The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld
Speculative fiction
When I was young, I was plagued by nightmares. (Being sexually abused will do that to a toddler.)
My bedroom door protected me at home; I was safe behind my door. But beyond that physical barrier, monsters seemed to be everywhere. So I built doors in my mind behind which I hid from those monsters.
I was very good at hiding, could stay so quiet the monsters couldn't ever hear my breath or my heart in the silence. Eventually, I stayed hidden, locked behind one door or another.
Behind that door, I lost my voice, and my heart.
[D]oors made of wishes are stronger than steel. — Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted
Though I had built all those damn doors, I never really felt safe, so I built more and more and more doors. There was always a reason to stay quiet, a reason to remain passive and unemotional. There was always a reason to remain detached.
My wish for safety became an emotionless life of wasted potential.
When my now-partner flung open my doors to let in air so I could breathe again, it was painful in the best way.
But even he couldn’t break down all my doors for me; some were too strong for him. I had to peel open an important door to find the light again, to see the shape of my own heart, to dream.
Now, I sleep with the bedroom door wide open.
I don’t recall how The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld wound up on my TBR, but this novel hit me hard. And though I’ve broken down the doors I had built up so long ago, I remember the weight of those doors, the sounds they made when they slammed shut, and the cold that followed.
The Enchanted is not for the easily triggered or faint of heart, but it is a beautifully wrought tragic tale, a story of hardened criminals in prison marching toward death.
If you’ve ever been trapped in a prison of your own creation marching toward your spiritual death, you’ll recognize these places, these people, the hope and longing and dread and fear and enchantment all tangled together in crude humanity.
Here are additional selected quotes and some brief reflections:
The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but always had room to be read again. I became fascinated with how writers did that. How did they make a story feel so complete and yet so open-ended? It was like painting a picture that changed each time you looked at it.
I probably don’t need to justify to you why writing and writers are so magical, how stories mean something different to us each time we read them, how they seem to provide the most needed lesson of the moment. For much of my life, I turned to books to escape my reality and dream of a better one, to explore worlds, and people, and circumstances. I turned to books to best understand myself, ever-changing, over time.
*
A prison is a place without history.
I think I read and re-read this line ten times, fully arrested by it. Of course, there are many famous prisons with sordid histories. Alcatraz Island comes to mind. Devil’s Island, Elmina Castle, and the Tower of London, too. But the prison of which the narrator speaks is not a place but a feeling. A sense of detachment, where time has no meaning, where names don’t matter.
Oddly, the movie Memento comes to mind. If you’re not familiar with it, a man with a short-term memory loss attempts to find the person who killed his wife, the last memory he has. And he must leave himself notes (lest he forget his research) which he must then be decipher for himself the next day. But there’s no satisfying conclusion because the film remains open-ended. All that’s left are questions.
*
Later I read that there are things inside us too tiny to see. Not even a microscope can capture them. This got me thinking—if there are things inside us too tiny to see, might there be things outside us too big to believe?
Yes, there are things outside us too big to believe. That’s all I will say about it.
*
It was [at the STATE HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE] they said I had selective mutism and a bunch of other words like antisocial and conduct and disorder. I didn’t agree with those words and I still don’t. People try to make names for things they don’t understand. They want to contain people in jars like dead babies.
I’ve been open about my thoughts on the pathologizing of the human condition (Enter Madness, Cognitive Dissonance and Rampant Addiction, and Time Travel and God’s Black Cube.), so I won’t spend too much time rehashing my thoughts here. But I, too, dislike the idea of a person being “disordered,” which is clever allopath speak for “not the way I want them to be.”
There are very many people in prison or who are otherwise institutionalized because they are seen as “abnormal” or “disordered,” though they’ve never harmed themselves or others. This is a modern tragedy.
*
Ideas are powerful things; we should take more care with them. I know there are some who would disagree—those who think ideas are like food they can taste and then spit out if they don’t like it. But ideas are stronger than that. You can get a taste of an idea inside you, and the next thing you know, it won’t leave. Unless you do something about it.
Just as the self-improvement experts rightly talk about taking action to manifest, having an idea is only one piece of the transformative experience. You must also put action behind the idea, to develop it, know it, and shape it. You must take that idea and turn it into something, lest it be left to fester and rot in your mind. And that is the worst thing that can happen to a good idea.
If you're easily triggered or offended, grossed out by graphic imagery of truly horrifying circumstances and the doings of criminals who can only be described as evil, this will be an incredibly difficult novel to get through. But if you can put away your gross-out factor long enough to read the story, you will realize the beauty of this fiction. Denfeld manages something profound in these pages. And though her work may be difficult to read, I know I will seek out more of it for the sheer rapture of it.
If you’ve read this novel and saved similar quotes, I’d love to hear your takes. Similarly, I’d love for you to share other quotes from the book I didn’t offer here with your musings.
<3 Fal
Good read Fallon!