Sofia Ajram (Laurence Philomene)

“The atmosphere is smoky grey. Dark. Penumbra almost-dusk, but stripped of any colour,” writes Sofia Ajram in an early description of an endless, eldritch subway station. “Seemingly small, it unravels into a boundless labyrinth with no way out but through.”

The narrator, Vicken, rides the Montreal Metro on his way to the beach, where he plans to drown himself in the St. Lawrence River. At the end of the line, he disembarks but soon finds himself in a subway terminal with no exit and where no more trains are either arriving or leaving. Growing increasingly distressed, Vicken wanders through an ever-expanding labyrinth of rooms and impossibly open concrete vistas.

Coup de Grâce is an ambitious debut, both in concept and prose style. Paradoxically, because of the conceit of the endless Metro station, its plot is tightly contained even as the setting sprawls forever outward. The premise borrows liberally from Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, as well as concepts from creepypasta (horror stories shared online) such as the Backrooms, and the video games The Exit 8 and P.T. The intertextuality doesn’t end there, and the novella can be seen as a literary work born of the internet as it bounces between ideas, references, and concepts with the frenetic energy of someone surfing the net. 

While nowhere near as formally experimental or bizarre as Danielewski’s opus, Ajram’s novella successfully marries theme to form and takes some wonderfully wild leaps in the latter third of the work. The first half is purposely weighted down with dense, looping, lyrical sentences, while the climax comes racing forward, confronting the reader with Vicken’s growing distress as well as their own role as an observer of Vicken’s story. In the closing pages, Ajram leans more aggressively into metatextual experimentation, making the reader question their complicity in Vicken’s fate.

Liminal spaces abound, as does the interplay of opposites. The novella is set in a sprawling subway station, but the text itself is only 144 pages. Vicken is driven to suicide by the dull drudgery of depression and the Kafkaesque effort of trying to access mental health care in Canada, yet his narration explodes into a manic panoply of literary and internet references. And through Vicken, Ajram points to the painful hope and desire for life that remains within someone who has decided to end their own life. As he contemplates the inspiration for his chosen method of death, Vicken tells of a man in London: “When they finally recovered his bloated white body, belly full of rocks, there was an unused train ticket in his pocket. A return ticket to London. He must’ve held the choice until the very end.” Although it may seem a paradox, even someone who has resigned themselves to suicide can still long for life, can be fearful of some ray of hope that will shatter their resolve or give them just enough strength to hold on a little longer. Depression, as it is described here, is itself a liminal state: living but not alive.

Ajram is daring and ambitious to choose to write a fiction entirely around the concept of suicide. Vicken’s experience is treated with surprising tenderness and empathy. While there are certainly moments of terror and gross-out gore, the real horror in this novella is the window it grants on an experience of depression and how it might feel to see death as the only way out. It is a horror of deep feeling: beautiful and terrifying.