The Reflective Horror of Gone to See the Riverman
Introspection can often be the enemy of enjoyment when it comes to a person’s passions, especially those fascinations that the mainstream would consider niche. It can be tempting for fans of any given form of entertainment to defend their interest, when inevitably questioned, with one of a series of rhymed off platitudes.
“I know it’s not for everyone.”
“Don’t knock it ‘till you try it.”
“It’s a little weird but it makes me happy.”
It’s the easy way out of an unpleasant interaction; why be held socially hostage and forced to expound on why you like that kind of literature, or this genre of film, or whatever classification of music your friends just don’t get? Your interests are your own and you needn’t be subjected to a Spanish Inquisition for every piece of media you wish to consume. Right?
Perhaps not. But perhaps there does exist some value in looking more critically at your fascinations and, by extension, your psychological self.
Gone to See The Riverman by Kristopher Triana asks you to do just this. The extreme horror novel explores the darkest peripheries of fascination and the tragic consequences of allowing your preoccupations to bleed into obsessions, while holding a mirror up to its audience and asking them to take a long look at every infirmity and imperfection of themselves. Triana doesn’t want us to revel in the horror he is crafting, he wants us to absorb it, reflect on it and ask exactly why we find things this grotesque just so engrossing.
This extreme horror novel follows Lori, a true crime obsessive, across two bisecting narratives taking place roughly twenty years apart. In her present she is nearing forty, overworked by dead-end jobs and enduringly single; caring for her disabled sister Abby who is her only living connection to family or friendship. That is, apart from Edmund Cox.
Edmund is less of a man than he is a beast: a serial murderer and necrophile who’s targeted attacks on women are not the focus of the narrative, but who looms over it like a mythical titan. Edmund is the progenitor of the novel’s primary narrative, the one taking place in the present day, as he incites the quest Lori embarks on with what seems like a simple request. Find a key I hid from the police and take it to a friend of mine. Take it to the Riverman. He is the object of Lori’s obsession and, later, her infatuation.
Lori is not some serial killer groupie though, or at least she doesn’t claim to be. She reviles the other women vying for the time and affections of the man she constantly communicates with through the bars of a supermax prison complex, characterising them as fame hungry manipulators looking for a sexual thrill and nothing more. What she wants, what she believes separates her from these others, is that she truly wants to understand Edmund. What makes her different is that she can understand him.
Lori exists in the novel’s initial chapters as something of a shallow archetype, as all of Triana’s characters appear to be at first. This will not remain the case. In the beginning, however, she is not carved as deeply as one might expect from a central protagonist. She is very not-like-other-girls in her anti-feminist gatekeeping of her serial killer crush who, it cannot be overstated, specifically targeted women in harrowing acts of extended mutilation and torture. The limited exposure we get to his crimes is stomach churning even for the most lead bellied horror fans and Lori is all too willing to forget the faceless women he so callously destroyed. She begins as the archetype for a kind of true-crime aficionado more interested in romanticising the perpetrators of human horror than in critically examining them as specimens of evil.
She represents the danger of this kind of fandom, the always present possibility of losing yourself in obsession and becoming an apologist for the worst kind of people because of your affection for a subject. Lori is at her core a feteshist. She is thrilled by her connection with Edmund and the taboo of the things he has done. She knows these things are wrong, that these acts perpetrated by her fantasy man are vile and repulsive (she is even forced to experience the aftermath of his violence by his own cruel machinations towards her), but she is drawn to him specifically because of them. This is where we find the true horror of Gone to See the Riverman.
A second narrative exists within this novel, a family narrative. Lori is a middle child, the younger sibling of Abby and the older of Pete. Triana moves between Lori’s present, coloured by obsession and self-delusion, and her past when the three siblings played by the river, developing together into adolescence. Pete was innocent, Abby was vibrant and had no disability to live with in her youth, and Lori was hopeful and curious. The novel contrasts these two realities to invite the questions the plot will later answer. What caused the brain injury that has left Abby disabled? What trauma occurred in Lori’s childhood to drive her into these behaviours? What happened to Pete?
It is with the plot’s chilling consummation of this secondary narrative that we realise Lori is not a victim of this family’s destruction, but the architect of it.
Gone to See the Riverman holds depths of meaning, allusion and mythology within its strikingly tight page count (the book rafts through its entire narrative in less than 200 pages) and accomplishes this by presenting us with seemingly shallow waters, the fathoms of which are not evident until we wade in. Lori herself is superficially etched at first as a delusional serial killer Stan who’s getting herself, and her sister who accompanies her on this Faustian expedition, into something she has no real comprehension of. The Riverman himself is a complete mystery to both her and the reader. It is not for some time into reading that any clarity is offered on whether he is man, myth, legend or Lucifer and any explanations Triana offers are about as transparent as gouache.
Where Triana succeeds is in offering a light outline of his characters and the mythology surrounding them and filling in only the absolute darkest tones in the landscape. Although with his art Triana has created something that is less of a painting than it is a mirror, held up to the reader of his novel reflecting an image of them they may not wish to see.
True Crime and horror fandom or not entirely separate spheres, they intersect like a Venn diagram with only a thin crescent of each circle untouched by the other. A fan of one is almost predisposed to be a fan of the other. Much as Lori is attracted to Edmund through her own trauma, selfishness and fetishisation of taboo, we may be attracted to her for reasons unknown to us. Make no mistake, Lori is a villain. She is an intensely disturbed individual who exemplifies not only horrifying actions but a rebarbative inner logic she uses to justify every evil she commits.
If we are being asked by Triana why Lori is so infatuated with Edmund, then by extension we must ask why we as fans of horror are so fascinated by people like her.
The answer for most is going to be a complex combination of environmental factors, timing, socialisation and some intoxicating hook in the material that reels them into the world of terror inducing media, in spite of whatever inhibitions they have. This is why horror and true crime have found such widespread interest in the 21st century, having been confined to the margins of popular entertainment for much of the 20th. So many fans of these genres have gravitated towards them for a simple reason, they too have in some way been marginalised.
Outsider media of this kind attracts those who feel alienated by the mainstream, those who struggle to find their community in the conventional or perhaps just those who find the typical unstimulating. Gone to See the Riverman is a treatise on the kind of niche it exists in itself, and on those of us who enjoy it. It is up to fans of horror to set healthy boundaries for themselves; to retain an interest, even a passion, for the genre without allowing it to overflow into delusion, obsession, or fetish. To make sure you don’t sell yourself down the river.