Seven Deadly Pleasures

I
n a prefatory note to
Deathbird Stories
(1975), Harlan Ellison wrote: "It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting." Without attempting to compare a relative novice to a living legend, I would repeat Ellison's caveat in regard to Michael Aronovitz's
Seven Deadly Pleasures.
In fact, I would go on to add that it might be advisable to read only
one
of the stories in this book at a sitting, perhaps one a day.

The emergence of a writer like Michael Aronovitz is a highly interesting literary phenomenon. As we come close to the end of this first decade of the twenty-first century, the horror "boom" that began, more or less, with the simultaneous appearance on the bestseller lists in 1971 of William Peter Blatty's
The Exorcist
and Thomas Tryon's
The Other
has been over for close to twenty years. Stephen King and Anne Rice still make the bestseller lists, but the former remains there for shorter and shorter periods and the latter scarcely seems to be writing horror at all. The best writers in the field appear to have retreated to the small press, for it is only those presses that can take a chance that a Thomas Ligotti, a Caitlín R. Kiernan, or a Jonathan Thomas will be able to find an audience without generating that blockbuster (usually a bloated and gore-filled novel) which commercial houses appear to require of their genre writers. And so, when Michael Aronovitz submitted these stories to me—first one or two, then the entire volume—I could see at once that here was a writer who deserved his audience but whose intense, gripping, and emotionally wrenching tales would be sure to scare off—in the wrong sense of the term—any commercial publisher he approached.

What is impressive about Aronovitz's tales is their range of tone, mood, and substance. To be sure, such stories as "How Bria Died," "The Legend of the Slither-Shifter," and "Toll Booth" shows the author to be unusually attuned to the angst of teenagers—as is fitting for a high school teacher. But to turn from the dramatic tensity of "How Bria Died"—one of the most terrifying supernatural tales I have read in many years—to the sardonic humour of "The Clever Mask" is to wonder how a single author could be responsible for such wildly diverse specimens. And the philosophical depth that Aronovitz shows in stories like "Quest for Sadness" and "The Exterminator" makes one realise that he is far more than a mere shudder-coiner; rather, he follows the best traditions of supernatural fiction in making us ponder our tenuous position in the universe by means of terror and wonder. And the story "Passive Passenger" confronts us with the quasi-science fictional horror of the computer and the Internet.

This collection's capstone is "Toll Booth," a 40,000-word novella that seamlessly accomplishes many things at once. It is simultaneously a poignant tale of teenagers' ability—or inability—to face a moral dilemma, an almost unbearable tale of physical gruesomeness that any splatterpunk writer would be proud of, and a subtle tale of supernatural haunting in the unlikeliest of places—a highway toll booth. From Le Fanu to Lovecraft to Ramsey Campbell to T. E. D. Klein, the novella has been the chosen venue of many masters of the supernatural to fuse the intensity of the short story with the character development usually possible only in the novel, and in "Toll Booth" Aronovitz has fully realised the aesthetic possibilities of this hybrid literary mode.

It would be unjust to consider Michael Aronovitz a novice, for some of his stories have appeared either in print on online more than fifteen years ago. His surehandedness in prose, in character portrayal, and in the pacing and development of the short story also mark him as a veteran. This may be his first book, but I venture to say that most readers will fervently hope it will not be his last.

—S. T. JOSHI