The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 5: Where I Am Now It Is Very Hot

There's a story about the ridiculously prolific writer Georges Simenon that claims he would sometimes write novels in bookstore windows, as a kind of exhibit, and to draw in customers.  It was a marketing gimmick and a kind of performance art, and the man wrote notoriously fast.  I'd been hearing this story for years before I learned, not all that long ago, that it's apocryphal, or probably is.  Considering that my source for this story had always been Harlan Ellison, this is perhaps not too surprising, but Ellison liked and believed in the story enough to actually do it.  On more than one occasion, Ellison did in fact set up a desk in the window of a, I believe, Los Angeles science fiction and fantasy bookstore, and would start a story from scratch and finish it sometime before the store closed up for the night.  I believe every time Ellison did this, the briefest and most basic of story ideas would be given to him in the morning, from one preordained source or another, and on this idea he would base his story.  In one case, the story idea came from Robin Williams, who through some confluence of event I can't even speculate about came to know Ellison, and on the slip of paper Williams handed Ellison -- before a teeming crowd -- he'd written "The byte that bites."  Because Robin Williams, you never know what that guy's got going on up in that brain of his.  The resulting story is called "Keyboard," and it ain't one of Ellison's best, though it was never intended, I don't think, to be anything more than a trifle.

The quality of "Keyboard" aside, I was thinking of this because I have here before me a very curious horror anthology that seems to have grown from an impulse similar to the one that led Ellison, not to write in public, but to accept the barest of story ideas from somebody else and see what could be built from it.  The editor of this anthology is D. F. Lewis, who in 2011 put together another conceptually bizarre anthology called The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies that I wrote about here.  He has another one which is sitting there behind me called The First Book of Classical Horror Stories, which is actually made of new horror stories each of which, evidently, deal in some way not with classical horror concepts or themes, but classical music.  So that's unusual.  However the one under discussion today beats them both, and the title lacks any ambiguity regarding the core idea.  It's called Horror Without Victims.  Or maybe it is ambiguous, I can't tell yet.  But Horror Without Victims.  D. F. Lewis doesn't include an introduction or any story notes -- this seems to be a running thing with him, and I don't believe the absence of these standard horror anthology features is an accident -- so when it comes to what led to this book's existence, all the reader has to go by is a brief statement on the back cover, which reads:

Twenty-five original Horror Stories written independently by twenty-five different authors who responded to the theme 'Horror Without Victims.' Their serendipitous gestalt seems to aspire towards a curative force for all of us.

I don't know, kinda sounds like some hippie bullshit to me, but, to me, deeply intriguing.  I'm going to spoil an aspect of a book I've never read here, but Kim Newman once said of his novel The Quorum that it's a horror novel in which nobody dies.  Now this is fairly unusual, but it's not unheard of, but a horror story in which there are no victims?  It certainly sounds oxymoronic to me, but in a way that I appreciate, at least the notion, very much.  What could such a story, one that regarded the task set by "horror without victims" literally, be like?  Well, "Survivor Type" by Stephen King, maybe...if the narrator of that story is a victim, what is he a victim of?  Himself?  And if so, does that start to redefine or turn nebulous the idea of the victim?

And so on.  As I typically do when reading short stories for this project, from Horror Without Victims I chose two, which means, therefore, that my overall feelings about the relative success or failure of the book sort of don't exist.  I can only have an opinion on how the writers in question -- in this case David Murphy and Charles Wilkinson, with whom I'm otherwise entirely unfamiliar -- managed to deal with must count as a rather extreme limitation, given the genre.  And one story, David Murphy's "We Do Things Differently Here," strikes me as an almost complete failure.  The plot is this:  a woman named Sophie travels with the man she plans to marry, Richard, to his home country.  It seems to be a country anyway, but it may be a particular village.  In any case, this place, called Efferentia, is known throughout the world, or the region, for its very peculiar differences.  For instance, Sophie meets Richard's delightful parents, and Richard shows her some of the books in their library, which includes biographies of Efferentine artists, books published within Efferentia, with titles like The Life of Humphrey Heseltine 2003 - 1936.  Why flip the birth and death years?  It's a stylistic choice common in Efferentia, says Richard.  So there's little things like that, and then one night Richard tells Sophie that they're going to go to "the afters of a funeral."  Sophie is put off by the idea, not knowing precisely what it is, though when they arrive it seems to be a fun party, of the "Irish wake" variety.  Though there is a corpse of an old man in a coffin, something that doesn't delight her.  And then the corpse opens its eyes, and the old man sits up.  Sophie faints.

