I can pinpoint one of my earliest moments of existential unease. I was nine years old and, defying my religiously conservative parents, snuck into the local movie theater to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I didn’t understand the social politics of the movie at the time, and while faintly aroused by Jessica Rabbit I remained thoroughly confused by the idea of bestial human/toon marriage—or whatever you want to call the sexual dynamics of that relationship. Honestly, I don’t remember much about the movie. Except the end. Except Christopher Lloyd being flattened by a steamroller and his bulging, burning red toon eyes popping out like daggers before he is ceremoniously drowned in the Dip. I don’t think I’m the only Oregon Trail Generation kid to still remember that nightmare fuel.
Fortunately, I haven’t known many moments of true horror. Watching my wife give birth to our children came close. Or maybe the time I loaded a firearm and walked down the stairs to confront what I thought was a home intruder, only it turned out to be—my memory is sketchy, but in both instances time slowed down and I felt like I was swimming in Jell-O. My heartbeat was on my tongue and I was suddenly aware of every breath in my ear. To be honest, it wasn’t much different from nine-year-old me seeing Judge Doom’s half-human, half-toon face screeching on the screen. I was terrified but oddly enchanted by the realness of it all. Almost as if horror is the thing that gives us breath even as it takes it away. Which is not so different from humor. Funny things break us, but laughter saves us too.
Before going any further, let me confess: I am not a horror writer. I can’t do what Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enriquez, the reigning queens of contemporary horror, do. And Necronauts, my debut novel, is not horror in the strictest, traditional sense. I know—not a ringing sales pitch from the author in an essay like his for a magazine like this. But I do think horror comes in a variety of strange and unexpected shapes. Kafka is a horror writer haunted by the nightmare of bureaucracy. So is Raymond Carver, sketching the quiet menace of the suburbs. Joy Williams is our contemporary master of spiritual horror. And Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge is probably my favorite book tracing the soft, subtle, and queasy terrors of being human.
Necronauts is my contribution to horror-adjacent fiction. Written in the form of ninety-five obituaries, the novel tells the story of a boy with a cosmonaut helmet grafted to his head who, after watching too many campy 1950s SF films, becomes convinced he is an alien and builds a catapult in the Utah desert hoping to launch himself into outer space. The brief, obituary style allows for a panoramic exploration of the quirky citizens and their small-town lore even as it zeroes in on both the cosmonaut boy’s quest to be reunited with the mothership and his troubled relationship with the local dentist, a fellow addict and adoptive father. Compounding the narrative strangeness are fifty-one vintage photographs which at first glance connect to the narrative but on closer inspection act as a form of dissonance. Photographs that seem like factual proof of textual details in the obituaries, but at the same time call into question the veracity of the story.
Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a hybrid live-action animation comedy noir about political corruption in an alternate 1940s L.A., my novel is on the fringe of genre. Part sci-fi, part fabulism, part reportage, and part gritty realism of the American West. But there’s horror too. Not with jump scares, or slasher gore, or otherworldly monsters, but a kind of slow, eerie existential malaise that tickles and then numbs into a tiny nightmare on your lips. The cosmonaut boy—something of a question mark to the townspeople who call him Nobody—is the epicenter of this dread. Is he a figment of their collective imagination? A ghost? A genuine alien? Or simply a weird orphan? What is he saying with his idiosyncratic sign language? What is he building out there in the desert? Is he really caught in a time loop resurfacing in the town’s past, present, and future? Who is he? And why doesn’t he go to church like the rest of them?
The angst surrounding the cosmonaut boy’s identity crisis is rooted in the existential migraine of my own Mormon upbringing. As my characters can attest, Mormonism is a strange, menacing religion. Zealous. Paranoid. Obsessed with the folklore of blood atonement, cursed Bigfoots, magic underwear, talking salamanders, and afterlife neuterings. Necronauts is a scrapbook of small, everyday horrors accumulated from this religious reality, wrestling with a faith I’ve left, but for those born into it like me there’s no really leaving it. As the drug-addled dentist tells the cosmonaut boy at one point: it’s a religion that sinks its teeth into you and never lets you go, so like it or not you’ll always feel the ghost of this faith gnawing you down to atoms.
