Heikki Nevala: Scars – Synopsis

Synopsis of the Science Fiction and horror short story collection Scars by Heikki Nevala

Scars is a wide ranging and entertaining collection of short stories which combines various literary genres that titillate the imagination; science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, and magic realism. Heikki Nevala makes use of the whole gamut, crossing over from one genre to another with ease and style. The collection includes awarded favourites and previously unpublished gems. The stories differ from each other in terms of form, theme and context, which indicate Nevala’s diversity as writer.
In 2010 Nevala won the Atorox prize for his long science fiction short story You Are Born of Machine, which had gained first place already in the previous year, in a writing competition organized by Portti Magazine. The events of the doubly awarded short story take place in an unspecified time and place at the birth of a new world order. The story’s protagonist, Barbnail (in orginal: Väkäkynsi), tells of his small tribe which consists entirely of men who live on an isolated island. Their only contact with outsiders are violent struggles against the beasts of the nearby monster island, the Nuru.

The Iron Gods who created the man world have returned to their Godhead world eons ago but have left behind a one eyed metal potentate, the Machine, to oversee the lives of the tribe. It decides on the life and death of the people. Since all the members of the tribe are men they are not able to reproduce among themselves. A new individual is born inside the Machine whenever an old person dies and is delivered to its jaws. Often old people and the badly injured are also sacrificed at the Machine to make way for new, useful members. Individuals born in this way are fully grown men who know upon birth their task in the tribe, whether it is hunting, basketwork or knowledge of herbal remedies.

The tribe’s age-old world order and familiar balance is shattered, however, when the Machine produces a different kind of person: a small, round creature without a penis. This is given the name Ama – different. The members of the tribe think the Machine has made a mistake. However, little by little, the useless person begins to gain power on the island when the tribesmen end up competing among themselves for Ama’s erotic attention. Ama soon does something unprecedented by bringing new people into the world without the Machine. People born of the “woman” are different from those born of the Machine: they are small and helpless, and are not equipped with the knowledge of their task in the tribe.

Ama achieves a God-like position on the island superseding both the Machine as a tribal leader and Manyara, the only member of the tribe who has had the ability to communicate with the Machine. Ama and her followers begin to build a raft with which to leave the island in search of new and unknown lands. Barbnail becomes the leader of Ama’s opponents. With a small group of fundamentalist supporters, he wants to return to the old world order under the leadership of the Divine Machine and Manayara the machine shaman.

The rebel group lives in exile in the mountains from where they plan a revolution. The enmity comes to a head when, one evening, Barbnail creeps into the village and kills Ama’s children while others burn the raft. Ama’s rage is boundless and her supporters and opponents, former friends, slaughter each other. In the story’s final scene, Barbnail, drawing his final breath, sees the mutilated bodies of his fellow tribesmen around him, above them the cold eye of the Machine and far out at sea a small fishing boat carrying the only survivor of the battle, Ama, who is on her way to a new world.

The events of the horror story Orson Shaney’s Face take place in the small Mellow Town in the United Sates. The story’s narrator, Andy, remembers in flashback a shocking childhood encounter with Mr. Shaney, the violent conclusion of which has never left him in peace. Only one fact is known about the mysterious Orson Shaney: he was injured in the face during the war which is why he always covers himself with a black silk kerchief.

Shaney’s destructive violence has made him damage not only others but also himself; he has caused the injuries to his face by scratching with his nails.  For years he has somehow managed to curb his bad tendencies by mutilating animals in the cellar of his house but upon meeting the curious boy Andy and attempting to answer his questions the damn breaks. But instead of Andy it is Andy’s friends Mike and Jenny who become Shaney’s victims and are tortured to death in Shaney’s cellar. Andy cannot escape the memory of his mutilated friends and is not able to get away from his feelings of guilt even when Orson Shaney is put to death in the electric chair.

The short stories effectively combine familiar everyday reality with supernatural phenomena. In the short story The Two Rooms of Horror an ordinary family mother, Kaisa, visits her own life in a parallel universe which she finds from a mysterious children’s room in her new home. Inside the magical room she sees the consequences of different choices she could have made in her life. At the beginning of the story Kaisa lives a happy family life, full of joy with her new home and newly born first child. Her happiness, however, is overshadowed by recurring visions she has in the children’s room. In these visions she appears overweight, lonely and depressed, finally committing suicide.

But it is not simply a question of Kaisa’s hallucinations because her husband is not immune to the room’s effects either. The couple seal up the door again and again, they try to forget its existence, but manage to do so only for a while. The room attracts them irresistibly and suddenly the door is left open again. Gradually the parallel reality begins to eat away at their happy life and at the story’s conclusion Kaisa has become what she always feared she would be. The room’s chimera has come true.

Themes

Scars deals with the dark, threatening and unspoken sides of everyday and familiar phenomena: birth, death, love, friendship and sexuality.
Love and sex appear in Nevala’s works as instruments of power, or even as sadistic despotism. For example, in the story You Are Born of Machine the lives and choices of the people are guided by a love that eventually drives them to commit insane and destructive deeds. Different aspects of sexuality are used to generate horror and disgust. In these stories the unwanted infliction of the sexual act and the graphic depiction of carnal sexuality often symbolize the human propensity to violence and cruelty as well as the endless lust for power over others.

In Scars Nevala dwells extensively on the themes of guilt and secrecy as well. His psychological horror stories chillingly depict the frailty of the psyche and the duality of the mind. Nevala’s characters are capable of extreme cruelty but they are often also consumed by repressed deeds and experienced horrors which now and then burst forth into the daylight. The themes of sin and guilt are often linked in the stories to the Christian belief tradition and the Bible. Churches, cemeteries, priests, crosses, flagellation and crucifixions are repeated throughout the collection bringing out in an interesting way the dark and frightening sides of the Christian faith and the ambiguity of the Bible.

Structure/Style/language

The richness of the Scars collection lies in the variety of its themes and forms. As a short story writer Nevala is ambitious. For example, the fifty-page-long You Are Born of Machine could be regarded in its length, form and unity as a novelette. In addition to the traditional short story form, the collection also displays amusing experimentation, such as The Salamander which consists of twelve separate pieces exactly one hundred words long, or the short, one hundred-word-long short stories The Striker and The Crown.

Nevala also makes masterly use of different narrating voices, changing from the subjective first person to the omniscient narrator and again to a multi-voiced choir. The writer masters dialogue in such a way that it simultaneously conceals and reveals, always taking the narrative forward, however. Nevala’s styles also change from humoristic stories written in dialect to meticulous descriptions and visually impressive horror stories and onwards to psychological science fiction.
Nevala’s language flows like a river, now and then making a sudden turn to reveal something unexpected.