The Carnivore, by Mark Sinnett

Reading The Carnivore was an interesting experience for me, because I’ve never been so engrossed in a story centered on characters I couldn’t stand. Both of the protagonists teetered on the border of unbearable, and perhaps it was because I anxiously wanted to see what abyss they’d sink into next, but I just couldn’t get enough. Like the undertow of the flooding rivers the pages describe, each time I turned a page I was sucked further in.

This is the story of a failed marriage, a husband and wife narrating alternating chapters of reflection on their troubled past. It is a story of a shared memory lacking the capacity to heal, existing only as the point of regeneration for a lifelong downward spiral. This fictional trip through the past takes place on the backdrop of the very real Hurricane Hazel, one of the deadliest storms to ever hit southern Ontario. The metaphor of the storm tracks perfectly the course of Ray and Mary’s union; like the citizens of Toronto preparing for the floods, they didn’t know exactly what to expect, were hit with innumerable horrors but somehow managed to survive and, when it passed, felt nothing but relief.

Interestingly, Hurricane Hazel had lost most of its momentum before moving north and breaking up, dropping most of its moisture on Toronto. What hit Ray and Mary was much the same; not a passing storm, but an immense flood that did irreparable damage to their relationship.

Raymore Drive, where Ray is literally (and figuratively) swept away by Hurricane Hazel.

As a young ingénue, Mary “hoped, and trusted even, that we could share an extraordinary love, and that would set us apart.” Because her husband had already cheated on her multiple times, Mary comes off as kind of a sucker, and her resentment at committing to her sinking ship of a marriage only grows into deep-seated bitterness as she ages. The only time I sympathized with her character was in relation to Ray, a very particular kind of monster. Completely devoid of any redemptive quality, Ray is eaten by his own selfishness, trapped in memories of his past and hurting everyone along the road to the future, left only to ask himself: “Will something change if I relive it enough times?”

The most remarkable thing about The Carnivore was that, through all of this, I wanted to keep reading. Desperately. Sinnett creates such a vivid and honest picture of Ray and Mary’s world that reading the book feels something like looking over their shoulders during the course of their relationship. Because it moves along at such a furious pace, however, I never felt like I was stuck too long in a room with an arguing couple and needed to escape. Though my first reaction was that the ending was somewhat anticlimactic juxtaposed against the action of the novel, it fits; in a story where sheer, white-knuckle survival is key, the real triumph is that they survived each other.

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Bonus! Mark Sinnett reading from The Carnivore:

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Skim, by Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki

I had never read a graphic novel until I picked up Skim, but I was definitely interested in doing so. I initially started with The Watchmen, which I found terribly hard to follow (the boyfriend informed me after this first futile foray that it is a particularly difficult graphic novel). Having come across some of Mariko’s writing recently and having been completely sucked in by it reminded me of the highly-praised Skim, so I decided to give it a try.

I’m happy to say it was much easier than The Watchmen. Part of it was that it was slipping back into a familiar (if equally dark and perilous environment) — high school. I may not have been a Goth or an budding Wiccan, but the Tamakis have tapped in to something most people felt in high school — different, baffled, and often alone. The cast that Skim wears from the page one until near the conclusion is a perfect metaphor for those difficult years — we’re fragile, reforming on the inside, protected by a hard shell we are always trying to refashion to signify what we would like to be within.

In Skim, the Toronto high school has been shaken by the shocking suicide of one of their classmates, and the widest range of reactions is represented from the phony  public exhibitions of sorrow to the quietest grief. But this is only one of the many things Skim must grapple with. Skim’s parents are separated and bitter, she kisses a teacher — a female teacher at that, she is a perpetual outcast, and her only friend seems to be changing. This is perhaps what resonated most with me — how Tamaki depicts the shifting allegiances that of high school, that can be both exciting and painful. Skim’s narration is concise, often scathingly funny, and completely honest, making it a pleasure to read. (“Swiss Chalet = Social black hole.”) And even as a graphic novel beginner, I could tell that Jillian Tamaki’s illustrations added a whole new depth to the text, with the size and detail of the illustration well-suited to the tone of the moment, and using varied angles and layouts on the pages to maintain interest.

Though a short book, Skim cuts right to the heart of all so many of the trials and the tribulations of the high school years, making it a good gift for a teen, or just for an adult who may need a reminder that despite uncertainty, tragedy, and social upheaval, we soldier on. Towards the end of the novel, Skim expresses the heart of the teen years and of life perfectly: “When people in the movies talk about Tarot cards, they always talk about the Death card and say it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to die. It’s change. But almost all the cards = change.” And so, in the end, we just try to deal with what we’re dealt.

