The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 31: Hurrah for the Race of Werewolves

You may not think you know the work of Guy Endore, but chances are you do. As a screenwriter, he worked on Tod Browning's The Devil Doll and The Mark of the Vampire, The Mask of Fu Manchu starring Boris Karloff, and has an adaptation credit on Karl Freund's Mad Love (coincidentally, this block of Endore's screen credits makes up a full two-thirds of the Warner Brothers Legends of Horror DVD set). Though he didn't write the script, Endore's novel Nightmare (also known as Methinks the Lady) was turned into the Otto Preminger film Whirlpool, and, perhaps most famously, his novel The Werewolf of Paris (first published in 1933) was the inspiration for the Hammer film Curse of the Werewolf, starring Oliver Reed.

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That's quite a list for a guy nobody's heard of anymore. All his novels are currently out of print (of course), though I have heard news about a new, highly-overpriced edition of The Werewolf of Paris that is set to come out early next year. Well, I couldn't wait that long -- plus, I couldn't afford it. I've endured glowing references to Endore's best-known novel (Marvin Kaye chose it as his selection for Horror: 100 Best Books, for instance, and on the commentary track for The Mark of the Vampire Kim Newman and Stephen Jones both admit that, were they able, they'd pony up the dough to finance a truly faithful adaptation of the book, just so they could see it*) for too many years, and when the opportunity to finally put my hands on an old, rather unattractive copy of The Werewolf of Paris, I didn't hesitate. And here we are.

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The story focuses primarily on two people, two men: Bertrand Caillet, a young man cursed at birth to be a bloodthirsty werewolf, and Aymar Galliez, Bertrand's uncle-by-proxy, and the only man who knows Bertrand's secret. Aymar is also the only man who can stop Bertrand's violence. The novel does not begin with either of these men, however, but rather with an unnamed American who lives in Paris and who one night, after witnessing debauchery and casual cruelty enacted by those around him, discovers an old manuscript in the possession of a hobo. The hobo agrees to sell the manuscript to the American, who discovers that it was written by a man named Aymar Galliez, and is, in essence, a memoir, and defense, of Bertrand Caillet, a French National Guardsman who was facing court martial in 1871. The remainder of the book is a sort of re-telling by the American of Galliez's memoir, filled out by the American's own research into the historical period Galliez and Caillet lived through.

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As I said, Caillet was cursed at birth. His mother Josephine, a young servant of Aymar's mother, is raped by a priest named Father Pitamont, who himself is the member of a family with a long history of evil and bloodshed. Josephine finds herself pregnant by this encounter, and her son Bertrand, though seemingly normal for several years, has certain features that make Mme. Didier, Aymar's mother, fear for his future. For one thing, he was born on Christmas Eve, which Mme. Didier insists to Aymar is a bad omen. Further, even at a very young age, his eyebrows meet in the center. Lastly, and most importantly to anyone who knows their werewolf lore, he has hair on his palms.

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And, indeed, poor little Bertrand is a werewolf, though he doesn't manifest as such until he's about ten years old, give or take. Not long after this, Mme. Didier dies (of natural causes), but even though she's no longer around to pour out her superstition to her son, Aymar does come to discover the truth about the boy, before the boy himself does. When the boy changes -- and feasts -- he's later aware of it only as a vague nightmare. Aymar, however, is completely aware of what's going on, though he neither knows how to convince anyone else of the incredible truth, or how to deal with it himself.

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Eventually, Bertrand is old enough to pursue his own life, and he moves from his country home to Paris. Aymar had by that time enjoyed some success in keeping Bertrand's condition controlled, but now the boy, a young man now, is free to do what he pleases. And what he pleases is fairly awful. As he travels to Paris, he's left behind more than one corpse, more than one innocent man to take the blame, and evidence of violent and deviant sexual appetites -- he badly injured a prostitute, for one thing, and -- though Aymar isn't aware of this -- had consensual sex with his own mother. This last crime against nature is one of the earliest hints at how far Endore was willing to go, even in 1933. The sex in the book is not graphic, but it's still rather alarming; the violence, meanwhile, is casually brutal. There's a great deal of cruelty in this book.

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There's also a great deal of humor. Endore doesn't waste a lot of time in revealing that The Werewolf of Paris is, among other things, a socio-political satire -- of an interestingly cynical and amorphous type -- but he also has some light-hearted fun with the basic idea of his story. When Aymar finally follows Bertrand to Paris, he wonders how he's going to find his nephew, and how he can possibly enlist the aid of the authorities:

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Aymar's first duty ought, then, to have been a visit to the police. But of this he naturally fought shy. What would he say to the police? For example: "I know something. There is a man who on certain nights craves blood so that he turns into a wolf and goes out to kill his prey."..."What proof have you?" --"There was a silver bullet, which was shot at a wolf, and was found in his leg." -- "The mere sight of this bullet wouldn't convince us, but where is it?" -- "I haven't got it, but he was born on Christmas Eve and his eyebrows meet..."

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And, in fact, Aymar and Bertrand do not meet again for the majority of the novel. While Aymar goes about his search, Bertrand desultorily lives the poor life of a National Guardsman, feeding his hunger, wracking himself with guilt, and falling in love with a rich young woman named Sophie de Blumenberg. Sophie is engaged to be engaged to a kind French soldier named Barral de Montfort. Barral loves Sophie without complication or selfishness, but he doesn't know that the outwardly sunny and endlessly happy young woman, like Bertrand, changes at night. Not into a wolf, but rather into a despairing and death-obsessed soul who lives her days at a fever pitch of brightness, to make up for the nights she dreads so much. When she crosses paths with the morose Bertrand, she notices that he's a kindred spirit (though why he is, exactly, she hasn't a clue), and soon this unhappy love triangle is going to be swept up by history, because the Franco-Prussian War, followed hotly by the Paris Commune, is on its way.

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Because The Werewolf of Paris is also a historical novel, you see. Quite a lot is crammed into less than 300 pages, here, but it really is Paris in the midst of this particular, and particularly bloody, historical meltdown that interests Endore the most. He returned to France over and over again in his fiction (he also wrote novels about Voltaire, de Sade, and Dumas), so perhaps that explains that, but Endore was also a registered Communist, which would seem to make what I take to be the proto-Communist government of the Paris Commune to be catnip to a guy like Endore. Except it's not, really. Look, I'll admit right now that my understanding and even basic knowledge of 19th Century French history is, well, really shitty. But in The Werewolf of Paris, after the aristocratic Versailles government is pushed out by the Paris Commune, France transformed into a state not unlike what Russia would become after the Bolshevik Revolution. The proponents and members of this new French government are referred to as Communards, and even, once, Communists, and they are all utterly corrupt. They are violent, unjust, and power-hungry, yet they claim to be a government of the people, restricting personal possessions and separating church and state.

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This last is obviously not solely a Communist measure, but, as with the Soviets, and as described by Endore, "separation of church and state" quickly became "persecution of Catholics", and Endore describes this aspect of the government thoroughly (and with some amount of creative license, I've gathered, though only in terms of creating specific incidents). Of course, the Paris Commune is eventually bloodily dismantled by an aristocratic rebel government -- mass executions of prisoners of at-best undetermined guilt is rampant on both sides, and bitterly described by Endore -- but this nightmarish cycle of bourgeois-socialist-bourgeois rule, with no justice or peace offered by anyone, would indicate that Endore was rather disillusioned with any form of politics whatsoever. His life, what little I've read about it, doesn't exactly bear this out, but the book is an intriguing window in any case.

