The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 26: Smoke and Flying Salt

Every year, at around this time and in some cases several months earlier, readers of horror fiction can be sure that soon they will be able to wallow in the pages of a variety of "best of" anthologies. By "a variety" I do only mean three, but they're reasonably jam-packed, and there's a lot less cross-over, in terms of stories appearing in more than one of them, then you'd probably think. Of course it's all objective, but the editors have access to a good deal more horror fiction in a given year than I do, and I've always regarded these things as handy sampler platters, which is probably the secret intent anyway. So every year, like I'm saying, these things come out, and I devote at least a couple of posts to a small fraction of what these backs have to offer. Now, there's three big ones, editor Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year, Stephen Jones's The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror (a somewhat distinctive title that I believe translates to "horror"), but right at the moment I have in my possession only the Datlow and Guran books.  Jones's anthology won't hit stories until October 29, which makes sense in its relation to October 31, but right at the moment does jack-shit for me.

Today I'm going to focus on the Datlow volume, which, like Jones's, offers a nice little overview of the previous year in horror, and I've already ordered a copy of Your House is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye which is mentioned therein, so thanks for that.  Outside of that, it's all stories, you guys, and I, as is my wont, selected two.  To begin with, I homed in on Jeffrey Ford's name in the table of contents, because even though I've never read him before he wrote a book of short stories that looks like this:

If you don't want to read that book just after looking at that picture, then fuck you.  I'm hoping though that the whole idea that sometimes good writers write bad stories holds true with him, because the one I read, "A Natural History of Autumn," was rather disappointing.  The story is set in Japan, and I think Ford wants you to know that he has just returned from Japan.  Which would have been entirely fine if he'd taken his knowledge of certain Japanese traditions and myths and created something unique, but instead he took it all and sprinkled it like wasabi, a traditional Japanese spice, over a story that is almost depressingly ordinary.  Even drinking sake, a Japanese rice win, afterwards can't make this story work.  Also have you guys heard about that weird suicide forest they got over there?

"A Natural History of Autumn" is about Rinko, a kind young man who might work for a gangster, and Michi, a young woman who works at a hostess bar.  Rinko likes her because she seems shy and sweet, and as they talk at the bar he learns that her ambition is to write a book called A Natural History of Autumn, sort of philosophical non-fiction examination of her favorite season.  She says that she asks the men she meets at the bar about their most pronounced memory -- happy, sad, or otherwise -- of autumn, and this she does by way of research.  Rinko says that he can tell her a story, and take you to a location especially lovely in an autumn sort of way.  It's called an "onsen" and that's a kind of spa.  So they go, fall in love, wonder about the old woman who runs the place, and then at night Michi sees the old woman fucking her dog, and the dog smiles at Michi, and she wants to leave, just all out of the blue.  The dog, we learn, is ajinmenken, which I looked up.  Jinmenken are dogs with the faces of humans.  These are basically a Japanese version of chupacabras, in that their legend consists mainly, from what I can tell, being seen (or "seen") and reported and not believed in by the majority of Japan's population, but once they're introduced in Ford's story they become just interchangeable monsters trying to kill Michi and Rinko.  At this point, it's just a run-from-the-monster story, one with a twist at the end that helps nothing (in fact it brings the story down further), so the Japanese-ness -- the onsen, the jinmenken, the hostess bar, some other minor bits -- is finally completely irrelevant.  It's maybe a nice setting, but why do nothing with this?  Why do nothing with jinmenken other than say "You know what, they're sort of like werewolves" and then make then sort of like werewolves?  Not to mention that title, "A Natural History of Autumn," implies I'm not sure what, but something, that Ford apparently had no intention of following through with.  It's a story about monsters eating people dressed up in a kimono, which is a traditional Japanese gown.

The other story is by Adam L. G. Nevill called "Pig Thing."  Obviously I'm going to read a story called "Pig Thing," but I also wanted to read it because of Nevill, and holy shit I just realized something.  Okay, I wanted to read the Nevill story because I thought "Hey, he wrote those novels I want to read, this will be a good way to get some idea about his writing and if I'd like him or not" but I just remembered that I did the exact same thing last year in a post about John Oliver's anthology The End of the Line; from that collection I chose, among others, Nevill's story "On All London Underground Lines."  So I already went through all this with Nevill.  How am I supposed to lead into "Pig Thing" now?  Goddamnit, I've been doing this too long.  Jesus Christ.  Fucking hell.  Shit.

