Book Two, Chapter Five
“New Murders in the Rue Morgue”
I think Book Two started off a little shakily, to be honest. “Dread” (though I know it has its partisans) is powerful but uneven, and “Hell’s Event” is a bit random. But boy, does this volume finish strong. “Jacqueline Ess,” “Skins of the Fathers,” and this story, a bizarre, sad, and troubling riff on Poe’s original, are each singular and strange and enormously effective horror.
As befits its semi-cover-version storyline, in which Poe’s ape-run-amok murder mystery is grafted uncomfortably and disastrously into the present day, “New Murders” is about the horror of getting old. That horror is twofold: On the one hand, main character Lewis feels that he’s outlived the usefulness of being alive, if you will–his best days are well behind him and he’s acutely aware that, in that sense, there’s really no point to sticking around.
In some ways Lewis was almost glad to be old and close to leaving the century to its own devices. Yes, the snow froze his marrow. Yes, to see a young girl with the face of a goddess uselessly stirred his desires. Yes, he felt like an observer now instead of a participator.
But it had not always been this way.
On the other hand, even as Lewis’s life thins, he is overwhelmed by a surfeit of life around him. As he investigates a brutal killing that has landed an old friend in jail, he’s constantly bombarded by an excess of experience–powerful smells, hideous faces, disconcerting sounds, painful physical trials, diquieting lusts.
It was too much. The dizziness throbbed through Lewis’ cortex. Was this death? The lights in the head, and the whine in the ears?
He closed his eyes, blotting out the sight of the lovers, but unable to shut out the noise. It seemed to go on forever, invading his head. Sighs, laughter, little shrieks.
Twice during “New Murders” Lewis muses on the distinction between fiction and reality. At first he dismisses it as a concern of the young–when you’re old, he thinks, it all becomes part of the same mental landscape. But by the end of the story over-reliance on convenient fictions has led to tragedy, and his opinion changes completely–something either is, or isn’t.
Lewis, in the end, realizes he falls into the latter category.
The real horror about getting old, according to “New Murders,” is that you can no longer afford your fiction. An unfixable mistake, an unforgivable crime, an unforgettable tragedy, an unhallowed death at the end of your days can ruin all that’s come before it.
The past, their past together, was dead. This final chapter in their joint lives soured utterly everything that preceded it, so that no shared memory could be enjoyed without the pleasure being spoilt….No innocence, no history of joy could remain unstained by that fact. Silently they mourned the loss…of their own past. Lewis understood now [the] reluctance to live when there was such loss in the world.
The fiction Lewis and his friends believed superior to reality is not just vulnerable to its intrusion but ultimately hollow and lousy in and of itself. Self-blandishments and pretense are not palliative but corrupting and destructive–the central horrific figure in this story, about whom I shall say no more, is the embodiment of this notion, very, very vividly so. And as the world marches on the shattered fictions and those who harbored them are left behind.