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Horrific Modifications: Horror and the New Zealand Literary Tradition

William Shaw

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Since the early 1960s, a striking number of texts written in this country have been preoccupied with a

particular kind of violence. This may, in itself, seem rather unremarkable – violence has long been a

preoccupation of all kinds of narratives, and has a notable record in New Zealand literature. However,

the violence that these texts display is distinctive. It is not realistic or explicable; it is barely controlled

and excessive - a violence more exaggerated than that usually seen in newspapers, history books, or

other kinds of fictional narratives. It is violence that performs a literary function, as opposed to a

narrative one; it does not serve to further the plot, or to increase the texts’ believability. Instead, I will

argue, its excessiveness disrupts and challenges the reader to readjust their habits of reading. This

kind of violence arises out of the various ways these texts engage with the strategies of horror, and by

examining this engagement it becomes possible to see the ways in which these texts position

themselves within social, literary, and critical contexts.

The three texts discussed below all feature this kind of exaggerated violence – from the pulp

movie murder and necrophilia in Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s The Scarecrow (1963), to the focused,

organised brutality of Owen Marshall’s 1995 short story ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ and the intensity

and scale of the violence in Elizabeth Knox’s Wake (2013). These three texts provide a complex

picture of the ways in which horror in New Zealand fiction of the mid twentieth to early twenty-first

century may be approached and critically examined. Out of the social, psychological, literary contexts

to which these depictions speak, the use of horror addresses the problems and limitations of literary

representation in post-provincial New Zealand. Horror, I will argue, is employed not as a style or

genre but rather as a way to shape and change our understandings of the places that we live in.

The violence employed by these writers is distinct from that of the ‘provincialism’ associated

with the major New Zealand writers of the early and mid-twentieth century. Patrick Evans identifies

the 1960s writing of Ronald Hugh Morrieson, David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down and

Frank Sargeson’s Joy of the Worm as all three looking “back over fifty years of New Zealand writing

and consummat[ing] its themes” (200). For Evans these texts mark a bridge between the ‘provincial’

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writing that came before, and the response “to influences from overseas” that developed from the

1970s onwards. Despite this shift, Erin Mercer, discussing the origins of a New Zealand literary

tradition, notes the importance still placed on the project of creating a literature as near as possible to

the actual social reality experienced in New Zealand (Mercer 132-134). By 1987 Lawrence Jones was

claiming that ‘critical realism’ “appears as the only mode” in “the brief history of New Zealand

narrative” (17). Jones characterises critical realism as realist writing which focuses on the “deflation

of N.Z. myths of itself … realism as the deconstruction of Utopia” (11) – in short, a realism that

attempts to provide an accurate depiction of the social reality in a way that refuses to idealise it, as

exemplified by the early twentieth-century works of writers such as Frank Sargeson and John Mulgan.

While such authors as Katherine Mansfield and Janet Frame show that critical realism has not been

the only mode in New Zealand literature, Erin Mercer, writing in 2013, claims that there has been a

historical privileging of such writing:

Writers working outside the realist mode in genres perceived as 'popular' have

frequently been overlooked, ghettoised – The Oxford History of New Zealand

Literature in English separates 'popular fiction' from 'the novel' – or disparaged

(134).

The inclusion of non-realist writing by authors such as Janet Frame and Charlotte Randall in the

“national canon” is, for Mercer, facilitated by their “literary” qualities (134). Mercer does not specify

precisely what she means by the term ‘literary’, but presumably it is seen as a way of distinguishing

their texts from “genre fiction”:

Genre fiction, then, is the kind of story that offers readers more or less what they

would expect upon the basis of having read similar books before, whereas its

presumed opposite, now increasingly referred to as ‘literary fiction’, is expected to

go beyond generic boundaries and offer more original imaginative exploration.

(Baldick)

Writing in 1990, Mark Williams presents a similar argument to Mercer, claiming that while writers

such as Janet Frame are not realist, their “anti-realist tendencies are always controlled by a complex

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respect for the details of social experience” (Leaving 25). Particularly relevant for the following

discussion is Williams’ a rgument that:

[W]hat is being transformed in the most significant recent fiction produced in this

country is the realist tradition itself, not into some other thing, as Wevers would

have it, but into a richer version of its own possibilities … by the ‘transportation’ of

literary influence (Leaving 20).

The three texts discussed below all display a “complex respect for the details of social experience”,

but the way in which they express this respect is through importations of literary influences. These

are not ‘genre’ or ‘popular fiction’ writers; all three continue to be subjects of academic criticism,

even if they share practices and techniques with such writing.

What follows is an examination of the way three ‘literary’ texts produced in this country

over the last fifty years have incorporated practices associated with ‘horror’. This thesis argues that

such practices have been employed to develop and modify the New Zealand ‘literary’ tradition and

that by bringing in such influences they are better placed to examine the layered and complex social

realities that they exist within. As Dani Cavallaro argues:

Fear does not anaesthetise consciousness but actually sharpens it. It makes us aware

that reality contains many more layers than common sense would have us recognise,

and that some of these layers are enticing, though also menacing, precisely because

we do not understand them. (6-7)

My purpose in examining the ‘horror’ in these three texts is not to claim these texts as unique or

separate from the literary traditions and contexts they are a part of. Nor is it an attempt to articulate a

consistent theory of a genre such as ‘New Zealand Horror’ – these texts frequently contradict each

other in the way they deploy these practices. What follows illustrates in detail one of the ways in

which New Zealand literature over the last fifty years has engaged with depictions and

conceptualisations of horror from varied places and times in order to examine the local in unexpected

and original ways. One contemporary reviewer of Morrieson complained that “[t]his is certainly not

the New Zealand I know” – grasping only half of the point I wish to make (qtd. in Simpson 12). All

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three texts discussed below are placed in identifiably New Zealand settings, and are concerned with

particular local details but, as I will show, in order to give these depictions their unique atmosphere,

they have recourse to ‘imported’ techniques and practices – those extreme devices that render the

familiar unfamiliar, and are commonly associated with (‘genre’) texts from Europe and America.

It is also important to point out that these are all texts written by Pakeha authors, with a

Pakeha focus. Alex Calder, writing in The Settler’s Plot , discusses how in New Zealand writing,

there has always been what C. K. Stead describes as “a tension … between here and there” (qtd. In

Calder 189). Calder expands on this statement: “By ‘there’, I mean anywhere in the big wide world

that makes ‘here’ seem outlying or negligible in comparison” (190). He then uses this observation to

make a distinction between Maori and Pakeha literature:

Stories of departure and return, of the distance between ‘here’ and ‘there’, are

perhaps even more characteristic of Maori writing, but ‘there’ is usually the city of

the post-World War II urban migration, while ‘here’ is typically the small rural

community (189).

What this implies is that the contexts in which Maori writing is produced are different from those of

Pakeha writers, and that the dialogues in Maori writing – the ways they depict social relationships

and environments; their different ‘here’s’ and ‘there’s’ – require different focuses than Pakeha

‘settler’ writing. It would be a mistake to assume Maori writing does not engage with many of the

same ‘unfamiliar’ practices discussed below, however, the context out of which these kinds of

violence arises in those texts would be different than in the three I have chosen. In these three texts,

the violence arises out of a ‘settled’ Pakeha worldview – these are characters with no perceptible

unease about their place in New Zealand, their status as non-Maori in New Zealand provides with

them no discernible anxiety, and there are no moments where this is challenged. It is from such a

place the effects I examine below arise. To examine those effects in Maori writing with any accuracy

and insight would require the recognition that that writing occupies a different place and to elucidate

that with any clarity would require more space than is available here.

