Life > April 24, 2008

By Ellen Hart | Staff writer

It is rare that a book will shake me and milk every bit of me for all I am worth. Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem’s recent creation, The Man on the Ceiling, came dangerously close to achieving that.

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The Tems explore the meanings and possibilities of story, time, imagination, love, death and healing with a series of surreal vignettes that very seldom resemble a conventional plot. The book is a reworking of their 2000 World Fantasy and Bram Stoker award-winning same-titled novella.

The novel is a largely episodic, partially autobiographical account of a family that can be described as both dysfunctional and cohesive but bound together by devoted love.

Much of the novel focuses on the author’s children: Chris, Veronica, Gabriella, Joe and Anthony – all adopted from abusive and broken homes.

They are described in magnificent and uncomfortable detail.

In reading, they almost became my own children as well, so deeply did I grow to care and worry about them.

The Man on the Ceiling, reputedly a memoir, is a disturbing and beautiful mixture of dark fantasy and real-life accounts.

Based on the award-winning novella of the same name, the Tems’ novel re-incorporates the metaphorical (perhaps) man on the ceiling, who continues to return throughout the book in the dreams of the authors to shake the life of their family, for good or bad.

Ironically dubbed an angel by Steve and Melanie, he is, no doubt, the stuff of nightmares.

The narrative jumps from place to place and time to time constantly, exploring memories and imaginings, telling of the immortality of these experiences in the minds of each of the characters.

Despite these jolting narrative departures, the reader is always taken back to a haunted house in Denver, filled with scarred children, heartfelt memories and the infamous man on the ceiling, a frightening, nocturnal shadow-figure who seems to be a manifestation of mortality and fate.

The writing style is stream of consciousness, shamelessly personal and metaphorical.

The Tems write as if they are speaking to you, telling a story before a warming hearth and enveloping you so deeply within their tale you forget you’re reading a book and imagine instead you are living the tales.

You are there on the roof talking to Chris, whose drug addictions threaten to destroy his life, or led to embrace a little child’s budding artistry as you watch her draw an amazing picture of a cat shaped as a heart.

Or, as the authors come back to again and again, you are mourning the death of a child that cannot be assuaged by any explanation.

Despite the skill and pathos of their writing, I couldn’t help but feel that they could probably have cut at least 200 pages from the 384-page-book. The first 150 pages were inspirational and gripping, but the novel became repetitive after a while. The magic that I loved about the writing and stories and imagination dwindled to a mere “been there, done that” monotony.

The Tams insist that everything they tell you is true. This is stated several times throughout The Man on the Ceiling, and the more you read these unbelievable tales of magic and the ethereal, the more this statement begins to take on a different meaning.

The events may not be factual, but, again, the honesty and resonance in every word is unprecedented.

I admire the courage it must have taken to publish these innermost thoughts and fears for all the world to see.

According to the authors, they write in the horror genre because they want to know, explore and embrace the fears of humanity.

The Man on the Ceiling accomplishes their goal powerfully.

“Once upon a time,” Steve says at the end of the book, “Once upon a time we get so close, we get so close. That’s the mystery of it, the romance and the fantasy, the horror.”