Lafferty as writer of Mystical Slashers

They'd kill the Stutgards first, that very night, with axes.  They'd axe old man Stutgard, and all the blood would run out of his big red neck.  They'd cut off Mrs. Stutgard's head that was round as a pumpkin, and it would roll down to the bottom of the hill and look at you.  They'd kill the Stutgard kids.  It's most fun to kill kids who are just enough bigger than you to make it interesting.

-R. A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968)

What has been a slow-dawning thought for a while now coalesced for me on a walk this morning:  Lafferty wrote slashers.  Once you say it plain and simple like that, you then, of course, have to qualify it to death. But let's leave the qualifications and nuances for another time.  I'm re-reading The Reefs of Earth right now, which is one of Lafferty's blatantly bloodiest tall tales, a backwoods murder-spree told through a loose-fisted science fiction trope (the killers are alien children who look a lot like human children).  But it's not just this famously murderous early novel.  It has occurred to me that almost every one of Lafferty's published novels (and a significant number of his short stories) involves attempted (and eventually successful) murder as a crucial element of the story arc (this is often in the form of politically motivated and often state-sanctioned assassinations).  Such killing all by itself, of course, only nudges these works into the murder mystery or crime story (a genre Lafferty assayed in a number of tales, including some yet-to-be-published novels).  But anyone who has read more than a few Lafferty stories will know full well that he goes way beyond mere depiction of a murder, even a grisly murder.  His tales are often soaked in buckets of blood and gore.

To throw out some of the more conspicuous specimens from his short fiction, there are  'Snuffles', 'Once On Aranea', 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw', 'Thieving Bear Planet', 'Jack Bang's Eyes', 'The Last Astronomer', and 'Happening in Chosky Bottoms'.  (Lesser specimens could include 'Camels and Dromedaries, Clem', 'Name of the Snake', 'The Hole On the Corner', 'The Man Who Never Was', 'Cliffs That Laughed', 'Frog On the Mountain', 'Ride a Tin Can', 'Sky', 'Groaning Hinges of the World', 'Ishmael Into the Barrens', 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire', 'And Mad Undancing Bears', 'Endangered Species', 'Fog in My Throat', 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay', 'The Hand With One Hundred Fingers', 'Thou Whited Wall', 'Splinters', 'The Funny Face Murders', and 'The Ninety-Ninth Cubicle' - each of which depicts grisly death or graphic violence, even if it's not as pervasive as in other stories.)

But it is probably mainly in his novels that one encounters the most gory, slashery stuff.  In fact, those of you who have read the novels can go back and re-read them with this theme in mind.  I think you'll be surprised how much of the bloodshed and killing you may have forgotten.  The quote above from Reefs is one of the tamest samples.  (Okay, I'll add in a nuance here:  a lot of the time it may be more accurate to say that Lafferty practiced a lot of literary gore rather than slasher stuff per se.  There are some really bloody scenes that don't have anything to do with persons murdering other persons - e.g. the wildly gory slaughter of the devil fish in Past Master, or the blood-spattering high-fall deaths from wrestling with God in 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'.  But the depiction of gruesome bloodshed remains central.)

Now why call all this violence 'mystical'?  Lafferty seems to have had a sort of death-vision through which he saw the world in bloody-rosy hues.  I add 'rosy' to that characterisation on purpose.  How does such a bloody-minded author also fill us with so much joy and laughter, sometimes even as we cringe at horrific maiming and death scenes?  It's partly because Lafferty is almost always funny or wry.  He can't write anything it seems, no matter how dark, without at least a wink.  This often means that the more violent and grotesque the matter, the more hilarious (sometimes uncomfortably so) it comes across to us.  So Lafferty's work is grotesque in the comedic and carnival sense.  'I Think I Will Dismember the World With My Hands' is a chapter title in Lafferty's celebrated novel Fourth Mansions (1969) and it could be an artist's statement for Laff.  Andrew Ferguson has argued persuasively that Lafferty's practice of literary dismemberment is an artistic strategy of taking apart the science fiction genre in order to put it back together again 'renewed and revealed' in 'new potentiality' (Lafferty and His World, page 29 and following).

It is very much this and it is also very much more also.  Lafferty's comedic-grotesque slasher fiction is mystical because it exemplifies his deeply held convictions.  Comedy and laughter are huge central worldview categories for Lafferty.  He can't bring himself to flinch from writing bloody murderous horror, but nor can he bring himself to not laugh at it as well - and his laughter is ontological.  He's laughing because he thinks there's something more real than grisly horror and brutal death.  He has probably tricked you into laughing at that level too.

