The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 13: The Raw Human Heart

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In their introduction to the strikingly titled collection of fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby, editors and translators Keith Gessen and Anna Summers describe Petrushevskaya as both the most popular writer in Russia today (now that Solzhenitsyn's gone, anyway) and a public figure who continues to be extremely divisive. Summers and Gessen say that many readers object to the relentlessly bleak nature of Petrushevskaya's work (to which I might say "Well, look around you", if that didn't sound so insensitive), while others refuse to accept that great literary respect has been bestowed upon a woman who, among other things, has been known to perform a solo cabaret act "while wearing an enormous hat." I had no idea enormous hats were such a hot potato in Russia, but there it is.

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The above just about exhausts my knowledge of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, the public figure. I have a little bit more experience with her fiction, having now read the majority of There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (a title I refuse to shorten, so catchy do I find it) -- I've read enough of it, in fact, to know that it's subtitle, Scary Fairy Tales, is at least a tiny bit misleading. Though my past reading from the book yielded a number of horror or horror-tinged stories -- "The Arm", "Incident at Sokolniki", "The God Poseidon", the plague story "Hygiene" -- last night caught me floundering through the unread stories, trying to find something that I wouldn't have to twist myself into knots trying to justify as horror. It's a sad story, I know, but this is what I sometimes have to go through. The point being that Scary Fairy Tales is a rather reductive description, or at least the "scary" part is -- it is true that all of the stories from the book I've read so far have an unmistakable fairy tale ring to their prose; some more than others, but it's always there. But "scary"...not always. One story I read, "The Miracle", featured mysterious portents and gutter prophecies and all that, but, for once, ended on a note of obscure uplift that cast the whole story into an odd, new, horror-less light. Same thing with "The Father", which features a childless father tramping through the snow to a mysterious hut and finding a baby that looks like an old man. Even these horrid beginnings are eventually transformed into a story of paternal fulfillment (sort of, and also, I think).

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Two stories did eventually fit the bill, however, or as close as I was able to get. The first, called "There's Someone in the House", is an especially odd duck of a story about a woman who believes there is a poltergeist in her home, and decides to go to war with it, all the while reflecting on what would appear to be her own difficult childhood, where she suffered at the hands of an overbearing stage mother. The woman's method of battling this ghost is particularly warped, however:

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It clearly wants something, this Creature, It's trying to get at something...Now if she could just figure out what It wants, she could -- she's done this before -- defeat Its design. She could seize the initiative. That's a classic maneuver -- meet your enemy halfway. Like when they light a fire to battle another fire in the forest -- if they intersect in the right spot, they'll both go out for lack of oxygen.

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Once upon a time, for example, the mother had owned an expensive set of German china...and she guarded this china with her life in case they'd have to sell it to pay for a funeral (hers) -- and one time, when, in a fit, the daughter had hurled one of the cups to the floor, the mother cold-bloodedly began smashing the rest of the set ("slut!" went the noise it made, "slut!"), piece by piece by piece, nearly driving her daughter insane, and declaring, to top it off, "I'm going to die, all right, but you'll be left with nothing."

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That's how her plan to defeat the poltergeist is summarized, so it's fair to wonder how much of this ghost business is actually on the level. No matter, though, because clearly the woman -- who eventually comes to be referred to in the story as "mother-daughter" -- believes it, and she proceeds to demolish her apartment before the poltergeist can do it first. "There's Someone in the House" is clearly not a chronicle of a ghost infestation, but rather one of a damaged psyche finally cutting loose, with a subplot about how all this is effecting her cat. It's a weird little story, full of more pain than I'm probably getting across here. "Is there a ghost or is s/he mad?" stories being very common (as I think I've mentioned) in the horror genre, "There's Someone in the House" fits in nicely, even though I think the answer is pretty apparent. Either way, in all manifestations of this idea, the answer is often thought to be beside the point, and while that doesn't always play for me, in a perverse way it does here. No, I don't believe there's a ghost. However, yes, she does. As a result, her wide-eyed, stumbling progress into some kind of happiness at the end may be objectively phony, to someone who doesn't live in her head, but if she believes it then at least that's something.

