Spider, by Patrick McGrath
SPIDER is my favorite horror novel.
It’s atmospheric, and full of self-inflicted psychological terror rather than monsters or gore, so it’s not to everyone’s taste. The book is ostensibly a journal written by Dennis “Spider” Cleg, describing his memories of a bleak childhood spent in east London in the 1930s, and (eventually) a re-telling of the terrible event that led to his twenty-year exile in “Canada.”
In the introduction to his classic novel THE SHINING, Stephen King declared that the source of all horror lies within “the family.” That’s certainly true of SPIDER. Mealtimes are especially horrible for the young narrator because his downtrodden, working-class father unleashes his disappointment and rage on his helpless family: “I cast a quick fearful glance at him; and in the way his jaw worked I knew what he thought of the pair of us, his gangling, useless son and his mutely reproachful wife.”
Spider’s mom is wonderful: quiet, patient and loving. “Her sweetness of temper persisted against all odds.” Mrs. Cleg plays “imagination games” with her awkward son, providing Spider with his only happy childhood memory. Mr. Cleg spends most nights at the local pub to avoid his family, and when he returns home drunk, the abuse intensifies. “Oh I hated him then! Then I would have killed him were it in my power—he had a squalid nature that man, he was dead inside, stinking and rotten and dead.”
At first, Spider’s emotional trauma seems to be the typical baggage we associate with poverty and crappy parenting. But readers gradually come to understand that the narrator’s problem is more profound. He becomes “uncoupled” (his polite euphemism for “crazy”) when his father murders his mother, buries her underneath the potatoes in his allotment garden, then invites a neighborhood prostitute into the house to take her place.
Young Dennis is expected to believe that his mother has gone to visit her sister in Canada, even though she never mentioned that branch of the family before.
At this point in the novel, the “horror” seems to be a natural byproduct of young Dennis’ helplessness in the face of outrageous falsehoods. The stress of living with competing realities splits the young man’s personality. He has to pretend “that fat tart, Hilda Wilkerson” is his mom, all the while knowing his real mom’s corpse is buried in the allotment garden.
The true horror, however, is much more complex because Spider’s mental illness actually predates his mother’s murder, it didn’t suddenly develop afterwards. As an adult, Dennis Cleg has paranoid fantasies about malevolent creatures living in his rooming house attic, taunting him through the crackling light bulb in his ceiling. He imagines that his intestines have wrapped around his spine like a snake, and his anus has migrated to the top of his skull.
In the novel’s “present” (1959) Spider is living in a half-way house following his release from an asylum for the criminally insane. Early generation anti-psychotics seem to be available, but Spider hoards the pills instead of swallowing them.
Eventually, the reader has to be like Porter Wagoner and face the cold hard facts: Spider’s father did NOT murder his mother, the crime was just one of Spider’s psychotic delusions.
Spider’s journal is full of events that he couldn’t possibly have witnessed. When Mr. Cleg has his first sexual encounter with Hilda Wilkerson, Spider says they hid at the bottom of a slimy canal stairway where they COULD NOT BE OBSERVED. Mr. Cleg grabs Hilda’s breasts and she jerks him off into the filthy water. Spider describes the scraggly sperm in the canal water from his father’s point of view.
Similarly, Spider admits he remained in his room the night his mother was murdered, yet he claims he witnessed the act, because he accompanied her in some golem-like way. Of course, there is no physical evidence of the murder, because Spider maintains his mother rose from the grave so she could sporadically comfort him.
What actually happened was quite different. “That fat tart, Hilda Wilkerson,” was Spider’s real mom, his only mom. He invented another mother that he liked better, probably after discovering that his mom was a sexual being (he regularly spied on his parents through the crack in their bedroom door.)
The wonderful-mom was another delusion, complete with backstory. Supposedly, that mom “married down” and had a wealthy cultured family who gave the Clegs their house on Kitchener Street as a wedding present. But that family mysteriously never appears in the novel, and Spider never considers them as a possible refuge when he periodically escapes the terrors of home.
