Why I (Continue to) Love the Horror Fiction of John Langan

(By Cody Lakin, author of The Family Condition and The Aching Plane.)

“That intersection of the real and otherworldly, the insignificant and the cosmic, the mundane and the horrific, the literary and the genre, is why I fell in love with Langan’s work in the first place, and is why I continue to love his work”

John Langan

After reading one of my horror novels, a friend and fellow writer once said something to me along the lines of, “You’re actually pretty good at writing the love story stuff. Maybe one day you’ll try that without the horror part?”

I don’t remember if I said this or merely thought it, but I remember exactly the response that came to mind: “But why would I ever do that?”

My first encounter with a book by John Langan was the beginning of what I have no doubt will be a lifelong love affair. Wrapped in his exquisite sense of voice and style was an emotional honesty I can only describe as authentic, and the writing itself scratched an itch in my brain that I don’t always expect to be scratched in genre fiction. When I first read The Fisherman, I remember thinking, “This could be a serious literary classic I’m reading, but it happens to be a cosmic horror novel—and with monsters!”

When it comes to my personal tastes, that’s an uncommon and particularly wondrous high: one of those items on the menu at the nice restaurant you’re unsure of but decide to give a try, and a week later you still can’t get the taste out of your mind. This encapsulates an amalgamation of things I’m ever hungry for in fiction, and which is to be cherished when found. Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Mariana Enriquez, and Dan Simmons are just a small handful of names that come to mind, who’ve both satisfied and deepened that hunger in me.

And as I read John Langan’s newest collection, Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions, a certain phrase kept haunting my thoughts:

Horror changes the conversation.

We’ll come back to that.

The first thing that comes to mind in facing the challenge of describing this collection is how playful it is. There are stories within stories, unique approaches to frame narratives, as well as experimentation with the entire delivery method, so to speak, of the story. “My Father, Dr. Frankenstein” is a story told in endnotes. “Madame Painte: For Sale” weaponizes the second-person point of view in such a way that, when the story decides it’s time, it essentially punches you in the face, to both humorous and genuinely chilling effect. The title story, “Lost in the Dark,” isn’t merely written like a record or documentary of real events, it actually feels that real, too, as it circles around empty spaces both literal and metaphorical. That story, as well as “Haak,” another of my favorites, showcases Langan’s singular gift for myth making, which is to say, his understanding—and ability to portray—how the past is a story we tell, and as long as that story exists in the minds of people and is shared among them, it is a living thing, possibly a dangerous thing, and it is shaped by the tellers, by the context and culture they live in, and by everything that comes and goes with the passing of time.

When it comes to reviewing a collection of short stories, there’s always the temptation to sort of list the stories and what each one is about, just as, in reviewing novels, there’s also the option to summarize the plot. I mention this for two reasons. One: to say that this is something I avoid when writing reviews, mostly because I enjoy reading book reviews as much as writing them (and when I read book reviews, I’m there for the reviewer’s thought and feelings; if I want a plot description, I’ll read the blurb/summary). And two: I mention this because it occurs to me, a surface-level summary of the plot of a John Langan story is almost always woefully insufficient. To say “Natalya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs” is a ghost story, or one level deeper, that it’s a story about what lengths a person might go to for someone they love—a friend, or a sister—to say even that is to leave out so much of what the story has to offer. Langan’s ability, for example, to convince you of the flesh-and-blood reality of entire characters in a mere paragraph or two, sometimes less. Or, how much emotion is folded beneath and between the words, rarely outright pointed to but nonetheless palpable.

That Langan has so much fun with form and structure is pure gravy, though even to say this feels like it discounts the importance of the layers of Langan’s storytelling. You won’t find anything there “just because,” or find experimentation for experimentation’s sake, in these pages. And perhaps that’s a separate point, but it’s another reason why I love the work of John Langan. When a writer is compelled to push themselves, to press up against their limitations or to tread new ground so as to avoid stagnancy, it might be easy to fall into the trap of “how,” but in the process to forget “why.” It might be easy, I mean, to try on a new voice, or to experiment with a form, trope, or even a whole genre, just to do so, forgetting or ignoring the more important considerations of why one is doing those things. John Langan never forgets the why. If he were the owner of a weird fine-dining experience, you could trust that the meals aren’t being deconstructed just to be fancy, no. Each course wouldn’t merely be deconstructed, it’d be vivisected and then dissected, with each deconstructed aspect presented with context and with purpose.