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On an even more obscure note, the next story is called "The Fountain House", and it begins like this:
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There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life. That is, her parents were told that the girl was dead, but they couldn't have the body (they had all been riding in the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her). The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown back by the blast.

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I'm going to admit, up front, something I maybe shouldn't, which is that I don't really have any idea what happens at the end of this story. On a certain level, yes, I do, up to a point. But beyond that point, and in a more general sense, I'm flummoxed. What I do know is that the dead girl's father kidnaps her body from the morgue because he believes she's still alive, and needs to see a doctor. He bribes his way to the hospital, and bribes his way to a doctor, who he bribes to take a look at the girl. The doctor can see she's dead, but he plays along, partly because of the money, and partly because...

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...there was nothing more important to him than a difficult case, than a sick person, no matter who it was, on the brink of death.

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And therein lies my difficulty with this story. One the one hand, Petrushevskaya is blunt about the girl being dead. At other times, such as in the first paragraph I quoted, and here again in the doctor's consideration of his task, she makes you wonder. The fact that much of the rest of the story consists of strange dreams had by the father does not go very far towards clearing things up.

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Which is unimportant, ultimately. What "The Fountain House" is at its core is a story about tearing grief, and the brief flickers of madness it can create in otherwise stable human beings. In its obscurity, "The Fountain House" also leaves open the possibility that a girl is brought back from the dead, and in doing so it marries itself, in my head anyway, to the non-horror Petrushevskaya story I mentioned earlier called "The Miracle". At one point in that story, Nadya, the protagonist, is desperately trying to find a way to phrase her wish, one she expects to be granted, in a way that will minimize any karmic blowback that are often the nasty residue of wishing. During her figuring, another woman lists a series of wishes that came true for other people, and the difficulties and horrors that followed after. What one usually thinks of in these cases is W. W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw". Or at our darkest hours, Stephen King's Pet Sematary. And it follows that, unless I'm completely of the charts in my consideration of "The Fountain House" (a possibility I know to never discount), the father who stole his daughter from the morgue could be facing a nightmare that Petrushevskaya simply couldn't bring herself to tell us about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 10: A Small Tail Was in My Pants

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Sigh...

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Okay, let me tell you how I first heard about Carlton Mellick III. Actually, I can't tell you exactly. All I know for sure is that, many years ago, I was dicking around on Amazon, browsing through random books, presumably in my chosen genres, by authors I'd never heard of before. Somewhere along the way, I came across a book called Satan Burger by Carlton Mellick III. The cover of Satan Burger told me pretty much everything I needed to know about Mellick, and I imagine I wondered idly if he was of legal drinking age yet. Or voting age, for that matter. I'm not going to include an image of Satan Burger's cover in this post, because I will not have the good name of this blog sullied in that manner, but some of you are going to want to see it, and instead of being all superior and telling you to look it up yourself, I will include this link. However, be aware that this link is NSFW, and not because it's sexy and awesome. Whether or not you choose to view that link, I will take a moment to note Satan Burger's cover blurb, provided by one "Vincent W. Sakowski" (talk about a get!), which reads: "This generation's Vonnegut!" If so, then may God have mercy on us all.

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Jump ahead a bunch of years, and I'm shopping for horror anthologies in preparation for posts such as the one you're reading this very moment. I find two massive ones edited by John Skipp, one called Werewolves and Shapeshifters: Encounters with the Beast Within and the other called Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead. Taken together, these collections contain short stories by, among others, Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter, John Collier, Saki, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem, Theodore Sturgeon, and Neil Gaiman. And both collections boast a story by Carlton Mellick III. That's some mighty high-toned company for a guy who looks like this on purpose...

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...and is undoubtedly a massive GWAR fan to be keeping. Is it possible that I let a book cover and a generally snobby attitude cloud what I like to think is my open mind about such things? Was I wrong about Carlton Mellick III? Is it possible that he's actually a talented writer?
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NO!!! What, are you fucking kidding me? No, not at all. But I have evidence now to back this up, as I read both stories offered by the two Skipp anthologies: "War Pig" from the werewolf book and "Lemon Knives n' Cockroaches" from the zombie one.

