Interview for The Pulp

This interview was originally published by The Pulp. 

Our generation loves gore. Horror and the horrific. Sordid tales and psychological mindfucks. We address our need for the weird and spooky through video games, movies, and novels. The latter has been around for the longest, but there are writers putting a new spin on the traditional—taking the basics from Stephen King and making them relate more to our generation, how we respond to society, and how our worldview is warped by the way in which we live.

Axl Barnes, a local author and philosopher, addresses all of these issues from the perspective of rebellious teenage youths in his upcoming novel, Odin Rising. Author of the novella Ich Will, Barnes incorporates his impressive background with philosophy into fiction that attempts to deal with the oppression of social systems, youthful narcissism, existentialism, psychological horror, and more. Although difficult to categorize, Barnes’ writing tends to build on his own experiences as a teenager in Romania and the meaning of ethics, life, and death to those too young to fully understand.

We caught up with Barnes to ask him a few questions about his upcoming novel, his influences, and the difficulties of writing outside of one particular genre.

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What’s your background? How did you get into writing fiction?

I’m a philosophy and fiction lover. I had my first attempts at writing fiction when in high-school in the late 90s. Afterwards, I only wrote sporadically while studying for my undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy. Once I got my Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2011 from the University of Alberta, I started focusing exclusively on writing fiction and finally tackling some projects which have been shelved for too long. In 2012, I published a novella, Ich Will, which is about a poor, misanthropic philosophy student who’s unable to pay for his undergraduate degree and whose hatred for society takes an unexpected, bloody turn. Since then, I’ve been working on my first full-length novel, Odin Rising.

What will Odin Rising be about?

It’s about a group of teenage metal-heads in a small Romanian town in the mid 90s. Alex and Tudor, the group’s leaders, egg each other on to progressively more extreme, anti-social actions, from breaking windows and cutting car tires to desecrating graves and sacrificing animals to Satan. Their gruesome competition leads to killing an innocent older man, who just happened to challenge them at the wrong place at the wrong time. The death prompts a conflict between Alex and Tudor, a conflict between their views of what is extreme and the purpose of violence. While Alex is a Neo-Nazi who idolizes Hitler and the Aryan race, Tudor is a self-proclaimed nihilist who hates all races equally and only loves his knife, death-metal, and horror movies. Despite their differences, both youngsters think that they are possessed by Odin, the Norse god of storm and battle frenzy, and who’s awakening in Europe after centuries of slumber. Which one of two will prove himself a hero and join Odin in Valhalla?

When do you aim to have the book finished? 

By the end of the year. I hope to publish it sometime next year.

What were your influences in writing this book?

The book is rooted in personal experience and focused on two real-life events, both centered on the river that passes through my hometown. During summer in high school, my grandmother had asked me to take away a cat and drop it into someone’s back yard, as far as possible from her house. She handed me the cat in a sack, stating it was lazy and wouldn’t catch mice. I was with a few friends on that day and, youthful victims of boredom, we decided to take the cat to the nearby river and drown it. I’ll spare the sordid details, but suffice it to say that it’s true that cats have nine lives.

The second event occurred on another empty summer day: two friends, Vali and Lucian, and I got drunk and broke the windows of an abandoned service station. Then we went by the side of the river to drink some more and smoke cigarettes (that was the coolest thing, as we didn’t know of weed or other drugs). An older guy chased us down on his bike to lecture us, threatening to tell Vali’s dad about his vandalism. I remember asking Lucian why we couldn’t just drown the stranger into the river just like we had done with the cat? Lucian didn’t go for it, but what if he had? Or what if I had been drunk enough to just do it myself?

An additional impetus toward writing the book came from reading Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise Of The Satanic Metal Underground, a journalistic account of the Norwegian 90s rash of crimes connected with the black-metal scene. Varg Vikernes, a.k.a. Count Grishnackh, a central figure, was involved in many church-burnings as well as the murder of another leader of the movement. In his interviews, Varg argues fervently that his arson wasn’t part of a Satanic ritual, but part of reviving local Nordic pagan religion, and worshiping warrior gods like Odin and Thor, instead of the Jewish Jehovah. In my story, Alex and Tudor are aware and inspired by the events in Norway. Hence also the name of the book, Odin Rising.

What other fiction would you compare Odin Rising to and why?

Mainly Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Meursault, the main character of the novel, is a misfit who commits an apparently absurd crime. The deed puts him in jail, where he has a chance to reflect on the insurmountable gap between him and the rest of society, and to make explicit the meaning of his rebellion.

