Jack Cady’s Phantoms and the Horror of Now
I recently wrapped up teaching a writing class for teenagers interested in horror fiction. It was a joy to read their writing. Some of it was frankly shocking. All of it was pretty scary.
I also finished Jack Cady's Phantoms this week, a collection of his short stories. It's noteworthy that the collection, almost entirely fiction, begins with the letter Cady wrote and read aloud to a judge when he refused to pay a portion of his federal taxes as part of a Quaker protest against U.S. adventurism and war crimes. Cady's writing drips voice—sometimes in a way that marks his writing as dated—and also warmth, care for everything that is noble and good in the human spirit.
It is also melancholy in a way that is sometimes troubling. His stories swing, for me, between admirably direct critique of what he sees as the U.S. spiritual decay (how quaint, given that Cady died in 2004 and never got to see what's happening today) and a kind of embarrassing romanticization of the past.
No story embodies this for me more than his "Kilroy Was Here." To make a long-ish story short, a veteran at a VA hospital becomes aware of a lurking evil that is plucking away some of the old-timers…before they have a chance to die naturally. One particularly canny and compassionate nurse is aware of these supernatural events. No one else is.
By the end of the story, our narrator has resolved to go out and meet this vague and nameless evil along with some of his veteran compatriots—assisted by a legion of ghosts, phantoms of other people lost to war, only some of them recognizable as soldiers.
On a line-by-line basis, the story is compelling. As a stylist, Cady was everything I had been told he was, with a real eye for cadence and rhythm. On the other hand, the menacing evil is perhaps too cosmic, too vague, too redolent of some old cynic's idea of spiritual rot that, as a teacher of wonderful young people, rankles me quite a bit. The kids aren't necessarily all right, Jack, but let's not pretend that there was some magical golden age we've lost. The "Great Generation" also gave us redlining and fought tooth and nail against school integration.
Yet there is a humanity to Cady's stories that is touching, despite my reservations, and I feel that in "Kilroy Was Here." Perhaps the most memorable moment comes when the narrator asks the nurse why she doesn't work in pediatrics; he feels sorry for her, spending her time with senile ex-soldiers, at least one of whom makes a show of sexually harassing her over the course of the story.
Her explanation is the stuff of real horror, scarier than any looming bogeyman. She says that she already tried pediatrics, and "not all parents love their children."
No more explanation is required. The sentence holds horror and sorrow in equal measure.
Volumes and volumes have been written about the Horror genre, both for and against it. I don't think it's liable to go anywhere, and anyway I don't think it requires any defense I might offer. It stands the test of time for self-evident reasons: in addition to being, as Lovecraft claims, the oldest emotion, fear is also likely the first emotion any of us experiences, screaming as we enter the world ill-equipped to understand or survive it on our own.
But as I read my students' horror stories, I felt a real kinship to them, to the fears that still manifest as ghosts and monsters but that always represent the fear of death, fears that now resonant with the reality of death on a scale unimaginable. The recent IPCC report shows that climate change is not a possibility but a certainty. The work that is left is not to prevent it but to mitigate its worst effects. That work will be uncomfortable and scary at best. A future without that change is terrifying beyond our ability to comprehend—which is part of the problem.
Yet horror gives us a way to comprehend all our fears, the old and the new. Cady's Phantoms was a welcome bit of reading, warm in its tone and its voice and its ideals. I think I would have liked Cady. But it was also very much horror of its time, horror that looks to the past for answers, in which the titular phantoms are solutions to modern problems rather than their progenitors.
The kids know that the real horror, as well as real hope, both lie ahead.
#
You can donate to support survivors of sexual assault here: https://tiltify.com/@northeastpunch19/support-survivors