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So "War Pig" takes the werewolf myth and turns that motherfucker on its ear because instead of the guy turning into a wolf he turns into a pig. And also it's sort of like The Running Man, but the movie, not the book. What happens is, in the future poor people can't make any money, but there's this sport where first you go through this series of "serum" injections that turn you into a part man, part animal creature, and then once you're enough of an animal, they put you in the ring with another manimal, and you both fight until one of you is dead. The winner gets money. The title character is the reigning champion, but he's taken so much of that serum that he's about to become all pig, and/or die. So his time's running out, and War Pig's son, Tommy, who's still all human, and is our narrator watches on in sadness as War Pig seems set to fall beneath the slashing claws of his current opponent, named Grizzly Titan. Meanwhile, War Pig's manager, an unscrupulous greed-monster named Mr. Crumbly, is trying to entice Tommy to begin the serum treatment himself. War Pig gets wind of this, and is all "Oh no you don't."

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So that's your story, basically. It ends in a fury of violence, described in Mellick's best approximation of high school creativity:
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Mr. Crumbly whistled and three of his fighters came up from the lower deck to protect him. A werewolf, a crocodile man, and a werehorse. But all three were quickly pummeled to death.

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Not the werehorse! "War Pig" develops a surprising sentimental streak towards at the end, when War Pig and his son Tommy bond over the carnage and mend their relationship, which has been fractured ever since the dad started to try to become a pig. But I'd like to break away from my analysis of "War Pig" and focus on this serum treatment business. When Mellick cracks his knuckles and gets down to the task of providing us exposition on this stuff, here's what he lays out:
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Every injection would make you a little less human, and a lot more animal. Which beast you transformed into depended a little on your DNA and a lot on chance.

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So what kind of animal you become has nothing to do with the serum? Your DNA has more to do with it than the frickin' made up serum?? What does Mellick think DNA is? A bunch of human goo mixed with a mystery animal goo, unique to each person, so that while I might have a bit of giraffe in me, my brother might be part seal? I realize this doesn't really matter in a made up story, but Mellick seems to think it does, otherwise he would have left that inanity out completely. Which I guess makes sense, as Mellick is the same guy who, when describing the appalling conditions the poor live in, later writes:

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After paying, I went to the nearby fire pit to cook the meat, passing a rat woman nibbling on her meat raw. The animal people often preferred the taste of raw meat, though they usually ate it that way because using the fire was an extra cost.

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Well why the fuck don't they just eat it raw if that's the way they like it??? You dumb bastard, you just said they liked it better raw! Fire being "an extra cost" shouldn't even enter into their considerations because they don't even want to cook the meat! THEY'D RATHER EAT IT RAW!!

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And speaking of all that, there's this other story, "Lemon Knives 'n Cockroaches". Never mind what it's about -- uh, it's post-zombie Apocalypse, and humans have devolved into filthy underground dwellers who eat zombies and also other humans, and there's these two people, our narrator and some chick named Alyxa, who do all sorts of gross things, and who live in this tribe run by this guy named Thomas who is evil and gay, and who eventually Alyxa and the narrator fight back against and kill, and then feed to zombies, but then Alyxa wants to eat Thomas, also, but then she gets killed by other guys from her tribe because they think she's a zombie and so they kill her the way she used to kill zombies, which is pretty ironic -- because in the story are these things called "lemon knives". "Lemon knives", we are told, are "sharp handmade knives greased with sour acids yellow in color..." Perhaps this is nit-picking, but in order for our narrator to know that the acids are sour, someone at some point in the history of the development of this weapon must have drunk some of this acid and said "Oh hey, it's pretty sour. We should call these 'lemon knives'", just before the acid finished eating through his face.

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Then again, aren't sour flavors often referred to as "acids"? That's what the Food Network continues to imply, because on that channel someone will try some pork dish and say "This needs an acid", which often means "You needed to squeeze a lime all over this plate." So maybe all acids really are sour, and therefore, regarding the lemon knives, our narrator was making a relatively safe assumption.

