THE DEEP ONES: "A Short Guide to the City" by Peter Straub

"A Short Guide to the City" by Peter Straub

Discussion begins September 13, 2017.

First published in Houses Without Doors (1990).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/a-short-guide-to-the-city/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?65498

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Houses Without Doors
American Gothic Tales
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now
Best New Horror 2

MISCELLANY

http://peterstraub.net/home/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Straub
http://theweek.com/articles/609945/horror-writer-peter-straubs-6-favorite-books
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-peter-straub-part-1/
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-whole-ball-of-wax-in-a-nutshell/#!
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/32838-a-...
http://tinyurl.com/y7zjsevq

Online for me!

I've long held an idea that Straub was a modern horror writer, perhaps somewhat in the mold of a James Herbert, and of no particular interest. But I have no specific datum for that impression, I think it must come simply from seeing his books in grocery store check-out racks and airports. Looking forward to reading a story and seeing if I revise that idea or not.

>2 elenchus:

Straub is extremely important to modern horror. One might call his style high-brow or literary horror, but it packs a decidedly nasty punch. I appreciate his pro-Lovecraft stance and I'll always be in his debt for introducing me to "The Jolly Corner". Hope you get to some of his novels!

I read Straub's 1995 novel The Hellfire Club, and really enjoyed it, but I don't think I'd even call it horror, let alone weird. (In my review I characterized it as a mix of "suspense thriller, literary fiction, and mystery.") His debut novel Ghost Story has a good reputation for subtle, genuinely creepy supernatural horror. Joshi thought Straub was worthy of inclusion in The Modern Weird Tale.

>4 paradoxosalpha:

True. Straub is spectacular at evoking menace, though. My favorite Straub novels would have to be Shadowland and Koko. Both feature very different kinds of hauntings, although the latter is not a tale of the supernatural.

The only Straub I've read is his novel Ghost Story which was impressive in its own right but also in its aim to be a compendium of classic ghost story plots and tropes. I also have a higher regard for the 1981 film version than what seems to be the consensus of opinion (that it's a dud) (it has to be admitted though, that so much had to be dropped from the novel that it's more of a "suggested by" than a faithful adaptation).

I've just read the A Short Guide to the City in American Fantastic Tales: terror and the uncanny from the 1940s to now.

I'll read this one out of Houses Without Doors, which I acquired after this story made the DEEP ONES list, hoping to read the whole book. I suppose I'll still get around to it, but I have some really high-priority reading of borrowed books right now (to wit, The House of Rumour and The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah), so I'll just read the one Straub story for the time being.

I'm a sucker for this kind of weird travelogue. Wolf ranches? A winged man? Feral children? Turn back before you reach the Sports Complex! :-D

I enjoyed the manner in which the mundane would suddenly be undercut with descriptions of matter-of-fact violence. While the menace is palpable, the city still sounds like an interesting place to visit. Just follow the guide, although what those men might be "yearning" for at the end brings a distinct chill.

There is some wonderfully poetic imagery here too:

Beneath you is a valley—the valley is perhaps best seen in the dead of winter. All of our city welcomes winter, for our public buildings are gray stone fortresses which, on days when the tem­perature dips below zero and the old gray snow of previous storms swirls in the avenues, seem to blend with the leaden air and become dreamlike and cloudy. This is how they were meant to be seen.

I was struck by the reference to the attempted assassination of Eisenhower, which seemed like it was going to give the city a concrete historical identity. But quick research shows that both (!) Eisenhower assassination attempts took place in D.C.

Edited to add: Too quick. There don't seem to be any documented attempts to assassinate Eisenhower.

I confess I found the thing rather bewildering - left with the impression that points were being made that went above my head. Something about the rôle of violence in American society? Something about misogyny? Or is it just strange and all attempts to find a message are mistaken?

The Green Woman Taproom seems to supply a connection to the larger Straub oeuvre. I read a graphic novel he wrote by that title (The Green Woman), and it was focused on Fielding Bandolier, a serial killer character originally developed in Straub's The Throat.

>10 AndreasJ:

I too feel like I'm missing a key to this one somehow. Houses Without Doors, although sold as a volume of short stories, seems to have more structure to it, alternating chapters with "interludes." I may be coming back to this thread with more ideas after I read the whole book.

I liked the refrain about violence, indicating that attitudes towards violence are one of the distinguishing features of the sub-populations being inventoried.

The tone was unexpected for me, as well. Not the voice over from a Tourist Bureau so much as from someone reading instructions out of a weapons manual. Safety with menace.

>9 paradoxosalpha:

I poked about for that Eisenhower assassination, too! I think there was one but when he served as General, not as President. So a bit of alternative history, yet references to the social unrest in 1968 added to the impression there was something specific in Straub's mind. Clearly it's another layer in the theme of violence and how it defines places, populations (subcultures), and times.

