Blood, Guts, Formal Violence: On Haunted Media and Christopher Norris’ “Hunchback ’88”
Christopher Norris | Hunchback ‘88 | Inside The Castle | 2021 | 432 Pages
In his two-star review of The Ring, Roger Ebert complains, among other things, that:
[t]his is Naomi Watts’ first move since ‘Mulholland Drive’ and I was going to complain that we essentially learn nothing about her character except that she’s a newspaper reporter—but then I remembered that in ‘Mulholland Drive’ we essentially learned nothing except that she was a small-town girl in Hollywood, and by the end of the movie we weren’t even sure we had learned that. ‘Mulholland Drive,’ however, evoked juicy emotions and dimensions that ‘The Ring’ is lacking, and involved us in a puzzle that was intriguing instead of simply tedious.
One could imagine—perhaps even relish—the thought of this as a kind of meta-promo for the film, somehow cementing its success in spite of his blatant disapproval. Inside the Castle’s 2021 reissue of Hunchback ’88, published with an assortment of essays and responses not included in Permanent Sleep’s first edition of the book, is similarly tough to pin down. Beyond all over the place, the book is in several places at once, ectoplasmically; any form, genre, or critique that might have quelled it is only another channel for it to propagate, only another wooden lever thrown. Ebert seems to be asking: what makes one puzzle intriguing and another tedious? The better question is: how do you know it’s a puzzle if you haven’t solved it yet?
Among the latest entries into an ever-growing catalog of “haunted media,” Christopher Norris’s experimental horror novel Hunchback ’88 frustrates any attempt at criticism along the lines of exegesis or “solutions”—a word rendered as un-punk here as anywhere. And though the book has been billed as a novel, it also joins a cadre of books that call themselves novels despite lacking many of the traits that we most associate with them—Hunchback ’88 is low on stable characters, clear narratives, and even on a sense of what exactly is happening at any given point in the book. In lieu of those things, Hunchback ’88 partakes in, examines, and exceeds the genre of horror, particularly of horror film, through a poetic engagement with the tropes of the slasher flick, including but not limited to torture, teenagers, their organs, spring break, and an astonishing, even visionary fascination with bodily harm and violence. These tropes are deployed under the guise of what reads like a second-rate screenplay by an eccentric writer that got carried away with it, though as the book falls apart and fails to convince as a traditional work of horror, the feeling that failure was the point all along starts to spread, like a malignant growth on the judgment of the reader: the book has no interest in convincing you, being that you’re the one tied to the chair. Unlike in an actual puzzle, cohesion is a second-order effect and a second-order concern. The expectation that, in the end, there will be enough pieces to complete the picture is precisely what is being thwarted; rather than expression, transgression is its method. More succinctly, “puzzling” is not a quality that inheres only in puzzles.
Much like the fraudulent reviews at the end of Mark Z Danielwski’s House of Leaves (among them a spurious blurb from Harold Bloom), the supplementary pieces included with Inside the Castle’s 2021 reissue of Hunchback ’88 nod jointly to the existence of Hunchback ’88 itself. What they also imply is that Hunchback ’88 is cursed. Subsumed under the heading “The OTHERSIDE of MEATNIGHT: 4 from The Fungeon,” these four responses range from the strictly critical to the devoutly mimetic, enacting various levels of engagement with the reissued text. Each is penned by someone other than Norris, a famed hardcore musician and visual artist known better as Stk Mtn. For instance, Christopher Zeischegg’s short piece “The paper bag” is a fictionalized account of his reading Hunchback ’88 after discovering it stuffed mysteriously into his mailbox, inside of a paper bag. As far as analysis goes, Zeischegg only quotes three lines from the novel itself. Instead of considering what’s inside the book, he documents the effect it has on his body: “I removed my hand and felt my fingertips detached on to the paper. The pain was nothing, like cutting away hair.” As Zeischegg’s skin loosens and peels away, his life unravels with it, prompting him to stuff the book back into his mailbox, as if to make it somebody else’s problem. Like in The Ring, paying the curse forward is the only way to break it.