Well, there's your lead-in, I guess.  "Pig Thing" is about an English family who has moved to a home in the wilds of New Zealand.  As the story opens, the three children -- Hector, who is ten, Jack, who is nine, and Lozzy, who is four -- have just watched their parents, Dad first, then Mom to search for him, leave the house and not return.  And they won't return.  Dad was going to go for help, but no help is coming.  There is a pig thing outside, a creature that has haunted their home since they moved in, but now appears to want in, and to eat.

The pig thing looks almost like you might expect -- it has a "snouty face" -- but with some disturbing details -- it has "thin girlish hair that fell about its leathery shoulders."  Nevill does a good job of sketching the thing in, so that a not quite fully seen, but massive creature is burned into the reader's brain as he otherwise focuses on the three children.  He does good work with them, too, not making them unreasonably adult in their behavior, which is so often the approach to these things.  Horror writers write about kids quite a lot, but they often write about them in a way that makes me think they'd rather be writing about adults, and Nevill doesn't do that.  In fact there's an element to all this that really highlights how ruthlessly he does not do this, but I'd have to tell you the whole story, so maybe check it out yourself.  Otherwise, it's a good story from an old tradition that, again, like the Ford story, tries to draw from a relatively exotic locale.  But Nevill pulls it off better by not making a big deal about it, and by making "Pig Thing" part of two traditions, the other being that those not familiar with the wilder parts of nature should take them very, very seriously.  Simple, perhaps, but sometimes that's just the thing.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 29: She's In Her Coffin, Laughing Merrily

Perhaps you'll recall the many times this month when I've expressed some amount of displeasure over the sanity-crushing grip the eldritch immensity of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's influence has on modern horror fiction. I haven't changed my mind about that, and in fact I'd rather all influences, whatever or whoever they happen to be, would be shoved more aggressively into the attic rather than set with a proud wink on the desks of horror writers everywhere. I can't change the world, alas, but what I can do is point out other stories by writers who have been influenced by someone who, in my opinion, is more deserving, and has a greater claim, on the souls who toil within the genre than Lovecraft (yeah, I'm sick of him! What of it?!). That writer is, well, look:

It hardly needs to be said that without Poe there would be no Lovecraft, or at least not the Lovecraft we know. This is not to say that the two writers are all that similar, and as for Poe himself I'd appreciate it if you'd allow me to link to this post, and let what I wrote there suffice. The gist is, in terms of modern horror, at least in America, Poe's shadow looms larger than a lot of people, including people who write in and about horror, seem willing to admit. To the degree, I should say, that the existence of editor Ellen Datlow's Poe feels like kind of an anomaly. Even Straub's anthology Poe's Children only really took Poe's name as a symbol in the title -- it didn't look for stories that explicitly absorbed Poe as Datlow attempted here. Striking a note that was slightly worrisome, in her introduction Datlow writes that she told her writers that she didn't want pastiches (fine, good) but "I asked each writer to tell me in advance what work of Poe's was to be riffed on..." Oh, hm, well. Why does a specific Poe story have to be riffed on? Why can't something wholly new be written in his spirit? I don't know, you're asking the wrong guy, but based on what I read for today I can't say that Datlow's choice is giving me a great deal of heartburn.

As far as whose stories I chose to read, I had several options, including a number by writers I'd never covered on this blog before. This normally would have been my preference, but in the end I was too strongly pulled in by stories by two guys, Laird Barron and John Langan, I've dealt with before, more than once in the case of Barron. About Laird Barron's "Strappado," I'd only heard it was a good one, and I've been wanting to ramp up my reading of Barron's fiction, so that's that one taken care of, and as for Langan's "Technicolor" I knew that it dealt in some way with Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," and it was told entirely as a lecture delivered by an English professor. Barron I already liked, but what I knew of Langan's work hadn't impressed me, and I suspect it would be lying to myself as much as you if I claimed part of my interest in "Technicolor" wasn't to see if Langan sprawled face-first into a giant table full of pies after the seat of his pants split in front of everybody. Which...more about how that turned out in a little bit.

