A Review of Ghosts in the Attic, by Mark Allan Gunnells

GHOSTS IN THE ATTIC by Mark Allan Gunnells

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ghosts in the Attic

Mark Allan Gunnells

Crossroad Press, 1st Digital Edition, 2011

Dark, macabre. Disturbing and provocative—and funny and wise, and gentle. These are some of the adjectives I would use to describe the fifteen stories in Mark Allan Gunnells’ latest collection, which provides compelling evidence of the author’s range and his depth of talent. This collection includes ghost stories, a tale of a demonic pizza delivery boy, a story of rock stars literally living off their fans, and a reverse werewolf story that is also a gay love story. Yes, I am quite sure Gunnells wants to disturb his readers, and perhaps even induce a few nightmares; even so he wants them to think and consider the world in which they live, and on storytelling itself: why do we do it, what do we get from it, what does it give us, and what do we give to the telling, to the stories? How is the interpretation a transaction between the reader and the text and the writer, between the reader and the cultural mythos from which the story comes? In Gunnells’ deft and sure hand, as evident in this collection, we begin to get some possible answers to these questions.

The nature of storytelling is perhaps a core theme in “Ghost of Winnie Davis Hall,” set on the Limestone College campus (a real school in Gaffney, SC, and one of Gunnells’ favorite settings, something akin to his “postage stamp of earth”). A student comes to her professor’s office in the newly renovated Winnie Davis Hall, a building allegedly haunted. Lights flicker, doors unlock mysteriously, heat comes out when the vents should be releasing cool air—strange things happen. Dr. Rob tells his student the story of this ghost and then proceeds to tell her why it is completely bogus. The weeping spirit haunting the building, is supposed to have been a young woman, Patty Montgomery, who threw herself off the top of Davis Hall’s tower over the loss of her boyfriend in the American Civil War. Unfortunately Winnie Davis Hall was built in 1903.

But Dr. Rob gets a phone call from a weeping woman and he goes looking for a ghost that shouldn’t exist, and he finds her, a “legend that created a person . . . a representation created over the years by the collective belief of students whose knowledge of history was probably tenuous at best.” Patty is “the ghost of a person who never lived.” And Dr. Rob wonders, as Gunnells is asking his readers to wonder, does belief create, is myth born out of what we need to believe? “Did devout worship of certain deities actually give form to these gods, a reverse creation story?” Storytelling itself is a creative act, and readers are asked to willingly suspend disbelief—does this creation become literal? Can a ghost belief has created survive when belief wanes?

Gunnells asks this question in a slightly different fashion in “A Hell of Deal,” his interpretation of a classic horror motif: the bargain with the devil. For Lisa, the protagonist, the bargain was to “the best singer in the world.” But, as always with such deals, the devil is in the details, the fine print: she didn’t ask to be successful. She didn’t ask to believe in herself, as the Devil very gently reminds her. Belief in the expected, the assumed, is questioned in another tale, “The Delivery Boy.” Pizza, now an iconic American food, despite its Italian origins, is usually delivered by iconic young men and women, in ramshackle cars, trying to make a buck, earn their tuition. All very mundane—yet a part of the American cultural mythos. But Gunnells uses what I would call the reverse or anti-icon, a favorite of the horror genre: the evil delivery boy, who relentlessly brings the unordered pizzas and equally as relentless, informs Grayson of the escalating bill. Until he comes for the final collection.

Gunnells uses this myth reversal quite effectively in “A Stranger Comes to Lipscomb Street.” The story begins, as do many of Gunnells’ stories, with an intersection of the mundane and the magical: “Justin glanced out the window and saw a nude man walking down the street.” And what does one do when one sees a nude man in the middle of the street: “there wasn’t exactly a set of proper etiquette on which Justin could draw.” The man—Ty, or the Swift One, as Justin later learns—doesn’t seem well, and is having difficulty walking upright, so, of course Justin offers to help and takes him in and, risking everything, eventually to bed. The next morning, the man is gone; instead there is a wolf—a werewolf—who turns into a man during the full moon, and a gay man at that. The legend is reversed and instead of a destructive creature, this wolf-into-man is a gentle man, who apparently falls in love with Justin. The myth of the werewolf is the story of a monster, the beast within that we dare not let out, yet here, it is a gentle tale, a love story.

Gunnells is inviting the reader into his skewed world via these stories and the rest in this collection, an invitation into his explorations of the intersections of the real and unreal, in which love is often present, yet not as it might be expected to be. Icons, myths, legends are reversed, turned around—giving the reader a new perspective, a new way of seeing the world and thus of being human, creatures who live in both the dark and the light, are both good and evil, funny and sad, wise and foolish.

Recommended.



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