Adrian Van Young channels such a diversity of mighty literary voices, you'd think this book was an anthology collecting the work of the best young writers of the new generation

Adrian Van Young, The Man Who Noticed Everything, Black Lawrence Press, 2013.
  
adrianvanyoung.com/

“Adrian Van Young is the secret love-child of so many authors I admire, from Ambrose Bierce to H.P. Lovecraft to Sherwood Anderson to Tobias Wolff. The stories in this collection are not easily forgotten.”- John Wray

Adrian Van Young channels such a diversity of mighty literary voices, you'd think this book was an anthology collecting the work of the best young writers of the new generation. But in truth these stories were all written by one man: an astoundingly talented writer. — Ben Marcus


1. I first met Adrian Van Young at 2012 AWP, when he was hanging out at the Gigantic table. I remembered him as an engaging person to talk to. That’s saying a lot, cuz, you know, AWP.
2. Six months later he emailed me about reading in Baltimore. That’s when I remembered what a nice guy he was.
3. His email was cordial but also professional, and he attached a press release about his book, The Man Who Noticed Everything, and a headshot. The color scheme in the photo matched the colors on his book jacket: black and dark green.
4. Ben Marcus said “you’d think this book was an anthology collecting the work of the best young writers of the new generation”—talking about The Man Who Noticed Everything.
5. So we set up a reading for January, even though I hadn’t read his book and even though the main provision for the series that Stephanie Barber and I run is that we’ll only host writers whose work we really admire. I guess the thinking was, this guy has his act together.
6. And he does. I’m not just saying that because he brought a fresh bottle of Jameson to the reading.
7. At the reading, Adrian read a short story. Sometimes I have a hard time listening to fiction. It can be so boring.
8. But while Adrian read, I laughed and laughed. The story was called “The Sub-Leaser,” and listening to it, I felt like it was full of jokes. Or, actually, it struck me as a better kind of funny writing, in which there aren’t actually jokes, but the whole concept (and the way the concept is delivered) is meant to be funny.
9. What’s more, the funniness happens within the prose, which is primarily descriptive, and that is a really hard and precarious thing to do. The story’s narrator is describing his apartment. He says, “My apartment is a standard one for the part of the city where I live. It begins at the door, which opens, like so, to show the splintered wooden hallway that I mentioned before. On the right is a bathroom, ill-sequenced of tile, with a sink built onto the wall and a bathtub, where a thin and mildewed curtain hangs, clad in a pattern of green and white plaid. To the left of the curtain, an insolent toilet, coated with a film of brown.”
10. “ill-sequenced of tile”? “an insolent toilet”? You see what I mean. The whole story is like that.
11. He is like Edgar Allan Poe.
12. “The Sub-Leaser” is about a guy who rents out a room in his apartment. When the sub-leaser leaves, the guy goes a little crazy, finds his life turned upside down, can’t figure out what’s going on. Whereas a Poe story would probably have killed a character and buried him behind a wall, the only thing that happens in the Van Young version is that the sub-leaser considerately calls a cleaning service to take care of his room, but the guy declines the favor. He’s a head case, to be sure.
13. An Adrian Van Young story is about voice. The stories in this book, you read them slowly. They have a slowing effect.
14. There are eight stories total. They are each skillful. The reason I said it’s precarious to write the way he does is that it’s so easy to lose the tone and then you’re just left with a pile of quirky sentences. To do it right requires consistency, and Adrian does it right.
15. In “The Sub-Leaser” there is a real phone number. At the reading, I asked Adrian whose number it was, and he didn’t know, so I called it. There was no answer.
16. Remember when I was talking about the book cover being dark green, just like his headshot? Well, if you want to read this book and want something peculiar to pay attention to while doing so, keep an eye out for how often the color green comes up.
17. The first story is called “Hard Water.” It put me in mind of William Gass. It’s kind of a cowboy thing, but has gays in it.
18. Another story I really liked is called “The Elder Brother Washes His Hands.” It’s a civil war story, but it seemed a little like Shakespeare because there are three, like, spectres or whatever.
19. The title story, “The Man Who Noticed Everything,” is about a guy who takes a day laboring job digging up dead bodies from a graveyard. It’s haunting and mysterious, but not because it’s about a guy digging up dead bodies from a graveyard. It’s because you don’t know who the guy is, where he came from and where he ends up (he ends up in what seems like a grave, but in the story’s last line he says he’s “happy to begin his life on such outstanding terms”).
20. Why does he care about the foreman’s son so much? What’s the deal with him and Carol, the waitress, who sleeps with him in his sleeping bag?
21. I didn’t see Adrian at AWP this year. My loss.
22. Lovecraft. That’s what I’m looking for. The stories in The Man Who Noticed Everything have the sensibility that the world is unknowable, human experience is mysterious even to the human experiencer.
23. The stories are subtle because big action, like life, is unrealistic. Maybe. I dunno.
24. Want to know more about the horror behind these stories? Read Adrian’s essay in The Believer about horror movies for background. It’s excellent. It should be published as the book’s appendix.
25. AdrianVanYoung.com. - Adam Robinson

