As I read on, though, I began to get that sinking feeling — you know the one? Where you can see the author steering into a bad, bad curve, and you are clutching the book whispering don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it? And then they do it? You know?

Mapping the Interior

(Assume there will be spoilers throughout.) The protagonist’s younger brother Dino¹ has intellectual and physical disabilities, and his seizures have recently been getting more severe. Junior’s father is dead, but he thinks that he sees the ghost of his father in his house. He believes that his father is coming back to help him and Dino, and that there may be some way to help his father cross back over the border between life and death.

As Junior investigates what’s going on with his father’s ghost, however, he begins to realize that his father is actually draining Dino of life in order to cross back into life himself. Dino’s worsening seizures are a result of this vampiric effort by Junior’s late father. I was, let’s say, uneasy with the book at this point: We have no sense of Dino’s interiority. As far as the reader is able to tell, he is a saintly innocent, acted upon by parties of varying good (Junior) and bad (his father, prejudiced kids at his school) intentions. I also hated the implication that abled-ness is related to the possession of a kind of “life force,” and that the extraction of such life force would lead to disabled-ness.

The book then does a time jump, many years into the future. Dino now lives in a residential facility, and Junior is the father of a son who has died. Junior takes Dino out of the facility for a day trip and sets out to perform the same ritual that their father attempted many years ago. The book closes with the understanding that Junior is going to bring his late son back to life using Dino’s life as a means of doing so — just as their father attempted to do, all those years ago.

This is meant to be horrifying, and it is, though perhaps not for the reasons I think the author intended. The book is clear that Junior is doing something inexcusable, so I don’t think Jones intended to send the message that disabled lives are worth less than abled ones. But killing marginalized characters is not a neutral act, and disabled characters are more likely than abled ones to be the author’s choice of tragic death. Mapping the Interior doesn’t pass the Fries Test on any one of its three conditions. On an emotional level, it upset me very badly that Dino cannot trust the brother who has always protected him. Even to the character who most valued and cared about Dino, Dino’s disabled life is worth less than the life of an able person, Junior’s son.

(Please do not respond to this post to tell me that Jones is also condemning Junior’s choice. I know he is. I take issue with him choosing to tell a story in which the sole disabled character serves no narrative purpose separate from the desires and choices of the abled characters, survives abuse from one family member, then dies at the hands of another family member. The choice to tell this story plays into ableist tropes that privilege abled lives and voices over of those of disabled people.)

The Silent Companions

Again, assume there will be spoilers here. We start with Mrs. Bainbridge, shut up in an asylum/prison for suspected arson. She has lost her voice and many of her memories. A kind doctor is helping her to remember what happened. Jump back in time, and we are with Elsie Bainbridge, a young pregnant widow who married above her station and is now arriving at her late husband’s country home, The Bridge. She is accompanied by a poor cousin of her husband’s, Sarah. The Bridge is very desolate and creepy. It contains a locked garret to which nobody has the key. Inside the garret (don’t worry too much about how this happens, for now), she finds the diaries of a Bainbridge ancestor who lived during the time of Charles I, and a whole slew of creepy wooden people.

Aside: The creepy wooden people are a real thing from history. Look how creepy they are!

The wooden people, or silent companions, as they are called, take on a life of their own. Their eyes shift to follow Elsie. They appear in rooms where nobody will admit to putting them. Anne Bainbridge’s diaries tell us that she acquired the silent companions from a merchant (whose stall later vanished) in anticipation of a visit from Charles I and his queen.

Anne also has a daughter called Hetta who cannot speak because she has a deformed tongue. This is cast as Anne’s “fault” for using herbs and tisanes to ensure that she would have another child, and that it would be a daughter. “Why should Hetta be punished for my greed?” she asks. She also draws a distinction between her daughter and the “freaks” the Queen and King bring with them for after-dinner entertainment.

