When one of us finds a poem or story in our pages that we especially like, it’s common for us to adopt the voice of that piece for the rest of the day. On any given week in the office, you might hear us conducting staff meetings in the omniscient past, or addressing the fax machine in the vocative “O.” But when long-time volunteer Suzanne Warren bounded into the office speaking in the eerie first-person plural of Christopher Merker’s “Last Cottage” (volume 7, number 1), we crowned her our POV queen. Sadly, Suzanne left her minions shortly thereafter to pursue a career in Wisconsin’s lucrative vacation-rental industry. But she did leave these notes behind:
Suzanne Warren: “We know the Larsons.” So begins Christopher Merkner’s “Last Cottage,”
a Gothic horror tale of lakefront Wisconsin real estate. “Last Cottage” is told from the point of view of a first-person plural narrator—the we of the first sentence. Stories related from this vantage point—notoriously hard to pull off—generally fall into one of two camps. The story may be lyrical and elegiac, invoking the pleasurably blurred ego boundaries of lovers or children; think of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven or Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides. Alternately, the narrating we suggests mob violence and militarized groupthink, as in Donald Barthelme’s “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby.” “Last Cottage” falls in the latter camp. That is, a group of townspeople tell of their progressively more violent harassment of the Larsons, owners of the titular summer cottage.
These narrators are poor and desperate. They believe the Larsons’ property, the last on the lake, stands in the way of their little town’s economic development. The Larsons, on the other hand, are pleasant and well-off, blessed with the luxury of innocence. They suspect nothing, and that is their undoing. Here, we find ourselves unsure of our sympathies. Don’t we, too, resent those who have more than we do? Don’t we, too, hate the Larsons, just a little, for not knowing they are despised? Yet Merkner refuses us the comfort of easy allegiances. Far from the smug rich folk we might imagine, the Larsons are resourceful and uncomplaining. They greet each of the indignities visited upon them by the townspeople with pragmatic good cheer. They are better people than these locals, are they not?
The pleasures of “Last Cottage” are not all cerebral. Mention must be made of the sheer wonderful weirdness of the storytelling—which includes a quantity of dead fish and some highly unusual lovemaking—and the beauty of the writing. We learn, for example, that “the locusts were scorching the ears of the trees” on the Larsons’ property, an image made more resonant by the eavesdropping townsfolk Merkner conceals in the foliage.
These spies in the trees, the tellers of the tale, are classic unreliable narrators, their assertions of innocence belied by horrific acts. “Last Cottage” functions as an elaborate justification, an apologia of sorts, on the part of these storytellers. In the tale’s last lines, they define themselves by their lostness, a dispossession we’ve come to understand as spiritual as well as economic. In the end we learn who we are: monstrous victims, blinded by fury to the humanity of the perpetrator.
