Customer Reviews

Orpheus and the Pearl

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Though rife with many of the trappings of the classic horror tale, Kim Paffenroth's novelette, ORPHEUS AND THE PEARL (Magus Press, 2008), isn't what I would call "horror" at all. With thematic elements that hearken to DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, and HERBERT WEST: REANIMATOR, ORPHEUS is a haunting tale that offers a few little chills and the occasional shudder, but above all, it's a story with a heart (and no, not just an organ yanked out of somebody's chest cavity).

Set in the early 20th century, ORPHEUS opens with a scene reminiscent of Jonathan Harker's arrival at Castle Dracula, but here, it's a woman psychiatrist, Catherine McGuire, arriving at the dwelling of Dr. Wollston, a highly regarded physician/research scientist who faces an unusual moral, ethical, and practical problem: his young wife is recently deceased, but he has found a way to revive her to a state that resembles life. While her "soul" remains intact, preserving her body requires extensive measures, and her mind has suffered unexplainable damage by the ordeal of dying and resuscitation. Most significantly, she is prone to fits of extreme rage, with a corresponding amplification of physical strength and appetite. It is this problem that Dr. McGuire has been summoned to address.

Tension begins on page 1 and undulates snakelike behind every scene. Just how does one understand, psychoanalyze, and "cure" someone who is technically dead? Mrs. Wollston is not a mindless zombie, yet her presence inspires the kind of fear one might feel in the presence of a wild animal -- an animal that might, at the slightest provocation, rip your throat clean out. As Dr. McGuire interacts more closely with Mrs. Wollston, we, as readers, gain increasing insight into this weird state somewhere between life and death, rendered by Paffenroth in alternating shades of clinical detachment and emotional intensity. The characters drive the story to a moving climax and a resolution that is at once hopeful and bittersweet.

Paffenroth's crafting is mostly masterful, yet all is not quite perfect in this novelette, for the occasional turn of a phrase clunks like a B-flat that should have been an F-major-seventh, and I'm not sure it's due entirely to the style of the telling. One line in particular slammed my reading to a stop and even now, it feels as ugly as scraping my fingers across a cheese grater. It describes "a wide, narrow window," followed by its approximate dimensions. This sentence could have breezed right to the portal's dimensions, leaving out the "wide, narrow" bit, and suffered not a smidgen of harm. Perhaps I nitpick, but this stood out sufficiently to make me remember it long after the fact. Thankfully, such gaffes are few in number, and none other so grievous, and when Paffenroth's prose is elegant, it is the very definition.

I'm going to recommend ORPHEUS to you folks who are dying for a story that is both tense and touching. In my fairly long experience of reading dark fiction, I've too often found the latter quality deficient. ORPHEUS makes up for a mess of it.

While much lighter in tone than I am used to reading from Paffenroth, Orpheus And The Pearl was still as thought provoking as his other titles, Dying To Live, and its sequel, Life Sentence. The story immediately pulls you in to a gothic mystery, perfectly paced and thick with atmosphere. Paffenroth focuses the story on just three characters at a secluded estate with a problem that must be resolved.

While the plot is certainly fascinating, it is ultimately the characters Paffenroth smartly pushes to the forefront and focuses on. The ending, for me, feels a little too convenient and rushed, but in the end, still satisfying. The story might be a bit conservative for today's violent horror market, but it was a breath of fresh air to read something that feels like an old classic - one you might find in your attic, dusty from years of neglect, but happy to have found again.

My first encounter with Kim Paffenroth's work was early last year when I was asked to review his post-apocalyptic zombie novel Dying to Live . Up until that point, I had never been a tremendous fan of the zombie genre, or at least, so I had thought. However, I was so enthralled by the world Paffenroth painted in Dying to Live that I suddenly found myself devouring every zombie novel I could get my hands on, and all thanks to Paffenroth's brilliant storytelling abilities and his innate ability to blend horror with philosophy. A professor of religious studies, a Bram Stoker Award Winner for his book Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth (Baylor, 2006) and the author of several books on the Bible and theology, Paffenroth constructs his writing with a certain elegant sophistication and literary intelligence which is often painfully absent in many modern works of literature. No matter whether he is slaying zombies in a grim and terrifying post-apocalyptic world or pondering the disturbing philosophical and spiritual ramifications of reanimation, as in Orpheus and the Pearl , Paffenroth manages to transcend the stereotypical, and often self-inflicted, boundaries of the horror genre which often restrain an author from exploring the extent of their writing abilities. Along with the pure inspiration of the tales he weaves, his range as an author is one of the many exciting aspects of his work, one that keeps you wondering just what he will come up with next. [...]

This is a zombie tale, no doubt about it. But it is also an unconventional approach to the genre. There are no menacing hordes to fight, no gore, no bloodshed. Gorehounds may be a little put off with that. Enough reviewers have spoken of the zombie renaissance of the past few years that I don't need to go over that ground again. Suffice it to say that we've seen zombies in many permutations now. We've seen them as the backdrop for survival horror. We've seen them as metaphors for the social ills of modern America. We've seem them as comedy and agents of the apocalypse. But I guarantee you you have not seen zombies like the one in Orpheus and the Pearl.

This is a quiet tale, but one that runs deep. Going through it, I found myself enjoying the story for its wonderful gothic elements. There are echoes of Jane Eyre and Frankenstein and Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," and yet it always retains its own clear voice. Paffenroth's version of the madwoman in the attic is harrowing. It is a short book, and it is played by a small cast, but it is a big story. If you are a fan of the zombie genre, this is a must read because it takes you far afield of what you've read before. If you are a fan of the gothic, you will find yourself making wonderful new connections to old favorites. I loved this book. I bet you will too. One thing for sure, you will never hear the phrase milk bath again without thinking of a certain scene from this book.

--Joe McKinney, author of Dead City and Quarantined