I love literary fiction and I love horror, and their intersection is where my favorite fiction tends to live. Horror, when approached as though it were literary fiction, tends to leave the deepest grooves in my brain. If there’s a common theme among the books I love most under the umbrellas of literary fiction and horror fiction, it might be their relationship to interiority. No description is ever just a description, no detail is ever just a detail, and nothing supernatural or uncanny is ever there just to be there, it is so often an extension of the perceiver, part of the statement or conversation about the human experience and condition, and it’s all in service of the bigger picture. The inner and outer worlds blend and blur, creating space for unexpected experiences and feelings to rise. That’s a long way of me trying to say, the characters and the worlds in this collection feel truly lived-in. More than trying to scare or unsettle you, these stories set out to convince you, and that’s exactly what they do.

At the onset, the characters in most of these stories are convincing enough in their lives and their struggles, their stories would be compelling on their initial trajectories, if only thanks to the masterful storyteller. But horror changes the conversation, and this is a John Langan book we’re reading. There’s a crossroads waiting, at some point ahead; or maybe you’ve already passed it and didn’t realize until it was too late. The story of someone going to visit their dying friend becomes a conversation about more than just mortality when you introduce a liminal realm of trapped ghosts beyond the edge of life. A simple tale of recalling a strange moment in time and a senseless loss, with the mere suggestion of the otherworldly, brushes up against the cosmic sense of one’s own insignificance. The world is not what it seems. It has cracks, and sometimes it opens up enough for us to fall into—or for something else to fall through.

That intersection of the real and otherworldly, the insignificant and the cosmic, the mundane and the horrific, the literary and the genre, is why I fell in love with Langan’s work in the first place, and is why I continue to love his work.

Finally, if my relationship to the horror genre can be likened to an actual relationship, one of my favorite things I’ve ever heard about the nature of a healthy long-term relationship is this: You have to fall in love with your partner over and over again. That means the relationship as you once knew it will end, and so you will have to start it anew; and eventually that one as you know it will end, and you will have to start it anew. This is daunting, of course, but it’s also exciting. The chance to fall in love multiple times, and with the same person.

My relationship to horror has been like this. And though it’s only been a few years since I first discovered the horror fiction of John Langan, I can say his work renews and redefines my love of horror again and again. Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions is clearly the work of a writer who refuses to stagnate, who reexamines and reevaluates himself and then pushes himself, willing to grow and evolve.

I felt deeply invigorated while I read this book—both as a writer and a reader. It echoes what came before while promising what is to come, in the genre of horror and in the horror of John Langan.

(By Cody Lakin, author of The Family Condition and The Aching Plane.)

Listen to our recent interview with John Langan about his upcoming novel The Cleaving Stone! It’s on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

#books #codyLakin #horror #johnLangan #lostInTheDark #lovecraft #theCleavingStone #theFisherman #weirdFiction

Grieving David Lynch

By Cody Lakin.

What do you do with the grief for a person you didn’t know?

When I saw the first headline about David Lynch’s passing, I stood as if paralyzed, unable to accept it as truth. A quick Google search led me to the slew of headlines that cemented the news as reality. I became extremely aware of my own breath and my own heart’s beating, and sat down, wilting with the beginnings of a grief more complicated than I ever could’ve anticipated.

Everyone who knows his work has a story of their first encounter. Mine was with Mulholland Drive (2001), the film that began production as a television pilot—and one of so many examples across Lynch’s career of doubt and interference from executives. After it was turned down by executives, Lynch later wrote an ending for the story and filmed new material for it, shaping it into a feature film.

