The Edge Online - Reviews: Jonathan Carroll

Sleeping in Flame
Jonathan Carroll
Doubleday, hardback, 273 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1990)

‘A clown isn’t funny in the moonlight.’

That Lon Chaney quote, as used by the author here, in many ways points up exactly what he was trying to achieve in his fiction – his work has confounded critics in search of a genre label for him. Sleeping In Flame is a horror novel, but one that blurs the edges of what that tag has come to mean in such a way as to make it genuinely unique.

Walker Eastling is an actor and screenwriter living in Vienna. Through a friend he meets Maris York, a beautiful and successful artist who spends her days creating cities from Lego. As their relationship develops, Walker begins to have strange dreams and premonitions, meets bizarre characters in the city, and experiences seemingly magical occurrences. The discovery of a gravestone bearing a picture of a man – apparently Walker’s double – spurs him into a search for the truth which takes him to America and a TV obsessed guru with a pet pig, the violent death of a friend, and an odyssey through his previous lives.

The key word to describe Carroll must be magic; Sleeping In Flame is magic realism. Fantastical elements occur as a matter of course – the arrival of a talking pig, or the appearance of a sea-monster on a film set are simply part of Carroll’s tapestry. At points, the narrative slides effortlessly into a dream world, and here Carroll proves himself to be possibly the best writer working today in his understanding of the dream process. These sequences ride their own train of logic that is both divorced from reality and a part of it.

That the ultimate resolution of the conundrum Walker finds himself in lies literally in the fairy tale world of the Brothers Grimm is at once ludicrous, and yet somehow logical within the off-kilter reality Carroll creates, where magic lies just below the surface. But, in common with those tales, this magic is firmly rooted in gothic horror.

Carroll’s message is that life is never quite what it appears; that something else, be it wonderful or horrific, lies just out of our sight waiting to be wakened – in this case, by love.

Whatever else Sleeping In Flame achieves, it confirms Carroll as an extraordinary and original voice. And the killer sting he saves for the climax is one that no reader will predict, and something that will alter your perception of fairy tales forever.