“Have you ever looked at a mirror in the dark?” Keith Cadieux’s debut novella Gaze asks the reader. “It’s weird to think of what it might be reflecting that you’re not able to see.”
Our narrator is an everyman—he could be any man—Cadieux never reveals his name. He works part-time at a big box hardware store, orange smock and all, “only a temporary arrangement,” he assures the reader.
The disdain he evokes for his employment is immediately recognizable to anyone who’s spent time in the retail salt mines. He’s bitter about his job, and his place in life, full of missed chances, and unmet expectations, but too callow to effect change.
Working late shifting stock while his crush Mandy and her beau Kyle, “the store’s newest ill-conceived romantic pairing” spend their time in each other’s arms, the narrator creates an accidental mirrored corridor. In this surreal environment he gazes into the mirror and knows that something is staring back. Cadieux plays with tactile sensation here, rather than vision. “It was like someone had swiped very gently at the corner of the mirror, as though feeling for the edges.”The moment is broken—as are some of the mirrors—when the narrator leaps back in fear.
The narrator wants us to believe him a sceptic, but it’s notable that his apartment’s only decoration is a poster featuring a grainy UFO photograph and the words “I Want to Believe.” Gaze is presented as a journal, an attempt to document and understand the incident. Within, Cadieux has left few images from mirror folklore unexposed: from fun houses to Bloody Mary, crystal balls to spirit photography, Gaze reflects them all.
Each entry begins with a contextual quotation from sources as varied as H.P. Lovecraft, Sigmund Freud and the Bible. The technique of a found journal was used to great effect by Lovecraft, but by presenting mirror references from the literary and horror canon, Cadieux’s novella is not well served by the juxtaposition of epigraph and journal. His style is engaging, but too ironic, too modern to evoke the gothic or eldritch sensibilities of his horror progenitors. While thoroughly researched, Gaze suffers from a feeling of showing its work.
The psychomanteum is a mirrored room for communicating with the spiritual realm, and was an ancient Greek invention popularized and expanded upon by the spirit-obsessed Victorians. It is in this invention that Gaze’s narrator finds the fuel for his madness. By sitting in a mirrored chamber lit by a single light one waits to see something in the reflection of a reflection.
The narrator creates a makeshift chamber in his apartment washroom trying—-needing—-to recreate the spooky experience from his late night at work. He rationalizes wasting his time by wishing to disprove the first experience. He ignores phone calls, errands, family, even Mandy’s growing concern. When the first small chamber is not enough, he moves the experiment to his bedroom.
Mirrors are not truth but “a kind of trick,”the narrator admits, showing a reversal rather than a replication, but in the reflection of a reflection, the narrator hopes to see truth. Likewise, the supernatural in Gaze is a trick. There is no monster behind the mirror. The clues are there, in the narrator’s subconscious. At the first incident while he watches the reflection of his coworkers fornicating, next to himself in dark outline, part of a toilet is also visible. His determination to “induce” a second incident was followed by street noise, “the faint and fading sound of drunken laughter.” But the narrator can no longer recognize this, “strange to think after all that time in front of the mirrors, the thing I least expected to see was myself,” he writes after spending a sleepless night in his newly mirrored bedroom.
Cadieux establishes the narrator’s fall into obsession and madness swiftly, but organically. The narrator’s not content with the progress he’s making on his psychomanteum and begins stealing damaged product—- a small step, but justification to step further: damaging the mirrors himself, shoplifting from other stores in the chain, and finally a brazen theft of as many mirrors as he can wheel away. When no one was looking, the narrator was so cautious not to draw any attention, “but now that they are,” he writes, “I realize just how little they matter.”
When he finally covers his bedroom window, his last connection to the world outside his psychomanteum—and to reality–disappears. He notes this, writing “If I close the door behind me it takes me some time to find my way back out,” and “I seem to be in fewer and fewer mirrors, but you… I see you everywhere.”
“Whatever it is that you are trying to communicate, I understand now that you can only do it through showing,”he says to his reflected self. And Cadieux shows issues of vanity and the frailty of self-esteem. But with the separation the journal provides, despite all the dread Gaze’s narrator chronicles, it evokes little in the reader. All of our cautionary tales of staring too long at our reflections, from Bloody Mary to Narcissus, give Gaze a ponderous inevitability. Death is predetermined, and its instrument is the very cause of the narrator’s gradual decline: the glass of a mirror.
Quattro Books | 2010 | 90 pages | $16.95 |paper | ISBN #978-1926802-10-7
Contributor
Chadwick Ginther
Chadwick Ginther latest novel is Tombstone Blues (Ravenstone). He lives and writes in Winnipeg.
