Although Sefira & Other Betrayals is Langan’s third collection, following Mr Gaunt & Other Uneasy Encounters (2008) and The Wide Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies (2013), this was my first encounter with his work. After reading the title novella and seven other stories collected here, this omission is clearly my loss, for, on the whole, these striking fabulations display a rich literary sensibility combined with a deep understanding of horror in all its restless manifestations. As expressed in the book’s title, betrayal is the unifying theme here, and what’s astonishing is the range of different formal and stylistic approaches with which Langan tackles the subject. 

 

Of the two stories original to the collection, ‘At Home in the Devil’s House’, is the more harrowing. At the heart of the story is the narrator’s abandonment of his junkie girlfriend, an act of betrayal compounded by his complicity in Sonya’s addiction, and made more complex not by any attempt at justification—for reasons of self-preservation—so much as his failure to fully understand his motives, or, when given the opportunity, to atone for his actions. This is not a tale of redemption. At one point the narrator asks himself if, had he known in advance the “train wreck” their relationship would become, would he have been able to leave her before the damage was done? “Seen in retrospect,” he says, “most of our lives’ complications have obvious solutions.” As it turns out, retrospection offers him neither solace nor relief from the guilt he feels at his betrayal, particularly after the devastating consequences of his action are spelled out for him by the devil, whom he encounters in the mundane setting of a diner, a few days after abandoning Sonya. 

 

This encounter would seem to represent a fulfilment of a supposed aphorism passed down to the narrator by his father, that “Every man meets the devil once before he dies.” Long before their encounter, he has struggled with the question of religious faith, and in particular with belief in the devil’s existence, a struggle whose roots lay in his mother’s literal representations of the Biblical vision of Hell, embellished by his father’s interpretations of C.S. Lewis and Dante. Though by the time he is an adult he no longer believes, apart from one brief period when an extreme panic attack prompts a temporary return to church, he remains troubled by the challenge of reconciling his supposed social liberalism with the reality of abortion. Langan leaves us to decide for ourselves whether Sonya’s decision to have an abortion—what would seem a rational choice, given her addiction—is the reason for the narrator’s betrayal, and it’s this ambiguity, this failure to know himself, with which the devil taunts him, making clear to him the extent of his culpability for her fate, whilst at the same time suggesting that he could be lying, as, after all, “isn’t that one of my aliases?” This is a highly literary work, full of classical and biblical allusions, beautifully written but grounded in the prosaic, using the commonplace to examine the nature of guilt and despair, and what it is to be unable to ask for, or accept, forgiveness. Ultimately, the narrator knows himself, and therefore knows, and perhaps has always known, that at the end of his life, the devil will be waiting to inflict on him “the punishment I have so long deserved.”

 

‘Sefira’ is a more conventional horror tale and though to my mind, neither as innovative or as emotionally charged as ‘At Home …’ it’s still one hell of a roller-coaster ride, full of startling images and vividly described set-pieces. In Lisa, Langan gives us a memorably real and complex protagonist who, in the process of tracking down Sefira—a succubus who has tempted husband Gary into betrayal—undergoes a nightmarish physical transformation: the story begins, “Lisa looked in the mirror and saw that her eyes had turned black.” Essentially a quest story, the narrative alternates between present day scenes depicting Lisa’s surreal and mazy road trip across the American north west to a motel rendezvous with Sefira, and flashbacks to the events leading up to and immediately after Gary’s betrayal. Much of the pleasure of the story lies in Lisa’s ambivalence toward Gary, for, where one might expect a strong-minded individual like Lisa to give him the heave-ho (a point Langan himself makes in his marvellous story notes), his fate at Sefira’s hands (a literal fate worse than death), prompts a more complex, not to say contradictory response. Her quest is not simply one of revenge, but of self-assertion and of acceptance of the true nature of her transformation. 

 

The story is not without flaws: the road trip seemed at some points repetitive and too meandering; Lisa’s karate skills, called upon in numerous encounters to dispense with Sefira’s emissaries, seemed too convenient and a little unbelievable: “Almost as shocking as the gun … as someone preparing to shoot her, to kill her, was the speed of Lisa’s response.” A speed which allows her to disarm and disable not only this would be assailant, but numerous others with relative ease; and Gary seems a little too passive and feckless to deserve Lisa’s loyalty and devotion, no matter the extent of his repentance, or the gruesome price he pays for his affair with Sefira. That said, there’s more than enough here to compensate, from the manner in which Langan conveys Lisa’s growing sense of panic and disorientation at her continuing transformation, where her teeth become “dirty yellow shards … sharp as razors,” to Gary’s own after-death transformation, not to mention his Hieronymous Bosch inspired description of Hell, to the final horrific confrontation with Sefira and it’s bitter and surprising aftermath.

