The freedom of horror: "The Brothers Brujo" by Matthew Lyons

If you leave out all the uncomfortable, gory parts of "The Brothers Brujo," it's surprisingly easy to summarize. A man and his two sons live in a ramshackle home on the outskirts of town. It's not clear what town. Maybe it's the only town in the universe of this story. The three family members perform magic that is either consistent with the Afro-Latino practice of Santería or highly influenced by it. The town members are extremely hedonistic--drinking, drugging, sexing and eating themselves to death. But that's okay, because when one of them dies, their friends can bring them to the shack on the outskirts of town where the father and his two sons will revive them. As in bring them back from the dead.

The two boys are abused terribly. The whole ritual of bringing people back requires suffering on the part of the priest family, and the father isn't shy about exacting that suffering from his sons. The town needs the family, although the villagers loathe and fear the father and his sons. Meanwhile, the family needs the town's donations to eat. That is, until one of the sons comes up with a plan to kill his father and the whole town with him when they come to revive the mayor. He plans to use a deeper and older magic than his father's to do this. The other brother helps with the plot, and they both realize they are stronger than they knew.

That's it. That's the whole story.

The freedom of horror

A good horror story will frighten you, but won't tell you why you should be scared. Over-explaining what's scary about something makes it not scary anymore, the way creating midichlorions to explain the Force makes it not mysterious anymore. That means horror stories become Rorschach tests where everyone fills in for themselves what makes the story frightening.

On one level, a lot of the gut feeling of terror in this story comes from just the visceral scenes depicting the pain the family has to endure to carry out the ritual. Some passages stay with this pain for a long time:

...the old man slowly creaks to the garage, and his home-baked tattoo gun. Strips his pants off and picks out a bare spot on top of his left stump. Dips the sharp end of the rig in the ink and starts drawing. Rides the needle deep, 'til red seeps out around the wet black. He relishes the hurt, drinks it in. The ritual demands sacrifice. When it gets too much, he starts to groan and growl and then he's coming again.

The effect of these passages is like the long, continuous shots of a horror movie that lead to the inevitable jump scare. The audience wants to stop looking but can't as long as the camera doesn't break away from the needle going into the body.

So what are the scary parts, really?

We're free to read a lot of different ideas into the scary parts of the story, but here are a couple of choices that seem to leap out at me:

1) It's about American capitalism and the spiritual bankruptcy of its excesses. 

The town folk seem to be on a non-stop bender. The mayor has died "like he always does--too much crank and booze and pussy and doughnuts for his overworked heart to handle." The rest of the town doesn't seem to live much differently. Rather, they descend over and over into the "depths of vulgar infinity." At the end, the boys head into town to kill whoever is left there. They find "The wakes rumbling to rest, the townies passing out drunk and stoned for the night or maybe just dying." It's a town killing itself with its own excess.

It's the twilight of America, the story shrunk to one town on the edge of the desert. Nearly the last words of the story describe the town as "not long for this world." This might be the last town that exists before the wilderness claims it again. "Brothers" seems to urge us pretty insistently to read it in an American context. Even though the Santería practiced by the boys and their father comes from Africa, the father thinks of it as "American magic," which is "brutal, and ugly, and messy, but goddamn it fuckin' works." One of the sons has his own kind of magic, which is a Henry .45-70 Government rifle. It's hard not to see this as American. When the townies try to escape the ritual when it turns against them, this son uses the rifle for "crowd control," and the America that loves its guns is hoisted on its own petard.

In this reading, capitalism has run its secular course, devoid of any sense of a  spirit to animate it. The brutal but spiritual world of Santería is there to destroy it and inherit the world from it.

Fun fact: this is a photo of a voodoo Halloween costume. Like this story, it's a bit of a commodification of Santería.

2) It's about a culture that's out of artistic ideas.

The town's need for the priest and his kids--even while they mistrust them--can be seen as echoing a culture that has become so materialistic it cannot make art to sustain itself any more without coming to raid the pre-capitalist religion. It both mocks this religion for its primitivism and also relies on it as the only source of ideas for an aesthetically bankrupt culture. But primitivism, it turns out, is a double-edged sword. "Real magic," the people will discover when they ascend to the temple, is "so much better and so much worse" than they have imagined:

The truth is that magic's a beast, enormous and lumbering and starving. It's powerful, and it's violent, and it makes a fuck-awful mess that people don't want to see, or if they see, don't want to remember. 

While the father has been content to keep giving himself to magic on behalf of the people from town (and he's given three-fourths of his body to them already, having lost an arm and two legs in Vietnam), the boys have bigger plans. Why keep taking the dregs from the table of civilization when you can just take over the whole thing from them?

A word about the Santería roots of this story

Three names are right out of the canon of Santeria.  The younger son is Changó, who is kind of the Thor of Santería. The father's name is Agaju, who, fittingly, is known for being the father of Changó in Santería mythology. He's not known for much else. Changó's brother Leonel calls his rifle Ochosi, who is a hunter in Santería.

We never actually are told directly that Changó's name is Changó. His father calls him "Skeet," as in the thing you shoot. But that's because the father fears the boy's real name, as he fears the boy's connection to an older, more dangerous magic than even Agaju knows. The boy spells out four of the letters of his name on the shower and notes there are "two more," which allows those with ears to hear (or those with Google to find). I found it a little hammy. Why this coy game with the reader to see who gets the references?

The problem for the story is that the same critique of Western civilization as out of ideas and bereft of spirituality such that it needs to look to exotic religions can be turned on the story itself. It's easy to throw some references to Santería or something else not totally familiar to Westerners into a story and have it be mistaken for depth. It's the kind of pilfering of native American beliefs Jim Morrison did that so incensed characters in a couple of Sherman Alexie stories.

In fact, the big climax is prefaced by the most explain-y passage of the story, a long sidetrip into how people who witness "real magic" compartmentalize it because it breaks their brains. It's the least magical part of this magical story.

"Brothers" probably insulates itself enough through critiquing this false appeal to the exotic that it can escape with some of its dignity intact, but it does not get away altogether unscathed. I don't understand why it keeps doing this "Do you get it? Do you get it?" referencing to its source material throughout the story. It's a little tiring, and there are points where it seems the story didn't have much life of its own, so it had to coast on the inertia from native religions (and American ignorance of those religions, which will inevitably be filled in by assuming everything is mysterious and awe-inspiring). Ultimately, the story feels like a horror movie that is full of inventive and memorable cinematography, but which struggles here and there with story line.

And now, since if you've made it this far, there's a good chance this song is stuck in your head, I'll provide it for you here to make it easy: