David Vann and Realistic Horror
Are you interested in reading stories set in Alaska that feature chilling representations of mental illness and violence? If so, I highly recommend the works of David Vann.
Usually, I would not count myself among the people interested in such stories. As a history educator and enthusiast, I will eagerly read books that discuss violent and terrible events from the past in an analytical manner. When it comes to fiction, however, I usually avoid stories about murder or other types of horror. To adapt the quote often misattributed to Stalin, perhaps it’s harder for me to stomach the tragedy of a single death, and easier to process a million deaths as a statistic.
In fact, I prefer to read non-fiction and read relatively few novels of any kind. I don’t know whether that makes me less valuable as a book recommender or more, but feel free to weigh my opinion accordingly.
In any case, I believe David Vann is an incredible Alaska-born writer in a genre I would call “realistic horror.” Although I usually wouldn’t read similar books, I’m very glad I found Vann’s work.
I call Vann’s stories realistic horror because they feature the most horrific events that I can genuinely imagine happening in my own life or the lives of people I love. As I said, I am not an avid reader of fiction, so I can’t say I’m thoroughly familiar with everything written in the horror or thriller genres today. My impression, however, is that there are vast quantities of stories written about psychopaths, sociopaths, and serial killers, all of whom are quite rare in reality. Far less seems to be written about the more “mundane” mental illnesses or violent acts that plague our society, at least in proportion to how much more common they are. For example, there are at least three times as many deaths by suicide each year in the United States as there are by homicide. It seems to me, then, that suicide is a more realistic and more terrifying horror than murder—but that reality isn’t reflected in popular literature.
To take a concrete example from one of the few thrillers I’ve read, let’s consider Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: Gone Girl is terrifying because of the reader’s realization that the main character is a psychopath. (I hope I’m not spoiling the story for anyone.) We’re scared of the idea that the same thing could happen to us — that we could marry a psychopath and that they could plot against us, creating some ingeniously cruel premeditated series of events. At the end of the day, however, the chance of that occurring is vanishingly small, even fantastical. It’s far more likely our loved one could commit a crime of passion in a moment of mental instability, or an act of violence against themselves. That’s what David Vann creates — the horror of the plausible.
My story with David Vann starts in September, 2011 in Strasbourg, France. It was my first week in a semester of study at l’Université de Strasbourg, and as I walked by a bookshop in the city, I was shocked to see a very strange title mentioned on a book in the display window: Sukkwan Island. Sukkwan Island is a small, nearly uninhabited, and virtually unknown island to the west of my hometown of Ketchikan, Alaska. The only reason I know it exists is because it was the site of a Haida village, and I learned about it in my work at Ketchikan’s Totem Heritage Center. I honestly could not believe that I had seen a book with that title mentioned while walking around in France. I took a picture and swore I would investigate the mystery later.
It turns out French readers (or at least, French literary critics) had fallen in love with David Vann. In 2010 his novella Sukkwan Island had won France’s Prix Médicis literary award for best foreign novel. In the United States, the novella was published as part of the book Legend of a Suicide, which also includes five short stories leading up to Sukkwan Island. A fair amount of the story is set in Ketchikan, so apparently thousands of people in France had been reading about my hometown in the leadup to my studying abroad there.
It took me until the winter of 2014-2015 before I read Legend of a Suicide myself. I believe I was browsing the wonderful Ketchikan Public Library when the name Vann jumped out at me, so I figured it was time for me to follow the signs the universe had been giving me and finally read his work. (Click here for another book review dedicated to my public library.)
That school year was my first as a teacher, so I had little time for personal reading and even less of an attention span. Winter was turning to spring before I felt I could fully commit to finishing Legend of a Suicide, and I remember exactly where I was when I read the most horrifying pages of the story: I was sitting in the waiting area at the local tire shop, reading while the staff took off my winter tires.
I’m glad that I was in a well-lit public place when I read the stomach-churning climax and denoument. I was transfixed to my chair and wasn’t going to embarrass myself by crying out in anguish, but I certainly felt like doing so. If I had been at home after dark, I’m not sure how I would have handled it. I won’t spoil the details of the story, but it took my own experiences of remote Southeast Alaska and my own darkest imaginings of how a mind can turn and twisted those thoughts into images I will never forget. It was probably the most harrowing reading experience of my life—realistic horror.
