Nightfolk
Which is more frightening– Gothic Genre or a History of the Twentieth Century?
–because compared to the likes of Hitler or Stalin, Dracula might as well have been a quaint, country squire with a few fetishes…
While residing at an Adirondacks hotel in the winter of 1930, the socialite occultist and political intriguer W.A. Richardson surmised the existence of an ancient, preternatural people imbued with pervasive memories and vampiric proclivities. Describing them in his journal as “Travelers,” Richardson would witness the disappearance of Emily, a chambermaid who returns transformed, prompting a calamitous reaction from her husband Jack.
Fifty years later, disenchanted graduate student Fran Avery encounters a still youthful Emily. Drawn into her memories, Fran glimpses a legacy reaching back across the centuries to Medieval Scandinavia——beginning a metamorphosis of her own. Watched over by an aged, seething Jack, Fran contrives to find a way beyond her newfound instincts, her conscience retreating into past experiences and events where she soon gleans the costs of transcendence and redemption.
In the Magical Realist traditions of The Master and Margarita and The Tin Drum, Nightfolk departs from the Gothic genre into the mythic territories of legend and folklore, offering an intimate perspective from within the shadows of history.
Review by Belle Struck– There’s no point in saying that Nightfolk isn’t a vampire novel, but with the exception of one slip of the tongue, the word is never used. The preternatural people at the heart of the story are clearly that, (whether described as “Nättfolk,” or “Travelers,” or even “Nox Viatori,”) but where Ms. Saknusseneouw is offering an expansive and extremely impressionistic historical narrative, vampires with their long lifespans and contagious memories make for a nifty vehicle. Mind you, I’ve never come across any previous nosferatu lore that involved shedding memories, but it’s a flexible metaphor, promising nocturnal locales and predatory glamour, although in Nightfolk the vampires are far less predatory than some of the mortals and movements they come across over the centuries. This is a point made right from the prologue, a journal entry by a boozy old codger named Richardson, whose florid prose style veers between H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft. Sitting out the Depression in an Adirondacks hotel, Richardson sets the story in place, recounting the tale of Emily and Jack, a destitute couple that could be out of a Frank Capra film. When Emily is transformed from a chambermaid into an otherworldly ingénue, her mousy, everyman husband Jack also changes, his puritan instincts curdling with repulsion and desire– turning him into a Paul Bunyan-like recluse.
Transformations abound in Nightfolk. This is clearly where Ms. Saknusseneouw’s fascination lies, for the central character, Fran Avery, is in a process of metamorphosis throughout the novel. Fran starts out a seething upper-middle class WASP who has just ditched her crunchy boyfriend during the summer of 1979. Fran is only too ready to put the liberal seventies behind her. She is craving reaction if not outright tyranny, her instincts aligning with Sylvia Plath’s lament of “women adore a Fascist.”
So when Fran meets a still very-young Emily, and is lured into her universe with it’s invasive memories, she will indeed get to meet Fascists, among them Jack. One can picture Fran evolving into a kind of Ann Coulter if she made it into the Reagan Era–if she stayed on in what the novel calls “the Natural World.” But upon being transformed, Fran passes through a succession of memories and consciences, effectively becoming a time traveler. Along the way, Fran finds a conscience of her own, and tries to forestall morphing any further by becoming a Rip van Winkle.
During her long, long sleep, she glimpses a number of periods, some iconic, such as the French Revolution and the London Blitz, other eras are obscure, involving long-forgotten revolutions, pogroms, and cocktail parties– with the Nightfolk forever watching from the sidelines. A few of the Nightfolk that Fran encounters are indeed quite dangerous, while others are discreetly hapless, or have simply seen too much. More often it’s the mortals of the daylight hours who are out of control, especially Emily’s ancient husband Jack, whose crazed pursuit of redemption over the years assumes monstrous proportions. Jack is a complicated fellow. He starts fires, fights fires, and then embraces a homegrown Fascist group in the early ‘30s only to kill hundreds of Germans when war comes. As hard as Jack tries to purge himself, he can never shake off his attraction for Emily– a fact that Richardson, even as a ghost, repeatedly teases him about.
History, for Ms. Saknusseneouw, seems to be an ongoing process of waking up a relic, no longer relevant, while the people who have stayed on have changed beyond recognition, possessed by events, ideologies, and misguided piety.
The result is a web of mythic tangents, as Nightfolk plays out like a dreamy labyrinth– making for a rather cracked morality tale.
NIGHTFOLK Richardson Prologue
On January 5, 1931, the socialite occultist and political intriguer W. Arthur Richardson sat down for a newsreel interview. It would be the last public record he would offer, drawing from a diary that forms the beginning of NIGHTFOLK.