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Endore's relationship with religion appears similarly conflicted. Catholicism and Communism traditionally don't mix, and Bertrand is sired, after all, by an evil and lascivious priest (though what we're told about Father Pitamont's family history makes it reasonable to assume that he joined the Church primarily out of a desire to hide out), and yet Aymar himself -- a skeptic and rationalist -- becomes more and more enamored with the idea of religious faith, brought on in no small part by the proof of the supernatural that lived in his home, as his nephew, for so many years. Not that I think that Endore was entirely in the bag for Catholicism, or even faith -- late in the book, Aymar and an atheist doctor have a debate on the subject (and lycanthropy) that makes both men look more than a little absurd.

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But then again, the doctor in question is a human monster, and Aymar, we know, is a decent man. So there's that. And what that is, is actually the core of the book. Not faith, but rather human, non-supernatural evil. When the Paris Commune has collapsed, and Aymar finds himself, with bitter amusement walking through the streets of a hellish Paris, he can't ignore the irony of his quest to apprehend or kill Bertrand, while missing for so long the fact that Bertrand's hidden crimes, while horrible, ultimately pale next to the massive evil that was in front of him the whole time:

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Bertrand, it now seemed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! "And there'll be worse," he said... Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!

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And what of Bertrand? If I have any major criticism of The Werewolf of Paris, it is that the actual, non-figurative werewolf drops out of the novel for long stretches (strangely, his actual transformations are never described), but when he does return as the center of the novel, Endore makes it count. Despite the passage quoted above, Aymar does understand the need to bring Bertrand to heel, and when he does, and what follows, is very nasty, very mean, very sad. And probably just, at least in part, but justice can be awfully pitiful sometimes.

*No they didn't. They just said they'd love to see a faithful adaptation. My brain makes me look foolish. Again.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 30: Ann Has a Martian in Her Womb!

This is going to be a tough one. Look, every day of this project is a crapshoot, because I don't know if I'm going to like the story or stories that I read, and therefore don't know what my attitude will be when I sit down to write about them. And I don't especially mind if I hate the story, because that will certainly give me something to write about, at the very least. What kills me is when I'm indifferent to the story. In those cases, I hardly think I can get by with saying "This one was okay, you might like it, but I don't know." This problem is sometimes compounded by the fact that I don't know anything about the person who wrote it, though today that isn't an issue. What's really bugging me today is that the guy who wrote the story to which I'll be directing my apathy is Richard Matheson, and in choosing to write about him today, I really, really wanted to put him in a good light.

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I don't think this can reasonably be considered a "first thing's first" kind of statement, but I do want to start off by saying that Matheson's fiction has severely dropped off in quality over the last decade or two. More, possibly, because he actually doesn't publish much these days. But outside of a couple of really good Westerns he wrote in the 1990s (Journal of the Gun Years and The Gunfight) his later fiction has been sort of awful, with the nadir coming in 2002, in the form of a novel called Hunted Past Reason. This is a novel that combines Matheson's non-mainstream spiritual beliefs with an alarmingly graphic Deliverance-style suspense story. Though I don't share them, I'm not going to spend any time mocking Matheson's beliefs, but I must say that preaching about reincarnation doesn't mix well with male rape. Few things do, I suppose.

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I read Hunted Past Reason at a time when I was well past my early exposure to Matheson's work, and was coming to find much to dislike about his new stuff. But I loved that old stuff. Great short stories like "The Distributor" and "Born of Man and Woman", and truly classic novels like I Am Legend, plus his work as a screenwriter on Burn, Witch, Burn!, the films based on his work like The Incredible Shrinking Man and Duel...the guy's got a hell of a resume, and his reputation as one of the great genre writers of the 50s, 60s and 70s is entirely justified. As he got older, he just lost his feel for it. Big deal, it happens; it happened to Robert Bloch, also, and I'm not the kind of guy who believes that bad work late in a career tarnishes the good work done before. Still, books like Hunted Past Reason made me wonder if I'd grown out of Matheson, and that maybe if I went back to his old work I'd find that he was never that good, and that it was all hype. So I reread I Am Legend, and doing so completely shot the shit out of that theory. It's still a great book.

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All of which, finally, made me confident about today's reading, because I was gonna read something old. Because Matheson has written in so many genres, I figured the best book to use was a collection of old Matheson stories, put out by TOR several years ago, called Duel, and I picked a fairly long one called "Trespass". It's about a guy named David Collier who, as the story opens, has just returned home from South America after six months to find Ann, his wife, strangely withdrawn. He's been dreaming of this homecoming for a long time, and is shaken by its anticlimactic nature. Why is Ann so upset? Because she's pregnant. And she conceived within the last six months. David is understandably outraged, but Ann assures him that she did not cheat on him, and does not know how this could have happened. A skeptical David reminds her that he's a scientist, and that conception is impossible without intercourse (or at least sperm, but Ann's argument implies that this was also nowhere to be found).

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As the months pass by, David frantically tries to find an answer that will prove his wife correct -- he consults Kleinman, their doctor, and David's fellow scientist and friend John Meader -- but comes up empty. At the same time, Ann -- who is increasingly angry at David for refusing to believe her, let's face it, pretty messed up story -- begins behaving erratically. She eats incredible amounts of salt. She drinks gallons of water and coffee. She goes outside, into the cold Indiana winter, wearing very little and catches pneumonia. She begins reading every book on every subject she can get her hands on -- on physics, geography, history, chemistry, etc. -- books she never showed any interest in before. She begins chanting a strange singsong with lyrics such as "To walk on shores of orange sea, cool, to tread the crimson fields, cool, to raft on silent waters, cool..."

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And there's more. Her pneumonia is cured in seventeen minutes. X-rays show the fetus continues to change its size, apparently at will. It also has two hearts. So basically, it's a martian. Yeah, that's where this story's going, and you probably knew that, as I did, and you probably also, as I do, find nothing inherently wrong with that premise. In fact, the story threatens to have a surprisingly nasty ending, though it ultimately goes soft (while maintaining a kind of subjective bleakness in the heroes triumph). The problem is the story's overall flatness and repetition. Ann eats salt and drinks a lot of coffee and water, and she keeps doing that for pages. Page after page after page of that. Possibly this is Matheson's attempt to build up the strangeness of his situation so that the final revelation of what's going on, and the various characters' essentially rapid acceptance of the idea, will go down easier, but it doesn't quite work.

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The title of this post is the exact line of dialogue as delivered by John Meader when he tells David and Kleinman what he believes Ann's real problem is. He says: "Ann has a Martian in her womb!" I wonder how that line would have played for me had he said "alien" instead of "Martian" -- I still may have not been a fan of it, but I think I at least would have given it a pass. As it stands, all I could think was, "Why 'Martian'? How the hell do you know it's specifically from Mars? General 'alien', okay, but there's nothing about Ann's symptoms that scream 'Mars'." Of course, in the 1950s, when the story was written, "Martian" and "alien" were basically synonymous in popular culture, but the line still reads as plain goofy.

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I don't know. I don't know what else to say about this story, really. Despite my misgivings, it is fine. But this is Matheson, and I wanted to read something great by him, or at least very good, something I could point to and say, "See? When people say Matheson is great, this is what they're talking about." And he is great, or was, but my choice of story unfortunately does not bear that out.

