The Kind of Face You Slash: Thinking Won't Get You Anywhere

The first time I learned the name William Sloane was in 1988, when in the introduction to Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's seminal Horror: 100 Best Books (and yes, I bring this book up a lot, there's a reason for that) it was pointed out that Harlan Ellison (yes, I bring him up a lot too, leave me alone), was originally going to contribute a piece about Sloane's 1939 novel The Edge of Running Water, but, according to Jones and Newman, Ellison reread the novel, one he'd loved in his youth, and found it to be rotten. The essay Ellison ended up writing to the book was about Clark Ashton Smith, and one can hardly question that choice, but why did Sloane slide into the gutter for him? Having read Sloane now, I'll be honest: I don't know.

The opportunity to familiarize myself with Sloane was afforded to me through the release by NYRB of The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror. This volume, originally published in 1964, collects the only two novels that Sloane, mainly a publisher and editor by trade, ever wrote. These are To Walk the Night from 1937, and the aforementioned The Edge of Running Water. He also wrote a number of plays, and, according to Stephen King, in the typically chatty and rather interesting introduction he wrote for the NYRB edition, at least one short story that anybody has been able to track down, but as far as prose fiction goes, that story, called "Let Nothing You Dismay," and these two novels are it. This would make more immediate sense if Sloane had fallen off a bridge in 1940 or so, but he lived until 1974. I'm not going to speculate, but there is an interesting, though by no means off-putting, similarity between the two stories. Though I said I wasn't going to do this, it's possible to wonder if he believed he'd written one book twice. I would argue that he didn't, or that both novels are good enough that it doesn't matter, but why keep barking up this tree that may well not even be the one I'm looking for? But it's interesting. In some ways, you could even say the later novel, The Edge of Running Water, picks up where the earlier To Walk the Night leaves off.

The easiest way to get a sense of what Sloane was up to in a short period of time is to watch The Devil Commands, the adaptation of The Edge of Running Water starring Boris Karloff and directed by Edward Dmytryk that came out in 1941. That film isn't the subject of this post, but even though it whittles a 240-some page novel down to a 65-minute film, it's surprisingly faithful, and the gist, more or less, of that film and of Sloane's fiction is the mad scientist who is driven by either good intentions or understandable emotional turmoil. Sloane's doomed characters are the clear descendants of Victor von Frankenstein..

However, in Sloane's first novel To Walk the Night, the one full-blown scientist is dead, or nearly dead, and soon fully dead, when we first meet him. In fact, we know about all of the deaths in To Walk the Night within about the first twenty pages. The main characters are our narrator, Berkeley Jones and his best friend Jerry Lister, who we learn rather quickly has committed suicide. As the novel begins, Berkeley, nicknamed Bark, is travelling to visit Jerry's father, who knows of his son's suicide, but not the details. Bark is terrified by the prospect of telling him the full truth, but eventually he realizes that he must; perhaps in doing so he and Dr. Lister can figure out what it all means. But that, of course, is what terrifies Bark. The horror began, as even Dr. Lister knows, when the two friends were back at their alma mater, some years previously, for a football game. While there, they decided to visit Professor LeNormand, Jerry's one-time astrophysicist mentor. But they find the man dead, his body bent into an insane posture, and on fire, yet when extinguished strangely cool. When they learn from the authorities that LeNormand was married, Jerry is shocked -- the controversial scientist who'd made enemies with his article "A Fundamental Critique of the Einstein Space-Time Continuum" cared only for his work. But soon the young men meet LeNormand's wife, a stunning woman named Selena who behaves strangely and doesn't seem, in Bark's estimation, to have any idea how to dress, and after a while -- but not long enough, many believe -- Jerry begins romancing her. Along the way, Selena exhibits surprising powers of prediction, continues to behave as though everyday situations are new and confusing to her, and to generally strike Bark as rather frightening, if not quite malevolent. The plot of the novel by this point has shifted all the major characters back to New York City (of which Sloane seems rather fond, which is fine, if this didn't often contrast with a not-quite-but-close sneering attitude towards places that aren't New York City), but there will be two major geographical shifts: one back to the college town where we began, and where the chief of police has summoned Bark because he's made no headway in the death of LeNormand, and wants to share a bizarre theory about connections between Selena (whose alibi at the time of her husband's death is obviously water-tight) and a young mentally handicapped woman who went missing some time ago; and the other to a small town in Arizona, where Jerry and his eventual wife Selena move so he can carry on LeNormand's work, and where he finally commits suicide.

That last bit may sound like I've given away too much, but this is all revealed in Bark's initial conversation with Dr. Lister. The fact that the reader is naturally anticipating the suicide yet Sloane is still able to make it shocking is, I'd say, impressive, but I think I know how he did it. This will sound like an insult, but I don't mean it to be: the suicide is one of the very few visceral moments in the novel. The mystery of To Walk at Night is intriguing, and Sloane's willingness to spend time on things like parties and night's out, and on Bark's reckless, alcoholic behavior as his nameless panic over his Jerry's relationship with Selena, is unusual for writers in this genre, even back in the 1930s. To Walk the Night is by no means a long book, but once he's set everything up, Sloane is in no hurry to cut to the chase. Furthermore, Bark isn't merely a personality-free tube through which Sloane funnels his plot. He's weirder and more obviously troubled than Jerry, I'd say. His mother's weird too -- I won't get into all of that, I have another book to get to, but notice the bit where Bark admits to feeling "unfilial" towards her. And ask yourself, is the effect achieved here what Sloane was going for? And if so, what a weird thing to plunk down in the middle of this particular novel.

More about that book in a minute. When I said that The Edge of Running Water picks up where To Walk the Night leaves off, I meant that the later book takes the work of the mad scientist further, and gives it a definite purpose, which the essential unknowability of To Walk the Night doesn't allow for. That this purpose is taken from Mary Shelley is neither here nor there -- she gave Fankenstein a pretty huge goal to pursue, and it's only natural that other scientists would be driven that way, too. I'm talking about death, of course, and the defeat of death. In The Edge of Running Water, we again have a narrator, less strange than Bark though not quite an everyman, named Richard Sayles. Sayles was once good friends with, and (once again) the student of an eminent professor and scientist named Julian Blair. Once a beloved figure with a great mind, the sudden death of Blair's wife Helen sent him into a spiral that led him to move to a small town in New England called Barsham Harbor. There, five years after last seeing him, Sayles finds him, having been summoned to visit and lend assistance on a mysterious project Blair is deep into, living in a big house with his late wife's young sister, Anne, and a large, suspicious, unpleasant woman named Mrs. Walters. You should know that Sayles was also in love with Helen but he never got in the way of her relationship with Julian Blair, and Anne, when last he saw her, was fifteen, so now she's twenty. You can probably see where that's heading.

A bit more plot-driven than To Walk the Night, though not aggressively so, The Edge of Running Water has an ambling way about lining up and following the paths of its various mysterious. It's not hard to guess what Blair is trying to do before we're told outright. Obviously, he wants to communicate with the dead, and possibly destroy the barrier between life and death. Blair, looking terribly worn down, thin and unhealthy, when Sayles finally lays eyes on him, is more determined than ever to do this, and he claims to be making strides. This is something Sayles can't believe, but Blair refuses to show him any evidence yet. When Sayles learns that Mrs. Walters is a spirit medium, he's even more appalled. Then, all of a sudden -- or not "all of a sudden"; like To Walk the Night, the fates of various characters are told to us early on, and it's our job to find out why they end up the way they do -- The Edge of Running Water turns into a whodunnit. Or rather, a how'dithappen. Blair's lovable housekeeper, Mrs. Marcy, dies, suddenly, apparently from a fall down the stairs. But Sayles and Anne, who were outside when it happened, heard a terrible noise, one both Anne and Mrs. Marcy had heard before. Both Sayles and Anne are positive in this case it wasn't thunder, though a storm was boiling up at the time:

It happened as we passed the maple tree under which we had been lying earlier in the afternoon. Between one step and the next I found myself stopped, as if I had run into a wall, or come to the edge of an unexpected cliff and halted instinctively. For a second I did not understand why I had brought up short, and then I knew. It was the thing Anne and Mrs. Marcy had tried to describe to me. By the time I was fully aware of it, the noise had stopped, but the echo of it was still in my ears...From ahead of us somewhere -- I felt certain that it was from the house itself -- had come such a sound as I have never heard in any other place. It was a deep and indescribable thing, as single and yet as multiple as the noise of a tempest or the roar of a rock slide. An instant after it had reach us there was a sharp rush of wind and a stinging splatter of rain across my naked back, so that I checked my stride only momentarily and was running again toward the blurred loom of the house ahead in the same second, perhaps, that I had paused.

