Review of Curtis M. Lawson's "Couch Surfing through the 12 Chambers of Hell"

I guess I’m becoming familiar with Curtis M. Lawson’s exquisite work because I can trace the origins of this novella, Couch Surfing through the 12 Chambers of Hell, to two short stories the author previously published: “Through Hell For One Kiss,” in his collection Devil’s Night and “Orphan,” in The Envious Nothing. The novella incorporates elements of the two previous stories into an honest and personal narrative about loss, grief, and guilt that is bound to tear at the heartstrings of any reader. 

The main character, Nathan Pharaoh, is a famous musician who is not there for his family when they need him the most. As a result of his neglect his daughter Cloe becomes estranged and kills her mother Dalia and then herself. Nathan is incapacitated by self-hatred and loss. This book is a metaphysical exploration of grief and its stages of anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These emotions blend into each other and can assault the mourner almost at the same time. What Lawson manages to capture accurately and vividly is that the battle against loss, or the struggle to accept loss, takes place mainly at an unconscious level. At the conscious level, depression weighs heavily and reduces the mourner to a zombielike state. Gravity sags all muscles like a constant underground call to surrender to darkness and oblivion, a call that plagues Nathan Pharaoh throughout his journey. The most minor tasks require herculean force. But while the conscious mind is paralyzed, the unconscious self seeks a key to salvation in a journey through mythological dreamscapes. As we learned from Carl Gustav Jung, dreams are mythological battlefields and realms of magic and sacred alchemy. Pharaoh embarks on a journey to find the pieces of himself left in the wake of a personal apocalypse and try to breathe new life into the ashes.

The part I enjoyed most in the story is when Pharaoh enters a pyramid and the walls of the tomb are covered with reliefs depicting stages in his life. When he touches them they replay the scenes in his mind: his first date with Dalia, going on the first tour, and so on. Pharaoh is on the brink of chaos and oblivion and needs to find the key, just like a musician plays the opening keys to a song to get inspiration for ending it or the way a writer might read the opening chapters of a book to figure out how to move on. The reason why I love this scene is because I see the self as a narrative, in a broad sense. Or, to use a metaphor, I think of how we construct our identities as similar to the way a spider spins its web. Now, in a self fractured by loss, the web is mostly destroyed, and he needs to start the process anew building on the strands of silk that weren’t damaged.  

I wasn’t a fan of some aspects of the book, but they didn’t take away from the immersive read. While I’m no expert in mythology, I felt that the symbolism behind the story was a bit cut and dry. The image of the snake as a symbol of chaos, evil or oblivion was overused. The dichotomies had the starkness of Abrahamic religions rather than pagan myths: good vs. evil, dark vs. light, chaos/entropy vs. order, and creation vs. destruction. Ancient mythology usually comes with a mix of these opposites, with deities that incorporate elements of creation and destruction, order and chaos. For example, let’s take one of Nathan’s lamentations: “I was the void in my daughter’s childhood--a ghost, rarely found outside of records and music videos. I was the degradation of something into nothing and now I am nothing given form.”

As paradoxical as it may sound, this passage paints nothingness in an unfavorable light.

(Puts Dissection hoodie on. Turns up Watain’s Lawless Darkness)

In Sumero-Babylonyan mythology, it is creation that is a degradation of nothingness, as goddess Tiamat was in the slumber of uncreation before before lower gods decided to wake her. As a feminine principle, nothingness contains everything in virtual form, blackness is pregnant with everything, and the birth of something is a degradation of the pristine nothingness. Just like sound may be the degradation of a beautiful silence. Or like form may be the degradation of a wordless revelation.

Now, if I remember Jung correctly, the unconscious itself is feminine while the conscious mind is masculine. The conscious mind is rationality and order whereas the unconscious is irrationality and chaos. Nathan Pharaoh’s journey is a quest through the unconscious mind, through chaos, and the solution or the key to his ascension will come from chaos. So, chaos is good, darkness is good, and blackness holds the answers. Not the light of the conscious, ordered rational mind, but the pregnant darkness of the unconscious. The snake will give Nathan knowledge and wisdom. So, to sum up, pagan thinking features a mix of the opposites which Christian thought sets in stark contrast. And, as a reader, I didn’t get the pagan vibe from this text, but it seemed that the narrative flowed from a Christian matrix.

I could wax philosophical for hours about this book, and I’m sure each reader can come up with their own interpretation of this story just like movie lovers have different takes on a David Lynch movie. My point is just this is a work of art that engages the reader both on an emotional and an intellectual level, as all true art should. Go check it out! And check Lawson’s other books while at it!