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"What must I do in the time remaining? Only everything." - Clive Barker, Galilee
IN THE pantheon of things demonic, two insistently sexual creatures thrive: the succubus, which assumes the female form to mate with sleeping men; and the incubus, which exerts the masculine by laying upon, and usually ravishing, its slumbering victims. Ann Arensberg's Incubus (Alfred A. Knopf, hc, $24) explores the malefic male impulse - an obvious progenitor of Count Dracula - with formidable style; but the familiarity of her setting and story, framed as an equally familiar occult investigation, results in a disappointing novel that reads like an overwritten episode of The X-Files.
It's a shame: Arensberg, best known for an elegant and endearing first novel, Sister Wolf ( 1981), brings serious craft and intent - and a leading imprint, Knopf - to horror fiction at a time when mainstream publishing interest in the subject has waned. Read sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Incubus is powerful and, at times, profound; but its plot simply fails to fulfill the promise of its prose.
The book opens uneasily with a preface in which narrator Cora Whitman, the once-skeptical wife of an Episcopal rector, insists that the experiences she will recount are supernatural in origin - thus preempting the novel's essential tension, which concerns the collision of Cora's hard-headed materialism with husband Henry's wishful spiritualism. Henry, who heard the voice of God on the battlefield in the waning days of World War II, longs for another word from on high - some confirmation, or continuation, of that encounter. His faith, tested by the mundane, is no longer enough - and certainly it is not reinforced by Cora, a curiously apathetic bride whose domesticity (cooking, gardening, and the writing of recipe columns) cloaks a deep and divisive anger with a life that seems profoundly rote: "A pastor's job is something like women's work," she tells us. "Once it is done it is almost time to do it over again." The feminist subtext evolves skillfully into supertext with the arrival of a mysterious and invasive "entity," which ends the passivity of their life (and love), awakening Cora and Henry into a world haunted by possibility.
Arensberg's setting - the village of Dry Falls - is...