Northern Gothic

Nick Mamatas

More and more books from Soft Skull Press seem to be falling into my hands over the last year or so. You may never have heard of Soft Skull Press, but you will. They have a mission to publish the best indie authors they can find, and while they slip on occasion, they also uncover gems every now and then. Nick Mamatas, who's been steadily making a name for himself in the underground horror community for the past five years or so, is one of those gems.

That he's made such a name for himself intrigues me, as Mamatas' fiction runs counter to what seems to be the trend these days; rather than the extreme horror of such present hot young things as Charlee Jacob, Mamatas goes for the atmospheric. He doesn't tie up his loose ends, leaving the reader with more questions than answers; he's a lot more Stanislaw Lem than he is Brian Keene. And the horror here is almost a stretch to even call horror; it's more a quiet instensity.

Ahmadi Jenkins is gay, black, and living in New York City for the past three weeks, still getting accustomed to the world around him and his present state of out of the closet-ness. In a parallel story, William Patten, an Irish dockworker, is trying to scrape up three hundred dollars to buy his way out of the Civil War draft in 1863, but suddenly finds himself spearheading one arm of the Draft Riots. The two stories collide when an offhand comment Patten makes in a bar about not caring for the darkies finds its way onto Jenkins' answering machine.

Mamatas gives us just enough rope. He never comes right out and tells us that time's doing weird things, he just gives us enough hints through the action and setting that we know something really odd is going on. He's not going to tell us what it is, we have to fill in the blanks ourselves. This is the mark of great literature.

Not to say that Northern Gothic is great literature; there are a few too many holes for the work to come off a a great piece of impressionism (though given the choice, I'd much rather have too many holes than too few; horror is always better when you have to imagine it yourself), and Patten and Jenkins, despite being relatively well-drawn characters, don't really jump off the page at you. That said, it should be obvious to the discerning reader of horror that Nick Mamatas is soon going to be a force to be reckoned with, and wouldn't you like to say you knew that guy back when? Well, "back when" is fading rapidly. Read Nick Mamatas now.