[Not a rigorous review so much as a set of impressions.]

The stories in Matt Briggs’ collection The Moss Gatherers (Stringtown Press 2005) aren’t actually ghost stories, but they suggest the genre because so many of his characters’ lives are built around the absence or invisible presence of some particular person. There are sons living in the shadows of estranged fathers, and husbands and wives struggling to see themselves as they once were or as they were seen by some long gone lover. In the chilling story “Randy,” an unseen cult leader delivers cruel instructions to his followers, destroying a community miles away and across state lines because he has become the guiding force of so many lives. All of these stories take place in a brooding, mossy northwestern United States, in cities and towns and family homes as creepy and murky as the wilderness that surrounds them, enriching the aura of loss and decay.

In the title story, a sister and brother travel from their French home to Oregon to claim the body of another brother who has been murdered while on a cycling tour. No attacker has been found, but the local police are content to blame “moss gatherers” who lurk in the wild according to local legend, allowing the community a way to look outward for a scapegoat rather than consider the possibility of a murderer among them, and so long as the moss gatherers remain unseen there’s no need to doubt the status quo. Neither the life lived by the lost brother or that of his rumored killer makes much sense to the mourning siblings, try as they might to retrace the cyclist’s route on the western frontier. Before learning of the murder, in fact, while her wandering brother has only been out of touch for a longer than usual time, his sister wonders from the comfort of France

How dangerous could America be, the American West? Not very dangerous, really. It was a built up country. Despite the movies and the Associated Press which promised backwoods rapists, two men kidnapping a trail jogger and keeping her as their wife, two naked women escaping a backyard bunker in New Mexico where they’d been kept as sex slaves, the place couldn’t really be that bad. Sensational news was a global epidemic. Jaq, though, was further west than New Mexico. Jaq was on the Pacific Coast, in Oregon. The name itself conjured to his sister in Grenoble a place beyond a place, some place too far even to think about.

In this story and many of the others, the American West is both a promise and a portent of doom. Briggs’ northwest is a region of ghosts because the past and the present are inseparable in towns where misty light allows old women to be mistaken for teenaged girls lost too young as it does in “Snoqualmie.” In that story a young man is left behind by the deaths of his parents to live alone in a downtown apartment surrounded by old men who “recalled bitter, past winters with nostalgia and often debated about the location of buildings and roads that had vanished long ago,” and watched over by a landlady in whose apartment “the walls of the entire room were images of other places, places he’d been, he realized, but with things distorted, missing, added, recombined.” Like ghosts, these characters and their homes exist in the present while defining themselves through the past, their promise and possibility behind them even as they live on. Like them, the American West is a region first defined by an idyllic future envisioned in a decades-old past, which might make the presence of ghosts — literal or figurative — both the most potent of fears and an inevitable consequence of living in the past and the present at once.

It’s hard, reading these stories, not to think of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion, with its Stamper family driven by decades of wanderlust all the way west only to fester and rot on the Oregon coast once they’ve finally been forced to sit still. Brigg’s characters are rarely as bleak or irredeemable as Kesey’s Stampers, but there’s a similar sense of unfulfilled promise tinged with a lingering optimism that treats eventual success like something owed and assumed. That similarity also makes me want to return to Briggs’ novel Shoot The Buffalo, with it’s own Oregon family haunted by loss yet hellbent on doing things their own way, since I read that book before both The Moss Gatherers and Sometimes A Great Notion.