The haunted or cursed media object, such as Zeischegg’s copy of Hunchback ’88 or the evil videotape from The Ring, has become a hallmark of post-internet horror. Affordable home-recording devices and smartphones, the ubiquity of video sharing via content platforms like YouTube, and the seemingly endless and often byzantine annals of the internet have proven especially conducive to the fantasy that a certain software or file, whether it be image, text, audio, video, or otherwise, might be in possession of properties that ought to be improper to it. Though the phenomenon predates its name, these haunted media are frequently mythologized in what have come to be called “creepypastas,” the rough equivalent of ghost stories for people who grew up with a computer. The creepypasta spreads virally (like its etymological ancestor, the “copypasta,” a self-explanatory portmanteau) and can concern nearly anything, but more often than not it concerns a single piece of media capable of affecting its audience in malevolent, supernatural ways. Lost episodes of television shows are a popular subgenre: “Suicidemouse.avi” describes an original Mickey Mouse cartoon that supposedly drives its viewers to madness and suicide. Often, the stories that these media are embedded into include clips from the alleged video files minus their climaxes, which are “lost” and therefore left to the imagination. Similarly, “Smile.jpg” denotes both an image and a creepypasta about that image. Another notable creepypasta concerns a haunted cartridge of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask from which the spirit of its previous owner, a boy who drowned to death, escapes. But what makes all of these examples most effective as horror, however poorly written and categorically ill-conceived they tend to be, is that their narratives are framed and delivered in such a way that they could be real: as with any urban legend, believing it is half the fun.
Though technology tends to be relevant in some way or another, haunted media is not merely or strictly technological. More important is that haunted media is always embedded, as content into form, within a frame. For example, “Lemurian Time War,” a short work of speculative realism or “theory fiction” authored collectively by The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, functions as a frame into which William S. Burroughs’ novella Ghost of Chance is embedded as a haunted or cursed media object. In this case, the book (which, just like Hunchback ’88 in the context of Zeischegg’s piece, is a real-life novella written by Boroughs) apparently defies the laws of time by creating rifts in it, allowing Boroughs to stumble across the book in a library only to realize that he himself had already written it in the distant past. Just like in the above examples, the story is a layer applied to the haunted media that, in a sense, makes it possible by couching it. In the particular case of horror, the haunted media takes the place of the ghost or the killer or the monster as that which horrifies us—except now, the horrifying thing stands also as an analogy for the text itself.
The timeliest works of horror, those that could be said to be the most relevant to the Zeitgeist, have at their disposal today any number of techniques and relationships to artifice, in particular the foregrounding of artifice and hyperrealism (the latter of which is borne out in horror films as “found footage,” or else something “based on a true story” that might have been believed if it weren’t being watched in a theater or read on “creepypasta.com”), that unveil a mise en abyme in the work. The routes by which this unveiling occurs in each case is opposite: the foregrounding of artifice destabilizes form or medium by making it obvious, whereas found footage films, such as The Blair Witch Project or Cannibal Holocaust, abuse artifice in such a manner as to draw attention to the form or medium that it was meant to make vanish—the same mechanism at play in the overapplication of makeup. As Deleuze writes, the two ways of overturning a law are to “challeng[e] the law as secondary, derived, borrowed” or to submit to the law “with a too-perfect attention to detail.” Traditionally, the proper domain of art has been artifice, meaning that the ideal work of art once occupied a purgatory in which artifice was used to obscure medium so that media could be safely and comfortably constituted by it. Artifice tells us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain: now, the horror of the curtain itself is the new frontier. Audiences know that the content of something can be horrific, but experimental horror like Hunchback ’88 wonders whether form can be horrific, too. Haunted media are themselves the unattainable ideal of a work of art that attempts to overcome form and medium, and the stories that those haunted media are embedded into—the stories that they come to haunt—barrel towards them asymptotically. If a work that foregrounds artifice can be said to pivot left away from form, and found footage films can be said to pivot right, haunted media can be said to take the impossible shortcut: crawling right out of the medium that sits in your living room—crawling directly toward you.
Originally published in 3:AM Magazine, John Trefry’s incisive essay “how wonderfully shall their words pearce into inward human partes: the new visual rhetoric of literature & hunchback ’88” is the only piece of conventional criticism among the four pieces located in the back of the reissue, and perhaps the only point between its covers where the reader is justified in feeling safe from any stripe of irony or metafictive antics. The piece quite cogently lays out that Hunchback ’88 is a literary work concerned with visual mediums, and more specifically that what this consists of is “transmigrating the ‘cinematic’ [befitting things such as soundtracks and screenplays, to be distinguished from ‘cinema’ or ‘film,’ the moving image itself] into a never-coinciding location parallel with film, with all of the properties of their own mediums embodying a new form that is neither evocative of film or evocative of literature” (brackets and emphasis mine). And besides, he points out, many of the visual techniques borrowed from film originate in literature (or orature) anyway, making the evolution of rhetoric more of a spiral than a straight line, which is at least half the fun of it. For instance, Norris writes:
Wider view… naked, the man is laced around a wooden chair, each arm slung back like a sock of meat fanged on a hook… any wind of strength would make them pendulum and tumble in spiral slop.
