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 3: A Sound Like a Baby's Rattle

I don't know anything about John Langan. He doesn't have a website, not that I could find anyway, that would tell me more about who he is and where he comes from, and Elizabeth Hand's introduction to his collection of stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, focuses on the difference between the two kinds of traditional horror stories, which, she informs me, critic Jack Sullivan has labeled "the antiquarian and the visionary", before going on to explain that this is the kind of story John Langan writes.

And so it would appear, based on the two stories I sampled from the collection. I believe I first heard of Mr. Gaunt, which was published in 2007, while persuing a list of recent winners and nominees of the Bram Stoker Award, which is to the horror genre what the Hugo is to science fiction. Langan's collection was nominated, though it didn't win, for best story collection, and, despite my at-best sketchy experience with the fiction that is deemed Stoker-worthy, I was immediately struck by the title. Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters immediately invokes, for me, good, traditional, spooky horror fiction, the kind of fiction that every contemporary horror fan and writer claims to love, but which very few people seem to want to write anymore. Langan, apparently, does want to write it. This is encouraging, not least because the pictures of Langan I've found on-line reveal him to be a young guy, or young-ish. The title of his collection, combined with the book's cover design, had led me to jump to the baseless conclusion that Langan was at least in his early middle-age, and had either been writing for decades under my radar, or was maybe simply not prolific (Mr. Gaunt is his first book), or maybe he even came to writing later in his life than is the norm. But I was wrong -- he's young guy who wants to write the good old stuff. Good for him, possibly good for us, although, unfortunately, his youth (or youthful outlook; I can't find out how old this guy is) does occasionally show in his writing.

The first story I read was "Mr. Gaunt", which tells the story of Henry Farange, his recently deceased father (who was, not incidentally, a scholar of Henry James), and his Uncle George. While going through his father's belongings, some time after the funeral, Henry finds a cassette tape on which his father has recorded a story for Henry -- the true story, he insists, on which he'd based the childhood fairytale of Mr. Gaunt. This fairy tale was used as a kind of deterrent, a variation on the old "Don't do that or the Boogeyman will get you!" stories with which we're all familiar. In the story, an unnamed boy does something his father told him not to do, and as a result the evil and mysterious Mr. Gaunt rains vengeance down upon the poor soul. But Mr. Gaunt, Henry's father now tells him, was real, and served as the butler to his Uncle George.

George dominates Langan's story, even though quite a bit about him is left vague. George traveled the world, acquiring along the way, and losing, through divorce, a wife, as well as a son named Peter, of whom George won full custody -- a fight he waged not, it must be stressed, out of love for the child, but out of a desire to hurt his wife. He also acquired the impossibly thin Mr. Gaunt as his butler, a cruel streak a mile wide, and a great deal of money. How he did most of this is, as I said, left intentionally vague. It doesn't need to be more clear than it is, because what matters is that George is plainly amoral, a full-blown sociopath who is doing far too well for himself for him to feel the need to wonder why he does awful things and yet experiences no guilt.

At one point, Henry's father relates to him a story about having a conversation with George, during which George reveals to him the horrific truth behind what his brother thought was a family mystery. The real story is shocking, vicious, and largely the doing of George. The victim of this is George's own son, Peter. George says:

"...It is a shame: there would have been a certain amount of pleasure in passing on my knowledge to my son, to someone of my own blood...Nonetheless, while I would not have done anything to him myself, I am forced to admit that Peter's removal from my life has been to the good."

"You can't be serious," I said.

"I am."

"Then you're a monster."

"To you, perhaps," he said.

And who did harm Peter? Who removed him from his father's life? Well, you know the answer to that one. Here's a thing about Langan, and tradition, and his youth: the revelation of what Mr. Gaunt is, or has become, does work well enough, I'll admit, but it's also such a cornball horror convention that it's almost the equivelant of revealing that the vampire in your story is a guy in a tuxedo and black cape with red lining, who has a widow's peak and two big fangs with little drops of blood on each tip. Who also says things like "Bleh!" and "I vant" all the time.

