🎃 What I Am Reading for Halloween: "Frankenstein in Baghdad" by Ahmed Saadawi

I am a big Halloween fan, but after college there aren't many opportunities for Halloween parties and the like. Instead, I celebrate the season by spending October reading horror novels, after building up a list for most of the year (I also usually scratch the itch a bit in the spring, the calendrical antipode of Halloween; this year that was with the Matt Wesolowski Six Stories series, and some short stories from a book called Lost Films).

My first novel this year came late to the list. I admit that I am not well-equipped to judge this novel because I have never read Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. The novel only contains a few explicit allusions to the original, and so any implicit allusions may have escaped me.

In any event, the novel's main topic is the cycle of violence and revenge that drives sectarian conflict in Iraq. The monster, "Whatsitsname," is created by an unstable and disreputable local junk dealer out of the parts of other corpses, mostly those dismembered in explosions, with the vague idea that this will allow for a proper burial for these corpses. Supernaturally speaking, this is the right idea, as spirits are shown to be unable to rest without a burial. One of these spirits, of a hotel guard killed during a truck bombing, comes to inhabit the corpse.

The monster then comes to be embroiled in the novel's most poignant subplot when an elderly Assyrian Christian woman, Elishva (neighbor of Hadi, the junk dealer) comes to believe that the monster is her son, Daniel, who was press-ganged into serving in the Iran-Iraq war twenty years earlier and never returned . The monster takes refuge with her at some points.

In the meantime, the bulk of the plot evolves in a single chapter, related through a story the monster records for Mahmoud, a local journalist (another main subplot involves Mahmoud emulating his charismatic boss at the magazine while learning of his shady dealings). The monster recounts that he attracts several disciples to him, upon discovering that his purpose is to avenge the deaths of his constituent parts. After a death is avenged, the relevant parts proceed to rot away, and his disciples (forming different, ever-growing factions) replace them with new parts, thus bringing new urges to kill. Eventually, his small army tears itself apart over ideological disputes, but not before the monster has come to be made up, he believes, of parts from petty criminals. He comes to reason that everyone is partially innocent and partially guilty of crimes, which abets him in continuing his killing spree.

In the meantime, a general, Sorour Mohamed Majid, heads the Tracking and Pursuit Department, a unit employing supernatural methods to advance the government's agenda, in a bit of an Urban Fantasy touch. Mostly the group employs astrologers, who become involved in their own low-key conflict when the general turns his focus primarily to pursuing Whatsitsname, a growing urban legend in the city. This subplot and Mahmoud's subplot resolve themselves (in the downfall of their protagonists), but Whatsitsname is still at large at the conclusion of the book, stoically pursuing his agenda. This makes sense, as the sectarian violence doesn't have the second half of a story arc, and is instead an ever-present fact of life. Meanwhile, Elishva's family does convince her to leave the city after deploying her grandson, a look-alike of her disappeared son, to convince her; so this sad story about the memory of the disappeared has something of a happy ending. Beyond that, as someone who understands the drive for revenge, there was some of that satisfaction in the story as well.

Did It Scare Me?

I didn't find this book to be particularly chilling, as I was mainly engaged in Understanding Its Subtext. The interventions of the police were sinister, but Mahmoud's boss did not turn out to be engrossed in a dangerous conspiracy as I expected for a bit, only in corrupt dealings. If anything, the book hits hardest with the body horror, including some of Whatsitsname's killings and especially the details of his rotting, oozing body.