Peter Cameron is an American author who has fallen somewhat out of focus in this country.

The sixty-two-year-old was reliably translated into German by 2012 and published by Knaus Verlag, but his new book "What Happens at Night", published in the United States in 2020, no longer made it into the program of that publisher, which after the great concentration process at Munich-based book group Random House is now bundling the numerous previously independent programs: Penguin.

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

  • Follow I follow

It was not to be expected that the takeover of the world-famous English publishing name would also be at the expense of an English-speaking author for the lion's share of the group's more demanding German books - even if Cameron is less known as an author in his home country than in Europe.

But that didn't prevent his latest novel from being published by the New York publisher Catapult, which even belongs to Random House.

It didn't help Cameron.

On the other hand, his local audience is helped by the fact that the publishing house Liebeskind has now gotten a chance in Germany.

She can congratulate herself on that.

“What happens in the night” – as the title of the novel reads here, which is rhythmically and semantically clumsy in contrast to the rest of the text – is a genre work for which there should be great interest.

The book can be described as gothic literature by an archaic term, but there is nothing archaic about it itself apart from this literary-historical inheritance.

Cameron and his translator Werner Loecher-Lawrence, who is used here for the first time with this author, consistently use the great tradition of English, but also German-speaking authors in this field, to tell a story that is uncanny in the best sense of the word.

It offers romantic motifs,

A couple drives into the Nordic night out of desperation

An unnamed American couple is traveling by train to the far north-east of Europe – whether in Sweden, Finland or Russia, Cameron leaves open;

there are indicators for all three countries, but the best way to imagine the finally reached town with the tongue-twisting name Borgarfjaroasysla is the epitome of no man's land.

In the “Grand Imperial Hotel” there, nothing but failures gather who can only hope for something like a future here on the – pardon me – ass of the world.

The middle-aged American couple want to adopt a son at the local orphanage after their own children failed to materialize and the wife fell ill, which rules out an adoption in the United States.

If she died as expected, at least he would have the boy.

But in the long nights and short days of the Nordic wasteland, both of them meet a man who changes the way they see themselves: the woman, a local healer who makes her think about recovery again, the man, a Dutch businessman who offers him homosexual advances power.

There is also a former actress who now works at the hotel and sees the two new guests as a welcome goal in her life-wisdom imparting.

Incidentally, Cameron does give names to all of this staff beyond its main characters, but this is precisely what makes the anonymity of the two spouses a symbol of their self-search.

The hotel from The Shining is nothing compared to the Grand Imperial of this novel

The main location in the hotel is even more symbolic.

The "Overlook" from Stephen King's "Shining" is nothing compared to the "Grand Imperial" - not because it would be more lonely here (there are guests after all), but because this house, as a prototypical old European institution in terms of equipment and staff, is a gothic Conjuring up a feeling not to be had in the Colorado setting of The Shining: "All the doors of this house were rescued from the original Khedival Opera House in Cairo.

They are historical objects certified by UNESCO,” says the craziest passage in the book, which also evokes a pharaoh's curse, because what else should come out of an ancient Egyptian building.

The lostness of the married couple from the United States in the unpredictability of the Old World can also be made particularly believable in that region of our continent that, as a result of the Ukraine war, is again conjuring up the worst of what creepy readers living far away in idyllic conditions could imagine under European conditions .

Bram Stoker did it no differently 125 years ago with his “Dracula” novel, which was set in what was then a permanent crisis area in south-eastern Europe.

And if we're honest, this recipe also serves our own clichés in the best possible way.

Who wouldn't want literature to confirm their beliefs?

Now, when Peter Cameron wrote “What Happens During the Night”, he could not have known what current associations would come up now that the book has been published in German.

All the more remarkable is the skill with which he creates a horror that never becomes explicit, but rather arises entirely from the mood.

The uncertainty created by not using quotation marks in the numerous passages of dialogue, as authorial narration and literal speech interpenetrate and contaminate each other, contributes decisively to the impression that what is happening is never entirely clear.

And when, at the end, only one half of the couple emerges from the darkness into which the couple plunged at the beginning of the storyline, the feeling of relief is about as great as at the end of Roman Polanski's film "Dance of the Vampires".

Peter Cameron: "What Happens in the Night".

Novel.


Translated from the English by Werner Loecher-Lawrence.

Verlagsbuchhandlung Liebeskind, Munich 2022. 272 ​​p., hard copy, €24.