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Although, you know what lemon knives basically are? They're basically knives, because while a number of people are stabbed and sliced with these things over the course of the story's fifteen pages, at no point is anyone said to have been burned by acid. So maybe it's just a color thing with these people, an aesthetic choice. This theory is given credence by the fact that we are first told about lemon knives when Alyxa "opens her lips to release two lemon knives" into her hands. So they're just tucked up their in her mouth for hours on end until she decides she needs them, and then she opens her lips. Meanwhile, no ill effects due to the acid. On a related note, later on Alyxa is completely naked, but our narrator realizes "[b]y the way she walks" that "she has her lemon knives hidden between her legs". So she's not wearing a stitch of clothing, but she's walking around with two knives between her legs. Just...what, taped there? Or her thighs are locked tight over two knives, and the guy she's about to use these knives on doesn't think "God she's walking stupid. What is between her legs, anyway? It better not be two lemon knives."

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Anyway, so that's what reading Carlton Mellick III is like. Better stories tomorrow, hopefully.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 9: Come Take Us All

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Larry Blamire is best known as the writer/director/star of the cult film The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, an affectionate spoof of movies like The Creeping Terror, Attack of the Crab Monsters, and basically any film from the 1950s that was filmed in Bronson Canyon. Though Lost Skeleton attracted a number of fans, myself included, it also met with a fair amount of derision, in some cases viewing Blamire's film as a sneering mockery of the films it's sending up. There is a contingent of cinephiles out there who reject all forms -- or all forms that don't make them laugh, anyway -- of jesting at the expense of incompetent films from the 50s and 60s, and to a certain extent I can understand that. It's very easy to feel superior to Ed Wood when you feel no personal drive to stick your neck out and make your own damn movie, for example. But at the same time, if you're not going to watch Bride of the Monster in order to laugh at it, you're not going to watch Bride of the Monster at all.

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So I'm a fan of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, but even if I wasn't I don't know how you could watch the film and not believe that Blamire not only knows whereof he spoofs, but in order to do so he'd have to be pretty fond of his subject. You don't watch that many cheap horror and science fiction movies because you hate them so much. Further evidence that Blamire is a fan -- and even an unironic one -- of this stuff comes in the form of Tales of the Callamo Mountains, a collection of thirteen Western/horror stories, a genre hybrid I wrote a little bit about last year. Though I'm a fan of this particular hybrid, and other hybrids, one area of concern I've had is that such fiction often is burdened with a crippling self-consciousness. The writers are so busy "playing" with these genre combinations that any possibility of the reader becoming immersed is lost.

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Well, Blamire has solved that particular problem by simply not being self-conscious about what he's doing. In his preface, he talks about being a long-time fan of Western horror, and citing a surprising list of classic TV shows, like Rawhide, Have Gun Will Travel and Cimarron Strip, that have all dabbled in it (and I've seen not a single episode that Blamire talks about here, but I'm anxious to see them all, particularly the Have Gun Will Travel episode called "Sweet Lady of the Moon" and the Cheyenne episode called "Satonka"). These references are striking because Blamire's fiction itself feels like a throwback to that era, which I mean in the best possible way -- there's something very Robert Bloch-ish about these stories. His brand of horror is quiet and insinuating, dread-laden rather than explicitly violent. The Western elements feel authentic, with no sense ever of an overplayed "You Are Reading About the Old West -- Let Me Instruct You" sensibility.

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I've read several stories from Tales of the Callamo Mountains since picking it up earlier this year, but for today I read "The Trouble at Poysadine" and "On Tuesday I'll Be in China". One thing that impresses me about Blamire's take on Western horror is that he's able to find quite a bit of variety within it -- the story "Winchester Repeater" would have been very comfortable as an episode of The Twilight Zone, and "An Unexpected Stop" is all mood and creepy uncertainty -- and these two stories illustrate that point quite well. "The Trouble at Poysadine", for example, is structured as a murder mystery. An unofficial US Marshal (he does the odd job, now and again) named Buster Helgruder is sent to the mining town of Poysadine (should have been "Poseidon", but the town founder couldn't spell), located in the Callamo Mountains, because no ore has shipped from them in a month, and the mining company wanted an answer. So off Buster goes, and, upon arrival, he finds Poysadine to be a virtual ghost town. Not quite, though, because there are still about a dozen residents, including Miss Melanie, who lives in the big white mansion overlooking the town, in which she used to live with her recently departed husband Captain Brewster, town founder and mine boss. Brewster was killed, having fallen, or been pushed, or been thrown, down a hole deep inside the mine. Many citizens of Poysadine have died recently, all violently -- most who haven't been killed have fled. This dozen or so is all that remains, and Buster has a hard time figuring out what's keeping them there.