When he and Anne reach the house, they see Mrs. Marcy at the bottom of the stares, with Blair and Mrs. Walters standing over her. It should be noted that the read is fully aware by now that Mrs. Marcy will die, but she's not officially declared dead for several pages yet, which in terms of suspense is a strange move. But then again, this is a strange book, as was To Walk the Night before it. It's a better novel, too (apart from Sloane's seeming hatred of small-town people, which gets a workout here) -- the title The Edge of Running Water turns out to be a great one. Not only does it simply sound good (better than To Walk the Night, a title I was constantly forgetting as I read it), but it ultimately has a meaning that is sad, poetic, and eerie, all at once. Still, I think it's the curious nature of the plot progressions that I'll eventually find so memorable. It's almost like a straightforward mystery story (and with an inquest scene that goes on forever, though this didn't bother me, I have to say) in many ways, but with this cloud of otherworldly terror hanging over everything. 

And of course it's that terror which is the whole point, right? What is going on with Selena, and what was LeNormand doing that Jerry was trying to finish before killing himself in Arizona? And has Julian Blair found a way to end the separation between life and death? Of course, it was H. P. Lovecraft who wrote "And with strange aeons, even death may die," but in context, this wasn't exactly something he hoped for. Neither does Sloane. ("Death is good," said Val Lewton.) NYRB calls To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water "Tales of Cosmic Horror," cosmic horror being the subgenre of horror that is most directly associated with Lovecraft. He pretty much started it all, didn't he, with his Old Ones, the horrible gods who live in outer space (roughly speaking), and he did it before Sloane had written a word. Lovecraft in fact died the same year that To Walk the Night was published. 

Stephen King notes the connection between Sloane and Lovecraft in his introduction for NYRB, but only in passing. He brings it up mainly so that he can mark the difference in the two writers' prose styles. King has always given off the air of being somewhat skeptical of Lovecraft's greatness, because of his prose. He says that Sloane is closer to Chandler. I'd say he's not that close, but the examples King pulls from Sloane (such as this from To Walk the Night: "Maybe the Italians can live happily on the slopes of Vesuvius, but I am not that sort of person") do sound more like The Long Goodbye than "The Dunwich Horror."

This is no small thing, though horror fans, I must say, do seem to devalue good prose. They can get behind good purple prose, maybe (and I like that stuff myself, and when Lovecraft was at his best, that's what he wrote, better than a lot of writers), but good clean prose tends to get lumped in with the garbage. Sloane was very good, and he actually provided fewer answers to the questions raised by his horrors than Lovecraft did. Sure, Yog-Sothoth is a kind of metaphor, but Sloane doesn't even give his readers that much. There is something above us that is dangerous. There is something beyond us that is terrible. We don't know what it looks like or what it's called or what it wants or even if it hates us. Perhaps killing us is just an inevitable side effect of its perpetual motion. That's what Sloane is willing to send us off to bed thinking about.

The Kind of Face You Slash: The Struggle Was Brief and Weird

The dedication to a bizarre 1946 horror novel written by Paul Bailey provides, maybe, a clue, or clues, to, well a variety of things. The dedication is:

To MYSELF...

and the life that

is slowly loosening

my skull plates...

There's humor there, certainly, but humor of a particularly grim, even despairing, sort. How much weight should be given to the humor, and how much to the grimness? Or the despair? While recently reading the novel to which that dedication is attached, called Deliver Me from Eva (another joke, obviously), it never really occurred to me that, as crazy as much of the book is, I was not supposed to regard it as serious. Yet when I consulted Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's indispensable reference book Horror: 100 Best Books, from which I first learned of the existence of Deliver Me from Eva way back in 1988, in the introduction to Forrest J. Ackerman's short essay about Bailey's novel written by Newman and/or Jones, I find the it described as "blatantly silly" before reading this:

...Deliver Me from Eva has just enough jokes...to suggest that the author wasn't absolutely serious.

Which, okay. That's certainly not the same thing as claiming the novel was intended as parody. But in Ackerman's essay, the legendary editor/publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland, noted goofball, and lover of puns (he points out, not incorrectly, that if Bailey hadn't used the title Deliver Me from Eva, Robert Bloch certainly would have) comes perilously close to dismissing the novel as deliberately tossed-off hackwork at the same time that he's ostensibly praising it as his favorite, or at least among his favorite, horror novels. Deliver Me from Eva is a pretty healthy distance from being a masterpiece, but I nevertheless find the opinions expressed by Newman/Jones and Ackerman to be pretty curious (as I find many of the opinions expressed in Horror: 100 Best Books, however indispensable it remains). Deliver Me from Eva struck me as, yes, ridiculous in the way that pulp often is, but also genuinely horrified, if not quite horrifying (though you might find it to be that as well). An interesting distinction, if I do say so myself, and one that, if I'm write about this, strongly implies that Bailey wasn't in the business of winking at the audience. At least, not the whole time.

If Deliver Me from Eva's entry in Horror: 100 Best Books did nothing else, it did give me a lead on Paul Bailey, clues about whom I was otherwise finding to be non-existent. I was finding him to be rather pleasantly mysterious -- no biographical information that could be linked with that dedication about loosening skull plates was actually turning out to be an eerie detail. Still, the truth isn't necessarily less interesting. Newman/Jones toss out titles for a couple of Bailey's other novels, and subsequent rudimentary investigation turns up that Bailey was primarily a historical novelist whose focus was the American West, and occasionally more specifically Mormons, and Mormonism, as they and it existed within that Western expansion. Trust me, if you found this out directly after finishing Deliver Me from Eva, your reaction, like mine, would be something along the lines of "...Wuh?" It can be a little bit tough to put all this together, and indeed my 2011 Bruin Crimeworks reprint of Deliver Me from Eva offers no contextual addenda, which is odd for this sort of thing these days. Anyway, it turns out that Bailey was better known in his day as Paul Dayton Bailey, a crucial difference -- Paul Dayton Bailey's Wikipedia page mentions Deliver Me from Eva not at all (Paul NMI Bailey's Wikipedia page doesn't exist). At any rate, in addition to writing books like The Gay Saint, For Time and All Eternity, and Jacob Hamblin, Buckskin Apostle, Bailey also wrote essays and articles with titles like "Polygamy Was Better Than Monotony." So, you know. (Bailey's maternal grandfather was Joseph Barlow Forbes, a major figure in Utah history, and I though Bailey might have had connections to others Forbes, those of Steve and Magazine fame, but so far I don't think he does. Just FYI). I have no interest, by the way, in trying to link through smug armchair psychoanalytic means Bailey's Mormonism with what goes on in Deliver Me from Eva. That novel's apparent disconnect from the rest of Bailey's work is part of what's so fascinating here. And it's not like he wrote Eva before find his way to the church. His Mormon writing both precedes and follows after this weird piece of horror fiction.

So then what is this fucking book about, you might well ask. Okay then. That dedication about loosening skull plates isn't incidental, by the way, because listen, here's this guy, Mark Allard, he's around forty years old, and he's seeing a young woman named Edith Brinkley, the daughter of his law partner. Except when we first meet Mark, who is our narrator in Deliver Me from Eva, he's already thrown Edith over for someone else. For whom? For Eva Craner. To be brief, Mark was drawn away from Edith to Eva for reasons we're not entirely clear on (there's nothing wrong with Edith, we're assured), but basically Eva is hopelessly gorgeous and Mark is swept up. And she tells him that her father, Dr. Craner, is a great man, a genius whose ability to manipulate the craniums of human beings -- because the human skull is divided into hinged segments, which must serve a purpose, yes? -- allow them to achieve feats of great genius. See not just Eva's breathtaking knowledge, but also her brother Osman's accomplishments as a concert pianist. Another step along which path he's about to take when Mark is brought into the family estate, or compound maybe, which Dr. Craner, a man born without legs or ears, has dubbed The Cradle of Light.

There's your set up. And a couple of things, or three things, about that: the title, Deliver Me from Eva, is misleading, because Mark is pulled into this world not because Eva, who he loves so much that he's fled his apparently quite lovely girlfriend, as well as his lucrative job as an attorney, is such a femme fatale. She is in fact not that. Mark is drawn in because of the weird and freakish Dr. Craner. It's this detail that begins to slide Deliver Me from Eva from crime fiction into horror. Because it does always seem to be on the cusp of becoming a crime novel, though it's not that easy to say why. I'd suppose it's because religious cults in California are a rich and thriving -- I won't even say cliche' -- pool into which crime writers have and will always dive. Cults, or even just New Age scams, have been covered by Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, and pretty much every other crime writer who has staked their ground in L.A. Bailey shifts that to Pasadena. That's where Dr. Craner's estate The Cradle of Light is located, and within that is found the house where Mark and Eva are expected to live. That house is called Thalamus.