His skin, useless as it is, mucid in lost white and hairless after all.
The chair, a being as important as the pre-corpse on it, is sullen and light on personality—except for a large hole in the seat—but holds his draped slump weight just fine.
Although the 3rd-person present tense is the specific register of screenplays, it has the interesting effect of referring immediately to cinematography (by way of the idea of screenplays) rather than screenplays themselves. The literal designations of camera angles, more or less explicit throughout the book, here purposely and even prohibitively delimiting a textual point-of-view (feigning as if the omniscient narrator isn’t really omniscient), launder in the reader’s own associations with moving images—their idealized, sometimes flattened, sometimes burst notions of it—rather than screenplays, or whatever people mean when they describe something as “filmic.”
And, for what it’s worth, “the filmic” is less filmic than Norris’s more-explicit duplications throughout. The previous passage continues:
Gut, drooling… the spasms of open offal red-leak to a spreading pool… in the slick shimmer of that softening thick: an up-skirt mirror of seatless death slouch.
Although it doesn’t take much to figure what’s going on here (a pool of blood beneath a human body tied to a chair forms a reflective surface that reflects the crotch of said body in a doubly-perverse pun on an up-skirt mirror), there’s a dizzying conflation between objects, between actions, and between objects and actions here that typifies Norris’s prose. For example, “red-leak” borders on an Old English kenning for bleeding: the quality of blood (a quality invoked throughout Hunchback ’88) being carried with and by the movement of blood.
The book is somewhat apolitical (as far as that is possible for a work of art); or, if politics is concerned most fundamentally with the organization of people into groups, then as antisocial, onanistic, “Egoist” in the anarchist sense. Nevertheless, this style of writing reaches a crescendo in the book’s fourth section: Norris’s prose enters, though perhaps not literally, into the mode of automatic writing—whether or not he divorces it (or intends to) from its liberatory, anti-hegemonic, surrealist politics matters very little, beyond the usual conversation about the politics of “transgressive literature.” His liberation is his own, and the social, public fact of his art is only that sadism requires an object, as a book does an audience. The descriptions begin to melt into each other, as well as the comedy into the horror:
Obviously, duh, this slick sick sack would’ve never ever never been cleaned, and itself, a being so important on a shelf, in a box, touching leather, or capturing a face… absolutely resisted the natural bath that would come with being stored in a water tank, toilet or no, so as to allow every gross moment of former panic it’s [sic] ghastly right to swarm and stench the interior black I’ve been stuck in and staring through for a period I like to refer to as “The Rubber, After” —even though it’s the rubber still, right now… Rubber’s Dawn… it just starting and all… Wearing it is not unlike living in a noxious packrat’s colon-centric garage apartment… located closer to the delta than the processing plant, or even, the headwaters… if you know what I mean…
I don’t.
The mouth continues, …frenzy and truth splash around in the pool dug yonder in my skull. If I could see, if I wasn’t wrapped in redundant black… I would see that I looked like a nude abbot dipped in molten graphite, rigged to a point… A simple detail of someone’s minor masturbation… one that is of continuous discomfort in my new my-life. But I can’t see, so the fact that I know that look is my look is wholly projection. I may also look like something else. I could look like a frosted pink cupcake, soft on a blue plate, where a woman’s foot is dangling above my dessertness… a vampire bat gathering moisture from the warm slit—who knows, and I started to morosely ’mare back to the countless captives that’ve had this hood over their head, how it’s been spumed in their particular flavors…
This may seem as if it’s taken out of context, but this is close to the amount of context that a reader would have upon reaching this point in the book, when the protagonist is (probably literally) being talked to death by a floating, disembodied mouth recounting an act of abstract torture. This monologue continues for pages and pages in relatively uninterrupted blocks of text, to equal effect of revulsion and hilarity. Here the camera is abandoned for the boom-mic, and the quality of raw dialogue—riffing; droning; even recounting an embedded narrative complete with its own visual descriptions—is invoked. This is, therefore, not merely a visual rhetoric, but an audiovisual rhetoric, returning us to a fuller notion of the “cinematic.” Nevertheless, one cannot escape the sense that to write a book that mimics a film was not at all Norris’s intention: in an interview conducted by Dan Ozzi for Vice, Norris modestly claims that he set out to “write a book that’s just a screenplay,” but even that is decidedly not what Hunchback ’88 is. Ultimately, the effect of his prose is the pulp horror version of what Sianne Ngai calls “stuplimity”: the reader is subjected to a sprawl of text that stupefies—only here it also horrifies. Norris’s unfastened, impressionistic style muddies the mind’s eye, the mind’s ear, and the mind. The “horror movie” is merely a convention for Hunchback ’88 to rely on for the reader’s quick comprehension, and moreover a way of tricking the reader into becoming a lab animal for an eerier experiment in literary trespass—after all, what experimentalism makes clear is that the experiment is as much upon the audience as upon the text. The blur of his narrative is more like a prank on narrative than actual narrative; considered as a screenplay, something which serves a very practical purpose, it would be absolutely useless. The instability that this provides for is, of course, unsettling. His engagement with genre is at first obvious, then increasingly sloppy, and then finally a studied sloppiness; a convincing sprezzatura.