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The use of the term ‘horror’ in what follows is informed by a number of different theories

from a range of disciplines. In his landmark work The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll makes a

distinction between ‘horror texts’ and ‘texts of terror’ – using as his examples, texts such as Grand

Guignol plays and those “Gothic exercises such as Radcliffe’s The Mystery of Udolpho”,

respectively (15). These are distinguished for Carroll through the presence or absence of ‘monsters’.

Particular kinds of monsters are required for a text to exemplify horror in Carroll’s view: “if we are

to exploit usefully the hint that monsters are central to horror, we will have to find a way to

distinguish the horror story from mere stories with monsters in them, such as fairy tales” – in short,

to devise a definition of the particular horror monster (16). His argument is that, in horror texts,

monsters are considered ‘unnatural’; they “breach the norms of ontological propriety presumed by

the positive human characters in the story” (16). As a result, they are portrayed as abnormal,

repulsive, and “threatening psychologically, morally, or socially” (43). Susan Stewart adds to this

argument by claiming that “the referents [of a horror or fantastic story] will not be dissolved into a

systematic articulation of a hidden set of signs” – thus reinforcing Carroll’s viewpoint by refusing to

allow the reader to explain away a monster’s ‘unnaturalness’ as an allegory or symbol (Stewart 36).

One of the most important ideas for Carroll’s definition of a horror-monster is the concept of

‘impurity’ – successful horror-monsters are ‘categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory,

incomplete, or formless” (32). A horror-monster, for Carroll, is both threatening and disgusting: “[i]f

the monster were only evaluated as potentially threatening, the emotion would be fear; if only

potentially impure, the emotion would be disgust. Art-horror requires evaluation both in terms of

threat and disgust” (28). The way in which we, as readers of these texts, can determine whether or not

particular entities are monsters in the above sense is through examining the way in which they interact

with the other characters, the ‘positive humans’, in the text. Carroll claims that “one indicator of that

which differentiates works of horror proper from monster stories in general is the affective responses

of the positive human characters in the stories to the monsters that beleaguer them” and that “horror

appears to be one of those genres in which the emotive responses of the audience, ideally, run parallel

to the emotions of the characters” (17). He tempers this latter point by arguing that, for his theory, he

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is “not preoccupied with the actual relations of art-horror to audiences, but with a normative relation,

the response the audience is supposed to have” (31). Stewart reinforces this position:

The horror story threatens us with a situation where our assumed patterns of

significance and insignificance are skewed … Here the reader is trapped by the mesh

of the literal; the sequentiality of the narrative has been determined before the

reader’s arrival (37; 39).

Ideally, the traditional horror-story is one in which the reader occupies, more or less, the same place

as the victim. It is the “mesh of the literal” which allows the reader to identify the horror-aspects of

texts, and to locate the “norms of ontological propriety” required to engage with the narrative. Thus

the emphasis on the relationships between beings in a text employing horror allows us to focus on not

only the relationships between the monster and the ‘victim’ but also the normative relationships

between text and reader as well. Horror-stories require a willingness to engage in particular practices

as a reader that other narratives may not.

While this idea of a monster will prove essential in the discussion to follow (and it does

inform the following uses of the term), there are problems with a prescriptive, normative definition of

‘art-horror’ as a genre. It may be useful when discussing the texts that Carroll and Stewart discuss

(and their surveys are very wide ranging), but as a rubric for determining what constitutes horror in

literature it becomes less relevant as writers and producers create more complex texts. Cavallaro notes

that “the shapes given by individual tales to unsettling experiences are quite diverse” and how this

makes genre criticism a “precarious and unreliable endeavour” (15).

Discussing the expansion of the term ‘Gothic’, Timothy Jones argues that a focus on tropes as the

determining characteristic of genre leads to critical arguments which “claim [texts] contain Gothic

elements unrecognised by the common reader”, and thus the genre in question

[C]an be ‘discovered’ in almost any text, and the area that Gothic studies concerns

itself with becomes potentially enormous. A genre with roots in the popular and the

recognisable is now thought to appear in forms utterly unrecognisable to the non-

specialist (23).

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This is a potential problem for the discussion below as well: the recent anthology Gothic NZ: The

darker side of kiwi culture, mentions or discusses Knox (13), Marshall (14), and Morrieson (32-33) in

relation to the gothic. It would seem counter-productive to simply remove one label in order to apply

another in the same fashion – to replace a genre description of ‘Gothic’ with the genre description

‘Horror’. Such an argument would risk running into the same problem that Jones identifies with the

Gothic, simply becoming a list of tropes which may be ‘discovered’ anywhere. Jones’s argument that

genres are distinguished by their discrete practices and their readers’ engagement is useful here, as it

posits that when readers:

[I]dentify a text as Gothic, they engage with it in a particular way. The Gothic text

exists within a particular horizon of expectations, and this field is the proper context

in which to read the Gothic. This recognition engenders a kind of perceptual shift.

Gothic habitus enables readers to negotiate the implicit emphases of the text;

Gothics are read with a set of expectations and procedures in mind. … It is less

useful to look for what the Gothic text ‘means’ than to see it as providing an

individual modulation of a specific kind of reading experience. (257).

This idea is useful in conceiving the function of the ‘horrific moments’ in the texts discussed here –

it explains how it is that these texts may simultaneously incorporate practices that we associate with

genre while not belonging to that genre. For instance, the narrative complexity of The Scarecrow

barely accords with Stewart’s claim as to the sequentiality of horror-stories, yet we recognise clearly

the figuring of the Scarecrow himself within Carroll’s notions of impurity and interstitiality; there

may be links between the desires of the townsfolk and the Scarecrow’s crimes, but the Scarecrow is

figured in terms of a horror-monster, not as an allegorical critique of 1930s New Zealand. The goal is

not to argue that The Scarecrow is part of a horror genre, but that the way we read its depictions of

people and place is modulated by its engagement with practices of horror. Such events shift our

readings so as to, as Janet Frame says, “construe as miracle the hieroglyphic commonplace” (241).

The violent disruptions of realism being worked into these texts attempt to both depict the social and

also show us new ways in which understand it.

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The concept of discrete horror ‘practices’, as opposed to a list of tropes, is useful in the way

it allows the reader to critically expand their repertoire of what constitutes ‘horror’ – in this

particular case it allows for conceptions of horror that are based on ‘real world’ phenomena to

inform readings. It would be possible to articulate the ‘proper context’, or ‘horizon of expectations’

in which to read texts of the horror genre, and it would be quite likely that the three texts discussed

here would not fit into this context – they are very different to the examples that critics such as

Carroll propose – but when this context is expanded to take into account practices from outside the

corpus of horror fiction identified by critics such as Carroll, they appear to be inhabiting it in

interesting and original ways. When our ‘horizon of expectations’ is taken to include our knowledge

of ‘real-world’ horror, the complexity and interactions of these texts may be better understood. In

using the term ‘real-world’ I mean events from history and contemporaneity that we know actually

happened, and were not ‘invented’ by an author – particular kinds of violence known to us primarily

through newspapers, history books, and television documentaries. As Adriana Cavarero argues:

Beginning with the biblical slaughter of the innocents, and passing through various

events that include the aberration of Auschwitz, the name used is ‘horror’ rather than

‘war’ or ‘terror,’ and it speaks primarily of crime rather than of strategy or politics

(3)

These texts are then engaging with more than traditional literary practices – the sources of ‘horror’

are, for them, drawn from a context familiar to that of their readers.

