The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 11: Queen of the Laugh Parlors

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Another year, another massive, expansive anthology of horror fiction edited by Peter Straub. Two this year, actually, but they're kind of a package deal, in that they are volume one and volume two of American Fantastic Tales, the first taking the reader from "Poe to the Pulps", and the second charting "the 1940s to Now". At what point Straub gets involved in these high profile anthologies, I don't know -- does he pitch the general idea to the publisher, in this case New American Library, or does someone at NAL have an idea and think "Straub's always good for this kind of thing." And he is, and in truth there's no real conrete idea to the American Fantastic Tales anthology that would need to be pitched. The idea is "We should do another giant collection sampling 200 years worth of horror fiction, because people like those", and you're off to the races. The point is, Straub seems to get a lot of cherry anthology-editing gigs -- he also did NAL's H. P. Lovecraft: Tales from a while back.

Anyway, obviously today I'm going to begin my two part look at this two volume anthology (whether or not I'll be doing part two tomorrow or later is something I haven't decided), and, counterintuitively, I've chose to do these back to front, covering the "1940s to Now" volume first. There's no reason for this, outside of the fact that I very much wanted to read the two stories from this volume that are on deck for today, and saw no reason to deny myself the pleasure. In general, volume two of American Fantastic Tales is fairly packed with stories I want to read, moreso than its brother: most inticingly is "The God of Dark Laughter", Michael Chabon's, by my count, second horror story ever, despite the fact that he promised a full book of them about a decade ago (his earlier story, "In the Black Mill", is, i thought, aces); something by Jeff VanderMeer called "The General Who is Dead"; "The Myseries of Joy Rio" by Tennessee Williams, and so on. You're guaranteed a good mix from Straub, although I wish he'd be a little more creative when picking work from established horror writers. Not all of Thomas Ligotti's fiction is easy to come by, so do we need to see yet another reprint of "The Last Feast of Harlequin"? And great as it is, Harlan Ellison's catalogue is vast enough that "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" probably could have used a rest.

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But who cares, really, because Straub also included stories by George Saunders and Steven Millhauser. It didn't shock me to see a Millhauser story included here, because while he's never been labeled a horror writer, and has too much literary cache' for that anyway (plus Straub is an avowed Millhauser fan), I'm pretty familiar with his work (I'm also an avowed Millhauser fan) and therefore know the dark games he can get up to. Saunders, though, threw me for a bit of a loop. I admit I'd never read his work before last night, but I was always under the impression that he was something of an arch satirist whose work, while possibly skirting the edges of science fiction (the premise, as I understand it, behind his story "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" struck me as something of an SF gray area), would rigorously resist any kind of genre categorization. But lookit here, because "Sea Oak" is a zombie story! It's so much a zombie story that the sucker also pops up in that John Skipp anthology I talked about yesterday.

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Though the zombie-ness of "Sea Oak" is not in question, if I were a betting man I would say that no one was more surprised to see a Saunders story included in not one, but two horror anthologies in one year than Saunders himself. Because I appear to have been correct: Saunders is an arch satirist, and a gut-bustingly funny one, at that. "Sea Oak" is a satire, one about modern poverty and living a life in which you're eternally doing without, as Aunt Bernie does in this story. Aunt Bernie lives with her nieces, Jade and Min, and her nephew, our narrator, in a tenement or rundown apartment building called Sea Oak. The nephew works at a male strip club called Joysticks, whose bizarre theme is World War II era fighter planes and pilots. Min and Jade, both of them single mothers, are first seen struggling to study for their GEDs while watching a TV show called How My Child Died Violently:
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The audience is shrieking threats at the parents of the killer while the parents of the victim urge restraint and forgiveness to such an extent that finally the audience starts shrieking threats at them too. Then it's a commercial. Min and Jade put down the babies and light cigarettes and pace the room while studying aloud for their GEDs. It doesn't look good. Jade says "regicide" is a virus. Min locates Biafra one planet from Saturn.
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Saunders could possibly be viewed as being downright nasty and condescending in his lampooning of poor people, even though "Sea Oak" turns the neat trick of becoming genuinely moving by the end. All the emotion in "Sea Oak" comes from Aunt Bernie, an old woman who never even had a boyfriend, and, when she dies from fright when faced with an intruder while she's home alone, her nephew reflects:

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Did she ever go on a cruise? All her life it was buses. Buses buses buses. Once she went with Ma on a bus to Quigley, Kansas, to gamble and shop at an outlet mall. Someone broke into her room and stole her clothes and took a dump in her suitcase while they were at the Roy Clark show. That was it. That was the extent of her tourism.