I’d been working at an independent movie rental store called Couch Critics in my hometown of Mount Shasta, California, a job that was singularly responsible for informing and refining my taste in art and storytelling. At a certain point, I went through a thankfully brief phase of bigheadedness about my own so-called expertise in cinema. I was discovering filmmakers who are still deeply important to me, but I was overly certain of myself and my assessments of film, having little notion of the type of cinema I would later discover that would radically rearrange my view of the possibilities of art.

One such seismic discovery was David Lynch. At the time, no film had ever pissed me off to the degree that Mulholland Drive did. Here was a film that refused any conventional logic in plot or character. Here was a film that felt as much like a dream as like a nightmare, seeming to use a sometimes pedestrian aesthetic to settle you into a false sense of security. There’s much debate about what the term Lynchian actually means, but I might not be remiss to approach it by describing how Lynch’s work sometimes plays upon a specific Americana aesthetic, one that can seem idyllic, charming, pedestrian, even campy, while a savage, hungry, incomprehensible darkness lurks just underneath, not merely in the story but in how the visual style of his films adapts to fit what they depict. Like with Twin Peaks, the normality present in much of Mulholland Drive merely amplifies its encroaching yet ever-present darkness. Like a nightmare that wears the mask of a pleasant dream.

I lost sleep over that film. Why did it feel so impenetrable? Why didn’t it offer at least some clearer clues to its meanings? What the hell had I just watched and why couldn’t I get it out of my head? If you had asked me, then, what I’d thought of it, I might’ve said, simply, “I hate Mulholland Drive.” Yet there was something about it I couldn’t shake, an admiration for its audacity, a sense of begrudging awe. After all, I’d truly never seen anything like it.

DAVID LYNCH: a video conversation with Laird Barron, John Langan, Stephen Mark Rainey, and Mike Davis

After reading those initial articles about Lynch’s passing, I went to work at the bookstore and shared the news with my managers and coworkers. One of my coworkers came in later that day—another lover of film and specifically of David Lynch—and we hugged and talked about our reactions to the news. He spoke about the tears he shed, and we agreed to meet in a few nights to watch Inland Empire (2006). With every passing conversation I had that day with every customer, I felt something like a gulf in me. Anyone familiar with the fresh sense of loss may understand. Questions that occur to you, like, “How is the world just going on as normal?”

That evening after returning home from work, I played a few of my favorite YouTube videos about David Lynch; compilations of interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, conversations with his film family of actors, actresses, and composers, and snippets from his occasional lectures on meditation, art, and the creative process. These were videos I’d been returning to throughout the years, having always found Lynch’s personality a surprising mixture of funny, inspiring, and wholesome. He spoke so clearly about creativity; his familiarity with that abstract, mercurial landscape was apparent, as was his passion for it. For someone capable of creating some of the most unsettling and disturbing films I’d ever seen, I never ceased to be surprised by how wonderful a human being he was.

Watching those videos in the immediate wake of his passing, it occurred to me how automatic my appreciation of David Lynch had been for a long time, nearly to the point I felt I’d taken it for granted. He had been a curiously big part of my life ever since first experiencing his work, and I was only feeling the gravity of that connection fully now, in the beginnings of mourning. There are countless examples of Lynch refusing to elaborate on the meanings of his work; there are just as many clips of him championing his collaborators, raging against imposed limitations on the creative process, and urging everyone to abandon the idea of suffering as a necessity to create meaningful art. These videos—mainstays in my life—made me laugh and made me feel inspired. Now there was a new dimension to them. A melancholy, but a comfort.

Years later, when I think of Mulholland Drive, the emotions are just as strong but they’re a different shade. I was a young, quietly arrogant person back then. That was one of the first films I can describe as a humbling experience. It flattened any sense of intellectual understanding in favor of a more intuitive understanding, something I had very little experience with at the time. It was the type of work that made me reevaluate what it means to engage with a piece of art. Art isn’t always palatable or beautiful; it isn’t always there to simply be admired or understood. The French filmmaker, Robert Bresson, is one of the earliest examples I’m aware of of a filmmaker who was vocal about the hope that viewers would rather feel his films than understand them. This is one of the key things, I discovered, with engaging a work from David Lynch. If you can let go of the need to understand it, there will be a deeper sense of understanding, an emotional one. An understanding in your heart.