The difference between ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ has been discussed widely and is worth

remarking on here. Ann Radcliffe made the first major distinction with her 1862 argument: “[t]error

and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high

degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them” (“Terror and Horror”). This

view, of terror as related to the psychological and intangible and horror as related to the physical and

immediate, is common, as is seen in Carroll’s argument (Carroll 15). Adriana Cavarero, writing about

‘real-world’ violence, also follows this line – positing that the distinction has something to do with the

repugnance and revulsion generated by horror, while terror is seen as something with a “strategy” –

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something with a comprehensible logic and an end to which it is the means; qualities that she argues

are lacking in horror (7-8; 41). Dani Cavallaro critiques this binary, arguing that “horror and terror are

closely interconnected and that each is capable of metamorphosing into the other … [due to] the

experience of fear as an ongoing condition” in which we “acquaint ourselves with its more or less

subtle modulations” (6-7). Even if, as Devendra P. Varma argues, the “difference between Terror and

Horror is the difference … between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse” (Varma 130),

it is important to recognise the contexts in which both events happen – the way that terror “acquires

vibrant bodies”, and “our inability to classify [the] sources … and motives” of horror, as Cavallaro

puts it (5). The most important aspect of this discussion for what follows below, is that horror is a

physical manifestation with roots in wide range of contexts of fear – the contexts out of which both

terror and horror arise may be one and the same. Horror is figured as a disruption, which modulates

that “ongoing condition” of fear – a broader but no less relevant area than those literary and social

contexts discussed above. In these texts this happens through their representations of violence; thus,

examining the ways in which these violences are figured as manifestations of horror involves

attention to the causes and contexts in which they occur. It is because this violence arises from and

exists within such contexts, that it is, as Adriana Cavarero argues, “a particular kind of violence that

exceeds … the simple crime of homicide” resulting in what she terms a “perversion of living and

dying” (32; 43). This violence, regardless of when it happens in the structure of the narrative is

indispensable in any understanding of the texts discussed, and by delving into how these texts

incorporate horror, the working methods of this violence may be seen more clearly.

In the following I will discuss a variety of theories surrounding the processes by

which horror arises. Regarding The Scarecrow I will look at the concept of the monster, and the

relationship between the monster and victim. Discussing ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ I will look at

how horror is implicated in Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abjection’ and John Keats’s concept of

‘negative capability’. With Wake I will look at how horror is generated by violent forms of

‘haunting’. These three texts contain literary instantiations of these theories, which allow one to

examine how they may be figured in imaginative contexts.

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The striking opening line of Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s The Scarecrow: “[t]he same week our

fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut” reveals the novel’s preoccupation with violence

(1). However, we are not introduced to the centre of all this violence until the beginning of Chapter

three. This is how the reader first sees the Scarecrow, or Hubert Salter (as is his name):

A tall, gaunt man standing motionless beside the dusty road; for all the world, in the

rays of the declining sun, like a scarecrow, strayed from the cloud-shadowed field.

The shadow he cast heightened the impression of a scarecrow, for under his arm, he

carried a cardboard box and this gave great width, in silhouette, to the shoulders of

his flapping suit coat, as if his arms were spread. He topped the six-foot mark by

three or four inches and was thin to the point of emaciation. He was hatless and

balding. His suit, of some dark cloth, was old, crumpled, streaked with dust. The

man looked derelict, like a person who has slept under a tree with a handkerchief

over his face. That his grimy shirt was held together at the neck by a black bow tie

was ridiculous, but some power emanating in and projected from the sunken eyes

would have silenced derision. After some moments spent, apparently, in

contemplation, he began to walk down the rough road to the smoke-blackened

buildings in the hollow. (26-27)

It is important to note just how much of this description actually depicts Salter almost literally as a

scarecrow. John Widdowson, in his article on ‘Frightening Figures’ notes the scarecrow as one of

those figures that may be made frightening in a culture; he distinguishes between figures which he

claims are “intrinsically frightening” and “threatening figures” which are “invented or adapted for

the specific function of frightening others” (105). Scarecrows are interesting here for the way in

which they do not fit easily into either of those two categories: as the name itself implies, scarecrows

are inherently frightening figures, even if only to birds, yet presumably they must be made

frightening to humans. The Oxford English Dictionary records two definitions of ‘scarecrow’ which

are illuminating here: “Something (not really formidable) that frightens or is intended to frighten: a

‘bogy’”; and a “device for frightening birds from growing crops, usually a figure of a man dressed in

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old and ragged clothes.” These two definitions are almost exact descriptions of what Morrieson

depicts in this scene – showing how Salter is constructed as both a “bogy” and as a figure of a man,

distinct from an actual man. By this scarecrow-construction, it seems that Morrieson is drawing on a

history of frightening associations with scarecrows.

This scene introduces the way that Salter is constructed as a ‘monster’ in Carroll’s sense.

Salter is “categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory” (32). He is simultaneously depicted

as a real human being and as a scarecrow – an “old and ragged” representation of a human. A few

pages later, Lynette, the cousin of the murdered Daphne Moran notes how “[h]e looked as if he

might belong to the walking dead … ‘A zombie’ she breathed” (Morrieson 29-30). Like a scarecrow,

a zombie is a figure inhabiting Carroll’s liminal zone, an interstitial, inadequate ‘representation’ of a

human. As Alex Calder argues in ‘The Word, The Look, and the Flesh’: “[t]he presentation of the

Scarecrow figure is not coded by reference to the story-world of Klynham, but to a discourse world

of horror movies and uncanny tales” (9). This argument brings to mind Carroll’s distinction between

horror-stories and fairy tales: “in works of horror, the humans regard the monsters they meet as

abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order. In fairy tales, on the other hand, monsters are part of

the everyday furniture of the universe” (16). The world of Klynham, while certainly peopled by the

odd and memorable, is not a world in which characters like Salter are part of the ‘everyday

furniture’. Calder draws attention to the way the writing changes when the novel is forced to

acknowledge Salter’s point of view: “wolf bane, a witching moon, ‘I am death’ – it is all so

Transylvanian” (“The Word, The Look” 14). He argues that this is another one of the ways in which

Morrieson creates a division between Salter and the world of Klynham: “the effect … is to convert

Hubert Salter into a screen villain” (“The Word, The Look” 14).

While there are important distinctions, these two ‘worlds’ are not totally separated, as their

constructions rely on each other; it is through their interaction that the novel works. Central to this is

the way in which the ‘positive’ characters (to use Carroll’s term) of the novel interact with and

regard Salter. The fact that the novel is narrated by its main character, Neddy Poindexter (and it is

Neddy writing the passages quoted above), has already shown us that these depictions include some

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very strong hints about the attitude of those ‘positive characters’ to Salter. More revealing in terms of

relations is the scene in which Salter is shown interacting with the major characters of the novel in

the Poindexter family home. This encounter takes place over the course of Chapter Ten. The actions

of Salter in the first part of the chapter contrast sharply with those of the heavily intoxicated Uncle

Athol and Charlie Dabney. Neddy claims that compared to Salter, Chester Montgomery – a man

considered to be overly polite – is “only a novice” (115). He is clearly positioned as an outsider, very

different to the local inhabitants: “he’s a friend of Mr Dabney’s, but acherly he’s Salter the

Sensational. He’s toured the world hundreds of times. I tell yuh he’s got a bow tie and everything”

Neddy breathlessly exclaims to his father and brother (116). Salter quotes Shakespeare (badly) and

speaks of his skills as coming from “beyond the confines of the mistykeist” – a word the narrator

reveals to be a strange pronunciation of ‘mystic East’ (118; italics in original). Neddy even goes so

far as to claim Salter has black blood (125). All of these associations depict Salter as a sort of

inversion of contemporary comic-book and film serial character Mandrake the Magician, an early

super-hero who Robert S. Peterson notes was “always dressed in a dapper suit-coat with tails, top

hat, and cape … impeccably dressed and groomed” (137).

