Books: Disbelief on a Gibbet

A DANCER IN DARKNESS (247 pp.)—David Stacton—Pantheon ($3.95).

The prose of David Stacton is like that of no other writer. It suggests a corridor in a dark Gothic tower, ill-lit by tapers, at one end of which a gong sounds incessantly. Stacton’s gong clashes are malevolent aphorisms, asides spoken to Nemesis, hard little explanations of motive.

Four toughs burst by night into the palazzo of a cardinal, who “looked up irritably. His ambitions had scooped him out like a melon. There was no one left inside to be taken by surprise . . .”A man is stationed at a prison: “For the first time in his life he had others at his mercy. Any man who has ever been a prisoner longs to be a guard. Children like to re-enact the crucifixion. Rejected lovers dream of murder. The tortured are fascinated by the rack. In their sleep the humbled pull down whole towns.”

The characters who vibrate to Stacton’s obsessive music move in a dim past — 14th century Japan (Segaki), Yucatan at the time of the Spanish conquest (A Signal Victory), the court of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton (On a Balcony). This time the novelist chooses a subject particularly well suited to his oddly cerebral evocation of blood and brass: the legend of the Duchess of Amain.

The story was old when John Webster used it to write that goriest of Elizabethan dramas, The Duchess of Malfi; Webster borrowed it from a story of the

Italian Matteo Bandello, who himself had not invented the tale but had merely written it down. No one knows now, and it is a dreadful thought, but there may actually have been an unfortunate duchess of Amalfi.

The plot of this old nightmare is too athletic to be staged successfully in an age dulled by realism, but in Stacton’s retelling it moves as smoothly as the oiled gears of a stretching rack. The reader’s disbelief is abruptly suspended—as from a gibbet—as the rich young widowed duchess runs off with her lover Antonio, and her brothers, the bloody Ferdinand and the scheming Cardinal, stalk her to earth for profit and incestuous love.

Stacton’s brooding chronicle, the best horror story in years, prods the reader to panicky speculation: What lurks behind the shadows of the mind? The death of the incestuous Ferdinand, who is set upon by vengeful dwarfs, is a marvel of umbrousness: “The dwarfs stood in a semicircle, watching. They had never brought down anything so large before. It made them solemn. Ferdinand took a long time to die. Then the rustle of silk inside his brain abruptly stopped.”