Fear for the Anxious Animal: Carson Winter’s Portraits of Decay

It’s easy to forget why the strange and the unfamiliar unsettles us. You watch and read about so many zombies or puppets or doppelgangers that after a while, we’re unsure why they were ever strange or uncanny at all. Carson Winter’s Portraits of Decay does not suffer this issue. There are more prescient terrors lurking in the wings of this stage—horrors that could only be truly captured in the Weird mode of today, when anxiety pervades our every action, when social events feel like performances, when we have to calm our breathing a little after not remembering where we were during a two hour drive. Portraits of Decay captures the unseen, the unspoken, the forgotten moments of eclectic unease that we’ve grown far too accustomed to. Winter’s collection might be a guided tour through the twisted carnival of modern day living, but, I promise, readers come away feeling lighter, more understanding: or perhaps that’s the shock still worming through my mind. 

Winter splits this collection into three sections. Who we are, Who we wish to be, What we will become. In typical Winterian fashion, however, we begin with this section because each of the stories within allude to the complete tragedies (and therefore fictions) that go into the formation of identity. Self-knowing is a hard process—it takes years, especially when the canon before you has been busy rewiring what “self” and “knowing” is. ‘They Always Kill the Dog’ unpacks meta-textually the very sacrifice of pets, for instance, to further plot, but also pointing out the tension of pets in our own lives, as something we ourselves use.  

Winter argues that identity isn’t even anything with depth; grand narratives don’t require that of us. They require surface-level acts. Ending with ‘In Haskins’, Winter only says that if there’s any reality to us, it is problematised by its innate link to theatre, the performativity of gender, class, and of every social mask that hierarchical structures rely on.

Who We Wish To Be builds on this desire of narrative and meaning with characters getting this very wish, and paying the price—sometimes even gladly. Here, nightmares enjoy wearing false faces to terrorise the psychically sensitive; age-old tropes of frightening pseudobiblia don’t drive its keepers insane, it excites them; even podcasters out of their depth go gladly sauntering after cosmic truths squelching in the mountains to meet terrible fates. Life goes on, in spite of the weird; sometimes a character will face the promethean tax awaiting all pursuers, and other times, the complete dissolution of logic and security is taken as a given. 

Even if we do meet grisly fates, these are only the result of our being unable to cope with Who We Are. In this final section, What we will become extracts a toll. Stories like ‘4633 Memory Stick’ argues that self-actualisation can be self-fragmentation, self-dissolution. A similar fate befalls ‘The Mushroom Men’, when  humans meet the decidedly nonhuman. These fates are not deaths, but creeping realisations that our experiences are consistently unable to account for the vast spectrum of how life can exist. 

The strange, the weird, and the unfamiliar: Carson Winter properly understands these emotions so deep in our DNA. Characters in this collection don’t always pull their hair out in the face of apocalyptic change; sometimes they find that comforting, and intimate, a moment of absolution where two creatures can abandon their cultivated neuroses and melt into each other. 

They hold us when we learn, when we realise—because when we learn we are changed. When we learn we aren’t the main character, or that monsters as old as society are placed there as ways of control and policing us, or that we are nothing but masks we pretend to never see, nothing but the patently obvious delusions we ignore in favour of frail, poor lies, Winter is scratching into your brain pathways you will never be able to forget. ‘The Final Circus’ ending this collection doesn’t just make the joke that we will all become over the top theatricalizations (what is, after all, the pomp of funeral if not our final gift to ourselves?), it’s Winter’s lamentation of the innate ephemera of all things. It’s important to deal with these hard truths, because the quiet supposition behind the innate ephemera of all things we love, is the innate ephemera of everything we hate. The apocalypse doesn’t cherry pick—even the devil is trapped in hell.    

 Portraits of Decay is a masterclass in retooling what fear should have always been defined as. It’s realising we are liars, to ourselves and to everyone—and that the things we all collectively and quietly promise to forget, can and will drive us to dangerous delusions if we let them. There’s no reassuring, empty platitudes, no ‘change is natural’ or ‘death gives life meaning’. Our existence is pitiable; our endless tussle with no objective reasoning, our entrapment in the reality we did not create, our brief flirtation with false transcendence from life when we all become the bubbling protein in the gut of a maggot.

We are afraid because we are always shifting through new conceptions of what the unknown can be—but a collection like this, horror always helps corral, helps distinguish. We only huddled around campfires in caves because the dark pressed us together—and that’s at the heart of what makes fear so important, its ability to compel community. Fear is not the unknown, then, not the atavistic terror that humans are not who they appeared to be, not the terror baked in us at the dawn of our understanding, nor our obsessive gaze into the stagnant spaces between the stars. Fear is simpler than that here; it’s the failure of words to give someone meaning, the narrow understanding of the world that biases create. If there’s any terror, any anxiety, any existential crisis Winter embodies the weird with, it’s not from a place that polices difference or enforces structure. It’s at the gaps in understanding; the absences reason patches up with a smile; it’s in the reflections of ourselves we look away from. It is in Carson Winter’s, Portraits of Decay. 

Portraits of Decay is due for publication June 16th from Salt Heart Press. You can order your copy HERE