When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected,
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Shakespeare, “Sonnet 43”
In Lyndsie Manusos’s From These Dark Abodes, Lethe and Petunia are trapped in St. Edah’s, a house of infinite rooms. By night, they’re forced to serve a party of gods and legendary heroes who strip off their skins then revel throughout St. Edah’s as skeletons. By day, while the supernatural merrymakers are resting before the following night’s bacchanal, Lethe and Petunia go from room to room, exploring the house’s mysteries, looking for a way out and slowly recovering the lost memories of who they were before their forced servitude at St. Edah’s.
The great well of mythology from which writers keep drawing inspiration for literary revisits never seems to run dry. How is it that these reimaginings keep capturing our attention? Some of the enjoyment in reading them comes from the pleasures of renewal, recognition and discovery; and From These Dark Abodes strikes a nice balance. Manusos’s characters are mostly a mix of humans and lesser-known figures of mythology placed in a 20th century gothic house, giving the story the feel of a Vincent Price film starring chthonic deities and their friends. This setting creates a neutral ground that allows characters from other cultures’ legends to enter the narrative. Avid mythologists and folklorists will find plenty of Easter eggs Manusos has placed for them. But like many works that draw new stories from mythology, this book has a deeper purpose: to serve as a measuring rod for progress, to show how much we’ve evolved since the stories’ origins… and also how little.
For example, the themes of equilibrium and love are examined extensively in Lethe and Petunia’s relationship.
To Lethe, though, [Petunia] was infinitely lovely. Where Lethe was shadow, Petunia was light. Even unkempt as Petunia was, she was radiant. Her innocence was not naïve but purer, a wanting for hope. Lethe wanted to crawl to Petunia, but she forced herself to stay where she was.
What storyline is more eternal than one of unrequited love? Petunia’s “wanting for hope” is a desire she shares with Lethe, making Lethe’s passion all the stronger. Petunia’s unaware of the intimacy she creates in sharing her hopes and dreams, another example of the innocence that Lethe loves. Though Lethe doesn’t hide her feelings, she forces herself to keep a respectable distance. Petunia responds to her with kindness, but the attraction isn’t reciprocal—a detail that seems to make her even more careful to respect Lethe’s feelings.
This contrasts with the libertine nature of the skeleton gods. Take this moment as Lethe is about to fetch more brandy for the mistress of the house, Erinyes.
Lethe found Erinyes watching her. The mistress now relaxed on the couch of green velvet, another skeleton beside her, leaning over her until their ribs came together like the teeth of a key in a lock. Erinyes’s skull, though, was turned toward Lethe, while the other skeleton nibbled on Erinyes’s clavicle.
Stripped free of their flesh, they invert the sensual and the macabre, expressing joy and sexuality in interlocking ribs and nipping at each other’s bones in a gut-churning parody of seduction. The life-affirming act of lovemaking is turned on its head in this skeletal coupling while ironically also illustrating a defiance of death. Love, death and power: omnipresent themes in mythology as well as soap operas. Storytelling has certainly changed since these characters first appeared, but our narratives are still infantile in their development.
Another primordial motivation for all Manusos’s characters is the desire to escape. This isn’t limited to Lethe and Petunia’s search for an exit to the house. The skeleton gods seek different forms of escape as well. Take the example of the Slavic hero Slavochka:
He sought Erinyes at St. Edah’s because he was scarred by fire. Half of his body was red and white, skin pulled taut. He relished unzipping himself. Marched and danced in his skeleton, chucking glasses against the wall, the shards falling like ice at his feet. He would go to the fire, wave his bones over the flames and marvel. In his skin, he avoided fire, slept in the dark, forbidding Petunia or Lethe to enter his rooms with candles or lamps. His revelry at night was the opposite of fear.
Stripping off their skin for nightly festivities is more than just an elegant new representation of the danse macabre; it’s an escape from the limitations of individuality and, on a grander scale, the embodiment—or perhaps in this case the disembodiment—of death. They revel in the present, but only by divesting themselves of their particularities. Lethe and Petunia’s escape story is almost the reverse. They’re ostensibly trying to get out; yet when they split up to look for an exit to St. Edah’s, it isn’t a thorough search. Lethe spends her time eavesdropping on a conversation between two of the reveler gods, while Petunia spends her time in the library reading stories she’ll later narrate to Lethe; the freedom of their minds is more real to them than the possibility of physical freedom. They escape by anchoring deeper into themselves.
That gives Lethe and Petunia’s dreams particular importance, their sleeping lives reflecting their vastly different—though interconnected—realities. While Petunia’s dreams are full of memories of family and mothering a baby, Lethe’s are empty voids—a darkness so absolute that it feels like a negation.
Lethe was glad she didn’t have Petunia’s dreams, but she was jealous Petunia had dreams. Any clues of life before St. Edah’s. When Lethe slept, there was nothing. A flash of blankness. She awoke each time – morning or night – feeling as if she had dropped back into her body.
This creates another node of attraction between Lethe and Petunia while accentuating their relationship as opposite forces. Despite Lethe’s feelings of jealousy over Petunia’s dreams, she hungers to hear them. And just as much so, Petunia hungers to tell them. This mirrors Lethe’s instinct for eavesdropping and Petunia’s for library learning. One is the listener and the other is the storyteller. In these roles, both find comfort and a way to run away from their condition.
But how often do we find that, in running away, we end up going in a loop? How often does escape end in regret? How often do we only learn to appreciate what we have when it’s too late? Combining the contemporary, the gothic, and the classic, this novella explores the timeless relationship between oppression and agency, all in the framework of a simple, pure love story. Manusos shows how far these stories have traveled, even when they find themselves back in the same place. From These Dark Abodes cherishes the journey and the return. It will show you how to as well.
Publisher: Psychopomp
Publication date: September 17, 2024
Reviewed by David Lewis
David Lewis’s reviews and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, Barrelhouse, Strange Horizons, The Weird Fiction Review, Ancillary Review of Books, 21st Century Ghost Stories Volume II, The Fish Anthology, Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 9, The Fairlight Book of Short Stories, Paris Lit Up and others. Originally from Oklahoma, he now lives in France with his husband and dog.