The thalamus, of course, being a gland, which, I just now read, might be called the human body's "hub of information." Plus remember those skull hinges, the manipulation of which, etc. Bailey's dedication suddenly seems less random, possibly less personal (does it?), and more of a nod to his novel. Mark winds up having his skull manipulated by the legless and earless Dr. Craner, and he turns from a skeptic to a true believer. Because of course Dr. Craner is both evil and sort of on to something. But anyway, the point is, Eva isn't the villain. She, like her doomed brother Osman, who when we meet him is in a small way revolting against his father's treatments, is an acolyte, rightly or wrongly. And is she wrong? Her maid Margot, who will turn out to be far more than just a maid, supplies information along the way that both condemns Dr. Craner morally, but perhaps absolves him on scientific grounds.

So that's one of the three things. And it connects to the second thing, which is that Deliver Me from Eva feels, for at least about the first third, like a crime novel. Which it isn't, at all, but you do have a professional guy in Los Angeles throwing away his business and his girl for a mysterious and sexy woman. It's just that Eva isn't asking or driving in any way Mark to murder anybody. For profit, or any other motive. Yet the James M. Cain-ian pulse continues to throb. Deliver Me from Eva is a genre hybrid (comedy/horror, adventure/comedy, horror/crime, etc.), but unlike most such stitched-together creatures it's not trying to be. It's a horror novel of the Mad Scientist variety that perhaps due simply to the year of its publication, and our own contemporary view of pulp fiction from that era, and the fact that it doesn't begin in a dungeon but rather the Honeymoon suite of a San Francisco hotel (a good place for crime to begin) fools us into reading it as hardboiled crime. But out hero Mark isn't just a decent man who fends off the hypnotic cult-ish powers of Dr. Craner so that he is finally aware of the body horror, the rampant decapitation, of The Cradle of Light -- he continues to be a decent man throughout it all, who fights the push into Hell.

The third thing is, what did Bailey mean by any of this? Newman/Jones and Ackerman seem to suggest that he meant nothing, but I'm (obviously) not convinced of that. For one thing, none of them offer any evidence, apart from the pun of the title. I would even add to their meager case the novel's last line, which I won't quote because I guess it's a spoiler, though plot-wise it reveals very little, but in any case it's a joke, one I don't like that much, but anyway, it's a joke, is the point. So they have that. They're not wrong. But what I have is the dedication, which is grim, and its connection to the plot, which becomes a frenzy of mortality, and then, finally, I have the end, which isn't a matter of ten pages or so. No, the climax of Deliver Me from Eva hits, but you're aware, as a reader, that there's a good clutch of pages to go. Without giving away too much, or giving away the bare minimum I can give away while still going forward, Mark, our hero, has to contend with the possibility that Dr. Craner, the madman, the murderer, might, when you boil it all down, have been on to something. That humans, in essence, are fucked, are dumb, blank-eyed zombies, without his skull-plate manipulation (which, also, the reader gets the sense is only the tip of the iceberg). It's insisted to Mark that Dr. Craner's evil aside, humanity stands to benefit enormously by the continuation of his work. Yet Mark is us, he's just a goddamn person, who can't see past evil, or past love. I'll finally quote Bailey, by way of Mark:

The ethical concepts of my nature, as interpreted in normal human behavior, seemed dulled by the impact of forces beyond control. If it were dementia, it seems odd that my mind was still crystal clear as to every detail of past events. The interpretive functions of my intellect were the parts which seemed to have gone awry. As I see it now, the norm of my conscious thought followed a pattern of oblique distortion which seemed in that hour perfectly lucid and logical. I felt the urge not to brush away the evils and oddities of my existence, but to perversely examine them one by one. I knew they were interesting, and I knew that I would write of them, but in this moment it was Eva I wanted; the woman I had married; my wife, and loved one.

Am I supposed to regard this passage as insincere? This, to clarify, is after the violence. This isn't part of a build towards pulp madness. Pulp madness -- of a quite mad sort, I must admit -- has already occurred. What this is, and what the roughly thirty pages in which this is included is, is a dealing with the insanity section that you don't often find in novels like this, and which I can't interpret as frivolous. I don't know what Paul Dayton Bailey's deal was, and I haven't read any of his other novels. They may offer greater insight into him than Deliver Me from Eva could ever begin to. But pretty clearly, this novel is his big outlier. He wasn't in his twenties when this came out. He was forty. He said right up top that life was loosening his skull-plates. I'm sorry, but I can't see the joke.

The Kind of Face You Whaaaaaaa!?: An Announcement

Oh hello. As some of you may remember, every October for the first several years of this blog's existence, I used to write, every day, about horror fiction. Sometimes novels, sometimes a pair of short stories more or less randomly chosen from an anthology, most often a couple of short stories by the same author so that I might discuss that author within some kind of framework. While by no means my most popular posts, this project did sort of define The Kind of Face You Hate, and those who did read them seemed to like them. I found this very flattering and gratifying, and every year I looked forward to expanding my knowledge about one of my favorite genres. I was forced to think about horror on a level that I wouldn't have had I been merely(!) reading these books and stories for pleasure. If my blog was ever going to have any sort of legacy, which I would have to say I kind of doubt it will, but if was ever going to, this ongoing series, collectively titled The Kind of Face You Slash, would be it.

On the other hand, it fucking sucked; it was, to my mind, and increasingly so over the years, a ridiculous amount of work for someone to do yet not be paid for. Remember, I not only had to write every day, but read every day, as well. Yes, foresight and better planning might have eased this burden, but I have frequently found, over the course of my life, that the best way for me to actually complete something is to have a deadline. And this was a downright shithouse of a deadline. The whole thing, once fun, became after five years a howling, waking nightmare of effort. I believe you can almost see me crumbling under the weight in those later years. One post in particular almost did me in. The stories I read so thoroughly defeated me through their mediocrity that when I sat down to write about them I did briefly consider hitting my computer with a brick to see what the result would be (I'm not going to link to it because, as you might expect, my review of the writer in question was unkind, and eventually he showed up in the comments, and said something that still makes me feel bad about what I wrote). In 2013, I enlisted the help of a series of friends and associates to take half of October off my hands, so that I would have to write and read fifty per cent less than I had before, and those guys came through like gangbusters. The problem was, being a kind of...not editor, because I didn't edit anyone, but I guess a manager, of a sort, didn't alleviate the pressure; it merely substituted the old ones, and not even all of those, with new ones. In short, I still had to work. So, in 2014, I decided that was it, I was indefinitely retiring The Kind of Face You Slash. You know how homicide detectives can get so burned out by the atrocities they're forced to deal with every day that they finally ash up and have to "get out of the life?" Well that was me exactly, and there's no difference between me and a homicide detective.

Cut to today! I'm still not going to bring back The Kind of Face You Slash this October! However, what I am doing, is I'm announcing that The Kind of Face You Slash is going to be an ongoing series from here until whenever. That is to say, I will be writing The Kind of Face You Slash posts in, say, November. And December, maybe. And January. And possibly even (almost certainly) this October. Not thirty-one posts in thirty-one days, but a continuous, though sporadic, series about horror literature. It will be similar to The Cronenberg Series, the major difference being that while The Cronenberg Series ended (for the time being) when I reached the latest of Cronenberg's major works (still entertaining the idea of writing addendum-type posts about his short films, by the way) in the case of The Kind of Face You Slash there's no end in sight. I'll end the series when I finally think "You know what? Fuck you guys." Which could be tomorrow, just to be clear.

But hold on! There's still even more to tell you! And I think I'd better keep this part brief because this announcement post has been very long and boring so far! As a result of my ruthless focus on horror fiction, as someone who writes about genre fiction I have been shamefully neglectful of my other favorite genre, which is crime fiction. And so the other day I says to myself, I says "Hey wait a minute, maybe you could write about crime fiction." And I was like "Yes." So, as of today I am announcing the start of yet another series, as continuous and as sporadic as The Kind of Face You Slash, but this time about crime fiction. So everything I said about the horror project in the last paragraph you can apply to this crime project, which I shall call The Kind of Face You Shoot. That one's actually going to begin sooner rather than later, because I've had something percolating, but anyway, there's your announcement. The Kind of Face You Slash is back, but on a new and endless-ish schedule, and it will be joined by The Kind of Face You Shoot, which will look at crime fiction (mostly novels, given the nature of the genre) from the old-timey ones to new-timey ones. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to some fuckin' new guy, I guess.