Another angle I attempted to track on my first reading: just which U.S. city is this? A lot aligns with Chicago, but it occurs to me several other Great Lakes cities also probably qualify, though I'm not as familiar with Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis / St Paul, Toledo, Buffalo, etc. I was left with the impression Straub wasn't so much pointing to a specific city as he was distilling key characteristics from many of these. The lake (or ocean?), the river, the distinct sections of the city, the segregation ....

I shall have to read this through again. Our various comments are helpful even if we haven't nailed anything down specifically.

I think he was being careful not to make it a particular city, but the lake to the north suggested Ohio or Northwest Indiana to me.

The city seems to exist in multiple time frames, as evidenced in "Here the visitor may wander freely among the markets and street fairs, delighting in the sight of well-bundled children rolling hoops, patriarchs in tall fur hats and long beards, and women gathering around the numerous communal water pumps." That would seem to put it in maybe the late 19th or very early 20th century, well before General Eisenhower may or may not have been the object of an assassination plot. An "Arts Center" or a "Sports Center", is very late 20th century terminology. Some sections of the city even seem to be located in early 20th century Eastern Europe, while others must be mid-20th century U.S. suburban.

>11 paradoxosalpha:

Nice observation! Could Bandolier also be the Viaduct Killer? I don't think there is any specific key to be found here. Straub's villains are sometimes serial killers with a near-supernatural glamour to them. The Viaduct Killer seems to have attained mythic resonance amongst the populace.

>16 gwendetenebre: The city seems to exist in multiple time frames

Yes, I found it suggestive of the situation of the Alsacia in Moorcock's The Whispering Swarm.

I did wonder when it was supposed to be set, picking up contradictory hints, but it didn't occur to me that it may be intentionally ambiguous or paradoxical; I rather thought that the older-seeming parts were seriously behind the times, and wondering if there was a point being made about real or perceived backwardness.

>18 AndreasJ:

I had a similar idea, it goes along with the segregation and insularism described in the various sections of the city. I hadn't thought it thereby comments on both the real and perceived backwardness, definitely part of the dynamic which plays into violence, as well.

We're seeing that daily in Chicago, it was always there but it's taking a new public form, if you will. This story is quite timely for me, in that respect. Everything Straub includes here applies very much to my city and its current transformation. The violence is taking a social form which could aptly be described as a serial killer.

A couple more observations.

After the tour of each city section and attendant description of its typical inhabitants, the narrator declaims in some form or another, "No one imagines the viaduct killer comes from here." Only of the northerners -- the affluent class who originally built their fortune on the city's success and presumably continue to benefit despite civic decline -- is nothing said.

The narrator additionally characterises each group's relation to violence, even if only to note that it is unknown (ghetto residents). Of the northerners: "You deplore violence, you do not recognize it."

Interestingly, the narrator smoothly shifts the mode of address to include the listener, the reader, whomever it is that the "guide" addresses, so that what begins as a description of what you see in the north, ends by including you in the activity around the dinner table. "You" also are among those who deplore violence, yet do not recognize it.

At the end of the story, there is a construction similar to that regarding violence but this time with regard to the unfinished bridge, the "Broken Span". Each population has a peculiar way of referring to the bridge, from "Whitey" to "Ursula", "The Ghost" to "The Beast", even as only "that thing".

And the narrator links these two observations. The bridge is a memorial to violence, a symbol of yearning and expectation, of something undone. (This yearning is noted again, as highlighted in >8 gwendetenebre:, as evident in the men looking over the walls of the viaduct.) And only the northerners have no documented name for the bridge. Perhaps that's to be expected, given they do not recognize violence.

I really enjoyed this story, and I'll concede my vague but poor impression of Straub's work changed for the better after reading. I'll be very curious to know whether there is any linkage between the various stories in Houses Without Doors. The LT reviews don't provide much commentary on that one way or another, as I expect if present it would be thematic and perhaps linked to "world building" more than it would be plot based.

>20 elenchus: Thanks for all that! Good notes.

I didn't get the impression that the city is a megalopolis like Chicago, but it could still be any of a number of large cities. I was thinking Illinois or Indiana, though.

If there is a key to the story, it's the relationship of the citizenry to violence. Besides the murders themselves, and the "yearning" men, there are 13 specific references to the V-word:

Both of the city’s newspapers also support the Chief of Police, crediting him with keeping the city free of the kind of violence that has undermined so many other American cities.

We are ambivalent about violence.

You deplore violence, you do not recognize it.

Violence in this district is invariably domestic, and the visitor may feel free to enter the frequent political discussions, which in any case partake of a nostalgic character.

For these people, violence is an internal matter, to be resolved within or exercised upon one’s own body and soul or those of one’s immediate family.

The South Siders live in a profound relationship to violence, and its effects are invariably implosive rather than explosive.

These industrious children of the mercantile area have ritualized their violence into highly formalized tattooing and “spontaneous” forays and raids into the tree houses of opposing tribes during which only superficial injuries are sustained, and it is not suspected that the viaduct killer comes from their number.

