Is the idea of a crime taking place in a locked room the most primal version of the mystery novel? As a young reader, I devoured plenty of mystery stories, beginning with the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown and graduating to Agatha Christie’s novels. Lately, I’ve been exploring the world of John Dickson Carr, whose mysteries also revolve around crime scenes that defy logical explanations.
You can find something of that quality in the premise of Kyle Winkler’s novel Enter the Peerless. The Peerless referred to in the title is a trailer located in a small Midwestern town. Narrator Elpenor is a detective hired to figure out why 29 people have entered the space, with approximately zero of them ever exiting.
There’s another world in which Winkler’s novel concludes with Elpenor having a breakthrough and coming up with an ingenious solution to this particular mystery. Instead, the direction this novel heads in is very different, owing to the presence of, well, another world.
As Elpenor begins to untangle the mystery of the Peerless, he learns more about it — including that getting inside is nearly impossible. The reason for that has a decidedly strange explanation: this trailer is home to an interdimensional portal, one that takes Elpenor and two of his associates into a parallel world ruled by a demiurge figure named Fiascoal.
Fiascoal has a penchant for bonding with the souls of the humans living in this otherwise-empty world. Unfortunately, he also sees no ethical issues with transforming people who defy him into inanimate objects — usually, but not always, bicycles, which leads to a few deeply unnerving moments as one such transformed individual loses their humanity over time and becomes an object.
Enter the Peerless is grade-A Weird fiction, with imagery that follows its own logic and neatly juxtaposes the everyday with the utterly bizarre. For all that the phantasmagorical elements of this novel abound, though, Winkler has a few effective ways of keeping things focused. One of them is Elpenor himself, who has a tendency to think about past relationships and the complexities of his own life, even when he’s in another world.
The other is the way that Enter the Peerless never really stops being a detective novel, even when it takes a headlong leap into the surreal. Elpenor develops uncanny abilities while in this parallel world, while some of the people stranded there break into cults and factions; even so, Elpenor remains focused on understanding exactly what everyone is doing there, why they were transported there in the first place, and what the semi-powerful being ruling over them has in store.
I should stress here that this is not a juxtaposition of crime fiction and horror in the manner of, say, Richard Kadrey’s terrific Sandman Slim novels. In the case of Enter the Peerless, Winkler has taken an archetypal premise and stretched it until it’s nearly beyond recognition. The key is in the “nearly” of it all. In rooting this novel in a solid premise and a complex protagonist, Winkler has established a solid foundation on which he can take things in bizarre directions. It’s the literary equivalent of a rock-solid rhythm section — one that lets a guitarist solo in increasingly transcendental realms while keeping everything beatifically focused.
***
Enter the Peerless
by Kyle Winkler
From Beyond Press; 246 p.