Metafictional Cosmic Horror: Reading “Where Black Stars Rise”
A look inside Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger's unsettling graphic novel "Where Black Stars Rise"
What does it mean for an author’s surname to become shorthand for a certain method of storytelling? “Lovecraftian” has taken on that quality; even people who wouldn’t recognize a shoggoth have a broad understanding of what it means. “Chambersian” doesn’t quite have the same kick, even though Robert W. Chambers’s fiction has influenced everything from True Detective to the cosmic horror film Corpse to Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Providence.
Maybe there’s room out there for “Chambersian” to make its debut as a literary adjective. But it’s also a bit more challenging, and the graphic novel Where Black Stars Rise helps to illustrate just why Chambers’s influence is both enduring and difficult to easily quantify. (Right about here is where I tip my hat to Ritesh Babu for recommending it.) ) The creators here are Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger; you might know Shammas from her work on the acclaimed graphic novel Squire. This, however, is a very different kind of story.
It begins with the first encounter between this book’s central characters. Yasmin, a graduate student, is meeting with therapist Amal for the first time. Yasmin is nervous; her body language includes furtive glances and a reluctance to sit still. Enger’s art tends towards the stylized, but that impressionistic quality works well here. Enger is also able to convey the anxiety and alienation felt by both therapist and patient; she also memorably evokes the more abstract imagery that comes up when, say, Yasmin recounts an ominous memory involving a door.
Shammas and Enger’s storytelling is efficient here; we see Yasmin and Amal falling into a rhythm over the course of many sessions. We also get a sense of Amal’s home life and her own conversation with her mentor. It’s a subtle technique; she’s very different in these different spaces, but that approach tells the reader about Amal both through what she does in those settings and what she doesn’t reveal there. At one point early on, Amal says, “I’m foreign. I’m always formal.” That’s another point of characterization, and some of the most effective aspects of this book are when we see how that formality becomes a kind of defense mechanism.
Yasmin has been having unsettling nightmares involving a massive yellow form — and even before Amal reads an article about an “adaptation of the metatextual play King in Yellow,” that presence seems alternately regal and terrifying. Eventually, Yasmin vanishes, and Amal tracks down the theater company presenting the play in question — one that sends her into a Brooklyn neighborhood that has plenty of Lovecraftian connotations: Red Hook.
When Amal arrives there, the exteriors seem distorted and bizarre; there’s a hulking building that contrasts in its sprawl with the more representative images of subway entrances seen when she boards the subway at 168th Street. As Amal surveys this new space, her phone mysteriously goes dead. In Enger’s artwork, space seems to break down and become irregular.
Shammas and Enger aren’t kidding about the metatextual aspect of the play. Amal encounters a man with a shifting visage; he informs her that they are on “the path to Carcosa,” a landscape that resembles less avant-garde theater and more a circle of Hell. Here, too, the basic storytelling components of comics begin to blur together. The King in Yellow, in particular, is more of an abstract shape than anything. There are some echoes of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol run in some of the imagery — which is far from a bad thing.
While the city of Carcosa is often associated with Robert W. Chambers’s work, it’s not a direct creation of his. Instead, it first cropped up in the work of Ambrose Bierce; later, it also made an appearance in some of Lovecraft’s fiction. The intertextuality of these three writers becomes an important detail in Where Black Stars Rise — and it might help to explain why Robert W. Chambers’s name has not quite attained the currency that Lovecraft’s has.
There’s another, subtler, connection to Chambers’s work, and it’s one that gives this book an added weight if you’re aware of it. Chambers’s short story “The Repairer of Reputations” is set in what was for him the near future; one of the characteristics of this society was the ability to euthanize oneself in a government-operated space. Contrast that with Where Black Stars Rise, where a doctor goes to extraordinary lengths to save a patient, and it makes for a fascinating juxtaposition — and one last metatextual twist for this haunting book.
As always, I'm Tobias Carroll, and this has been Postcards From Komiksoj.
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