Episode 156: The Only Possible End: On Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History'
There are works of weird fiction that dispense their strangeness so subtly that many readers never pick up on it, books that allow themselves to be pass for mundane, the better to haunt us after we put them down. Donna Tartt's debut novel The Secret History, published in 1992, is such a work. On the surface, it is a brilliant, yet completely naturalistic, telling of the lead-up and aftermath of a murder. But The Secret History is also a work of the depths, and readers who go in seeking the Weird will find it lurking on every page. More than a masterpiece of psychological exploration, it is a story about the resurgence of the old god Dionysus, and a chronicle of fate; fate conceived, in the manner of the Ancient Greeks, as a cosmic force.
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REFERENCES
\n\nDonna Tartt, The Secret History
\nRobertson Davies, Canadian novelist
\nWeird Studies, Episode 98 on Exotica
\nM. R. James, English author
\nWeird Studies, Episode 3 on \u201cThe White People\u201d
\nE. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational
\nJean Cocteau, La Machine Infernale
\nJohn Crowley, Little, Big
\nStar Trek: The Next Generation, \u201cThe Outrageous Okana\u201d
\nWeird Studies, Episode 110 on \u201cThe Glass Bead Game\u201d
\nGabriel Faure, Nocturne No. 11
\nPierre-Andr\xe9 Boutang, L'Ab\xe9c\xe9daire de Gilles Deleuze
\nDonna Tartt, The Goldfinch