The first four chapters of Odin Rising are written in a realist, minimalist style, but in the last two chapters the boundary between reality and mythical dreams becomes blurred. In this respect, I was inspired by classic authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, as well as contemporaries like Clive Barker.

My fiction is also very much indebted to popular horror writers like Stephen King, Richard Laymon, and Brian Keene.

Are there any controversial themes in the book? If so, how and why did you approach them? 

Teenage rebellion is the main theme of the book. It’s such a widespread phenomenon, ranging from petty vandalism to more serious crimes like school shootings, arson, and suicide. This novel is an attempt to uncover the source of this violence. Why do teenagers think that the adult world is lame and disgusting? Why do they want to mock or destroy it? I tried to see things from their perspective, which also used to be my own perspective, and make explicit their brutal judgment of the adult world.

One thing about the teenage psyche that struck me was the fact that the prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for decision-making, practical deliberation, and planning, isn’t fully formed. So, while their intelligence, memory, creativity, and other brain functions are normal, teens don’t care about the future. For an adolescent, everything is here and now—there’s no tomorrow, no career, no insurance of this and that, no pension plans, no happily ever after. And that’s partly why teens are so emotional and restless, because for them everything is at stake all the time. But this psychological condition allows them a deep insight into the nature of the world around them and the nature of society. I think expressing that insight has both artistic and philosophical value.

If you had to describe Odin Rising in an elevator pitch of 10 words or less, what would you say? 

It’s an artistic and philosophical exploration of teenage rebellion.

What difficulties have you faced in writing and publishing Ich Will and in the upcoming publication of Odin Rising?

Marketing is the main challenge, especially since my fiction doesn’t fit a specific genre. Both Ich Will and Odin Rising are close to psychological horror, in the sense that the horror is triggered by an abnormality of the main characters’ psychology. However, this categorization misses something essential: my characters end up doing horrible things because they’re in the grips of some philosophical ideas. And those ideas are critically discussed in the context of those stories. So, in a sense, my writing appeals to both readers who enjoy Socratic dialogues, but also to those who like graphic horror and violence. If I were forced to put a label on it, I’d call this genre philosophical horror or existentialist horror. Paradigmatic examples of this are Clive Barker’s chilling short story “Dread,” and its movie adaptation, as well as Scott Bakker’s horrific thriller Neuropath. Still, I hope that a consistent marketing effort through social media and websites like Goodreads will help my fiction reach the right audience.

Odin Rising may still be in progress, but do you have any plans for future work? 

I have developed ideas for two more novels. The first one has the working title This Town Must Burn! and features Canadian analogs of Tudor and Alex from Odin Rising. The action is set in a small Western Canadian town in the early 2000s. The youngsters are now in their early twenties and face the overwhelming pressures of adult life. Will they adapt and become domesticated, or will they continue to rebel and burn everything to the ground?

The second novel has the tentative title Defective, and it’s my take on zombies. Jack, the main character, is a young, obese warehouse worker who starts rotting alive: his mind stays fully functional while his body starts decomposing. The story is an account of Jack’s actions, decisions, and psychology in his transition from life to bodily death. While still philosophical, this book will fit well into the genre of body horror.

Both these projected novels will feature one theme that I’ve approached in Ich Will: alienated labour in capitalism. One of the main weapons capitalist society uses to break down and dehumanize its members is meaningless work, or wage slavery. So, in the spirit of George A. Romero’s zombie movies, this will be horror with a political edge.

Black Metal and Lucian Blaga (the pregnant darkness)

I love black metal to the point of obsession. I've been under its spell for a few years now. I dig both the early pioneers of the genre, like Burzum, Mayhem, Dark Throne, Emperor, and Immortal, and later explorers like Behemoth, Belphegor, Gorgoroth, Watain, Marduk, Negura Bunget, Shining and Inquisition. Initially, the music was characterized by low production, cold, harsh, repetitive riffs, shrieked inhuman sounding vocals, relentless, aggressive drumming, and more melodic, sublime instrumental parts that seemed to form gradually from the primordial chaos of the more aggressive parts. After the late '80s and early '90s there was an explosion of black metal sub-genres: Satanic Black Metal, Ambient/Pagan Black Metal, Depressive/Suicidal Black Metal and others. Each sub-genre came with its own musical style but they all evolved from the stylistic matrix of early black metal.