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As I say, "The Trouble at Poysadine" is structured as a mystery, but that doesn't mean it's not a horror story. Buster suspects pretty much everybody he meets as being capable of murder, and further suspects there's more to that mine than just iron ore. But he experiences more than just professional suspicion:

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Buster woke like a shot. Something he'd always been able to do. The shotgun was already in hand. But he didn't know what woke him.

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He looked for the window of his room, a rectangle of moonlight, and listened for any sounds above the wind.

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It was a whimper, faint and distant...

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Poysadine was a solid black mass. If something stirred in those shadows he didn't see it. He tried listening but the gale now sounded like a church choir in the grip of madness...Buster knew emerging into that [moonlight] made him a childishly easy target. But that miserable whimper repeated and left him no choice.

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It's that whimper that clues Buster, and the reader, into the idea that the solution to Poysadine's troubles might be found to be something other than a run-of-the-mill murderer, someone grubbing for secret gold, which is underlying motivation Buster clings to as his guide. The solution Blamire actually has in store manages to be briefly disappointing, until it's dwelled on for a few minutes. Then the chill creeps in.

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Changing direction rapidly, next up we have "On Tuesday I'll Be in China", which finds Blamire exploring, with surprising success, the realm of surrealism in horror. In fact, what we have in this story is a Western/surrealism/horror/Steampunk hybrid that is quite unlike anything I've read, at least in a while. It's a hard story to talk about, because it really doesn't seem to belong in a collection of horror stories, until you get to the last couple of pages. Therefore, in order to really discuss it in depth as a horror story, I would be forced to ruin the effect (though not the twist -- the story isn't that easy), which is not something I'm eager to do. But basically what goes on is this: a young farmhand named Enoch is out in the field one day when he sees an airship gliding overhead. This happens a couple more times before he's able to find where it lands, and greet the pilot. The pilot, who never gives his name, seems perfectly happy to have Enoch around, whenever he happens to be flying through this area, and Enoch is not only incredibly impressed with this mind-boggling new mode of transportation, but also eager to pump himself up to everyone on the farm with his story. Except that nobody believes him, because why should they? Enoch's inability to prove his story begins to obsess him, until one day he's able to beg a souvenir off the airship pilot, one he can show to everyone and confirm his story. The pilot agrees, and gives Enoch a fresh biscuit.

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I know, I realize that, but this is a horror story, one of a very specific -- and, compared to the rest of Tales of the Callamo Mountains, somewhat modern in its execution -- sort. It is also, as you may have guessed, deeply strange, and for me, hard to shake.

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In his preface, Blamire talks about this clutch of stories coming about almost by accident -- he was asked to write one, for an anthology that never materialized, and found himself compelled to write more in the same general line -- and to my knowledge he's published no other prose fiction. Perhaps the classic pulp nature of these stories is a hindrance, because if there's one thing I've learned as a reader of fiction and watcher of movies, is that everyone professes to love the old stuff, but nobody wants anyone to do that old stuff ever again. If that's the reason Blamire hasn't published anything else, that's a damn shame. If the reason is that he's more focused on films, then it's still a damn shame, but one I can live with.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 8: The Two Hands of the Strangler, Not the Two Hands of the Lover

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I first heard about Brian Evenson on Sept. 26 of this year, when, in the comments section of this post, the mysteriously named frequent commenter "otherbill" offered Evenson up as a suggestion of a writer I might wish to take a look at this October. In response, I claimed that Evenson sounded vaguely familiar, and while I'm sure I believed it to be at the time, now that I've researched Evenson a bit I'm pretty sure otherbill's mention of him was the first I'd encountered. But mention Evenson I'm glad he did, because this is a writer I would hate to have missed out on.

The essential fact of Evenson's biography, as a writer at least, is that he used to be a member of the Mormon Church, and a teacher at Brigham Young University, and is no longer either one of those. In the case of his split with the church, my understanding is that it more or less immediately followed the publication of his first collection of stories, called Altmann's Tongue. Though I've read nothing of that book, a quick perusal of his subsequent work -- four more story collections and four novels -- shows a certain dark preoccupation with the Mormon faith, and a not necessarily glowing regard for its history or contemporary practice. As for Brigham Young University, well, for some reason Evenson's resignation letter is available online, so I'll leave that to you.

