Norman Prentiss Reads From His Novella Invisible Fences
By Michael M. Hughes

It’s June, but it feels like Halloween.

Norman Prentiss stands at a podium inside The Shoshana S. Cardin School in North Baltimore, preparing to read from his recently released novella Invisible Fences (Cemetery Dance Publications, 2010). The room is large and bright, with standard issue beige walls, fluorescent lights, and vintage posters of Orioles heroes Frank Robinson and Eddie Murray. But the black-robed, skeletal Grim Reaper hanging above Prentiss’s head hints that the story he is about to tell will fall on the darker end of the literary spectrum.

The lights lower, and Prentiss begins. “There’s an invention for today’s dog owners called an invisible fence,” he reads, laying bare the book’s central metaphor. He describes the Pavlovian system for keeping dogs from straying with carefully delivered painful shocks, then lifts his eyes from the page and gazes directly at his audience. “But it seems a bit cruel to me.”

Doctor Prentiss, as he is known to is students, teaches English at the private Jewish high school, and he looks like the stereotypical warm and fuzzy high school teacher—graying goatee, wiry glasses, mirthful eyes, and an infectious laugh. And he is warm and fuzzy, at ease and joking among the hundred or so people, including more than a handful of his students, who turned up at his reading on a warm Sunday evening. But as he continues, what unravels is a story that is anything but nice—a deeply disturbing tale of a young boy, Nathan, caught in the tight trap of his parents’ poisonous fears.

Prentiss’s voice is quiet and reserved, but enticing as much for what it withholds as what it reveals—I have a secret, and it’s not a pleasant one, and I’m going to let you in on it.

“When I was growing up, my parents invented their own kind of invisible fence for me and my sister. All parents build some version of this fence—never talk to strangers, keep close to home after sundown, that kind of thing. But my parents had a gift with words and storytelling. . .”

The only sound in the classroom is the low buzz of the air conditioning. With barely a hint of what is to come, Prentiss has built his own storytelling fence around his captive audience.

Invisible Fences comes at a time when Prentiss is gaining a significant readership and recognition (he won the 2009 Stoker Award for his short story, “In the Porches of My Ears,” which also appears in the anthology Best Horror of the Year). It’s to his credit that the psychological phantoms that emerge are more frightening than the supernatural monsters or deranged murderers found in much contemporary horror fiction. The fears caging in young Nate are horrifying because they are familiar—dope fiends lurking in our collective childhood woods, waiting to shove syringes full of corruption beneath our skin; a dark stain in the shape of a run-down kid on the street, where the cleanup crews couldn’t soak up all the blood; and the screeching jigsaw in the workshop seemingly begging for a finger to sever. When I was a kid, those phantom fiends and dismembering blades were more terrifying than any ghost, vampire, or boogeyman, and Prentiss skillfully weaves into his tale the barriers that well-meaning adults build to protect their children—and the dangerous results of fanatical over-protection.

Are the horrors within our minds real, and can they attain a form of objective reality? Can ghosts from our past take physical form, or are they phantoms of perception? Invisible Fences doesn’t offer easy answers, but instead plunges us into the disintegrating reality of the grown-up Nathan as he finds himself literally and figuratively trapped in the darkness of his past.

The reading ends with a story told by Nathan’s senile father, a gruesome metaphor for the dark secrets we try to cut away from ourselves, only to find that they always come back. Like any good reader, Prentiss leaves his fans wanting more, and as the line for signed copies stretches around the room, it’s clear they do, indeed, want to discover the rest of the macabre secrets enclosed within Invisible Fences.

Visit the product page for Invisible Fences to learn more about the book or to place your order.