Book Review… Lessons in Abnormal Psychology

Apr 28, 2019 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

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Book: Houston Noir
Edited by Gwendolyn Zepeda
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

Call it case studies in abnormal psychology. Houston Noir is twisted and depraved, every story foraying into the darkest chambers of the mind.

Anton DiSclafani’s ‘Tangled’ is as much a tale of corrupted passions as it is a statement on psychic regression and libidinal stagnation. Lisa, the main character might seem to have it all, but she’s weighed down by Lance, her philandering husband.
Lance’s emotional investment in his medical profession, a surgeon, no less, reflects an unconscious fear of castration that only heightens as his once vaunted skills are no longer a rarity. His libido is turned inward. “[He] had been f—king someone else while his wife was at the hospital. An outpatient procedure. It killed Lance that handling the heart had become so ordinary.” This explains his promiscuity, his philandering revolving around the ‘complexes of castration.’
And in his most significant conquest, his crème de la crème is the person closest to his wife. In the Oedipal Complex many of us never disentangle ourselves. We regress to in the manipulative games of childhood. Lisa, her daughter Victoria, and Lance, never really matured, and in a destructive web of manipulation and deceit they unconsciously claw and punish each other. In psychoanalytic terms, ‘Tangled’ is instructively brilliant.
Tales torrentially follow, competing for shock value.
In Adrienne Perry’s ‘One in the Family – Museum District’ the significance of dreams as psychic impulses cannot be overemphasized.
“I dreamed that Angus had installed a grill inside the Turrell tunnel,” Re, the protagonist, explains. “[A]nd I had shrunk to fit the grill…Angus seared my back, browned my front. Poked my thighs with a spatula to make sure I was done. Then he chopped me up, slid me into a corn tortilla, and handed me over to Larson with a wedge of lime.”
The dream of being eaten, swallowed up, devoured is a representation of the Re’s unconscious desire to die, to end his miserable existence. He feels the weight of his family’s burdens back home – his father’s expectations, his sister’s disability – the demands. And he struggles to make sense of college and the world. He lashes out, vengeance is mine, but not before his dance with Death, as reflected in his disturbing dream.
Robert Boswell’s dabbles with childhood traumas in his sobering offering. His characters are con artists crying for attention. There is that abandoned child, predictably cold, narcissistic and dangerous.
“Why Cole Loved No One: He didn’t know how. Why Herta Loved Cole: He was handsome, decisive, clever, lively, and heartless,” the textbook traits of narcissistic personality disorder.
“Narcissists have a delusional sense of grandeur,” Cole says, unaware that he is describing himself.
Their deadly heists are well-planned. They prey on the gullible with daring calculation.
“I think we enjoy this…because our shady intentions darken the things we do, and that darkness lends them weight,” Herta admits, trying to make sense of their deadly criminality.
Cole rationalizes, “Each of the stupid things we do with these rich turds is bearable because the promise of money cuts through the odor of shit.”
Cole and Herta find each other; they are pulled together like magnets, void of affect; self-serving vampires they are, the only role they know and have mastered. ‘The Use of Landscape’ is that raw, unapologetic making this narrative that more troubling.
In Larry Watts’ ‘Dark Universe,’ the protagonist, an ex-cop turned private investigator and alcoholic draws little sympathy. It’s not so much that he executed a child rapist (many supported him) and engineers the exoneration of a guilty man, but he exhaustingly validates his existence through his own self-induced victimhood.
In ‘Miles Blues’ by Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Jennifer predictably succumbs to the haunting image of self-destruction that accompanies her into adulthood. A yearning, an insatiable need for the affection that eludes her in childhood is finally satisfied. Still, deep down she can no longer trust adults – her parents made sure of that – and deep down, she knows that her emotionally stirring trysts with Miles are not only taboo but ephemeral. She must efface her existence if only to kill the torment of her troubled past.
In Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton’s ‘Where the End’s Meet,’ conscience surrenders to the existential impulse to survive in the face of destitution. With perfect tenor and cadence we experience a dizzying ride; inner sanctity is put to the test. In a split second Jamaal must make a choice: bow to his upbringing or go down a path that has never ended well.
And in Stephanie Jaye Evans’ Jamie’s Mother, we feel the horrors of a mother’s tragedy, a mother on a mission to murder the heroin dealer that has all but killed her son. She’s methodical, intrepid and donning high heels (unconsciously taking on the phallic, masculine role), she moves to her target only to meet a boy “no more than fifteen.” What happens next is not only alarming but it reveals the mother’s unconscious desire to die with her son. Her final thoughts, so gracious and the incontrovertibly true, “I won’t bury Jamie…thank you.”
Not only does Evans capture Houston’s shifting, restless spirit, she redefines with the starkest of imageries the bond between mother and child, an attachment that no words could genuinely describe.
Houston Noir lives up to its foreboding title, every tale a reminder of the pain that dwells in the bosom of men. Still, we are pulled without resistance, insatiably deeper, bathing in darkness and relishing every minute.“There has always been something beautiful about destruction,” said one of the tales’ leading figures. I couldn’t agree more.

Feedback: glenvilleashby@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby
©2019 Houston Noir
Publisher: Akashic Books, Brooklyn NY
ISBN: 978-1617757068
Available 5/7/19 on Amazon
Ratings: A must read

 

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