Evenson is largely unknown, but beloved by those who are familiar with his work. He has been praised by Peter Straub, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Samuel R. Delany, and collector of obscure writers throughout history, Jonathan Lethem. He has been compared to Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, Jim Thompson, J. G. Ballard and Paul Bowles. Who, I think it's fair to ask, the fuck is this guy? I can't even really ask "Where did he come from?" because to a certain degree I have that answer. But I can wonder why I'm just now hearing about him.

That comparison to Paul Bowles, by the way, strikes a particular chord with me -- now that someone else has mentioned the two writers in the same breath, I can nod wisely and say "Yes." Both of the Evenson stories I read for today (not the only ones I've read, though), taken from his 2004 collection The Wavering Knife, have that same creeping distance and merciless progression towards a horrible doom that can be found so often in Bowles's stories. Not just Bowles, but Thomas Ligotti, another writer I found insinuating his way into my mind as I read Evenson's "The Wavering Knife". That story begins like this:

Despite the unfortunate and increasingly serious illness of my benefactor, I continued to work without cease or rest to salvage my analysis of the Gengli oeuvre. The image of the wavering knife, which I had for years perceived as the unifier and ultimate hingepiece of Eva Gengli's philosophy, had, under the severe scrutiny made possible by her private papers, collapsed, and I could discover no adequate trope to stand in its stead. Indeed, Eva Gengli's private papers had led me to realize with an alarming degree of clarity that the Gengli philosophy was exceedingly more complex than I had first imagined.

Already, with the philosophical works of Eva Gengli, we're dealing with the kind of scholarly arcana often found in Thomas Ligotti's fiction, and, indeed, in weird fiction going all the way back to whenever it is that all began. Except here, Evenson has removed the supernatural element; he's even removed the question of it. "The Wavering Knife" is unambiguously the chronicle of a disintegrating psychology, in this case the one belonging to our narrator, who will become so deeply obsessed with what would appear to be utter gibberish -- that is, Gengli's philosophy-- that his neglect for his bed-ridden benefactor will become positively demonic:

I might have sat in the same position [contemplating Gengli] for another seven or eight hours except that I began to grow hungry and, growing hungry, realized that I had not fed my benefactor for several days.

Gengli isn't just gibberish, but contradictory gibberish. It's this facet of her work that so winds up our narrator, and which gives this post its title. There's probably an easy point to make about the fractured nature of Gengli's philosophy and how that relates the fracturing of our narrator's mind, but I'm not going to bother to make it, mainly because I don't think Evenson would much care to, himself. The horror of "The Wavering Knife" is the kind that exists above such easy metaphor. At the same time, I don't think it would quite do to call what happens in the story senseless -- it is, of course, but try telling that to our narrator.

If "The Wavering Knife" casts a chill of unease, disquiet and indifferent brutality, then so does our second story for today, called "The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette", except this time with jokes. Since Evenson seems to be especially skilled with openings, let's quote the beginning of this story, too:

One winter morning, watching Bein read his breakfast paper, Kohke decided to kill him. He stood behind Bein, aligned a pistol barrel with Bein's skull and worked the trigger. He had reasons for wanting Bein dead, but watching his lover shake about the floor, smearing blood on the linoleum, he could not bring those reasons to mind.

Nor does he ever. Bein goes on to not, in fact, die, despite the fact that Kohke shot him twice (Kohke is bewildered to learn this, believing he'd only shot him once). Bein does go blind from his wounds, and he is rendered paralyzed from the neck down. And even though Kohke would appear to be a complete incompetent (after firing, he hides the pistol in a pitcher of orange juice) he is somehow not prosecuted by the authorities. So what he's left to think about is this relationship with Bein, and how he'd meant to end it, but now it seems to be ongoing, and should he a) visit Bein in the hospital (no, he decides); and b) bring Bein back into the home they once shared together. To this, he decides that yes, he will, though the thought of pushing Bein's wheelchair over the same patch of floor where he'd lain bleeding is just too much, so Kohke rents an identical apartment a few floors down from their old one. When he finally brings Bein home and puts him to bed, Bein notices a difference:

"Welcome home," [Kohke] said. He lifted his ex-lover out of his chair and into the bed.