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Read I Am Legend instead.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 29: That New Being, the New Master

If I wanted to, and didn't mind reading and writing exclusively about vampires (I would), I think I could very easily get a whole month's worth of posts out of the book pictured above. As you can see, it advertises itself as "The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published". I have no idea if that claim is true, but if it isn't I'd very much like to meet the book that makes it a liar. This thing is over 1,000 pages long (including a 100-some page bibliography of vampire fiction), and it includes stories by virtually everybody: Bram Stoker, Clark Ashton Smith, Clive Barker, Richard Matheson, Lafcadio Hearn, Charles Beaumont, Steve Rasnic Tem, F. Paul Wilson, Harlan Ellison, Guy de Maupassant, Arthur Conan Doyle, Anne Rice, Manly Wade Wellman, Vernon Lee, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and on and on. It's a brand new book, and instantly essential. The only drawback that I can see is that the print on each page is divided into two columns, like magazine print, or the old pulps and serials. On one hand, this keeps the book from being something like twice the size it is already, but on the other hand stories that appear to be only fourteen pages turn out to be quite a bit longer. As a result, what with time is always of the essence with me this month and everything, I wasn't able to cram in all the glorious reading I'd fantasized about while poring over The Vampire Archives' table of contents. Besides which, reading fiction in two columns just jacks with my brain.
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I did manage two stories, which really is close to my limit, but the first one, Harlan Ellison's "Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time", is a bit of a throwaway. Short and one-dimensional, pretty much by design, it shows Ellison on auto-pilot scolding mode. It's about a guy named Mitch who, following the funeral of a girlfriend he didn't much like, goes to his local bar to pick up chicks. The girlfriend committed suicide, and while he tells himself he shouldn't care, because she was just supposed to be a one-night stand who managed to hang around for a while longer, Mitch does feel a bit sick to his stomach about the whole nasty situation. Still, he does end up going home with a woman, and the book is called The Vampire Archives, so there you go.

"Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time" is one of Ellison's "loneliness" stories; he's written a number on that theme, and this one isn't a patch on, for instance, "Lonelyache". The sub-theme of "Lonely Women..." is how some people do things out of loneliness that, in fact, make other lonely people even lonelier -- in this case, men who troll for one-night stands with women who are vulnerable, but want more, and then don't get it. Fine, but I wonder if the story is so short and shrug-worthy because Ellison doesn't drink alcohol, and never has. Most of the story is set in a bar, and while I'm sure Ellison has been in bars, I think you need to at least have been a drinker at some point in your life to get bars. Or maybe not -- they're actually fairly uncomplicated, when you think about it. But whatever the reason, Ellison just wasn't feeling it here, I don't think, and perhaps was just desperate to graft some kind of story onto that title (which, not to pile on or anything, feels forced) before he forgot it. He didn't like the idea that three months down the line he'd be thinking, "What the hell was that title? It was so good. Something like, 'Lonely Women are...the Vases of Hope'. No, that's shit. 'Lonely Women are Like Kettles of Sadness'. Oh, Jesus, I hope that wasn't it. I was telling everyone what a great title I'd thought up." You get the idea.

The other story I read was Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla". Like "Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time", "The Horla" is only kind of a vampire story. Neither one features the traditional be-fanged, bloodsucking fiend of the night that we're all used to, but both feature creatures that come in the night and drain their victims, or control them, or both. In Ellison's story, sex is at the root, but in "The Horla" something much more complex is going on. The story is told in the form of a diary kept by an unnamed man who, when we first meet him, is actually quite upbeat, marveling at the glory of the new day and the beauty of his home. This is significant, because in the next entry he's suddenly become ill. Not only is he sick, but his spirits have plummeted:
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Whence come those mysterious influences which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Powers whose mysterious presence we have to endure.

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He's genuinely perplexed by his current state, particularly after his doctor informs him that (of course) he can find nothing physically wrong with him. His physical condition remains unchanged for almost a month, and his mood, if anything, worsens. At one point, he even takes what he hopes will be a refreshing walk through the woods around his home, only to find himself plagued by the belief that something terrible, but unseen, is hunting him. After this low point, he resolves to take a trip to Mont Saint-Michel, from which he does indeed return feeling much better. While there, he meets a monk who, when questioned about a particular hill on which stands a strange and ancient monument, relates to our narrator a series of legends that involve the hill, and the area. After being struck by one legend that involves a mysterious shepherd who is followed by two goats with human faces, he asks the monk if he believes the story:

"I scarcely know," he replied, and I continued: "If there are other beings beside ourselves on this earth, how comes it that we have not known it long since, or why have you not seen them? How is that I have not seen them?" He replied: "Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Look here; there is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature, which knocks down men, and blows down buildings, destroys cliffs and casts great ships on the rocks...have you ever seen it, and can you see it? It exists for all that, however."

Though our narrator returns from his trip feeling better, this doesn't last. Shortly, he finds himself tortured in his sleep by uncertainty, and the dread that there is someone, or some thing, harassing him at night. His previously full water bottles are drained dry the next morning. Is he drinking the water, but not knowing he's doing it? Eventually, he sets up a string of experiments, and the results all seem to point to some invisible stranger. And whatever it is is not merely taunting him, or toying with him:

.Last night I felt somebody leaning on me and sucking my life from between my lips. Yes he was sucking it out of my throat, like a leech. Then he got up, satiated, and I woke up, so exhausted, crushed, and weak that I could not move...

And later...

Picture to yourself a sleeping man who is being murdered and who wakes up with a knife in his lung, and whose breath rattles, who is covered with blood, and who can no longer breathe and is about to die, and does not understand -- there you have it.

Our narrator will fluctuate between believing that some supernatural creature is overtaking his life, and believing that he has gone, or is quickly going, completely mad. Eventually, he will be convinced of the former, when he feels his body being entirely controlled by this invisible thing, this "horla". Though he can still think for himself, and write in his diary, his every other action is dictated by someone else. If he wants to stand up, he will stay seated. And feeling no particular personal urge, he will nevertheless find his body compelled into the garden to eat strawberries.

Finally, he will deduce that what has possession of his body -- if not his mind -- is a new, or rather previously unknown, form of life:

We are only a few, so few in this world, from the oyster up to a man. Why should there not be one more, once that period is passed which separates the successive apparitions from all the different species?

...Why not other elements beside fire, air, earth, and water? There are four, only four, those nursing fathers of various beings! What a pity! Why are there not forty, four hundred, four thousand? How poor everything is, how mean and wretched!

What's so interesting about this aspect of "The Horla" is the fact that it plays into the question of what the evolutionary life-form will be that eventually pushes out human beings. This is a subject more often dealt with in science fiction -- Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, for example, or Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End -- but here it joins up with the vampire myth, and drives our poor narrator absolutely bonkers. One of the things de Maupassant was pulling from to combine these ideas was the supposedly "scientific" (and then new) work being done in the fields of hypnosis and "mesmerism". The narrator sees such an experiment successfully executed, or so it appears, at least, and it's this experience that begins to lead him away from a belief in his own madness. The most important thing the monk in Mont Saint-Michel says to him is that no one has seen even one hundred-thousandth of what exists. Why can't this "horla" -- as he claims it calls itself -- be part of that?

Ordinarily, when dealing with horror fiction that aims for psychological ambiguity -- is the supernatural in the story real, or is it all in the narrator's disintegrating mind? -- I fall on the side of the monster, if for no other reason than that, in such stories, monsters are more interesting to me. But "The Horla" tips the scales more towards the narrator's madness than most such stories. Obviously, for starters, all the information we get about the narrator and his situation is from his diary. We have no other witnesses, we are privy to no other opinions of the narrator, or anything. All we see, we see through his eyes. Not only that, but de Maupassant uses the idea of mirrors and vampires in a way that perhaps tells us more about the man looking into the mirror than about what he's seeing. And that ending...the narrator's final plan (not to mention his plan B) for dealing with the horla, when viewed objectively, is the work of a total madman. The tone of de Maupassant's prose, of the narrator's voice, at this point even becomes a little manic. Which of course it would be, as would anyone's whose body was being controlled by one of those horla things, but...

