels from Julia through Mr. X but also forward to Straub’s most recent work.
That work has come out in two main forms: The Skylark, published by the specialty house Subterranean Press, and A Dark Matter, a shorter version given trade publication by Doubleday. The specialty house Borderlands Press published some of the material cut from A Dark Matter separately, under the title A Special Place. Examination of the trope of the secret place in this work does show a cleavage exactly along the lines of A Dark Matter and A Special Place. A Special Place and those parts of The Skylark depict an even darker incarnation of the tomb and cave of the Blue Rose books: the lair, a site of horrible violence seen not as a place of trauma, from the perspective of the victim or appalled spectator, but as a site of power and self-expression, from the point of view of the perpetrator. The lair is the location of unrepentant evil; insofar as it hides itself or closes itself off, it does so to continue its horrible work, never out of fear or shame. The other secret places of significance in The Skylark, and the only ones seen directly in A Dark Matter, cannot truly be called bad places at all, although they are terrifying and even actively dangerous. These meeting places are spaces—that can be any place or no place—where the human meets the transhuman; the forces in play there are primarily both inhumanly powerful and beyond mere good or evil.
The lair is a reminder that not everyone who is deeply wounded wants to be healed. In A Special Place, Keith Hayward is only 12 years old when his uncle, a canny multiple murderer himself, helps Keith turn himself into a serial killer. Uncle Till sees his nephew as a fertile field to be planted with poison. “If you get a special place all your own,” Uncle Till advises, “you should be able to lock it up, so no one else can get in. What goes on in that room is private. Nobody should know about it except you” (7). The basement of an abandoned building becomes Keith’s special place, where he displays the pelts of the neighborhood pets he kills, dominates and makes a sex slave of a fellow student named Miller, and finally gives Miller as a Christmas present to his Uncle Till.
Keith is not totally evil: in fact, it is vital to The Skylark and A Dark Matter that Keith in some twisted way loves Miller and that another character named the Eel realizes that. Still, to Keith the horrible basement is his “sacred chamber” (35), and he is dedicated to it unreservedly. When he realizes that Uncle Till actually murders people, Keith experiences a dark epiphany:
here was the true, the real abyss.... Lit with bright, wandering fires, his entire body seemed to tremble from within. A great confirmation rang through him and seemed to lift him off the ground. (46)
Instead of being divided selves, like those who have survived the underground bad place but not yet recovered from it, Keith and Uncle Till are wholly what they are. As Uncle Till states, “Unlike you and me, most people hide their real motives from themselves.” When they explain their actions, he says, “what they tell you isn’t even close to the truth. Because they don’t know the truth. They can’t let themselves know it. The truth is unacceptable” (62). Uncle Till is not completely right: Tom Flanagan or Tim Underhill could tell him about the self-acceptance that is possible and even necessary in the mind of the magus or the artist. However, he may be right about most people. As the labyrinth opens onto one kind of integrity, the lair embodies another.
Another lair appears in The Green Woman; written by Straub and Michael Easton and drawn by Jon Bolton, it is a graphic novel about Fee Bandolier, another name of the main killer in the Blue Rose stories. The eponymous location in Black House, cowritten by Straub and Stephen King, is another major presentation of the lair. However, compared to Straub’s other recent work, these pieces are much simpler, both artistically and psychologically, more similar to Straub’s novels from Julia through Floating Dragon. One reason may be that both works are collaborations. However, more importantly, unlike in A Special Place, the evil in these lairs is not purely human. In Black House, the killer is used—although quite willingly—by a servant of the Crimson King, a major power of evil in King’s Dark Tower series. In The Green Woman, the female spirit of the abandoned tavern may be all in Fee’s head, but the visual nature of the medium gives a reality to her that Straub’s prose might not. Still, both these secret places are lairs, including the fact that both, like Joseph Kalendar’s house and Keith Hayward’s special place, are finally destroyed. Unlike the cave or the grave, the lair does not have the permanence that trauma gives, and unlike the labyrinth, it cannot be traveled through and learned from.
The other type of location featured in The Skylark, and the dominating motif of A Dark Matter, is the meeting place. While the lair is a site of unremitting violence and evil, the meeting place is where quasi-magus Spender Mallon and his acolytes encounter new dimensions of experience beyond anyone’s ability to categorize. They are part of, as Underhill says of his near-death experience, “a realm where darkness and light inhabited the same dazzling space” (Night Room 15).
Straub’s earlier works do present moments of pure transcendence, including the psychic union that defeats the supernatural villain in Floating Dragon, Tom Flanagan’s literally magical act of self-acceptance and transformation in Shadowland, and moments I have referred to as “the everyday sublime” in Koko and elsewhere. Often, such moments are linked to music, especially in Mr. X and The Throat. However, these moments are either tied to a kind of supernaturalism that seems unrelated to the reader’s world (generally in the earlier works, though also in Mr. X) or, if they are glimpsed in and through our ordinary world, they are fleeting and highly subjective.
In A Dark Matter, our world repeatedly rips open or gives way to allow contact with another kind of reality; these moments are presented as transpersonal but seem more compatible with the real world. The secret space here, the meeting place, is characterized by an encounter with transcendence. During the rehearsal of a magical ritual, Hootie perceives something “small, white, and agonized, not a scarf” fly by:
Around it ... the landscape had bulged.... the tormented white scarflike thing had been in flight from whatever had caused the world to ripple and bulge.... The wretched thing had flown through, it had escaped into this world. (85)
During the ritual itself, each person perceives something different, but each is changed permanently by the encounter; one is killed and one disappears into the seams between worlds.