Consider the narrative arc that takes up the most space in the book: Bettys, described upfront as “barely 19” (and referred to inconsistently in both the 2nd and 3rd persons) is embarking on a spring break trip to the beach with her friends, known only as Girl 2, Girl 3, and Girl 4. As per the book’s title, this is the spring of 1988. Though the writing is desultory as this narrative begins, one foot is planted after another and the order of events is clear enough, even if showing the first hints of a willingness to abandon the plot for gratuitous elaboration on other things. Bettys and Girl 2 are preparing for their trip, when all of a sudden:
And when you’re told the wild organ sound is confusing, right now, just then, and you do end up confused, but only in this moment… soon sewn together as a promise farther along, words to come… that the organ venom will shake to a crawling doom? You believe. It bounces around a room larger than the swinging body, in the slippery air, that dances slowly against all rhythm… The skin, young, bronze—eventually you understand the meat to be topless… lithe back muscles, arms stretched high, female… In tacky praise of the music?, and think, Awful, and, Wait, she can hear the music?
It’s like hearing someone talk to themselves, riddled with internal references and mired in a private logic. This shift happens with no warning; before, we were apparently with Bettys and Girl 2, who were preparing for their trip, and certainly nowhere near a dangling corpse. This vision overcomes Bettys for a few pages, and then, just as abruptly, we return: “Inside the Le Sabre: Two girls. Girl 4 is driving. Girl 3, the passenger.”
On display here is Hunchback ’88’s tendency to veer into playful, nearly metaphysical embellishment. Important not only is that the narrative is beside the point, but that Norris’s apparent attitude toward narrative is “Gotcha!” His sprawling interruptions, on the other hand, are the secret that the book harbors, the dark “point” of it all. To borrow from an earlier excerpt, most of Hunchback ’88 is like a “simple detail of someone’s minor masturbation.” Put plainly, it is masturbatory, ornamental, and impractical. Even if Bettys is the novel’s most stable, recurring character, her recurrence is, like so much of the book, merely fugal.
Hunchback ’88 foregrounds its artifice like so many other cutting-edge works of art and literature, and it does so with a slapdash, mutative appropriation of methods and means from film. Indeed, there is more film than literature in its DNA. All of this is to say that the species-jump emphasizes speciation, and so we might imagine Hunchback ’88 as the inheritor of a hunched back, frightening not just because it delivers frightening things but because it is a frightening deliverance of frightening things, wrong on all counts, ignorant of any safe word in its perverse game with the reader (perhaps Mr. Ebert would be overcome with both tedium and mystery, a neverending mess of unmatched, brownish-red jigsaw pieces strewn about the dungeon floor before him...). Though it is still very much a work of horror, Hunchback ’88 plays with horror tropes in the manner of parody. However, it is in this playfulness that a certain detachment or double-jointedness is made apparent: horror is not identical with its tropes. And, though both horror and its tropes may be present in a work of art, the relationship between them in the work of art, far from being preordained in its nature, is in fact preordained as the scene of the determination of both horror and the horrific—that is, the very battleground of the genre.
