Michael Griffin’s THE LURE of DEVOURING LIGHT is the short story collection of an exceptional writer, whose evocative, lyrical tales are impossible to forget. Griffin’s work has been described as “quiet horror”, a subgenre of Weird Fiction. Considering that Griffin’s prose is both bold and often graphic, the description may be somewhat misleading.
Nature – seductive, tantalizing, and ultimately unknowable – is frequently the setting of these stories. In “Far From Streets”, city dwellers Dane and Carolyn seek renewal by spending weekends at a cabin Dane built by hand. Sinister omens abound – from the bird that beats itself to death trying to escape the newly finished cabin to the starving young man who seems to be keeping watch on them. In the middle of this daunting landscape, Dane and Carolyn become lost in more ways than one. As Griffin writes of the beleagered Dane, “Nothing had prepared him for the possibility of meanings deeper than office toil, with short breaks for television.”
In “Dreaming Awake In the Tree of the World”, the enigmatic Nomia appears to be a tree-dwelling nature sprite, a kinswoman perhaps to Rima in GREEN MANSIONS. She has rescued the ill-fated Tomas and nursed him back to health high in the treetops. But in Griffin’s work, reality is rarely what it seems. Is Tomas safe in the heart of lush, wild nature or is he facing something altogether different and more deadly?
In “The Accident of Survival”, a terrifying near-miss on the highway leaves two people badly shaken. As they continue to their destination, however, it becomes increasingly unclear who’s survived and who perhaps hasn’t, and how people “shaken loose from life” can struggle to reclaim reality.
Griffin’s prose sings, but his formidable power resides in his ability to make us doubt our own senses, his ability to explore the deeply unstable and shapeshifting nature of what we blithely consider ‘reality’.