The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 27: Crimson Plastic River

Paula Guran does me no favors in that her annual anthology The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror provides no ancillary matter other than a very short and kind of jokey introduction and an "about the author" after every story.  She doesn't even help me choose my stories because her short one-sentence lead-ins to each story tells nothing about what kind of thing we're dealing with here, and as a result I'm not really sure either of my selections for today count as horror.  In fact, I'm sure they don't.  Yesterday, in my post about Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year collection, I made a joke to the effect that Guran's "Dark Fantasy & Horror" categorization was basically like saying "Horror & Horror" and now boy is my face red.  In my defense, I first saw the term "dark fantasy" applied to Clive Barker, and while I do see what folks mean by using the term for his fiction, that doesn't change the fact that it's also, in essence, horror.

But now what about this stuff I read for today?  Peter S. Beagle's "Great-Grandmother in the Cellar" is unquestionably dark, but it's also unquestionably a fantasy story.  So I guess I'm the asshole.  Beagle is a sort of living legend in the fantasy genre, which is not a specialty of mine.  But Beagle's most famous novel is The Last Unicorn, a stone-cold classic (I've seen the movie!).  This was his third book, and came out in 1968.  Since then he's racked up awards and respect for books like Giant Bones and The Innkeeper's Song.  Though not a household name, Beagle is a beloved figure, who, by the way, is still at it to a degree that I find frankly absurd.  According to his Wikipedia page, Beagle has, or had, a ridiculous nine books slated for publication in 2013.  I have no idea if all of those came out, and I'm not to check either because I won't be a party to this nonsense.  But anyway, Beagle is still at it, and it's interesting to me that at this late stage of his career (a career, I reiterate, about which I'm basically ignorant) an idea like "Great-Grandmother in the Cellar" would occur him, as if for the first time.  Surely he's done something like it already?  Well, it doesn't matter.  It's a fine story about a small group of characters in a vaguely defined, but kind of default fantasy world -- sort of Middle Ages, with magic, etc. -- who are facing a powerful threat.  The threat is named Borbos, a "witch-boy" of considerable power who has cast a spell on Jashani, the "beautiful, beautiful, sweet-natured idiot sister" of Da'mas, the narrator and sort of protagonist, so that she will sleep, Sleeping Beauty-like, until Da'mas and Jashani's father agrees to let her marry Borbos.  This can't be allowed, such a terrible thing is Borbos, so Da'mas hits on the idea to dig up his Great-Grandmother, who is dead and buried in the cellar.  Da'mas believes, correctly, that his Great-Grandmother was a figure of enormous magical abilities, and also is maybe not dead as we understand the term.  He's right, and against his father's wishes he digs her up -- she's instantly alert, explains the situation, and Great-Grandmother agrees to help.

Beagle writes very well about Great-Grandmother.  Here he's describing her leaving her grave:

So my great-grandmother stepped out of her grave and followed my father and me upstairs, clattering with each step like an armload of dishes, yet held firmly together somehow by the recollection of muscles, the stark memory of tendons and sinews.

She's a strong character, one who admits to a life of wrong-doing -- the details of her death, when they come out, make her seem like she'd be the villain in anybody else's story.  In this one, however, she isn't, and "Great Grandmother in the Cellar" is simply a story about a battle between two magical beings.  If it's appealingly unique in any way it's that the battle is quite lop-sided, the issue never in doubt, but it feels like the kind of thing that a long-time expert in the field like Beagle could dash off on his lunch break.  But it's a good example of the kind of story it is, so where is there room to actually quibble?  I think now about how I actually enjoyed reading it, and wonder, as I look at my complaints, when I became so jaded.  If I'm frustrated, I think it's because it's not a horror story, and Paula Guran said it might not be, and I was like "Yeah okay, whatever lady."

Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Fake Plastic Trees" comes closer to horror by being about the end of the world, or a little bit after it, and resembling one of J. G. Ballard's many chillingly weird Apocalyptic visions.  Indeed, Ballard does seem to be the primary influence here (well, him and Radiohead):  Kiernan's end of the world comes through a strange series of events, which she describes with just enough scientific detail, that results in a planet being overcome by an ever-encroaching plastic blight, which is nicknamed GOO.  Trees, roads, people, water, are all effected; water that has been "infected" becomes almost rubbery, or gelatinous.  Trees become what the title says they do.  And people, well, that's where the horror comes in, late in the story.

The narrator is Cody Hernandez, a fifteen-year-old girl who lives in Florida where there is a small outpost of a new kind of civilization.  Her best friend, and perhaps more, is Max, who urges her to write down her story, because, we get the sense, something special has happened to her.  And something indeed has, involving her attempt to cross a plastic-encrusted bridge, which has been strangely left unguarded since beyond it civilization is gone, and plastic is all.  On her trip -- Cody does concede to write her story -- she finds a car, a single car, where no cars should be.  And the car has not been enveloped by the plague.  Where did it come from, and what's inside?  What she finds is the horror:

The woman was sitting with her back to the door, and her arms were wrapped tightly around the gift.  The woman's fingers disappeared into the gift's hair -- hair and hand all one and the same now.  I figured they drove as far as they could, drove until they were too far gone to keep going.  It takes hours and hours for the infected to die.


I love how Kiernan refers to the woman's child as "the gift" -- that phrase means a couple of different things, one sweet, the other grotesque.  The plastic has made this little girl a toy.  And of course the nature of the plague itself is a bit of social commentary -- what about the trees, you guys?  Why all this plastic stuff in the world, anyhow? -- but it's only there if you want it, Kiernan doesn't hammer at the thing, and if you don't, or even if you do, the imagery is effectively surreal.

The problem with the story is how it begins to undercut itself in the final pages.  I won't say how it does this, but Kiernan seems to have changed her mind about the tone she wanted to set for her climax, but didn't want to take out the stuff she'd changed her mind about.  I'd say if she did that, and just threw out the pages that hit the note she now rejected, the ending would have better achieved what she wanted it to.  As it stands, the structure of the ending makes little sense, and takes on the structure of the "twist," which is a bad structure.  I am, of course, presuming a lot, as I often do, but it's hard to understand what other motivation Kiernan could have had to let things play out in this manner.  It heightens nothing, and in fact makes "Fake Plastic Trees" feel a little bit chickenshit.  The pisser is it didn't need to, as the ending she wants, played straight, would have worked fine.  I think the other one she hints at might have been better, and more of an emotional jolt, but better one or the other, not both.  Pick one.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 13: Even, Only, Human

Speaking of editor Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010, as I was yesterday, reminded me that, while it may not be the most up to date volume of the series available (that would be The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011, for the curious), there are still a couple of stories from that volume I wanted to read for this year. Three, actually, one of them also by one of Tuesday's featured authors, Michael Marshall Smith. The story is called "What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night", and it appeared, if memory serves (I'm unfortunately not near my vast library at the moment) in all three of the major "best of" horror anthologies from 2010. I felt like I was kind of hard on Smith yesterday, so I wanted to give him a second chance with this story, but as I started reading it last night, I realized I'd read it a while back, which for some reason I can't remember disqualifies it from use in this series. But I will say it's a good story, very odd and much more interesting than the one I covered the other day. Just wanted to throw that out there.

The other two major "best of" horror anthology series are, of course, Stephen Jones's The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year. Jones's approach to his books is of a very broad, all-encompassing, This is the Year That Was kind of philosophy -- the stories themselves are just a part of the package. Datlow's feels a bit more meat and potatoes -- very little ancillary material, and what there is is very brief, certainly when compared to what Jones provides (this should not be read as a critique to either approach). Guran, meanwhile, provides only the briefest of introductions to her 2010 volume (the first, for the record) and instead of prefatory story notes, which is the norm, she, in 2010, went for a brief afterword for each story, with the real difference being her tone. This is how she closes out Gary McMahon's "Strange Scenes from an Unfinished Film":

The narrator says: "I'm not important. I have nothing to offer...I have no story to tell."