Gorgoroth 

Black metal also comes with its own imagery and lyrical content. It's about nature, deep forests, majestic snow-peaked mountains, fog and darkness, ancient mythology and Paganism, the Dark Ages, Satanism and occultism, loneliness and despair, self-destruction and suicide. On album covers and during live performances musicians wear corpse-paint, black outfits, and spikes on their arms and legs. They do their best to look and sound as grim and sinister as possible and sometimes, under the spell of their music, they end up cutting themselves or members of the audience, drinking their own blood and letting it drip on their chins. (Make no mistake, this is different than a GWAR concert, the blood isn't fake.) The atmosphere of the shows is that of a ritual where evil forces are being summoned, and possess the musicians. Fire-breathing, inverted, burning crosses and heads of sheep or pigs impaled on spikes came to define black-metal shows.

Reflecting on my obsession with black metal, I realized that one of the things that attracted me to it was its esoteric, obscure, mystery-generating power. Black metal is a very suggestive style, it suggests what is hidden from view, it's a burning arrow shot into darkness, a light that makes the darkness even more solid and threatening. Hence the repeated images of woods, and sharp mountain peaks, deep, forgotten lakes and caves. When you go up a trail in a forested mountain, all around you is hidden, even in daylight. By contrast, walking down a city sidewalk, everything is open to view. Deep caves and lakes are also archetypal representations of the unknown and terrifying.

The esoteric character of black metal comes in sharp focus when we compare black metal to death metal. Most death metal is about rape and torture, serial killers, and flesh-eating zombies. But this music is all in the light, out in the open, and that makes it less dangerous, less insidious. And it has very limited expressive power. I mean, you can kidnap a girl, drag her in your basement, rape and strangle her, stab her body brutally, eat her flesh and then vomit it and then rape the mangled corpse again and again and again till you feel nauseous. But this is a scene that everyone can see in the smallest details. There are no shadows in death metal. In other words, while death metal is the sound of torture, brutality and morbidity, black metal is a cold, deep vibration which hypnotizes your very soul and takes it to the brink of madness. Only the grimness of black metal can darken your spirit. By contrast, the relentless violence of death metal can only infect and decompose your flesh.

Thinking of this mystery-generating power of black metal reminded me of Romanian philosopher and poet Lucian Blaga. The concept of mystery is at the heart of Blaga's philosophical system. Understanding how this notion relates in his system to human existence, cultural style and the hidden powers of the unconscious can throw some light on black metal, and into what glues together its various sub-genres. Conversely, black metal can be a great place to start toward grasping Blaga's philosophy. I'm not going to follow all these connections in this post, but rather clear some paths for future explorations.  

According to Blaga, man is essentially a seeker of knowledge and revelation regarding the universe and his place in it. But, on his view, the unknown is a mystery that could never be fully revealed.

Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga 
(1895-1961)

"Blaga's world was saturated with mysteries of all kinds [...]. For him mystery was not the completely unknowable but an obscurity not yet adequately illuminated. It was full of meaning precisely because it concealed so much, and this overpowering incitement to investigation led Blaga to the depths of the human psyche and the furthest limits of human reason.

Man's vocation could be none other than to reveal mystery and that, in so doing, he became a creator of culture.

Blaga was intrigued by how man approached the unknowable, that is, by what mechanisms he created culture, and thus he was led to investigate cultural style. By the term style he didn't mean the outward form of a work of art or literature, but rather its manner of being. It was style that imbued works of art and literature and even entire ethnic communities and historical periods with their unique character; it was style that revealed the hidden side of human nature and thus became the principal means of objectifying human spirituality; and it was style that caused creativity to differ from individual to individual, people to people, and period to period.

Beside mystery, the unconscious was an indispensable component of Blaga's theory of style. Indeed, he located the source of style in the unconscious, and, thus, his theory of style and his entire philosophy of culture were based on the presupposition that creative acts such as the structuring of a work of art, a philosophical theory, or a scientific hypothesis were directed by powers beyond the control of the conscious. As he put it, style was the "supreme yoke" which held an author, a current, or an entire culture in bondage and from which none could escape. Although he didn't question the important contribution that the conscious made to the external elaboration of style, he denied that man's fundamental way of being, his "inner style," could be substantially altered by his own will.

