Breena Clarke's Blog: A Few Whiles - Posts Tagged "tananarive-due"

Knowable horror that makes me quake

Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due

These stories are suspenseful - really, really suspenseful. The reader finds herself gobbling the tales — telling herself to slow down, but saying, “Go on. Go on. Let’s find out what’s happening next.” There is a certain interlocutory feel to reading the stories as if we’re telling stories around a campfire or cross-legged on a best friends bed inside our heads — as though we are hearing the story told and are asking questions. And as in all of those secret collusions outside of the purview of parents, teachers and authority figures, in these stories we are titillated and horrified often in equal measure. Due suggests horrors that we allow our minds to fill in. We know about a whole lot of real life horribleness. The wise child's perspective is flawless in the title story, "Ghost Stories". It works on so many levels. We are already well-primed when we begin this story which is the third of three set in Gracetown, Fla. Oh, what a place! This final story is heartstoppingly suspenseful. It has complex characters several of whom change and evolve in plausible and deeply meaningful ways though the young person’s perspective is never exceeded. The outcome of the tale stays within the imaginative range of this somewhat sheltered child and never exposes him to some of the other horrors we readers can imagine. Due creates a speculative look backward to the past - a look that plumbs the truly horrible and torturous events of the slavery and reconstruction eras. The real real - the everyday horrors of the lives of southern blacks - are the devices of this horror story. It's fitting that Stephen King has blurbed this collection. These horror fantasy tales are of a kind with King’s novels, Carrie and Cujo, in that they magnify realistic fears to an awful pitch. The reader responds inside her head, “But things never get this bad, do they?” In the case of the horrors of the Jim Crow south employed/portrayed judiciously here in these stories, the horror unrevealed continues to haunt the reader long after the conclusion of the tale. “How did they survive the horrors to which they were subjected.

A host of contemporary challenges and future technological speculation converges in these stories as well. Things spun from headlines but taken a step or two further than the here and now and the everyday. But each story has shadows in doorways and out of the corners of an eye. There are apparitions and wraiths and enigmatic grandparents and deeply troubled parents and vulnerable siblings and friends and lots of plausible fiends and scary domiciles and spells and potions and bloodletting. And there are wise, courageous children in these stories — agents of hope. The world of Due’s imagination is neither dystopian nor utopian, but plausibly frightening and finally very, very optimistic.

I like a good ghost story and this is a collection of a lot of them. I think I like these tales best because they are speculative stories that stay within the basic human configuration that I am used to. I tend to most appreciate the mystery and marvels of human behavior. Tananarive Due gives us so many intriguing turns in “Ghost Summer: Stories”