Perhaps we all should hope this is true because -- to my mind -- at the end of this story, one gets the feeling that he will soon have all too many stories to offer...and they will be tales we might not survive the telling of.

I, just, huh? Guran's approach is one of swoony romanticism, her love affair being with the horror genre, but it gets a bit thick, and not very helpful, certainly not informative. Her note there has very little to do with McMahon's story, but I suspect she thought it sounded good.

On the plus side is that this all takes up very little room (and obviously, you're free to skip it), and in terms of pure amount of horror fiction provided, Guran's book beats out both Jones and Datlow. Her 2010 volume is 568 pages long, and almost every page of that is given over to the stories themselves. And her taste is as good or as bad, by which I mean as individually distinctive, as either of her top peers. You take the good with the bad with all three, in other words, but Guran's looking pretty sharp right at the moment as the two stories I pegged for today are both wonderful.

Here's the book itself. I like this cover because it's mostly just big blocks of text, but then up in the top corner there's a little horror guy. Anyway, in her brief introduction to the book, Guran talks briefly about defining horror, and how difficult that's become not just due to the genre's diversity, but because those who don't care so much would pigeonhole it as one or two things that aren't very flattering. Guran pretty quickly gives up with an air of "Oh, who cares what those people think," as well she should, and then five stories later, with Stewart O'Nan's "Monsters", gives us a story that even I am tempted to consider as something other than horror. I'm certainly not going to argue the point, because I am generally on Guran's side and I don't want to look like one of those douches she was talking about. And besides, even if I did want to argue, O'Nan's story was originally published not in All-Story or n+1, but in Cemetery Dance, so I would be very much alone in my opposition.

I'm somewhat familiar with O'Nan's writing, and I'm a fan. And I must admit, though he is not regarded as a genre writer, he has flirted with the fringes of it more than once. If O'Nan has a best-known book, it might be Snow Angels, which was the basis for the David Gordon Green film (I've neither read the book nor seen the movie), but I know him from two other novels, A Prayer for the Dying, which is about a devastating diphtheria outbreak shortly after the Civil war, and The Speed Queen, at one point to be called Dear Stephen King, and which takes the form of a long letter to that writer by a young woman embroiled in a rather nasty cross-country crime spree. Both are very strong (even stronger is his non-fiction book The Circus Fire, about the Ringling Bros. disaster in Hartford, CT, in 1944), and on the basis of the latter book O'Nan came to be friends with King, and eventually together they wrote Faithful, a book I don't give a fuck about because it's about baseball. O'Nan also has a straight-up ghost story out there in the form of his novel The Night Country.

Which brings me, at long last, to "Monsters." “Monsters” is about Mark and Derek, two kids, best friends, who, shortly before Halloween and the opening of the church-sponsored haunted house where they’ll both be dressed up as creatures from the Black Lagoon* to scare patrons, are out playing one day with Derek’s BB gun. A wild and unlikely shot by Mark (“from the hip”) hits Derek in the eye, and the rest of the story deals with the aftermath, the extent of Derek’s injury, and Mark’s guilt. The strength of the story is in the details, both of everyday childhood and Halloween (O’Nan mentions white tubes of a product called Vampire Blood, and brother, I haven’t thought of that stuff in forever; I remember stressing over how much “blood” was “dripping” from the corner of my mouth, and whether or not it was getting smeared – I treated it like lipstick, basically) and of the way children handle guilt, and the idea of being the cause of significant damage:

The nurse at the emergency room said Mark's mom could go in with Derek but Mark and Sarah would have to wait outside. Sarah lost herself in Cosmopolitan and Mark got up and looked at everything in the vending machines. The hospital had taped up the same cardboard decorations his Sunday school class had -- the same pickle-nosed witches and rearing black cats and ogling, wide-eyed pumpkins. Mark tried to read a Sports Illustrated but it was too old. The last time he'd been here was when he broke his wrist trying to grind on a concrete bench in the back lot, and now he wondered if he was bad luck, if the rest of his life would be like this. It would be okay, he thought.