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Aunt Bernie comes back from the grave, however, and her former sweetness and overpowering, even obnoxious, optimism has been replaced with an angry, cursing, decaying terror who insists to her nephew and nieces that this time around she's going to get laid, because she never had anything in her first life, and she's sick of having nothing. She wants her family to start earning money, and tells her nephew that the way to get that particular show on the road is for him to show his cock (her words). As a stripper, he's limited to wearing what I guess are called "T-backs", as well as a penis simulator. It's against policy to show the real thing, but Aunt Bernie informs him that this is how to make real money. She even uses her otherworldly powers to imprint the women who are up for that sort of thing, so he won't anger anyone. The first time he attempts this, he notices that at the table with the imprinted women he's focusing on is an ex-girlfriend, from years ago. He lived at home at the time, with, among other people, his Uncle Ed, who, while the nephew and his girl were making out on the couch, came home drunk and urinated in the dishwasher. She broke up with the nephew after that, sending him this note:
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You will always be my first love...But now my path converges to a higher ground. Be well always. Walk in joy. Please don't think me cruel, it's just that I want so much in terms of accomplishment, plus I couldn't believe that guy peed right on your dishes.

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I tried to read that bit out loud to my wife, and I couldn't make it through. Really, the entire Saunders portion of this post could be given over to just rampant quoting, because "Sea Oak" is quite hilarious. As a horror story -- as a story intended to invoke feelings of horror or fear or dread or a particular kind of unease -- I'm not sure how to rate it, but I'm positive that doesn't matter. The Aunt Bernie character carries a lot on her back, including a great deal of humor, but most importantly she allows Saunders to stand free and clear (or free, anyway) of the harshest charges of condescension that might otherwise come his way by providing the story with an honest emotional punch at the end. But hell, if we were only allowed to make fun of the rich and the middle classes, what kind of a world would this be?

.Next up is Millhauser, and I'm very pleased to have an opportunity to talk about one of my favorite writers. Millhauser is an odd duck, writing, in a clear but mannered prose, stories about things like early 20th century American animators, or architects who construct entire cities within one building in downtown Manhattan, or magicians, or writers who create their masterpiece before the age of 10. That last one is the basic story of his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse. That novel may be a gloss on Nabokov's Pale Fire (a fact I wasn't aware of when I read the Millhauser, as I'd not yet read the Nabokov) but it's still very much it's own work of art, a brilliant, funny, wondrous, frightening and masterful piece of fiction that stands pretty high on my own list of favorite novels. Millhauser won the Pulitzer in 1997 for his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (that's the architect one, though my summary doesn't really quite get there), and wrote the short story (his preferred form, I've gathered) "Eisenheim the Illusionist", on which the Neil Burger film The Illusionist was based. And quite how Burger was willing and able to take that supremely odd little story and transform it into a contender for that year's big twist movie, I'll never know or understand. Suffice it to say, I was fairly annoyed by The Illusionist..

