The Monster at the End of Every Book

Pete Mesling, Fool’s Fire

A learned German physician apprentices himself to a mad scientist in a castle, only to reveal his madness is far more ambitious. The last free-minded neuroscientist on Earth must face the apocalypse of blandness his research has unleashed. A mother fleeing an abusive relationship is trapped in a military bunker with two soldiers, and must determine which of them is lying. A failed Dickensian actor realizes that suicide doesn’t necessarily end all opportunities.

Reviewing horror stories is innately subjective, because not everyone finds the same elements scary. Slasher movie aficionados often find Lovecraftian dread sluggish and unengaging, for instance. So saying whether I personally found Pete Mesling’s short stories frightening doesn’t say much. But I can unequivocally say that it appears Mesling would rather be writing novels, because his stories often read like good beginnings which end abruptly.

This collection lacks a through-line, beyond the author’s effort to cause fear. Mesling samples generously from established subgenres, and adjacent stories carom wildly in style. His opening story, “Imposter Syndrome,” reflects Hollywood’s love of the half-seen monster, in movies like The Descent and Cloverfield. The fear comes from our inability to know the monster, or whether the character describing the monster in grim, portentous terms is trustworthy.

Mesling careens from this directly into “The Private Ambitions of Arthur Hemming,” a deliberate pastiche of classic Universal black-and-white horror films. He plays this one with tongue planted firmly in cheek, giving this story a playful, Young Frankenstein-like flavor. I really enjoyed this one, and felt like Mesling was going somewhere. But then he abruptly ended, with the first-person narrator declaring tomorrow is the big experiment, so he’s sticking this narrative in the trunk for posterity.

Sadly, this pattern repeats itself consistently. Mesling starts several good stories, builds some level of tension, then stops mid-action. I remember, as an apprentice writer, hearing the critique “This story ends just where it should be beginning.” Not until an undergraduate writing workshop did I understand what that meant: your manuscript provides thoughtful, incisive exposition. But your “resolution” should be the inciting action; what you’ve written is simply preamble.

Pete Mesling

One of this collection’s best stories, “Caught In a Trap,” features an unhappily married woman whose angst manifests itself in unanticipated psychic powers. She accidentally makes contact with another psychic, a grandiose personality who promises to tutor her expanding powers. But the person she ultimately meets proves to be a self-important incel. This really felt like the prologue to a supernatural battle between two forms of late-capitalist ennui.

Except Mesling literally ends by having one character muttering: “You’ve won this one, but I’ll be back.” Really? That’s the resolution? This could’ve incited a defining battle for the ages, like Batman and the Joker, except driven by pop apathy rather than self-righteousness. Time and again, Mesling repeats this pattern, laying the groundwork for something epic, then deciding he’s done enough.

I find this frustrating because Mesling is a remarkably good writer. His characters have distinct voices, his stories have their own tones, and the conflicts he establishes are brimming with possibilities. His storytelling choices are clearly influenced by cinema, to the point where one of his stories features a lost classic by Hollywood icon Fritz Lang. But that’s not a knock against Mesling. In today’s image-driven milieu, Mesling makes these Hollywood stories his own.

Until the moment he doesn’t. In “The Dragon’s Tooth,” Fritz Lang realizes the movie he’s just completed couldn’t possibly exist, that it defies the values and mores of post-WWII Hollywood. I’m reminded of Shadow of the Vampire, a Willem Dafoe vehicle fictionalizing the making of the first vampire movie. That movie built dread around the gulf between image and reality, between expectation and disappointment. Mesling’s Lang simply realizes, and the story’s over.

Since we’re discussing films anyway, I realize today’s horror cinema seldom resolves. Today’s movie monsters aren’t beaten, and stories often end with protagonists resigned to fate. That’s a choice. But first, those movies guide us through the protagonists’ struggles, forcing them to resist fate multiple ways before realizing, with the Greek tragedians, that doom is inevitable. They don’t start with characters already resigned.

Mesling reveals, in his preface, that this is probably his last short story collection for now. He’s recently commenced a well-received novel series, which he promises will monopolize his attention. I suggest the novel-writing process already owns his mind. Because time after time, his stories present the promising first chapter of a complex and terrifying novel which he just hasn’t written yet.