This past year, after I’d had a few years to recover from that experience, my wife happened to find Vann’s novel Caribou Island at one of our local thrift stores. (We both love thrift shopping for books.) She asked me if I wanted to buy it and I immediately said yes, although I also felt an immediate sense of dread: I was going to read David Vann again.
While Legend of a Suicide and the Sukkwan Island novella in particular are highly personal and psychological, mainly focusing on a father and son, Caribou Island is a longer novel with a wider cast of characters living around the Soldotna area on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. The story centers on a retired couple building a cabin on Caribou Island in Skilak Lake, but their children and the people their children love and interact with feature heavily. Some literary types might criticize that these characters aren’t fully developed, but I felt that the narration focused on sharing the characters’ thoughts and actions that were most essential to maintaining the direction and emotional tone of the story. While it is a full-length novel, Caribou Island does not aim to be a sprawling epic filled with ups and downs for a clutch of complex characters. Instead, it is an intense and concentrated narrative that drives toward one terrifying conclusion.
Within the confines of that path, I thought Vann did an impressive job of using his cast of characters to illustrate a range of challenging traits and themes: The women in the story struggle against gaslighting and mental anguish that is downplayed by everyone around them, and they perform enormous acts of emotional labor with little reward. The men in the story exhibit shades of male egotism, fragility, and toxicity that reminded me of men I know from my own life, and of the type of man I never want to become.
As I followed and reflected on these characters reading through the bulk of Caribou Island’s plot, I also felt anxious—given my ingrained memories from Legend of a Suicide—about what sort of horror might befall them. For a time, I even thought that Vann might be playing with his readers’ expectations, and the book might end without any single tragic event or clear resolution to the ongoing conflicts. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that prediction (or hope?) was incorrect: Vann lived up to his reputation and delivered more realistic horror.
It is worth questioning if the reason I’m so eager to label David Vann’s work as “realistic horror” is because I’m an Alaskan. Sukkwan Island and Caribou Island are real places, but they are particularly real to me: I know exactly what those environments are like; I’ve stayed in remote cabins; and I know people who have lived alone in such places for long periods of time. I do wonder what the thoughts might be of readers who have never been to Alaska—thousands of French people, for example—and whether these stories seem more exotic and fantastical to them.
Some Alaskan readers, meanwhile, might try to find “plot holes” in these stories, particularly in the many instances where characters make questionable or downright stupid decisions in the wilderness. I would respond that it is in fact highly realistic for people to do stupid things, as seen in writing from “To Build a Fire” to Into the Wild. There are some other aspects of Sukkwan Island and perhaps Caribou Island as well that do seem too terrible to believe, but I think they are meant to indicate the unreliable narration of characters who are truly mentally ill, which again goes to reinforce themes of tragedy and horror that are all too real.
Regardless of the setting and the details of the plot, I know Vann’s writing is honest in its raw emotionality and unforgivingly disturbing imagery. Much of his work has been fueled by his own life experiences, and if you’re curious to learn more about that background as well as some of Vann’s other work, I recommend this article. (Note that it does spoil the plot of Sukkwan Island and Vann’s fourth novel, Goat Mountain.)
Although I generally do not enjoy reading fictional works of horror or tragedy, David Vann’s work reminds me that the written word is powerful. As I alluded to previously, I believe there are too many books published that titillate and terrify their readers by relying on improbable or downright impossible premises. One effect is that the public fixates their fear on the rarest of dangers (such as cold-blooded murder committed by strangers) while downplaying or even forgetting about far greater threats.
I am thinking about Alaska in particular, but it’s true across the U.S. and around much of the world: Our societies have such tragically high rates of mental illness, alcoholism and drug abuse, domestic violence, and suicide, I think it might be better for us to be more afraid of these demons, rather than ignoring and forgetting them as we so often seem to. The power of storytelling is that it awakens our emotions, makes our stomachs churn and our hearts flutter, and it can push us to confront problems we might neglect if they are only explained to us with dispassionate statistics.
