‘Night Visits’ is a short, sparse tale of two disturbed individuals. Malcolm is a pre-pubescent boy who finds his sick father’s dead body. After the death Malcolm and his mother Margret go to live with Marget’s sister – and Malcolm’s ‘favourite aunt’ - Fiona, in the nursing home she runs. Fiona’s a sexually repressed, near-psychotically religious, and withdrawn woman, still struggling to terms with the death of her mother.

So there you have it. Two withdrawn socially awkward types, both traumatised by the death of a parent, stuck in an old folk’s home. Fiona plays out mother-daughter scenes with a vegetatative-state patient, while Malcolm, after his father’s death, tries to keep the world at arm’s length. His aim seems to be to shrink inside himself, and as he does so the narrative changes with him, moving from third to second person:

“His reflection and himself together, looking out for the first time. As thought seeing the room through his reflection’s eyes.”

“Everything in the kitchen happening as it should do. The plates laid out, the chairs in position, the two-bar fire, and you standing by yourself in front of the mirror. You can still hear your mother’s screams but as they are on the outside now, they can no longer hurt you.

Moving into the nursing home, Malcolm finds a building full of NO signs, a building as seemingly impenetrable as his weird aunt, and as closed as he himself would like to become. The weird aunt, Fiona, who ‘encourages’ him to read the bible, and seems to sense a shared bond with her favourite nephew. Gradually that bond develops, turning sinister (remember the sexual repression?) until a dark undertone starts seeping like tar through everything. We know this isn’t going to end happily, but Butlin is so subtle, and his touch so light, you’re always wondering just how deep this goes, just how bad the ending will be. And of course, the ending is bad, but I won’t give it away.

The only faults in this novel are the presence of a few cliches. One is scene I can’t mention, since it will give away the ending, the other is a device – the whole obsessively-religious equals sexually repressed equation has entered the realm of the overdone. Apart from that, and ignoring the off references to Gameboys and Space Precinct, this is a great little gothic melodrama, which deserves an extra little rosette for Butlin’s crystal-clear prose.

I’ll leave you with the first two paragraphs, with Butlin describing death:

“A few seconds before he died Malcolm’s father raised his head from the pillow to look out at the falling snow. Loose flakes were being blown into the top corner of the window, flattening there until one by one they stuck to the glass. There was no sky anymore, and no village. Soon the garden itself would disappear.

Three months back he would have managed to the burn; then only to Robson’s field. Then the few yards to the start of the low road, with his stick testing the ground and Margaret helping. When he was a child the world had grown bigger every day. Now it was shrinking on every side towards him at a dead centre.”

Iain Bahlaj lives in Fife, Scotland. His short stories have appeared in Front & Centre, Fife Fringe, Chapman, Pulp.net and The Macallan Shorts 3 and 5. His novel, 'Tilt' was published in 2003 (Pulp Books, London). The short story 'Sugar' is a prequel to 'Tilt.' Iain currently works as a night-shift shelf-stacker, while working on a novel about vampires, in this spare time. To read more about Iain on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.