The Sub-Leaser

by Adrian Van Young

AND SO I RETURNED FROM A SERIES OF ERRANDS to find my apartment unalterably changed. Which change, I should say, was in fact several changes that had, in collusion, effected the one by dint of a sly and concerted campaign against the state of my rooms preceding my absence. Rooms, and not room, to be clear on one thing; namely, that I, their primary tenant, was only fiscally and moreover physically liable for the sustained occupation of one, my room, while the other, which lay around a bend and down a splintered wooden hallway from my own, the north room, I had leased for undetermined months to a certain third party little known to me then. But more of him, the sub-leaser, the stranger, to come.

It is the matter of the change that I wish to embark on.

My apartment is a standard one for the part of the city where I live. It begins at the door, which opens, like so, to show the splintered wooden hallway that I mentioned before. On the right is a bathroom, ill-sequenced of tile, with a sink built onto the wall and a bathtub, where a thin and mildewed curtain hangs, clad in a pattern of green and white plaid. To the left of the curtain, an insolent toilet, coated with a film of brown. Above the toilet is a window of thick, smeary glass that peers out on a bend in a courtyard of stone which does not correspond, I have need to observe, to the crook of the L that makes up the apartment. Continuing down the splintered hall, tandem to the bathroom on the right, is a kitchen, with a wide metal sink, and a stovetop and oven, and copious shelf-space above, where sit foodstuffs. Facing the shelving, a circular table, unmatted and scarred, with extendable leaves. Though these leaves, I should mention, have not been extended for some inhospitable months by my calendar.

Roughly tandem to the kitchen is the room in which I take my rest. My room, the north room, leased only to me, is a large and ascetic, say, scholarly space, bisected along the western wall by a naked lead pipe grown outrageously hot in what are now, as I write this, the dog days of winter. Next to the pipe sits a modest bookshelf where I have invested a paperback library—philosophical texts by dead men with spry minds in whom I have vested a tentative trust. Northeast of the shelf, in the room’s farthest corner, hunkers the whiteness of the bed, and next to the bed, a lacquered side-table, where a number of disparate items reside, including, but not always limited to, the book I happen to be reading, a flexible, prehensile lamp, a humidifier that severs the air with its shrill, unbending jet of steam, a glass of night-water with things floating in it whose molecular makeup I would rather not know, things native to here, to the pipes underneath, to the far reservoirs, kept by concrete, that do their best to keep me healthy.

There is nothing on the walls of the room where I sleep. The white of the paint there has proven acceptable.

