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A review by sawtooth_jack
Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies by John Langan
2.0
Last year, I read John Langan's second novel "The Fisherman", and that experience made me believe that this was an author I needed more of. So, after browsing a few more of his titles at Amazon, I selected this one to be put on my wish list for Christmas. "Corpsemouth"? What a bizarrely intriguing title!
After lurching my way through all 275 pages of this, I have decided that Langan either peaked with "The Fisherman" or he should really just stick to writing novels. This isn't to say that this collection is all bad. There are a few gems here, and I had told Constance (my girlfriend and steady reading companion) when I had finished reading it that I wished I could give it two-and-a-half stars, but as it is, I couldn't bring myself to give it three.
The subtitle "and Other Autobiographies" makes it clear that the stories in this collection are all drawn from Langan's life in some way or another. There are constant references to family in Scotland, to his father working for IBM, to his siblings. The extensive notes following the stories explain each tale's inspiration, if one were at all interested. I wonder if reading these would have made the stories more engaging? I didn't read them all, mainly because the ones I did read ended up killing the imaginative effort put into the stories to which they're connected.
Now, there isn't anything particularly wrong with Langan's writing. He's definitely capable of crafting an eerie tale when the ideas are fleshed out enough. With this collection, though, too many stories consist of just a bare-bones plot, nothing much more than an idea that's talked about to death by one of the characters. A father gets stuck in a time-traveling prison, for example. and spends much of the story explaining to his son what he'd discovered there. In another story, a librarian explains to the narrator (for many pages) how a certain book she's come into possession of has affected her physical body. In yet another story, some kid explains to the narrator how a cassette of some obscure band is able to show him glimpses of "the beyond." This type of structure appears over and over and over, and I quickly found myself dying inside whenever a new story started and yet another character launches into some long backstory explaining the weirdness on which the story is based.
Maybe this is just Langan's style. It's certainly the way "The Fisherman" was structured, with much of that novel delivered as a story told to the narrator by a bartender he meets on his way to check out a secretive fishing spot. I get that there's a certain sense of "mythology building" that comes with characters sharing backstory and local lore – it’s a method that's been present in fiction since at least Washington Irving's description of the area surrounding Sleepy Hollow. The problem arises when the backstory becomes the story, and anything happening outside of the backstory feels like page filler.
Take the titular story, for example. There's page after page about the narrator visiting with family in Scotland, none of which has any bearing on the actual story (which is laughably anti-climactic). Or the last story in the collection, which begins with an extensive description of the narrator's relationship with his mother vs. his other siblings, and the places they would vacation -- when really the story is only about his mother's encounter with some girl who sings for the souls of the dead during the German blitzkrieg of World War II. None of the story's opening information serves any real purpose in the narrative, and it makes me think Langan was simply padding his pages to meet some sort of word count required by whatever editor he was writing for.
This is a shame, because the first three or four stories in the collection are actually quite good. Unfortunately, it all quickly cycles into the drudgery of repetitive structures and themes. Langan really does have some good ideas (the book made from layers of Odin’s eye is particularly clever), but he spends far too much time hammering in the unnecessary details and not enough exploring the rich directions his ideas could take him. As in the story told in the form of a letter from father to son, the father admits his tendency to digress into details that have little-to-no bearing on the tale he’s telling, writing something like, “I know, I know. Too much information.”
No shit.
After lurching my way through all 275 pages of this, I have decided that Langan either peaked with "The Fisherman" or he should really just stick to writing novels. This isn't to say that this collection is all bad. There are a few gems here, and I had told Constance (my girlfriend and steady reading companion) when I had finished reading it that I wished I could give it two-and-a-half stars, but as it is, I couldn't bring myself to give it three.
The subtitle "and Other Autobiographies" makes it clear that the stories in this collection are all drawn from Langan's life in some way or another. There are constant references to family in Scotland, to his father working for IBM, to his siblings. The extensive notes following the stories explain each tale's inspiration, if one were at all interested. I wonder if reading these would have made the stories more engaging? I didn't read them all, mainly because the ones I did read ended up killing the imaginative effort put into the stories to which they're connected.
Now, there isn't anything particularly wrong with Langan's writing. He's definitely capable of crafting an eerie tale when the ideas are fleshed out enough. With this collection, though, too many stories consist of just a bare-bones plot, nothing much more than an idea that's talked about to death by one of the characters. A father gets stuck in a time-traveling prison, for example. and spends much of the story explaining to his son what he'd discovered there. In another story, a librarian explains to the narrator (for many pages) how a certain book she's come into possession of has affected her physical body. In yet another story, some kid explains to the narrator how a cassette of some obscure band is able to show him glimpses of "the beyond." This type of structure appears over and over and over, and I quickly found myself dying inside whenever a new story started and yet another character launches into some long backstory explaining the weirdness on which the story is based.
Maybe this is just Langan's style. It's certainly the way "The Fisherman" was structured, with much of that novel delivered as a story told to the narrator by a bartender he meets on his way to check out a secretive fishing spot. I get that there's a certain sense of "mythology building" that comes with characters sharing backstory and local lore – it’s a method that's been present in fiction since at least Washington Irving's description of the area surrounding Sleepy Hollow. The problem arises when the backstory becomes the story, and anything happening outside of the backstory feels like page filler.
Take the titular story, for example. There's page after page about the narrator visiting with family in Scotland, none of which has any bearing on the actual story (which is laughably anti-climactic). Or the last story in the collection, which begins with an extensive description of the narrator's relationship with his mother vs. his other siblings, and the places they would vacation -- when really the story is only about his mother's encounter with some girl who sings for the souls of the dead during the German blitzkrieg of World War II. None of the story's opening information serves any real purpose in the narrative, and it makes me think Langan was simply padding his pages to meet some sort of word count required by whatever editor he was writing for.
This is a shame, because the first three or four stories in the collection are actually quite good. Unfortunately, it all quickly cycles into the drudgery of repetitive structures and themes. Langan really does have some good ideas (the book made from layers of Odin’s eye is particularly clever), but he spends far too much time hammering in the unnecessary details and not enough exploring the rich directions his ideas could take him. As in the story told in the form of a letter from father to son, the father admits his tendency to digress into details that have little-to-no bearing on the tale he’s telling, writing something like, “I know, I know. Too much information.”
No shit.