Spider’s interaction with his mom was never idyllic, he was like an egg sac deposited by an arachnid. Imaginary-mom gives him the biology lesson: when a mother spider finishes laying her eggs, “she just crawls off to her hole without a backward glance. For her work is done.” There’s no nurturing. “She’s all dried up and empty. She just crawls away and dies.”
Spider eventually admits that his trip to “Canada” was really a prolonged stay in an institution for the criminally insane. He was placed there after HE killed his mother. He ran a string from his bedroom to the knob of the gas stove and opened the valve when his parents staggered home from the pub, drunk.
Spider seemed to be targeting his father, because he mentioned hearing Hilda’s footsteps heading upstairs to the bedroom. But if that was his intention, he messed up. Hilda passed out in the kitchen and his father escaped death upstairs.
I think Spider was deliberately careless and killed Hilda to preserve the illusion of a caring mother.
Spider’s delusions can be sourced, bit by bit, as the novel progresses. It’s like the movie THE USUAL SUSPECTS, where Kevin Spacey’s character improvises a story based on random articles in a Customs officer’s cluttered workspace.
The “fat tart” character was inspired by Spider’s halfway house landlady, Mrs. Wilkerson. Spider's perception that his intestines are wrapped around his spine was suggested by a design on a doctor’s tie: snakes entwined around a staff. And neighbors on Kitchener Street regularly used the “trip to Canada” excuse when they swapped one wife for another.
Patrick McGrath once worked in the top security unit of the Penetang Mental Health Centre in Ontario; he’s empathetic and knowledgeable, not trying to perpetuate the myth that people with mental illnesses are psycho-killers. I think the mid-century setting of SPIDER is important because the various diseases were less well understood then, and much “horror” is derived from being trapped in an unenlightened time.
Spider’s father is genuinely baffled by his son’s odd behavior. “Is that what you really think, Dennis? That I done her in?” Mr. Cleg realizes that berating his son or beating him with a belt isn’t helpful but, at the time, there’s little else in the playbook.
It’s atmospheric, and full of self-inflicted psychological terror rather than monsters or gore, so it’s not to everyone’s taste. The book is ostensibly a journal written by Dennis “Spider” Cleg, describing his memories of a bleak childhood spent in east London in the 1930s, and (eventually) a re-telling of the terrible event that led to his twenty-year exile in “Canada.”
In the introduction to his classic novel THE SHINING, Stephen King declared that the source of all horror lies within “the family.” That’s certainly true of SPIDER. Mealtimes are especially horrible for the young narrator because his downtrodden, working-class father unleashes his disappointment and rage on his helpless family: “I cast a quick fearful glance at him; and in the way his jaw worked I knew what he thought of the pair of us, his gangling, useless son and his mutely reproachful wife.”
Spider’s mom is wonderful: quiet, patient and loving. “Her sweetness of temper persisted against all odds.” Mrs. Cleg plays “imagination games” with her awkward son, providing Spider with his only happy childhood memory. Mr. Cleg spends most nights at the local pub to avoid his family, and when he returns home drunk, the abuse intensifies. “Oh I hated him then! Then I would have killed him were it in my power—he had a squalid nature that man, he was dead inside, stinking and rotten and dead.”
At first, Spider’s emotional trauma seems to be the typical baggage we associate with poverty and crappy parenting. But readers gradually come to understand that the narrator’s problem is more profound. He becomes “uncoupled” (his polite euphemism for “crazy”) when his father murders his mother, buries her underneath the potatoes in his allotment garden, then invites a neighborhood prostitute into the house to take her place.
Young Dennis is expected to believe that his mother has gone to visit her sister in Canada, even though she never mentioned that branch of the family before.
At this point in the novel, the “horror” seems to be a natural byproduct of young Dennis’ helplessness in the face of outrageous falsehoods. The stress of living with competing realities splits the young man’s personality. He has to pretend “that fat tart, Hilda Wilkerson” is his mom, all the while knowing his real mom’s corpse is buried in the allotment garden.