Yet, I can't shake the importance of the story's beginning, that first diary entry: they're the words of a man in love with life, his life in particular. And then suddenly it all begins to crumble. Why? If his fate is the result of a psychological break, what in the world brought it on? There's no clue. So as far as motivation is concerned, the horla has it all, even if it doesn't exist. Based on what we know, the supernatural reading of "The Horla" actually makes some degree of sense. Total madness makes no sense at all. But really, when does it ever?

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 28: Tell Me Tales of Inconceivable Fear and Unimaginable Love

Clark Ashton Smith began his literary career as a poet, and despite devoting much of his writing life to horror and fantasy fiction, it would have to be said that he remained so by inclination. His mentor was a man named George Sterling, who, when Smith first turned his attention to fantastic stories, applauded his efforts, but said:
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I don't advise you to devote much time to such things...the mind of man begins to smile at anything that is inherently absurd and outdated. Your faculties are far too fine to be wasted on such vacua...
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...You have squeezed every drop from the weird (and what drop!) and should touch on it only infrequently, as I on the stars. The swine don't want pearls: they want corn; and it is foolish to hope to change their tastes.
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Horror fans! We never get an ounce of credit! But, okay, I can't blame him.
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For the above chunk of background, I borrowed liberally from the story notes written by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, editors of the new five-volume edition of Clark Ashton Smith's collected stories. These are truly lovely volumes put out by Night Shade Books, and have provided me with my first taste of the fiction of Smith, about whom Gene Wolfe has said:
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Let us pause briefly to notice that although Lovecraft has had many imitators (he is in fact quite easy to imitate) and [Robert E.] Howard more than a few, no one imitates Smith. There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him.
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So it would seem. Having now read some of Smith's work, even if only the tiniest fraction, it seems very easy to not only trace certain influences, but also more or less coincidental similarities to contemporaries like Lovecraft, Smith's fiction is very much on its own, and the primary reason would be his style. I'll admit right off the bat that I already feel like I'm talking out of my ass, given how little I've read -- the truth is I would have read more, but time was unusually restricted today (I particularly regret not being able to fit in the stories "The Abominations of Yondo" and -- especially, because the title is so striking -- "A Murder in the Fourth Dimension"). Even so, I was immediately struck by Smith's writing, and instantly grateful to Connors, Hilger and Night Shade for refusing to let Smith sink, forgotten, into history, as so many other genre writers, good and bad, already have.
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All the fiction I read today comes from The End of the Story, volume one of this collection, and the main story I read is, indeed, called "The End of the Story" -- a rather curious and interesting title, it now occurs to me -- which, as a piece of plot-work, is very conventional. The reader is told right away that...
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The following narrative was found among the papers of Christophe Morand, a young law-student of Tours, after his unaccountable disappearance during a visit at his father's home near Moulins, in November, 1789...
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Morand's tale concerns his attempted journey home to visit his father. He is waylaid by a storm, and forced to seek shelter at a nearby monastery in the (fictional) region of Averoigne. There he meets a highly gregarious monk named Hilaire, who instantly befriends Morand, offers him food, a bed, and access to the monastery's vast library, which includes "the finest works of heathendom and Christendom, even...certain unique writings that survived the holocaust of Alexandria."
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Not only that, but Hilaire offers Morand -- a young scholar and lawyer -- the opportunity to read "an unknown dialogue of Plato", "two lost tales of Miletus", and so on. There is also a strange little six-page manuscript that immediately sparks Morand's interest, but about which Hilaire says:
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"There is a curse on the pages that you hold in you hand...Christophe, there are things beyond your understanding, things that it were not for you to know. The might of Satan is manifestable in devious modes, in diverse manners; there are other temptations than those of the world and the flesh, there are evils no less subtle than irresistible, there are hidden heresies, and necromancies other than those which sorcerers practice."
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He further implores Morand not to read the manuscript -- comes just short of forbidding him, in fact -- which, of course, makes it far more likely that Morand will read it, which he does.
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What he reads is a short account of the mysterious fate of Gerard, Comte de Venteillon, who, on the eve of his marriage, disappeared -- a point that puts me in mind of Shirley Jackson's "The Daemon Lover". The gist is, in the forest near his home, Gerard meets a "half-human creature with hoofs and horns". Appalled by the image, as a Christian, Gerard demands that the creature speak for itself...
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Laughing wildly in the twilight, the bizarre being capered before him, and cried:
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"I am a satyr, and your Christ is less to me than the weeds that grow in your kitchen-middens...
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"Stay, Gerard de Venteillon, and I will tell you a secret, knowing which, you will forget the worship of Christ, and forget your beautiful bride of tomorrow, and turn your back on the world and on the very sun itself with no reluctance and no regret."
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The satyr does tell him the secret, and Gerard does turn his back on everything, making his way not towards his bride but to the mysterious ruins of the Chateau des Faussesflammes (literally "House of False Flames"). These ruins, Morand believes (correctly), might well be the same ruins he's noticed on a hill near the monastery. And, of course, he's drawn to them himself.
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The evil in this story is as ancient as that found in Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", and, of course, it is quite intriguing how Machen's story hangs over so much horror fiction that came after, particularly the fiction I've read this month. Not only are there mysterious satyrs in Smith's forest, but Pan is mentioned in Laird Barron's "The Imago Sequence" ("The panpipes went wild") -- sorry I forgot to mention that one -- Machen himself was referred to in Mark Samuels's "The White Hands", and there is yet more to come. But Smith's belief and reliance on the ancient past for his source of evil seems somehow more genuine -- and don't forget, I really liked all those other stories. Perhaps this is due to Smith's vocabulary. Here, Morand reflects on his desire to visit the ruins near the monastery, despite the warnings that Hilaire has just given him:
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Before he had finished speaking, a resolve had sprung to life full-born in my mind: I felt that I must go to the Chateau des Faussesflammes and learn for myself, if possible, all that could be learned. The impulse was immediate, overwhelming, ineluctable; and even if I had so desired, I could no more have fought against it than if I had so desired, I could no more have fought against it than if I had been the victim of some sorcerer's invultuation.
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This language sounds like it was itself drawn from some ancient spellbook. I mean, "invultuation"? But it works. The language drew me back centuries, or more, to the time of the evil which Morand will soon face (though he won't quite see it as evil).
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In another story I read, "The Epiphany of Death" (another title more intriguing after you've read the story than before), Theolus, the narrator discusses his strange relationship with a man named Tomeron. Tomeron thinks very highly of Theolus, but, while fascinated by him, Theolus's opinion of him is somewhat different:
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Though he fascinated him at all times, there were occasions when my interest was not unalloyed with an actual sense of repulsion. At whiles, his pallor was too cadaverous, too suggestive of fungi that have grown in the dark, or of leprous bones by moonlight; and the stoop of his shoulders conveyed to my brain the idea that they bore a burden of centuries through which no man could conceivably have lived.
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Later, the two enter a tomb where...
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The air was increasingly dank, chill and miasmal; and mephitic shadows crouched or swayed before our torches in every niche and corner.
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I didn't even know what "mephitic" meant until about five minutes ago, but I instantly knew I loved it. And it's such a crazy word, by the way, that even the definition includes the word "noisome".
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I won't describe "The Epiphany of Death" beyond that -- it's a very short story that lives off its own language. If you're as taken with the examples I've provided above, then you probably already know that you want to read it. And, actually, the only other story, if it can be referred to as such, that I read today was a half-page piece of work called "To the Daemon" (there's that word, or rather that spelling, again). It's from there that I pulled the quote I used as the title for this post. One interesting detail about "To the Daemon", and its place in The End of the Story is that it's the only story in the book that doesn't get its own story notes from Connors and Hilger. It's almost as though they don't know where it came from -- perhaps it was found, old and dried out, in an old desk that belonged to Smith, the details of its discovery not unlike Morand's uncovering of the manuscript that sends him to the House of False Flames. "To the Daemon" begins:
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Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently.
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Perhaps it's a manifesto.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 27: Laughing Down the Hallway

