Give Me Life or Give Me Death

Poe. Now, there was a guy who knew how to dig deep. Time and time again, he took up his pen and cut a clean, satisfying line right to the heart of the matter.

Tortured by love? Be happy nevermore. Fleeing an angsty crisis? Witness the house of your mind go up in flames. Lost your conscience? It's beneath the floorboards, of course. Poe lays his characters open. He pokes and prods at their moral failings and (often mad) eccentricities to reveal the thick stuff that lies beneath. Sure, what we discover may be disturbing, but at least we know it's there.

The collection of characters in the Spring 2007 issue of ELM (Eureka Literary Magazine out of Eureka College in Illinois), on the other hand, dwell in their respective stories like ghosts and we readers have no choice but to experience them as such. They are figures without substance, ineffectual and unaffecting; thus, we are unmoved. They haunt the text for a measured period time--for twelve pages of fiction or sixteen lines of poetry--and then pass away, unremembered. We wander through ELM's drafty rooms without a doubt haunted, although not by emotional resonance or literary portraits that endure. Rather, we're plagued by the eerie feeling that these characters, out of touch with themselves, die within these pages long before they ever really live.

"Rhythm," for example, a short story by David Rosston offers intriguing, Gaitskillian insights (see Bad Behavior, Vintage 1988) into the backbeats that both dictate and define relationships. He makes a fine universal point--that we're all marching to an invisible drummer, acting out the steadiest and most predictable rat-a-tats of love, lust, companionship and grief--but he does so at the cost of specificity, of unique, humanizing identity. Morgan, a successful real estate mogul low on ethics and high on misogyny, prides himself on his ability to read women: "So elastic, women. So connective" (48), he reflects. He marries simply because "she was there for the taking, sweetly confused Valerie" (53). She suffers in her shared life with Morgan and blames this largely unacknowledged misery on her dying mother, Mildred. We see Morgan. We see Valerie. Neither of them is particularly warm, but surely we're meant to feel something. When Valerie suddenly panics about her mother, we sympathize and when Morgan flies out to Pittsburgh to care for Mildred, she "leaning against him like a long lost lover" (55), it stirs affection. But with whom and for what? Mildred dies and we don't care. Valerie cries and, still, we don't care.

The inhuman cast to these characters extends far beyond their chilly demeanors. They're cardboard cut-outs of real people. They leave us cold precisely because we have no idea what they look like inside. If we had to guess, we would envision a core nonexistent, or perhaps thin at best. Whatever resonance we do feel may be attributed to our own wishful thinking for characters that mean and the story's appeal to our sensitive readerly rhythms.

Jennifer Dworschack-Kinter's "Images in Silver" and Pamela Gullard's "Revocable Family Trust" also fall short of the living character mark, although Gullard should be commended on her ambitious undertaking. It's not easy to breathe life into a character that is, for most of the story, blossoming into annihilation. Kinter includes a wonderfully dark and intensely lonely moment, when teenage boys sorting x-rays at an abandoned hospital come across a slide of a cancer-ridden breast. "Like a ghost picture" (38), our young narrator states and watches as one of the boys "held the film up to his face, sticking his tongue out and licking the ghost nipple" (39). Such innocent perversion demands exploration. Unfortunately, the narration moves swiftly on, unconcerned with reflection or discovery, and the opportunity for significance is lost. (Note: Brian Doyle's short non-fiction pieces are charming little vignettes.)

After spending so much time in the company specters, "Gulf" by Brock Adams reminds us of the tangible and lends ELM's spring issue a touch of much needed solidity. A mother sits on a beach beside her soon-to-be-divorced husband, observing her son as he plays in the sand. Suddenly, we're launched into fantasy, a chilling sequence reminiscent of Lovecraft's twisted worlds (see Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, Ecco 1997). The mother imagines a half-man creature--"A black-veined webbing, papery and translucent, stretches between the man's fingers and toes," she envisions. "He glances at me with an eye that has turned black and glassy" (46)--snatching up her child and drawing him down into the weedy ocean depths.