It seems that Lafferty just couldn't see death as termination, not finally.  Death was more of a waystation than a terminal for Lafferty.  Characters (even whole planets and the cosmos itself in Lafferty's stories) go through death on their way to something else.  Sometimes this is pretty jokey and immediate, such as when a just-severed head keeps talking and is placed at the prow of a boat in order to navigate raiders to other villages to pillage ('Groaning Hinges of the World'), or when a group of astronauts are slaughtered by their hosts on a planet only to regain life the next morning and be invited to enjoy the slaughter all over again as the day's entertainment (that's a rough remembrance of a long-ago reading of Lafferty's 1968 novel Space Chantey).

But often, neither narrator nor reader are privy to what-comes-next. Lafferty simply tells us that a resurrection, a new birth, a new creation is probably in the offing thanks to this bloody death we have witnessed--personal, communal, planetary, or cosmic.  He leaves the story open-ended on that score.  It's up to the reader whether she'll participate in the hushed anticipation that Lafferty enjoins, for example, at the end of Past Master (1968), when the narrator asks whether the destruction of the world will result in its rebirth and answers:  'Be quiet.  We hope.'

The carnival hope in Lafferty is not mere slapstick, however, as many of the deaths depicted are quite poignant and tragic ('Ride a Tin Can' is an obvious example; another for me is the intelligent talking elephant in Laff's 1987 novel Serpent's Egg).  Lafferty is aware of the big ask he is making of the reader:  to laugh even through the tears.  Indeed, to laugh in outright defiance of ultimate tragedy and sorrow (see his ending of 'I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows' as one instance of a direct depiction of laughter as subversive resistance - a story that contains amusingly grotesque surgical body-horror as its main trope).

Well, this post is just a first stab (wink) at this theory about Lafferty.  I'll have to come back to it and more thoroughly evidence it for a start - a very fun task if you like totting up and citing deliciously gory scenes. Please let me know what you think.  Agree?  Disagree?  Have you noticed all the bloodshed and if so, what do you make of it?

Related:

Cosmic Horror vs. Cosmic Laughter (Lovecraft vs. Lafferty)

Not To Mention Camels (1976) - Interworld Horror & Ultra-Purple Fun with the Media Lords

This is probably the most brain-melting work of fiction I've ever read.  I'm a huge fan of Lafferty, but I would not recommend the novice start here.  (Then again, I once saw someone on a forum say this was the first thing they had read by Lafferty and they were hooked.)  The novel's quite exciting, full of very strange and gruesome wonders, but possibly even fuller of philosophical exposition about the multiple identities of one person instantiated across various possible worlds:  'that wide tangle of buckling, parallel worlds' and 'the smell of bi-location' or 'bi-location kickback'  and 'interworld routes' and 'transworld impetus' and many other such modal locutions abound.  Characters often chat to one another thusly:  'It is the slight deplacement of two coincident worlds that generates incredible force in the line of creativity and shaping also.  Half the pattern has to come from another world' (p. 42).

Even the names of the characters add to the oddity in the air of the narrative:  Pilgrim Dusmano, Aubry Pim, Cyrus Evenhand, Howard Praise, Rhinestone Suderman, Noah Zontik, Mary Morey and many more.

The protagonist (Dusmano) is an unlikeable political villain, which makes for unpleasant reading sometimes.  Then again, the lampooning of media-manipulated spin of political-celebrity identity is some of the most enjoyably acerbic I've ever seen.  There are Media Lords and cults of personality and at one point a meteorological Hand of Heaven pointing down at the political candidate, which has been contracted in advance.  This manufactured divine approval is a central motif of the novel.  It's a viciously satirical study of the intersection not only of media and politics, but also of theologies, both bogus and true.

Resistance to the cult/cultural group-think is dispatched by 'the chopping down of uncultic and unelectronic persons... Who would want to save them?  They are the unelectronic people, the nontinsel people, the folks of the unfractured flesh, and they never showed a deep love for us of the Media' (p. 73).  Remember, this was published in 1976.  I can't imagine what Lafferty would make of our internet generation.  No, I think I can.  I think he'd just quietly sardonically remark:  'Told ya.'