There's also a hint here, maybe more than a hint, of a story about a young boy losing his faith in God. Nothing much is made of this, and no one who believes, including the friendly and sympathetic priest who is overseeing the haunted house, is demonized. But Mark prays with his family on behalf of Derek, and he wonders if it will work, and it doesn't; his father tries to help him by relating a Bible story to him, but Mark can't find the relation between the story and what happened to Derek (neither can I, for the record). He doesn't even seem terribly surprised by any of this. On that note, and speaking of "Monsters" being a kind of flashback to my own childhood, at one point Mark agrees to say Derek's name during his church's prayer for the afflicted. I remember this part of my Catholic church's service very well, though one person read all the names in my church, and O'Nan brings it all back:

The church was a field of heads bent down, and he was taller than all of them, except Father Don, who turned to look at him, as if he expected this.

"Derek Rota," Mark said, and Father Don nodded.

He wasn't loud enough, he thought, but it was too late and knelt down again.

"Eileen Covington," someone else said, and then it was quiet.

"Gertrude Wheeler."

"Jan Tomczak."

It went on for eight names. Mark thought it was a lot, all of those people in the hospital, and all their families worried about them. Some of them were probably going to die. He'd barely noticed this part of the service before, and now it seemed terrible to him, proof of something gone wrong.

I can remember noticing when a specific name that had been part of the prayer for the ailing for several weeks in a row would change over and become part of the prayer for remembrance.

So as you can probably see, "Monsters" is not a horror story, as such. There is nothing supernatural, and more to the point, there is no evil. However, interestingly, by the end of the story horror imagery, specifically the Creature from the Black Lagoon, of all things, has come to the forefront. So it's not a horror story (as such) that nevertheless comes to rely on horror imagery, and not in some cute or nostalgic way. This is much different from Bradbury's "The Tombling Day", discussed here the other day, because while that story features the supernatural and actual death, it does so in a fantastical, not macabre, way, while "Monsters" uses imagery borrowed from what some would regard as B-level trash (I would accept the B-level part, but only the B-level part) to shade his nostalgic story of a childhood accident into something very grim and sad and maybe even, in its uneasy implications, slightly disturbing. This can also be contrasted with Joe Hill's (rather disappointing, but anyway) "Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead", which is a light-hearted and sunny non-horror story about a kid and his parents who have roles as zombie extras on the set of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. "Monsters" is by far the most interesting and insinuating and lingering of any of these.

Next is Gerard Houarner’s “The Other Box”. I’d never read Houarner before this, but for what seems like years I’ve been waffling back on forth, trying to decide how much interest I actually had in reading his cult novel The Beast That Was Max. My assumption, which I’m now forced to question, had always been that this was some kind of latter day splatterpunk wank, and while splatterpunk of a sort it still may be (and wank it still may be, too, let’s be honest), on the basis of “The Other Box” I believe I’ll have no choice now but to give The Beast That Was Max a whirl.

“The Other Box” is a bizarre, mystical horror story about a woman, Samarra, whose children go missing one by one. First the eldest, Justine, then Mirabel, the middle child, and finally Rey, the youngest. Justine somehow goes missing (“picked up by an angel”, according to Mirabel, though she can provide no further information) sometime between getting off the bus outside of her dance school, and the front door of the dance school itself. Sometime later, Mirabel and Rey disappear apparently right out from under the noses of both family, and finally authorities, who are trying to protect them. But nobody sees anything. Nobody hears anything, or knows anything, or can even imagine what could have happened.

