Cracks, From Which Come Madness
From “The Road of Pins,” by Caitlin R. Kiernan:
“Dear Alex”, the letter begins, and she notices that it was typed on a typewriter that drops its “t”s.
Dear Alex,
I’m sure that you won’t remember me. We talked briefly at the gallery in May….
…
Alex lays the small bundle of paper down on the coffee table and picks up her drink. The glass has left a ring of condensation on the dark wood, the finish already beginning to turn pale and opaque underneath. An heirloom from Margot’s grandmother or a great aunt or some such, and she’ll have a cow when she sees it, so Alex wipes the water away with the hem of her T-shirt. But the ring stays put, defiant, accusing, condemning tattoo, and she sighs, sits back, and takes another swallow of the vodka and grapefruit juice.
I first read about Caitlin Kiernan through a book jacket that highlighted someone else’s description of her as “the new Lovecraft.” The jacket’s repurposing of that person’s quote placed me several levels deep into that opinion — knowing of her because of the thoughts from someone else that she, or probably her publisher, chose to print. It was instant and inescapable and strangely enticing as a spiral from one mind (my own) to the next (the jacket writer’s) to the next (the quoted).
It’s an effective line, “new Lovecraft,” in that it readied me for something otherworldly assuming I know his writing. She is him; he was she. He wrote strange horror-sci-fi tales and is synonymous with the Cthulhu character, that gigantic octopus overlord. She must then, also, write about monsters?
But in “The Road of Pins” she doesn’t. In that story, she achieves something much more subtle and sinister. Where there could have been otherworldly beings, she places dropped letters and tense changes and malformed sentence structure. It’s lovely.
Alex sees dropped “t”s on her written page. You will see them in Kiernan’s original text. Above, I have italicized them.
A typewriter of many facets arises from that experience. The outer-most effect, the typewriter shows Alex and you the reader this unnerving block of text that’s odd only in a physical way. All those letters suggest that the typewriter should have been replaced or repaired. It provides a window into the misshapen inner parts of the machine and a physical representation of the malformed relationship between Alex and her admirer, if you’re willing to take the suggestion that far. Every part of the letter is unstable and rickety, like it will soon fall apart and all the “t”s will drop down the page onto the floor.
Then, if you’re me or like me or maybe you’re “the new me,” you see that the typewriter doesn’t drop all its “t”s. That fifth one isn’t a mistake on my part. It wasn’t a mistake Kiernan made either.
Then later in Alex’s mental processing of the letter, Kiernan brings her character’s existence back toward normalcy — even if normal is associated with being steady and Alex’s steadiness has been tilted by a few vodkas — with Alex and the water ring.
Alex sets down the glass. Liquid collects on the outside of the vessel. The excess seeps into the wood. It’s such a simple thing we have all encountered, yet there’s more. Hidden gems. What made its mark for me was this:
The glass has left a ring of condensation on the dark wood
The glass has left; not, the glass leaves. Alex lives in first person within this story. The glass, on the other hand, occupies some other space beside that present moment. I don’t want to fly on about the escapist nature of inanimate objects in this universe or how perhaps the people are present but objects move into and out of the moment (look later in the paragraph and see the ring work in the present, an artifact of the glass that has left it). The only comment I want to make is that Kiernan’s aside about the glass exiting the present is the smallest amount of creepy that could have a noticeable outsized effect. This is masterful. Another minuscule giant in the room. This one sneaks into the cracks of normalized writing structure.
Wonderfully, it doesn’t end there. The ring, Kiernan finally describes as “defiant, accusing, condemning tattoo,” again steps outside the bounds of what you might expect as a reader looking for regularity. She doesn’t hand over the ring as “a defiant, accusing” figure or give it life as being “defiant, accusing, a condemning tattoo,” she sidesteps words of structure and instead lets the strangeness of the moment work itself out. You can read it however you like to have it make sense. On the page, it will remain a defiant object written in a defiant manner.
Kiernan supplies this kind of shapeshifting throughout her work. Every conflict in the story gains more depth because of it. Every person and object teeters on the edge of instability, even if all they’re doing is reading a letter or all the they’re being is a spot on a surface. Best, the shifts swallow you reader into something entirely comprehensible but for hairline cracks into where, when you have found them of they have found you, you have met the madness.