Cancer

Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for his House of Leaves, a typographically delirious horror novel about a manuscript written by a blind man describing a film which showed an impossible house. It seemed to exhaust a particular kind of postmodernism of footnotes, cryptography, metatexts, pop culture and more, yet remained at heart a story about grief. Tom’s Crossing is more immediately accessible, but it is every bit as clever and even more emotionally devastating. The bulk of the action takes place over five days running up to Halloween in 1982, although with a preface, ‘Some of what happened before’, and a longer epilogue, ‘Some of what happened after’.

I have to confess that I am not a fan of horror fiction. I have a stack of unread H.P. Lovecrafts sent to me by enthusiasts. M.R. James scares me silly. Even Elizabeth Bowen’s ghost stories remain neglected among her other much-loved books. I have, however, been impressed over the years by writers usually identified as belonging to the movement described in the late 1990s by M. John Harrison as the New Weird, which marries chiefly supernatural themes to realism or naturalism. As a stylist, Harrison remains the greatest of these writers. They included Angela Carter, China Miéville and Jeffrey Ford. The movement is naturally associated with the science fiction New Wave, whose best known practitioner was J.G.

Reading this third memoir by Graham Caveney, a knot in my chest tightened. It wasn’t only because it’s a cancer memoir; it was because the unfolding of history so often shows that abuse begets self-destructive behaviour. To parody Auden: I and the public knowWhat all healthcare staff learnThose to whom evil is doneDestroy themselves in turn. Caveney’s two previous memoirs, The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness and Agoraphobia, outlined his working-class childhood in Accrington, Lancashire, and his winning of a place at a Catholic grammar school. But where the school succeeded in helping him achieve his aim of becoming a writer, it also screwed with his head, because he was not only taken to plays but also played with by a member of staff.

When you are a foreign correspondent and have covered wars in dozens of countries, the last place you’d expect a threat to your life to come from is your own cells. Yet this was the predicament in which the New York Times reporter Rod Nordland found himself in July 2019. Despite close shaves in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central America and Darfur, he only really became aware of his mortality after collapsing with a seizure in India and discovering the existence of a ‘space occupying lesion’ (SOL) in his brain – a euphemism for a growth, benign or malignant. On transfer to a hospital in Manhattan, Nordland learned that his was a stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme, a primary brain cancer with a poor prognosis.