A common tie unites the strangler of the child, the creative artist, the classic eroticist and the murderer of fiction,” writes Nelson Algren in the introduction to his anthology of Lonesome Monsters. He quotes Goethe—”I have never heard of a crime of which I am not myself capable”—and then asks us to love his monsters, for their crimes are human.
Very well. But the artist must control his monster. There’s something self-indulgent about the uncritical embrace of horror, something sentimentalizing. Goethe, after all, didn’t commit all the crimes he heard about—the mind must seek information, create value out of horrors, or it fails. The best stories in Algren’s collection—by Bruce Jay Friedman, Thomas Pynchon, James Blake, Chandler Brossard and Joan Kerckhoff—do not embrace their monsters uncritically. Theirs are stories of “no contact,” and they make a moral point. Friedman and Pynchon are brilliant writers already moving away from their early influences—Malamud and Nabokov, respectively. Blake and Miss Kerckhoff are not yet quite so stylistically accomplished, but their stories are stronger. Brossard is too obvious—with his persona and his suicide—but his scenes between husband and wife are superb.
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