"This is my bed?" Bein asked. "It doesn't feel like my bed."

"Nothing feels the same after you've been shot, Bein."

"How would you know?"

.

"That's just what they say."

"The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette" is mad, black, awful, and savagely funny. The relationship between Kohke and Bein (and that's a big word in this story -- "relationship") is very similar to that of the narrator and his benefactor in "The Wavering Knife", and the brutality of both stories is about as appalling. It's an interesting, even fortuitous pairing of stories for today, though I think it hardly represents every tool in Evenson's kit. I know it doesn't, in fact, as I've also experienced the mild Kafka vibe of "White Square", the wry satire of "Promisekeepers", and the plainly experimental nightmare of "Garker's Aestheticals". Evenson is a major writer. Forget about horror for a second -- Evenson is simply a sensational talent. Take note, everybody.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 7: Big Red Demon Gods

Yesterday I began staging a duel between two rival (probably not really) horror anthology series: Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year and Stephen Jones’s The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. There can and will be no kind of control over this experiment (or duel, whatever), unless I was willing to read all of the stories in the two volumes Datlow has put out so far, as well as all of the stories from the last two Jones books. And I’m both unable and unwilling to do that! But this duel’s (or experiment’s) utter pointlessness aside, volume one of Datlow’s series made a very strong showing, with, out of three selections, one solid story from Trent Hergenrader called “The Hodag”, and a truly excellent one by Adam Golaski called “The Man from the Peak”. Now it’s Jones’s turn, and one can’t help but wonder -- can one? -- how today’s selections will measure up?

To make this whole thing even more pointlesser, the Datlow book I chose for yesterday is from 2008, while the Jones book – volume 15 of Best New Horror – is from 2004. So why bother. Well, because, is why. As a quick bit of ancillary business, I want to point out that book series feature a fair amount of valuable and interesting “extras”. Both Datlow and Jones include a “Year in Horror” kind of introduction, in which they lay out what was published in the genre, from the mainstream to the furthest, dankest corners of the fringe. Jones also talks about film and other media, and he tends to be a bit looser in what he considers relevant to horror, spending a lot of time, when there’s any reason to, discussing the Harry Potter phenomenon, and so forth. Even if you wonder what that stuff is doing in a review of a year in horror, Jones’s introductions can be upwards of 80 pages long, so he’s not leaving anything out in favor of that wizard guy. Jones also, in collaboration with Kim Newman, puts together a rather depressing “necrology” for each volume’s given year, which amounts to dozens upon dozens of mini-obituaries for artists of various media (and, again, various genres) who passed away. Depressing, but informative.

But enough of that. I read two stories today, the first by Jay Lake, called “The Goat Cutter”. This one is legitimately bizarre, in a way that removes it from the pool of "weird" or "strange" stories that count as their own horror subgenre. I don't know if anyone has really defined or categorized the kind of story "The Goat Cutter" actually is -- and I should add that I don't know why anyone would feel the need to do so, but clearly people do -- but it feels to me be kind of the literary equivalent of psychobilly (that's a kind of music, right?). There's a lot of this stuff in contemporary horror, and its best-known practitioner would have to be Joe R. Lansdale. Though I like a lot of Lansdale's short fiction, this kind of white trash freak show story is not something I'm likely to seek out, unless he wrote it.

But Lake's story is pretty good, I must say. For one thing, Lake is a good writer, the best evidence of this being that he writes in a deep Southern vernacular, but he does so without resorting to unreadable dialect. In other words, in "The Goat Cutter" you won't find anything like this: "Maw, I kin he'p yew wit' dat dang mule in jes' uh sekint! But fust I hafta plow me up s'm corn!" You all know what I'm talking about. It's sickening.

No, this is what you'll find with Lake:

Me and my best friend Pootie, we liked to run through the woods, climbing bob wire and following pipelines. Trees is smaller there, easier to slip between. You gotta watch out in deer season, though. Idiots come out from Austin or San Antone to their leases, get blind drunk and shoot every blessed thing that moves. Rest of the time, there's nothing but you and them turkey vultures. Course, you can't steal beer coolers from turkey vultures.