Beyond the living room, in the back of the apartment, lies the south room, the strange room, the room not mine, and of which I prefer, on the whole, not to speak. For it marks what is clearly, in my mind at least, the origin of the greater change that I found had come over the whole of the rooms upon coming back from the series of errands. As if, like some malignancy, the change had begun in that room and spread outward. It had been occupied, the room, I mean, by the sub-leaser little known to me, who had come to inquire about said room after happening, he claimed, on an advertisement for it. That was the word he had used, the word “happen”—I happened on the ad, he’d said, while reading the paper this morning at breakfast. As if to say in truth that he’d done nothing of the sort, but had had the room in mind to sub-lease for some time, and this feigned indifference the ultimate ploy to ensure it would be his, and quick. When I returned from my day running errands he had gone, without a word in advance or a courtesy call, and the apartment without him was utterly changed, not because he had left but because he had been there.

However, he did leave a note, the sub-leaser, less a source of information than it was a kind of cipher, tamped beneath the grey saltshaker at the center of the table with extendable leaves. It was a word-processed note, as opposed to handwritten, which struck me as odd for a couple of reasons: 1. As a note, it did not merit printing, which was what had produced it, a printer, I mean, and not a typewriter, as might stand to reason, the latter machine on the whole more conducive to jotting a note on the fly, for quick viewing, and the former altogether best for composing a statement or even a missive, while the note, as you will find, was neither; 2. The sub-leaser, for whatever reason, had quit the south room with remarkable haste in the five-hour period I was gone, which was really four hours, by the sub-leaser’s clock, for he would have been wise to account for, at least, a buffering margin of one or more hours between when he had fixed for himself to be gone, and roughly the time he expected me home, which was barely enough for the moving essentials, let alone to sit down at a laptop computer, format a note and print the note out; and 3. It consisted of the following words, which were odd irrespective of their method of production:

Hey,

Enclosed bills ($60) are for Tatiana, arriving 2/2/09. Thanks for the shelter, however brief. And good luck!

Sincerely,

Hank

P.S.—Tatiana’s #: (212) 555-2398

Hank’s “enclosed bills” were indeed in the note, congruent the seam of the folded up paper. They were not meant to count towards the rent, I knew, which he had always paid by check, and which he had paid me in full the day prior by way of said check slipped under my door, perhaps, I reflected, to avoid circumstances that would have been colored, on his part at least, by the awkward foreknowledge of his imminent departure, which he planned to effect the next day, i.e., this one. But then again, I reconciled, he had long been in the habit of paying me thus by slipping the check beneath my door, and therefore had always been planning to leave, as soon as the moment presented itself. So the money was not, then, intended for me, but indeed the elusive Tatiana, set to arrive “2/2/09”—which now I considered it was tomorrow—and whose contact information, which appeared to be local, appended the word-processed note. But who was she, this Tatiana, and what had the sub-leaser hired her to do? And why, furthermore, was her number a post-script as opposed to placed beside her name? When I added the numbers, successively, I arrived at the sum of 46. What did it signify, that number? Or was it merely happenstancial? And what, furthermore, had the sub-leaser meant when he thanked me, rather glibly, I thought, for the “shelter”? Did ”shelter” refer to the shared space itself, in an easy and jocular way, perhaps, or did it have a more urgent, even literal dimension, as in “shelter from harm,” i.e., persecution, which put me in mind of nefarious doings that Hank might well have taken part in—ones that had driven him here, to these rooms, to seek respite in anonymity?

 Publications

"A Friday of the Living Dead Nightmare" in The Believer — March 2012
An essay on horror movie franchises.

"Answers from the Dark" in The Believer — October 2010
An essay on the modern-day spiritualist movement.

"…the imperatives of the modern horror film" in Gigantic Magazine — October 2009
An interview with writer Brian Evenson.

"King Dodd" in Lumina Journal — April 2008
A short story about a man so quintessentially average-looking that he cannot be perceived by others who finds himself the subject of a macabre plot that musters in the tunnels of the New York City subway system.