I'm going to spoil the ending of this story.  I see no way to deal with either story in terms of its approach to "horror without victims" if I don't spoil them, "We Do Things Differently Here" in particular.  So, everybody in Efferentia suffers from that Benjamin Button thing where they're born old and age backwards.  The "afters of a funeral" is really a birth celebration.  This is a conclusion Sophie jumps to herself, though I'm willing to let that unlikelihood slide, because there are hints that the novelties of Efferentia are not necessarily a local secret.  Anyhow, so she figures it out, and then after she's just had sex with Richard, she goes "Hey, but what if I get pregnant?" and Richard says "That's a funny story, I'll tell you tomorrow." I'm paraphrasing slightly.  But his reticence to own up is enough to drive Sophie away the next morning, telling Richard's mom to pass on the message "Go fuck yourself" to Richard, and hops a train back to London.  Because why?  Well, she has her reasons, but it's a fruitless endeavor, as the story's ending reveals that she is, in fact, pregnant, and what that means for someone inseminated by an Efferentine man (and by the way, this story is told in the first person):

...the thing within would grow and grow, taking up more and more of my insides the way all Efferentine babies consume their mothers, until the mother dies and the baby does too, or so it seems, and both are buried together for the few weeks it takes the newborn to consume its host completely.

With the realisation of that, my rationality flew out that window.  And with it, what remained of my sanity.

The end!  BOO!  Now, first of all, that "what remained of my sanity" bit is almost infuriating.  There are first person stories at the end of which the narrator is actually killed, and these, the good ones, are easier to accept than "And now I'm a crazy person."  It's all in how you do it, of course, and maybe there's a story that ends with the narrator saying "One thing I forgot to tell you is that I'm insane now" that actually works, but this?  This is nonsense.  Part of it might be that as far as I can remember, the first person narrators who die are describing the events that lead up to their deaths as they happen, but in "We Do Things Differently Here" Sophie is clearly looking back (from the grave? She apparently is also dead, or soon will be), describing what led to her madness not in the moment but at some remove.  Is she writing this story in shit on her loony bin wall?  Beside the point, perhaps.

But that's the least of it.  How is this horror without a victim?  What it is, essentially, is The Wicker Man.  Sophie is very plainly being set up by Richard and his parents to give him a child, knowing what this will mean for her.  In The Wicker Man, Sgt. Howie is lured to Summerisle so that he can be burned alive.  The hope is that his death will help the island's apple crops, and the residents of Summerisle think this is all a good thing, but that doesn't somehow mean that Howie isn't a victim, just because his killers have decided it's all for the best.  Clearly Richard and his folks think him having a kid is worth Sophie's life, but so?  The Manson family believed they'd had a pretty good idea, too.  This story completely disregards the concept of "horror without victims" to the point that it's almost insulting.

A much better story in many ways is "Night in the Pink House" by Charles Wilkinson.  It's much better written, for one thing, the narrator in this case being Richard Topcliffe, an erudite and affected young graduate student who, I get the feeling, allows Wilkinson to flower things up a bit, linguistically speaking.  But it's fun to read.  Topcliffe works for an old, blind, rich, wheelchair bound man named Mr. Slater, and the work Topcliffe does for him is rather unusual.  Before Wilkinson gets to that, we're tipped off a bit by the story's first sentence:

The day we went down to the beach Slater insisted that his interest in torture was of a scholarly nature.

A little bit later, it's implied that Slater often requires Topcliffe to pelt seagulls with rocks.  We also learn, incidentally, that one reason Slater is drawn to Topcliffe is because the young man is the descendant of another Richard Topcliffe, a real Richard Topcliffe, who was a torturer for Elizabeth I.  Slater is working on a book, some kind of scholarly, academic thing, on torture, and one thing he believes he needs for his work is audio recordings of people actually being tortured.  Topcliffe, the young man who works for him, has presented himself as someone who can make such recordings.  He will torture people, record it, and play it for Slater.  Which he does, except he's not actually torturing anybody.  He pays a young woman named Rose to scream and essentially play the role of a victim, and Slater will never know the difference.  So this seemed to be horror without a victim, because no one's being hurt, but given the pleasure Slater takes in the recordings, there's some actual horror, too.  This struck me as a bit of a cop out, but an honest one, and one that could actually transcend its cop out nature, as long as Wilkinson dealt straight on with the concept of a man taking depraved pleasure in something horrible that, unbeknownst to him, wasn't real.