Barron's "Strappado" is actually fairly close to being in the spirit of Poe than being a straight riff. Reading this removed from the context of Datlow's anthology, I don't believe I would have automatically made the connection to "The Cask of Amontillado" that comes through reasonably strongly once you know the idea. Still, Barron's excellent story stands firmly on its own two legs. It's told from the point of view of Kenshi Suzuki, a man who's ashamed of his lack of connection to Japan, the home of his parents, and overall has a quietly nervous, not withdrawn, but unsure-of-himself demeanor. Kenshi is nevertheless successful, his vague Hollywood production job taking him all over the world on various junkets, during one of which he had a brief but torrid affair with an Englishman named Swayne Harris. As the story opens, the two men find their paths crossing again in an Indian tourism mecca. After sex, they head out for a night on the town, eschewing Kenshi's suggestion of a popular disco in favor of Swayne's of a more hole-in-the-wall location. Kenshi's discomfort with exploring the fringes of foreign countries is overcome by his inability to assert himself, and much of the rest of the story will find him following along. In the nightclub Swayne picked, the two men find themselves in a group of mixed European high-rollers (including one American, who is of course fat and loud and bigoted, Barron choosing to stick with the tiresome "Ha ha ha we're terrible!" self-xenophobia that I find so obnoxious; also, one of the characters is named Luis Guzman, which, I feel, is a strange choice). Swayne adds to the electricity so far generated by money, booze, and vague hints of sex by announcing that he can get them all into the new exhibit by guerrilla artist Van Iblis. This is a big deal -- Van Iblis's work has been banned in England, and his stuff work is often dark and disturbing and is often of an extra-legal, if not quite criminal -- if you get my distinction -- nature. So like Banksy, essentially, but more likely to be focused on death.

But they all go, and are quite excited during the journey to the hidden away warehouse where the exhibit will take place, a journey which is long enough that it's dawn by the time the two cars carrying the wealthy international group arrives. But Barron gets at something very appealingly specific when he writes:

Guzman and Rashid's groups climbed from the vans and congregated, faces slack and bruised by hangovers, jet lag, and burgeoning unease. What had seemed a lark in the cozy confines of the disco became a more ominous prospect as each took stock and realized he or she hadn't a bloody clue as to north or south, or up and down, for that matter. Gnats came at them in quick, sniping swarms, and several people cursed when they lost shoes to the soft, wet earth. Black and white chickens scratched in the weedy ruts.

Embarking on drunken adventures you soon wish you'd been sober enough to decline (as Kenshi actually wanted to) is universal, although the adventures open to these characters is a bit beyond what most people are used to. Which is not beside the point, I suppose, but given Kenshi's head-down, charmingly shy demeanor, their wealth becomes irrelevant pretty easily, if you choose to make it so. In any case, the "adventure" continues when outside the warehouse, associates of Van Iblis instruct the partygoers to strip naked. They're paired off -- due to an odd number of people, Kenshi is alone at the end of this process -- and two by two, they're ushered into the warehouse. And since Barron is vague about what goes on inside, I'll leave it even more vague by telling you nothing. But, you know, it's not good. However, what makes "Strappado" stand out from other horror stories to which it might bear some similarity (I can't think of a specific one, but "Strappado" does not bowl you over with its originality, nor does Barron mean it to) is that in this case, there is actually room for an aftermath -- typically the aftermath in stories like this is someone feasting on corpses or something, but with "Strappado" Barron is at least a little bit interested in the kind of effect horror can have on somebody, the anger and disgust and even upending of basic personality that can follow. In a very subtle way, Barron's story achieves a greater sense of dread than if it had ended with everybody getting their heads split in two, because in Barron's story, for some people the dread doesn't end. An obvious idea, you'd think, but just as obviously an idea few writers have, or at least had and then didn't reject.

As for Langan's "Technicolor," I...okay, I'll just relieve whatever meager suspense I've managed to build up and say that Langan wins this round. I'm not entirely convinced that he brings his very complicated story all the way home, but he at least comes damn close. And anyway, he may have -- a reread someday will decide that for me. But what Langan pulls off here is fairly extraordinary. I'm wary of overselling this, but when you consider that the story, as I've said, takes the form of a college English lecture, and that I, at least, rarely failed to believe the language used, I could picture the professor, any male English professor I ever had, really, saying these very things (well, up to a point), and was moved by the end to pull my Poe biography off the bookshelf to see how much, if any, of what the professor is going on about was based even a little bit on truth (one important element does seem to have come from Poe's delirium in the hospital shortly before his death), and read, and read, and read on fascinated by the strange alternate partial biography of Poe that Langan was laying out, clueless as to where this was all going, I'm fairly confident has achieved something quite admirable with "Technicolor." And he does that, by the way, with a story that finally feels a bit less like something Poe would have written than fuckin' Lovecraft! But I'm not even angry about that!

