INCUBUS
By Ann Arensberg
Knopf, 322 pages, $24
Ann Arensberg’s third novel wants to wed events straight out of genre fiction–in this case, Christian horror: devils, possession, exorcism–with the psychological acuity and sharp prose usually reserved for more “literary” stock. It’s a marriage with deep roots in American fiction, from Hawthorne to Poe, and it has certainly produced some wonderful and disturbing books in recent years. But the risk lies in the popularity of the genre elements–call it the Rice King Effect (as in Anne and Stephen)–and perhaps also in the sheer fun of whipping up a troop of horny, let’s-get-’em demons. The literary author’s soul is at stake when she treads into this territory, and while Arensberg never quite grows a tail, her higher aims are partly despoiled by the familiar material to which she attaches them.
In spring and summer 1974, the female population of Dry Falls, Maine, is sexually manipulated by what our narrator, Cora Whitman, eventually takes to be “incubus devils who corrupted women’s souls by lechery.” It is actually Cora’s husband, Henry Lieber, the Episcopal pastor in town, who first identifies the demons as incubuses and gives them their due. In a pairing reminiscent of Mulder and Scully from “The X-Files,” Cora is the skeptic, the “materialist” who can always find a grounded, psychological answer for the weird things going on, while her husband is a thrilled believer in the supernatural who has begun to find the traditional Christian mysteries a bit dull.
Two girls from Burridge Academy, the local boarding school, see a strange, threatening figure–a sort of black cloud condensing into a man–in the cemetery one night. An unprecedented heat wave descends in April, extending only so far as the town line, and an equally local drought lasts through the summer. The men of Dry Falls all lose their craven appetites that spring, causing the women to become rather desperate. “Sexually deprived women are labile: their moods change quickly,” Cora tells us. “By turns, they can be pathetic, shrill, or vengeful.”
Surprisingly, these women bring their frustrations to their pastor, unaware that he has been holding out on Cora. Soon enough, however, they’re getting quite a bit more sexual attention than they would like, although it takes some time for everyone to realize their husbands still aren’t their lovers.
There is some nicely creepy stuff detailing our spirit assailants, and Arensberg sustains a racy note by never allowing the “rapes” to gain a realistically traumatic edge. But the demon payoff is finally pretty slim by Rice King standards, and the author certainly makes you wait for it. There is a familiar formula at work: We are told
that an incident, or the retelling of an incident, is about to occur, and that it will be shocking; we are delayed by several paragraphs or pages of peripheral, contextual details — what the person, the evening, the act of telling, and the weather was like — all of which are only worthwhile about half the time, and which in any case would generally be more palatable as a side dish rather than an appetizer, served along with the meat; and then, finally, we get the incident itself, which is usually interesting yet disappointing too — less horrifying or revealing than we had been made to expect by such a lengthy buildup. It’s a cheap brand of suspense, but Arensberg is seldom willing to deliver the garish product as compensation.
In its place she has some interesting broader concerns, and through Cora’s dry, articulate voice, these are generally conveyed in sharp paragraphs of well-made prose. The persecution is quite gender specific, and Cora wonders if there might “soon be a time when we would have to censor the smallest act of sensual gratification, the most natural, automatic gesture: dabbing perfume on our pulse spots.” For Henry the issue is faith, and his assiduous interviews of victims amount to a desperate search for “anyone reputable, or disreputable, who might have some information about the existence of God and other incongruous phenomena.”
These passages are reminders that we’re in the hands of a serious writer, and they’re welcome as such, but one keeps expecting them to develop into some larger meaning — something interesting and original about those of us thus far untroubled by incubuses — and they never quite do. They are like the inappropriately tasteful and delicate ornaments that your one stylish aunt used to hang on the otherwise gaudy Christmas tree. And they end up largely obscured by the blinking lights and the tinsel.