But the story doesn't really deal with that.  It instead becomes much stranger, as Topcliffe discovers in Slater's home -- the "pink house" of the title -- a bizarre cupboard the back of which seems made of something fleshy, something bloody.  The aftermath of this discovery is what the story winds up being about, and Topcliffe's torture fakery kind of drifts away.  Other fakery -- that he is not, in fact, descended from that Richard Topcliffe -- does, but even that's kind of a red herring.  It serves as the basis for Slater to fire Richard, but in itself it doesn't matter a great deal.  Thematically I believe Wilkinson believes it does, but I can't see how.  Especially when, at the very end, we learn that Richard has gone from Slater's house to somewhere in Africa, where he has become an actual, no-foolin' torturer.  Which would mean there are victims.  Not within the main body of the story, maybe, something Wilkinson awkwardly highlights when he has Richard think back on his job with Slater and say "I think it strange that I cannot name one person who fell prey to the horrors of that time."  See, guys?  That's the premise of this book!

And no, no one is a victim of "that time," but there's an additional horror at the very end, and victims are heavily implied there.  The ending of a horror story is generally the place where the horror's main gut punch can be found, and that's the case with "Night in the Pink House."  And it's littered with victims!  We never meet them, we never see what's done to them, but we sure know what's up.  Richard has one major encounter with the strange...thing in, or behind, that cupboard door, and this is the story's climax.  Going from there to Richard's firing, as Wilkinson does, could have ended things on a nice note of anticlimactic uncertainty -- a powerful tool in horror -- but it's like he can't help himself.  And clearly, the ending we get was always the intention, but it obliterates D. F. Lewis's idea.  If the book had been called Horror With Victims, then okay, now we got something.  Otherwise it's a well-written story -- in fact, despite my complaining, we have a good story, but one that doesn't deal honestly with the potentially fascinating parameters Lewis set up.

Oh well!  This book has twenty-five stories in it, and I read two.  I obviously can't say the other twenty-two don't have a better creative handle on the concept, and I hope to find out that, indeed, many do.  But it's tough work Lewis set for his writers and at least with these two, it's a job some would rather avoid.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 6: A Dust That Still Feels Things

Anthologies really need to have some kind of bonus material, outside of the stories themselves. Until recently, I’d have thought this was so well understood not just by me but by the people who actually put anthologies together that the last thing I’d ever have to do in my life is mention it. Stephen Jones’s annual Best New Horror collections are so packed with story notes and introductions and the-year-that-was essays that it’s getting to the point where that stuff makes up about a quarter of the whole book (I am not complaining about this). The very least you’re bound to get are brief author biographies and some kind of introduction explaining what the anthology is all about. This is common for all kinds of anthologies, in all genres, though it strikes me as particularly useful or, alternately, amusingly pointless, in horror anthologies because they always have some sort of core idea, however vague. Presumably, all anthologies have some idea behind them, but in horror, even the vague ones are specific. Ellen Datlow’s Inferno came into being supposedly out of a desire to collect stories each of which contained a moment of horror so powerful as to make the reader actually uncomfortable (which is, well, more on that another day). On the less vague end, you have something like Michelle Slung’s I Shudder At Your Touch, which features stories that combine horror with eroticism. You don’t tend to see this sort of thing in mainstream literary anthologies. You don’t, for example, see anthologies made up exclusively of stories about trying to make it through Harvard Law School while strung out on heroin, or about married couples whose lives are crumbling because what happened on their trip to Angola changed them irreparably.

