Like Moby Dick, a novel that everyone's knows about and that they all have the wrong idea about. Everyone knows that Wuthering Heights is a romance surrounding the dark and "Byronic" (more on this later) Heathcliff and... some woman. Cathy, as it turns out. Unfortunately, not as iconic a name as Heathcliff and shared with the comic strip secretary who loves saying "Ack!". The romance, the idea goes, is a bit hot and heavy, perhaps even bordering on the salacious, but this only adds some spice to the affair.

But it's not that. It's a surreal nightmare. The closest thing I can think of is Beckett's Endgame or Francis Bacon (the painter) in its relentless brutality and surrealism. And it is surreal. Bronte's world seems to lack all spatial coherence. There are two houses, absolute and eternal: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Between them is a hazy and misty interzone, a "liminal space" to use a fashionable term, where nothing exists but is yet full of peril and wonder. In this Pale there is a church somewhere and a market, but nothing is know about them nor do they exist in a meaningful way. London is mentioned. The houses are almost oppressive in their reality, like two enormous bunkers in a post-apocalyptic world.

Heathcliff is a supernatural figure. His exact physical stature is indeterminate, growing and shrinking as the occasion sees fit. He materializes through the fog, though in one scene he is not seen, only heard over a wall. He belongs nowhere and is from nowhere, a Victorian Anton Chigurh. Like a vampire, he is granted occult powers when invited into homes, whence he cannot be easily gotten rid of. Those who yield to him or do him favors are cursed. The object of his obsession, Cathy the First, is a horrifying elf, all madness and prophecy, fragile and dangerous as a piece of broken glass. Her descent into a mass of frayed nerves is a nightmare to watch. Her brother, Hindley, is slowly turned into a re-animated corpse, a zombie, whom we are relieved to see die and put out of his misery. But the real grotesque — my favorite! — is little Linton. A mewling and diseased child, weak and cruel, fawning and sadistic. I imagine him looking like Paul Reubens' Gerhardt Hapsburg from 30 Rock. You cannot wait for him to die. There's a particularly nasty scene of him just idly sucking a sweet and... Ugh! It's masterful, like Cronenberg's Fly.

And in these houses, what do people do? They torture each other. The young Hindley and Edgar torture young Heathcliff, Cathy the First tortures Heathcliff, Heathcliff tortures Hindley and Cathy, and so on, down to the very end! Cathy Two and Hareton, the end point of all this incestuous marrying and fucking and torturing, first come to love each other through brutalizing each other. It is overwhelming in its brutality, the kind of thing that made me hesitate to pick up this book at times. This is the hard stuff, not to be imbibed too quickly. I, purveyor of 20th and 21st century gore and violence, of internet trash, of Japanese horror, was pleasantly surprised that this could still shock me. Corpse fucking, a grown man beating a child and calling her a "slut"... It's all pretty heavy.

So where's the romance? I don't fucking know. But I'm a sunny child of the tropics. The Brontes (haven't read Anne yet but guessing she isn't an exception) and the rest of the Victorian Death Worshippers are on the opposite side of the globe from me. They loved death. They were obsessed by it. That shit was in the air back then: Sorrows of Young Werther, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Schubert's "Death and the Maiden"... Death, death, death. And in that sense perhaps it is romantic: Death personified as the ultimate lover.

An aside: One glaring exception to this Victorian sickness is the man who, unfortunately, was turned into a walking stereotype by these same death-worshippers: Lord Byron. Dark and brooding seems to be synonymous with "Byronic." Apparently this is due to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron's first and biggest hit. I haven't read it, but I have read a lot of Byron nd I just don't see it. Byron is the picture of health. He loves swimming, nature, fucking, boxing, eating... He had a dog, Boatswain, whom he adored. And he's funny! He's hilarious, in fact. Byron, in other words, is the consummate Lover of Life. That's what "Don Juan" is all about. Byron wanted more life, more experience. He hated his contemporaries for their insularity, wishing they'd "change their lakes for oceans." He was a champion of the oppressed, standing up for the Irish and the Greeks. So there's nothing "Byronic" about Heathcliff. He's entirely the product of the sick Victorian mind, the same mind which demonized Byron.

So it's a sick, sick book. A deeply unhealthy and mentally unstable book. Truly the work of a shut-in genius weirdo. In other words, it's awesome. Despite me being more on Byron's side of the whole Death v. Life debate, I enjoyed taking a stroll through this insane asylum.

Rating: 5 Spooky Skeletons