In the years since that first encounter, I’ve seen nearly all of his films, including the entirety of Twin Peaks multiple times. Some of his work I still find myself afraid to revisit; they truly feel like nightmares, and reach parts of me that no other films ever have in terms of evoking visceral reactions. Recently, after generously listening to me talk about David Lynch on and off for several days, I had the joy of introducing a couple good friends to the film Lost Highway (1997). Equal to the joy of revisiting what I consider to be one of Lynch’s most cohesive—but no less confounding—visions, was witnessing these friends experience a film like this for the first time. The way everyone’s breath changed during the most unsettling of scenes. The way one of them slid forward on the couch after the end credits, slack-jawed, his eyes wide, and said, “I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve never seen anything like that.” And then how we sat and discussed the film, offering questions and interpretations to which we knew there would never be any concrete answers.

That’s another thing about David Lynch, not merely his work but his person: his willingness to live in the questions, rather than to seek for the answers. His love of those questions, and his disinterest in answers.

Another DAVID LYNCH video conversation: With Cody Lakin, Jeffrey Thomas, Emma J. Gibbon, Nadia Bulkin, and Mike Davis

It has been almost two months since his death. While I’m not a frequent user of the social media platform Threads, I’ve found myself returning there more often for a simple reason: the Threads algorithm won’t stop showing me David Lynch posts. It’s become a community of people who, like me, are grieving, and who are finding solace of a kind in that sense of community. The legacy David Lynch has left behind is a truly unique one. Whereas, days before, the internet was ablaze with disappointment and shock over the Vulture article detailing Neil Gaiman’s abuse allegations, prompting the question of whether it’s possible—or ethical—to separate the art from the artist, my internet replaced this with an overwhelming love and appreciation for David Lynch. With him, there is no question of whether it’s necessary to separate the art from the artist. Lynch’s legacy among those who loved him comes down to a few themes: be entirely yourself, fly that freak flag in how you are and what you do; fall in love with the process, not with the results; create, create, create; be still, sometimes, for you are pure consciousness and there is only positivity and creativity and love to be found in stillness, in getting in touch with yourself and with those around you; don’t cling to certainty, and stop feeling the need to elaborate or explain yourself; keep hold of your capacity for wonder and dreams; find what you love, and do it.

These are some of the sentiments I continue to see echoed. These are the things I’ve always felt whenever I sit down with one of Lynch’s works, or whenever I listen to him talk about art, consciousness, or creativity. They are things I feel strongly now, and it is a curious thing: the grief mingled with the fire of inspiration.

In both everyday life and in my own artistic life, I am prone to self-doubt, anxiety, and no small amount of inner darkness. These are things I try to work on all the time, though it can be exhausting work. When I was an angst-ridden teenager, I came to believe my suffering and my writing were inextricable. Not that this was how I wanted it to be, but I’m sure many of you reading this can understand: especially in youth, before you have a clearer view of yourself, it’s easy to fall into the trap of clinging to or even romanticizing your own suffering, and therefore trapping yourself in it, seeing it as part of your identity.

For these reasons, I cannot understate the impact of somebody like David Lynch. Before him, I had never heard somebody speak so adamantly about how suffering hinders creativity rather than helps it; about how it’s not merely possible, but necessary to be content or even happy in order to better and more clearly create. And I’ve found this to be true in my own life as I’ve matured and learned to navigate the issues and darknesses of my own life. When I feel better, I not only have the drive and capacity to be more productive, I also feel safer to explore the darker regions that I most love to explore, since I gravitate strongly toward the literary horror genre. It’s from a happier place that I don’t fear writing about such depths will overwhelm me or pull me in. Funnily enough, in the months since Lynch’s passing, when I’ve had low moments or moments of hyper self-awareness that feel almost crippling, I’ve thought about David Lynch. I’ve thought about what he might tell me, how he might encourage me, and it’s been helpful. It’s been a hand up onto my feet, even if in just in small ways, but that can make—and has made—all the difference.

