The Spectacle of the Void

The Spectacle of the Void by David Peak
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is philosophy the way I like it: succinct, less jargon-ridden than many philosophical treatises I’ve read, and the referent examples are things I am either familiar with, can easily find online, or contextualized in such a way that I can fill in gaps in my own knowledge/experience.

The Spectacle of the Void is a short work, with only 96 pages of actual text. Its vocabulary is only as complex as it has to be, yet Peak gets his points across with exactitude. You don’t need a PhD to understand it, but a Bachelor’s degree helps. And I love that the examples used are from such things as the work of Brian Evenson, John Carpenter movies, and Junji Ito manga. Laymen’s sources? Sure. Well, except Evenson, who is a thinking man’s writer. But you’ll occasionally need to dip into the dictionary, as Peak doesn’t water down his thoughts, either.

I’d like to ask the question “what is the gist of the book?”, but there are several sub-theses going on here. Peak poses, as his primary thesis, that horror, at its heart, is about communication, or lack thereof. Whether it is our inability to communicate what we know, see, and feel properly or the fact that language simply cannot encompass the breadths of what we experience, particularly in those numinous moments when we sense something “beyond” what is communicable, we all suffer when communication is cut off, whether by us, by another, or by our circumstances. It’s an interesting take that plays out quite well through Peak’s facile use of examples that we either all know or can easily access with a little effort.

The examination of the thesis and corollary sub-theses was great. But what I drew the most from this was a number of notes in my writer’s notebook that got me thinking about how I construct stories and the thematic elements that make them ring or make them fail. I believe that, as a result of reading and understanding this work, I can be more engaging to potential readers. I can now more deliberately examine what aspect(s) of horror (internal or external, for example) affect my characters and determine, much more clearly, why they are affected by them. This is one of the best books about writing (that is not about writing) that I’ve ever read.

The section on extra-dimensionality is outstanding and makes clear something that has been in the back of my mind (in a pocket dimension?) for some time, but Peak makes it explicit. I'm surprised, though, that he did not reference House of Leaves as an example.

I love the idea, briefly touched on in relation to the movie Blowup, that the closer we try to examine something from a distance, the blurrier it gets. That is good insight that one must keep in mind when constructing horror.

The section on "Transformers" (no, not those Transformers) draws upon my favorite Junji Ito story "The Enigma of Amigara Fault" to demonstrate how this content hole can be extrapolated into the general frisson of one's experience of time's passage, where we are constricted and reshaped in our inevitable journey toward death. Peak’s examples are extremely helpful, in that they are scalable – one can extrapolate a larger meaning from the specifics of a story, and Peak is very good at showing the reader the way.

I will have to revisit this book again and again and set it near my dictionary, thesaurus, and other reference books I use for writing. Like any good philosophical text, it has caused me to think deeper about the subject. While the existential (and sometimes nihilistic) focus of the book can sometimes be draining, overall, I have been energized by the read and return to this one again and again.


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