Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
More than any other horror writer, Dennis Etchison is the best at the heightened mundane. A versatile writer whose works span crime, science fiction, fantasy, and horror, Etchison’s best stories (my personal favorites include “The Late Shift” and “The Dog Park,” among others) take a relatively low-key situation featuring average people and then inject an element of the surreal or supernatural—for instance, low-income zombies working for a convenience store chain, or a man’s nested dreams of death helping him process an unusual event. The juxtaposition creates an unusual liminal space, one where the intrusion of the unnatural (as Hartwell and Lovecraft claimed horror was) barely pierces into the natural, a world much like ours but with some unnerving differences unique to Etchison’s horror fiction. “You Can Go Now” applies this approach in the psychological vein, painting an unnerving psychological portrait as Etchison peels away the layers of his unnamed protagonist’s dreams and memory to get to the rotten core.
An unnamed protagonist dies on the way to the airport, only to wake up on a plane. He then dies on the plane during a midair explosion, only to wake up on a boat. The further he travels, the more questions start to arise: What is the mysterious long envelope he carries with him? Why does he keep dying over and over again? Why does he seem so desperate to get away? And most of all, why is it that every time, before he dies, he seems to hear the words “you can go now?”
Unfortunately, to discuss this one, we also have to rip the central mystery to shreds. There are no supernatural elements in “You Can Go Now,” or at least no obvious ones. Instead, Etchison uses his sense of heightened mundanity to slowly crank up the surreal as the story’s main character navigates a series of nested dreams, eventually ending with the revelation that he killed his wife Shelley during a fight, and this was all his attempt to process his guilt over the act and move on. The “You can go now” refrain is the title of a poem one of them wrote to the other, and also (more horrifyingly) his brain telling him that he’s ready to move on from his own monstrous act. The meaning of “you can go now” changes with each layer of the dream, the context going from death to moving on from the past, to finally going “it’s okay, you can leave now that she’s dead.” The individual dreams don’t get unnatural, but it’s clear there’s more to them, whether it’s the impressionistic qualities of the river voyage (where no legible words appear, cleverly highlighting the cliché that you can’t read in a dream) or the fragmented way the opening layer (where the protagonist, mirroring the climax, rushes to the airport) proceeds quickly until the car crash.
“Liminal” is a word with many meanings in horror these days, everything from “a creepy empty hallway where a presence waits in the full quiet” to “someplace where you find yourself caught between dream and waking.” “You Can Go Now” is closer to the latter sense of liminality, mostly mundane situations that then become more and more heightened the deeper the dreamer gets into the dream. To Etchison’s credit, he handles this liminality with deftness, with the fragmented car journey leading to the unnerving plane explosion where the dreamer sees his own doppelganger, leading to the eerily pleasant boat trip. The way the scenes are arranged, each one seems gentler and less distressing, finally leading to the main character waking up to find the horrors he left behind in the last section of the piece. It’s ambiguous whether it’s the dreamer attempting to escape into more pleasant dreamscapes each time, or whether it’s meant to lull him and relax him so he can finally confront the murder scene revealed at the end of the story, but there’s a clear progression in the transitions as he slips deeper and deeper through his sleep. The menace is entirely in the context—why him, why these dreams specifically, and why the voice? As the dreams become more pleasant and the concept of death more abstract, that menace only lingers, a subtle room tone in the background of the dreams, waiting to strike.
That strike is the final reveal—the protagonist just experienced a series of nested dreams that eventually deposited him in the real world next to the body of the wife he accidentally killed during a fight, still on the phone with the airline he took a call from at the beginning of the story. He disassociated while unconscious and his brain was merely attempting to process the trauma and the guilt. And this is what makes that haunting refrain, the title of the story and its last line, so utterly terrifying. It’s not someone attempting to move on, or someone refusing to accept their death, or something melancholic but ultimately positive, it’s his brain justifying the guilt by sending him hurtling through violent catastrophe and then calming him down with pleasant memories. By the time he wakes up, he’s already been through the worst of it, and the trauma is partially assuaged.
Guilt isn’t an emotion people deal with particularly well. It hurts to know that we’ve hurt someone, that we’ve done something wrong, that something has, through either our witting or unwitting actions, made a situation worse. It’s the job of our subconscious to help mitigate those feelings, to help make things easier to deal with. Guilt in horror is usually unresolved, a psychological pressure that grinds and gnaws at a person, another force to act on them. Here, the horror comes from that pressure being relieved, the guilt resolved. The murderer, through his dreams of peaceful rivers and violent car crashes, absolves himself. He still won’t take responsibility—he vehemently claims he “didn’t mean to”—but it’s clear he’s moved on from the initial shock and horror of the act. His brain has given him the out he needs, and as the poem he’s been carrying around through every single dream tells him, “You can go now.” It’s unnerving that such a simple line carries a complete discarding of humanity, but that’s sort of the point—everything is working exactly as intended to carry the dreamer to a monstrous conclusion.
It’s that acceptance of inhumanity, the way the dreamer shrugs off his wife’s death, that ties the heightened mundane, the dreams, and that mysterious long envelope all together. In a twisted way, he’s accepting a death (maybe even two, depending on if you count the death of his sense of empathy and humanity), it’s just not his own. At the end of all this complexity is someone accepting his monsterhood, because he was able to offload his guilt through his traumatic nested dreams. Etchison’s twisted little character study ends with things that are all normally psychologically positive, but add up to something horrifying.
Because some of us need the negative to remind us what it means to be human.
And now to turn it over to you: Does the inception model work? Is there still hope for the narrator’s humanity? Do you share poems with your loved ones? And what was your first brush with Etchison’s work?
And please join us next week for New Mexico’s favorite houseguest D.H. Lawrence and “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”