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The Killing Circle, by Andrew Pyper

Last night I woke up at 3:30 am, struck by sudden-onset insomnia. I had only gone to bed 3 hours before, and generally I sleep like the dead, so this was strange. But after a few minutes of groggy incomprehension, I realized I wasn’t going back to sleep any time soon. And in those eerie hours in the middle of the night, I lied in my bed and listened to all the bizarre creakings and stirrings of my old apartment – and I tried desperately to try not to think about the Sandman.

But who is the Sandman? Perhaps the name is evocative enough, you’ve already pictured a shadowy figure that creeps in the night, lurking over children’s beds. In Andrew Pyper’s The Killing Circle, the Sandman’s archetypal role is not far from it that idea – he is the faceless menace that haunts the edges of rational thought.  More literally, he is  “the terrible man who does terrible things,” a child-murderer in a story by an amateur writer. It is a story that practically possesses The Killing Circle‘s protagonist, Patrick Rush, a single father, would-be novelist, and listless journalist. Though he claims he has no story of his own, he joins a writer’s circle where he hears the story of the Sandman, a story that becomes even more disturbing when people in his neighbourhood are found dismembered in the same manner of the Sandman of the story. And here the thriller takes off – for if only the 7 members of the writing circle know about the Sandman, could one of them be the Sandman himself?

After the first wave of killing abates, Rush is still possessed by the young woman’s story and is eventually driven to write it himself. It becomes an international megahit, and Rush is plunged into literary superstardom – but it is a story that is not his own. When members of Rush’s writer’s circle start fall victim to the same gorey murders as before, Rush starts to fear for his safety and that of his son, for wherever he goes he feels the Sandman lurking, watching, waiting. And worse yet, by planting the Sandman’s story in the imaginations of the nation, Rush fears his stolen story has unleashed another killer on unsuspecting Torontonians.

For this is not your average thriller – with its sophisticated metafictional bent it asks us to consider the importance of story. Is taking a story the same as taking a life? What is left if our stories are stolen; are we simply bone and sinew? Furthermore, Pyper correctly suggests that a writer is nothing without an audience, that a reader, especially a careful reader is somehow complicit in realizing a story. And in The Killing Circle, Pyper is always more reader than writer, trying to piece together what is before him, trying to survive the deadly tale he has been written into.

Pyper deftly exploits the conventions of horror. The prologue opens at a drive-in theatre where a horror movie is playing. It evokes strangers just outside the window, the darkness under the bed, all the childhood fears we try to put behind us. And although these seem over the top in the first scene, what we will later realize is that movie is closer to reality than one might think – in fact, it is a story of Patrick’s own making.

I’ll readily confess I’m a bit of a wimp, and generally avoid horror movies and novels for my own peace of mind. But The Killing Circle brings back all the horrific tales you wish you had forgotten, along with the primal fears you think you have long overcome. The Sandman is the bogeyman, the deep fear that can’t be rationalized away. Pyper is no sensationalist hack, and approaches his horror with a restraint that makes things all the more eerie. It can be as simple as a house broken into with nothing disturbed, or a flash of a stranger in the back yard. And  the Sandman himself is always faceless, as (I find) the characters in stories and the people in dreams. He could be anyone, but he is instantly recognizable. Add to the fact that we see things only through Rush, an unreliable narrator who often seems teetering on the brink of sanity, and as it becomes almost impossible to be rational we revert to instinct – which here is dominated by fear.

Pyper’s prose also distinguishes itself from its pulpy massmarket relatives. It is sharply perceptive with moments of often biting humour. Take his offhand assesssment that “The Mustang’s snack bar belongs to nether Sam’s generation or mine, but to whatever time it was when men wore ties to buy cheeseburgers.”  The Kiling Circle also offers up biting satire – skewering television and mainstream media (and the unholy alliance between the two), and the Canadian literary establishment.

I sped through this book (partially from curiosity, partially from anxiety), and Pyper uses enough twists and turns to keep the plot from being predictable without leaving the reader feeling manipulated. Yet it is a sign that this is a novel that rises above its genre’s conventions that when I finished I still had unanswered questions. I’m still not entirely sure what the metafictional implications are for the real-life readers – are we, too, complicit in the violence? Is there a subtle critique of the horror industry  that leaves readers, like Rush, salivating for more gore, to the extent that some may produce stories, some may create stories, and others may make their own? (probably stretching, I know, but I feel like there should be something there…) In any case, what I DO know is that after The Killing Circle,  I’m going to have to find something really cheery to put on my nightstand in case I wake up again at 3 AM…

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