"Technicolor" is a hard story to summarize, primarily because I'm loathe to spoil the narrative force of it. Langan very seamlessly carries his story from an interesting analysis of the color scheme at play in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," told in a thoroughly convincing impersonation of academic speak, into the shadow inspiration for Poe's classic story, who the man was who inspired it, what the man did that inspired it, what the man was trying to do when he did the thing that inspired it, and where this led, and left, a drunken, tumor-addled, and grief-stricken Edgar Allan Poe in his final days. Langan even drops a throwaway bit of classroom atmosphere that pays off quite fairly later on. All structured like a lecture. And it's no small feat -- one I honestly didn't believe Langan would bring off -- that the language necessary for this premise never drives into a ditch. There's interaction between the professor and his students, and the students' words are not given to us, yet at no point does Langan resort to "What's that you say? You want to know what Poe meant by placing the braziers where he did in each of the colored rooms? Well, I'll tell you..." He might skirt that once or twice, but never goes off the road. Plus, the ending, which I think is fairly strong (if I have an issue with it, it's that for as present as Poe is in this story, there's not much of Poe's specific imagination in the ending) somehow feels even more chilling knowing that it's occurring somewhere as innocuous as a college classroom. Not sacred, mind you, because, well, anyway...no, it's that it's so ordinary and everyday, and I can pull up a vision of one of several versions of that place in my head at any time. This is like the idea of horror being more frightening in daylight, but in this case it's more like horror being more frightening in a barbershop. So I guess you may have had the last laugh, John Langan.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 26: The Skullcap of the Beast

Speaking of genre hybrids, as I was yesterday, remember two years ago (of course you do, why wouldn't you?) when I talked about Laird Barron's "The Imago Sequence", a crime/horror hybrid that won me over as I was in the act of writing the post? Well, crime/horror -- or as its practitioners would probably prefer you call it, horror noir, or noir horror -- has become enough of a thing that the ubiquitous Ellen Datlow recently published an anthology called Supernatural Noir (or maybe that's what its practitioners would prefer you call it) devoted entirely to such stories. Having read a bit of it now, I'm quite happy it exists, because just based on my small sample Datlow has drawn from a pool of talent who know what it mean to combine these kinds of stories, as well as these tones, which neither Datlow nor anyone else represented in Supernatural Noir would be the first to point out aren't too terribly far apart to begin with.

It's a nice lineup, in Supernatural Noir. The great Brian Evenson is there, Joe Lansdale (of course), Lucius Shepard, Melanie Tem. Lee Thomas, who I wrote about earlier this month. There's enough here that I could have, and maybe should have, skipped over the already-covered Laird Barron, but I'm finding this year, that I'm continuously drawn towards writers I've given little more than a glancing look in the past, not least because that glance is probably the last time I've read anything by them. Barron is here, with a story called "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven", and I wanted to read it. It's that simple. So I paired that one off with a story called "But For Scars" written by Tom Piccirilli, who I've never read but who I know of because of his occasional penchant for baroque titles like A Choir of Ill Children, and This Cape is Red Because I've Been Bleeding, a book of horror poetry. From that perspective, as a title "But For Scars" can only be regarded as a disappointment, but boy he sure has a handle on his material.

Of the two, "But For Scars" feels the most like a crime story, while Barron's story feels more like horror. Piccirilli structures "But For Scars" as an investigation, conducted not by a regular cop but by a man on the fringe of society, and in a setting of rampant lawlessness and corruption. "But For Scars" begins with our unnamed narrator waking up in the very early morning to find a sixteen year old girl holding a .22 pistol, fatally overfeeding the narrator's fish. It's an image not out of line in something like, say, James Crumley's fiction, nor is Piccirilli's language:

Men would consider her sexy as hell until she hit maybe twenty-five, and then she'd be downgraded to bruised fruit. By the time she was thirty the neighbors would be saying she hadn't aged well.

The narrator knows the girl -- he's living in what was once her home. Her parents, Ron and Katy Wright, were brutally murdered in the basement, and their daughter, Emily, dealt with the loss in a manner that landed her in a state hospital for six years. It is from there she's just escaped. Our narrator knew Emily's parents very well (Emily asks him "Did you ever fuck my mother?", and while he doesn't answer her, he answers us through the narration: "I had. A lot."), and in fact was and is a part of the same outlaw biker gang as they, and within said gang the murders of Ron and Katy are believed to be an internal thing. Emily wants to know who killed her parents, and she wants to use her .22 on them. He wants to get the gun from her and calm her down and help her. She tries to seduce him, and he, by the skin of his teeth, manages to resist. They fall asleep in his bed, and when he wakes up she's gone. He sniffs the air, and smells something terrible coming from under his bed:

I crouched down and peered underneath and saw Emily wedged there wit her eyes and mouth open. She'd cut he wrists with the pocketknife I kept in an ashtray on my dresser. It hadn't been very sharp and she'd really had to saw into herself.

