Ghostly horror stories bring brilliant unease

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This article was published 14/12/2024 (654 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg author Keith Cadieux’s Donner Parties and Other Anti-Social Gatherings is a haunting collection of 11 stories interwoven with both literary commentary and personal insight.

Cadieux puts the stories under an all-encompassing description of “horror,” but they range from uneasy reminiscence to ghost stories and outright tales of terror.

Cadieux’s commentary on each is often necessary, particularly when he describes his personal physical and psychological state — in an odd way, haunting his own work — but falter a bit when there is a mix of postmodern literary context and a touch of political correctness. No matter: none of his commentary on the stories affects their insidious power.

Many of the stories, especially the title story Donner Parties as well as Diastema and Gizzard Stones, portray the body as a prison we can’t escape from, no matter how hard we try.

In engrossing, leisurely paced prose, Donner Parties offers a man preparing for a subterranean eating contest for cannibals in the same way one would for any eating contest. Grotesque is too mild a word for the contest, yet it all appears logical in a way.

In Diastema, the bloodiness of teeth removed from the protagonist — suffice to say it isn’t in the usual manner — and its desperate replacement by another set is frightening, even disgusting, but the events seem almost inevitable. The story should be repellent but is instead wierdly sensual — it’s ugly, yet the reader can’t turn away.

Gizzard Stones combines, in an understated yet volatile way, the story of a girl wanting transformation from human to bird with her taking part in a creepy AI experiment concerning our sense of another’s presence, though no one may be there.

The trauma of her childhood — she and her father discovered a dead woman in their cottage — seems unrelated, but it shows there’s always something or someone touching us, no matter who we are or what we become. The sadness in the story, as well as its mix of terror and elation, is astute.

In My Son The Insomniac a father worries about his son’s obsession with a literay character. This “dread figure,” as Cadieux calls it, appears not only willed into existence but haunts the sleepless nights of both men. Eventually even the reader suffers from their disorientation. The ending, though, is hopeful if cautious.

Less hopeful is the Victorian-era Stuck, the best of the collection’s several ghost stories. A boy, Henry, is forced to pose for a photograph with his dead mother of six days, an act of ghoulish sentimentality forced on him by his domineering father.

While it’s bad enough that his mother’s corpse is degenerating, his memory of her is also not one of a loving parent. Even worse, he can’t escape the photograph; his mother’s horrible death stare controls his short life, no matter how hard he tries to turn away from it. Her haunting is inexorable, as is death itself caught in an image.

Not every story resonates as strongly as those mentioned, but all work at a high level, invoking at least a sense of unease in the reader.

Beyond that, the best of them are there to experience as personal nightmares; the question of “liking” or “enjoying” them seems almost irrelevant.

Cadieux is a master of letting the horrors which lie beneath and outside us press up relentlessly into our troubled minds.

No one should miss that experience.

Rory Runnells is a Winnipeg writer.