The chapter alternates between observations of Salter’s performances, and arguments

amongst the Klynham locals, which are mostly about alcohol, food, and work. Salter is not present in

any of the arguments, he is only shown when he is performing: when Neddy’s mother proclaims she

is “living in a bloody nuthouse” Neddy “looked to see whether Salter the Sensational thought so too,

but he was draped over the mantelpiece…” (122). The beginning of the chapter clearly sets Salter

apart from the normal world of Klynham, but it is only when we are shown his interactions with

Prudence, Neddy’s sixteen year old sister, that we see Salter as a threatening and disgusting

character. At this point in the narrative, it could be argued that this view of Salter derives from its

mediation through the pubescent Neddy (who is not without strong affections for his sister).

However, the knowledge we have of Salter’s previous actions, and the actions that he is to perform

confirm Neddy’s assessment here. As Neddy watches Salter interact with Prudence, his comment

that “right then I entertained a creepy feeling” is a vast understatement. Salter attempts to hypnotise

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Prudence with his lengthy knife, holding it against her torso, intoning to her to “[b]ehold how far that

razor-sharp edge would sink into yer lush and virginal body” and Neddy notes how “I hated him …

hated and feared him” (123). Right after this scene, the ‘spell’ that Salter has cast is broken, we are

returned to the comic reality of Klynham and Salter is turned from a disgusting, threatening character

to one of ridicule – he is laughed at, and subsequently flees the scene.

The Scarecrow is a novel co-opting horror practices. However, it is not doing so consistently

– the changes and interruptions between Salter as threatening and impure, and the comic elements

shown throughout the novel are tightly condensed in this chapter. Calder argues that the novel

features a “two world structure” which it switches between: “one identified with comedy and the

Poindexter family, the other associated with the melodrama of horror and violence and dominated by

Hubert Salter” (5). This viewpoint is reiterated elsewhere in critical writing on The Scarecrow, with

Peter Simpson arguing that “Morrieson contrives to write simultaneously a comedy of small town

trivia and a melodrama of horror and violence” (20). This follows from the argument of Frank

Sargeson, who similarly notes that “melodrama is shot right through the story, and should not be

mistaken for a flaw when it is in fact a device” (Sargeson 136). It is important to note the way in

which these ‘melodramas’ are overlaid onto a recognisable setting: that of Depression era small-town

New Zealand. As William Schafer says: “Horror from pulp fiction has come alive and stalks among

the placid fields and sheep of the real, monotonous, and verifiable New Zealand backblocks” (126).

The identifiable setting of The Scarecrow is informed by our recognition of the various practices laid

on top of it – in doing this Morrieson shapes and changes our understanding of that setting. Even

though, as Schafer notes, “Morrieson’s forte … was not sociology”, we do see new ways in which

that society may be imaginatively figured (127).

These ‘worlds’ of the novel are most closely entwined in the kitchen scene discussed above.

Simpson argues that this is due to the enabling factor of Uncle Athol: “[w]hen Salter the Sensational

comes into contact with Uncle Athol the two worlds of the novel begin to converge. As Neddy says,

‘It has long been my contention that the constant presence of that man [Uncle Athol] had a more

degrading influence on our household than any other factor” (20). Through the association of Salter

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and Athol, Morrieson is able to begin convincingly to introduce these multiple practices into his

work. Uncle Athol functions as a bridge between the ‘two worlds’ of the novel. Simpson notes how,

in the opening sentence of the novel, the crimes of Salter and Athol are linked (20). Despite the

bridging of the novel’s ‘two worlds’, the violence carried out by Salter is not lessened or rendered

any less horrific by his association with Athol – a character whose crimes (crashing a funeral vehicle,

accidentally setting the house on fire) are shown to be the result of a preference for drinking above

all else.

Following from Rosman and Resnick, Cahill, Dickey, and Shon argue that “genuine”

necrophiles “whose interest in corpses is not transitory but a persistent recurrence” may be further

divided into three categories: “(1) necrophilic homicide, (2) regular necrophilia, (3) necrophilic

fantasy” (125). Of these three categories, Salter clearly belongs to the first – the second being

restricted to those who, instead of committing murder to satisfy their desires, “commonly situate

themselves in professions where they have periodic contact with corpses” and the third category

being those “who merely fantasise about necrophilia” (125). Salter is not restricted to either of these

latter two categories, as he commits multiple homicides so as to acquire “a corpse for sexual

purposes” (Cahill, Dickey, Shon 125). The majority of his victims, while not strictly children, are

young – indeed, much of the novel is focussed on the fact that Prudence turns sixteen. In addition to

killing them, the real focus of his violence is against their deceased bodies. Cavarero claims that the

“child is the vulnerable being par excellence” (Cavarero 30), to which Salter adds an extra layer of

helplessness before carrying out the full extent of his crimes. Discussing torture, Cavarero argues

that there is a distinction between the ‘vulnerable’ and the ‘helpless’: “torture belongs to the type of

circumstance in which the coincidence between the vulnerable and the helpless is the result of a

series of acts … aimed at bringing it about. … [D]eath may come at the end, but it is not the end in

view” (31). Horror, for Cavarero, is measured against the ‘limit’ of death – horror attempts to surpass

this limit, to “exceed death itself” (32). Viewed against this, Salter’s violence becomes an exemplary

form of horror. Yet, as in the scene in the Poindexter kitchen, Salter’s horror-violence is broken off

abruptly. Salter is found to have been hiding in the premises of Charlie Dabney’s business,

16

unbeknownst to anyone. It is here that Salter attacks the drinking party of Charlie, Uncle Athol, and

Herbert; Herbert then ends up accidentally killing Salter and disposing of his body in the Klynham

rubbish tip. Because of this, the horror-violence that Salter intended to carry out on Prudence is

never realised. Neddy notes that although “[s]he was scratched and bruised and all her front teeth

were missing … for all the beating she had taken and the hell she must have been through, she was

still alive and even dressed” – a significant detail when considering Salter’s intentions (230).

Herbert Poindexter kills Hubert Salter, but their respective kinds of violence are vastly

different. Herbert’s violence is one carried out against an agent that is not helpless – Salter’s status as

a victim here is a result not of Herbert’s (or anyone else’s) intentions, but of accidental circumstance.

Salter is the perpetrator of the violence until the very last. Herbert’s violence is one stripped of

horror almost as much as possible – what is at stake for Herbert is his life and the lives of friends, for

Salter in his crimes what is at stake is, as Cavarero puts it, “the ontological dignity of the victim …

not so much killing … but rather dehumanizing and savaging the body as body” (9; emphasis mine).

