It’s All About Squandered Potential, Not Actual Accomplishments: Stephen Graham Jones’ Mapping the Interior

Stephen Graham Jones weaves the everyday and the mythic with the ease of a Clive Barker. Though his darker turns are not necessarily as gruesome as some of that author’s better-known works, the two writers shared a skewed view of both the world and the genre that has made their name. Whereas Barker has left horror per se for fantasy (his own brand of fantastique, in fact), Jones still dwells with dread, hope, despair, and pain. Sure, his work blends the mundane with the ineffable in unexpected ways, drawing from Blackfeet lore, told in a prose that is sometimes dreamlike, often hypnotic. When he is firing on all cylinders, Jones writes narratives that employ the engrossing qualities of a good memoir or confession. These are private stories, intimate, something just between his characters and you, the individual reader (no matter that everyone else is talking about them on Twitter). This is never clearer than in his moving, chilling exploration of a twelve-year-old’s unique haunting, the Tor.com novella Mapping the Interior.

Junior, his mom, and his damaged brother Dino (the latter suffers some mental handicaps as well as an intensifying seizures) live in a narrow but long, modular house in a quiet neighborhood well off the rez. Their neighbors have some truly undisciplined dogs, animals that snap and howl whenever Junior and his brother walk by, animals that would like nothing more than to do a little damage, break a few bones, snap up some young boy meat. The kids at school are repugnant to Dino, bullying him and drawing on him despite his inability to recognize the behavior as anything other than a game. Dino likes to please, and he likes to play games, so he lets the little shits have their way. Twelve-year-old Junior is not so easy going or forgiving. In fact, he is a barely contained pressure cooker, though he does not quite know it. Even if he did, he would not know enough about self-care to resolve his situation.

Things take a turn for the weird when Junior sees his dad crossing the kitchen to the utility room one night, dressed up in his pow-wow dance regalia. Of course, Junior seeing his father going to the laundry room in such duds is not the essential oddity of the matter. That would be the simple fact that Junior’s dad has been dead since he was four.

Of course, his mother finds unexpectedly reasonable grounds to dispute her son’s claim:

“I saw him the other night,” I said, shrugging like this was no big. “He’s different now. Better.”

“You saw him where?” Mom said, giving me her full attention now.

What she was thinking, I know, was the neighbors just had someone get processed out of lockup, and now they were standing out at the fence, watching the little boys who had moved in next door.

“Right here,” I said, nodding to the kitchen. “He was going back to the utility room.”

Mom just stared at me some more.

“Your father never did laundry,” she finally said. “I don’t think he would come back from the afterlife to run a load of whites.”

Mapping the Interior, 36-37

That’s one of the finer touches in Jones’ writing. He approaches all his works with as much of a sense of humor as he does a sense of the macabre, the moody, or the mournful. His fiction overflows with emotion, honestly drawn.

According to the mythology Junior has assembled about the incident, his father’s death may well be more than it seems.

But in the year or two after he either drowned or was drowned—there’s stories both ways, and they each make sense—when we were still on the reservation, when his sisters would still watch us some days, they’d tell us about Dad when he was our age and his eyes were still big with dreams.

He’d really been into bows and arrows and headbands, they said, the toy ones from the trading post. I imagine that when you grow up in a cowboy place, then you’re all into saddles and boots and ropes. When you grow up in Indian country, the TV tells you how to be Indian. And it starts with bows and arrows and headbands. They’re the exciting part of your heritage. They’re also the thing you can always find at the gift shop.

Mapping the Interior, 15

So much in such a few short sentences, modest paragraphs. Right there we have a finale for a man who died on the rez while his oldest son was four and his youngest was practically newborn. In fact, the man’s death on the reservation land’s lake occurred while he was hunting something he had no business hunting, a concept that strikes a chord with readers of The Only Good Indians. The matter is not an early stab at the topic explored in depth in that subsequent, longer work. It’s simply a matter of character.

Was Junior’s father’s death accident or murder? Could be one or the other, depending on who’s telling the story. That’s the surest sign of a man who is larger than life, a nigh-unto-mythic figure. He’s made enemies who want him dead, or he’s just being foolish. As the narrative explores the matter, we explore the events surrounding that death and they explode to nearly epic proportions.

From the start, there is mystery. This only intensifies with his subsequent reappearance.

This visitation is a brush with the otherworldly. Or is it? Junior has to investigate further, using this opportunity to know the man who vanished so early from his life. The journey is an intensely personal one, fraught with eeriness and the intersection of the waking and sleeping worlds, the material world and the phantom realm of spirit. There might be an instance of time travel as well, and then again there might not. It’s all up for interpretation.

As Junior explores the intersection of the mundane and mystical, he comes upon some unexpected revelations and a cool appraisal of the barriers that exist between fathers and their sons.

Jones is a chronicler of more than dark fantasy and horror. Here, as in the recent novel The Only Good Indians, he gives us people who have interests tied to the real world. Junior is a drawer, and he uses his skill to map out the modular house. The novella’s title draws on this, while also suggesting Junior’s coming of age (mapping his own interior landscape and watching its changes).