Incidentally, the best part of this announcement is that the idea was all my own, and wasn't quite reasonably suggested to me by Jose Cruz one day on Facebook. So thanks for nothing, Jose! I DON'T NEED YOU!

October Has Been Cancelled

This ghost is sad because he got kicked out of a red castle (right) and also because of what this post is about

I probably should have posted this earlier, but anyway, listen: for the past God alone knows how many years, I have spent every October reading and writing about horror fiction for my The Kind of Face You Slash project. And I loved doing it! Sometimes! But not so much recently. I read countless (you could probably actually count them without much effort) horror stories and novels, and wrote about what I read every day for 31 days. Every November 1, I told myself I wasn't going to be doing it again next year, and then around May of the following year I'd start thinking about the writers and stories and books I could cover next time. So it kept going, and I was, and am, hugely grateful to the people who bothered to read and comment on my posts.

Two years ago, though, I was feeling burned out pretty much from October 1 to October 31. I had nothing else to say about the genre, or couldn't think of anything, and it felt like a terrible chore that was eating up all my free time. Last year, a friend recommended that I bring in guest writers to help carry the load, which I did, and which I think worked out extremely well. All the writers who agreed to write a post (for free) did a great job, but coordinating all that brought on new pressures and stress I hadn't anticipated. So well before last year's project was done, I knew, without question, that in 2014 I would not be doing any version of The Kind of Face You Slash. And I'm sticking to that. I'm not doing it this year. Even if I suddenly decided I wanted to, which I haven't and won't, I've done no preparation at all, and it's simply not conceivable. So The Kind of Face You Slash is done.

For now! I promise nothing. It might actually really be done forever, but it would be stupid to say that because what the hell do I know. But it's absolutely not happening this year.  Lots of other blogs and "web sites" do all sorts of fun and interesting horror-related things in October, so there'll be plenty to read. And I'm not shutting down the blog that month anyway, it'll still be running right along at the same snail's pace you've come to depend on. But no The Kind of Face You Slash for a while. Sorry, and thanks.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 30: Good Fare, Some Accommodation

What specifically the above book cover is meant to communicate, as the image pertains either to the book's contents or to Robert Aickman in general, is difficult to figure. Granted, when it comes to Aickman's stories I tend to bounce around, never reading a collection straight through but rather picking among the various tables of content for a title that catches my eye, or for a story I've heard something interesting about but haven't yet gotten around to, so maybe somewhere in Cold Hand in Mine there is in fact a story about a beaked and handless armored hedgehog soldier and his dead Indian chief pal having adventures on an alien planet (maybe "Pages From a Young Girl's Journal," I haven't read that one yet), but even if not, and even though I doubt this ever entered anyone's mind along the road to publishing this particular edition of Aickman's classic 1975 collection, the very inexplicability of the image would seem to be, or could be said to be, the whole point. Aickman's reputation as a horror writer, apart from his quite frankly exquisite prose talents, rests on his special gift for creating haunting stories whose eeriness lingers because the reader's ability to to coherently describe what he or she has just read will always be very sorely tested. By which I mean, describe it in terms of "This happened and then this happened, and it all happened because of this." Aickman will not allow this.

If you've never read Aickman -- and if not what's your deal, I've pushed him on you guys often enough, God knows -- you shouldn't take the preceding paragraph to mean that a typical Aickman story features a guy sitting in a museum when suddenly a unicorn walks up to him and they eat peas together THE END. Although absurdity does play a part, even a large part, in his fiction, it is not merely absurd, nor does the absurdity overwhelm the story (though the most surrealistic Aickman story I've read, "Growing Boys," comes close). These elements, which are invariably unnerving in ways that are not always easy to pinpoint, are woven through the lives of his characters, even if only for a brief period of time. It may only be a day out of the decades of life to be lived by a given character, but as Aickman describes these strange -- and that's the word; it is, in fact, Aickman's preferred description -- events they can briefly seem, if not natural, then at least among those things that sometimes people have to deal with. Somehow, Aickman describes the strangest occurrences with a very precise verisimilitude.

Readers familiar with Aickman will probably find that description to be inaccurate as a general description of his body of work, but you must forgive me because at the moment my head is full of one particular story of his, one of his best-known and most-anthologized, called "The Hospice." And I do think the previous paragraph contains a workable description of this, one of his genuine masterpieces. Writing about "The Hospice" presents two problems, one of them being a problem that would spring up when writing about anything by Aickman: one is, how do you describe the indescribable without killing the impact for those who don't know the story; and two, how do you write about a story that you (me) honestly thinks is perfect? Given that opinion, it's entirely clear to me that there is nothing I can say about "The Hospice" that would not be better and more clearly, and I don't use that word ironically, expressed by the reading of "The Hospice" itself. I've read many stories by Robert Aickman over the years, and it's just now, with this story, that I found the one that is plainly the best introduction to his work for newcomers. This isn't to say it's my favorite -- that honor still goes to "The Inner Room," my favorite horror story of all time -- but to understand what Aickman is all about, "The Hospice" is where you should turn.

I will continue my pattern of beginning a new paragraph by referring to the contents of the previous one by assuring you that none of the above is my way of saying "And that's why I'm not going to describe 'The Hospice' to you," though my fear of ruining the experience remains. Nevertheless: Lucas Maybury has finished work at a location that, the reader gathers, is not familiar to him. Wishing he could simply "follow a route 'given' by one of the automobile organizations," he is instead bullied by the manager of the location to take a supposedly shorter route home, one whose benefits have been proven -- again, supposedly -- time and again. But Maybury experiences none of those benefits, and instead is soon lost, and his car is running out of gas. He gets out of his car and walks a bit, and is soon attacked what he, in the darkness, assumes is a cat. It bites his leg, and he kicks back savagely. "The strange sequel was silence," Aickman writes.

Eventually he finds, as you do, a place -- there are no other houses or buildings of any sort in sight -- where he might find food, gas, a phone, something. There is a sign at the entrance that reads: "The Hospice -- Good Fare -- Some Accommodation." Upon entering and asking for food -- and being followed into the restroom by a white-jacketed server while he quickly washes up -- he is shown to the dining room, the walls of which are covered with heavy, massive hangings, the reason for these being "possibly noise reduction":

It is true that knives and forks make a clatter, but there appeared to be no other immediate necessity for costly noise abatement, as the diners were all extremely quiet; which at first seemed the more unexpected in that most of them were seated, fairly closely packed, at a single long table running down the central axis of the room. Maybury soon reflected, however, that if he had been wedged together with a party of total strangers, he might have found little to say to them either.

This was not put to the test. On each side of the room were four smaller tables, set endways against the walls, every table set for a single person, even though big enough to accommodate four, two on either side: and at one of these, Maybury was settled by the handsome lad in the white jacket.

Immediately, soup arrived.

And so the strangeness begins. The food, which is served in enormous quantities, seems to be good enough, but Maybury's inability to finish a course drives the woman serving him to scold him and smash his plate on the floor. He notices, too, upon leaving the dining room that one other diner is attached by a string to a rail that runs around the room. Maybury's pleas to Falkner, the manager of the hospice, to help him find gas, seem to fall on sympathetic ears, yet he comes away from it all without any gas. There is no phone, a bit of information Maybury doesn't believe but he can't do anything about it. The potential for a sexual encounter with a strange, beautiful, "tragic" woman he first saw across the dining room tempts him in a way that belies his worries that his wife Angela will be horribly worried if he's not home soon.

It's all very subtle, and the eeriness is almost more of a nuisance, certainly as Aickman describes Maybury's reaction to it, than anything else. Along the way, and as the strangeness deepens -- and you are not wrong if you believe that Maybury will probably be forced to accept a room for the night -- bits of the kind of man Maybury is are revealed. At one point, through Falkner's attempts to be accommodating, Maybury is paired off with a sad, shrunken man named Bannard, who is delighted by the company as he is, he says, quite lonely. Bannard, a true believer in whatever The Hospice is, is clearly a long-term resident -- is his apparent lack of life experience a result of his being there so long, or is he there because it's the only place he can exist without hassle? Either way, he quizzes Maybury with great interest:

"Tell us about it," said Bannard. "Tell us exactly what it's like to be a married man. Has it changed your whole life? Transformed everything?"

"Not exactly," [said Maybury]. "In any case, I married years ago."

"So now there is someone else. I understand."

"No, actually, there is not."

"Love's old sweet song still sings to you?"

"If you like to put it like that, yes. I love my wife. Besides she's ill. And we have a son. There's him to consider too."

