With Creeping Jenny, Nyquist mystery #3, Jeff Noon has created a new fictional genre – the hypercreepy. Permit me to explain.
A Man of Shadows (Nyquist mystery #1) and The Body Library (Nyquist mystery #2) are both urban tales that will bring to mind Philip K Dick and China Miéville whereas Creeping Jenny is set in an English village and shares an uncanny affinity with the supernatural horror yarns penned by Arthur Machen, Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti. However, the happenings in Noon's novel are so eerie, weird and ominous, calling this tale creepy simply doesn't suffice – more to the point, we have entered the twisted, far-out freaky realm of the hypercreepy.
One interviewer asked Jeff Noon, "Is there any book, written by someone else, that you wish you'd written?" Jeff replied that he has always been jealous of Jorge Luis Borges because the Argentine author created stories about imaginary novels. After all, why write a long novel when you can simply write a short-story about a novel? Jeff's reply speaks to his fertile imagination - I'm sure Jeff could come up with dozens of stories about different fantastical novels. I mention this to underscore the power and uniqueness of Creeping Jenny - many scenes will surely etch themselves in your memory.
Jeff Noon frames the tale as follows: we're in the year 1959 and John Nyquist, private investigator by profession, receives seven photographs relating to his missing father from a mysterious sender, photographs beckoning him to a specific village. Is his father alive or dead? And what connects his father to this remote locale? Nyquist possesses deeply personal reasons for setting off to seek answers. Note: Creeping Jenny can be read as a standalone novel but reading A Man of Shadows and The Body Library prior will make for a richer experience.
I’m in complete agreement with Stephen King who has stated more than once that dust jackets and book reviewers frequently give away far too much, most especially when it comes to mysteries and thrillers. Not for me to be counted among those culprits, thus I’ll make an immediate shift to a few Creeping Jenny highlights:
HOXLEY-ON-THE-HALE
J.G. Ballard fumed:"The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters." Here we can think of novels by authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as well as all those popular TV shows set in quaint English villages featuring the likes of Inspector Morse, Father Brown or Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby.
Jeff Noon cites Ballard as a prime influence and Jeff shares J.G.'s hatred of the conventional novel. The tale's English village, Hoxley-on-the-Hale, is anything but quaint or charming; quite the opposite, every aspect of the village and its surroundings is disturbing, menacing and sinister in the extreme – in a word, hypercreepy.
Take the days dedicated to their local village saints – 360 days a year in total and each day demanding a different ritual. For instance, in observance of one saint, no speaking is permitted for the entire day - sophisticated arm and hand gestures only, a type of village-created sign language. On another day, all villagers wear a semitransparent mask that fuses with one's face, females wear the Alice mask and males wear the Edmund mask. And all villagers take on the names of Alice and Edmund. On still other days...well, again, Creeping Jenny is a tale of supernatural horror.
An additional village quirk: a saint is not assigned a specific day on the calendar. Every year saints and days are scrambled so villagers don't know what the next day will bring until informed by village elders. Sound weird? It is very weird. And are these villagers Christian? Maybe. There's a church at the end of the main road and a villager speaks the name of Jesus once but the more information we're given regarding these saints, odds are they're pagan. Want a good laugh? Imagine Jane Marple or Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby hunting down clues in Hoxley-on-the-Hale.
TOLLY MAN
Walking by the village green on his first evening in Hoxley-on-the-Hale, hearing a song being sung, Nyquist peers into the gloom -
“The dancers circled around each other, and around the pole. Their song continued, its words audible now, or nearly so, floating in the dark air.
Sing along a Sally, O
The moon is in the valley, O
He couldn't help but be drawn forth by the sight and the sound, close enough to feel the shadow children as they passed by, close enough almost to be a dancer himself, caught in a game. And even this close he was still unsure: were the children real, or imagined? The music, the slap of the ribbons and the shrieks of joy or terror, the motion of the wind writing its own story across the surface of the pond, he saw it all, and saw nothing, and reached out, steady now, steady, and he brushed against one child, a young boy, and felt hardly anything from the contact other than a breath. Their song had more substance than their bodies.
Come to grief or come what may,
Tolly Man, Tolly Man, come out to play!
And then they were gone, in an instant.”
I include this extended snippet to provide an example of how Jeff Noon creates an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling tone that grows deeper and darker as we turn the pages. And, of course, with the mention of a Tolly Man we hear echoes of The Wicker Man - 1973 British horror film starring Edward Woodward. In point of fact, we can easily picture thirtyish John Nyquist looking a bit like the famous actor.
NEVERMORE
Oh, I could list many more highlights, among their number: a swan with two heads, an ominous pool of water, a mysterious dark tower and even Creeping Jenny herself. But, alas, I'm writing a book review not a book so I'll conclude with a vivid detail (thus giving Jeff Noon the last words) and the wish you will treat yourself to this hypercreepy tale that, in the end, contains great beauty.
“The noise came again. Nyquist turned. He walked over to the birdcage on its stand. It was covered in a purple cloth. He lifted this off and peered through the bars. The brightly colored budgerigar was no longer in residence. Instead a raven was standing on the perch, its body and wingspan far too large for the cage. Like a creature from a nightmare it beaded him with one yellow eye, its head turned to the side. A single diamond of white marked its forehead, like the symbol of a castle, or an assassin's guild.”
British author Jeff Noon, Born 1957
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