 

‘In Paris, in the mouth of Kronos’ is an enthralling mix of noir, myth, horror and geopolitics, pulled off with aplomb. Vasquez and Buchanan are ex-military and former employees of private military contractor Stillwater (a reference to the notorious Blackwater Security Company, whose contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Bagdhad in 2007) for whom they worked at a detention facility known as The Closet. The two are recruited by their former boss, Plowman, to help him apprehend another former associate, Mr. White, in Paris. They are to be well paid, and think initially, the job is straightforward, with some downtime to enjoy Paris. The story is very different in tone to ‘At Home …’, employing the familiar tropes of the thriller, as well as the sardonic humour of noir. At times, particularly early in the story, the dialogue between the two reminded me of the restless and discursive conversations between the two protagonists of In Bruges(similarly suffering the ennui of waiting), but behind their talk one senses, particularly with regard to Vasquez, a fatalism born out their experiences in The Closet. There’s a powerful irony in Vasquez’s self-justification for her part in torture, particularly given that her father was a victim of torture by the secret police at Villa Grimaldi in Pinochet’s Chile. The moral ambiguity that allows her to make a distinction between her father as ‘an innocent victim’, and those men in whose torture she assisted—themselves “spiritual kin to the officers who had scarred her father’s arms … (and) scored his mind with nightmares”—is a telling indictment of the mindset that dehumanizes those who “are not like you and me.”  The chilling climax takes a not unexpected turn into supernatural territory—the seeds of which have been sown throughout the narrative.

 

The most powerful and disturbing tale is ‘The Third Always Beside You’, in which the identity of the ‘other’ woman in their parents’ marriage, is a question that has long troubled brother and sister Weber and Gertrude Schenker. Prompted by curiosity as to the cold and resentful nature of their relationship, and by a chance encounter with an old family friend, Aunt Victoria, Gert takes it upon herself to ascertain the identity of the other woman, and why she still seems to have such an influence over her parents. From Victoria she learns not only the identity of her father’s lover, but the nature of the act—of desperation? Selfishness? Revenge?—by which she binds herself to his marriage. Langan describes it as a story “about vampirism”, and though no vampires feature in it, the description is apt, particularly given the extent to which the presence of “the third” lingers, like a parasite, feeding off the relationship between husband and wife, distorting and corrupting, keeping them bound to each other for no other purpose than to sustain herself. Taking the form of a mystery story, but written in rich, evocative prose, full of metaphor and inference, as, for example, where Gert’s parents’ descent into old age is marked by flesh that hangs “from their arms and legs in that loose way that comes with old age, the skin and muscle easing their grip on the bones that have supported them for so long, as if rehearsing their final relaxation”, or when Gert finally comes to realise the extent to which Elsie Durant—the ‘third’—has infiltrated the family: “Every house in which they had lived was a house in which Elsie Durant had resided too, as if all their houses had possessed an extra room, a secret chamber for their family’s secret member.” Langan sustains this sense of ‘wrongness’ throughout the story, dropping subtle hints as to its nature, to the extent that like Gert, we begin to sense a shadowy presence in their lives long before we learn its identity. It’s a beautifully sinister and haunting story about ‘haunting’, one that lingers in the mind long after the tale is read.

 

Both ‘Bloom’ and ‘The Unbearable Proximity of Mr Dunn’s Balloons’ feature different types of betrayal—one of trust, the other of idealism—and share a fascination with inexplicable forces their protagonists try to exploit. The former, with its Lovecraftian inflections, reminded me somewhat of Brian Lumley’s ‘Fruiting Bodies’, although it also has something of the cautionary tone of a forgotten episode of Twilight Zone. Rick and Connie find a medical type cooler in the middle of the highway and think it might contain an organ for transplant. Having made a cursory attempt to trace its owner, they take it home and after much debate and prevarication as to its origins, Rick opens the box. To reveal more about what comes next would be to spoil the reader’s enjoyment. I’m not a great fan of Lovecraftian fiction, but Langan’s subtle layering of ideas and themes, including allusions to the pre-neolithic society of Gobekli Tepe and the dwarf planet Sedna (not to mention the Goddess of Inuit mythology of the same name, the mother of the deep), adds depth and texture to the narrative, transforming what at first seems a mundane domestic drama into a quietly shattering tale of cosmic horror.