‘Gaze’ by Keith Cadieux
Book Reviews
“Have you ever looked at a mirror in the dark?” Keith Cadieux’s debut novella Gaze asks the reader. “It’s weird to think of what it might be reflecting that you’re not able to see.”
Our narrator is an everyman—he could be any man—Cadieux never reveals his name. He works part-time at a big box hardware store, orange smock and all, “only a temporary arrangement,” he assures the reader.
The disdain he evokes for his employment is immediately recognizable to anyone who’s spent time in the retail salt mines. He’s bitter about his job, and his place in life, full of missed chances, and unmet expectations, but too callow to effect change.
Working late shifting stock while his crush Mandy and her beau Kyle, “the store’s newest ill-conceived romantic pairing” spend their time in each other’s arms, the narrator creates an accidental mirrored corridor. In this surreal environment he gazes into the mirror and knows that something is staring back. Cadieux plays with tactile sensation here, rather than vision. “It was like someone had swiped very gently at the corner of the mirror, as though feeling for the edges.” The moment is broken—as are some of the mirrors—when the narrator leaps back in fear.
The narrator wants us to believe him a sceptic, but it’s notable that his apartment’s only decoration is a poster featuring a grainy UFO photograph and the words “I Want to Believe.” Gaze is presented as a journal, an attempt to document and understand the incident. Within, Cadieux has left few images from mirror folklore unexposed: from fun houses to Bloody Mary, crystal balls to spirit photography, Gaze reflects them all.
Each entry begins with a contextual quotation from sources as varied as H.P. Lovecraft, Sigmund Freud and the Bible. The technique of a found journal was used to great effect by Lovecraft, but by presenting mirror references from the literary and horror canon, Cadieux’s novella is not well served by the juxtaposition of epigraph and journal. His style is engaging, but too ironic, too modern to evoke the gothic or eldritch sensibilities of his horror progenitors. While thoroughly researched, Gaze suffers from a feeling of showing its work.
The psychomanteum is a mirrored room for communicating with the spiritual realm, and was an ancient Greek invention popularized and expanded upon by the spirit-obsessed Victorians. It is in this invention that Gaze’s narrator finds the fuel for his madness. By sitting in a mirrored chamber lit by a single light one waits to see something in the reflection of a reflection.
The narrator creates a makeshift chamber in his apartment washroom trying—-needing—-to recreate the spooky experience from his late night at work. He rationalizes wasting his time by wishing to disprove the first experience. He ignores phone calls, errands, family, even Mandy’s growing concern. When the first small chamber is not enough, he moves the experiment to his bedroom.
Mirrors are not truth but “a kind of trick,” the narrator admits, showing a reversal rather than a replication, but in the reflection of a reflection, the narrator hopes to see truth. Likewise, the supernatural in Gaze is a trick. There is no monster behind the mirror. The clues are there, in the narrator’s subconscious. At the first incident while he watches the reflection of his coworkers fornicating, next to himself in dark outline, part of a toilet is also visible. His determination to “induce” a second incident was followed by street noise, “the faint and fading sound of drunken laughter.” But the narrator can no longer recognize this, “strange to think after all that time in front of the mirrors, the thing I least expected to see was myself,” he writes after spending a sleepless night in his newly mirrored bedroom.
Cadieux establishes the narrator’s fall into obsession and madness swiftly, but organically. The narrator’s not content with the progress he’s making on his psychomanteum and begins stealing damaged product—- a small step, but justification to step further: damaging the mirrors himself, shoplifting from other stores in the chain, and finally a brazen theft of as many mirrors as he can wheel away. When no one was looking, the narrator was so cautious not to draw any attention, “but now that they are,” he writes, “I realize just how little they matter.”
When he finally covers his bedroom window, his last connection to the world outside his psychomanteum—and to reality–disappears. He notes this, writing “If I close the door behind me it takes me some time to find my way back out,” and “I seem to be in fewer and fewer mirrors, but you… I see you everywhere.”
“Whatever it is that you are trying to communicate, I understand now that you can only do it through showing,” he says to his reflected self. And Cadieux shows issues of vanity and the frailty of self-esteem. But with the separation the journal provides, despite all the dread Gaze’s narrator chronicles, it evokes little in the reader. All of our cautionary tales of staring too long at our reflections, from Bloody Mary to Narcissus, give Gaze a ponderous inevitability. Death is predetermined, and its instrument is the very cause of the narrator’s gradual decline: the glass of a mirror.
Quattro Books | 2010 | 90 pages | $16.95 |paper | ISBN #978-1926802-10-7