"How old is your son?"

"Nearly sixteen."

"What colour are his hair and eyes?"

"Really, I'm not sure. No particular colour. He's not a baby, you know."

"Are his hands still soft?"

"I shouldn't think so."

"Do you love your son, then?"

"In his own way, yes, of course."

A terrifically strange conversation -- funny, pathetic, unnerving, revealing. It reveals a coldness in Maybury, an absence of affectionate emotion, but what does that "In his own way," as opposed to the clearer and more appropriate "In my own way" reveal? Nothing too good, I'd wager, but it's a very curious bit of phrasing. This is the other thing about Aickman -- if his stories make no logical sense, that is not because he's ignorant of actual humanity.

The ending is one of Aickman's best, and I won't say a word about it. The story comes together, to the degree that it does come together, in a way that was entirely unexpected to me, but unquestionably right on target. It also, in the way Aickman goes about this sort of thing, moves the story from an ambiguous strangeness into legitimate, yet still deeply ambiguous, horror. It is, as I've said, perfect, the kind of ending that all great short stories have, one that is completely of a piece with what has come before, and crystallizes everything into a final paragraph that is inevitable and powerful.

I was talking to a Arion Berger about this story when she was considering covering it herself, and I had to admit I'd never read it. Considering the place "The Hospice" has among Aickman's work, this, I said, was a little bit like a Faulkner fan admitting that they'd never read As I Lay Dying. In retrospect, this was an interesting comparison. And you shouldn't assume that I've just now accidentally revealed too much, but then again, who knows?

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 29: An Exquisitely Beautiful Skeleton

by Philip Tatler IV

Thinking it would boost her profile, Karen Blixen wrote under the male pseudonym “Isak Dinesen” for most of her career. Blixen/Dinesen is, of course, known best for her novel Out of Africa and her short story “Babette’s Feast,” both of which were adapted into acclaimed films (she also wrote “The Immortal Story,” which was adapted by Blixen uber-fan Orson Welles and unfortunately remains unavailable on DVD).

From the little bit of digging I did for this piece, Blixen sounds like a fascinating woman. She led a hardscrabble, lion-killing life in Kenya before returning to her native Denmark, where she started her official writing career at the age of 39, when she published Seven Gothic Tales.

What drew me to Dinesen’s Tales was its recent publication over at The Folio Society. (I imagine Bill has a healthy amount of bibliophiles that visit this blog so let me heartily recommend you folks head over to the Folio Society’s site and empty what’s left of your coffers; it’ll be worth the bankruptcy proceedings that follow, I promise!) I was also intrigued when, upon researching her, I discovered that both she and her father had contracted syphilis. He was diagnosed with it when Dinesen was 10 and promptly killed himself. She was 25 and living in Africa and suspected her husband’s infidelity as the root cause. I bring this up not for shock value, but because I think it has some bearing on the Dinesen story I chose for today's piece. Back to that in a second.

First, there's the term "Gothic" -- defining which is a bit of a sticky wicket; the term has become warped beyond recognition. For most people, "Gothic" has become truncated to "goth" and is used solely to describe those unfortunate teenagers with black lipstick and no curfews that haunt the malls looking for fellow Type O Negative fans. I'll revert to the loose description employed by H.P. Lovecraft in his Supernatural Horror in Literature:

...the infinite array of stage properties which include strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All of this paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel...

That's not really even a proper definition of "Gothic" so much as a cataloging of the elements which inform the style. However, Lovecraft's elements stack up nicely enough to convey what I think most readers of this blog think of when they hear the word. In essence, Gothic stories are fairy tales for adults, the logic of the fairy tales warping with age and taking on the more sinister stains of the mature world.

The story I chose was "The Monkey" and it certainly has some of the “stage properties” Lovecraft mentions. “Monkey” is, for me, another evocative word. Like extraterrestrials, I find primates upsetting on a soul-deep level. It’s their “same-but-other”-ness that gives me a chronic case of the willies. Humanoid in shape, beastly in manner, too smart for their own good. I figured a Gothic tale called “The Monkey” would do the trick on a cold autumn night.

In a few of the Lutheran countries of northern Europe,” the story begins, “there are still in existence places which make use of the name convent, and are governed by a prioress or chanoiness, although they are of no religious nature.

The setting is remote, off-kilter: a nunnery for women who aren’t religious and who are, in fact, desperate to be married off to whomever will take them. The convent is presided over by an imposing Prioress who keeps a pet monkey from Zanzibar, gifted to her by a suitor. The women joke that the creature is the Prioress’s Geheimrat or “secret counselor.”

…it would be found … in the library, pulling out brittle folios a hundred years old, and scattering over the black-and-white marble floor browned leaves dealing with strategy, princely marriage contracts, and witches’ trials.

The monkey has interesting, and significant, choices in reading material. It also has, Dinesen reminds us several times, glittering eyes, which made me wonder if she hadn’t read Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” at some point before writing this.

The story begins with a visit to the convent from the Prioress’s nephew, Boris Boris has recently become embroiled in a career-damaging controversy “(connected) somehow with those sacred shores of ancient Greece they had till now held in high esteem”, which is Dinesen’s polite way of telling us that Boris is either a homosexual or a pedophile. Either way, he’s not exactly pursuing interests that are encouraged in nineteenth century Europe, especially within the military. This kerfuffle has driven him to the arms of his aunt.

Initially, Boris is the soft center of the tale and presumably our surrogate. Boris is a young man “under some great agitation of mind” and therefore immediately sympathetic. The convent gives him “an unsure welcome, as if he might have been … a young priest of black magic, still within hope of conversion.” His last hope to save face is to marry a woman and, since his aunt’s convent is chockablock with eligible virgins of various ages, he’s come to the right place.

However, his aunt’s solution to the quandary is to do a bit of outsourcing; she suggests he marry Athena, his childhood playmate and the daughter of a local Count. The Count’s star has fallen a bit; his fortune has been sliding, “House of Usher”-style, into decadence for years, as it’s been tied up in a legal battle the Count expects to die fighting. “Athena,” the Prioress points out, “has never had an offer of marriage in her life.” We learn later that Athena has been virtually the Count’s only companion and he has, in turn, raised her as something like a son. Her manliness is emphasized in Dinesen’s description (“a pair of shoulders which could lift and carry a sack of wheat”) so, if Boris’s predilections lie that way, it’s more than implied that Athena’s a viable close second.

“If Athena will not have you, my little Boris,” his aunt says, “I will.” The statement is equally playful and presciently menacing. Boris is too desperate (and weak of character) to protest and he’s immediately off to the Count’s to plead his case.

Throughout “The Monkey”, Dinesen effortlessly weaves layers of biblical and Classical allusion, while also drawing heavily on folk myths of the region, to create an atmosphere thick with transcendent tradition. Two asides – before we even dig into the paranormal meat of the plot – keep the Gothic torch burning. As Boris rides to the Count’s castle, he is suddenly struck by the enchanting landscape:

…[It] seemed cool, all blue and pale gold. Boris was able now to believe what the old gardener at the convent had told him when he was a child: that he had once seen, about this time of the year and the day, a herd of unicorns come out of the woods to graze upon the sunny slopes… The air smelled of fir leaves and toadstools, and was so fresh that it made him yawn.

During the journey, Boris has another recollection of a time when he and a friend were travelling this same countryside on a three week holiday:

One night they had come, very tired, to a farmhouse in a grass field, and had been given a large bed in a room that had in it a grandfather’s clock and a dim looking-glass. Just as the clock was striking twelve, three quite young girls appeared on the threshold in their shifts, each with a lighted candle in her hand, but the night was so clear that the little flames looked only like little drops of the moon. They clearly did not know that two wayfaring young men had been taken in… and the guests watched them in deep silence from behind the hangings of the big bed… one by one they dropped their slight garments on the floor and quite naked that walked up to the mirror and looked into it… absorbed in the picture. Then they blew out their candles, and in the same solemn silence they walked backward to the door… and disappeared… The two boys remembered that this was Walpurgis Night, and decided that what they had witnessed was some witchcraft by which these girls had hoped to catch a glimpse of their future husbands.

Not for nothing does Boris recall this instant. To him marriage – and women – are an eerie, mystifying, erotic mess that he’d probably rather view from “behind the hangings of the big bed.”