The narrator had awoken in the first place because he believed Emily had whispered in his ear that she was pregnant, and this, along with her death, fuels his desire to find out what's going on, who killed her parents, who got her pregnant if indeed she was (the narrator seems confident he wasn't dreaming, and I was never clear why) -- all of this leads him to state hospitals and into the lair of the biker gang. It's quite an excellent short crime story, where the supernatural horror is so subtle as to be questionable as that. You don't really doubt that there is something ghostly going on here by the end, because two different characters describe the same phenomenon that neither would have been likely to privately share with the other, but it's interesting that our point of view character never sees anything otherworldly for himself. "But For Scars" is a morbid and sad crime story that has just a hint of...something. Plus, as I write this, I'm asking myself other questions, the answers to which are not provided, and which on reflection add a more visceral horror kick to the whole thing.

But mainly, "But For Scars" is a really nicely written piece of crime fiction, of the currently popular semi-rural type. It's tough, though, and mean. When the narrator is being roughed up by probably corrupt cops, following Emily's suicide, Piccirilli writes:

One detective smacked me with a sloppy open palm. His hand was soft and smelled of aloe. Afterward, he looked like he wanted to apologize. Another cop tried to work my kidneys but he couldn't find them. I didn't know whether to be grateful or disgusted.

Well, that's great, and proves that Piccirilli knows the language of crime fiction. If anything about "But For Scars" is frustrating it's that in just under thirty pages, Piccirilli creates a world that I would love to return to for other crime stories, or, better yet, novels. Forget the barely-there horror stuff, even -- this overcast world of brutal biker gangs in control of a corrput town is a great setting that I fear I won't be reading about again anytime soon.

Laird Barron's "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven" does not have the same effect, and it's hard to talk about this without sounding like I'm criticizing one story or the other. It's just interesting to me that Piccirilli leaves me wanting more, and Barron leaves me feeling as though I've been given enough, and both reactions reflect well on the stories. I think I know why this is. "But For Scars" is a crime story first, and for whatever reason crime fiction is most effective in novel form. Something about the genre benefits from the long form. Horror, for whatever reason, is precisely the opposite, finding its greatest power in the short story. And, of course, as I've said, "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven" is a horror story before it's anything else.

It does have a common crime set up. Lorna is on the run from her rich, abusive husband, Bruce, and with Miranda, her lover, she has moved into an old cabin outside of the very small town of Poger Rock in the state of Washington. The cabin is known by locals as the Haugstad Place, and of course the history of the structure, and the bloody past of Haugstad himself, will come into play later. But Miranda gets a gun, private investigators hired by Bruce come sniffing around the place, Lorna drinks a lot, and violence is considered as an end result of all this. As indeed it is, but of a rather different sort.

One day Miranda comes home with a giant animal skin, one used apparently as a cloak, that she'd found in the surrounding wilderness. Lorna finds it hideous, but Miranda becomes more and more attached to it, and her behavior, and desire to be violently proactive in regards to Bruce and his hired guns, begins to very reasonably freak Lorna out:

The pelt covered Miranda, concealed her so she was scarcely more than a lump. She whined and shuddered and took otice of the pallid light, and she stirred, Lorna was convinced that the pelt was not a loose cloak, not an ill-fitted garment, but something else entirely for the manner in which it flexed with each twitch and shiver of Miranda's musculature.

...Lorna's mouth was dry. She said, "Sweetheart?"

Miranda said, in a voice rusty and rugged, "Why don't you...go on to bed. I'll be along. I'll come see you real soon."

So "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven" is rather creepy, actually, and it moves from there to grotesque, at a level that is nearly Clive Barker-ian. I could nitpick at the concept behind Supernatural Noir as it pertains to "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven", as it doesn't really feel like Barron wrote a genre hybrid so much as it was realized that the common set-ups for any number of horror stories could double as the set-ups to crime stories, but pffffft. Who cares. This is good fiction. Good new horror fiction, even. And brother, that ain't hay.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 14: Furious and Ruined

It seems to me that four years after its publication, and after four years of pulling it off the shelf with the intention of including it in my horror reading in October, maybe now's the time to actually crack into editor Ellen Datlow's 2007 anthology Inferno ("It is astonishingly good," claims Peter Straub) and see what's what. That's the one whose stories Datlow hopes, according to her introduction, will:

...provide the reader with a frisson of shock, or a moment of dread so powerful it might cause the reader outright physical discomfort; or a sensation of fear so palpable that the reader feels impelled to turn up the lights very bright and play music or seek the company of others to dispel the fear; or to linger in the reader's consciousness for a long, long time after the final word is read.