Not The Ring itself, but the evil VHS tape that it concerns represents a transgressed limit: it is the movie that becomes real life. Like similar haunted media in aforementioned internet horror stories and, to an extent, like Hunchback ’88, it is a plotless montage of disturbing imagery that has the power to affect its viewer as if in possession of an extra dimension, above that of plot or character or even mood, that is on a continuum with the real, nonfictional world of the viewer. Hunchback ’88 even features an evil VHS tape of its own: “The Creamiest Babysitter” appears throughout the book, and never under happy circumstances. Both “The Creamiest Babysitter” and The Ring, then, are movies about movie-ness; speculations upon the qualities, real or imagined, of film (montage, or, more broadly, technique, being a central one). In fact, medium is easily read (and frequently so in the late-20th and early-21st centuries) as limit, and media as the test of that limit. What makes haunted media so alluring is that when it tests medium, medium breaks. Haunted media, then, is not so much haunted as it is the thing that haunts: like a ghost, it has no proper form, is bound in no way to the physical world except through the possession of physical things. Haunted media is impossible because it is media imagined apart from medium, even if only in principle rather than practice.
Inside the Castle’s reissue layers Hunchback ’88 into a larger text and thereby grants it this spectral status. The reissue also marks the introduction of the hyperrealist “based on a true story” technique into the book, as we now have no choice but to consider Hunchback ’88 itself as a book with critics, imitators, and evil powers. Metafiction, too, makes an ouroboros at this juncture: by casting Hunchback ’88 as a real book within a real book, artifice is foregrounded and overapplied in the same gesture. Furthermore, as Trefry notes, Hunchback ’88 is a real book that takes full advantage of the fact of being a real book, in keeping with Inside the Castle’s “books-as-objects” modus operandi: it lacks page numbers entirely and is littered with xeroxed images, claustrophobic margin sizes, non-standard lineation, and blacked-out pages, unlike most works of “literature.” Much more so than the abundance of blood and guts, these formal violences are the real slasher flick. The publishers of “literature” and the entertainment industry at large will likely be content to produce provincial, tepid horror films and novels that deviate as little as possible from the template until the end of time, or at least until the end of an audience that will pay for them, but, in spite of this, there will continue to be works of horror that venture ahead—or rather, that keep pace with the present. If we take irony in its broadest, most metaphysical sense as the disjunction between appearances and realities; as that which denotes those things that are what they are not, or are not what they are; then it follows that the works of horror in closest communion with the state of the contemporary world will be alloyed with that irony to achieve their fullest force—in order to destabilize the ground so that the eventual push results in a hard fall. Medium and media will continue to be brought into tension rather than harmony for as long as that succeeds as a method not just of scaring audiences, but of scaring them in a way that is relevant.
As my “[sic]” from the earlier passage might suggest, the book also abounds with errata. Uncurled and curled apostrophes frequently cohabitate on the same page, and yet there are just as many instances in which neither are present where one should be. Even the apostrophe that comes before 88 faces different directions on different pages. One could point to the fact that indie presses and literary-arts nonprofits are categorically underfunded, and that, therefore, the onus of copyediting falls upon writers and editors that can only afford to write and edit books in their free time; on the other hand, there’s something charming about all this, in part because of my intuition that telling the author of Hunchback ’88 that his book “has typos” would prompt a resounding “go fuck yourself.” That should be justification enough, but, if more justification is desired, it could be further argued that this is merely another example of how the book does things that it is not supposed to do, whether intentional or not, and whether one likes it or not.
Hunchback ’88 concludes with a single, whimsical sentence, written not in English but in French, that reads more like lyric poetry than nearly everything that comes before it. Similarly, Mulholland Drive concludes with a single Italian word: silencio. In both cases, the task of translation marks the final, intractable mystery—and yet the perceived mysteriousness of the romance languages is itself a kind of joke. While both works meet the criteria for intrigue, to call them puzzles, solved or not, speaks to an overwhelming desire for closure. But, complain as one might, the desire to know the unknown is equal and opposite to the desire to willingly place oneself into a state of not-knowing—and, together, these desires are what make horror effective in the first place. We may only disagree about whether the mystery should remain mysterious, and if so, to what degree. Still, contrary to common sense, the critical appendix included with Inside the Castle’s reissue only lessens closure by opening the work to interpretation: by mythologizing the text, the spirit of Norris’ novel is set free rather than reigned in. Criticism, in this sense, is not a demystification but a mystification, a séance; the critic is the conjurer. Depending on how broadly one conceives of cinema, and how narrowly one conceives of literature, Hunchback ’88 makes a daring, confrontational, and bewildering contribution to both. Completely sidestepping the lowbrow–highbrow distinctions within them, it continues the legacy of horror in general as a hotbed of experimentalism, while presenting itself in this new form as a more perplexing and sinister project than before.