Being positive can be especially hard, too, when the world around us seems to be taking such increasingly dark turns. It can make each day feel like a Sisyphean task just to maintain any sense of optimism or hope for the goodness of people and the future of this place we live in. Then I think of such things as words from Twin Peaks, when David Lynch’s own character, FBI director Gordon Cole, is speaking to David Duchovny’s transgender character, Denise. He says to her:

“And when you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”

Those words feel more relevant and more powerful than ever now. Like a rallying cry. An expression of compassion, strength, and beautiful defiance against hate. Fix your hearts or die.

There are a lot of things I’ve taken to heart in reflecting on my own grief these past months. Among them is the importance of community. Those who loved David Lynch, who’ve found each other, is testament to the kind of community that can form around kindness, acceptance, and freedom of expression—in art and in life.

I have to add, too, that it’s no small comfort knowing there was someone like David Lynch in the world, someone who grew up in the time he did, who lived to the age he did, whose view of the world expanded rather than narrowed, who lived and taught the aforementioned values of acceptance, goodness, and love. That’s the kind of person I always try and hope to be.

I often think about what it must’ve been like for the first people who went to see Eraserhead (1977) in a movie theater. It was a film unlike anything that came before it, and I’d say there’s really nothing like it today, after all this time. The experience of watching that film is one of many I can’t forget. The palpable unease; the unprecedented humor; the horror and the wonder.

When I think of Eraserhead, which may very well be my favorite film from David Lynch—if it’s even possible to pick a favorite—I think of the mind that created it. So much of the film is literally handcrafted, as Lynch built the sets and most of the set pieces, and had all the time and freedom he needed to work. From the moment he emerged onto the art scene and the film scene, he was inimitable. Entirely himself, and committed to his vision. He’s even been quoted as saying his Disney film The Straight Story, a simple movie about a man driving a tractor across states to see his sick brother, is his most experimental film. There’s something to be said about the sincerity of a mind as weird and undefinable as David Lynch’s working with a bare-bones, conventional narrative, and regarding it as experimental.

That’s my long way of saying, the great artists are those who are entirely themselves, who find their voice and give themselves to it. As someone who loves cinema and has seen a vast range of films in my lifetime, I’ve seen my fair share of the weird, the unconventional, the experimental, the obscure. But there’s just something about David Lynch. Never once have I ever felt he was being weird or obscure for the sake of doing so. What sets his work apart is his absolute sincerity, a sincerity that is palpable even in the darkest and most disorienting moments.

That heart is what draws me perpetually to him and his dark visions. Being purely sentimental about it, there have been times when I’ve felt as though his films were made exactly for me, and that his words were spoken directly to my heart. What’s amazing is I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. The art industry is filled nowadays with projects seemingly made by committee, where the main intent is to make more money by appealing to the widest possible audiences. In contrast, the authenticity of somebody as unapologetically weird and original as David Lynch is a beacon and an inexplicable comfort. And for somebody so willing to plumb the dark depths of the mind and soul, he was a shining light of a person.

I did not know David Lynch, but a few nights ago, after talking about him with a friend and re-watching another of his films—in this case, Blue Velvet (1986)—I sat down with my thoughts and came as close to meditating as I have in years. This is something his passing has had me reflecting on: how much time I actually spend with myself, in stillness, in silence.

What do you do with the grief for a person you didn’t know? I didn’t know David Lynch, but I felt seen and understood by his work, and sometimes I feel as if I did know him. I carry what I feel I’ve learned from him, and it is an empowering weight. He believed it was possible for the world to grow kinder, more positive, more loving, more creative. Because of him—and because of the people I love—I want to believe that.

And some days, despite everything, I do.

Cody Lakin

By Cody Lakin, author of The Aching Plane and The Family Condition.

Lovecraft eZine: A Friendly Horror Podcast, a community, an online magazine, and more.

#codyLakin #davidLynch #dune #eraserhead #lostHighway #mulhollandDrive #twinPeaks #weirdFiction