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Living paintings, spectral children, cannibal serial killers, lost souls, haunted houses, and ancient evil proliferate The Door and Other Uncanny Tales. Everywhere reality and fantasy collapse to create a new unstable world, even the body is not what it seems. Combined with Dmetri Kakmi's gothic imagination and mordant humor, the result is fiction that is as memorable as it is unsettling.
This collection contains three new and three previously published stories, including the acclaimed Haunting Matilda, The Long Lonely Road and The Boy by the Gate.
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The Door and Other Uncanny Tales (NineStar Press) is a departure for Melbourne essayist and author, Dmetri Kakmi.
It represents his first full-scale exploration of his passion for the literary gothic.
The stories in this collection draw the reader into a psycho-sexual vortex in which fantasy and reality collapse to create nightmarish worlds from which there is no escape. They are powerfully charged, dream-like explorations of violence, neglect, regret and the need for love, graced with poetic elegance. Make no mistake, however, these are disturbing tales that push boundaries.
Living paintings, spectral children, cannibal serial killers, lost souls, haunted houses, and ancient evil proliferate in The Door. Combined with Dmetri Kakmi’s gothic imagination and mordant humour, the result is fiction that is provocative and unsettling.
This collection contains three new and three previously published stories, including the acclaimed “Haunting Matilda”, “The Long Lonely Road” and “The Boy by the Gate”. There are diverse starting points. Most stories are set in Australia, though “The Long Lonely Road” is set on the island of Tenedos in Turkey, where Kakmi grew up, and centres on a Muslim boy. The main character of the novella, The Door, which lends its name to the collection, is Greek and homosexual. Some stories have queer characters, most do not. Several stories have female main characters.
Putting the collection together gave Kakmi pause for thought.
“Where do stories come from? The best I can do is to say they come from an unconscious urge inside the author and find sentience on the page,” Kakmi says.
“Often you do not know what you are writing about until someone—a friend, a reader or a critic—draws your attention to the subject matter. For instance, when my first book Mother Land was published a reviewer said it was about how violence can affect a community like a virus and spread to the most unlikely individuals. ‘Is it?’ I thought. When I looked closely, I saw that on some level it is. I just did not realize it at the time.
“The act of violence runs through everything I write. For me it is the ultimate existential question. I am attracted and repelled by it.”
Kakmi says that the other thing that links these stories is children, often in dire situations.
“Given my upbringing at a volatile time in Turkish history, it is inevitable I keep going back to the locus, trying to understand what happened in the Grimm’s fairy tale of my childhood, and why?
“Ultimately, I sought to create finely wrought tales that will entrap readers in my head, like flies in a spider’s web. I hope they are suitably rattled by the experience.”
Author: Dmetri Kakmi
Paperback Published 14 September 2020 212 pages
“The Door is a ghost story for modern times—layered, unpredictable and complex. The story goes deep, examining our motives for creating art and exposing the fragilities of the artist in the process. I loved it.”-Sofie Laguna, author of The Choke