But what the hell, it works. I felt no genuine sense of vicarious dread while reading "Mr. Gaunt", but I did want to know what happened at the end, which, as a creative gift, is rare enough among writers. Which is sort of the thing about Langan: he has good, basic storytelling gifts. This fact (or opinion, if you'd prefer) leads me to the second Langan story I read, called "Tutorial". This curious story is about a young creative writing student named James Williamson, who has been referred by his snooty, uptight professor to the department's tutorial services. This professor detests genre fiction and what he perceives to be a lack of clarity in his student's prose. Here is what he scribbled on one of Williamson's stories (the all caps is Langan's idea):

HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU, MR. WILLIAMSON, THAT PROSE IS ARCHITECTURE, NOT INTERIOR DECORATION? YOU ARE, I REMIND YOU, A TYRO. ACCEPT THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING AND WRITE ABOUT IT CLEARLY. THE BAROQUE IS OVER.

The professor also says that "[h]orror stories are meant for groups of drunken teenagers sitting around the campfire, not the printed page." I think you can be forgiven if you, as I did, have begun to view "Tutorial" as a bit autobiographical on Langan's part, or at least his way of venting his spleen a little bit. Williamson will go on to face, and reject, a series of tutors, each more persistent (yet also more polite) about holding up the professor's view of literature, until we reach a man known only as the Editor, who reveals certain things to the increasingly uneasy student regarding what, exactly, all this is in aid of. The revelation, the details of which I won't get into, reveal a great deal about the kind of frustration Langan must have felt when he found his early horror stories rejected by his teachers. This is no doubt a fairly common occurrence, and I'm with Langan completely regarding the off-hand dismissal of any genre based on the lone fact that it is genre. But "Tutorial" as a whole reveals a great deal of off-putting youthful arrogance, and even ignorance, on Langan's part.

For one thing, look at that all-caps professor's note. "The Baroque is over". Well, maybe I'm reading way too much into "Tutorial", but Langan's own prose is, actually, quite clear -- but also, yes, occasionally clumsy -- and not even close to Baroque. We get samplings of Williamson's prose style as well, but that can only be considered Baroque if by Baroque you mean "not minimalist". I would allow for the possibility that Langan intends for the entire genre of horror and other fantastic fiction to be, by definition, Baroque, and such an argument can be made, but it's Langan who makes such a big deal about prose itself.

The ending is the real kicker, though. Early in the story, Williamson's professor is revealed to be an elderly writer who has made his name writing books about elderly men getting their rocks off with younger women. I think we can agree that this is a literary genre unto itself, but I can't help projecting my own youthful prejudices onto Langan. I used to sneer at this sort of thing myself, you see, and placed John Updike and Philip Roth as that genre's chief practiotioners. I used to think of them as a couple of guys who were beloved by the elite (that part's true) but who couldn't tell a story -- the primary function, I thought then, and still think now, of fiction -- to save their lives. Then I decided to actually read them both, and while I still can't get on with Updike, I've become quite taken with Roth and his precise, almost subliminally powerful prose, which is usually in the service of some pretty high drama.

But Langan, through Williamson and the story, comes across as a kind of benign Alfred Muswell, from Mark Samuels's "White Hands" (see yesterday's post): it's horror fiction, or it's nothing. At the end of the story, Williamson has chosen to defy his Lovecraftian writing teachers, and has returned to writing horror. Langan presents this as a revolutionary act:

Did the Editor notice that the dimensions of his office seemed to be changing, that it appeared to be shrinking around him?

And, I mean, please. I realize that this is just Langan the one-time frustrated writing student getting back some of his own, but let's not go nuts. No writing, or any kind of art, is that powerful, even metaphorically speaking, and it also doesn't help that Langan is essentially battling against one type of aesthetic bias by smacking it in the teeth with another one.

I know you're angry, man, but put down the axe and don't be afraid to read a little bit outside of your field every once in a while.

You Can't Stop What's Coming

Since Greg has already been teasing his October project, I figured I might as well do the same. I got some nice feedback last year, but I didn't spend much effort building up to it, which, had I done so, could possibly have enticed new readers to join in. So this year, I think I'll drive the whole idea into the ground before we even get started.
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If you were around here last October, you'll know what to expect. If not, here's a little taste of what you can look forward to...

And much more! Good Christ, so much more. So very, very, very much more...

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Anyway, join me this October, as I wallow in the best and, more than likely, the worst (though I won't be going out of my way to find it) of horror literature. All month, every day. Seriously: every day!