Unspeakable Horror!

A writer taking on writers in horror fiction is not a new idea. Stephen King explored the dark side of the writing life in The Dark Half (1989), Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990), and more recently in Lisey’s Story (2006). But it’s the master dark scribe’s Misery (1987) that bears closest resemblance to Bram Stoker award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke’s masterful Midlisters. Midlisters is an ambitious novella that examines the dangers of celebrity, the destructive nature of preconception, the tenuous connections between writers and their fans and writers and other writers, and the frightening concept that our own emotional well-being might just rely on others in one way or another after all. That Burke can accomplish this in a concise 88 pages is proof that his own time toiling as a midlister will be mercifully brief.

Horror novelist Jason Tennant is one of those moderately successful writers who straddle that broad line somewhere between bestseller and obscurity. Equally far from King as he is from the anonymity of a ghostwriter, Tennant is a working-class scribe plagued with the insecurities, uncertainties, and fears anyone who has ever dared call himself or herself a writer can relate to. Those literary self-doubts reach far into Tennant’s personal life, and when Burke’s narrative opens, we find him grappling with an indifferent father’s disappointment and a wife’s possible infidelity.

Tennant is surprised then when he’s invited to attend a science fiction and horror convention amongst a shortlist of guests of honor that includes his literary nemesis - Kent Gray, author of disposable “sex-fi” novels. When Tennant agrees to attend, a dark journey during which he will confront demons old and new, real and perceived, begins.

Midlisters is a harrowing and heartbreaking tale, populated with what one suspects are colorful characters based on Burke’s own ride through the midlist funhouse. Admittedly, half the fun here comes from trying to figure out which real-life writers and convention regulars Burke has met along the way may be along for the ride. It’s a brilliantly balanced ode to the writer’s life, never self-pitying and perhaps tinged with just a touch of arrogance perfectly in keeping with the requisite ego of a writer writing about the writing life. With razor-sharp insight, Burke dissects the writer’s psyche like a master surgeon. He crafts a richly layered and finely nuanced narrative here, his pen a sharp scalpel drawing painful lines through tender flesh until he can reach in and pull back the musculature to show us the bare bone underneath. And what’s underneath is the ugly, nasty stuff of the human condition.

Whereas King made Misery’s antagonist the focal point of his celebrity morality tale, Burke’s version of Annie Wilkes is a peripheral character, an insidious presence that creeps up on you versus hobbling you with a sledgehammer. It’s a wise narrative choice, and one that pays off handsomely with a far more resonant story. While the influence of King’s Misery is readily apparent, there are also shades of Enduring Love, Ian McEwan’s 1998 suspense thriller disguised as highbrow literature about a science writer stalked by a deluded religious fanatic, here. For while Burke admirably ratchets up the horror a few requisite notches at points, it’s his reflections on the true horrors of life – the fragility of love, failed expectations, death – that transcend the genre and make Midlisters something special. Something (gasp)…literary. Consider the poignancy of this passage in which Tennant confronts the mortality of his aging mother:

Jesus, I thought, when did she get so old? I’d made a point of visiting her at least three times a year, outside of holidays which we alternated with Kelly’s parents, and had never noticed before how much she’d changed from the picture of her I always saw when she was in my thoughts. I was afraid that one of these days only her voice would be recognizable, everything else loosened around her thin frame like an ill-fitting glove, as if God’s Laundromat had returned to her the wrong costume. I was more than afraid; I was terrified and saddened. She had always been a face in the audience, bearing witness to my spotlighted theatrics when the houselights had gone down. Invisible, but there.

Few writers can give voice to everyday fears with such precision, and fewer still can do so in the context of a story like Midlisters without losing momentum or tension.

It’s refreshing to find horror writers who refuse to pander to blood and guts at the expense of the more literary machinations of writing. Burke flexes both his craft and carnage muscles here with equal aplomb, with passages of visceral gruesomeness (book sandwich, anyone?) matching some genuine literary finesse as when he constructs a rather clever metaphorical parallel between the protagonist’s wife’s possible marital infidelity with another man and her unfaithfulness in reading a rival writer’s work.

With a vivid and fully realized narrator to anchor the narrative, Midlisters will mesmerize in its dichotomy of complex ideas simply executed. This surprisingly compact novella gets to the core of what makes writers tick like hungry teeth on a baby spare rib, its succulent bits of narrative meat and chewy conceptual gristle whetting your appetite and leaving you eagerly seeking out the next course to devour from Burke's literary kitchen.

Forward by Jack Ketchum

Cover and Interior Artwork by Keith Minnion

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