I’ve never understood people who disdain horror films; in fact, I’d say that the antipathy creates a gulf between me and the horror-averse, a sort of void that the films themselves then fill. From this void howl the moments that echo in my brain: the woman running through the woods in the rain in Suspiria, Danny’s seizures as the Overlook Hotel possesses his father in The Shining, the son and daughter rushing off to play after shooting their murderous parents in Twitch of the Death Nerve, drunkards hollering as they night-stalk kangaroos in Wake in Fright, Albrun’s drowning of her daughter in Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse, and the list goes on. To me, the predilection for horror films signals the ability to grapple with what exists “at the limit of what can be assimilated and thought,” as Kristeva terms it; to engage with such films can be read as part of the eternal struggle against the hegemony of the superego, that which would tame and constrict through its imposition of cultural mores, rules, and expectations. Horror is transgressive, yes, but it is its reality that allows it this quality—it exists in the space of annihilation to which most of us quite understandably avert our eyes.
While Ed Steck’s A Place Beyond Shame is published in a gorgeous, full-color hardback edition by Wonder, it is also drenched in horror, and is difficult to read. The difficulty does not derive from its formal constraints or insistent gestures or enigmatically disturbing visual tokens, but instead from the central narrative that gurgles and gasps in its shadows: obscured sexual trauma and more explicit physical violence inflicted on the book’s speaker by the speaker’s father in a “heavily wooded” landscape of “white power stickers” and “fentanyl” and “chicken shacks ablaze.” It is a book that one puts down at intervals while sighing heavily, perhaps whispering “holy shit” under one's breath as the phantasmatic confrontation with the abject tightens its clammy grip on the psyche. Steck writes, “I remember feelings of outside, feeling being outside on my skin, feeling fluid on myself squirm noxiously, bodily,” and as readers we, too, writhe in discomfort.
Throughout the largest section of the work, “Westmoreland County Double Feature,” two columns (entitled “When the Day Won't Start” and “When the Day Won’t Start II,” respectively) run down the page, moving between repetitions of “I watch [film title],” psychogeographical rambles, philosophical musings on horror aesthetics, mundanities (“Butterscotch candy”), and scenes from the dire, disturbing relationship between the speaker and his father. The vivid accretion of signs throughout this “Double Feature” is punctuated by these scenes, so that the sheer force of their terror is magnified. The father has already been described as a “yellowing, decaying mass,” addicted to opiates and surrounded by “Coors Banquet cold cans” and other detritus of poverty and paranoid substance abuse, so when he forces the speaker at gunpoint “into dog food bag choking on kibble dust, gagging dense doggie bag air, crying-digging through compressed beef-wax dust,” the reader recoils as if we are also in the ramshackle house in the rustbelt of southwestern Pennsylvania. “What would you do if your father stuck a gun to the back of your neck and threatened your life over a bag of dog food?” The question is impossible, and indeed, the next sentence reads, “How could anything else be real?”
Here we are at the apex of horror, what Kristeva calls the “limit of the originary repression… repugnance, nausea, abjection,” the locus where “object and sign” are so horrible that they become part of the “impossible real,” where the loss of distinction between self and other overwhelms, allowing the monstrous to take hold and be repressed. Indeed, Steck’s speaker echoes Kristeva when he writes about “a rejection of object-based memory for the abjection of self—an exclusion of one from their own biographical agency.” This “‘me’ (who is not),” this exclusion helps to explain Steck’s major character constructions in the book, Ghoul and Son of Ghoul. The former is quite clearly the father, and the latter is quite clearly the book’s speaker, but in their construction, they become characters excluded from the “I” of the book and the father that terrorizes him. In “Lobby Cards,” the section of the book preceding the “Double Feature,” the final sentence reads, “Everything is in place now for audience, Ghoul, Son of Ghoul to proceed down the path to a place beyond shame together.” In this sense, it becomes evident that Steck’s book is an exorcism, an attempt to move beyond the abjection of “finding [oneself] to be so many other things but never a person,” beyond the “weird butt stuff” and “placing [oneself] smashed naked in… beady, red-cracked arms,” beyond the druggy animalistic violence of the aforementioned scene of dog kibble and firearms. Ghoul and Son of Ghoul are the characterizations not just of the actual lived pain of the speaker and the father, but also of the path that is coexistent with that pain yet able to travel beyond the shame of “absolute negation in self-embodiment” caused by “addiction and trauma,” that which “stole everything” from both of them.
Through my time with the book, I found that A Place Beyond Shame lends itself to repeated readings and reinterpretations, and perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the final sections of the book, which include a deeply spooky photo gallery entitled, “‘Can You See the Real Me?’/ The Mutilator (1984),” as well as “Haunted Cabinet,” which proves a more prosaic and less fragmented reflection on the events of the “Double Feature.” Here, after the narrator loses himself in a hallucinatory daze at a drive-in movie theater, there is the resolve of “a truck with flashlight-beam-like headlights traces the invisible horizon…[carving] beingness from nothingness.” In most other books, such a phrase would feel impossibly cheesy and high-school existentialist, but in Steck’s hands, it feels like grace after everything that has come before.
Kristeva hypothesizes that poetic experience with an immersion in the abject allows the artist to protect themselves from its horrors, but given A Place Beyond Shame (among other pieces of literature), I am no longer certain that her words hold true. If we immerse ourselves in the abject reality of our own collapse and annihilation, then might we be merely reinforcing that reality’s nihilism? At one point in Steck’s work, Ghoul says, “Have you ever seen death? It’s like a corridor of mirrors.” Destroying the image is possible but means death, yet sitting with the image means sitting with death. Perhaps this is the main challenge of Steck’s exceptional and harrowing work: how to sit with death without embracing it. As Judy Grahn would exhort us to say, “death, ho death / you shall be poor.”