Because I already talked briefly about Shirley Jackson in yesterday's post about Fritz Leiber, I'm tempted to just jump right into talking about today's story, which is, in fact, Jackson's own "The Daemon Lover". The story is taken from her landmark 1949 story collection The Lottery, a book that is actually sometimes subtitled The Adventures of a Demon Lover -- whether or not there is any connective tissue between these stories, in the form of a tall man in a blue suit, I don't know. I've only read a handful, but, for instance, "The Lottery" and "The Dummy" seem to be entirely their own things.
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Either way, in "The Daemon Lover" itself, the title character is a man named Jamie Harris, and he's never actually seen. The whole story is told through the eyes of an unnamed woman who believes she's about to marry him. When we meet her, she has just abandoned writing a letter to her friend that begins:
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Dearest Anne, by the time you read this I will be married...
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As though it were a suicide note. She is very happy, though, or thinks she is. She obsesses over cleaning her apartment and looking her best for Harris, who is supposed to meet her at 10:00 that morning, and off they'll go to be married. By 10:30, he still hasn't arrived, nor has he arrived by 11:00, or by 1:00. Becoming worried, she decides see if she can find him. She first goes to his own apartment, to find that he's just moved out. Believing that maybe he's on his way to her apartment now, she retraces her steps, asking several people -- a man who runs a newsstand, a shoeshiner, a florist (because maybe he stopped to get her flowers first) -- if they've seen a tall man in a blue suit.
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That's the best description she can give anyone, because, as she noted earlier:
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...she tried to think of Jamie and could not see his face clearly, or hear his voice. It's always that way with someone you love, she thought...
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This is the reader's first tip that something is quite wrong here, although "The Daemon Lover" never quite tips over into full horror, and an argument could in fact be made that it's not a horror story at all. I believe it is, but the main character is a shy, naive, deeply unhappy woman who believes herself unattractive, and, at 34, old. The world around her seems more than happy to encourage her low sense of self worth: practically every person she asks for help is either rude, even deliberately misleading (the man at the newsstand claims to have seen the tall man in the blue suit, but it's clear to the reader that he's messing with her), or plain indifferent. So Jackson's story could simply be a dark, sympathetic portrait of a certain kind of woman, and the world's view of a woman's place in the 1940s.
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Except that much of the indifference the woman encounters is downright grotesque. At one point, she's standing on the sidewalk, at a loss, and Jackson describes a woman looking down at her, and calling someone else over to have a look, too. What are they looking at? What's to be entertained by? Only the distress of an unhappy woman.
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There's also the fact, of course, that she can't remember what the man she plans to marry either looks or sounds like, as well as this cryptic description of the last time the two of them spoke:
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Half-consciously she set her clock back a minute; she was remembering her own voice saying last night, in the doorway: "Ten o'clock then. I'll be read. Is it really true?"
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And Jamie laughing down the hallway.
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Some of the people the woman asks do seem to be giving her good, honest information about the tall man in the blue suit. The shoeshiner says he did see such a man walking in the direction of her own apartment, carrying flowers. A young boy confirms, somewhat nastily, this information. However, the place she's finally led by these directions are not her apartment, and the story ends on a note of the subtlest dread, and sadness, and despair.
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If "The Daemon Lover" is indeed a horror story, and I believe that it is, then it is incredibly circumspect about its own genre. Even Robert Aickman never, in my experience reading his work, went this far into the inexplicable and subdued. Still, this is much to the story's credit, in my view. The last few lines of the story really flared my imagination, and I went from wondering if I wouldn't have to find another story to read for today to being genuinely haunted.
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In "The Events at Poroth Farm", T. E. D. Klein's narrator talks about reading some Shirley Jackson. He says:
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Read some Shirley Jackson stories over breakfast, but got so turned off at her view of humanity that I switched to old Aleister Crowley, who at least keeps a sunny disposition. For her, people in the country are callous and vicious, those in the city are callous and vicious, husbands are (of course) callous and vicious, and children are merely sadistic. The only ones with feelings are her put-upon middle-aged heroines, with whom she obviously identifies. I guess if she didn't write so well the stories wouldn't sting so.
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Well, yes.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 26: The Horror Behind the Bright Billboard

I read Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife well over a decade ago, and I still remember that novel's central horrific moment very clearly. My subsequent reading of Leiber's work -- he was very prolific in horror, science fiction, and fantasy -- can't even be called "spotty", but I do think that the way that moment in Conjure Wife lingers in my mind -- even stronger than Burn, Witch, Burn the very good film adaptation of the novel I saw some time after -- says something about Leiber's ability to describe moments of pure dread in a way that is, if not technically similar, at least in impact akin to Shirley Jackson. In The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson describes a moment where the characters discover mysterious writing on a wall of the house. This idea had been seemingly beaten to death by the time Jackson got around to it, but there's something about the way she describes it, and what the writing says, and the context of it all, that made the hair on my arms literally stand up. Leiber's big moment in Conjure Wife was similarly old hat when he was writing his book, but he knew how to make it play, and how to make the reader care about what had just happened. This, I believe, is a very hard trick to pull off.

So I should have been reading a lot of Leiber's work in the years that followed, but I didn't. I apparently read a story by him called "Belsen Express", but I can't remember a thing about it. The only work of Leiber's I really knew, outside of Conjure Wife, and before today's reading, was his little-more-than-a-cameo turn as Dr. Waterman in the goofy, yet legitimately compelling, 1970 monster movie Equinox, which means that my decision to take Leiber as my subject was one I made happily, and with no little anticipation. That's always nice.

I chose two of Leiber's best known and most reprinted stories, "Smoke Ghost" and "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" -- I took both from his 1948 collection Night's Black Agents, but they're not hard to find in horror anthologies ("Smoke Ghost", for instance, can be found in The Dark Descent and "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" recently appeared in S. T. Joshi's American Supernatural Tales). There are a number of possible reasons to explain the longevity of each story (both are good, for one thing), but the primary reason is that, though both stories were written in the 1940s, thematically they travel very well. The issues, or, more properly, the states of mind, that each story touches on are timeless, or close enough, to 20th and 21st century eyes.

"Smoke Ghost" is about a man with the unlikely name of Catesby Wran. Wran works in advertising, and appeared to his friends and family, before the story opens, as a reasonably normal guy. But one morning he comes to work and says the following to his secretary, Miss Millick:

"Have you ever thought what a ghost of our times would look like, Miss Millick? Just picture it. A smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the uneasy resentment of the striker, the callous opportunism of the scab, the aggressive whine of the panhandler, the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns. Each one overlying and yet blending with the other, like a pile of semi-transparent masks?"