The day of Justine’s disappearance, shortly before Samarra realizes that anything has gone wrong, she finds a box sitting in the middle of the floor in her home’s foyer. After everyone realizes Justine has gone missing, the strange box, which no one can account for, is believed to be a clue, but when the police open it, it falls apart, apparently consisting entirely of some intricate and delicate origami construct. Apart from Rey’s desire to build his own version of this box – before he himself goes missing – not much is said about it until the end of “The Other Box”, and by then the story has gone from a more or less straightforward telling of a strange story to something much more unhinged. Not that Houarner alters his prose – it still remains mostly cold, yet warmed occasionally by Samarra’s intense grief (after Justine and Mirabel have disappeared, she remembers how she used to tell them stories, and is overheard saying “Once upon a time, I had two daughters”), but something mad has surely occurred by the end of “The Other Box”, something that can’t help but make everything seem ripped off its axis.

“The Other Box” is not all smooth sailing. There is a mysticism -- which is distinct from, or at least distinct within, the supernatural -- to the story that is hard for me to take. Other writers can sometimes do this, and it’s all such a nebulous attempt by the writer to grapple with spirituality without trying in any way to be clear or concrete about it. Pretty much every time I’ve seen this in horror fiction, the mysticism is rooted, though pretty loosely for the most part, in some kind of native spirituality – American Indian spirits are popular in the work of Dan Simmons, for instance, though he at least appears to know what he's talking about – and I believe the same might be going on in “The Other Box”, which I base solely on the names of some of the characters: Mirabel, Rey, Samarra, and possibly most importantly, her strange brother Reynaldo. Nothing more specific about the root of any of this is said, though Reynaldo’s appearances in the story tend to end or even begin with him making statements such as “We were too young to be soldiers…Now we’re too old.” He speaks in bleak aphorisms, the root of which only Samarra seems to have any idea about, and she wants nothing to do with any of it.

So even if the mysticism unintentionally works to dissipate the story initially, it comes to firm up the terror in the final stretches, which I will not give away. Suffice it to say that there is a horrible uncertainty to what eventually happens. Something unknowable has occurred here.

*The Creature from the Black Lagoon is threatening to be something of a motif this year. Yesterday he popped up as the allegedly funny part of a joke I insisted on telling, here he is again today in Stewart O'Nan's "Monsters", and there is yet another, much more direct, appearance to come. How curious!

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 12: Good Old Clyde

Okay. Really, really quick one today. The last few days I’ve thought these would be quick, and then they aren’t, really, so I’ve engineered this one specifically to zip by. Time, she is crowding me.

What I do every October when I want to write something short is I plum the contents of a couple of anthologies that I have which are dedicated to the short, short horror story. Some of these are eight or nine pages, which is bullshit, because none of these should be longer than five or six pages at the most. So that’s how I scour for these, going by page count first, then author and title. And frankly, I don’t think this is working anymore. Yesterday I read two stories using this method, both taken from a book called 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories (the cuteness of this title is something I kind of resent): “The Fisherman’s Special” by H. L. Thompson and “Smudge Makes a New Best Friend” by Peter Cannon – neither author was familiar to me, but something about the title of each made me curious. That’ll show me, I guess because neither one is worth the effort to talk about at any length.

In fairness to “The Fisherman’s Special”, it was written somewhere between 60 and 80 years ago – the copyrights page of the anthology in question is really vague on the matter – so at the time it was originally published the story’s kicker might have had more impact. But even then, the idea behind the story had to be ancient. Our narrator is on a train sitting next to a stranger. For one reason or another, the two of them get to talking about old legends and folktales, and the stranger insists that back where he’s from, Sweden, werewolves are actually a thing. Then a he proceeds to tell a story about two brothers and a volatile love triangle and lycanthropy, as well as a tell-tale wound suffered by said lycanthrope, and so you’ll never guess who winds up bearing a similar wound. I’m not sure what there is of worth to say about something like this, except that our narrator has only heard this story told, he didn’t witness any of it, so the fact that his seatmate has a wound like the one the werewolf has in the story, proves absolutely nothing. If I told you that I’d heard a story about a guy who turned into a creature from the Black Lagoon, and while he was the creature someone put out a cigarette on the back of his hand, and then I showed you my hand and there was a burn scar on the back of it, would that prove to you that I was actually a creature from the Black Lagoon? If you’re the narrator of “The Fisherman’s Special”, then yes it would.