And yet these folklores are some of the things I find most amusing about Mormonism. How is that possible?
Film scholar Noël Carroll has spilt quite a bit of ink on the unlikely friendship between humor and horror. “There is some intimate relation of affinity between horror and humor,” Carroll writes, despite the fact that “horror oppresses; comedy liberates. Horror turns the screw; comedy releases it. Comedy elates; horror simulates depression, paranoia, and dread.” Nevertheless, Carroll argues, “horrific impurity and perceived comedic incongruity overlap.” Carroll goes so far as to refer to the relationship between horror and comedy as a “mysterious marriage” with constant shifts from one emotion to the other. But what if humor and horror were, and why not evoke biblical imagery of marriage here, flesh twain into one? What if humor and horror coexisted simultaneously? Not two distinct cognitive and affective states so much as a singular, hybrid, ambivalent thing—an ouroboros swallowing and rebirthing itself?
A few years ago, I made a tasteless, offhand comment to my brother about something deemed sacred in Mormon culture related to death and the afterlife. Rather than smirk as I expected, my brother shook his head and said, obviously annoyed, “Do you ever take anything seriously?” The short answer was, no, life is too short not to laugh at everything, especially death and religion. After rambling through a half-hearted response, I told him that the thing I was mocking made me nervous and I’m the kind of person who has to laugh to swallow the screams.
Don Quixote and Pinocchio, two key influences on Necronauts, are books that epitomize this kind of anxious laughter. Neither can be considered horror by any standard. And yet, these are existentially terrifying books. Nabokov famously hated Quixote for the perpetual savagery inflicted on the titular hero, and it’s not too much of an interpretive leap to say the Knight of the Mournful Countenance who battles imaginary monsters becomes something of a delusional monster whose escalating madness inflicts suffering on others even as it questions the very fabric of reality. And if you’ve only seen the sanitized Disney version of Pinocchio you’re missing out on ghostly crickets and hanged marionettes. They are unquestionably funny books, precisely because the humorous scenarios are conjoined with moments of terror, even as the horror is amplified by the laughter that keeps me from screaming.
In an odd and unexpected way, Who Framed Roger Rabbit might have been my first writing lesson: if you can make a reader feel a singular emotion, you’ve got something. But if you can capture two conflicting emotions within a single moment—cruelty and tenderness, fascination and disgust, sadness and beauty, worship and perversion—then you’re digger deeper into the mess of being human. And when we’re talking about these startling juxtapositions of incongruous opposites that blur together into a strange affective amalgamation that is neither this nor that, when we talk about hybrid things that enchant and terrify, I think what we’re really talking about is the grotesque. Whether that’s Wolfgang Kayser’s notion of the grotesque as a fearsome sensation of estrangement from the world, or Mikhail Bakhtin’s proposal that the grotesque is the life-affirming, upside-down carnivalesque world in which abnormality is fecund rather than fatal and regenerates the cosmos—the grotesque is ambivalence made manifest, and such ambiguity always carries with it a kind of playful dread.
The grotesque is Gargantua pissing on Paris from atop the Notre Dame. It’s Swift describing the proper way to flay an Irish baby. It’s Addie Bundren’s corpse floating down the river. It’s a vodka drinking, machine-gun-toting, talking cat in Stalinist Russia. It’s the Misfit shooting a grandmother in a roadside ditch. It’s a winged aerialiste circus nymph in Victorian London.
But for all its angsty, unnerving comedy, the grotesque is revelatory. It’s only a natural fit that Necronauts is a satire of Mormonism, America’s homespun religion, because satire loves the grotesque. Both of them peel back the layers of this human animal so we can better hear the ticking time bomb of the human heart. When done right, the grotesque stretches us between the stars and the dirt, grounds us in reality while infecting us with fever dreams of possibility. It’s masquerade and nakedness all at once. Perhaps the obituaries in Necronauts offer a blurry map for navigating the inescapable grotesqueries of life, and in the very least I hope they take your breath away, one way or another.