To me, that's expecting an awful lot. The more horror one reads, after all, the less likely one is to experience any of those sensations. I might even argue that as one gets older, one is similarly less likely to ibid. None of this is impossible, of course, but I'd say it's rare enough that to expect to read an anthology made up entirely of such stories is to reveal yourself to be horribly naive, or entitled, or both.

But hold on there. Look, I don't have much to go by here, having only read two of the stories in Inferno, but if I feel even the mildest whisper of what Datlow says she wants from these stories -- physical discomfort, shock, true fear -- then I may have to start writing my apology letters. The two stories I chose were "The Monsters of Heaven" by Nathan Ballingrud, and "An Apiary of White Bees" by Lee Thomas, and four years ago, when I first bought Inferno with the specific intention of plundering it for this series I selected these stories entirely because I liked their titles -- that, and because I'd never heard of either writer, but mainly the titles. What hooked me about the titles I couldn't really say now (well, I do know I liked the idea of white bees), and in fact I've spent so much time waffling over reading these stories that whatever power the titles once had for me has badly waned. But if nothing else, I was committed to these two, and one of them is very good, and the other one is excellent.

The very good one is Lee Thomas's "An Apiary of White Bees", and it's quite an odd one. Thomas has been around a little while, and has published quite a bit, but he was completely new to me. I have no idea if "An Apiary of White Bees" is typical of him, but if it is his fiction might be unique in its ability to cause its readers discomfort. The story is about a man named Oliver Bennett, a man of old family money who is nevertheless not judged for this, which in itself is unusual in horror fiction. Now the owner of an opulent hotel called the Cortland, at the behest of his cruel and egotistical wife, Amanda, Oliver has recently found himself also the owner of what originally appeared to be a bunker of some sort, buried underground on Cortland Hotel property, but which upon opening turned out to be what one character calls a "hooch hut". This means that it was a storehouse used by Davis Cortland, the hotel's original proprietor, to store liquor for his clients back during Prohibition. Inside this hooch hut is a wide array of booze, including four unlabeled crates that contain hexagonal bottles, slotted into the crates like segments of a honeycomb. Curious, Oliver can't help but sample this stuff, and while the physical effects are initially alarming, Oliver very quickly becomes very fond of it, finding it very relaxing, and rapidly addictive.

Not just that, but it seems to transport him back, at least mentally, to his childhood, specifically to a particular day when he had a sexual experience with another boy. Far from appearing shocked by this memory, as you might expect from a man who is publicly heterosexual, though his marriage is not a happy one, and who has evidently forcibly submerged any homosexual urges or even memories, Oliver seems to seek to flesh out this memory by continuing, as the story goes along, to nip at the intoxicating contents of those odd hexagonal bottles.

There is a great deal more, including white bees. The history of the Cortland Hotel and especially of the Cortland family, which is filled with mysterious deaths, incest, and perhaps witchcraft, becomes hugely significant, and the reader comes to the unavoidable conclusion that Oliver Bennett should have never bought this hotel. This might sound a little bit standard in summary, but it is not in practice, and there's something about the hazy way Oliver, reckless and completely oblivious to consequences even though he alone among the characters knows something of what's going on, that makes "An Apiary of White Bees" quite disturbing. Less what happens (although that too, at times) than how Oliver reacts to and absorbs it all. A weird, uneasy, psychologically forked story, this one, and worth seeking out.

The excellent story is Nathan Ballingrud's "The Monsters of Heaven." Like Gerard Houarner's "The Other Box" from yesterday, Ballingrud's deeply disturbing story centers around a missing child, Toby, four-year-old son of Brian, whose descent into useless grief and alcoholism this story charts. Brian drinks, fantasizes about violent retribution against whoever took his boy, and he and his wife pull apart -- again, all rather standard as a set up, but Ballingrud is a terrific writer who can reveal the emotional devastation of a moment with terrific precision, as here when we're told about the day Toby disappeared, on a day when Brian, Toby, and Toby's dog Dodger are enjoying their time at the neighborhood playground. Brian dozed off while Toby was playing with some teacher-supervised schoolchildren, and when he awakes:

"Where's Toby? he asked the dog, and climbed to his feet. He felt a sudden sickening lurch in his gut. He turned in a quick circle, a half-smile on his face, utterly sure that this was an impossible situation, that children didn't disappear in broad daylight while their parents were right fucking there. So he was still here. Of course he was still here. Dodger trotted up to him and sat down at his feet, waiting for him to produce the boy, as though he were a tennis ball.