Counterpoising the jargon and philosophical discourse are moments of focalised narration that can reach grotesque lyricism:

To swoop it all in!  That would be the last great commercial stroke for Pilgrim Dusmano before leaving the world.  This would be the real final pleasure, a break-bone and blood-suck pleasure.  The red joy of it, gathering in all the fine property with its long roots with bits of flesh still clinging to them, would go far to nourish even the parallel Dusmanos on alternate worlds or aspects.  It was a corporate good, really (p. 89).

It's not all dialogue and terminology and commentary, of course (though there's a ton, which is often the case in Lafferty).  Vivid (but usually brief) scenes of action are furnished now and again as well:

The scarf that Pilgrim had been twisting in his hands now overflowed or exploded into a mantle or a cloak.  Arrayed in this, Pilgrim went right through the walls of the Prismatic Room and the Personage Club in incipient flight.  Noah Zontik stepped to a window and watched Pilgrim ascend the incandescent blue air of the outdoors in slanting, soaring flight.  He had a finesse beyond that of any bird.  A bird doesn't understand how to pose in the air, how to get the most from his natural lines, how to live a lyric in quick stanzas of flight.  Pilgrim covered half a city in the ticking off of a dozen seconds.  It was perfection... Pilgrim Dusmano, halfway across town, descended from his flight into the interior of an unspecified house.  He quickly killed a startled man there.

"A bit casual, was it not?" the victim rasped with his dying breath (p. 24).

Or witness a snippet of the boar hunt that takes place as part of the festivities on Hieronymous Bosch Day in one alternate world:

Parrots were like flights of fat green arrows in the air.  Dogs had a catchy bark on every gasping breath... But the present and embattled boar wheeled again and killed several of the harrying peasant girls and lads.  It left them awkwardly broken in the sunny grass.  The boar coursed again, and it foamed, not with weariness, but with fury.

Lorica, on a steep bay horse, closed in on the boar and let his horse overrun itself and become impaled on the wheeling boar.  At the moment of overrunning, Lorica's lance went into the boar in snout and mouth and throat, but the bogus-stone lance head did not touch the boar brain in any way.  That animal, disdaining even to notice the lance, was into the horse with long tusks, richly and redly into the belly; and it raised horse and rider high into the air as it reared on giant bristled hams and small feet (152-153).

The modus operandi of the book appears to be:  'This requires a new way of looking at margins, which are spaces outside of accepted spaces' (p. 15).  The action usually takes place in fairly solid and essentially rational, if wild and violent and dystopian, variations of worlds.  But late in the book there's even some time spent right inside one of those psycho-freakish liminal voids:

Foremost of the threats was a hulking apelike creature that the polymorph saw high ahead.  (This was all by firelight, there being no sun in the iron sky, so the seeing and the seeming ran together.)  The ape-thing was moving down the terrible and steep path toward the three climbers.  It was coming fast enough to intercept them at the Narrow Corner.  The path was fearfully narrow even where the three climbed it.  The ariel had her crest drooping and smoking; the dog had his singed tail between his legs; the polymorph himself had teeth in his heart that crunched it and gnawed it away (p. 123).

Oh heck, there's even a bit of loveliness thrown in here and there:

She was freckled and unaccountably brilliant.  She was dappled and sunbeamed.  She was daylight itself, freckled daylight with clouds roiling up behind her (p. 150).

I really can't begin to convey how chock full of delightfully inventive jargon and mind-bending ontology this novel is.  It simultaneously hurts and thrills the brain.  You often feel as some characters are early on described as feeling:  'There was a bit of horror gnawing at them in the area there, but also some ultra-purple fun' (p. 10).

I leave you with a final sample of the visceral carnival ontological chatter that bristles throughout the book:

Let me tell you a little bit more about the Prime World of prime people, Pilgrim.  It is the uninfused world, the grubby world, the spiritualist world, the quack world, the Fortean world.  That world is real, and all others are shadows of it.  You say this, but you are afraid to mean it, and you are afraid to acknowledge yourself a citizen of it.  But your only alternative is to own yourself to be a reflected and not a real person.  On Prime World, fish and rocks and blood do indeed fall on the earth out of low and stationary skies.  For these are stale skies and do not turn.  One can reach those skies with stones thrown by a ballista, and such shots will bring other stones falling in showers onto prime earth.  Everything moves very slowly on prime, like objects moved by poltergeists.  It is like things moving underwater.  It is things moving in prime atmosphere and the reek and heaviness of it.  There are vulgar shouts out of that lowering sky.  Why not?   There are giants living up there, dimwit giants who are the original people.  What, Pilgrim - would you swallow only half a camel?  And what will you do with the rest of it? (p. 24).