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“Dangerous Laughter”, the second story I read for today, is typical Millhauser, though it could not possibly be typical for anyone else. In its story of suburban teenagers – mostly female, I gathered, and located some decades back from the present day, or at any rate located out of a specific time – developing, from a strange but simple game to a kind of sensual mania, an obsession with laughter calls to mind his novella Enchanted Night, for example, as well as the story “Sisterhood of the Night” from his collection The Knife Thrower and Other Stories. In all three, but particular in “Dangerous Laughter” and “Sisterhood of the Night”, Millhauser seems to be exploring, through teenage girls, new kinds of witchcraft. In “Dangerous Laughter”, all the most powerful characters, those who are best at inducing wild, spasmodic, mad laughter in others, are female -- from Bernice Alderson, whose methods are methodical, her bearing almost regal as her house becomes one of the central locations for “laughter parties”, to Clara Schuler, the shy, disheveled girl who displays a surprising gift for prolonged, transformative laughter, or “performance”, as it’s sometimes referred to.
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Though she’s not the narrator (that role goes to someone who is, as always, unnamed), Clara becomes the focus, as she represents the possible, even likely, fate of anyone who seeks out this type of personal abandonment to ruthlessly, or is, perhaps, simply too good at it. But her fate is plain to see, even before we see Clara at one of the “laugh parties”, looking “suddenly old”. There’s a mixture of addiction and sexuality in “Dangerous Laughter”, though the latter is in some sense dismissed when we’re told that everyone saw the link between this intense laughter and sex, the true connoisseurs, which is who this story is about, reject making that link the point of it all. The point is…what? Abandonment, as I said, and power, and a strange kind of sorcery.
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But it’s the witchcraft of teenage girls, at least in his fiction, that makes Millhauser an occasionally interesting participant in the horror genre. Nobody is casting over spells, or reading mystical texts, or anything like that. But walking through the neighborhood on a summer night when all the houses are dark, and meeting your friends in a field to play a new game, that turns into an obsession…this is the kind of witchcraft that Millhauser is most often thinking about. And notice I didn’t say “magic” – nothing so charming as that. I said witchcraft.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 22: We Are Ambivelant About Violence

After writing about Stephen King the other day, I figured it was only fair and reasonable to take a look at two other horror writers who came along in his wake, achieved a great deal of success, but are both still oddly considered more cult figures that best-selling authors. The thing is, they both are best-selling authors, but because, rightly or wrongly, each is considered better King: these guys are sometimes talked about as the real artists of the genre, as compared to the more populist King..
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I'm talking, of course, about Peter Straub and Clive Barker. The three writers were commonly lumped together in the old days, often by critics, and often for the purposes of denigrating King. Of course, King is inextricably linked to both men, because he's co-written two novels with Straub (The Talisman, which did neither author any favors in my view, and its sequel Black House, which I haven't read, but I've always thought it sounded kind of interesting), and when Barker's series of story collections, The Books of Blood, first hit American stores, they were emblazoned with the now rather infamous King quote: "I have seen the future of horror, and its name is Clive Barker."

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I've read a certain amount of both Straub and Barker's work, though in my younger days I was never anywhere near as devoted to them as I was to King (I didn't even think I liked Barker very much, until I got older). Straub, I always thought -- and still do, sometimes -- was a tiny bit ponderous, though I suspect that, at his best anyway, he's really just demanding patience from the reader, which, at my worst, is something I'm sorely lacking. The point is, his books don't start off guns a-blazin', and since, like King (and Barker, while I'm at it) his books have a problem with bloat, it's sometimes hard for me to work up a head of steam while reading him. And, for the record, I've never read his most famous novel, Ghost Story. I saw the film, which no doubt has delayed my reading of the book, but it's still kind of inexcusable. But, so you know, I've made my way through Shadowlands, If You Could See Me Now and The Hellfire Club, and I've run hot and cold on each of them. Shadowlands had a wonderful sense of place and character, but the ending was too big and neat, a complaint, in fact, that could apply to the other novels I've read, as well -- If You Could See Me Now ends with fireworks, betraying the quiet dread that preceded it, as well as an intriguingly flawed hero, and The Hellfire Club squandered a great villain and great premise on a standard thriller ending. However, I've also read a novella by Straub called Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, from his collection Magic Terror, and although I didn't then, and don't now, quite know what to make of it, it is by a huge margin the best and most interesting piece by Straub I've read. And Straub himself has admitted to a particular fondness for that story. The evidence is strong that long horror novels are a dead end, and perhaps many of the people who write them know that, as well.

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Clive Barker's another story. His stuff was strange and unpredictable right from the beginning, and even though it was full of the kind of sex and violence that has become too much of a staple in the genre, in a carrot-that-wags-the-dog kind of way, you also never knew how far he would go. More importantly, when you read a story like "In the Hills, the Cities", with its feud between two villages acted out in the most berserk fashion imaginable, or "The Body Politic", with its sea of disembodied hands, you know full well that he's not clinging to the coattails of a past master. Even though I've always had issues with Barker -- those early stories weren't all winners, for instance, and his take on Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is, frankly, plain stupid -- he was always thrilling to read. The very act of reading his work, as a young kid, felt positively transgressive, in fact, "In the Hills, the Cities" and "The Skins of the Fathers" in particular. But guess what happened when I started reading his novels? Great ideas with a lot of padding. Barker himself has said of The Damnation Game, his first novel, that he thought at the time that he was writing a real page-turner, until he went back to it years later and found it kind of a slog. Well, me too! Due to the Hollywood backdrop, his later novel Coldheart Canyon, flies along much more smoothly, but is also not as successful. The right people live, and the right people die, and Barker's transgressions begin to seem more calculated.

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All of which sounds a great deal more negative than it probably should. The fact is, I truly like both these writers, and admire the hell out of them, too. Neither of them write to a market (though it could be argued that Barker has all but created his own market), and both stand apart from the crowded world of horror fiction as being eminent talents who, frankly, probably are better than Stephen King. But a frustration with their work remains.

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The Barker story I chose for today is a relatively recent one called "Haeckel's Tale" (it can be found, among other places, in volume 17 of Stephen Jones's Best New Horror series), and what I found sort of odd about it is that it's probably the most traditional horror story I've seen from Barker, at least as far as its structure is concerned, while retaining the outre' sex and violence he's known for. The story is told as a double flashback: it's narrated, ostensibly, by an aging scientist and philosopher who we know only as Theodore, who tells the story of a night in 1822 when his circle of philosopher pals got together, as they often did, to get drunk and talk politics, science, and so on. On that night, spurred by a discussion of a man named Montesquino (I must admit that at first I very nearly read that name as "Mansquito") who'd recently Hamburg -- where the story is set -- claiming to be a necromancer, or a "scientist" who supposedly could commune with, and raise, the dead. Completely dismissed by the majority of the group, including Theodore, one among them wonders if maybe they're not being too hasty. His name is Ernst Haeckel, and, after some pressure, he agrees to tell them why he thinks necromancy might be legitimate.

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"Then listen," Haeckel said. "What I'm about to tell you is absolutely true, though by the time I get to the end of it you may not welcome me into this room, because you may think I am a little crazy. More than a little, perhaps."

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And his story is quite something. Briefly, ten years ago, Haeckel was obliged to walk back to his hometown of Luneburg to visit his ailing father. This journey would take days, and at one point he was caught in a terrible rainstorm. Attempting to bed down among trees by the side of the road, he was warned away from doing so by an old man named Walter Wolfram, who tells him, "It would not be wise for you to sleep here tonight." The reason it wouldn't be wise is because the spot Haeckel has chosen is actually part of an old graveyard. Made uneasy by this fact, against his scientific nature, Haeckel agrees to accompany Wolfram to his own, where he will have a hot meal and a bed. He will also meet Wolfram's beautiful young wife, Elise; hear, in the night, Elise's baby crying (a baby he was not told about during the trio's conversations before bed); and secretly witness a curious exchange of money between Wolfram and a mysterious and off-putting Englishman named Doctor Skal. Later that night, Elise leaves the house. Where to, Haeckel doesn't know.

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Confronting Wolfram about the scenes he has witnessed -- which also include seeing a desperate and wild-looking Elise staring out the window while rubbing her crotch -- he learns that Elise's first husband died, and that Doctor Skal is a necromancer. Believing this "science" to be pure fraud, intended, by the perpetrator, to not only separate women from their money, but often from their clothes and, let's say, dignity, Haeckel races after Elise, imagining himself rescuing her for the depraved Doctor Skal. What he eventually finds belongs to the category "things that can't be unseen".

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It occurs to me that anyone reading this summary might come to a pretty accurate assumption about what Haeckel sees, but that's okay. As I said, this is, in its own way, a very traditional horror story, pulling its structure from the classic works of writers like M. R. James. I've never been entirely clear what the originators of this kind of second-hand narrative felt was the benefit of this structure, but, for whatever reason, it's absolute catnip to me. I think one thing it achieves is a plain telling of the story, and the horrors that lie within, while maintaining a distance by regarding everything at the level of a rumor. And the distance doesn't relate to intimacy with the characters -- Haeckel's emotions are palpable, as are Wolfram and Elise's -- but rather to reality. Again, what happens in these stories, at least the modern versions, is often made more or less explicit, but not only is it being told to you after the fact -- it's being told to you by someone who wasn't even there in the first place. He just heard it from a guy. It's like an urban legend, in that sense, and, as such, allows the mystery to remain, despite the fact that we've "seen" everything. Of course, the way such stories manage this is to basically cheat, but if it works, it works, and Barker's story works.