So because of this specificity in horror anthologies, some sort of explanatory introduction, at the very least, would seem to be in order. Never has this been more true than in the case of D. F. Lewis’s new collection The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies. I first encountered any mention of the book through a link on a horror message board that described it only as The HA of HA, which also offered a look at the cover. Following a line of logical reasoning I can now no longer reproduce nor justify, I initially assumed this was an anthology of essays. But no, further exploration revealed that this very curious book is actually a collection of brand new, original horror stories, each of which revolves around a fictional horror anthology. So, for example, you might have a story called “No Fangs, I’m Trying to Read!” that’s about a lonely guy who has been waiting for this new anthology of vampire stories called A Bite on the Town to come out – all of the stories are about going on dates with vampires – and when it finally hits stores, he goes by after work to pick it up, brings it home, sits in his favorite chair and happily opens the book to begin his night of reading, but then a vampire pops out of the book and eats him. Or I don’t know, maybe in a twist it’s a werewolf instead.

The point is, The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies contains no explanatory material whatsoever, not even on the back cover. If I hadn’t stumbled across that link on-line I…well, first of all I might not have ever heard of the book in the first place, but if I had I would have no clue what kind of wonky book this is. I mean, that title really isn’t much help – it reads more like a brag than anything else. This is the horror anthology to end all horror anthologies, sort of thing. Also not included in the book are any author biographies, which is, if anything, even more surprising. This is a pretty packed collection, and of twenty authors represented, I’ve only heard of three, and only one, Reggie Oliver, do I know anything at all about. Part of the point of anthologies, I would have thought, is to introduce the reader to previously unknown talent, and to let the reader know who these people are. One of the writers in The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, I have since learned through my own research, is pretty brand new himself, with only four or five publishing credits to his name. You could argue there’s not much biography to include in his case, but I would argue right back that this is exactly why he needs it.

Anyway. This is all less a criticism than a note on the various different ways The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies manages to be weird. It also means that in my selection of which stories to read, I was largely flying blind -- I knew almost none of the writers, and had no information to guide me. Yes, I could have stacked the deck in the anthology's favor by choosing Reggie Oliver's story, him being the heir apparent to Arthur Machen, but no, I was going new the whole way. Which mainly worked out, since the first story I chose, Mike O'Driscoll's "The Rediscovery of Death", is sort of a hoot, and catnip for a guy like me. The main character is Nick Cleaver, and Cleaver is the owner of the small horror publisher Thingumbob Press. He specializes in publishing the first story collections by promising young horror writers. His business life has been a bit of a see-saw, and Nick is nervous about the future when he's contacted by a man named Simon Strickle who claims to have in his possession a large number of excellent, never-before published stories by the genre's leading writers. Intrigued, Cleaver agrees to meet with Strickle and have a look. However, he'd assumed that by "leading writers" Strickle had meant contemporary names, like King, Campbell, Barker, and so on. But no. The first name Strickle mentions is Robert Aickman, dead for thirty years. And Shirley Jackson, dead for almost fifty. Fritz Leiber, August Derleth, Angela Carter, all dead. H.P. Lovecraft...

How, Cleaver wants to know, did nobody know about these stories? How could the estates, the various biographers and anthologists, not know? And right around here is where "The Rediscovery of Death" gets amusing, because O'Driscoll starts name-dropping like crazy. Not name-dropping in the "I know this person!" sense, but in the "I'm going to pack my story as full of real names as is physically possible." So, when Cleaver is researching Strickle on the internet, we get:

By the late eighties Strickle was editing a series of little known but highly influential anthologies, all now out of print. Among those who commented on Strickle's work was Jonathan Carroll, who called him one of the most astute editors in the field, while Peter Crowther said he owed him a huge debt of gratitude...

There were people [Cleaver] could speak to about Strickle -- Peter Crowther for one. And surely Ellen Datlow and Stephen Jones could confirm his reputation?

And elsewhere he wonders aloud to Strickle how editors like David G. Hartwell and S. T. Joshi could have missed these stories, so thorough are they. Outside of the double up on Peter Crowther, no horror editor or anthologist is mentioned twice -- every time, it's someone knew, which gets a little ridiculous (although, on the other hand, where the hell was Kim Newman in all this?). But fun. I found it to be sort of like watching a film and suddenly a major scene is taking place on a streetcorner you know very well, maybe near where you grew up. It's uselessly exciting. Useless or not, though, I enjoyed how fully within the world of contemporary horror publishing O'Driscoll wanted to submerge his story, and this method ended up achieving the verisimilitude he was no doubt going for. He does the same thing with the writers whose stories Strickle gives to Cleaver, and that was neat, too, although I did blanch when suddenly Richard Laymon's name was dropped in there with Aickman and Lovecraft and Jackson and Leiber and so on. I mean, please.

