By Gina Webb

For the AJC


If there were an annual Southern Gothic Fiction Award, Brian Ray's debut novel might win this year's. He's turned a summer job in a South Carolina steel mill into a dazzling coming-of-age story saturated with Gothic motifs: fiery furnaces, buildings in ruins, an artist gone mad, even a raven or two. And then he's gone one better and made it darkly funny, human and poetic.

"Through the Pale Door" could also win a prize for best crazy Southern mother: Monday West, a painter who has been losing her mind since her daughter, Sarah, turned 13. She barrels through the story alternately flinging paint, crouched in corners, and kabukied in toothpaste to steal the show, chapter after chapter -- and she does it posthumously, no less.

As the novel opens, Sarah, now 18 and an aspiring artist, sneaks out of the house she shares with her mother to head off to Columbia, where she hopes to earn money for college by working at her father's steel mill. From the moment she sets foot inside the plant, she recognizes the dangerous settings of her mother's paintings, which depict victims of gruesome mill accidents. With disaster threatening all around them, Sarah's father casually remarks that if she's lucky, she "won't even lose a finger." But it's not the physical dangers that menace his daughter.

Having left behind her unstable mom, Sarah finds herself in the company of her workaholic, emotionally distant father. With no illusions about either parent's ability to nurture her, Sarah quickly gravitates toward someone who can -- a fellow worker named Edgewood, also an artist, who paints murals of warriors and dancing skeletons that appear on the steel plant buildings at night.

As the two explore each other's artistic beliefs, they fall in a herky-jerky kind of love that reflects their oddball personalities. "The fact that he lived in an abandoned prison might be a deal breaker for many people," Sarah notes, but she is captivated by this boy who "handled courtship as strangely as I did."

Less than a week after their first kiss, though, Monday West makes another appearance, and this time, she's not so easy to escape.

After delivering Sarah's graduation present, Monday runs off the road on her way back to Marietta, and with her death, again grabs center stage in her daughter's world. From then on, through memories she finds "still lying around in the present tense, like broken glass on a bedroom floor," Sarah tries to come to terms with her guilt over her mother's death and with her own artistic talent and ambitions.

These glimpses of Monday's battle for sanity in an increasingly unsympathetic world show Sarah learning to accept her mother's schizophrenia, as all hope for a normal relationship with her disappears. Ray wisely heightens the impact by letting Sarah's sly, wry humor poke through, turning these scenes into some of the most wrenching -- and poignant -- in the book.

Reliving a day when Monday crouched naked behind doorways and in corners of their house, lying in ambush for her daughter and husband, Sarah notes, "My dad has called the police four times, but they won't come pick her up unless she hits one of us. What's worse is she's figured out how to unlock our doors with Q-tips."

In another vivid memory, Sarah happens upon her mother playing chess with another inmate after she's been institutionalized. She has smeared toothpaste across her face, made up her eyes with thick layers of shadow and streaked her hair purple. Sarah, whom we come to love at moments like this, approves of her mom's new look: "I actually liked it. She'd done a nice job. She looked like a vocalist for a Goth band."

Despite the flashbacks, Sarah's romance with Edgewood thrives as they exchange artistic ideas, steal kisses on the job and sketch each other. It's not until Sarah's drawings and paintings begin to resemble Monday's morbid landscapes that she recognizes the changes going on in her psyche, none of them welcome. She wonders who she is making art for: herself -- or her mother. It's a question she'll answer by the end of the summer, but not before sacrificing her own hold on sanity.

Ray's characters may be unhinged, but his writing is far from it. And though it was a gamble to set a contemporary story in such a haunted, Poe-drenched world, the result is a quirky first novel that's not afraid to be itself -- a modern, yet unabashedly romantic look at what happens when art and madness collide.

Fiction

"Through the Pale Door"

By Brian Ray

216 pages, Hub City Writer's Project, $24.95

Author appearance

Brian Ray

Noon-12:45 p.m. Sept. 6. Decatur Book Festival, "Sublime Southern Stories" at Decatur Presbyterian Sanctuary Stage.