The ghetto’s relationship to violence is unknown.

In itself and entirely by accident, this great non-span memorializes violence, not only by serving as a reference to the workmen who lost their lives during its construction (its non-construction).

In the days before access to the un-bridge was walled off by an electrified fence, two or three citizens each year elected to commit their suicides by leaping from the end of the span; and one must resort to a certain lexical violence when referring to it.

The “Broken Span” has the violence of all unfinished things, of everything interrupted or left undone.

In violence there is often the quality of yearning—the yearn¬ing for completion.

Violence, it is felt though unspoken, is the physical form of sensitivity.

Clues!

ETA

Or maybe it's not the relationship of the citizenry to violence, but the relationship of the guide's author to violence.

One more parallel implicit in the story: the reader is equated with the northerners, with those who do not recognise the violence around them, and the reader is like a tourist. If A=B and A=C, then A=B=C. The "Short Guide" should, then, be as useful to the northerner as to the tourist.

One reading of this story I like is an expressionistic reading. I see expressionism as a style employing an outward manifestation of an inner state. So what inner state would be similar between a tourist and a northerner? I think a psychological state of isolation, of insulation from whatever is unpleasant, fits in this case. When violence is repressed, in an individual or in a group, it will come out in unrecognized ways.

There could be any number of causes behind the repression, of course. And any number of ways the violence would manifest. I don't see Straub necessarily focusing on any of them, but his story elegantly illustrates the repercussions of such repression, and the insulation behind it. Here he suggests the viaduct killer is a northerner, and the northerner has no idea.

I bet everyone else in the city knows, though.

I don't think I quite registered that different versions of the city were being described, but nevertheless, I was still put in mind of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - the fantastical cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan all being versions of one city, Venice.

Reading the story in 2017 was strange because I was seeing parallels with the current sociopolitical situation in the US and the UK, while at the same time I couldn't fail to notice that its concerns were of its time. The original Robocop springs to mind as a work that's very different but has the same kind of anxieties about where society is going, and points the finger at the complacency (to put it perhaps too mildly) of the mindset elucidated by @elenchus above, in describing the northerners in Straub's story.

>24 housefulofpaper:

The Robocop is a great reference point. It's relevant to the story, as you point out, but a personal resonance for me involves an early insight into how political and moral viewpoints can inform a story in ways that weren't always clearly stated, took some closer reading. When I saw the movie in the cinema, I was attracted to the scifi setting and visual effects, and while watching I found the fake ads really funny. It wasn't for years that I started parsing out the assumptions of the film, and realising that I didn't share a lot of them. A pretty profound moment for me, literarily.

Delving into the MISCELLANY links, I found that Straub's mention of the old man with wings could be an allusion to a Gabriel García Márquez story, not one I've read.

Also interesting that Straub fairly deliberately turned his hometown of Milwaukee into a fictional locale, similar but with a lot more serial killers, one he calls Millhaven, IL.

From a Nightmare Magazine interview:
I had picked up a copy of Joseph Brodsky’s Less Than One: Selected Essays, and was reading his great piece on St. Petersburg, “A Guide to a Renamed City,” and realized with a kind of shock that I could write something similar (but more like a guidebook entry) about the city of my birth and childhood, Milwaukee. My feelings about Milwaukee are mixed and cloudy, and they veer back and forth between hostility and acceptance. I thought I could pack all kinds of feelings about the city into this story if I did not stick to the literal truth, to physical accuracy, but instead permitted myself to exaggerate and invent, and by those means perhaps to express another, deeper kind of truth.

No doubt it's obvious by now that this story made a strong impression on me, I love how much Straub packs into a small package, and how rewarding it is to approach the story as a puzzle or cipher.

>16 gwendetenebre: There's also the peculiar use of the word "wireless" in a story set in a post-1968 world. The further adds to the sense that the city's neighborhood aren't proceeding in time at the same rate.

Interesting discussion now that I've read the story.

A bit too elliptical story for me.

My stab at a meaning is that the bridge (a literal "bridge to nowhere" to evoke an American political scandal of a few years back) is unfinished because of the post-1968 social and racial turmoil that afflicted many American cities.

The city government tries to pass off its failure to complete an infrastructure project as a symbol of the city, an art project. But it's a symbol of failure. Not a lot of people in the city bother to go see it. In a sense, it's a future murdered by neglect and social disunity.

Meanwhile, by another bridge, the viaduct, the products of literal murders do excite a lot of interest.

The victims are middle aged women, women who may or may not be able to conceive children who are a bridge to the future. Thus the bridge is a static, concrete symbol of a stopped future. The victims are a smaller symbol of that, individual human projects unfinished.

The dead women are also sort of art projects since their bodies are placed "like statutes".

Neither the murders nor the stopped bridge means the death of the city. But it's not healthy either.

I like the reading of the women as a literal biological future. This reading layers well with others, as opposed to an alternative / mutually exclusive interpretation.