King Nyx
By Kirsten Bakis
Literary gothic fiction
Liveright
February 2024
The way we remember events, large and small, can have an impact that lasts a lifetime. It can affect ourselves, the way we look at and go through our lives. It can affect the decisions and lives of others.
Memories and the events that inspired them are central to King Nyx, the intense new novel from Kirsten Bakis. Annie, a married woman in her 40s, is worried about how she and her writer husband, Charlie, will make ends meet early in the last century. Charlie has a compulsive need to find a unifying theory that explains everything. He is especially intrigued by phenomena such as fish falling from the sky.
Annie once was a maid in the house where Charlie grew up as one of three sons of a rich grocery wholesaler and his wife. Charlie's father could be violent and hurt people during his rages. Annie, starting as a maid in her teens, learned how to stay calm and not upset her employer.
What that cost is a core part of her and Charlie's story, as they grow up, marry and spend their lives looking out for each other. As Annie notes in a prologue that takes place years after the events of the novel:
It's an old reflex, to tell myself that what's in my mind is unimportant. It was always easier that way.
In his notes, a writer characterizes Annie as:
This woman cannot think, she feels.
Both ideas are an integral part of what happens in the narrative, and why.
When they married, Charlie's father disinherited him. He's been working on his book to explain strange events for years, collecting evidence and trying to make it all fit, a bit like Casaubon's unending project in George Eliot's Middlemarch. While Annie supports him, though, and appears meek, she is not Dorothea. She has suffered in overcoming trauma, and Charlie looks out for her as much as she looks out for him.
Just when things are about as desperate as they can get, Charlie gets a surprise invitation from a reclusive millionaire. Mr. Arkel inherited a fortune with his canned fruit company, and became more rich after violently putting down a strike for better working conditions. Arkel lives in a mansion on an upstate New York island, where he can control everything.
Or does he?
Annie and Charlie are housed in a cabin near the mansion, ostensibly to quarantine because of the flu pandemic. Their neighbors, Frank and Stella Bixby, are there because psychologist Bixby treated Arkel after his first wife was killed in a hunting accident. Frank says Arkel is getting worse again.
He's not the only one. An encounter at the dock before boating over to Arkel's island brought back to Annie memories of her only friend. Mary was a new maid after Annie had been employed by her husband's family for nearly a decade. Mary was fiercely independent and had run away once. She won't stay long before leaving again. She asks Annie to go with her, but Annie prefers what she believes is the safety of where she is.
Every woman in the novel is affected by the attempts of a man to control her. It goes beyond societal strictures at the time, although the way society considered women made it easier for the controls. The controlling actions and the ways they are remembered have a great deal to with the plot of this gothic novel.
This controlling attitude also is seen in class structure. Frank is disdainful of the striking factory workers. His attitude may remind readers of a certain outspoken political stance:
"Not being able to understand the reality of running a business, thinking they're entitled to things that aren't possible, simply because they want them. The way a young child has no understanding of, or interest in, whether its father can afford to buy the toy it desires -- it simply knows what it wants. But that is the mentality of the common factory worker, after all. If they had more developed minds, they'd be in other lines of work."
One of the few ways in which Annie tried to exert control of her life was as a child. She named a mechanical blackbird King Nyx, a being that looked out for her broken dolls as they took part in journeys during her dreams. King Nyx talked to her for a spell, too, until she banished her childhood guide. That guide will return to play a role in the events on the island.
Charlie in the novel is based on Charles Fort, whose The Book of the Damned was published after it was championed by Theodore Dreiser. Yes, the Sister Carrie Dreiser, and he makes a cameo in this novel. Anna was his wife, but her story here, and their story, is from Bakis.
The story that Bakis has crafted can be densely atmospheric at times. It often has the feel of works by Susannah Clarke, Erin Morgenstern and Donna Tartt. The use of these tropes in a story about women trying to remember the facts of their own stories, without men manipulating them or their memories, is done in an earnest way. It is not an attempt to add contemporary shade.
Twenty-five years ago, Bakis published the incredible, genre-twisting and affecting novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs. Whether a reader approaches the new book because of memories of the debut novel, or finds the older story because of this one, an open mind will be able to enjoy and ponder her writing.