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Is "Haeckel's Tale" all that original? No, which is the other odd thing about it. Barker's been dining out almost exclusively on his truly formidable imagination for decades. After something like "In the Hills, the Cities" -- which I view as his signature story, despite the fact that the films Hellraiser and Candyman are based on his fiction, -- he was almost obligated to. But "Haeckel's Tale", however graphic, in a very modern way, its final pages, is very intentionally part of a form, and a tradition. His creative mind doesn't get much of a peak in, and yet he's able to find in tradition the fundamental effectiveness of the genre, and the story, ultimately, just sails.

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Meanwhile, the story I read by Peter Straub is...what is it again? It's called "A Short Guide to the City" (it can be found in his collection Houses Without Doors) and I'll be straight with you -- there's not a whole lot I can say about it. There is no story, as such, and while there are people in it, there are no characters. "A Short Guide to the City" is what the title says it is: a guide through an American city, albeit an unnamed one, that seems to be written with the intent to lure tourists, while achieving the opposite effect. This description makes it sound a little like a gimmick, but it's far from that.

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We are introduced to this city by being told about the "viaduct killer", a serial murderer who is plaguing the town:

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The viaduct killer, named for the location where his victims' bodies have been discovered, is still at large. There have been six victims to date, found by children, people exercising their dogs, lovers, or -- in one instance -- by policemen. The bodies lay sprawled, their throats slashed, partially sheltered by one or another of the massive concrete supports at the top of the slope beneath the great bridge. We assume that the viaduct killer is a resident of the city, a voter, a renter or property owner, a product of the city's excellent public school system, perhaps even a parent of children who even now attend one of its seven elementary schools, three public high schools, two parochial schools, or single nondenominational private school.

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From there, we are, indeed, guided through the city, where we learn about the different districts and enclaves, subcultures and historic buildings, as well as all their strange rites and legends. Broadly realistic in much of his description of the city, occasionally -- and increasingly, as the story goes along -- Straub will add a bit of information that is pure dark fantasy, though not, technically impossible. Such as the stories about the rich citizens owning private zoos, or the bohemian "memorists" who live in the ghetto, who memorize the work of all the artists in the area, regardless of the medium, in order to preserve the work. This is in lieu of painting on canvas, or writing on paper.

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There is much that is darker about this city, about how violence permeates it, and how its citizens deal with that violence ("The ghetto's relationship to violence is unknown"). Some handle it badly, and throughout our guide, whoever he or she may be, will pause in their tour to tell us whether or not the viaduct killer is believed to hail from a particular part of town. And then there is the bridge, the great unfinished bridge, which serves as the city's symbol of violence, due to its relation to the idea of this "interrupted or left undone". The citizens regards the "Broken Span", as some call the bridge, with a great deal of trepidation; meanwhile, the bridge seems to have exacted a psychological toll on those gaze upon it:
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In the days before access to the un-bridge was walled off by an electrified fence, two or three citizens each year elected to commit their suicides by leaping from the end of the span; and one must resort to a certain legical violence when referring to it.

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"Elected to commit their suicides"...what a wonderful, horrible, strange little turn of phrase that is. Overall, "A Short Guide to the City" is very reminiscent of the fiction of one of my favorite writers, Steven Millhauser, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler is about a man who builds elaborate hotels, and large chunks of the the book are given over to intricate, awed, but clinical descriptions of these amazing buildings. Many of Millhauser's stories, in fact, simply describe entirely imagined towns and societies, often with a tinge of unease. Straub, who has expressed a great admiration for Millhauser in the past, has written his own version of such a story: a narrative without people and whose true story is hidden. And while violence permeates "A Short Guide to the City", it is kept "off-screen", as it were, and is only one source of the horror. The other source, we learn, can be found in the act of waiting. You can read the story to find out what I mean by that, but I think we can all agree that this should be regarded as unusual.

Affinity #6

...Once I had revealed to Edwin that I was going to be his biographer, once he had allowed the idea to take hold and sink in, he became fascinated by my project, indeed obsessed by it, and proved at times almost aggressively helpful in providing me with information -- information which, I am grieved to say, was often at variance with my own precise and infallible memories.

- Steven Millhauser

Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an

American Writer, 1943 - 1954

by Jeffrey Cartwright