Wran has a very good reason for thinking along these lines -- every night, while riding the elevated train on the way home from work, he's been seeing something very strange on a particular set of bleak, sooty rooftops as he passed by. Although he suspects the problem is with himself, with his mind, he will have greater reason in the days to come to believe that what he's been seeing on his way home from work every day that has led him to these uneasy connections are not hallucinations, but rather based in a very real, if supernatural, reality. And here's what he's been seeing:

One evening toward winter he noticed what seemed to be a shapeless black sack lying on the third roof from the tracks. He did not think about it. It merely registered as an addition to the well-known scene and his memory stored away the impression for further reference. Next evening, however, he decided he had been mistaken in one detail. The object was a roof nearer than he had thought. Its color and texture, and the grimy stains around it, suggested that it was filled with coal dust...

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A few days later, after not seeing the sack:

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As he walked home from the elevated...he found himself wondering whether the sack was really gone. He seemed to recall a vague, smudgy trail leading across the gravel to the nearer side of the roof, which was masked by a parapet. For an instant an unpleasant picture formed in his mind -- that of an inky, humped creature crouched behind the parapet, waiting.

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"Smoke Ghost" was first published in 1941, which means, more than likely, America hadn't yet entered World War II when Leiber wrote it, but war was on the country's mind anyway, since it was already the preoccupation of the rest of the world. And war -- along with poverty and urban decay -- is continuously mentioned throughout "Smoke Ghost". Characters mention their fear of it, and Wran obsesses about living in a century in which the planet seems to be perpetually in conflict with itself. The ghost, the horror, of this story, therefore, is not the produce of any one person having passed away and who now seeks closure, or vengeance. The ghost is created by the way we lived then, and now, and pretty much every year in between. There is, I must say, a certain arrogance in believing that the era in which you live is the most trying and violent era the world has yet seen, especially when recorded history would vehemently argue against such a belief, but "Ah, it could be worse" isn't a philosophy that is conducive to horror fiction. And let's not forget that global war brought about by the greatest human evil in living memory is going to make anybody twitchy.

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Up to a point, "Smoke Ghost" and it sense of urban dread involving strange, fabricky nightmares brought to mind T. E. D. Klein's great "Children of the Kingdom", which, of course, was written thirty years later. This similarity, which is quite vague, doesn't cut into the effectiveness of either story, but Leiber's attempt to turn the horror up a few notches at the end of "Smoke Ghost" didn't quite work for me. For one thing, he puts a human face (in a sense) on the horror, and second he does so in a way that recalls a particular genre trope that has been absolutely played out. It's curious that the familiar trope I referred to, obliquely, from Conjure Wife works quite well, but I thought "Smoke Ghost" trailed off a little for doing something similar. Even more curious is that the trope in question was made familiar by a novel, and several film adaptations of same, that was published fourteen years after Leiber's story. The problem is, simply, that the ghost in "Smoke Ghost" is initially incomprehensible. At the end, it appears as something recognizable. To me, that's a step down. Ultimately, that's a small matter, however, and "Smoke Ghost" lives on and remains strong due to its early, quiet uneasiness.

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The second story, "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" is less successful, while being more consistent. Told in conversational first person by a second-rate commercial photographer named Dave, it relates Dave's discovery of -- or, rather, discovery by -- a young model who one day enters his studio and asks to be given a shot. Dave, not seeing much in her, grudgingly agrees to take a series of pictures of her, which he later includes in the portfolio he shops around to various clients and businesses looking for a new female model around which to base ad campaigns. To his surprise, he gets several bites right away, and although he has a bear of a time tracking the model down again (she didn't leave her phone number with him, or even her name), once he does his business begins to take off.

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The appeal of this girl is in her eyes. Leiber writes:

That's the real reason she's plastered all over the country today, you know -- those eyes. Nothing vulgar, but just the same they're looking at you with a hunger that's all sex and something more than sex. That's what everybody's been looking for since the Year One -- something a little more than sex.

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Dave's story is told after the girl (or, the Girl, as she's called throughout) has become a world-famous icon of beauty (and advertising). But Dave has broken away from her, because, he tells us, he is frightened. He's frightened by the Girl's strange behavior, he's frightened by his nearly uncontrollable desire for her, his frightened by her eyes, her hunger, as well as, we learn, the killings.

Like "Smoke Ghost", some version of "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" could be written at any time, at leasing during the last hundred years or so. It is vaguely a vampire story ("There are vampires," Dave says, "and vampires"), with all the connection to sex and obsession that normally follow. But it's also about becoming obsessed with an ideal that has been presented to us by mass culture, but which doesn't actually exist in reality, or at least doesn't exist in the way we hope it does. It's about the dangers of such obsession, as well as the base stupidity of it.

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Fritz Leiber stories, in my so far limited experience, don't date. Sixty years ago, he was looking around, feeling uneasy about the times in which he lived. If he were still alive, still looking around, he'd feel the exact amount of despair, and for the same reasons. That's vision.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 25: What Must the Inhabitant of This House Be Like?

Another quick one today, but this time I'm veering away from my usual source for lazy posts, the short short story, to stories that are only pretty short, and were written by literary giants. In this case, those writers are Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jorge Luis Borges. I don't think I've ever read Singer before, but I have noticed that his name pops up occasionally in more catholic horror anthologies. I have read some Borges, and the fact that he's written at least one straight-up horror story doesn't shock me.

The Singer story is called "The Enemy", and it was written specifically for Kirby McCauley's ground-breaking 1980 anthology Dark Forces (this anthology was also represents the first time Stephen King's The Mist saw publication, which should give you some idea of its wide-ranging nature). In classic ghost story style, the story is told entirely in conversation, with one character named Chaikin -- a Jew who has recently arrived in America, escaping Hitler's nightmare, by way of a brief stay in Argentina -- telling of his strange and creepy journey by boat to the US to an old friend, our narrator, who escaped Europe some time earlier. During Chaikin's trip across, at meal-times he was assigned to a particular table, by himself, where he was waited on by a large, possibly Argentinian man who, for no reason Chaikin has ever been able to decipher, thoroughly abuses him. He mocks Chaikin, laughs at him, makes him wait for menus, for his food, and when his food does come, it is never the food he ordered. The waiter is so relentless in his bullying attacks that Chaikin is tempted to think that the man might be a Nazi, but then he notices that there are other Jews on the ship, even at tables being served by the same waiter, who are treated with complete respect.

This continues for several days until one night, Chaikin is walking along the deck when he finds himself face to face with the waiter. Suddenly, the two begin fighting, and the story makes the turn from the simply strange to the supernatural. And it's a good story -- "The Enemy" is only seven or eight pages long, and I felt a good deal of anger and frustration on Chaikin's behalf -- but I would say that Singer makes a step wrong right at the end when he offers a possible explanation for what happened on the deck (which you may have noticed I haven't told you about). This doesn't remove the story from the realm of the supernatural -- in fact, if the reader were to accept the explanation, the story's ghostly roots would only be cemented -- but it's far better, I think, to remain totally puzzled by stories such as this. I've said something close to this many times, but I think "The Enemy" highlights the idea. Singer's solution to the mystery -- which, to be fair, he only offers as a possibility -- is one that is rooted in ancient philosophy and theology, but this fact doesn't help the story's final impact. If you read a story full of bizarre occurrences and uneasy, unexplainable visions, only to have a character say, in the last paragraph, "I bet it was ghosts", you'll probably find that the cold mystery that preceded this has evaporated.

Then again...I suspect there's something deeper going on in this story. I'm curious about Chaikin's sojourn to Argentina, and what the significance is of Chaikin being harassed by a man of apparently Argentenian descent. But on first impression, "The Enemy" is a solid piece of work that lacks mystery.