The central image in The Skylark (and A Dark Matter) is an ecstatic flight by the Eel’s soul, freed from her body by the ritual. In a series of nested boxes, she experiences moments in the lives of everyone else in the ritual, including their perceptions of creatures described by Cornelius Agrippa, madly rioting figures that are indifferent or hostile (358–61). Then, inside Keith Hayward’s soul, she encounters a demon (363–76) and boards a bus that leads to a stairway, which she climbs to an ultimate experience (380–86):
Assailed by both love and terror, an unbearable combination, the seventeen-year-old Eel, who had been weeping uncontrollably, cradled her head on her forearms, urinated into her blue jeans, and wept some more.... To the extent that she could think at all, she thought, So the Great Mystery and the Final Secret is that we cannot tolerate the Great Mystery and Final Secret. (386)
While others in the ritual experience a surfeit of meaning—especially Hootie and the Eel—the title of A Dark Matter comes from a haunting encounter by Jason Boatman, in which he steals a boat on the shores of Lake Michigan and then endures a world gradually stripped of all reality (288–309), another kind of meeting place.
In The Skylark and its two daughter works, the transformation of the cave or grave into the lair is easier to understand. It is in part a move back to horror, unmitigated by the theme of recovery that works through the Blue Rose stories; it presents an examination of extreme violence and violation from the point of view of the eager perpetrator instead of the victim who may heal from the trauma or may grow up to pass it on. Yet, paradoxically, that focus on the perpetrator stretches Straub’s themes of acceptance and sympathy if, like the Eel, we readers can endure the unendurable and embrace the intolerable.
It is harder to understand the movement from the cave or grave, or even the labyrinth, to the meeting place and its transhuman reality. Certainly, as Straub stated in an interview with Locus in 1994, “At moments of terrible terror and extremity, one can experience a sort of clarity” (4). However, The Skylark shows that Straub reconsidered an earlier statement in that interview, that a novelist “cannot write about transcendence” and must sneak up on it slantwise through such extremity and through the experience of “healing” that comes “later” (4). In 2009, talking to Cemetery Dance magazine, Straub stated that rather than an “escape,” horror is “more about engagement.... it’s about discovering one’s ability to feel in certain ways, and deepening and widening one’s emotional experience by that means” (Clasen 40). Though The Skylark definitely provides a full supper of horrors, the trope of the meeting place shows that the deepening and widening of emotions need not depend on horror, although they never can be fully separated, either.
The meeting places in both In the Night Room and A Dark Matter are guarded by ambiguous beings who may intend to keep people away, or to urge them forward, or just to observe any result. In the Night Room depicts a terrifying, serene angel that is first sighted by Tim Underhill on a Manhattan street (52–53) and that later allows Tim and Willy to enter Kalendar’s house, or perhaps even ushers them in (315). Willy tells Tim that Kalendar’s spirit is “afraid of” the angel (317); indeed, Kalendar says of the angel outside, “And tell that blasted thing out there to leave me alone” (322). Mallon and his followers encounter what Mallon calls “dogs,” humanoid figures so frightening that seeing one causes Hootie to stumble in “terror” (Dark Matter 62–63). During the ritual, another follower, named Don, sees one of these figures looking at him with “pity and contempt” (124).
Perhaps a necessary part of the meeting place, these austere and frightening guardians resonate in many ways. Immortal, transhuman beings naturally remind us of our limitations. Evil is a threat to us in one way, by calling us down to what we can be but resist being, and ultimate good—what Charles Williams calls “terrible good”—is a threat in another, calling us up to what we want to be but can never reach. The guardians also clearly represent the ineffable nature of the experience. As the Eel realizes after an evanescent moment of ultimate meaning in A Dark Matter, “you did what you could with the little bit you managed to keep” (380). From yet another perspective, in Straub’s fiction all transcendence comes in and through the imagination, and the guardians represent the fact that imagination is both boon and bane. In any event, the proper incarnation of the imagination by the process of art, Straub reminds us, is always hard work.
Examination of this one trope, then, leads us through many themes in Straub’s work, provides some implications regarding period and transitions in his career thus far, and leaves us with interesting questions regarding where his fiction will go next. The split publication of A Dark Matter and A Special Place may suggest that Straub’s writing has finally broken boundaries between supernatural and mimetic fiction, in a single work, in a way that his emphasis on subjective perception and his love of metafiction allow artistically, but may be too challenging for commercial labels. Or not. What will happen next to Straub’s use of the trope of the secret place is, perhaps even to Straub, still a secret.
Bernadette Lynn Bosky lives in her own hidden space in Yonkers, New York.
Works Cited
Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. June 1, 2008.
Clasen, Mathias. “A Conversation with Peter Straub.” Cemetery Dance #61, 2009.
King, Stephen and Peter Straub. Black House: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2001.
“Peter Straub: The Path of Extremity.” Locus v. 32, n. 1, January 1994.
Straub, Peter, Michael Easton, and Jon Bolton. The Green Woman. New York: DC Comics/Vertigo, 2010.
Straub, Peter. A Dark Matter: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
——. “The Ghost Village.” Magic Terror: 7 Tales. New York: Random House, 2000.
——. In the Night Room. New York: Random House, 2004.
——. “The Juniper Tree.” Houses Without Doors. New York: Dutton, 1990.
——. Koko. New York: Dutton, 1988.
——. lost boy, lost girl. New York: Random House, 2003.
——. The Skylark: A Novel. Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2010.
——. A Special Place: The Heart of A Dark Matter. Baltimore, Maryland: Borderlands Press, 2009.
——. The Throat. New York: Dutton, 1993.
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