So far, not great, right? But I foolishly hoped the book would at least make it clear that Anne was speaking with the attitudes of her time. I hoped that the book would later give us access to Hetta’s wants and interests, rather than filtering her exclusively through the eyes of her mother. But that’s not even what happens! What happens is that Anne realizes that the same “witchcraft” she used to bring Hetta into the world brought with it an evil that now lurks inside of Hetta. As becomes clear from Elsie’s sections of the book, Hetta’s evil spirit now occupies the silent companions, and it is searching for a new human host. At the very end of the book, the reader realizes that Hetta has found one, occupying the body of Elsie’s cousin-in-law, Sarah, and using her to ensure that Elsie hangs for all the murders the silent companions have committed at The Bridge.

Long, slow exhale.

Oh yeah, there’s also free use of a slur for Romani people; Anne has period-typical attitudes towards Romani people; and Hetta and Anne’s choices lead to the brutal deaths of two Romani children. SO THAT’S FUN TOO.

I would have hated it if Hetta had been the voiceless innocent Anne initially believes her to be, the pure-hearted victim of her era’s prejudices, whose thoughts we never get to hear. I would have hated it if the sole disabled character in the book had turned out to be the villain by reasons relating to her own agency — like maybe the perpetual mistreatment she experiences turns her to evil. But what made me want to really scream is that Hetta’s disability and her evil nature are explicitly linked together. They arise from the same source, a choice made by her mother before Hetta was even born. Oh, and Hetta’s ultimate goal turns out to be acquiring the use of a non-disabled body.

I know that the horror genre has a long history of ableism, and that there are works of horror out there trying to change this history. I delayed and delayed in writing this post because horror is not my home genre, and I have worried / do worry about criticizing a genre about which I know very little. I worry that I’m wrong about these books perpetuating ableist tropes.

But I also know that I’ve learned a lot about disability representation in just the past few years. Once someone gets you to notice the trope of the pure innocent disabled character (who dies! how poignant!) or the trope of the evil disabled character whose soul is as twisted as their [insert body part here] (who also dies! how inevitable!), you start seeing those tropes everywhere. I wish we had grown past them. Failing that, I want at least to not let them pass me by in silence.

The post Ableism, Two Ways appeared first on Reading the End.

Problem is, this too-much-of-a-good-thing thing didn’t erase my fondness for new interesting takes on supernatural critters; it just made me skeptical that there was anything new under the sun. So when Tor.com promised me that Mongrels was a take on werewolves I hadn’t seen before, I was intrigued. Add to that my desire to like Blackfeet horror author Stephen Graham Jones, whose short stories have been JUST TOO HORRIFYING for me, and it was a marriage made in book heaven.

If your question is “how much cannibalism though?” the answer is “honestly? still less than in at least half the Stephen Graham Jones short stories I’ve read.” So, I mean, you know if that’s a thing you can handle or not.

Our hero is an orphan boy being raised by his aunt Libby and uncle Darren. They are both werewolves, and the boy just wants to be — if he hasn’t turned by his late teens, he never will. As the family wanders across the American South getting whatever jobs will keep the lights on and sending the boy to school for brief stints when it’s possible, he learns more and more about the life of a werewolf and — most often — all the ways a werewolf can be caught and/or killed.

If like me you are the kind of reader who enjoys some social commentary in your werewolf literature, Mongrels is the book for you. Though the rootlessness and ruthlessness of the ways Darren and Libby and their nephew survive arise from their werewolf heritage, there’s a lot in this story that just reads poverty. Food insecurity follows them across the South, although they are werewolves and can, given the right circumstances, hunt their own. The boy is given different identities in every state (and indeed, he lacks a name, leaving his true identity shrouded in uncertainty), in and out of school  depending on what the laws of the state will permit.

Mongrels is in some respects a picaresque, which is not my favorite type of book and kept this from being a forever-favorite. But it’s a take on werewolves that feels fresh and does not shy away from the utter creepiness of the transformation process. Despite the episodic nature of the storytelling, there’s plenty of emotional through-lines for you to sink your teeth into, plus an ending that yr extremely picky correspondent found satisfying.

QUESTION TIME: Would you rather starve than resort to cannibalism? Does your answer change if you are a wolf at the time? Also, are you tired of werewolves and other supernatural critters or do you rejoice in those stories endlessly?

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