Blaga argued, the unconscious was a psychic reality possessing it own "sovereign" functions and an internal order and equilibrium of unlimited creative virtues. He admired Jung especially for having enriched the doctrine of the unconscious through his theory of psychic archetypes, which Blaga adapted for his own conception of the unconscious categories, and through his theory of the collective unconscious, which helped Blaga account for the continuity of cultural style throughout the centuries.

The categories of the unconscious are determinants of style, and, grouped together, they formed a general pattern, or "stylistic matrix," which imposed itself on every culture and endowed it with individuality.

Blaga was fascinated not only with the theoretical aspects of style, but eagerly undertook to apply his ideas to Romanian culture, explaining its uniqueness by using the categories of the unconscious stylistic matrix. He concentrated on the rural world, where he thought the main constituent elements of Romanian spirituality lay. He conceived of the Romanian village as the locale of the organic, pre-eminently human mode of existence, the place of the generating sources of the native culture were strongest and purest. In fact, when he spoke of "culture" he meant the creative life of the village, and it was through this culture, "our eternity revealed in time,"  that the Romanians participated in the great adventure of cosmic creation. He contrasted this culture, a product of the "rural soul," with "civilization," whose embodiment was the city, the mechanized, bourgeois world, whose collapse seemed to him close at hand. For him, the great urban center of the twentieth century was the locale of the "non-creative" preoccupations such as the accumulation of positive knowledge and the formulation of rationalistic conceptions; it was the place where man lost his "cosmic sentiment" and his attachment to the specifically human, organic mode of existence. But the village was for him always the preeminent zone of mythical thought, which assimilated concrete appearances and enabled man to enter into a creative relationship with existence." (Keith Hitchins' Introduction to the English Translation of Blaga's play Zalmoxis, Obscure Pagan)

Armed with these basic concepts of Blaga's philosophy we can now take a closer look at black metal's sub-genres and see that what ties all of them together is their power to reveal mystery. During the wave of media craze in Norway following the church burnings and other criminal activities related to the black metal milieu in the early '90s, the members of the movement were called Satanists. This label had a good shock value and increased newspaper sales and TV ratings. Later on, Varg Vikernes, the creative force behind Burzum, went to great lengths in arguing that none of the people in their movement were actual Satanists, but rather anti-Christians and seekers of the lost, forgotten spirit of Norse mythology and ancient Nordic customs and traditions (check interview here). But, leaving aside the politics surrounding this issue, both the Christian image of Satan as God's Accuser and Opposer AND the revival of the pagan Nordic Gods are both creations meant to reveal mystery. So, in spite of Varg's clarification, there has been an inflation of outstanding Satanic Black Metal bands like the pioneers Mayhem and Beherit, and later acts like Watain, Belphegor, Behemoth and Inquisition, to name just a few. Mayhem's second album is called  De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. The name speaks for itself, reinforcing my point.

So, Satan is a romantic figure who rebels against God and forges his own path. It's a symbol of the individual's struggle to challenge the order imposed on him, free himself and embark on a quest toward knowledge and self-improvement. Lucifer is the bringer of light. Thus, the figure of Satan naturally lends itself to black metal. Dagon from Inquisition makes this point vivid in the interview below. 

Similarly, the destruction of Christianity and revival of ancient pagan deities is also an instance of man as a mystery creator. Eradicating Christianity reveals a mystery, a lost, forgotten world of runes and ancient artifacts. Something we should piece together from bits and pieces that still survive today. It's also an inner journey, a spiritual quest of a pre-Christian mode of being, a time when man was more closely attuned to the rhythms of the cosmos. This is why Blaga says that the village is the preeminent zone of mythical thought.

This conclusion of Blaga's philosophy has been followed by critically-acclaimed Romanian ambient/folk black metal band Negura Bunget. In one of his interviews, Negru, drummer and founder of the band, describes pre-Christian rituals and traditions which still survive in the countryside. One of these is Sînzienele. "On Sînziene people put fairies at their doors and windows as a means of protection against evil fairies and spirits. The magical ritual is based on a symbolic association of the sun with the flowers, the Fairies and the garland wreathed of those flowers. The Fairies embody some of the characteristic features of plants. Another type of ritual consisted of a torch lighting symbolizing the invincibility of the sun during the longest day of the year. Torches used to be lighted on the hills surrounding the villages the night before the celebration and afterward spun in the air and thrusted in the middle of the orchards and cornfields." Below is an awesome video by Negura Bunget. 

