TL;DR: Perfect Black is cosmic horror that comes in through a backyard shed and goes to work on a family. Wolfgang builds his dread out of forgetting: a father who cannot place his wife, a son who cannot place his own passport, a black that gives back no light. The cult explains too much. The shed alone is worth the price.

The first thing Henry Witcher makes after a year of making nothing is a shed. Ten feet square, lacquered the color of a saddle, handcut shutters on the windows, and his wife stands in the dead October grass of an Oklahoma City backyard and thinks that if he never paints again he could have a future in carpentry. Then she tries the door. He has put a lock on it. Three nights later she beats the lock off with a rubber mallet, and the inside of the shed has been painted a black with nothing behind it, and on the floor lie a dozen Polaroids of paintings that are not in the shed, and on one of them, in his hand, are the two words of the title with a question mark after them. That is the book’s first monster. It is a shed. Wolfgang knows what the imitators of Lovecraft never learned, that the door matters more than what comes through it, and his is a pile of two by fours bought by a man who could not sleep.

Witcher is the one painter Oklahoma City ever produced that the world came to see, and for a year his brain has emptied whenever he lifts a brush. His wife Robin is a nurse on twelve hour shifts who scrubs the vomit out of her last pair of scrubs and puts them on half dry. Their daughter Lily is sixteen and paints and wears black lipstick and tells her father at his own show that he could do better than the canvas in the place of honor, which is not his. Their son Adam is twelve and inks superheroes and has drawn a beard onto his hero the Blue Bomber because the Bomber’s face kept coming out looking like his father’s. In the alley behind the gallery Henry asks his wife of seventeen years whether he knows her. On a mountaintop in the Wichitas he backs away from a man climbing the side of the mountain who is not there. And there is an email from something that signs itself BTIS and would like to help him understand what is happening to him.

That is the first third and it is domestic horror of a high order, because Wolfgang renders the rot of a man from the outside only, in the wet cold press of his lips on his wife’s cheek, in a voice his daughter hears across a dark patio at two in the morning and takes for an impression of her father good enough to pass with someone who knew him casually. The set piece is a live drawing contest at the comic convention, into which Henry enters his son by the wrist, the model a woman in the gold bikini of Princess Leia who will also serve as judge, the father standing behind the boy’s chair coaching him aloud. Her chin doesn’t jut out that much. Her chest isn’t that concave. The boy throws his clipboard on the floor with five minutes left and goes home and tears up every goddamned drawing he brought.

Four newspaper clippings carry the reader across ten years, missing, tribute show, declared dead, and the daughter, now a painter in Chelsea, coming home to the same gallery to unveil a canvas called The Waste Land. What is under the sheet is not what she painted. It is black, a black that gives back no light, and she takes a box cutter to it. Her brother tends bar and has failed the drug test for the fire academy. Her mother is sober. The three of them have managed a few minutes of talk in a year, most of it through her agent, and the first thing the daughter says at the reunion dinner is that she wants to know where her mother went the night her father left.

The horror that follows is a horror of forgetting, and it is Wolfgang’s best instrument. The people in this book lose their names, not their memories but their names, and he stages it small. A woman on a beach in Barcelona lets sand run through her fingers and wonders how the grains can be sure of the beach they belong to. A man on a hostel patio in Madrid is asked where he is from and the answer is nowhere to be found, and the passport in his pocket claims to know. Whatever is calling them sends figures, las obras the Spanish cultists call them, the works, shapes of black and white static that stand among the trees of the Retiro after midnight, where the park has gone as dark as a desert, or that fold inward on a sidewalk like a black hole taking back a man in rags with the teeth of a lamprey. And it has been calling a long time. There are Polaroids in a Madrid squat of a cave wall eight thousand years old, and there is a room in the Prado where an old deaf man’s paintings, done on the plaster of his own house with no buyer in mind, show a procession of pilgrims with their mouths hanging open, and the novel’s prelude, in which an old court painter watches the figures on his wall begin to move, is that room with the lights off. The book does not say Goya crossed. It says the line was ringing in that house and he picked up.

The finest thread in it is a lesson. On the mountain the father tells the boy to mix his colors less, to dab rather than stroke, that a little heterogeneity adds an organic quality, and the boy does as he is told without knowing the word. Twelve years on, in his sister’s old bedroom, painting the figures from his dreams onto a smokeyellowed canvas, he cannot make them move until the word comes back to him. The father’s one useful lesson is the one that opens the door. Wolfgang never remarks on this. He sets it down and moves on, the surest sign in the book that he knows what he has.

Alex Wolfgang is from Oklahoma, and this is his first novel. Before it there was a collection, Splinter and Other Stories, in 2020, and stories in the HOWL Society’s Howls From Hell, in Bloodlines: Four Tales of Familial Fear, in Nosetouch’s third Fiends in the Furrows, and in an anthology called Collage Macabre: An Exhibition of Art Horror, which is the shelf this book belongs on. He hosts and narrates the Cosmic Goblins podcast. He has said he came to the genre through Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always and Goosebumps, and that the obsession took hold when he found Ligotti and Laird Barron in 2016, and both are in this book, Ligotti in the puppet strings, Barron in the granite. It arrives from a small press called Witch Wolf Media, dedicated to anyone who makes art just for the hell of it, and the dedication is loadbearing.

The sentences are not the reason to read it. Wolfgang writes plain and now and then plainer than he means to, hearts pound in eardrums, blood boils, minds go a million miles away, and the images carry what the sentences will not. The cult explains itself. Diego, a Spaniard who appears on a beach at the exact square of sand where a woman is losing her mind and has all the answers, talks like a pamphlet, and the book knows it, the brother calls it art school bullshit, and lets him talk anyway, twice, at length. The three viewpoints each take a turn at the amnesia and by the fourth or fifth forgetting the trick shows its wiring. A drugging in a Lisbon nightclub, mirrors that are there and then are not, is the least frightening passage in the book, because a man who cannot trust a mirror is worse company sober. The thing beyond the paint has been recruiting since the Paleolithic. It does so by email. It has an acronym, and the acronym fits on a business card.

The last movement goes where the title has been pointing, at a run, and it resolves more than it haunts. But what the thing wants is not what its congregation preaches, and the book’s cosmology is smaller and sadder than any of its cultists could bear to hear, and that lifts it off the shelf of novels where a black canvas opens onto tentacles. At its widest the book is about the oldest bargain in the trade, the one in which a man is offered greatness and asked in return for the small matter of himself, and this novel is on the side of the ones who said no. It is on the side of the bartender and the girl with the accounting degree and the nurse who took a painting class for a minor a hundred years ago and let it go because she had married a master of the form. It ends warmer than a book this dark has any right to, and the warmth is not an apology.

The title appears once inside the book, in the vanished man’s hand on the back of a Polaroid, with a question mark after it. He wanted to know if he had found the color. The shed says he had. So does the canvas under the sheet, and the sand running out of a woman’s fingers on a beach, and the passport in a man’s pocket that knows his face better than he does.