Early Revelations of Death: the book that made me by Joshua Rex

 
It is the nature of epiphany to occur at moments we cannot possibly anticipate. Perhaps it is an essential characteristic of the latter, providing the bang necessary to qualify such ponderous and incontrovertible truths which, after comprehending, we are irreversibly altered.
 
Opening my Scholastic Troll book catalog during fourth grade in the fall of 1989 was for me one of these moments. Among the girls-with-horses stories and cartoon character sticker books and break dancing manuals was a ghostly tale about a phantom named Helen who tries to lure a young girl into death with her. I immediately ordered it. I have always had a predilection for horror and weird fiction, a love which began in childhood. Later would come the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark trilogy, R. L. Stein’s Fear Street books, and my juvenile attempt at reading the Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. But before these was the most influential book of my childhood, and perhaps my life. It is still my favorite novel: Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn (Avon Camelot, 1986).
 
It’s a story about a brother and sister, Molly and Michael, who are forced to move from their home in Baltimore to a church in a rural area of Maryland with their mother, stepfather, and dreadful stepsister Heather. Heather, seven, is a troubled little girl. Her mother died in a fire when she was three. She is not thrilled that her father has married Jean (Molly and Michael’s mother), and she hates her new step-siblings. Heather is a brat in the worst way—she whines, connives, lies, and continually attempts to drive apart her father and Jean. When the kids discover a graveyard on the church property, Heather is attracted to one grave in particular, hidden in some weeds beneath a massive oak. Later, Heather begins talking about a ghost girl called Helen, who she claims to have befriended. Molly, terrified not only by the prospect of a ghost in their midst but of death itself, understands that Helen does not have good intentions for Heather. As the dubious friendship between Heather and Helen deepens and becomes more destructive, Molly realizes that she is the only one who will be able to save Heather’s life.
 
Wait Till Helen Comes, like the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark volumes and their wonderfully macabre illustrations, offers little reassurance to its young readers. Its primary merit (among many) is the story’s honesty concerning the nature of death. This adherence to verity resulted in demands from parents to ban the book from reading lists and school libraries. Prior to Helen, my reading consisted of dinosaur encyclopedias and grade school series like The Babysitters Club. My mother, who is delightfully morbid beneath her cheery and vivacious façade (and I quote: “Haven’t you ever wanted to dig up coffins and open them and see what the people inside look like?”—her words, no kidding) had read me scary stuff when I was young—books like Dorrie and the Blue Witch (rendered in those dark and hairy pen-and-ink illustrations) and In a Dark Dark Room (the girl and with the green ribbon and her head rolling off the bed). She also liked to tell me about a ghost in our house in Plymouth, Massachusetts which, apparently, used to play with me when I was a baby. This was all creepy and spooky, but it was also fun and safe, like dressing up as a ghoul and getting your plastic sack filled with candy every 31st of October. But there was nothing safe about the central themes in Mary Downing Hahn’s multi award-winning masterpiece: despair, guilt, and the unavoidable inevitability of death.
 
1989 was an epiphany year for me, not only as a reader and future writer but as a human being, for it was the year I learned that death was Real. On March 25th my maternal grandmother Mary Jeanne “Jeannie” Weyer died of what should have been a preventable and treatable case of colon cancer. My parents allowed me to go to the funeral—a decision which changed the course of my life. Approaching her coffin and touching her icy, cement-hard hand was the moment when my mind was for the first time unable to reconcile what it was being confronted with: that what had once been was no longer, and would never again be what it had. Her death was the consequential event of my childhood. It established fundamental aspects of my nature and character—a disposition which later would determine the themes of my artistic ventures across all mediums: loss, memory, remembrance, and the unstoppable passage of Time.
 
I rediscovered Wait Till Helen Comes in 2006 when I was in my twenties. I can’t say what brought me back to it—perhaps it was returning to my hometown after eight years of college/traveling. Or perhaps it was the memory of how much I’d loved it as a kid. Whatever the case, I did not anticipate that the story would have the same powerful impact on me as an adult. Furthermore, I was stunned to discover in the text an instance of personal formative influence. The revelation came on page 146, when Molly contemplates Helen’s remains in the larger context of death itself. In a passage inspired perhaps by the character’s (and possibly even the author’s) admiration for the poetry of Emily Dickinson (see: “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”, Fr124C), Molly considers her own body, which will someday lie buried as the years blaze past indifferently overhead. She realizes that she cannot escape her own skeleton, i.e. her own mortality.
 
The Ultimate Terror is at the center of this epiphany: the undeniable axiom that death is always with us. It will take everything—in the end, you can’t even keep yourself. The only consolation is the hope that it will not come for some time. It was a verity affirmed for me in the incomprehensible chill I had felt in my grandmother’s hand earlier in the year. Such revelations make life poignant in a way that it hadn’t been a moment earlier. I became emotionally tenuous in some fundamental way, susceptible to the woeful, wordless language of violins and pianos. I became conscious of the ever Fleeting Moment—of the hourglass with wings carved on the schist headboards in Colonial graveyards. I began to empathize with those generations, who faced loss with a regularity we cannot comprehend today.
 
Wait Till Helen Comes shaped my preferences and predilections in art as well as in life. In Lovecraft, I favor the non-mythos nostalgia in pieces like Celephaïs over the decidedly un-sentimental and un-human Cthulhu; the contemplative, tortured eternal souls of Louis and Lestat in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles rather than Stephen King’s rapacious blood fiends (scary though they are) in ‘Salem’s Lot et al. I’m left staggered and awed by the force of love in the face of unimaginable dread seen in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Stories that bleed not only from their wounds, like Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Good Husband”, Alison Littlewood’s “Waiting for the Light”, and Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”.
 
In many ways, I suppose that my own writing as an attempt to accept transience and death. To celebrate, say, spring flowers for the unlikelihood of their efflorescing, their thrusting up from the dead, cold ground and unfurling gloriously during a late-March sleet. And to recognize that there will always be new bones—ones in which, if we are fortunate, some part of us might live on.
 
Joshua Rex’s debut horror collection WHAT’S COMING FOR YOU was released in the summer of 2020.