This is the whimsical stuff of fairy tales – certainly an important element in horror, Gothic and otherwise. The sinister side of the fairy tale coin – the witches who eat children, the trolls under bridges, wolves who stalk grandmothers – enters the story soon enough. Pulling up to Hopballehus – the Count’s estate – Boris is greeted by his potential father-in-law:

...the old Count appeared at the top step, standing like Samson when in wrath he broke down the temple of the Philistines… his mighty head surrounded by a mane of wild gray hair, like a poet’s or a lion’s… scrutinizing his visitor, like an old man gorilla outside his lair, ready for the attack… imposing upon (Boris) a presence such as the Lord himself might have shown had he descended, for once, the ladder of Jacob.

Obviously, the Count isn’t a man to be trifled with. Dinesen has constructed the story in such a way as to make us immediately defensive of young, sensitive Boris in the face of this imposing man. However, the tone shifts and the Count is immediately warm toward Boris. He enthuses over his recent legal victories, which have effectively restored the Count’s fortune and good name. He doesn’t hesitate to offer up the hand of his virtuous, strong-willed daughter (pending, of course, Athena’s acceptance of the arrangement). Everything becomes very “Happily Ever After” very quickly.

Except, there’s about two thirds of the story to go and Dinesen has very carefully left crooked signposts along the way that suggest we’re not in a safe world. There’s the unicorn, the witches, the bizarre aunt-nephew relationship, the oddly close (again, echoes of Usher) father-daughter relationship, and that damn monkey, who disappears after he’s introduced, only to be spotted by Boris on his way back from receiving the Count’s good news. This brief sighting signifies a change in the story:

And suddenly it came upon (Boris) that somewhere something was not right, was quite wrong and out of order. Strange powers were out tonight. The feeling was so strong and distinct that it was as if an ice-cold hand passed for a moment over his scalp. His hair rose a little upon his head. For a few minutes he was really and genuinely afraid, struck by an extraordinary terror. In this strange turbulence of the night, and the wild life of dead things all around him, he felt himself… terribly and absurdly small, exposed and unsafe.

All of that business above about defining “Gothic” wasn't to pad out my word count or make this sound like a grade school book report. This book comes wrapped in a label that suggests horror, hence my choosing it. However, for a while “The Monkey” seemed like it was just headed toward territory that was sort of Bronte-lite – yearning young lovers in a haunted landscape. Nothing wrong with that but not particularly horrifying either. About twenty pages in to the story, I started wondering if I should put it down and make another choice. But there was still that titular beast to contend with.

“The Monkey” certainly takes a turn for the Gothic – and extremely unnerving – in its last few pages. I won’t spoil it except to say that rape, attempted murder, and shape-shifting pay rather unexpected visits to the convent. And Boris becomes less and less sympathetic. Okay, I’ll spoil it a little, because this passage is just too wonderfully bizarre not to share:

“Boris, in the meantime, had been looking at Athena, and had let a fantasy take hold of his mind. He thought that she must have a lovely, an exquisitely beautiful, skeleton. She would lie in the ground … a work of art in ivory, and in a hundred years might be dug up and turn the heads of old archeologists… Less frivolous than the traditional old libertine who in his thoughts undresses the women with whom he sups Boris liberated the maiden of her strong and fresh flesh together with her clothes, and imagined that he might be very happy with her, that he might even fall in love with her, could he have her in her beautiful bones alone… Many human relations, he thought, would be infinitely easier if they could be carried out in bones only.”

Suffice to say, in “The Monkey” Dinesen works out what I imagine must have been some serious trust issues regarding men and sex. Having a syphilitic father and subsequently being infected with the disease via an unfaithful spouse has to take its toll. Which is not to reduce this beautifully written (and deeply disturbing) story to mere Freudian analysis; there was enough capital-W Weird going on here to sustain the mood well after I’d finished reading it (in fact, in light of the startling revelation at the climax, “The Monkey” certainly warrants a reread). I look forward to reading the other six of Dinesen’s Tales.
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Philip Tatler IV writes occasionally for GreenCine and his blog, Diary of a Country Pickpocket. His as-yet unproduced screenplay, Eyepole, won Best Screenplay in the 2010 Knoxville Horror Film Festival and he plans on resting on this laurel for the rest of his days.

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 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 25: What Is This That I Have Done?

by Roderick Heath

Montague Rhodes James, like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien after him, exemplified a bygone variety of creative and scholarly fecundity that many people would easily conjure to mind: the image of the British university don, scribbling away at private, eccentric visions as a pastime in between lectures and research. Perhaps James helped create the image himself, with his characters often coming from the ranks of tenured savants, variously absent-minded, churlish, gruff, and/or asocial. The impact James, Lewis, and Tolkien had on the fantastic genres of the twentieth century was powerful, and yet they stood far outside the usual flow of pressures familiar to most commercial genre writers, in their own time and ours (quite distinct from today when literary writers basically have to become teachers to make a living). Rather the contrary, their appeal and achievement lay precisely in the way they offered to readers respite from the raucous. Like Tolkien, James made his own delight in the arcane and the trappings of the scholarship he enjoyed part of the texture of his work, and likewise, the sense of untold lodes of lore and knowledge informs so many fleeing concepts and words found in their work. But James, a medieval scholar, archaeologist, translator, archivist, and finally teacher, was ultimately a very different kind of artist to the two later fantasy writers, and not just because they were Oxfordians. James’ world is our world, petty, mundane, often chokingly dull and predictable, and yet every now a veil is ripped and emanations of another zone invade stable reality and shock his characters into comprehending the fragility everything that surrounds them. The past stalks them like a bloodhound. Their transgressions, their need to learn, to uncover, to profit, to know, becomes their undoing as they run into the limits of the liminal. If they are to be saved, if they can be saved at all, they must abide the primal rules of the taboo and the ritual. Return the treasure to its hiding place. File the ancient document in the deepest archive. Pass the runes back. Run away as fast as you can.

An anecdote from James’ childhood holds that he broke out in tears when faced with a birthday party, and only calmed when he was allowed to retreat into a library, and around the same time he developed a fascination for an antique bible that he poured over for hours in delight. Not surprisingly, he died unmarried. Yes, James was what we’d now call a nerd, and much of his later writing contains an element of self-criticism, and self-provocation, in having the bubble of scholarly calm, and the domesticity and regulated, conciliatory civility of English life around it, disturbed by reminders of the uneasy nature of all stability. James’ prose is off-hand, rarely descriptive, except when sensatory experience starts to be distorted by strange presences and epiphanies. Oftentimes he writes as he’s speaking to another academic scholar, mumbling about manuscripts and pedantic details of dating, often commencing stories with dry anecdotes how he obtained such and such a paper and recounting the peculiar story behind it. The feeling of confidentiality, even intimacy, that James could create, turns his readers into confidants, fellow academes, someone to be told over a nice glass of sherry and a warm fireplace just why Professor so-and-so had to retire last year, or why Mr somebody-or-other seemed to just vanish. There’s often the carefully contrived feeling that he’s writing down a conversation or experience of his, or a friend’s. James got a kick out of reading his stories to fellows and friends around the university. It’s also certainly an aspect of the dryly realistic approach he takes, and indeed often gives his work a unique quality, at once fustily old-fashioned and peculiarly modern, even post-modern, as texts and accounts pile up, as if loosely arranged in a pile on his desk, trying to add them up into a narrative, scanning the evidence for the pivotal phrase, the revelatory moment.

There’s anticipation in James of Jose Luis Borges’ games with fake manuscripts and troves of imagined lore in this method. ‘Count Magnus,’ one of his most famous and anticipatory tales, is amassed in such a fashion, and indeed James states it upfront: these “papers out of which I have made a connected story…assumed the character of a record of one single experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve, almost, of its termination.” The recent craze for “found footage” movies – The Blair Witch Project, Rec, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, Chronicle, ad nauseum – which has proven particularly popular in horror cinema, is based around exactly the same method, and popular for exactly the same reason. As a storytelling method, it raises an ambiguity, however spurious, over the presumed nature of the narrative the audience is experiencing, bringing some elements into crucially sharp relief whilst helping obscure others. Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Bram Stoker’s Dracula exemplified the epistolary novel as a method for making the supernatural seem credible, but James’ approach is consciously much less neat. Whereas Dracula makes very clear what threat the living protagonists are dealing with, and gives them all the power of a rational society to meet it, ‘Count Magnus’ is genuinely disturbing for its elision, even abstraction, generated by James’ careful diffusion of the narrative in making the reader conscious of how it’s been recorded, or not recorded. He’s far more engaged with the almost tactile nature of the document as a repository of selective truth.

