The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 22: Bald and Fat and Not Rich

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One of the things I use October, and these posts, as an excuse to do is to catch up on the horror writers I grew up with, but never read. Like Thomas Tessier from the other day, there are a slew of horror writers who weren't household names when I was growing up in the 1980s, devouring Stephen King books and so forth, but whose names popped up everywhere a horror fan looked. My thinking has been, well, some of these guys must be good, right?
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Today's subject, Chet Williamson, isn't entirely alien to me, or even to this blog. Long time readers may, but almost certainly won't, remember that in 2008 I read a couple of his short short stories, in conjunction with similar stories by Steve Rasnic Tem and William F. Nolan, and that one Williamson story in particular, "The Assembly of the Dead", really struck a chord with me. And though this post wasn't really about Williamson, I did also make very favorable mention of his horror Western story "'Yore Skin's Jes's Soft 'n Purty'...He Said" at the end of this post last year. So I'm not exactly oblivious to the guy, and have read a couple more short stories outside of those mentioned above. But having liked what I've read up to now, I believe further investigation is warranted.
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And it'd be one of Williamson's novels, if I had the time, but sadly I don't, so it was back to scouring the anthologies again last night. The two Williamson stories I landed on are interesting in that they make me picture Williamson's career in terms of the classic pulp writers -- not people like Lovecraft, who only wrote one kind of story, but the guys who wrote Westerns, horror, romance, science fiction, even porn, whatever market was open that week. The difference being that Williamson is writing horror only (to my knowledge), but in my experience so far he's crossing lots of styles and subgenres within horror, as is illustrated by today's stories.
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First is "Blood Night", taken from the first of the Hot Blood anthologies edited by Jeff Gelb and various co-editors throughout the late 80s, mid 90s (or however long they lasted). These were, for lack of a better term, erotic horror anthologies, or at least so I believe was the intent. Meshing those two kinds of writing is ultimately going to shed a pretty dark light on the "erotic" part of this whole transaction, but I would still have a hard time calling "Blood Night" erotic, though it's undeniably abot sex. To each his own and all that, but the story is about Richard Bell, a single fellow who awakes one morning from an intensely sexual dream to find that not only did he apparently achieve completion while sleeping, but the dream woman who clawed his back drew real blood, as well. Not jumping to any conclusions, Bell simply marvels at his personal, slumbering vigor and goes about his day. Though it would appear from this description that "Blood Night" is going to turn out to be succubus tale, or something to do with some other type of supernatural night visitor, it's not. No, because when Bell gets to work and gets to chatting with a friend about what happened, the conversation turns towards dream control, and how a person can, supposedly, through certain planning and procedures and a lot of focus, dictate what he or she will dream about that night. So Bell decides he's going to read up on the great lovers, like Casanova and Don Juan, and let those stories and images dominate his mind while he sleeps. This works. It works really well. Then, in his ignorance, Bell moves on to De Sade.
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I appreciated, if that's the word, the De Sade section, because I feel like Williamson is playing with the popular perception of him (such as it is, these days), as personified by Bell and his expectations, and off-setting that with the reality. A reality which Bell doesn't entirely dislike, but this is a horror story, after all.
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Bell is not, nor does he become, a terrible human being -- rather, he's a guy who regards sex as a contest, and who loses all his control to this power he's suddenly located in himself. At one point, Williamson says that Bell feels "very sad", which is such a simple phrase, one you might use to describe a child, or a movie, but which can be very powerful in the right context, as it is here, because Bell's sadness is based on discovering that he harbors certain awful desires, ones he would absolutely rather not have. It's like he's become disappointed in himself, and dreads what this knowledge will mean down the line. It'll mean disaster, of course, and Williamson's ending is both surprising and a little...what? It's sort of a Twilight Zone twist, really, a stinger kind of ending, one that's a little overexplained, and maybe goofy, but I'll be damned if it doesn't also make a certain amount of sense. I mean, knowing what Bell is seeking to accomplish, and fast, at the end of the story, it seems like as good an idea as any.
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The other story, “The Return of the Neon Fireball”, surprised me by not being as pulpy as it sounded, or as “Blood Night” actually was. The title is, in fact, intended to sound like a throwback to a 1950s drive-in B movie (and an old Mickey Rooney film called The Fireball is referenced here) because the story is about Michael Price and his desire to buy, restore, and reopen The Fireball, a drive-in theater beloved in his youth (the “neon” comes from the marquee, of course). Not so much his desire, actually, but rather the fact that he goes ahead and does it – with the help of his more wealthy friend, Lenny – and the effect it all has on him. Price is a widower, and he complains to Lenny that his life isn’t fun anymore. He owns his own clothing store, but it’s nothing to him, even though he’s by no means wealthy, to sell it and funnel that money into the Fireball.
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The fact that Price is completely locked in, financially, to the success of the Fireball is not a big deal in this story – once they open, the place does pretty well. What does matter is that, on that first night, a group of kids show up driving a vintage – but not mint – Mercury, decked out in 50s styles, and paying with coins and bills dated from that decade and earlier. Price clues into what this is all about pretty quickly, or at least he gets a sense of it – certainly more quickly than I did, because I was expecting “The Return of the Neon Fireball” to have something of the loony vengeful-spirit-of-the-1950s feel of certain Stephen King works, like Christine or “Sometimes They Come Back”, but that’s not it at all. Instead, the story is steeped in the melancholy of a lumpish middle aged guy whose teenage years just happened to unfold in the 1950s. If the story was written by somebody my age, instead of a drive-in it would have been an arcade, and instead of the kids driving up in a Mercury, it would have been, I don’t know, a Buick Grand National or something. The point is the truth of Mike Price’s life, both as we see it, and as he saw it, or wishes it had been, in the 1950s. “The Return of the Neon Fireball” is ultimately a very sad story, its semi-pulp references – in the title, in some of the films set to play in the theater – only making us wonder if anything was ever as good as we remember it.