 

The forces that animate Mr Dunn’s Balloons also appear to have cosmic origins. As Langan admits in the story notes, this tale owes something to the ‘club story’ tradition, familiar in the tales of Dickens, M.R. James and others, and also invokes the work of Henry James. In fact the protagonist, writer Mark Coleman, is a kind of alternate world novelist, with Langan weaving events from James’s life into the warp and weft of his narrative. Coleman has come to the home of former armaments manufacturer and self-proclaimed spiritualist Parrish Dunn in order to investigate his mysterious balloons and to possibly expose him as a fraud. For reasons unknown, the balloons cause feelings of revulsion in Coleman, and also prompt suspicions of Dunn’s motivation for assisting another guest, the terminally ill Cal Earnshaw to “cross over” into the next life. These suspicions are prompted in part by Dunn’s revelations that his armaments were used in the defeat of the Paris Commune at a time when Coleman was himself in the city, having come over from England with an aid shipment. The writer’s idealism and support for the commune stands in sharp contrast to Dunn’s willingness to gain financially from the conflict. As in ‘In Paris, in the mouth of Kronos,’ the story doesn’t shy away from its political implications, and the final confrontation between Coleman and Dunn, in which the secret behind the balloons is revealed, serves as yet another reminder of the lengths to which the powerful will go to exploit for their own ends, forces they do not fully comprehend.

 

 ‘Bor Urus’ combines a fascination with the elemental power of storms, and the idea of liminal worlds. It’s another finely crafted tale that examines and tries to account for its protagonist’s impulsive and self-destructive behaviour. An early vision, during the height of a storm, of another world inhabited by a gigantic bull-like creature, may seem, initially, little more than hallucination, but it prefigures a self-awareness of the self-destructive listlessness that will lead to small acts of betrayal “in all facets of my life”,  and draw him “ever closer to a border to cross over which would bring disaster.” His dissatisfaction with life seems borne out of the absence of the passion and mystery he associates with the other, almost mythical world he has glimpsed, particularly when contrasted with his own bloodless existence. The story has a mythic feel, evoking, in the protagonist’s climactic and confused journey through a devastating storm, Theseus’s quest for the Marathonian Bull, and his journey through the labyrinth before his confrontation with the Minotaur.

 

Langan again draws on myth and folklore in the hallucinatory ‘Renfrew’s Course’, which describes a journey taken by lovers Neil and Jim, along a woodland path that maps out a number of sights associated with legendary Scots wizard Michael Renfrew (based on real life medieval mathematician and scholar Michael Scott). Those who walk the course are said to be offered the chance to have Renfrew appear to them and pass on his knowledge. Neil and Jim have set out on this ‘healing’ walk, in order to repair a rift in the relationship caused by Jim’s alleged affair with a woman named Rose Carlton. Though Jim claims the affair didn’t amount to anything, Neil finds it difficult to forgive, and his obsession with his partner’s betrayal is his real motivation for agreeing to walk Renfrew’s Course, for he knows that their journey will be one not only through physical space, but through time. He hopes to see how his and Jim’s relationship will play out, but what is revealed to both men leads to an act of betrayal far more harrowing than Jim’s dalliance with Rose Carlton.

 

All of these powerful and unsettling stories are enriched by Langan’s trenchant and enlightening ‘Story Notes.’ I remember the pleasure I used to get reading Harlan Ellison’s introductions and afterwords to his own stories, and to those he edited in the Dangerous Visions anthologies. Some of these were little more than yarns, but most offered at least a glimpse into the origins and motivations behind a particular story, and the best of them offered us a real insight into the creative process. All were entertaining. Langan’s variations on the theme, are at least the equal, if not superior to Ellison’s thoughts on the act of writing, and in Sefira and Other Betrayals, he gives us a collection of stories that deserve to be written about.

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This review first appeared in Black Static #70 in 2019.

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Sefira and Other Betrayals, is published by Hippocampus Press.