Meanwhile, the even less said about Peter Cannon’s “Smudge Makes a New Best Friend” the better. This thing is from 1993, and maybe I just don’t get it. I mean, I GET it, but I don’t get it. A guy meets a girl, they get together, they end up at her place, and he meets her cat, Smudge. He likes the cat, but it has a habit of kneading an old stocking the girl leaves out for her, and drooling on it, because, Smudge’s owner says, as a kitten he weaned too soon. The guy thinks it’s gross, but whatever. Until he starts living in the girl’s apartment, and much as he likes the cat, he really can’t take this habit, and asks the woman to take Smudge to see a…a cat therapist. But instead of doing that she puts something in the guy’s drink one day and turns him into a cat, who also kneads and drools over articles of her clothing. THE END.

So what is this? Is this some sex thing? The implication is that Smudge is also a former human and suitor, so is this kneading and drooling some vestige of their human desire for the woman? If so, then shouldn’t the intensity of their physical relationship have been highlighted in some way? Or even mentioned in any way at all? As it is, they seem to fall into comfortable domesticity almost immediately.

Something similar, but admittedly less egregious, is going on in Gary McMahon’s “Strange Scenes from an Unfinished Film”. See, being fed up as I was, I decided to turn to another anthology, this time the 2010 edition of Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, which I knew to contain some stories much shorter than you tend to find in those kinds of collections. The core of McMahon’s story is, by now, no less a cliché than what Thomson was up to in “The Fisherman’s Special”, but I fall for it every time: mysterious film director, specialized in horror, lost film has been found, horror ensues. The problem here, or one of the problems, is that in keeping his story down to about six pages, a decision I’m at a loss to understand, McMahon has no room to build up any sense of the looming, deceased film director, named Reef. The narrator is interested in him because his dad was once an extra in one of Reef’s films. And his horror output is described as “controversial.” That’s pretty much all we get, yet this lost ten-minute film at the center of “Strange Scenes from an Unfinished Film” is sought after mightily, and would be a huge windfall for anyone who found it. But why the obsession? No clue at all.

What transpires from the finding of the film is effective enough, though. There’s some nice imagery, and the horror is left almost entirely on the level of insinuation and this works quite well – McMahon achieves a genuine creepiness at times. But the movie love/obsession that is supposed to inform the story is entirely unearned. A reference is made to a creature building a nest out of coils of film, but meanwhile no one in the story can bring themselves to mention the films of the director the reader is somehow supposed to find fascinating, in terms other than complete indifference. Other than the movie that the story’s about, of course.

Also unearned is the title of Peter Straub’s "Variations on a Theme from Seinfeld". Seeing that title in a table of contents, I wanted to know what the hell kind of horror story could come from it. Well, it is a horror story, a rather strange and eerie one about a doppelganger and the unhappy world he inhabits, but any connection to Seinfeld is just Straub being cute. The theme in question would have come from that episode where Jerry, George, and etc. stumble upon the Bizarro versions of themselves, and of course that was a variation on a theme from the Superman comics. So maybe Straub is saying the theme from Seinfeld is a Bizarro version of a theme from Superman, or a doppelganger of it, but why? And plus no, he’s not saying that, or shouldn’t be saying that, because part of the joke in Seinfeld is that everybody picks up on the Superman stuff and talk about it at length. Bizarro, the character, doesn’t have that kind of self awareness. And why such a jokey title for a story that is actually not all that jokey? Why is Peter Straub making me think almost exclusively about his odd choice of title rather than the story to which it is attached? Because the title seems to promise a horror story unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and instead delivers a story, a good story, the likes of which I actually have read once or twice before. Maybe I should sue him.