Regarding the importance of the countryside as an inspiration for Negura Bunget's music, Negru adds: "There are still original traditions being kept around the country, but they are disappearing slowly. Fortunately, Romania has still parts of the country which are not connected with the modern world...no roads, electricity of phones...so people living in those areas still keep traditions and practices in their original forms."

Finally, just like Satanic and Pagan Black Metal, Depressive/Suicidal Black Metal is also a revelation of mystery. Depressive Black Metal focuses on self-destruction as a way of attaining higher knowledge. Revelation or shining, as  Niklas Kvarforth from Shining puts it. In this context, the normal functioning of our cognitive and physical systems are a veil which hides reality as it is in itself. So, the process of self-destruction, through drugs or other excesses is nothing but a deliberate attempt to look beyond that veil. The idea of mortifying one's body to attain the absolute truth is not new and has been put in practice by mystics of various religions since the dawn of time. But, as Blaga claims, the unknown is a mystery that could never be FULLY revealed. One way of understanding this is by reminding ourselves that reality always reveals itself to a conscious subject in a form that fits that subject's mind. So a mind monitoring its own destruction is still a mind, a subject, which perceives reality as it appears to him, not as it is in itself. Thus, no matter whether we perceive the world with our physical eyes or with our inner, psychic third eye, the world will be framed by darkness, never fully present, always partially hidden.

I finish with a note on black metal symbolism. The color black is associated with Saturn, the Roman god of generation, dissolution, plenty, agriculture, periodic renewal and liberation. Black is the color of the earth and of the night. Always on a quest, restless creators lit torches and throw them into the blackness. Darkness is thus the place of origin, of birth and rebirth. It's always pregnant with new terrifying and sublime sights, with magical, dreamy landscapes. As Nietzsche said, "When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." And the music that accompanies that deep, hypnotic gaze is black metal.

What's it like to rot alive?

I'm fascinated by the concept of rotting alive, of maintaining consciousness while your body slowly decomposes. This is why, as soon as I read the plot of the movie "Thanatomorphose" (2012), at a nearby struggling Movie Studio, I knew I had to watch it. Then, when I googled it, I found out about a more recent movie, "Contracted" (2013), based on the same idea. "Contracted" is the better movie, but "Thanatomorphose" is more philosophically ambitious. 

We figuratively say that someone is already dead when they are divorced from their own lives, trapped in a mindless routine, and they don't have the inner strength to make any meaningful changes. Their alienation is an absolute fact, their minds cannot spin any more narratives about themselves, their center of narrative gravity becoming a point of vague, constant anxiety.  

We say that these people are overwhelmed by life, pounded into submission by the external world, raped and strangled, stripped even of the luxury of suicide. 

Exploring this metaphor artistically implies taking some liberties with regards to what is scientifically possible. Obviously, from a materialist point of view, the mind will have to disappear once the body dies and the structure of the brain crumbles. So the artist, for the sake of his creation, should have to make use of the dualistic principle that the mind and soul are separate from the body. However, depicting the process of putrefaction as realistically as possible adds to the vividness of the artistic product. 

I don't remember the main character in "Thanatomorphose" having a name, so I'm just going to call her Rose, after the name of the actress. Samantha is the main protagonist in "Contracted". Both women go through an existential crisis. Rose is affected by a sense of malaise. She no longer finds pleasure in her sex life, in her relationships, or her artistic work (she's a sculptor). Her body's decomposition is triggered by a persistent, deep-seated sense of alienation and unhappiness. Samantha's sickness has a more precise cause. Although a committed lesbian, she isn't happy with her female partner, Nikki, and ends up having unprotected sex with a guy at a party, thus contracting a venereal disease. Ooopsy! The guy is a necropheliac, so —a fitting but unscientific consequence — the disease Samantha contracts is decaying of the body while the mind stays awake and witnesses the spread of the gangrene. Ooops again!!

Rose and Samantha start by feeling cold and somewhat stiff. Green and brown blotches appear on their bodies for unknown reasons. Then they start pissing and shitting blood and their nails fall off. An especially effective addition to this list of symptoms is Samantha's eyes turning red and then one of them turning milky white. Just like the cum which infested her body, right there on her face, impossible to ignore, the sight of her morbid weakness.  

When we're not strong, all of us, male or female, run the risk of becoming mobile cum-dumpsters, swallowing the salty, alien will of those around us, our bosses, our friends, our families, our gossipy neighbors and co-workers. We end up squinting at the world through a viscous curtain of fermented semen. And that seed's bloom is filth and decay. 