Herbert has no such aim. There is no description of Salter’s deceased body as with Salter’s victims –

the implication being that after Salter has accidentally hit his head on a coffin and died, his body is

swiftly disposed of. There is a similarity here with an argument made by Lawrence Jones about the

difference between Morrieson and Frank Sargeson’s use of “grotesque violence”:

When Sargeson presents such events … it is from the implicit authorial position of

the provincial intellectual who has liberated himself from the puritanical repression

that leads to such explosions, but who understands how the pressures build up in

those still within the system … the violence is … distanced, understood and

controlled by the author (148)

This is the way that Herbert’s violence is portrayed – while Salter’s can only lay the weakest of

claims to being distanced, understood, or controlled.

The incongruence between Salter and the other sympathetic residents of Klynham is, in

terms of action, most strikingly depicted in the murder and rape of Angela Potroz. The moment of

Angela’s murder, and subsequent rape, is where the “world of horror and violence” impedes most

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seriously upon Klynham and the Poindexters. It is with this that Salter is established as a serious

monster, validating the previously unsubstantiated fear and revulsion that Prudence has expressed

about him. Neddy is seriously distressed by his recollection that he wished to kiss Angela, due to this

wish being “even a distant cousin of the frenzy which raged in some murderous fiend” (202).

Angela, despite being friends with the Poindexter family, is a step further away from the primary

focus of the narrative. Simpson argues that

In Klynham the Scarecrow is a threat from the outside, a trespasser from the big city

or the big screen. But there is a sense, too, in which he is a permanent inhabitant …

symbolically the Scarecrow is no stranger to Klynham, he is always there, a feature

of the town … Specifically he personifies the repressed sexuality and violence of the

cosy little town of Klynham, a nightmarish intensification of what Neddy fears

about himself, or what the Lynch gang have on their minds, for instance. (30)

This argument is sustained by Salter’s status as a horror-monster, and the distinction between such a

being and those characters that are merely unsympathetic. As Angela is connected to, but a step apart

from, the Poindexter family – so is Salter’s violence connected to, but a step apart from Klynham’s

“repressed sexuality and violence”. As discussed above, the violence that Salter commits is a step

beyond. Not even the (barely repressed) desires of the Lynch gang approaches the horror-violence

Salter inflicts upon Angela. As Philip Matthews notes in ‘Local Infections’: “everyone has an eye on

Pru Poindexter, only Salter wants to kill her first” (184). The novel, with Neddy’s guilt over his sexual

desire for Angela, explicitly draws a connection between the actions of Salter and the desires of

Klynham. Relationships are constructed, and as Calder and Simpson note, radically substituted and

conflated. By creating an elaborate and highly complex matrix of horror and violence, arranged around

the monster figure of Salter, The Scarecrow deploys new ways of figuring the social.

Morrieson’s novel is a strong modification of the New Zealand critical realist tradition and

the way it represents the social. While in The Scarecrow this is portrayed in a pulp, comic and

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melodramatic way, Owen Marshall’s short story ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ does so in a much more

serious and disturbing manner.

In a 1989 issue of Sport, Owen Marshall observes that he imagines “a provincial writer such

as Ronald Morrieson had much the same experience” writing in small town New Zealand as he

himself has. Marshall is here emphasising that his similarity to other New Zealand writers is due to a

common social pattern rather than conscious stylistic and thematic borrowings. Marshall is a writer

frequently placed in the ‘lineages’ of earlier major New Zealand writers, particularly that derived

from Frank Sargeson (Gwynne 194). While there are surely similarities between Marshall and

Sargeson, it has been argued elsewhere that there are significant points of difference between the two.

Lawrence Jones (in Barbed Wire and Mirrors) and Joel Gwynne (in Secular Visionaries) both put

forth forward arguments for this view. Both Gwynne and Lawrence Jones argue that Marshall

employs the Sargesonian tradition, with what Mark Williams has termed “strategic modifications”

(“Literary Recession” 20). One of the ‘strategic modifications’ that Marshall employs is the way in

which he transforms Sargesonian critical realism with some of the horror-practices discussed above.

These practices show Marshall putting forth a complex and contemporary view of the world outside

the text, one marked as much by the contextual landscape as the textual – a view that refuses to

separate the two. It might be remarked that a number of Sargeson’s own stories feature elements of

shocking violence (the killing of the cat in ‘Sale Day’, for example), yet, as mentioned above in

relation to Morrieson, Sargeson’s stories often provide (relatively) satisfactory explanations for these

outbursts of violence, accounting for “how these pressures build up” (L. Jones 148). As is discussed

below, this is something ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ refuses to do.

Writing in the same issue of Sport, Vincent O’Sullivan argues that many of Marshall’s short

stories feature a “cognitive model” of realism – the text “is a way of making sense [of what is outside

the text]” instead of a “mere ‘reflection’ or ‘imitation’” (68-69). This is particularly interesting in

relation to Joel Gwynne’s discussion of ‘liberal humanism/anti-humanism’, where the former is

shown in writing that affirms the ability of the individual to improve their position, while the latter is

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shown in writing that affirms the predominance of “environmental determinism” (211). For Gwynne,

both of these are exemplified in Sargeson’s story ‘A Great Day’:

[W]here even though there is an anti-humanist positioning of society and nature as

potential legitimisations of Fred’s behaviour, the narrative refuses to qualify this …

Yet, the narrative simultaneously refuses to affirm the values of liberal humanism:

Fred is evidently not the master of his destiny (Gwynne 211-212)

Gwynne argues that instead of fluctuating between these two poles (as Gwynne posits Sargeson and

Patricia Grace do), Marshall occupies a kind of interstitial zone between the two, with the addition of

an existentialist belief in individual action (211-212; 218). Marshall’s stories, Gwynne argues, are not

strictly critical of the society or the individual, but of the individual who uncritically accepts their

existence. Explanations for the actions of individuals in Marshall’s stories do not insist on

deterministic explanations or self-determination alone. Marshall “refuses to cast the individual as

rebel or victim”, instead depicting them as (potentially) active participants (both positively and

negatively) in their surroundings (221).

This argument is useful in reading Marshall’s exceedingly violent short story ‘Coming Home

in the Dark’, which David Hill claims is “one of the most harrowing in our literature” (qtd. in

Matthews “Owen Marshall” 12). The story details the murder by two men (Mandrake and Tub) of a

middle-class family holidaying in the South Island (consisting of a husband, wife, and twin boys). The

landscape, seen as attractive and imposing, is rendered with dedication to detail. The family is well-

educated – Jill talks of nominations for the Auckland Art Council, and there are discussions about

providing the best education for the twins (196-197). Additionally, Mandrake attempts to engage

Hoaggie in debate, asking him “how’s your philosophy?” – implying that Mandrake considers him

relatively well-read (206).

The Internet news article “The Dark Side” quotes an uncited interview with Marshall,

claiming that the story was:

[F]iction but it was inspired by grim reports of home invasions that Marshall saw in

newspapers: ‘There might be a nice old lady just sitting there having a Horlicks and

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then someone on P decides that this is a door I'll bash in, strangles her and eats her

bacon and eggs.’