Our narrator and Pootie are young men, just about to become sophomores in high school, and they like to spend their summers in the environment described above. Also found in that environment is one Doug Bob Aaronson, who, we're told, spends his time "roasting goats, drinking tequila, and shooting people's dogs." That "roasting goats" bit is the important part. His goat butchery is not just something he does -- it's a ritual. In Doug Bob's little patch of stolen land, there is also an old school bus, on which Doug Bob has written, or smeared, many things in goat blood, including Bible verses. The boys are not allowed inside the bus.


This is a short story, only about twelve or thirteen pages, but with that set up you can maybe imagine the gist of what's in store. The Devil is in that bus, is what's in store, and what works about "The Goat Cutter" is that Lake is not coy about it -- the Devil actually shows himself, and engages with the characters. And the scene where the boys and the reader first lay eyes on the Devil is something of a tour de force, a bit of mad brilliance that made me wonder why horror films are so bereft of this sort of thing. You take this story, and you take Golaski's "The Man from the Peak", and both are full of quite filmmable imagery, horror imagery that is lush and full and deeply bizarre. Where is this imagination on film?

So Lake has that going for him, and it's nothing to sneeze at. Where the story ends up is something I'm less sure about. It would be inaccurate to say that Lake ties things up in a neat little bow, but it wouldn't be off to say that all Lake's madness boils down a little bit small for my taste. Even so, there's much left unsaid, and the hints that what we're dealing with in "The Goat Cutter" is a full blown Biblical Apocalypse in the making is very intriguing.

The other story I read is called "Story Time With the Bluefield Strangler". It was written by John Farris, who is one of those writers who's pretty big time among horror fans -- at least during the 70s and 80s -- but is completely unknown to everyone else. Farris's best known work is probably The Fury, which was adapted to the screen by Brian De Palma (for the record, I've never read the novel, but have always really enjoyed that film). I know Farris best as the other of two novels I actually did read: All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, which I liked a fair amount, and is considered something of a modern classic; and The Axman Cometh, which I sort of hated. Whatever my amiguous take on Farris, and despite the fact that he's been around a long time (he started with crime fiction in the 1950s), one thing that seems clear to me is that he's sort of the quintessential 80s horror writer. Prolific, full of sex and violence, full of kids who can see shit other people can't, voodoo, possession; but also serious about what he's up to, not writing horror (or at least not writing genre fiction) because that's where the cash is.

So the story, "Story Time With the Bluefield Strangler" is...not bad. The second half that title should let you know where the horror is coming from (it's coming from a guy who strangles people), and the first half should indicate that a child is somehow involved. The child is named Alison, who, at least since she was six, has been able to see young man who she refers to as "Big Boy", but who we come to know as Walter Banks, aka the strangler of the title. Alison alternately regards Big Boy as a boogeyman and an ally, the latter coming out when the little girl finds herself in a children's mental hospital, due to past trauma and her stories about Big Boy.

All the background, about Banks and Alison's trauma, are related to the reader by two other characters, a police detective named Ed Lewinsky, and Alison's therapist, a woman named Lorraine. Farris alternates the Ed/Lorraine scenes with Alison's childish point of view, where the sentences become short and simple, as though we were being taught to read. This gimmick is not as cloying as it might sound because, for one thing, it lets up a bit as the story progresses and Alison gets a little older, and because the youthful simplicity of the language highlights a certain chilling effect.

The thing about "Story Time With the Bluefield Strangler" is that it's a very professional piece of work, written in the first place, I suspect, because Farris wanted to play around with story structure. The story itself isn't much, and I doubt Farris would claim otherwise, but it's interesting the way he shifts in and out of perspective, and even ages (specifically regarding Banks/Big Boy/The Bluefield Strangler). All of which combines for a strong and effective ending. It's all very well-polished, which sounds like a backhanded compliment these days, and I frankly find that to be a bit depressing. So no backhand intended. Polish and professionalism are gratefully noted.

And there you have it! The great Jones/Datlow War That Never Even Really Happened is at an end! Man, what a bloodbath. I can't even tell who won, there's so much blood. That sure was crazy. Etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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