Ruminations on a “Sketch”

In “Sketch” (published online at Mandatory Midnight), North Carolina native and Brownsville, Texas denizen Ryan McGinnis crafts a sinister, Lovecraftian vision of cerebral horror befitting a New Weird moniker. In an introductory blurb we learn that Sarah, an aspiring sketch artist of landscapes and gothic architecture, has recently suffered from a hard breakup. Her friend Tracy attempts to help her by managing and staging an art exhibit of Sarah’s work on gothic castles from her travels in Europe. Sarah takes to the work well, at first, as she drafts image after image with her expressionist style of deep shadows and chiaroscuro contrast with attendant surrealist motifs and unsettling smudge-work. However, when an image of a man appears and then disappears of its own volition within her frames, Sarah experiences abject fear and her friends believe she is going insane. Half-horror, half-edge-of-your-seat-fugue-state, this tale draws parallels to the texts of Junji Ito. It’s gothic fixations remind one of the imaginative power of Mervyn Peake or Jorge Luis Borges.

As a sketch, “Sketch” is the beginnings of a larger body of work: One in development and one I will be reviewing for the next few weeks here. The narrative style is simple and unadorned third-person narration from a relatively invisible narrator with direct access to the interiority of Sarah’s mind. The writing is straightforward, which aids the reader in clipping along quickly and building the sense of tension. Its central idea of note is the question of how our creative works can absorb us as artists? In Sarah’s case, she is offered the vertiginous possibility of her creative work bringing new life into the world and through her fears and anxieties she is unable to do so. Instead, Sarah stifles her greatest creative achievement (freeing the spectre of the gothic castle) and is, in a sense, consumed by her inaction.

The idea here is that creative endeavor is voidal, abyssal, aporetic by its very nature. That in the process of writing, the writer changes, evolves, and becomes a more complex entity. The attendant fear of psychological disintegration is so strong that it may block the writer from ever truly engaging a project or putting it out into the world through submission or private publishing. Yet, by not letting the creative work live and emerge into the real world, the writer risks a far more pernicious spectre’s birth: Regret, a beast much more able to consume the artist totally in the final analysis. In “Sketch,” the anxieties of a beginning writer are veiled through an engaging piece of horror short fiction that is harrowing, both metaphysically and on the gut level.

For more information about Ryan McGinnis and to receive a free ebook and access to his writings, please peruse his personal website here. (Check out my review of “A Good Night’s Sleep” next)