For much of the story, the dissolution of Brian and his marriage is parallelled by a running news story, witnessed on TV while Brian and his wife are doing other things, about strange creatures being found throughout the area:

On television the news was filling with the creatures, more of which were being discovered all the time. The press had taken to calling them angels. Some were being found alive, though all of them appeared to have suffered from some violent experience. At least one family had become notorious by refusing to let anyone see the angel they'd found, or even let them out of their home. They boarded their windows and warned away visitors with a shotgun.

It is perhaps enough now to simply say Brian finds one of these creatures and brings it home, and it has a profound impact. "The Monsters of Heaven" is one of my favorite kinds of horror story, one where a human, earthly story carries on along one track and meets up with a separate story of haunting, otherworldly strangeness. And the fact that none of the characters seem to react too much -- the main ones, at least, who have quite a lot else going on -- just heightens everything, including the sense that outside of the bubble that contains Brian and his wife, the world has gone mad.

As of 2007, Nathan Ballingrud, according to Ellen Datlow's story introduction, had only published a handful of stories. Since then, according to his website, he's written a bit more, and has a few more forthcoming -- he's also been working on a serialized story (novel?) called The Cannibal Priests of New England on his site, so that's good, but it still feels like it's not enough. Still no story collection, for example. Please, Nathan Ballingrud -- put one together. I'll buy a copy.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 6: Filthy With Blood

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In the absence of any better idea, I decided to spend the next couple of days staging a showdown of sorts between two “best of” anthology series, both of which think they’re so big. The only criterion I’m going to use is one of taste, and also all I’m really going to be doing is reviewing stories from random editions of each series, and the resulting posts will be no more or less meaningful than anything else I write for this place, but…but I mean, might as well pretend this is something other than it is, right?

The two series in question are The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, edited by Stephen Jones (formerly edited, under a slightly different title,
Karl Edward Wagner, later by both Jones and Kim Newman, I think maybe by Ramsey Campbell for a little while…) and The Best Horror of the Year, edited by Ellen Datlow. The Best New Horror series has been around for many, many years, but Datlow’s series is only on volume two. You might be tempted to consider The Best Horror of the Year the young gun upstart, but, like Jones, Datlow is a perennial figure in the world of horror editing, with a slew of titles to her name. In fact, she used to edit, or co-edit, a whole different, but similar, series called The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. That series folded, I guess, and she recently shifted gears to this new one, but the point is that Datlow knows her business.

It might have been nice to select stories from the current editions of each anthology, but the most recent volume of The Best Horror of the Year came out in some goofball month like April or May, and the next edition of Best New Horror is slated to hit stores in November. Which is stupid. It might be easier to schedule these things if there was some time of year that was in any way associated with horror, but with those lamebrains in Congress doing all that shuckin’ and jivin’, I don’t think that will ever happen, so we’re stuck with these arbitrary release dates. Furthermore, this means that I just randomly grabbed a volume of each series and picked stories from those. So now you have a little window into my process.

I’m going with volume one of Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year first, because whatever, and a couple of things struck me. One is that while certain newly established writers are likely to show up in both series (Glen Hirshberg, Laird Barron, and so on), Datlow seems much more likely to use stories by unknown writers, while Stephen Jones’s series is going to be packed with stuff by Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman – in other words, Jones uses the big names as his base, from which he can build a (possibly) more diverse volume of stories. Datlow doesn’t seem to care so much about that. I certainly don’t know that she’s intentionally ignoring the Campbells and Barkers of the world – she clearly doesn’t do that in her other anthologies – but it’s an interesting difference to note, anyway. It’s possible that Datlow takes the word “new” as meaning something more than just “published recently”.

Another difference I noticed is that the stories that Datlow chooses tend to be, on average, a good deal shorter than those chosen by Jones. This means nothing I can see, as far as Datlow vs. Jones goes (other than that maybe Datlow favors shorter stories), but for my purposes it did allow me to read three whole stories for today’s post. And so I did.

 

The first story is "The Rising River" by Daniel Kaysen, and if any of the three are going to get short shrift today, it's this one. It's not a bad story, and I felt Kaysen got across a nice sense of the environment in which our two main characters, roommates Amy and Tish, lived (which is just a flat, in some unspecified area of England). And Kaysen's appropriation of James Ellroy's telegraph style of prose -- somewhat de-toughened for his purposes -- keeps things moving. But the story revolves around ghosts and/or madness, both revolving around Amy and her possible ability to see spirits, and the dark truth of her childhood, and so on. Ghosts and madness are themes that, when paired off, have grown tiresome to me. Not only that, but, like many contemporary horror writers, Kaysen has a tendency to match off his bleak story with moments of childish sentimentality, as in:

 

She brought a teddy bear. That made me smile. Gifts are always better when they're furry.

