Bartlett
and You: An Unsafety Guide
An
Introduction by Scott Nicolay
You may
already know what I am going to say here, or at least you may think you do: Matthew Bartlett is one of those authors
whose emergence redefines the genre. Barker, Ligotti, Barron, Llewellyn... Bartlett.
And there I said it. Not that it will come as any surprise to you if you have
read Gateways to Abomination and/or Creeping Waves...his importance is
really a given at this point.
That’s
really only a starting point though, isn’t it? It may well be the reason why
you are here in the first place. You may have heard the rumors. You may think
you know it already. You may even think you know what you are in for with this
latest collection of his work.
But
things are never what they seem chez Bartlett, are they? If you have played
previously in his twisted playground (a setting he actually used in one of the
most memorable stories from Gateways)
you might anticipate a progression from creepy to disturbing to
holy-shit-what-the-fuck, followed by a long hot shower and gargling with salt
water to get the taste of pus and leeches out of your mouth (it won’t work,
trust me). Critic s.j. bagley has described this payload delivery system of The
Weird and its lingering effects as unsettlement...a
deceptively understated term, especially in Bartlett’s case. He works like a
decrepit Charon ferrying readers from the shores of the self to the unself, boatloads at a time, and for
mere pennies. Each of his stories is a kind of haunted house that shunts you
through multiple unexpected turns and shocks, rapidly deranging your narrative
expectations until...it doesn’t really matter because the you who entered is no
longer the reader who emerges.
Just
so does my friend Matthew defy expectations afresh with each new tale. The
reader cannot possibly know what you did going in because you never came out.
Not that such knowledge would be much help anyway. Bartlett’s narratives follow
no formula, not even their own. Every story is a unique labyrinth with its own
rules, or rather, his labyrinth has no rules. Its corridors and catacombs are
constantly shifting, ceaselessly changing, always Bartlett, never the same.
There are many points of entry. No way out.
Here
the reader, searching for some fixed reference, a place to attach one end of a
long skein of colored yarn, may proclaim triumphantly: “But Bartlett’s stories
all do have a common thread: WXXT,
the sinister and mysterious radio station operated by an ancient and even more
mysterious witch cult in Leeds, Massachusetts!”
So
the reader may think...but that reader is neither you nor me. And the reader
who is fortunate enough to have acquired a copy of this small volume is about
to discover that our protean author has, like the slime mold, shifted into a
new form and slithered on to new ground during the dark intervals of our eye
blinks. You can’t step into the same Bartlett twice.
Oh,
he is not without form, but no one has seen his true form. Though not all Weird
writers are evolving, Bartlett, like rust, plasmodia, or The Weird itself,
never rests. A certain type of reader might attempt to create a visual
representation of the current amorphous state of The Weird, assigning a set of
variable characteristics to each author and mapping our work along multiple
axes in three or more dimensions. Such a display would likely reveal an
overlapping array of lumpy blobs, many clustered closely together in
unwholesome familiarity, others positioned at some greater remove from the
crowd. Bartlettia would be one of the latter.
A
similar approach to each individual author’s corpus might produce similar
results, showing nuclear cores surrounded by more elastic pseudopodia extending
in new directions. Variation within many populations would inevitably stand
revealed as greater than that between the populations themselves. And within
that dark star map, a graphic representation of the seven tale subset that
comprises The Stay-Awake Men and Other
Stories would indeed portray a single cluster and that cluster would still
lie within the overall Bartlettosphere. These tale all give me that Bartlett
Fink Feeling, true--but they belong to a new and distinct extrusion of that
system. Of course it is no secret that Bartlett is going places. He always has
been. Just not the places the reader expects.
So
it is with The
Stay-Awake Men and Other Stories (six
other stories, to be exact): WXXT remains silent here. Leeds receives mention more than once--as does its
major employer, Annelid Industries International--but though these are all
distinctly Bartlett stories, none of them are “Leeds stories.” The titular tale
is actually set at a radio station--but not WXXT. The différance is quite delicious, really. Amidst the familiar flavors
in this batch of stew are tantalizing hints of Barker, Ligotti, Aickman,
Samuels, and Klein, stronger than they have been before, but not strong enough
to do more than add spice to the stock of an author who himself seems to grow
in power with every paragraph. “Spettrini” (which previously appeared as a
limited edition chapbook from Dunhams Manor Press) in particular invoked not
only “The Glamour,” a long-standing personal favorite among Ligotti’s tales,
but also Barker’s Imajica. Perhaps
that was just me, but there is no way for me to tell now.
The
Stay-Awake Men shows Bartlett not simply
shifting his territory, but broadening it overall, becoming a little more
literary perhaps, maybe a bit more strange or uncanny, as some prefer to style
it in the Other England, the “Old” one. Part of that must come from the extent
that the author has distopiated these tales, distancing them from one of the
most distinctive locales in contemporary fiction. While the reader was
distracted, Bartlett expanded, growing not only greater, but nearer. As his
tales become less local, they become
more universal. Was their a vacant
house down the street from you? It may have a new occupant. Don’t worry if you
can’t visit: it may come to you.
Oh
look, here in your hands: it has already arrived. Oh well, time for me to
leave. It was nice knowing you.
Bartlett’s
house has many doors. Many gateways in. No way out. Don’t worry though. I think
you will like it there.
