Easily my favorite story takes place earlier in the collection. Titled Translations For A Dead Sea, it follows a woman living out near the end of the Cape. She and her father bonded over learning ancient Greek in order to translate a series of scrolls that may end the world or push back the rising seas. But every night, her cabin is assaulted by the denizens of the sea, and she is unsure if they are praising her quest or attempting to stop her. The story is in conversation with Lovecraft, modern climate anxieties, and regional histories. It dives deep into the psyche of the desire to do something, anything, that might solve the problem. It’s a slow build horror that ends ambiguously, driving into the heart of any solution to climate change—what do we have to sacrifice to find harmony with the world? What sorts of change do we need to go through as individuals and as societies to survive? Being someone who avidly reads about the history of climate studies, and the future scenarios based on current trajectories this story hit home. How much knowledge about a problem can you accrue before acting, and what will that action entail? Even if the other stories in this collection were mediocre as a group (they’re not), the collection would be worth it for Translations for A Dead Sea alone.
It’s fascinating how many of the stories within Haunted Ecologies are so different from each other. There are stories that skew closer to more traditional understandings of horror with monsters and the occult, along with those of a more psychological nature. They tend to question our place within nature and the horror of the placement. The first story, Mother’s Wolves, is a perfect introduction because it deals with the theme up front. In it, the protagonist is searching for her mother within the forests of Maine through a wolf rehabilitation study. Every night she and one of her grad students trek out into the woods, playing wolf howls, hoping that the wolves may be returning to Maine. The forest is empty, and there is a slight tension between the professor and her protege. It is filled with a dull grief, both at the loss of her mother, but for the great hunters that would have dominated a forest like this. There is a horror in that. But near the end, the story reminds us that the return of such creatures would also bring its own horror, and re-establish the woods as a place not fit for humans in the modern day. It follows a clever reversal that many of the stories in this collection grapple with.
The Tap, Tap, Tap of a Beak is the story emblazoned on the collection’s cover. The story follows an ornithologist as she makes a pilgrimage to a pile of bones. This pile is gigantic, filled with the skeletons of all the species that have gone extinct. She is on her way to bury the last of a specialized woodpecker she studied, carrying a complete skeleton in a shoe box. On her journey, she is approached by a man willing to purchase the skeleton to add it to his own collection. She refuses, and all manner of things ensue. It has some supernatural elements, but it digs into our need to possess things that we perceive as scarce, both in how the ornithologist perceives the survival of this woodpecker to have been her vocation, and how the mysterious collector wants to own a thing his vague background may have contributed to destroying. The story seems to raise this question of ownership, especially with regard to the mass death that our economic systems are perpetuating, and will continue to escalate to unimaginable degrees. And how much can we truly intervene as people who find ourselves connected to animals that are undergoing massive changes to their environment?
I could spend all day discussing the various stories in this collection and how they represent our collective fears about climate change and the destruction that it will lead to, and the destruction that has led to it. I appreciate the stories on their individual merits, even the ones I didn’t totally jive with. But the collection as a whole is just magical in how it draws in a sense of place, and understanding the environment that you, as an individual, live in and participate in. While I don’t know Cape Cod very well, if at all, my brief visit there helped me to see it as Farrenkopf explores it. It is a place full of wonder and horror, rife with contradictions, as it becomes more of a place for rich retirees, as the working-class folk who service them are forced out through pricing. It being a peninsula extending into the Atlantic offers a plethora of ecological niches that have been adapted, destroyed, and revitalized through active efforts over centuries.
Through learning about our local environments, we should be able to learn how to see those changes ourselves. See how we contribute to their destruction and revitalization. We can’t just lay blame on a system (though it is a massive contributor to the problem, don’t get me wrong) and call it a day, a life of horror. Because even if you start to engage in changing things, your perspective is also going to change; you are going to change. And there is a horror to what you will need to give up, what parts of yourself you will need to grieve. While you may have a choice in the matter, you sort of don’t. Either you adapt and try to survive the terror until you die, or die as part of that terror. There is no escape.
Rating: Haunted Ecologies – Grab your tent and several flashlights, there be monsters afoot.
-Alex