James was the great suggester of horror fiction, what Val Lewton would be for the cinema, the firm proponent that true interest lay in just what can’t be entirely identified, quantified, or treated with a rational mind. James’ namesake Henry had laid the building blocks for the psychological horror story with ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ but both men digressed from taking such a tack too literally, knowing the effect of such stories would degrade if reduced too obviously to symbolic tales of repression and frustration, and probably such an approach would have bored them anyway. And yet these qualities haunt M.R. James’ stories, stalking his heroes with their dried sap and fusty introversion. James’ stories often seem to ramble at first, partly because of his methods, as if the product of some intelligent but disorganised mind and disinterest in the reader’s immediate desires. ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ commences with a full, long paragraph of Latin, an antiquarian’s nastiest joke on his average reader. Structure and language often seem quaint, distracted, and yet his best stories always seem to suddenly crystallise in some memorable piece of phrasing that doesn’t violate the authorial voice and yet signals the presence of the unnatural, an obtuse invocation of something intensely disquieting, with an effect that can raise goosebumps at the right hour of the morning. Examples stick in my mind years after first reading them:

“…He could have sworn, he said, though it sounded foolish, squirrel or not, it had more than four legs.” – The Ash-Tree

“There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters.” – Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad

“One remark is universally made by those to whom I have shown the picture: ‘It was drawn from life.’” – Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook

“…But now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones.” – Count Magnus

These lines are generally benign out of context, only effective after the mood James creates has done its work. Only the last quote resembles a kind of gore money shot found in movies, where the other quotes are more oblique, yet all contain a queasy communication of unnatural physicality, made flesh out of the perversities of nightmare figurations. As Nigel Kneale, one of many genre writers who counted James among his influences, noted, James was always at his most concise and effective when describing physical mutilation and abnormality. The line from ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ comes at the end of a passage describing an illustration in a medieval book, of a Satanic monstrosity so perversely shaped a sane and lively contemporary expert in morphology couldn’t sleep for nights after seeing it. The idea that it’s so real, so troubling, that it can only have been drawn with the model standing before it, provides a gleefully alarming punchline. H.P. Lovecraft often tried to achieve a similar effect, to impart to the reader a sense of something so utterly inhuman that it beggars both countenancing and description. Lovecraft is often mocked for sometimes failing to achieve what he was going for, which indicates perhaps how skilled James was. He never made the mistake of describing too much. The use of the most seemingly bland, inexact word imaginable, “something,” in the quote from ‘Oh, Whistle,’ is James’ coup there, conjuring a disturbing image for the reader without anything concrete: everyone can fill in their own disturbing movement. The thing with more than four legs that mysteriously stalks the estate in ‘The Ash-Tree’, which proves, in the climax, to be a spider: nothing so unnatural in that, except that the spiders, when uncovered, prove to be poisonous brutes the size of a king crab. In ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,’ the treasure-hunting hero uncovers a horde of treasure, only for an unseen monster to gasp him with a clammy sensation of cold flesh, unknowable numbers of limbs, and wretched stench. James’ ability to concisely communicate a sense of tactile unease permeates so many of his tales that some commentators have believed he was trying to work through a phobic dislike of all physical contact.

‘Count Magnus’ begins, as usual, in a conversational manner, as the narrator, James “himself,” imparts how he assembled the tale from many documents, whilst mentioning that the reason he now possesses them thanks to a stroke of fortune which, however, he can’t reveal until the story’s end. The protagonist of his tale, Wraxhall, is only vaguely rescued from the obscurity of the written word and the fragmentary nature of the evidence; even his first name isn’t given, and the sorts of accidents that render a historian’s work frustratingly hard, in this case a fire that consumed a repository, have conspired to keep Wraxhall’s background all the more obscure. A professional writer with scholarly interests, Wraxhall embarked upon writing a guide book for English tourists who wanted to venture to Sweden, having already written one on his time in Brittany. James takes a poke at the fad for such books in the 1840s and ‘50s, a time when the idea of recreational travel was becoming more possible for burgeoning middle class folk in Britain, and explains the formula for writing such books: “reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers and garrulous peasants.” James’ sideswipe at a sort of dated version of Lonely Planet and the well-manicured paths of popular travel gives both an aptly mundane background to his story, a hint of satire, and also a digression of mood that’s a familiar part of his method. Wraxhall, James goes on to explain, travelled widely in Sweden before visiting a hamlet in Vestergothland, where he wanted to investigate a large archive kept by a prominent local family, at their manor house, known as Råbäck. As if out of deference to the family’s respectability, he only goes so far as to refer to them by the name of one of their antecedent clans, De La Gardie.

Loneliness is a keynote of ‘Count Magnus’ – loneliness, rootlessness, exposure, and finally desperation. Wraxhall is a forgotten being, albeit one who, in his time, was successful, but untethered to any hearth or heart, past middle-age and “very much alone in the world.” James notes that “he had, it seems no settled abode in England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses.” He declines an offer to stay with the De La Gardies and instead takes up in a hotel a mile away from the manor, a consequential choice. Wraxhall’s intention to write a usefully middling book is twisted back on itself, as he all but disappears within his travel notes with their seemingly inane lists of fellow passengers. James folds the narrative inwards like origami until he only comes through as the distant but haunting memory of strangers of a frantic man who died mysteriously and gruesomely. Whilst sifting through the De La Gardie archive, he learnt unusual things about the founder of the family’s fortunes, Count Magnus, whose body rests securely in a large sarcophagus in the church that sits halfway between manor and hotel. The church sits in the midst of a private forest Magnus used as a game reserve. So zealous was Magnus about the inviolability of his property and protecting it from usurpers that he burnt down the houses of neighbours, with whole families inside, and earned infamy for vicious reprisals to a peasant rebellion. Yes, Magnus was a right charmer, but for Wraxhall, as for most any inquisitive contemporary person safe in their vantage centuries hence, horror and tyranny have become sideshow. Discovering that Magnus apparently dabbled in alchemy and magic on top of such ruthless aristocratic behaviour “only made him a more picturesque figure.”

Count Magnus should be, like Wraxhall, a mere vestige, for, like the writer, he is held firmly in the grip of the past, extant to posterity only through his works, writings, and legend. But here emerges qualitative difference: Magnus is force of nature and force outside of nature, as desolating and consuming as nuclear fallout, and the totems of his existence have terrible power. Far more so than Wraxhall, who can barely dominate a page of his own narrative. Wraxhall is hapless Everyman. Magnus is extraordinary aristocrat, a product of an age with a different, less constrained idea of power, made immortal by different concepts of existence. Magnus’s portrait, Wraxhall records, depicts an extraordinarily ugly man. His book of cabalistic and alchemic research, which the unlucky writer finds in the De La Gardie archive, contains references to the unholiest lore. His body still lies in a sealed sarcophagus in the church, held in check by three massive padlocks. His house and grounds are still inviolate. Upon the sarcophagus are engraved unusual designs, including one that depicts a mysterious, diminutive form chasing a hapless man in a forest, at the direction of an onlooking master. Of the pursuer, we’re told, “the only part of the form which projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr Wraxhall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish.” Holy hentai, Batman. But most of all the power of Magnus is sensed the effervescent fear apparent in the locals when questions about Magnus’ activities are raised. The terror engendered by Magnus in his tenants and neighbours when alive was bad enough, but his malign reputation still reverberates. Wraxhall’s enquiries are, in what is now a familiar pattern for genre fans, deflected and delayed by garrulous men and helpful priests who suddenly clam up and avoid further questions when some particularly grim or evil subject is broached, especially that matter of the Black Pilgrimage.

Like Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote fine some fantastic stories situated on similar fault lines of the modern consciousness to his, James was essentially a late Victorian writer, but one who also kept producing stories until his death in the 1930s, who helped mediate his era’s struggle to accept the coexistence of emergent modernity’s sanitising urges and nagging cultural spectres. The capacity of the Victorians to be both archly rational and airily religious stemmed from a zeitgeist very different to the one James, with his knowledge of the arcane world of medieval and classical literature, knew underpinned much of the European intellectual tradition. In studied contrast to the sun-dappled, pacific moods of the tea-sipping Anglican sensibility, James dredges up pages torn from ancient alchemy textbooks, points of lore from near-forgotten grimoires, relics from before Hastings, and obscure evils from the darkest corners of Mosaic and early Christian mythologies, like the monster from ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’, a Solomonian grotesque that quite literally seems to eat its way off the page to stalk the milquetoast sons of men inhabiting the future. James delights in suggesting such scarcely plumbed depths from ages when distinctions were far more permeable and the zone of religion, science, magic, philosophy, and politics grew in tangled, troublingly intimate awareness of each-other. Lovecraft synthesised a body of imagined lore to prop up his morbid universe. James merely refers with sinister vagueness to such a body of possibly imagined yet authentic-sounding volumes from the dark vaults of Medieval Europe’s covert intelligentsia violating boundaries of presumed reality. Wraxhall records Magnus as possessing “the book of the Phoenix, book of the Thirty Words, book of the Toad, book of Miriam, Turba philosophorum, and so forth.” At the heart of the story’s mystery is a genuine piece of Biblical lore, the village of Chorazin in the Holy Lands, where the Antichrist will supposedly be born. Magnus went on his “Black Pilgrimage” there to kneel in obeisance before a Satanic emissary, and “brought something or someone back with him.”

