"The Christmas Eves Of Aunt Elise: A Tale Of Possession In Old Grosse Pointe"
Commentary (circa 1998)
We pronounced her name with a distinct "Z" sound--Remember, Jack, remember--the way some people slur Missus into Mizzuz or Christmas say Chrizmuzz.
This tale is written as a first person narrative--Jack's memories of Christmas holidays with his Aunt Elise. Through this retrospective narrative, we learn that Jack's Aunt was a wealthy widow with no children who, while she was alive, delighted in hosting holiday family reunions at her lakeside home in Grosse Pointe, an affluent suburb of Detroit, Michigan.
The protagonist intensely dislikes the overbearing and domineering matriarch of the family, a fact illustrated by Jack as a young child balking at entering her house year after year. This distaste for his Aunt Elise seems to be linked with Jack's general dislike for family reunions and the holiday season in general, though the narrator concedes that "...there are those to whom depictions of the unusual uncles, the loveable grandparents, and the common run of cousins will always be fresh and dear; those who delight in multiple generations of characters crowding the page, who are warmed by the feeling of their paper flesh. I tell you they share these desires with my Aunt Elise, and her spirit is in them." It is clear that Jack is not one with this distinctive group of relatives.
Jack describes his Aunt's house on these occasions vividly as a "hallucinatorium in holiday dress." The descriptions emphasize the illusory (and festive with many descriptions of a chaotic array of colors) yet stagnant qualities of her house. This atmosphere, invariably covered outside with fog, reveals the narrator's claustrophobic feelings about the holidays, in which he describes a "...nightmarish sense of a ritual forever reenacted without hope of escape."
The story makes a turn when Jack relates a story told by Aunt Elise when he was twenty or twenty-one, probably on the last occasion that he attended one of her get-togethers. Jack's Aunt, who clearly is as derisive of the narrator as he is of her, tells a kind of Christmas ghost story about a local old man who was so greedy and selfish that he had his house taken apart brick by brick so that he could, in some way, take the house with him into another world.
By this point, the story (and the story within the story) takes its last transition as it turns its own reality (and Jack's) on its head. The true nature of Aunt Elise, her story, and Jack is revealed as the tale wakes into a circumstance at once hideous and blackly amusing.
As in many of Ligotti's stories, the author toys with his own tale's sense of reality. No time or place is necessarily what it seems to be in one of his stories, and "The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise" is no exception. Highly emphasized are the themes of stagnation, entrapment, and illusion, all encompassed in the claustrophobic, festive presence of the rather horribly possessive Aunt Elise.
Ligotti Comments
DL: Does Jack's distaste for the big Christmas family get-together mirror your own? If so, to what extent and why?
TL: Jack's negative attitude is a one-sided and exaggerated version of my own experience, and no doubt that of many people, with family gatherings during the holidays. At the same time I wanted to retain in that story the sense of the magical I felt during Christmastime when I was young, before I came to a view of the underlying blackness of all such magic.
Commentary (circa 1998)
We pronounced her name with a distinct "Z" sound--Remember, Jack, remember--the way some people slur Missus into Mizzuz or Christmas say Chrizmuzz.
This tale is written as a first person narrative--Jack's memories of Christmas holidays with his Aunt Elise. Through this retrospective narrative, we learn that Jack's Aunt was a wealthy widow with no children who, while she was alive, delighted in hosting holiday family reunions at her lakeside home in Grosse Pointe, an affluent suburb of Detroit, Michigan.
The protagonist intensely dislikes the overbearing and domineering matriarch of the family, a fact illustrated by Jack as a young child balking at entering her house year after year. This distaste for his Aunt Elise seems to be linked with Jack's general dislike for family reunions and the holiday season in general, though the narrator concedes that "...there are those to whom depictions of the unusual uncles, the loveable grandparents, and the common run of cousins will always be fresh and dear; those who delight in multiple generations of characters crowding the page, who are warmed by the feeling of their paper flesh. I tell you they share these desires with my Aunt Elise, and her spirit is in them." It is clear that Jack is not one with this distinctive group of relatives.
Jack describes his Aunt's house on these occasions vividly as a "hallucinatorium in holiday dress." The descriptions emphasize the illusory (and festive with many descriptions of a chaotic array of colors) yet stagnant qualities of her house. This atmosphere, invariably covered outside with fog, reveals the narrator's claustrophobic feelings about the holidays, in which he describes a "...nightmarish sense of a ritual forever reenacted without hope of escape."
The story makes a turn when Jack relates a story told by Aunt Elise when he was twenty or twenty-one, probably on the last occasion that he attended one of her get-togethers. Jack's Aunt, who clearly is as derisive of the narrator as he is of her, tells a kind of Christmas ghost story about a local old man who was so greedy and selfish that he had his house taken apart brick by brick so that he could, in some way, take the house with him into another world.
By this point, the story (and the story within the story) takes its last transition as it turns its own reality (and Jack's) on its head. The true nature of Aunt Elise, her story, and Jack is revealed as the tale wakes into a circumstance at once hideous and blackly amusing.
As in many of Ligotti's stories, the author toys with his own tale's sense of reality. No time or place is necessarily what it seems to be in one of his stories, and "The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise" is no exception. Highly emphasized are the themes of stagnation, entrapment, and illusion, all encompassed in the claustrophobic, festive presence of the rather horribly possessive Aunt Elise.
Ligotti Comments
DL: Does Jack's distaste for the big Christmas family get-together mirror your own? If so, to what extent and why?
TL: Jack's negative attitude is a one-sided and exaggerated version of my own experience, and no doubt that of many people, with family gatherings during the holidays. At the same time I wanted to retain in that story the sense of the magical I felt during Christmastime when I was young, before I came to a view of the underlying blackness of all such magic.