The true horror, however, is much more complex because Spider’s mental illness actually predates his mother’s murder, it didn’t suddenly develop afterwards. As an adult, Dennis Cleg has paranoid fantasies about malevolent creatures living in his rooming house attic, taunting him through the crackling light bulb in his ceiling. He imagines that his intestines have wrapped around his spine like a snake, and his anus has migrated to the top of his skull.
In the novel’s “present” (1959) Spider is living in a half-way house following his release from an asylum for the criminally insane. Early generation anti-psychotics seem to be available, but Spider hoards the pills instead of swallowing them.
Eventually, the reader has to be like Porter Wagoner and face the cold hard facts: Spider’s father did NOT murder his mother, the crime was just one of Spider’s psychotic delusions.
Spider’s journal is full of events that he couldn’t possibly have witnessed. When Mr. Cleg has his first sexual encounter with Hilda Wilkerson, Spider says they hid at the bottom of a slimy canal stairway where they COULD NOT BE OBSERVED. Mr. Cleg grabs Hilda’s breasts and she jerks him off into the filthy water. Spider describes the scraggly sperm in the canal water from his father’s point of view.
Similarly, Spider admits he remained in his room the night his mother was murdered, yet he claims he witnessed the act, because he accompanied her in some golem-like way. Of course, there is no physical evidence of the murder, because Spider maintains his mother rose from the grave so she could sporadically comfort him.
What actually happened was quite different. “That fat tart, Hilda Wilkerson,” was Spider’s real mom, his only mom. He invented another mother that he liked better, probably after discovering that his mom was a sexual being (he regularly spied on his parents through the crack in their bedroom door.)
The wonderful-mom was another delusion, complete with backstory. Supposedly, that mom “married down” and had a wealthy cultured family who gave the Clegs their house on Kitchener Street as a wedding present. But that family mysteriously never appears in the novel, and Spider never considers them as a possible refuge when he periodically escapes the terrors of home.
Spider’s interaction with his mom was never idyllic, he was like an egg sac deposited by an arachnid. Imaginary-mom gives him the biology lesson: when a mother spider finishes laying her eggs, “she just crawls off to her hole without a backward glance. For her work is done.” There’s no nurturing. “She’s all dried up and empty. She just crawls away and dies.”
Spider eventually admits that his trip to “Canada” was really a prolonged stay in an institution for the criminally insane. He was placed there after HE killed his mother. He ran a string from his bedroom to the knob of the gas stove and opened the valve when his parents staggered home from the pub, drunk.
Spider seemed to be targeting his father, because he mentioned hearing Hilda’s footsteps heading upstairs to the bedroom. But if that was his intention, he messed up. Hilda passed out in the kitchen and his father escaped death upstairs.
I think Spider was deliberately careless and killed Hilda to preserve the illusion of a caring mother.
Spider’s delusions can be sourced, bit by bit, as the novel progresses. It’s like the movie THE USUAL SUSPECTS, where Kevin Spacey’s character improvises a story based on random articles in a Customs officer’s cluttered workspace.
The “fat tart” character was inspired by Spider’s halfway house landlady, Mrs. Wilkerson. Spider's perception that his intestines are wrapped around his spine was suggested by a design on a doctor’s tie: snakes entwined around a staff. And neighbors on Kitchener Street regularly used the “trip to Canada” excuse when they swapped one wife for another.
Patrick McGrath once worked in the top security unit of the Penetang Mental Health Centre in Ontario; he’s empathetic and knowledgeable, not trying to perpetuate the myth that people with mental illnesses are psycho-killers. I think the mid-century setting of SPIDER is important because the various diseases were less well understood then, and much “horror” is derived from being trapped in an unenlightened time.
Spider’s father is genuinely baffled by his son’s odd behavior. “Is that what you really think, Dennis? That I done her in?” Mr. Cleg realizes that berating his son or beating him with a belt isn’t helpful but, at the time, there’s little else in the playbook.
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