Though the story is clearly not about violence caused by drug psychosis, it seems possible, as

Marshall says in a Listener interview with Phillip Matthews, that “[i]t arose from considering one or

two incidents of random violence that were in the papers at the time”. Sociologist Greg Newbold,

writing for the Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand, claims that in New Zealand “[b]efore 1990

there were only four mass murders, involving 20 victims in total. Six mass murders, with a total of

43 victims, occurred between 1990 and 1997.” The publication of ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ in

1995 would have been only briefly preceded by the mass murders perpetrated by David Gray, Brian

Schlaepfer, Raymond Ratina, and the Bain family killings. While it seems highly unlikely 'Coming

Home in the Dark' was based on any actual New Zealand murders, when it is read in such a context it

seems clear that O’Sullivan’s ‘cognitive model’ of realism is in play here; the story in a number of

ways is an attempt to work through the motivations and explanations for particularly extreme violent

crime. Yet, part of the way in which it is achieved is by pushing beyond a ‘realistic’ depiction of

violence; the violence is excessive, and the unexpected talkativeness and intelligence of Mandrake

further compounds the intensity and strangeness of the narrative. By employing horrific techniques

and practices, it shifts the limits of ‘realism’, refusing to incorporate itself or that outside of it into

any easy order.

Gwynne’s argument, discussed above, that Marshall refuses to simplify his critical

protagonists into characters who are either rebels or victims, is convincingly applied to his general

oeuvre. Yet Gwynne, who is (rightly) reluctant to extend his argument to all of Marshall’s many and

varied texts, incorrectly identifies ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ as a story which alludes to

“Saregesonian determinism” without challenging it, arguing that “Marshall develops a trope of the

secular [critical] realist tradition in which social order constrains the individual” (212-213). Gwynne

argues that the motivation and explanation for the murder of the family is the killers’ backgrounds

and social status – that the social context has modified the killers’ interiority to such an extent that

murder is the obvious outcome (213). This argument, however, does not respond sufficiently to the

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text itself, and especially not when the text is read within O’Sullivan’s ‘cognitive realist’ context.

‘Coming Home in the Dark’ is, rather, a highly complex story in discussion with the ‘real world’

outside of the text, aware of the ambiguities prevalent in both the textual and the ‘actual’ worlds.

Gwynne is right to challenge Lydia Wevers’ comment that “the narrative ‘offers no explanation for

the random murders of a man and his family’” – the narrative does not explain the murders in any

expected way, but it is possible to understand its refusal on this matter (qtd. in Gwynne 213).

The story itself does not give enough information to seriously sustain any argument as to the

precise motivations of Mandrake and Tub. Tub barely talks at all – Mandrake explains on the last

page that Tub’s main interests are in eating and drinking (something which the rest of the text

supports) and that “[h]e’s a fucking natural man and doesn’t pretend to love his fellows, but he’s

very loyal” (Marshall 215). Mandrake, however, engages in philosophical discussions with Hoaggie.

Mandrake himself clearly supports the deterministic view: he tells Jill that “[t]here’s nothing you

could have done.… Nothing to be done now. Just one thing impinging on another as the philosophers

tell us. The whole thing is bad luck … just a matter of timing” (207). He attempts to explain his

murders to Hoaggie in terms of social exclusion:

I’m on the outside of this whole thing that the rest of you have got going. Nothing

connects me with it except bringing it down. … I’m teaching a few people, and

you’re one of them, that I’m determined to have all the things I can’t claim within

your rules. … By the time I was fourteen I was on my own and could see what a

fucking, rat-arsed world we’ve got here and entirely rigged against pricks like me.

… You get so far down the line that there’s no way back even if you wanted it.

You’re fucked one way or another. (210)

For Mandrake, unlike the typical Sargesonian protagonist, violence is a conscious attempt to break

out of determinism, despite his awareness and acknowledgment of the impossibility of his position.

Part of Gwynne's argument rests on Mandrake’s claim that he possesses “negative

capability” (Marshall 210). Gwynne argues that this statement “validates his outsider status”, that it

is something he has been “trapped [into] by the social system” (212-213). Rather, I would argue that

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'negative capability', if understood in the Keatsian sense of being capable “in uncertainties,

Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, instead plays a much larger

role than this, in that it points towards a position which ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ requires the

reader to occupy (“negative capability”). As Walter Jackson Bate argues, for Keats, the person

“whose distinguishing attribute is the quality of Negative Capability, will have no such desire to ‘feel

his own identity’; he will ‘make up his mind about nothing’; he will ‘let his mind be a thoroughfare

for all thoughts’” – the priority for those who possess a negative capability is personal experience,

above that of consciously deliberate “consequentive reasoning” (25; 15; italics in original). It is:

[A]n acceptance … of the particular, a love of it and a trust in it; and an acceptance,

moreover, with all its ‘half-knowledge,’ of the ‘sense of Beauty,’ of force, of

intensity, that lies within that particular is indeed its identity and its truth, and which

‘overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.’ (63)

Mandrake’s previous comment (“Nothing connects me with it except bringing it down”) seems to

reinforce this position – he requires the personal experience. So do his claims that “sooner or later

the point of every lesson that you can be told about occurs in the course of your life” and that he

“always feels uneasy when there’s only one choice, one way of looking at things” (209; 214).

However, it does not appear that Mandrake is following Keats’s advice to favour the “imagination”

over “consequitive reasoning”: “Well, you’re an educated man Hoaggie. I’m just a fucking bum

trying to get some share of the action and make sense of things. But I reckon that I have reasons: it’s

just that for you they’re not good enough” (Marshall 213). These reasons are never disclosed to

Hoaggie or the reader. However, the hint given to us by Mandrake’s self-proclaimed negative

capability may instead suggest a way that the reader should approach the story. The idea of 'negative

capability' here is found in the story’s ‘liminality’, its in-between qualities – the story places the

reader in a position of negative capability, where they are unable to fully reason out the position the

text wants to take in commenting on the world outside itself. As discussed below, Marshall blurs

distinctions in a way that forces the reader to be “in uncertainties” without satisfactory resolution.

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Like the teen-horror film whose target audience and on-screen victims are ideally of a

similar demographic, Marshall gives his readers a set of victims they will be able to easily relate to.

(A 2002 ‘Cultural Experiences Survey’ found that “People with either secondary or tertiary

qualifications were far more likely than people with no such qualifications to buy books” – bringing

to mind Jill and her Arts Council (Ongley)). Yet, any familiar demarcations of sympathy are

complicated by the interiority shown by Mandrake. As we see Mandrake’s attempts at justification,

his eloquence despite his frustration with the life he has led, the reader (and especially the reader

approaching this story from a Sargesonian standpoint) is invited to relate to and identify with

Mandrake. Marshall adeptly blurs the binaries of victim and ‘monster’.

In her book The Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva, discussing the writings of the French

author Celine, argues that what “brings into existence” horror is the vulnerable and “its confrontation

with the other term – the powerful, rich, and feared” (144). Kristeva argues that horror is created in

the interaction between those poles I have referred to as victim and ‘monster’. She refers to this

particular kind of horror as the ‘abject’ – what Dani Cavallaro describes as the

[T]roubling leftovers which come across as horrifying due to their stubborn

materiality and terrifying due to our inability to comprehend their scope. These

remainders consist of the debris floating in the wake of abortive socialising

processes and elicit sensations of anxiety insofar as they cannot be conclusively

accommodated either in the realm of normality or abnormality. … [They] point to

the persistence of heterogeneous fragments of experience which the encultured adult

world is powerless to clarify and incorporate into its sign systems. (199)

This explanation is congruent with Marshall’s depiction of the events in his story – he refuses to

“clarify and incorporate” his characters into explicable roles. ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ is a study

of various forms of abjection, which culminate in the horror of its violence. However, the violence is

generated by both Mandrake and Tub (as murderers) and by Hoaggie and his family (as active

participants in a system which Mandrake believes has caused him to become a murderer). We see

that “Hoaggie was happy to share the surroundings with no one but his wife and children. … Such

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feelings of exclusivity were selfish, Hoaggie knew” and that “Hoaggie had no god to pray to, but he

offered a sort of prayer nevertheless, which was part gratitude for what he had, and part plea for

continuance” (Marshall 199, 200). For Kristeva, a defining aspect of the abject is its perversity in the

way “it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads,

corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them” (15). Both Hoaggie and

Mandrake are explorations of abjection – they both operate in the interspace between victim and

‘monster’ (or ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in Kristeva’s terms). Thus abjection is closely related to

Marshall’s treatment of negative capability – both are functioning in a way that denies “consequitive

reasoning” in their generation of horror.