However, there is yet another sport at the center of this narrative. Basketball played a big role in The Only Good Indians, and it gets a mention here.

This time around, dance is a powerful presence in this book. The part of Junior’s family still living on the reservation perform the old dances during competitions, eyes on some fat prize money for the best moves and costumes. Junior’s father dallied with the art form, and he may well have been pretty good at it. Unfortunately, his life choices trended toward less socially acceptable outcomes.

“He’s was going to be the best dancer of us all, once he straightened back up again,” one of his sisters had told me. She wasn’t a dancer herself, but, playing it again in my head, I think she was talking about all the Indians on the whole reservation, maybe even on the whole pow-wow circuit. I think she was saying that if my dad would have just applied the same energy and forethought to his regalia and his routine as he did to what trouble there was to get in once the sun came down, there would have been no stopping him.

That’s how you talk about dead people, thought, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.

Mapping the Interior, 16

We know this character archetype from other Jones works. This type of father is the man Gabriel Cross Guns was in The Only Good Indians, maybe good intentions (though his kids will never know them) who liked trouble a little too much more than living respectably. I have not read enough of Jones’ fiction to say whether this type of character is a recurring one, but I suspect it is. This character type can be found in Mongrels, The Only Good Indians, and here. I’m sure it’s elsewhere. Such characters are fun to write about. These folks are unruly, rude, and they do not really understand just what problems they leave in their wake. Thus, the aftermath of their actions provides ample food for thought.

In Mapping the Interior, we get characters driven by the fallout. Junior’s mom has not remarried, not even taken a lover. She’s lonely, isolated except for her boys, and maybe she is setting her eyes on changing this. Loneliness can be unbearable, after all. Dino is broken, getting worse. Junior tries to reconnect with his father’s ghost, but the relationship there is a complex one. On the one hand, the spirit deals with the neighbor’s dogs when they get loose and trap Junior under the house, the father protecting the son; on the other hand, he might well be directly causing Dino’s mental disintegration.

Then again, there are plenty of questions as to whether or not what Junior sees is anything other than mere wish fulfillment. There are a few bits of evidence, but they are not nails-in-the-coffin evidence by any stretch of the imagination. Take the example of Dino’s action figure, which loses a foot to Dino’s grinding teeth during one of his attacks. During the story it “heals,” transforming into a kind of mystic fetish. Does Dino only have the one figure? Is it the very same one that was missing a foot? Could Junior have tricked himself into believing simply because he needs something to believe in? All possibilities. Particularly since Junior is prone to sleepwalking, particularly since he’s dealing with big problems (see the aforementioned pressure cooker status) and since he does not have some basic coping mechanisms to help him out. His life of the mind intrudes quite a bit on his life of the body . . .

Ghost stories are often drenched in the sorrows of opportunities lost. The films tend to lend themselves more toward active Boo scenarios, while fiction lends itself to remembrance, to grief, to coping with our inevitable destruction, and with the hopeful note that we might not wink out when the heart beats its last drum line. Jones’ novella hits some of these themes, as well as adding in the complexities of wanting a way to understand his brother’s intensifying troubles and possibly a way to confront and perhaps stop them.

Junior becomes convinced that his father’s spirit is making evening trips up from the crawlspace underneath the house to suck vitality from Dino, the result of which is all these seizures and Dino’s developmental challenges (e.g., loss of ability to count). It’s a way to manifest an adversary he can perhaps face and defeat.

So, Jones leads us into a dreamlike narrative about Junior’s world, his wakening perceptions, his eagerness to know his dead father better, and his grappling with a toxic legacy. And this is just what’s happening if we continue to believe the monster is mere metaphor. A whole world of mythic action opens up if we entertain the possibility of a supernatural intrusion . . .

I love the way Jones tells his stories. Mapping the Interior is a novella-length tale rife with metaphor and incident. It has a literary quality to the prose, a love of the unsaid, and enough action to keep my attention and emotional investment. A little gem of writing, this.

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Stephen Graham Jones’ Mapping the Interior is available in a couple of editions. Of course, there are the eBook and paperback editions from Tor.com. The novella’s full text also appeared in the Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 anthology (edited by Paula Guran) from Prime Books, which is still available in eBook and paperback editions.

Next up, we will check back in with S. A. Cosby, whose Blacktop Wasteland is taking crime fiction readers TBR stacks by storm. Prior to that engaging, thoughtful, and thrilling work, Cosby penned another crime fiction piece called My Darkest Prayer. It is another look at crime in rural America, when a Black preacher’s death reveals his ties to unsavory men, despicable deeds, and a legacy of crime. Fans of Blacktop Wasteland will find much to appreciate here. It is available in eBook and paperback editions.

WORKS CITED

Jones, Stephen Graham. Mapping the Interior. Tor.com: 2017.

“It’s All About Squandered Potential, Not Actual Accomplishments: Stephen Graham Jones’ Mapping the Interior” is copyright © 2020 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the paperback edition, released 2017.

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