The Borges story is called "There Are More Things", and I thought it was wonderful. Dedicated to "the memory of H. P. Lovecraft", it tells the story of a young man who travels from his home in Texas to a small rural town in South America to deal with the estate of his recently departed uncle. An engineer with a philosophical bent, this uncle owned a home known as the Red House, which was auctioned off to a man named Max Preetorious, who immediately guts the place and throws out all the uncle's possessions. Not only that, but...

For a fortnight, [the carpenter] was to work at night, behind closed doors. And it was by night that the new resident of Red House took up his habitation. The windows were never opened anymore, but through the darkness one could make out cracks of light. One morning the milkman came upon the body of the sheepdog, decapitated and mutilated, on the walk. That winter the Norfolk pines were cut down. No one ever saw Preetorious again; he apparently left the country soon after.

It's around here that our narrator arrives, and the story deals with his investigation into what Preetorious had done to his beloved uncle's house. He learns that many people found the whole situation very off-putting, even vaguely frightening, and that some of the workmen Preetorious hired only did the work asked of them because the money was so good. All of which leads our narrator to enter the apparently now-deserted house himself.

What he finds is very Lovecraftian indeed, specifically the Lovecraft of smaller-scale stories like "Pickman's Model" and "The Music of Erich Zann". What really pushes Borges's story beyond Lovecraft, however, are the last two sentences, which acknowledge a recognizable human reaction to the cosmically horrible beyond Lovecraft's preferred instant madness, followed by suicide. It's really a brilliantly subtle ending, with a marvelously disturbing use of the word "plural". Highly recommended.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 24: It Was Not an Unreasonable Dread

In his introduction to The Dark Descent, editor David G. Hartwell describes his "third stream of horror" (streams one and two discussed here and here) this way:
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Stories of the third stream have at their center ambiguity as to the nature of reality, and it is this very ambiguity that generates the horrific effects. Often there is an overtly supernatural (or certainly abnormal) occurrence, but we know of it only by allusion. Often, essential elements are left undescribed so that, for instance, we do not know whether there was really a ghost or not...[T]hird stream stories lack any explanation that makes sense in everyday reality -- we don't know, and that doubt disturbs us, horrifies us.

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I'm not entirely convinced that all horror fiction falls into one of Hartwell's three streams, or that, by logical extension, there are only three "streams". But the kind of story he describes above -- which he designates as "fantastic" -- is a legitimate form, and stories that can be categorized in this way are often among my favorites. Of course, Hartwell appears to have merely invented a new term for something that already existed, because Robert Aickman (who died six years before The Dark Descent was published), for instance, wrote what he referred to as his "strange stories" for thirty years. Virtually everything I've read by Aickman would fall into Hartwell's "third stream" (for the record, Aickman's story "The Hospice" is represented in this section of Hartwell's book), and yet in the introduction to his best-of-Aickman anthology, The Wine-Dark Sea, Peter Straub was still describing Aickman's work as "strange stories". I can't help but feel, sometimes, that Hartwell was simply describing things that everyone else already knew about, and was simply hoping his terminology would stick.

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But, either way, his description of the field of "fantastic" or "strange" horror fiction is a good one. Later in his introduction, Hartwell sums it up nicely when he says:

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Third stream stories maintain the pretense of everyday reality only to annihilate it, leaving us with another world entirely, one in which we are disturbingly imprisoned.

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Hartwell also claims that this kind of horror fiction is the genre's best claim for literary legitimacy, and (loathe as I am to admit it, given how my stomach tends to churn at the idea that genre fiction must be recognized by the correct people before it can be appreciated) I think he has a point, if only because, to me, these stories best embody what horror fiction is. Though much of this fiction is of high quality, it's almost primitive in its approach to fear: nothing makes sense, nothing you know or believe is true, anything can happen, nothing will be explained. The characters in these stories, and the reader, are dragged -- or gently led, as the case may be -- straight into the heart of the unknown, a place where we learn that not only is the unknown everywhere, but it is harmful and inescapable. The sense one takes from reading these stories is that we could leave our home tomorrow morning, get on a bus, and find teeth scattered all over the floor. And as we ride along, no other passenger will comment on it, but we'll watch those teeth shake over the ruts in the street and wonder who they belonged to, and why nobody else seems to care. Nothing about that scenario is necessarily impossible, but it is most definitely strange, not to mention upsetting (by the way: if in the next several months I run across a short horror story called "The Bus With All the Teeth on the Floor", I'm going to sue the ass of whoever wrote it).

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The story I chose to read from Hartwell's selection of "third stream" stories is "The Asian Shore" by Thomas M. Disch (which can be found not only in The Dark Descent, but also in Disch's own collection Getting Into Death). Before I get to the story itself, I wanted to say that I'm getting a little tired of what appears to be the formula of these posts, which is that I spend a few paragraphs running down, with varying degrees of severity, the fiction of the author in question that I'd previously read before continuing to run him down in the context of the story I just read, or, alternately, saying "Hey, but this one's pretty good!" So all I'm going to say here is that I approached "The Asian Shore" as someone who wouldn't describe himself as a fan of Thomas M. Disch. However, I often use these posts as an excuse to read some story I'd long wanted to read, but had never gotten around to -- this is how I landed on Disch's story. Although, I must admit, I recently found out that my long-held curiosity about "The Asian Shore" was based on a mistake, either mine or that of someone I can't remember. The deal is, or was, that science-fiction legend and certified loony Samuel R. Delany once wrote a book called The American Shore, which was, I thought, a critical analysis of a single short story by Thomas M. Disch. I believed, or had been told, that the story was "The Asian Shore". Which makes sense, what with the title similarities and everything, and I thought "Well that story must be pretty incredible, if Delany's going to devote an entire book to it. Even if I don't like it, I gotta read 'The Asian Shore'!" But when I was doing some research today, in preparation for this post, I discovered that Delany's book, while it is a critical study of a single short story by Thomas M. Disch, isn't about "The Asian Shore" at all, but rather "Angouleme", from Disch's book 334. So I've now read "The Asian Shore", but I did so with an exaggerated sense of its extraordinariness. Son of a bitch. Come to think of it, though, what would a limp-ass little blog post look like when compared to an entire scholarly-type book written on the exact same subject? Like a box of crap, that's what. Now I'm thinking I dodged a bullet here. Remind me to never write a blog post about "Angouleme", because that's just asking for trouble.

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So, "The Asian Shore". The story is about a man named John Benedict Harris. Harris is the author of an abstract philosophical book called Homo Arbitrans, whose subject is, in simple terms, the arbitrary nature of architecture:

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Once the lintels were lying on the posts, once some kind of roof had been spread across the hollow space, then anything else that might be done was gratuitous. Even the lintel and the post, the roof, the space below, these were gratuitous as well. Stated thus it was a mild enough notion; the difficulty was in training the eye to see the whole world of usual forms -- patterns of brick, painted plaster, carved and carpentered wood -- not as "buildings" and "streets" but as an infinite series of free and arbitrary choices...

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It had been his task, these last three or four years, to re-educate his eye and mind to just this condition, of innocence...What he sought...was a sense of the great artifice of things, of structures, of the immense interminable wall that has been built just to exclude nature.

