Satirical “Meta-Horror”
An Introduction to
Who Made Stevie Crye?
by Jack Slay, Jr.
Who Made Stevie Crye? was not what the science-fiction world or the fans of Michael Bishop were expecting. In a recent email, Michael told me that he had envisioned Who Made Stevie Crye? (1984), his tenth novel and the follow-up to the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time (1982), as “a parody-cum-satire of horror novels.” The horror genre was enormously popular at the time, thanks in large measure to Stephen King’s seemingly unending output, title after title coming to perch atop the bestseller lists. King, in fact, had not long before published Cujo, a novel that Michael reviewed for the Washington Post Book World. So Michael’s failure to write another anthropological SF novel instead, he says, proves that “I never had a very good nose for the main chance and didn’t exactly cash in on the success of No Enemy But Time.”
The “Stevie” at the heart of his unexpected quasi-horror novel is Mary Stevenson Crye, a name with an implicit allusion to Mr. King . . . as well as, Michael confesses, an implicit boast that his satire would “skewer this august person.” Indeed, midway through Who Made Stevie Crye?, Michael unfolds a scene that pokes fun at Cujo’s attacks on the protagonist of that novel. For King’s rabid, possibly even demonic St. Bernard, however, Michael substitutes a lugubrious basset hound, which, during one of the dog’s wobbly assaults on Stevie’s VW microbus, contorts his muzzle “into a sousaphone bell for the bugling of his bafflement and outrage.”
When Michael submitted the finished manuscript to his agent, Howard Morhaim, Morhaim told him that “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Mainstream publishers apparently agreed, and the novel ultimately appeared from Arkham House, tenderly edited by the late Jim Turner. The novel never had an American trade paperback or mass-market edition, but, in 1987, Headline Book Publishing released a trade-paper edition in England. Michael now believes that “such popularity or acclaim as [the novel] eventually garnered owed as much to J. K. Potter’s original photographic illustrations as to its own transgressive text.” Potter’s photographs are indeed haunting, but the novel rescues itself from the remainder table, for it contains writing worthy of our admiration and a story deserving of rediscovery.
Satire, for example, often skimps on characterization. But Michael says, “In all honesty, the characters took me over. I wanted them to be credible human beings, not just types, and I think I succeeded with Stevie, her children Ted and Marella, and maybe even with the African-American fortune-teller Sister Celestial.” All the characters self-disclose as strong, viable types, as tangible as your next-door neighbor—but, of them all, Stevie Crye most emphatically steps off the page and into real life. Indeed, Stevie’s day-to-day woes mirror humanity’s, our own quotidian travails and irritants. As a result, we embrace her as our hero, a character easy to identify with and easier to root for. She is alternately courageous, funny, bitter, and fearful, but, above all else, she is utterly believable. Her struggles as a woman, a mother, and a recent widow fully engage us. She fights to accept her husband’s death, which she sees as a surrender and desertion, and also to exorcise the daily terrors of single-parenthood, writer’s block, and financial anxiety.
When Stevie’s PDE Exceleriter, a top-of-the-line electric typewriter, snaps a cable, events begin to snowball. This is a simple occurrence, a common one in the long-ago ’80s—a bygone era when folks dialed telephones, trundled about in VW microbuses, and wrote on typewriters—but, in Who Made Stevie Crye?, this vexatious event becomes a doorway into a world of subterranean shadows. Through this doorway saunters Seaton Benecke, typewriter repairman, a creepy drop-in from Elsewhere. Seaton strikes Stevie as “having all the passion and tenderheartedness of a zombie in a George Romero flick.” (Michael himself describes the character as “spookily troublesome.”) Under the guises of a good-ol’-boy repairman and a closet fan of her writing, Seaton weasels his way into Stevie’s life, haunting her through the Exceleriter, tormenting her children and her. As icing on this uncanny cake, ’Crets, a white-faced, blood-imbibing capuchin monkey, more often than not accompanies Seaton on his rounds.
Then, of course, the novel gets weird.
*
Another noteworthy attribute of Who Made Stevie Crye? is the complex way that Michael layers the novel with the metafictional, an attribute, Michael says, that “surely derives from my delight in the tricky subversiveness of that kind of storytelling.” “Meta-horror,” Ian Watson, an early collaborator of Michael’s, calls this unusual approach in his essay on the novel in Horror: 100 Best Books (Carroll & Graf, 1988). The Exceleriter assumes sentience, steals and recomposes Stevie’s dreams, channels onto the page her deepest fears. Reality blurs with fancy, fact with nightmare, and our perceptions and expectations hang up between what the typewriter has composed and what Stevie has actually lived. And so the Exceleriter accurately states: “I AM THE FIGMENT OF AN IMAGINATION THAT IMAGINES YOU TO BE A FIGMENT OF MINE. OR VICE VERSA.”
Finally, Who Made Stevie Crye? is a novelist’s novel, one that explores the angst-ridden plight of the writer—the terrors of writer’s block, the fear of literary failure, all with the roles of creator and created inextricably entangled, in ways both disorienting and delightful. The craftiness and sagacity of Michael’s metaphors and images, his control and confidence as writer, combine to make this “parody-cum-satire of horror novels” fun. They lift the novel to another, more sublime level. Even better, the novel concludes with a grand but hoary joke, a revelation that turns everything on its simian ear. But there is rich, inventive storytelling here too, and the fact that Michael claims he will never write another novel remotely similar to Who Made Stevie Crye? makes this tightened Thirtieth Anniversary edition of the book well worth both your time and money.
—July 2012
LaGrange, Georgia
Jack Slay, Jr., is the author of two books, Ian McEwan (Twayne, 1996) and, with Dale Bailey, the suspense novel Sleeping Policemen (Golden Gryphon, 2006). His short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Cemetery Dance, Talebones, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, and in two anthologies, A Cross of Centuries and Passing for Human, edited by Michael Bishop. Slay has taught literature and writing at LaGrange College, Georgia, since 1992 (including an eight-year stint as Dean of Students). He and his wife Lori, an award-winning high-school English teacher, have three sons: Kirk, Justin, and Reed.