Both Rose and Samantha first react by trying to hide the symptoms of their putrefaction from themselves and from others. Rose keeps applying make-up, although her face is covered with dark spots and her teeth are falling out. Samantha starts wearing sunglasses and a tuque to cover her bold spots. 

At the same time, the gods Eros and Thanatos show up to meet the two rotting victims. The women are overwhelmed by a sex drive coupled with homicidal tendencies. They both end up violently murdering their partners, Nikki and Rose's abusive boyfriend. In an especially disturbing scene, a cadaveric Rose is playing with her worm-infested clit while fantasizing about stabbing her boyfriend repeatedly. Also, Samantha, although in a rough shape, manages to seduce a male friend of hers. When he penetrates her, he moans with pleasure that she's so "wet", but when she pulls out he realizes her pussy was crawling with worms which now want to burrow into his penis. The guy runs into the bathroom screaming. 

While Samantha slowly turns into a zombie and goes after her annoying mother, Rose maintains her lucidity till the last moments, when she's reduced to a bag of bones and there's no muscles left to articulate her screams. This is why I think "Thanatomorphose" is the more original, philosophically challenging movie. Rose doesn't turn into a zombie, but holds onto her identity in an extreme situation, and this contributes to the emotional punch of the movie. By contrast, witnessing Samantha turn into a zombie makes the viewer not care about her as much. 

Both movies are very graphic and hard to watch. But they both miss an important phase of the putrefaction process: bloating. A few days after death, "the gas produced by the proliferation of bacteria exerts more and more pressure on the body's outer wall, causing a dramatic ballooning effect that nearly doubles the corpse's volume. Of course, the abdomen is particularly infected given the large quantity of bacteria there, but other regions are also affected, notably the head: the eyeballs are pushed out of their orbits, the lips swell and the tongue hangs out." (Death: The Scientific Facts to Help Us Understand It Better, by Richard Beliveau and Denis Gingras) Adding this aspect to the movies would have made them even more graphic, gross, and gut-churning. That is, it would have made the films better and more realistic. 

Picture from www.shutterstock.com

The two films also miss another crucial point. The greatest fear triggered by the realization that one is rotting alive is not that one is dying, but that one is already dead. For some reason, — assuming the dualism between mind/soul and body — the body didn't catapult the soul out to the heavens at the moment of biological death, but kept it caged inside its ruined fortress. The thinking subject is still there, brooding, observing, expecting, fearing, trying to scream for help. Neither of the two movies managed to capture this horror of being forever paralyzed inside the dome of one's own skull. Will the soul facing an empty eternity try to escape inside its memories or its dreams? How long before it will surrender to insanity? How hard will it have to prey for the blessing of nonexistence?

Stephen King's "Dr. Sleep", much ado about nothing

I'm happy to be one of the millions of Stephen King fans, one of his Constant Readers. I had looked forward to reading Dr. Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, but I found the novel disappointing. Don't get me wrong, I totally enjoyed reading it, it was just not one of my favorites. Even worse. I mean The Dead Zone wasn't one of my favorites either, but it was an awesome book. The same with 11/22/63. But Dr. Sleep is nowhere near The Dead Zone or 11/22/63. 

Dr. Sleep reads like a collage of previous Stephen King novels. It reminded me how much I loved the Stand, and Dreamcatcher, and Insomnia. But when you peel off the stuff King borrows from his earlier works, there's not much left for Dr. Sleep to be, except a small puff of steam dissipating in darkness.

Let's just say that Dr. Sleep is much better than a Dean Koontz novel, and not as boring as Bag of Bones.

But it's not a good Stephen King novel. 

Dr. Sleep is about Dan Torrance. The kid from The Shining is now a grown man fighting alcoholism and a bad temper. While he tries to stay sober, he decides to redeem his sins by using his shining in a positive way. That is, working in a hospice, he helps sick people die peacefully. After being coached by Dan, a.k.a. Dr. Sleep, old people manage to give their last breath — "the gasp" — and there is a red steam rising out of their mouths, nose and eyes. The mist hovers around their body and then fades mysteriously. 