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Ultimately unsatisfied with what he was able to accomplish in his first book, Harris has decided to leave his home city of New York and travel to a part of the world where he will feel totally alien, so that he can better expand his thesis beyond architecture -- though that is still his base point -- to the rest of life and human endeavor. This decision results in the dissolution of his marriage. His wife, it seems, objects entirely to this whole line of thought, which Harris must admit makes a certain amount of sense:
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If there were no fixed laws that governed the furbelows and arabesques out of which a city is composed, there were equally no laws...to define the relationships woven into the lattice of that city, relationships between man and man, man and woman, John and Janice.

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His divorce does not, finally, bother Harris all that much ("Though he saw no necessity for it, he had agreed to Janice's request for a divorce"), and travels, alone, to Turkey, where he hopes to lose himself in his theory, and in that country's ancient temples. Harris does find much that is arbitrary in Turkey, both in the architecture -- he finds Greek and Byzantine symbols etched into the tiles of a Turkish fortress -- but in his day to day existence. For instance, he finds himself continually crossing paths with a woman and a young boy -- sometimes separately, sometimes together -- though he can't explain his connection with them. Is it merely a coincidence? He first saw the woman at the aforementioned fortress, an encounter that ended with him high atop the fortress and she below, signaling and calling inaudibly to him. When he first encountered the boy, the boy was struggling, cold and wet, through a rainstorm to carry home two buckets filled with water. Wanting to help -- help the boy seemed to be pleading with him to provide -- Harris finally runs away because he sees no way for the two of them to communicate.

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After a while, the woman comes to his apartment, knocking on the building's front door, and calling up to his window "Yavuz! Yavuz!" When he enquires about this, the building's mail clerk informs him that "Yavuz" is a very common Turkish man's name. Much like "John" is in English, I suppose.

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It's hard to summarize the rest of this story. It's somewhat episodic as a narrative, but thematically it's entirely cohesive. The point where the story ends up is set up brilliantly throughout, such as when Harris goes to see a Turkish film called Kiling Istanbula, which features a kind of Turkish pulp character named Kiling. While watching the film, Harris struggles to determine if Kiling is "fundamentally good, like Batman, or bad, like Fantomas." Disch also includes a passage from a book called The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Suleiman the Magnificent by A. H. Lyber; this passage, concerning the cross-ethnicity of rulers throughout the Ottoman Empire, and how such cross-ethnicity was achieved, weighs so heavily on Harris's mind that he transcribes in total into his notebook. Even though Harris is in Turkey ostensibly to gather materiel for a new book, you get the impression that this, and a letter he writes in rebuttal to a negative review his earlier book received, is all the writing Harris is getting done.

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Mentally, Harris is coming apart, and it's not hard to pick up on the clues early on. His malfunctioning brain begins with his very thesis, and I got the feeling that Janice was quite right to leave him. He's not a dangerous man, necessarily, but his new philosophy is hollowing him out, and what he experiences in Turkey is not making him any better. In fact, it's proving his thesis correct. Nothing matters, nothing means anything, the arbitrary is the ruling aesthetic and mental construct. Harris has trained his mind and eye to reach the innocence he sought, and the truth that he's now discovered -- the truth he believed in -- is breaking him down.

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This is a terrific story, one of true, dark mystery. That word, "mystery", has come to mean "something that is solvable", but everyone knows that the most disturbing and haunting mysteries are the ones that we are incapable of understanding. Whatever our personal beliefs are, and whatever answer we may some day find, our daily lives are steeped in an unending confusion and perplexity. We wallpaper over all that in order not to go mad, but Harris, in wondering simply about the practicality of architectural design, peels off a strip of that wallpaper, and then keeps peeling. Regarding Harris's split with his wife, Disch writes:
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The sense of the arbitrary did not stop at architecture; it embraced -- or it would, if he let it -- all phenomena.

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In the end, Harris lets it.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 23 - Into the Bloody Sea

It's going to have to be a quick one tonight, I'm afraid. I'm hoping to put up some pretty sizable posts in the next couple of days, only to watch them get lost in the weekend shuffle, but tonight I wanted to return to the strange world of the short short story.

It's such a strange form to me, and it's a rare three-or-four page story that makes its mark on me. More than the personal impact, though, I've often wondered about the inspiration behind them. Despite my general ambivelance towards them, in a sense the short short is true writing -- they're almost like poetry, and, in fact, were some of the stories I've read just a page or two shorter they might more properly be called prose poems. I remember reading Carolyn Forche's poem "The Colonel" in college and not fully understanding its distinction as poetry, as opposed to a very, very, very short story. I guess it depends on how you market it (I like Forche's poem, for the record), but still I think working regularly in this form does indicate a certain seriousness of intent on the part of the writer, if for no other reason than because they're sure as hell not going to make any money at it.

In horror, as I've shown, the short short is still fairly common, or was through the 80s and 90s. One of the prominent writers who regularly toiled this field was Richard Christian Matheson, son of the great Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, Hell House, and etc....more on him another day). Matheson Jr.'s first book, published in 1988, was called Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, and although it includes plenty of stories that achieve what we might call a "proper" length, there's something like thirteen at five pages or under. For tonight, I read five of them, and, yes, not a one struck a chord. Maybe it's me. This is quite possible. But here's a breakdown of what I read, and what I thought, presented every so briefly:

• "Obsolete" - A three page science fiction story (I've been tricked!) clearly modeled after the more melancholy stories of Ray Bradbury. A manufactured servant is causing its household the fidgits, and must be gotten rid of. Plus, there's a twist! And Radbury already did stuff like this, a thousand times. I'm not sure anybody can beat him at this game, and Matheson certainly doesn't.
• "Break-Up" - While lying in bad one night, a man turns to his girlfriend and breaks up with her. She freaks out (she also reveals they've only known each other for six months, so perhaps she needs to step it back a notch), he behaves coldly, reciting the cliche'd lines created for such occasions, before he starts to feel utterly apart from the situation, even from himself. He leaves, begins to feel ill, and we discover why he ended the relationship so abruptly. Once Matheson's cards are on the table, and I'd had a few seconds to think about it, I had to wonder how the guy knew. Logically, this one doesn't quite hold together. It's an interesting idea, I will admit. Maybe three pages really is too short.
• "Mr. Right" - A woman visits her psychiatrist and pours out her fears about the man she's living with. He beats her, burns her, kills animals, kills people...he also rapes her, but she likes that, and this explains why she can't leave him. The doctor pleads with her to leave this man, to get on a plane and fly away, which she agrees to do. Then the doctor accepts a phone call that no honorable psychiatrist would ever take, and says things he really shouldn't. Brutal, nasty, but -- maybe by virtue of its abbreviated length -- apparently calculatedly so.
• "Mugger" - Another science fiction story, with a horror tone, about starving kids in a blasted future who disembowel people for money. I tuned out of this one almost instantly, because two of its three pages are written as a letter from the main character to his girlfriend, and Matheson wants to have his cake and eat it to, linguistically speaking, because even though the character is writing this, he still says things like "pickin'", "screamin'" and "wanna". No. No no no. What, this kid really wrote in those apostrophes in place of the dropped Gs? Plus, if I read one more SF story where the slang of the future includes words like "Creepo", I'ma bus' some shit up.
• "The Dark Ones" - A Lovecraft riff? No. I don't think so, anyway. This is a mood piece, I guess, about a family getting slaughtered. By things that might not be human. Listen, this kind of thing can work, but the writing has to carry it, and the writing here is merely fine. The story has no pulse.

So, there it is. Hooray, I was negative again. I'll need to read some of Matheson's longer work -- even his novel, Created By, which I'm told is good -- but the short short as a form only scores rarely. Steve Rasnic Tem has done it, as has Chet Williamson. Everything else reads like something that is half formed, at best.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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