By evoking the concepts of abjection and negative capability Marshall refuses a binary of

liberal-humanism or anti-humanist determinism, where blame is placed either on the individual or

their environment. Kristeva argues that in literature dealing with abjection, “there takes place a

crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality and

Immorality” (16). By distorting our expectation that as a reader we will empathise with the ‘victims’

in the story, ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ generates new horrors, in order to, not as O’Sullivan

argues, “make sense” of that outside the text, but to suggest that the “sense” we expect may be

incompatible with both. It is in this way that the story avoids “the lesson” Damien Wilkins contrarily

finds in Marshall’s work (qtd. in Gwynne 200; italics in original). This type of violence, that “makes

us aware that reality contains many more layers than common sense would have us recognise”

(Cavallaro 6-7), is also the focus of Elizabeth Knox’s 2013 novel Wake.

In Wake, the small New Zealand town of Kahukura is visited by a totally invisible monster

(also called the Wake), which brutally kills all except fourteen survivors. The violence happens right

at the beginning of the novel, with most of the novel’s focus on the way in which those remaining

choose to function in its aftermath (or wake). The nature of the monster is explained somewhat by the

character Myr, an alien from the same ‘world’ as the Wake, while the character Sam has a unique

relationship with the Wake, also helping facilitate the reader’s knowledge of it.

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Discussing Wake on her blog, Elizabeth Knox asks herself “[w]hy a monster instead of human

evil?” She answers by saying that her interest was only in the “doing” part of evil: “malice directed

nowhere special, just somewhere, and the disaster of that”. The violence visited upon the characters of

the novel is coincidental – they suffer because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Readers

are never given any explanations for the horrific and violent events; the cause is, as the character Myr

explains, “a monster, a monster that worked on minds, and drove people mad, and fed on the resulting

chaos” – but it is a monster without any interiority or motivations (Wake 267). The Wake is unique in

its total invisibility; not only can it not be seen, it cannot be grasped by any of the senses, unlike other

invisible monsters such as ghosts. Thus the monster has an unclear relationship with Carroll’s

characterisation of a horror-monster: the Wake is threatening, and it is literal, it arouses feelings of

fear and disgust; however, it is not considered to “breach the norms of ontological propriety presumed

by the positive human characters in the story” (as Carroll says monsters should) (Wake 235-236;

Wake 311; Carroll 16). The monster is described as both interstitial and contradictory, despite the fact

that the characters seem prepared to accept the (rather unconvincing) scientific explanation for its

origin offered by Myr (Wake 268). It is these aspects, along with the threat it poses, that align it with

other horror-monsters. These features of the monster, and thus its role in the narrative, can be better

understood through an examination of the way the monster haunts Kahukura.

Reading Derrida’s discussion of spectres, and his theory of ‘hauntology’, Rosario Arias and

Patricia Pulham put forward a definition of a “ghost [as] a liminal presence, out of time, dislocated

and characterised by ‘temporal disjoining’” (xvii). Julian Wolfreys reiterates this position: “[i]t is the

case that haunting remains in place as a powerful force of displacement, as that disfiguring of the

present, as the trace of non-identity with identity, and through signs of alterity, otherness, abjection or

revenance” (1). Myr, an alien who follows and contains the Wake to limit its destruction, explains to

Sam that “the Wake doesn’t move its whole self between worlds, since only part of it touches down.

The rest of it remains where it belongs, out in the ‘between’, a place where there is no time, or

possibly where there is all time” (268). While not properly a spectre in the Derridean sense, the Wake

shares with that concept a number of similarities, which may be enough to make the claim that it is

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‘haunting’ Kahukura. Dani Cavallaro argues that key to an understanding of spectrality is an

awareness of ambiguity and repetition (68). She finds as an example of ambiguity the reticence of

ghosts to “be associated with any one of the senses” – the way in which ghosts are perceived

inconsistently (62). The Wake is similar, in that it cannot be grasped by any of the physical senses.

The few descriptions of it we are given all emphasise its contradictory nature:

Sam’s eyes grew wide, she raised her hands and held them up and open, just above her

head, like one of those old pictures of a saint in rapture. She grew radiant and still – then

seemed to explode. Her words flooded out. ‘It was like a whirlwind,’ she said. ‘Or a

biblical column of fire – flaming, noiseless, spectral, sullen, and terrible. But it didn’t have

a self. It was just made up of everything it had destroyed…’ She paused, shivered, and lit

up another notch, till it seemed to Oscar that she couldn’t be breathing air, the same air he

was, but something that went into her lungs and came alive in her blood. ‘It was like a

tower,’ she said. ‘A tower touching heaven, but every one of its building blocks a death. A

tower built of deaths – and a whirlwind.” (236)

The same character later describes it as having a “static, breathless body”, and as a “vast rapacious

thing, with its glassy proboscis thrust through to dabble at the dark earth … like a cat searching its

empty plate for any overlooked crumbs” – descriptions which contradict those given earlier (269).

These attempts to describe it in physical terms are necessarily inadequate when faced with a monster

that is not perceived directly.

In addition to being contradictory, the monster is repetitive. Myr explains how the Wake

continuously moves through a “string of worlds”, where it is implied that all of the worlds the Wake

alights upon are the same place: “in a place that always corresponds to this place … an insular nation,

remote from other landmasses, with these plants, this rain, these mountains hard up against the sea,

this large shallow bay, and these birds singing these songs” (269). That it is actually the same

Kahukura, and not just various “alternate worlds” is supported by the pre-European history of the area

discussed by Belle and Bub. They discuss archaeological evidence of mass graves from “about four

hundred years ago” and then examine two rock paintings, both depicting groups of human figures

27

surrounded by circular frames, representing the “No-Go”. The second frame has a large “foreign”

looking figure taken to be a depiction of Myr and the one red frame corresponds with the English

translation of Kahukura – a “cloak coloured with red ochre” (190-191; “Kahukura” Te Aka). The

visitations of the Wake correspond to a repetitive pattern which Myr recognises and exploits, in order

to limit its damage. Once it alights it follows the same pattern of behaviour, and as Myr’s description

implies, it does not appear to deviate.

Wolfreys argues that hauntings require a space, and that what differentiates hauntings from

apparitions (simply “seeing a ghost”) is the way in which “the haunting process puts into play a

disruptive structure … a disruption that is other to the familiarity of particular structures wherein the

disruption is itself structural and irreducible to a simple stabilised representation” (5-6). This aspect of

haunting is useful in examining Wake as it helps the reader to understand the focus placed on the

(surviving) victims of the monster – we can see the Wake as ‘haunting’ Kahukura in this sense only

by focussing on the way that it disrupts the familiar structures, creating new ones. The threat of the

monster here serves to draw attention to the way disruptive structures of ‘haunting’ shape and shift

those with which we (thought we) were familiar. In Wake the monster affects the characters of the

novel both directly and indirectly, forcing shifts in structures that are unable to dissolve or merge back

into the previous ones (until the very end of the novel). This happens in two explicit ways: the first is

the violence enacted by the monster, and the second is the No-Go powered by Myr and the monster,

which restricts their movements and communication to Kahukura.