Now, Dan gets in touch with another prodigy who has the shining, Abra Stone. Her paranormal powers are even greater than Dan's. But that's what makes her a perfect prey for a group of psychic vampires called the True Knot. These vampires don't look like Dracula, no fangs or capes, but they appear as boring RV people traveling around. Their leader, Rose the Hat, deposits their victims' steam or psychic gas in canisters she keeps hidden in her Earth Cruiser. She feeds her crew from time to time, when they get hungry and there's a shortage of "steamheads". Now, their supply is running low and they go after Abra, "the mother of all steamheads". The girl's shining, especially if extracted by severe torture, will keep them going for a few hundred years at least. 

Predictably, Dan joins forces with Abra and defeats The True Knot forever and ever. 

Two aspects of the novel stand out as original: the characterization of the True Knot, and the psychic wars between Abra and Dan on the one hand, and the circle of the True Knot, on the other. King moves away from the image of evil beings roaming the earth under the guise of a traveling carnival; an idea going back at least to Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. King keeps the idea that satanic groups are nomadic, but instead of equating them to the roaring Hell's Angels, he portrays them as the Mild Angels, the placid RV people. They get away with their crimes because they blend perfectly in the environment, nobody pays attention to them: 

"You hardly see them, right? Why would you? They’re just the RV People, elderly retirees and a few younger compatriots living their rootless lives on the turnpikes and blue highways, staying at campgrounds where they sit around in their Walmart lawnchairs and cook on their hibachis while they talk about investments and fishing tournaments and hotpot recipes and God knows what. They’re the ones who always stop at fleamarkets and yardsales, parking their damn dinosaurs nose-to-tail half on the shoulder and half on the road, so you have to slow to a crawl in order to creep by. They are the opposite of the motorcycle clubs you sometimes see on those same turnpikes and blue highways; the Mild Angels instead of the wild ones."

The only difference between this group of vampires and the normal RV people is that vampires don't have dogs. 

"They don’t like dogs, and dogs don’t like them. You might say dogs see through them. To the sharp and watchful eyes behind the cut-rate sunglasses. To the strong and long-muscled hunters’ legs beneath the polyester slacks from Walmart. To the sharp teeth beneath the dentures, waiting to come out. They don’t like dogs, but they like certain children. Oh yes, they like certain children very much."

That is, tasty children who have the shining, like Abra Stone. 

King is very inventive in his account of the parapsychological war between Abra Stone and Rose the Hat. Abra is able to jump bodies and see through other people's eyes, while others see through her eyes. This is what she and Dan call turning the wheel. Using this trick, Abra is able to fool Rose the Hat, not once, but twice, by giving her the wrong location. That is, in one instance, Abra jumps into Dan's body and gives Rose the impression she is where Dan is, that is on her way to Colorado, when in fact she's at home in New Hampshire. These mind games are reminiscent of the ones between Jonesy and Mr. Grey in Dreamcatcher.

 

While these aspects of the novel are original and entertaining, the story doesn't have enough emotional depth to make the reader care for the characters. I never cared for Dan Torrence as much as I did for Ralph Roberts in Insomnia, for instance. The depiction of Dan's struggle with alcoholism and with the demons of his dad and the Overlook Hotel is powerful and gripping. But then, we don't know enough about his gift of helping people die peacefully. How did Dan stumble upon this gift and how does it work exactly? Also, how can it go wrong? What if someone doesn't die peacefully? What's so terrible about that? Is the dull red mist that raises from the dead man's head, their soul? Is it going to go to Hell or Purgatory? Or keep roaming the earth aimlessly? If the novel explored this part of the story more, it would have been much better. 

Similarly, the author doesn't tell us much about the True Knot. And there must be a lot to tell, since they've been around for centuries. They are empty devils, concerned only with staying alive and finding new recruits and having lots of sex. But their characters, including their leader, Rose the Hat, are not really fleshed out. What's it like living such long lives? What keeps them going? What do they believe in? Do they feel loneliness, anxiety, fear? When they die there's no mist hovering above them. Their bodies just disappear. Does that mean they have no souls? King is silent on that point. 

All in all, one gets the impression that King wanted to fit too much in a book which ended up being about nothing. One reason why the novel doesn't work is that Dan's mysterious ability to help people die peacefully doesn't fit with his helping Abra against the True Knot. The only moment his strange power comes into play in the battle against the Knot is when he manages to trap Abra's great-great-mother cancerous steam in his mind and then release it against the members of the True Knot. But that's just a clever artifice. There's nothing substantial drawing these two essential strands of the book together. Maybe this book should have been two books? Or three books? Either way, on its own, it fails. But it can serve as a reminder of how good other Stephen King books are.