The Brooklyn Rail

We are introduced to the world of the book with a disclaimer. “Free $2000 if you should die from fright while reading A Place Beyond Shame.” This offer nods to William Castle, legendary B-movie director and king of the promotional gimmick, the man who drew historic crowds to his cheaply made horror movies by promising the risk of death from fear, offering 1,000 dollar life insurance policies to anyone who died of shock during his screenings, having nurses and ambulances parked outside the theater to take away those viewers who would surely be seized by fright. William Castle, every horror-head’s hero.

Ed Steck’s book about his relationship with his father opens with a quote from Castle himself. “We all have a common interest: bigger and more horrible monsters—and I’m just the monster to bring them to you.” The monsters in this book, beginning with the author and his father, referred to as Ghoul and Son of Ghoul, grow ever bigger and ever more horrible as they pass between the world of the real and the horror-inflected imaginary.

In the middle section of this book, “Westmoreland County Double Feature,” the two poems printed side-by-side columns, “When The Day Won’t Start” and its sequel “When The Day Won’t Start II,” meander freely between the real and cinematic worlds by circling a central traumatic experience, distilled further into the singular image of an embalming-fluid dipped cigarette smoked by Ghoul, the author’s father. The formaldehyde, a chemical used to preserve dead bodies, ingested in a living human body feels like the stuff of horror movies, the creation of the living dead, but is also a very real part of the landscape of horrors plaguing rural America, where death will find you, “rampantly, whether it was from the bludgeoning opioid crisis, suicide, or a series of disappearances, when the horrors of real death follow you home, if you survived, only to be thrashed by a recession-plagued, five-dollar heroin landscape of hellish demise. A place where heroin is cheaper than beer.”

The Castle quote operates in another way, too. The common interest of Ghoul and Son of Ghoul, the common interest and bonding experience between father and son in this narrative, is quite literally bigger and more horrible monsters. That’s what they do together. They watch horror movies, every horror movie they can get their hands on. They dub them from TV onto VHS, they collect memorabilia, they go into the world of the monsters, they go toward the contained and exaggerated terror, gore, blood, and death of the movies, like many of us, for the thrill of the approach. There is a kind of communion found there for many of us who can’t get enough of the approach. It makes such beautiful sense, Steck’s placement of autobiographical horror into the comfort, the home-feeling that the narrator seems to find in horror movies.

Steck writes, “I grew up in a town down a hill, train tracks, a bridge and river, more tracks over from Monroeville Mall, the primary filming location for Dawn of the Dead (1978).” He goes on to describe the fear he felt in certain parts of that mall, where his friend Beth worked, near the slatted staircase “where in the film, the undead splashed and grasped.” I loved this moment, and others like it, which explore the glitches in his experience of the rural Pennsylvanian landscape, where several of the films Steck catalogues in the book, B-movies with low budgets, were filmed. In the prologue, Steck writes, “To avoid fainting, keep repeating: it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie…” But what happens when you are in the very cemetery you’ve seen the living dead slump across on a VHS tape? It becomes a little more than a movie. It bleeds into the real. In the acknowledgments, we find a sentiment that mirrors the initial disclaimer. “It’s only a book, it’s only a book, it’s only a book….” Well, no, of course, it’s not. It never is.