The Man Who Sang in His Sleep

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at Ryerson University in
Toronto.

A book of fiction written by a poet can be an extraordinary thing: rising above the “prosaic,” it can assume an intensity of language, of image, and therefore of feeling that can erase the line between poetry and prose. It is disconcerting, then, to read poet Robin Skelton’s first work of fiction: it is flat in tone, chatty in diction, and in places even verbose — despite the theme of his ten short stories, which is in one way or another the occult.

But if we assume that his main purpose was simply to entertain, these stories fall into place as pleasant and playful amusements, as whimsical character sketches with sinister overtones. Most are built on a central conceit: an unmusical man who sings wonderfully in his sleep; a commercial magician who finds he can walk on water; a seemingly ordinary woman who lures strangers to their doom; a dog that finds lost objects — including those meant to stay lost. Most of these fictions are sly peeps at the occult — in the spirit of Harold Addams and Gary Larson — although in one we get all the gothic claptrap of crystal ball, attic trap door, and presences. In the tradition of light fiction, these pieces are heavy on plot and in most eases rely heavily on some final revelation which brings home the effect.

Along the way, Skelton pokes fun at some well-chosen targets. The sleeping singer of the title story appears on a television freak show called Strange But True, where, by the time he belts out “Methusalem, Methusalem the Harlot of Jerusalem,” the stage crew is in panic. In another farce, “The Importance of Being Percy,” Skelton wreaks havoc on a society hostess when over-educated students are hired as waiters and waitresses; the resulting interchanges between guests and employees produce the worst — or was it the best? — party in years.

The one story that stays, though, when the others have faded, is “Sarah.” A respectable man falls in love with the photograph of a woman long dead. The way in which he nurtures their “relationship” rises above the whimsical: it is a paradigm of our desires for that which is lost — an investigation that rises above the “sinister” and “occult” to a level of honest terror.