Could it be that Magnus returned to his home with his own personal devil, that disturbing imp, the one portrayed on the side of his sarcophagus? Well, duh. Small wonder that Magnus in all his cruelty and malignancy emerges far more vividly than Wraxhall from his artefacts, to the point where Wraxhall falls under his spell, quite literally it seems. “Ah, Count Magnus, there you are,” he utters fatefully (and fatally) in a seeming jest whilst gazing at the Count’s mausoleum: “I should dearly like to see you.” Later, “James” informs us, Wraxhall recounted an odd interlude of distraction bordering on compulsion, recovering to find himself “singing or chanting some such words as, “Are you awake, Count Magnus?” or, “Are you there, Count Magnus?”’ There’s an echo here of the repeated name that manifests Clive Barker’s Candyman, with a similar note of reference to both religious liturgy and childish invocation. “He had not no eyes for his surroundings, no perception of the evening scents of the woods or the evening light on the lake,” James notes as Wraxhall is drawn towards the church for one of his dissociative reveries, drawing the reader’s attention to imagine precisely those things whilst describing Wraxhall’s state, a fine example of James’ minimalist skill.

‘Count Magnus’ is interesting not least because of its resonance with that more famous undead literary count; indeed, the anthologist Peter Haining once included the story in a collection entitled The Rivals of Dracula, where I first read it. As in Stoker’s book, a Briton travels into an unfamiliar locale in one of Europe’s extreme places, and encounters a supernatural remnant of an aristocracy that once lorded over a Europe so different to the new society, and yet whose powerful grip on the mind and reality of the structure of that society can still prove staggeringly powerful. Like Dracula, based on Vlad ‘the Impaler,’ Count Magnus De La Gardie is associated with the past’s harshness. Except that where Vlad was a religious warrior in a time of invasion, Magnus is characterised as a vicious oppressor, who seems to have actively sought as much power in the spiritual world as he had in the human, his hubris both transcendingly mighty and amazingly petty and greedy (a common trait of those who set evil in motion in James’ tales). Unlike Dracula, Magnus remains a threatening cypher, a black figure at the far end of the path in the twilight. James’ manipulation of viewpoint and storytelling texture is most pronounced when Wraxhall finally extracts the source of his innkeeper Nielsen’s anxiety in discussing Magnus. Nielsen cautiously offers up his own anecdote from “my Grandfather’s time – that is, ninety-nine years ago.” Another layer of storytelling, another layer of time, and yet here the presence of threat becomes tangibly immediate. “I can tell you this one little tale, not any more. You must not ask anything when I have done.” Nielsen presents details like James himself, hard and impersonal, descriptive but unelaborate, telling everything by only telling what was sure. Nielsen’s recounting of grandfather’s story of two men who decided to mock Magnus and violate his domain, that private forest, culminates in pure horror movie shtick, recollections of dreadful screams (“just as if the most inside piece of his soul was twisted out of him”) and mocking, inhuman laughter. The fearful morning after finds one man driven mad, pushing away what he still imagines is threatening him, and the other man, the good-looking one, the one who no longer had a face: “The eyes of Anders Bjornsen were looking up, because there was nothing to close over them.”

Yikes. By James’ standards this is gory, showy stuff, but splendidly achieved, wrought with an exacting skill, like the use, in the sentence I quoted earlier, of the word “sucked” in noting the mutilation of Bjornsen’s face. Not a cliché like eaten, gnawed, or ripped, but sucked. What the hell kind off unholy creation could suck a man’s face off, we’re left to wonder. Perhaps even more effective is the description of the reaction of the men present – so appalled were they that they buried Bjornsen on the spot – and those who have been told this tale and have its intimations engraved upon their natures. This note recurs again in the story’s finale. The precision of James’ words, the suggestive quality, both avoids description and yet somehow describes the business here with true menace and clarity. Nielsen’s anecdote is a work of artisanal concision, delineated with pronouncements that describe the edge of taboo and atrocity, recalling an event so terrible it still chills the blood of people 99 years later, and ending with the bluntness of a smash cut in a movie, for the story continues the next day, without note of what sort of night’s sleep Wraxhall had after hearing that. Not too bad, it seems, as Wraxhall remains ignorant of threat until it’s too late. Too late being when, about to depart for England, he stops for a farewell visit to Magnus’ sarcophagus from which the padlocks keep seeing to fall off (a touch pilfered by Terence Fisher and Peter Bryan for The Brides of Dracula, 1960) in defiance of basic physics. The last one clangs to the floor at his feet, and “there was the sound of metal hinges creaking, and (he) distinctly saw the lid shifting upwards.” Bad enough, but Wraxhall further describes that “there was something more than I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or sight I am not able to remember. What is this thing I have done?”

Wraxhall’s subsequent flight from Sweden and journey home dissolves then, James reports, is described only in a peculiar series of lists he makes of fellow passengers, and James’ inference from his handwriting that a mere few days of sailing reduced him to “a broken man.” It becomes clear what he was looking for, a tall man under and old-fashioned hat and a short companion in a hooded cloak. Magnus and his familiar, pursuing the scholar, for whatever reason, whether for a petty slight or in maliciously black-humoured fulfilment of his wish, the undead master and malignant imp dog Wraxhall’s footsteps until he meets his fate in a village, Belchamp Saint Paul. The sparseness of the narrative style here, with James’ bare-boned, inference-laden telling from scant details, somehow manages to wring the worst kind of existential despair from the situation. Wraxhall finds himself spiralling unavoidably towards the most terrible of ends. The bitterest of ironies, this man who has no home and knows only boarding houses and hotels can find lodgings in the village but no aid, for even the parson’s away for some reason, and we’re left to imagine a Wraxhall in his final hours quivering in terror at what will inevitably be his horrific end. “What can he do but lock his door and cry to God?” James questions bleakly.

Nor does James provide any final escape: “And the jury that viewed the body, seven of ‘em did, none of them wouldn’t speak of what they see,” he recounts. Note the shift to the regional dialect, James’ last twist of technique, as he now quotes an eyewitness (and not even distinguished by quote marks), another layer of storytelling and this one the most immediate and faux-authentic, spoken to James’ own ear, or so he would have us believe. And how did he piece together the bulk of Wraxhall’s narrative? Why, he happened to inherit the house where Wraxhall found his last lodging, so benighted by the event that no-one would live in it, so he had it demolished, uncovering Wraxhall’s papers. Nice one, Monty. James wasn’t always a downbeat or unsentimental writer, and some of his great endings, as tales like ‘Casting the Runes’ and ‘Lost Hearts’ provide memorable defeats for evil, as does the closest thing I think he ever wrote to a romantic narrative, in ‘The Tractate Middoth’. But never in James’ work is the feeling that the forces of the supernatural are more than briefly containable. No silver bullets, no stakes through the heart, no handy exorcisms. Often his tales end with the protagonists wisely repairing whatever violation they’ve committed and retreating gratefully into obscurity. This quality makes him still feel modern and vital in the horror genre, and one reason why his influence seems to me to be everywhere in it today, even in product from another culture, like those signal J–Horror works, The Ring movies. Whereas Bram Stoker finally demonstrated that the new world of the mercantile bourgeoisie could forge alliance with the deferential local aristocracy and the new prophets of science to defeat an emissary of an evil variously identified as foreign, bygone, and tyrannical, James offers no such solace, nor even a grip on the phenomenon. Magnus and his familiar are finally as alien as Stanislaw Lem’s planet in Solaris, as cryptic and unforgiving as Kafka’s unseen forces, seemingly as unstoppable as Lovecraft’s Elder Gods. Magnus is the pure spirit of the past’s evil, but also the future’s, blank, abstract, and implacable, sure as death. Wraxhall does at least achieve one small victory. No-one who reads his tale would ever make the mistake of wanting to meet Count Magnus.
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Roderick Heath is an author, poet, and hopeless film geek, a resident of the Blue Mountains, outside Sydney, Australia. He is a proud dropout of the prestigious Australian Film, Television, and Radio School. He writes for the blogs Ferdy on Films and This Island Rod, and is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.