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Ghost in the Mycelium

Hey‌ ‌there‌ horror fans, ‌I’m‌ ‌Jessica‌ ‌Avery‌ ‌and‌ ‌I’ll‌ ‌be‌ ‌delivering‌ ‌your‌ ‌weekly‌ ‌brief‌ ‌of‌ ‌all‌ ‌that’s‌ ‌ghastly‌ ‌and‌ ‌grim‌ ‌in‌ ‌the‌ ‌world‌ ‌of‌ ‌Horror.‌ ‌Whether‌ ‌you’re‌ ‌looking‌ ‌for‌ ‌a‌ ‌backlist‌ ‌book‌ ‌that‌ ‌will‌ ‌give‌‌ you‌ ‌the‌ ‌willies,‌ ‌a‌ ‌terrifying‌ ‌new‌ ‌release,‌ ‌or‌ ‌the‌ ‌latest‌ ‌in‌ ‌horror‌ ‌community‌ ‌news,‌ ‌you’ll‌ ‌find‌ ‌it‌ ‌here‌ in‌ ‌The‌ ‌Fright‌ ‌Stuff.

This week’s slightly obsessive mini-essay is brought to you by the fact that Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic has ruined me for life, and now everything is mushrooms. Okay, not really, but there is an idea in Mexican Gothic that I have been turning over in my head since I finished the book and basically it’s this: how is a colony of fungi like a haunted house?

On the surface, Mexican Gothic seems like a familiar set up: Noemí gets a panicked letter from her recently married cousin, Catalina, claiming that something is very wrong in her husband’s isolated ancestral home, High Place. Noemí goes to the rescue and soon finds herself mired in darkness and secrets. But Mexican Gothic takes a sharp, biological twist that had me seriously second guessing my mushroom-based menu choices that week. Because at the moldering, rotting heart of High Place is the dark secret of its patriarch: a horrific immortality founded in flesh and fungi. A house haunted not by spirits, but by mushrooms.

The horror genre’s affection for mushrooms is easy to understand. As far as biological life forms go, fungi (particularly molds and mushrooms where horror is concerned) are as terrifying as they are fascinating. Mold poses a risk to human health, and its easy association with the sort of slow, rotting, delicious decay that horror adores is more than reason enough for its persistence in horror fiction. It’s easily identifiable as a threat. But mushrooms? Mushrooms are an unassuming terror. Even though there are varieties of mushrooms that are so poisonous they can kill you in a matter of hours, and a variety (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) capable of zombifying its host to increase its chances to spread and prosper, the sight of a mushroom seldom evokes the same visceral horror as rot or mold.

Mushrooms come in compelling colors and grow in a variety of unique and fascinating forms. And even though some varieties like Dead Man’s Fingers (Xylaria polymorpha), which grows with corpse-like accuracy, or the juvenile Bleeding Tooth Fungus (Hydnellum peckii), which “bleeds” bright red liquid until it reaches adulthood, may be visually striking in a way that implies horror or violence, they are more likely to encourage our curiosity and enthusiasm than to frighten us. But mushrooms thrive where the dead and dying are. And while mushrooms growing on your lawn may be proof of a healthy cycle of plant growth and decay, mushrooms growing in your house are probably a bad sign.

What fascinated me about the mushrooms in Mexican Gothic, however, was the way Moreno-Garcia played up the most fascinating facet of fungal biology: fungi communicate. They are intelligent and complex lifeforms capable of spreading their mycelium across the forest floor and creating vast networks of communication. If you’re a Hannibal fan, you might remember that fascinating episode where the killer would put his victims into diabetic comas and use them to grow mushrooms as a means of trying to “connect” them to him. He was trying to tap into the fungi’s ability to form communities, obsessed with the similarities between their communication networks and the functions of the human mind. It was the first thing I thought of when Mexican Gothic reached its heart-pounding final act and revealed the body of the family matriarch, Agnes, entombed in fungus, no longer alive, or herself, but not dead.

Much like the way that Ophiocordyceps unilateralis controls its victim’s mind, Agnes’ mind has been taken over by the unnatural fungus that infects the Doyle family tree. The fungi have become her mind, taking on its functions and capabilities. (Mushroom guy would be thrilled.) It is the fungi that keeps the family patriarch alive. So long as he keeps breeding an heir whose body he can inhabit, he will never truly die, and so the fungi is able to take advantage of Doyle’s patriarchal obsession with inheritance and blood lines, manipulating him into satisfying its own biological drive to propagate in exchange for a perverse immortality. But Agnes is its wellspring. She is the source of the family’s curse, as well as the receptacle of their memories.

In true Gothic fashion, the “ghosts” that have been haunting Noemí since she arrived in High Place prove to have a natural explanation… sort of. They’re recreations of the fungi that permeate High Place; echoes of the past that linger in the fungi’s mycelium. Which is genius, really, because one thing that ghosts are a common metaphor for is memory. So in a way, because there are memories trapped and manifesting themselves in the mycelium, High Place really is haunted. Not by the spirits of the dead, but by the last lingering traces of their consciousness preserved in the house’s biological web. And the longer that Noemí is exposed to the mushrooms spores, the more a part of the web she becomes, the more frequent and vivid the “ghosts” appear. Like in all haunted house stories, the longer you stay inside the more intense the haunting becomes.

Which got me thinking.

In a previous Fright Stuff, I hypothesized about why we are compelled to read and write characters who can see and communicate with the dead. How a desire to know the unknowable leads us to speak to the dead because we want to hear the dead speak back. And it made me wonder if the popularity of mushrooms in horror fiction stems from a similar desire. I mean, yes, there’s the inextricable link between mushrooms and death, and mushrooms as signifiers of death. Not to mention all the creepy things they can do and look like. Mushrooms are ripe for horror. But in Mexican Gothic they’re also a source of communication, not unlike what we seek from the dead. The mushrooms that infect the Doyle family connect them in a complex network of biology and memories, one that stretches out its mycelium and tries to attach to anyone who comes to High Place seeing the truth.

We reach out for knowledge and hope something will answer. If not the dead, then who knows. Maybe the mushrooms.

Fresh From the Skeleton’s Mouth

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As always, you can catch me on twitter at @JtheBookworm, where I try to keep up on all that’s new and frightening.