The Bride Laid Bare

Blistering heat hits a small Maine town early in spring and doesn’t let up until late fall. What makes this odder is that the condition is strictly local; only a few miles away, the customary cold and damp last well into June, and people are putting on sweaters for late August evenings.

Uncanny, the residents of Dry Falls find it, and their perplexity is voiced by the narrator of “Incubus”: Cora Lieber, assiduous cook, food writer and gardener and the resolutely earthbound wife of the town’s spacey Episcopalian minister. Witchy weather is just the start, though.

Two girls trying out a midnight pagan rite in the graveyard report a baleful masculine presence and hundreds of white-clad women lying supine on the ground, as if awaiting rape. The minister’s secretary tells of something heavy and unseen pressing her down in bed. Cora’s sister, a moody artist, flees screaming from her isolated cabin and vanishes into a clump of poppies. Early on, the town’s housewives find that their husbands no longer want sex; at the same time there is a sharp drop in the breeding rate of cows and sheep.

Suddenly, it all reverses and sex is everywhere. A half-dozen schoolgirls are found naked and unconscious, seemingly alone but plainly in mid-orgasm. The frustrated wives turn haggard after nights of ferocious intercourse. Following the long marital drought, Cora experiences a wild orgasm, waking to find in her bed not the minister but a foggy shape-changing presence. Finally, strangers begin appearing in town: more or less normal-looking but with sketchy and schematic features, as if hastily drawn.

For a while in Ann Arensberg’s “Incubus,” the reader may wonder whether it is to be a novel about mass hysteria. It is not; the intruders are real--real malevolent supernatural spirits, that is. There is plenty of hysterical suggestion in “Incubus,” along with an up-to-date mix of psychology, ecology and organic cookery, but mainly (also Mainely) we are in Stephen King country.

In Stephen King country but overdressed, over-encumbered and underimagined. Arensberg, author some years ago of the witty “Group Sex” and the suggestive “Sister Wolf,” brings not too little but too much to her story of paranormal intrusion.

To succeed, a tale of the supernatural, whatever philosophical or psychological implications it may carry, must travel light. Instead of compelling belief (impossible in most of us), it must suspend disbelief. This is a little like suspending gravity. A King novel, though making no real claims as literature, insinuates its talons into the susceptible and perhaps unacknowledged corners of our imagination. Like someone creeping up behind and suddenly pinching, it makes us jump.

With more ambitious concerns, “Incubus” weighs and eventually drags us down. Employing a mass of workaday detail to suggest the reality that has been invaded--along with too much talk and too little suggestive fantasy--Arensberg attempts a kind of allegory. Its point is roughly that our civilization, with its technology, acquisitiveness and loss of traditional limits, has stripped away the nurturing layers of the human spirit.

Pure air and water can no longer be taken for granted (pollution), nor the distinctive succession of the seasons (global warming), nor the autonomous power of art (post-modernism) nor any number of other things, perhaps including--Arensberg doesn’t specify--family cohesiveness and religion or a clearly edged secular morality.

All these, in the author’s conceit, have always provided a spiritual ozone layer keeping out an influx of alien ghosts and demons. Now, in Dry Falls, comes the first breaching burst of lethal spiritual radiation. By the end of the novel, it will be repelled--Henry, Cora’s husband, invokes a desperate provisional Christian exorcism--but only, perhaps, for the time being.

Arensberg has her story told by a skeptic, no doubt a good thing. Cora has come through the swirling currents of the ‘60s and ‘70s (the story is set in 1974), holding to the values of her father, a cabinet maker who retreated from the world to practice his craft. Hers are gardening, cooking, food writing and giving strictly domestic support--endless church fe^tes and bake sales--to her airy minister husband. “Nature,” she maintains, “made a better idol than the Christian God. She was just as theatrical and infinitely more generous.”

Cora’s exposure to Christianity, true, is fairly raddled. Henry, burned out by two arduous social ministries, had retreated to the small Maine town, his faith thinned down into various trendy forms of spiritual research. He is one of a small group interested in psychic and paranormal phenomena; they meet, eat and drink, and talk endlessly. Cora cooks, washes up and exercises a patience that frequently cracks. When the spooky stuff begins, she notes that Henry is more interested in interviewing the victims than in giving them spiritual comfort and protection.

Henry and his fellow adepts are endlessly talky. Cora, despite her native wit, becomes equally tedious if more sensible as she retails and comments on their expounding and theorizing about black magic and ghostly possession. Apart from brief flashes--of a possessed woman who claims no memory of a two-hour abduction, Cora remarks that “by now she was starting to forget whatever it was she couldn’t remember”--much of the writing is ponderous. Half-page paragraph follows half-page paragraph, each challenging the reader to get past its topic sentence.

There is an intriguing touch or two to the spooky invaders, notably their awkward and uncertain experiments in materializing such things as a passable penis. But they are portrayed so rigorously as aliens that, lacking any connection with our own imagination, they come out dull. The climactic scene--the whole town has taken refuge in the church--is closer to melodrama than to drama, with Henry calling out, “The temperature is dropping. We’re about out of time,” and similar “Twilight Zone” stuff.

Arensberg seems uncertain, not of her allegory but of the means she uses to tell it. The ratio of cooking, housework and gardening to haunting is disproportionate. Too often “Incubus” reads like a blend of “Malleus Maleficorum,” the 15th century black magic classic, and Mrs. Beeton’s “Household Management.”