Morgue’ onwards. Richard Davenport-Hines argues that there is a distinction between the simian fantasies of nineteenth-century writers like Sheridan LeFanu (whose malevolent spectral monkey in ‘Green Tea’ has resonances of not only subconscious urges but also the threat posed by the Irish poor) and of those in the twentieth century, like Karen Blixen. Blixen’s story ‘The Monkey’ (included in her Seven Gothic Tales) makes the monkey a redemptive figure. In McGrath’s tale, the monkey represents a perpetuated victimhood in which it is the narrator herself who is imprisoned by her history.
Whereas McGrath is able to draw on the long-established tradition of Southern Gothic in ‘Marmilion’, he adopts a distinctive approach to urban Gothic in his three New York tales. The concern with the Gothic aspects of embodiment in evidence in so many of the short stories appears here, too. As its title suggests, ‘Hand of a Wanker’ is a comic excursion into perverse sexuality; in it the Christian obsession with sexuality is rendered darkly comic through a jaunty and ironic narrative. Parodying the Book of Revelations, the ‘beast’ in this context is male sexual desire, represented by the severed hand, an image that echoes popular horror cinema.29 As the title suggests, through its use of British slang, this story offers a comic take on a practice that caused the Victorians a good deal of anxiety and was a taboo subject in all but the coarsest company.30 Characterized by the legendary hairy palm of the compulsive masturbator (in this instance the mark of the beast), the hand appears in a seedy night club in the East Village one late summer afternoon, where it proves itself to be as subversive and disruptive as its counterpart ‘the Black Hand of the Raj’. In the final sentence, an indulgence in the florid writing of popular horror in the manner of H. P. Lovecraft, a reference to the ‘putrid existential miasma that seethed within his guilt-ridden soul’, is stopped short in a bathetic conclusion, as ‘the stranger waved his stump over his head and limped off into the sharp Manhattan dawn’.31
Equally strange but less comic as a tale of Gothic embodiment and the decay of religion is ‘The Angel’. ‘I was very happy with that story,’ McGrath told a recent interviewer:
I was living on the Bowery at one stage and that’s very much how I was experiencing New York at the time, sweating through those hot summers, couldn’t afford to get out of the city, and there were all these curious creatures, men like The Angel – you saw Quentin Crisp every day on the streets.32
Identified by Andrew Hock-Soon Ng (who has written the only piece of sustained criticism on this story) as ‘a narrative of the fin de siècle that is related to the crisis of representing the body’,33 ‘The Angel’ is marked by features that are characteristic of late nineteenth-century decadence. The city is represented as a place of corruption and decay in which the narrator, Bernard Finnegan, walks along a ‘garbage-strewn and urine-pungent sidewalk’ (1). The city as a locus of Gothic possibility is suggested by a ‘rather grisly murder’ where ‘the body was mutilated and drained of all its blood’, which leads the New York Post to suggest that a vampire may be on the loose’ (5). The subject of Bernard’s story, the old man Harry Talboys,34 is one of the ‘curious creatures’ described by McGrath; he bears the markers of a late nineteenth-century dandy, the shabbiness of his clothes failing to disguise ‘the quality and elegance of the cut’ (1). His mouth is made up with lipstick and he habitually wears a ‘fresh white lily’ in his buttonhole, a flower associated with death. He is a subject waiting to be found by a dandified writer, Bernard, whose opening paragraph displays a self-conscious mannered excess:
It was high summer when I met him, high summer in Manhattan, when liquid heat settles on the body of the city like an incubus, and one’s whole activity devolves to a languid commerce of flesh and fluids, the ingestion and excretion of one by the other, and all sane organisms simply estivate. (1)
Bernard’s narrative creates the frame for Harry’s reminiscences as well as for a shorter intertext, in the form of a Gnostic tale that he discovers. In this, Satan, ‘a great god’, persuades a spirit called Arbal-Jesus to project himself into a human body, causing him great agony. Then, subjected to sexual abuse by Satan, his only consolation is the presence of another spirit in the body, that of Death. Along with this intertext, the fin de siècle markers in the contemporary New York setting point to the two dimensions of Gothic that provide the means through which Harry’s story can be understood: the abhuman and the doppelgänger.
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