 

Yes, well, fine. It just doesn't go down smooth, is what I'm saying.

 

Next up is a curious little number by Trent Hergenrader called "The Hodag". A hodag, so you know, is actually a thing, in the same way that the Loch Ness Monster is "actually" a thing. This particular legendary creature roams the wilds of Wisconsin, and a, I guess, sculpture, or something, of a hodag can be seen below:

 

And that's not too far off from they way Hergenrader describes it in his story:

 

The face looked hauntingly human despite its oblong shape, the mouth crowded with sharp teeth, and its black leathery skin. The eyes burned like embers and there was an unmistakable intelligence behind them, perhaps even cunning. Worse, the face was grinning in pure malice.

 

As you see. Hergenrader's story takes place in Oswego, WI, before World War II. It opens with a dog named Maggie, who belongs to a boy named Whitey McFarland, staggering out of the woods, ripped open. The story's narrator, his friend Whitey, and a bunch of other kids are playing baseball, and they come together to save Maggie (the fact that this is a story about a vicious creature, and a beloved animal doesn't die at any point, is, in itself, unique), but of course the question of what attacked the dog lingers. Also lingering is Whitey's father, a boozer who abuses both his son and the dog.

 

It's not uncommon, I've found, for horror writers to match up some kind of violent, otherworldly mystery with real-world childhood trauma. In fact, this could probably describe 90% of all horror fiction published since Carrie came out. What makes "The Hodag" interesting is its lack of resolution, and its relation to Wisconsin folklore. Obviously, it's discovered who attacked Maggie, and who is behind subsequent violent attacks on men and animals, but where that discovery takes anyone is anyone's guess. The resolution of Whitey's abusive homelife is left similarly ambiguous, because what a frustrated, impotent child might wish to see happen in such a situation may not actually benefit anyone -- then again, with that alternate future unwritten, maybe it would.

 

Finally, I read a story called "The Man from the Peak" by Adam Golaski. And let me just tell you, this story is pretty stunning. It's the best piece of horror fiction I've read so far this month: so precisely written, so effortlessly evocative, and so confident of its eventual effect that I became a bit giddy as I read it. It's a story I'd hate to spoil for anyone who might follow my recommendation, but briefly Golaski tells the story of a party. Richard, who is wealthy, is taking a job in Boston, so his friends, also wealthy, are gathering at his place in the mountains to send him off in style. Our nameless narrator wants mainly to discover if Richard's girlfriend Sarah is going to Boston, as well, or if she's staying to pursue the flirtatious relationship the narrator's had going with her for, apparently, a long time. When the narrator is unable to spend time with her, he spends time with a busty woman in a bikini who says her name is Prudence ("Of course it is," the narrator says).

 

There are satellite partygoers, but mainly, there is the stranger, the man from the peak. The peak of the mountain, that is, where everyone agrees nobody lives. But he's there -- the narrator first saw his shadow descending from the peak, and then heard him being issued into Richard's home by someone who said "What, you need a formal invitation? Sure come on in, you are welcome to come in."

 

The man from the peak brings horror with him, and the way Golaski quietly insinuates that horror, here and there in patches, as the story progresses is a marvel, and clearly the work of a writer who knows what he's doing. The ghastliness of it all just stays in the background for a while, until it's the only thing left, and the man from the peak has control of everything.

 

Again, I hesitate to say any more than that. It's too good a story for my gushing to ruin it for you. But one thing that's especially important to note is that Golaski is simply a very good writer. He can toss off lines that sum up not only the person being observed:

 

...one unfortunate looking girl (pasty, a large flat nose and hair forced into a strange shade of red).

 

...but the person doing the observing. He also has a clean, sardonic way with human behavior, as in this bit, where Prudence, rising from a hot tub full of men, accepts a beer from the narrator:

"Thank you so much," she said, and took the beer. The guys in the tub were happily gazing up at her tiny bottom -- those men were nothing to her, made to carry her bags and perform rudimentary tasks while she gazed off in other, more interesting directions.

 

Plainly speaking, you don't see that kind of writing in horror fiction very often. Almost worse than that is the acceptance of this fact, and the apparent belief that good writing in horror fiction must necessarily be different -- in other words, worse -- than good writing anywhere else. The expectations for quality horror prose have descended to such a low level that competency has been celebrated as brilliance. I myself am so unused to anything of genuine quality from contemporary horror that a story like Golaski's can stop me dead.

 

It is a brilliant story, wonderfully unsettling, with a final three or four pages that I simply want to just type out here for you, as it will make my point better than I ever could. But I can't do that, so you should go and seek this out.