A new extreme horror author has exploded onto the scene, and her name is Nikki Noir. I first encountered Nikki Noir via her non-fiction work. I found her essays over at Redrum Reviews, reflecting on horror and its cultural significance, extremely illuminating. I then went on to read a novella / short novel Noir had collaboratively written with S. C. Mendes. I am a huge fan of S. C. Mendes, as he wrote the conspiracy theorist’s wet dream: The City, a detective novel that involves a secret city, lying just beneath the world we know. Their collaboration, Algorithm Of The Gods, was like The Matrix mixed with a grim-dark universe. It probed human psychological depths through the mechanism of virtual reality (a subject which is very close to my heart). It was a complete slam dunk, faulted only by not being longer! At the back of Algorithm Of The Gods, Noir included an extract from her ongoing series Black Planet. After reading merely a few pages, I knew I had to read the entire thing.
Black Planet is currently a four-part series, although it’s clear that Noir intends to write more. You can get all four existing volumes together in a gorgeous paperback edition here.
Black Planet is not a book for the faint of heart: it features black magic, gruesome sex rites, and cosmic horror. There is a lot going on in these four volumes, but to attempt a rough summary: forces, perhaps from another dimension, arrive within the small American town of Shale, Arizona. These forces begin to worm their way into the population. Whilst the immediate temptation would be to draw comparisons with something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I actually think it has a little bit more of the flavour of The Shining; there are profoundly dark powers at work, and they begin to affect everyone within their reach. Some are more easily influenced than others, and they become the instruments of these powers.
What particularly intrigued me about the book were its Thelemic influences: the magick (with an intentional ‘k’) of Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, and other such mystics. Noir deftly utilises these influences to create a sense of something awful and beyond understanding, but without falling into the trap many occult writers fall victim to of lacing their work with impenetrable and aloof symbolism. She tells a compelling yarn of human addiction and desire, in which characters feel (arguably rightfully) wronged by the modern world, and have resorted to dark paths to success and freedom from their current state. This is embodied in the opening volume (“Corpse Paint and Rabbit Hole”) in which a disillusioned webcam model, Claire, and her boyfriend slash “manager”, Brian, are sucked into the whirlpool ofnecromantic arts. Noir perfectly encapsulates the feeling of spiritual and physical awakening in a hair-raising sexual encounter in the midst of a violent storm, in which the transcendental experience of an orgasm amidst rains of lightning becomes emblematic of something else.
But despite the fact there is a lot of sex in Black Planet, Noir isn’t writing just to titillate us. More often than not, strikingly erotic scenes are suddenly undercut by intense horror. One teenager’s sexual fantasy suddenly becomes a process of bodily invasion – where the penetrator becomes the penetratee. This is reminiscent of the harrowing descriptions in Jack Parson’s Book of the Antichrist in which he finds punishment for his hubristic pursuit of the magical arts at the hand of demonic entities. Noir is playing a dark and delicious game with us, showing how easily we might be allured by our fantasies – to use a crude phrase: led by the dick – only for her to then turn it on us, which is, of course, the universal testimony of anyone who has dabbled with the dark arts, or drugs for that matter. First, all seems wonderful. Then cometh the fall.
Each volume of this four-parter has a slightly different flavour. There are characters who run throughout the entire story, but we see less or more of them depending on the focus of a particular volume. This creates quite an unsettling and unconventional narrative experience. At times I felt like perhaps the net had been cast too wide, and I wanted Noir to focus more on a tighter cast of characters – but she also managed to pull off some incredible plot dovetails that were very satisfactory. In addition, characters whom I had very little interest in at one stage, suddenly developed and became fascinating later on. She practices “less is more”, and knows that readers need space to flesh out characters with their own imaginative fuel. Noir doesn’t overprescribe them.
Amidst all the darkness, however, there is also innocence, and one of the most moving aspects of the novel is the fact that this innocence can be preserved, even where there is trauma and violation. Haley and Tyler are two siblings, good kids, who have to endure the maelstrom that is steadily enveloping Shale. They only really have each other. Throughout the novel we see both of them go through hell, and a good deal of character development. Haley moves from someone who is uncertain about her future, to someone who will do whatever it takes to protect her brother, and her evolving resourcefulness is well depicted. She doesn’t jump from frightened girl to Sigourney Weaver overnight, but we see the steady progression and how each new experience transforms her attitude to the world. This kind of character development is hard to achieve, and in a novel with this many moving parts, even more so; Noir is to be commended for this triumphant effort.
Lastly, Black Planet has an ending, but it’s clear it’s not the ending, and we’ll be following Tyler and Haley again some time in the future. Anyone who has read my work will know I’m very big on endings, and whilst I’ve no qualms with a slightly open-ended approach, especially where there is clearly more story to be told, I would be interested to see Noir tackle a more “final” and conclusive ending in subsequent books or future volumes of Black Planet itself. That said, this is perhaps my own personal preference, and nothing more.
If you’re looking for extreme horror (and it really is extreme folks), something dark that deals with what lies just beyond our civilised sphere, then I cannot recommend picking up Black Planet enough. Nikki Noir has immense writing talent, and I cannot wait to see what she does next.
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