As for the story itself, it's a good one. It's not entirely not what you might expect from a story with that premise -- Strickle is clearly a sinister figure, and Cleaver has no clue what he's getting into, even as the stories themselves, each one a fresh masterpiece, begin to obsess him. I won't ruin it, though. One odd thing is that among the writers being celebrated/used to crush Nick Cleaver's soul is one named Willard Grant. He appears to be fictional, but my assumption that Grant would come to function in a way similar to Lilith Blake from Mark Samuels' fiction turned out to be off. There's something going on there -- O'Driscoll's "The Rediscovery of Death" takes it's title from Grant's "The Rediscovery of Death", which in turn will become the title anthology, The Rediscovery of Death, being put together by Cleaver. But O'Driscoll doesn't go much further with that. Maybe for the best. Anyway, I'm in favor of this sort of post-modern horror fiction, of which there is very little -- you're far more likely to find this kind of thing on film, and there it's generally being produced by a pack of gibbering idiots. So this is better!

One of the contemporary horror writers whose name O'Driscoll drops is Rhys Hughes, and Hughes just happens to have his own story in The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies. It's a short one, six pages, called "Tears of the Mutant Jesters", and while laziness played a role, I did choose two very short stories to follow up O'Driscoll's long-ish (not very, though) story because I wondered how the premise inherent to the whole anthology could be gotten across, while still leaving room for anything else, in a six or seven page story. Plus, one of those stories was called "Tears of the Mutant Jesters", and I'm not made of stone. Well, in Hughes's case, it doesn't matter, because "Tears of the Mutant Jesters" plays more like an advertisement for surreal horror than anything else, and a pretty low brand of surrealism, at that. "Tears of the Mutant Jesters" is the title of a horror anthology beloved by Thornton Excelsior. It is a collection of surreal horror, "a somewhat sidelined subgenre." The six pages of the story mainly consist of the book needing readjustment on the shelf, the book weeping, Excelsior's attempt to help the book, his various conversations, which are basically each exactly the same, with his housekeepers -- none of whom he hired which is pretty surreal when you think about it -- named Dawn, Midday and Dusk. So you'll have lines like "Dusk was sweeping the land", which is a pun, but also she really is sweeping the land -- sweeping up mountains. Anyway, I guess I missed the thing where everybody likes puns again, but I still don't. Hughes features them prominently, and makes me very much against the idea of partaking in his brand of surreal horror.

The final story I read, though, I think is rather interesting. It's called "You Walk the Pages", and was written by Mark Valentine, a writer I only know by name. Also quite short, this story is narrated by a clearly insane man who wishes to relate how he used the services of a gift website called youwalkthepages.com to get back at his enemies. The site -- which, if some version doesn't actually exist now, certainly will soon -- takes classic literature and replaces the names of the heroes with the names of whoever you want to give the gift to. So if someone wanted to get me a copy of Ulysses wherein I can read things like "Mr. Bill R. ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls", that's how you'd go about it. But our narrator has the idea to place his enemies in the position of victims in horror stories. The resulting private volume is Valentine's horror anthology.

And I know what you're probably thinking about where this one's heading, but I'll go ahead and spoil it, sort of, by pointing out that no, these enemies do not suddenly drop dead. This is because our narrator is insane. He's delusional. He's never not those things, and the story doesn't try to fool us into thinking that what he believes might be true but might not be true -- it pretty obviously isn't, and the horror of "You Walk the Pages" is the horror of the narrator's madness. On this level, it is entirely successful. When describing one of his "enemies", an old man who takes up too much space at the library table, our narrator says:

I want to sit there and make notes, I only have a standard size notebook, I do not need much space, but it is all I can do to get a little patch of the desk because of all the space he has got with his papers. He does not even look up, he does not give any sign that he sees you, or that you might want some space as well, you might as well not be there. If he saw what books I was looking at and what i was writing in my book he might take a different attitude I believe.

I also like the approach to the anthology idea here. While O'Driscoll's approach is as delightfull literal as you might expect when hearing the idea for The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, and Hughes's approach is to sort of not approach it at all, Valentine imagines something entirely new and unique and on point. Well done.