Adelphi’s to publish Through the night by William Sloane is certainly a singular choice. Born in the United States in 1906 and died in 1974, a life spent in the publishing world (among other things as director of Rutgers University Press), Sloane only published a couple of novels during his lifetime: in addition to the one proposed (whose title original it is To Walk the Night), The Edge of Running Water. These are books published in 1937 and 1939 respectively, which were not followed by other novelistic attempts, and which if they did not gain the author a cult following, they still had their re-editions and, consequently, their fans in the subsequent decades – including Stephen King, who signed the preface to the Adelphi volume. To Walk the Night it had already appeared in Italian in 1961, with the title of You are a disease for the Longanesi types, and in 1990, as Selena, for Mondadori’s unforgettable Oscar horror series. Contrary to the bad habits of many Italian publishers, Adelphi does not recover old rusty translations, but relies on the proven craft of Gianni Pannofino.
1937, 1939: we are clearly in the golden age of science fiction and the weird. Howard Phillips Lovecraft died in 1937, after having published his most memorable stories between the 1920s and 1930s, mostly in genre magazines such as Weird Tales And Astounding Stories; and precisely that mix of science, horror and detective story that we tend to associate with the weird is also found in Sloane’s novel. Even more, however, it is weird in the Lovecraftian sense of cosmic horror – even if explaining how and why would mean ruining the surprise for the reader by indicating the solution to the mystery, and a book like this would lose meaning without the driving force of the anxiety of discovering it. Suffice it to say that it has more than a little in common with “The Shadow of Time” and “The Thing on the Doorstep.”
Not that Sloane’s novel is a banal page-turner, in which only the development of the plot has value: on the contrary, we find described a dense network of complex personal relationships, a male friendship, and the American university world at the beginning of the century. Compared to Lovecraft’s, Sloane’s writing is strangely anchored to everyday reality – indeed, there is even a description of a football game, which in any HPL story would be far more inconceivable than any demonic creature spewing from the depths of the cosmos . But as in the best weird novels, also in Through the night all these things are given only as a function of the element of horror, which absorbs and deflects every other question.
The plot of Through the night it is rather linear, net of the dual narrative frame. First of all, the story is presented as the arrangement of notes from a conversation between the narrator and Doctor Lister, father of his best friend; and this conversation intersperses the story itself. The narrator goes to the house of the father of his close friend Jerry to tell him how and what, in his opinion, were the causes of his sudden suicide. It all began, according to the narrator, when the two stumbled upon a terrible and inexplicable scene: when they went to visit their mathematician friend LeNormand in his study at the university, they found him engulfed in flames – which however did not seem like “the fire produced by a log of wood” but gave off “a faint yellow glow. (…) Clear, white, silent, it flicked out like a snake’s tongue and writhed like a plume of algae in the current, coiling over, around and inside the professor’s body” (60-61). During the investigation into this mysterious combustion, the two meet Selena, their friend’s new bride, with whom Jerry soon begins a relationship which will in turn culminate in marriage.
I talked about investigation before, but Through the night it is not a detection novel in the traditional sense, rather one in which the narrator retrospectively reassembles the pieces of an impossible puzzle. In this sense, Sloane’s book is subtle and hypnotic, and after the coup of the LeNormand fire it simply presents the reader with a series of small, unnerving oddities whose sum brings a sense of frustration and growing anxiety. Sloane’s narrator outlines very clearly what kind of mystery the novelist has constructed:
As a rule, it seems to me, the things of life do not present themselves in the form of grandiose and overwhelming facts, characterized by theatrical violence. Life is a series of little things that, for the most part, mean a lot or a little depending on the position of the observer. I, for example, didn’t pay much attention to what happened that evening. Yet, if I had done so, I would have recognized a pattern, the pattern of the fifth act of a tragedy, when the events have already been completed, and only the last words and the final ruin of the protagonist are missing. Now I see those things for what they were really worth, last tiny events before an unspeakable horror. (239)
Also contributing to this deceptiveness is the fact that the fire scene, however unexpected and impressive, is not the true center of the novel: if anything, that is Selena. In this sense, Sloane’s book is situated in that tradition of horror novels, from The great god Pan by Arthur Machen a Ghost Story by Peter Straub, in which a disturbing female character sows confusion among the protagonists. Yet Selena is not disturbed by some sinister characteristic, but only by an oddity that no one around her seems to be able to pinpoint exactly. Selena appears to have no past; she appears to know nothing of the world she moves in, not being able to hold a normal conversation, or interpret humor. She learns quickly, but, as the narrator notes, always by imitating, and never as if her behaviors really belonged to her.
At the end of the novel, the reader will understand the reason for Selena’s strangeness and her motives. Yet, during reading, what seems to disturb the narrator is above all to find himself in front of a female figure who does not respond to his expectations and her needs for control. What disturbs him, more than anything, more than Selena’s inconsistencies and her separateness from her world? Her intelligence: “Of course! That was the point. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? That woman was too smart. Too smart. Of course, she was beautiful and also very strange, but that was the thing that struck me most about her” (108). Here, after closing Through the night one suspects that cosmic horror plays its part, but that an equally significant role is also played by the intrusion, in the life of the protagonist and his friend, of an uncontrollable female agency, which breaks a male relationship which is not without , with subtle streaks of homoerotic camaraderie.
With Through the nightAdelphi offers in an excellent translation a singular and fascinating volume, which is nice to see back on the shelves of Italian bookstores: a precious weird work, with more than something to say to the contemporary reader.