The novel opens with the initial burst of violence by the monster – at this point Kahukura is a

small settlement, one character guesses that the “daytime population is about five hundred” – yet

within a short space of time all except fourteen inhabitants are killed by the monster (84). The way

that this violence is enacted – the monster causing its victims to become extremely aggressive,

effectively murdering each other in the most graphic ways possible, before eventually dropping dead

– results in Kahukura being full of destruction and corpses. In addition to the difficulties this creates

for the remaining characters, the monster is still ‘at large’ – “it savours what’s left. It cleans its plate”

we are told (Wake 275). The monster 'feeds' off of the negative emotions of its victims until this

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results in their deaths. This means that the community of survivors (the term is convenient, even if the

novel says it isn’t “strictly true”) still must confront the monster. This happens with the character of

Curtis Haines, who is gradually killed by the monster throughout the course of the first half of the

novel:

His extremities were feeling strange … there were deep bruises on his torso and

thighs. … The marks looked like something worse than bruising. What he had first

seen as the discolouration of blood seeping into damaged tissues was, in fact, an

interior rot beginning to show itself. … Didn’t that dark patch feel a bit pulpy? …

Clearly something was wrong with him, something terrible, and without remedy.

(201-202; italics in original).

Later Curtis is inspected by Jacob, a nurse: “[h]onestly, Curtis, all I can see are one or two bruises”

(214). These changes that (only) Curtis perceives in himself, along with the cruel attitude and

paranoia he develops, are revealed to be caused by the monster:

Something’s here. I hoped it was my wife. That Adele was sustaining me, telling me

that was all I would ever need. But it’s something else.’ … Curtis glared into the

dim corners of the room. ‘Something at the foot of the slide. Something with its

mouth open.’ … The shower stall was splashed and puddled with blood. (254-255).

The violence inflicted upon Curtis by the monster is both psychological and physical (although the

monster causes Curtis’s own being to inflict the actual physical violence). Like the violence inflicted

by Salter in The Scarecrow, it is a horror-violence: to return to Caverero, it is a violence that denies

“the ontological dignity of the victim … it is not so much killing that is in question here but rather

dehumanising and savaging the body … sullying it” (9). The purpose of the violence is not to force

death, but to extract those qualities which the monster 'feeds' on. Such a violence means that the

structures with which the survivors are familiar are disrupted by the threat and their fear of the

Wake. Both individually and collectively new structures are shaped due to this knowledge. Knox

makes this aspect clear by their diversity. Sam writes a list of the survivors:

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Oscar Brie is 15. His mum and dad work in Nelson. Warren Crootser smokes dope

all the time. Jacob F? is nice. He is an Islander. Kate is Mrs Mcneal from Mary

Whitaker [retirement home]. She knows me. Holly is Kates daughter. She has

glasses. Belle works with the kakapo. She is the one with curly blonde hair. Bub

Lanagan is a fisherman. Maori. He is a good person. William Minute is not a good

person. He is American. Theresa Grey is a police officer. She lives in Nelson. She is

very pretty with red hair. Dan Hail lives in Christchurch and has a wife and kids. He

is bald. Lily Kay runs races. She has been on TV and is thin. Curtis Hanes is about

sixty. (142).

This social makeup implies a microcosm of contemporary New Zealand society. The ‘No-Go’,

which restricts their movement and communication within Kahukura, further reinforces this idea. By

creating this particular environment, the “disruptive structure” brought into being by the monster is

shown all the more explicitly.

The unfamiliarity of the situation requires a reorganisation of each of the survivors’ social

roles. While for some characters the changes are more major than others (Jacob, as a nurse, still has

effectively the same role), there is still a shift for all:

When they had finished dealing with Mary Whitaker, Theresa called a meeting, and

put it to the others – what they should do. … After that, for nearly three weeks, they

went from house to house collecting bodies for burial (145).

Those who insist on continuing with the roles they had in their previous society suffer the most.

Knox emphasises the necessity of disruption by having Curtis, who struggles to relinquish his wife

(killed in the initial violence) and his career (as a documentary filmmaker), succumb to the monster.

Likewise, Lily Kay’s refusal to accept the disruption results in her returning to her training schedule,

and staying away from the rest of the group (145-146). Like Curtis, Lily is also killed by the

monster, wearing herself out until death (298). While still unaware of the nature of the monster, the

rest of group discusses Lily’s gradual death: “‘We did this,’ Holly said, … ‘We let her down. … We

can’t look after one another,’ … ‘We just have to try harder,’ said Theresa” (301). Lily and Curtis

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highlight Knox’s focus on the new structures created by the monster, and how those structures must

be dealt with and acknowledged. The new “disruptive structure” put into place by the monster cannot

revert back to the previous structures, yet neither is it able to totally replace them. The haunting

reassesses those structures by taking them, and shifting and disrupting them to examine their

relationship to the individuals who embody social structures.

This argument bears similarities to that made by Erin Mercer about Knox’s novel Daylight.

Mercer argues that

It certainly employs modalities associated with the Gothic, but Daylight ultimately

insists on rationality and realism by figuring vampires as victims of a virus rather

than of demonic possession. The privileging of an ostensibly scientifically verifiable

reality over supernatural fantasy suggests that Daylight is more closely connected

with New Zealand literary culture than its lowbrow antecedents and international

settings and characters might imply. (131)

Mercer goes on to argue that the concern with the relationship between the real and supernatural and

the focus on the meanings of ‘authenticity’ in Daylight represents an engagement with New Zealand

literary culture (144). She concludes by arguing that Daylight can “be interpreted as an attempt to

develop New Zealand fiction by importing a literary tradition not prevalent in local writing” (145).

While the details are different, Wake also employs these ‘imported’ literary techniques using them to

engage with New Zealand’s culture – both literary and otherwise – as a way of examining the

“tension … between here and there” (qtd. in Calder 189). As discussed above, particularly in relation

to Owen Marshall, a focus on the relationship between individuals and society (‘critical realism’) is

considered a key tenet of writing in New Zealand. Knox claims that she doesn’t “’use genre’ or

‘adopt its tropes’” – and yet this is exactly what is happening in Wake (“Why Horror?”). However,

she is using them actively, in a way similar to Morrieson in The Scarecrow. The use of horror-

practices is intentional, and it modulates the way in which the text is read, creating a new ‘horizon of

expectations’ (to return to Timothy Jones’ term). Knox’s reputation as a notable ‘literary’ author

alerts us to the probability that Wake will be a narrative acutely aware of its practices – like The

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Scarecrow, we read the aspects of horror in the work as devices for making sense of its overall shape

and concerns. The modulation created by these horror-practices is employed so as to create a

situation in which to examine how characters operate both individually and collectively. In short, the

horror is a device which modulates our expectations and understandings of the text, in order that it

examine particular kinds of social relations.

By employing these practices associated with horror, the texts discussed above modulate our

readings in a number of different ways. Their use of horror allows for the depiction of new situations

and new ways in which to examine them – they use horror actively, as a way of reading and

theorising the contexts in which they find themselves. Horror, as a violent rupture of the ‘everyday’,

shifts our attention and readjusts our habits of reading. In doing so it creates new imaginative

possibilities in which the social world may be figured.

32

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