The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 8: Welcome to Your New House

Today we begin a series of three posts dealing with the fiction and philosophy of David G. Hartwell's massive 1987 horror anthology, The Dark Descent. Originally, my intention was to do these posts back-to-back-to-back, but now I'm thinking of spreading them out a little bit. Mayhap you'll see why, mayhap you'll think I'm being lazy. Either one is cool.

With The Dark Descent, David G. Hartwell hoped to chart the evolution of what he then viewed -- rightly, it must be said -- as a dying art: the short horror story. By the time the idea first entered his mind, the horror novel had taken over the genre, both for economic and artistic reasons. Hartwell firmly believed that the short story and the novella were horror's natural forms, but he generously, and rather brilliantly, regards the horror novel as an avant-garde experiment, an "unsolved aesthetic problem". I would stay the problem remains largely unsolved, of course, but I must say that's a pretty wonderful way of putting it.

The anthology, which comes in at a little over 1,000 pages, is broken up into three sections (and at one point, each section was published as a separate book), each dealing with one of what Hartwell calls the "three streams" of horror fiction. Part one, The Color of Evil, includes stories that deal in moral allegory; part two, The Medusa in the Shield, with psychological metaphor; and part three, A Fabulous, Formless Darkness with the "fantastic". Parts two and three will be dealt with when the time comes, but the anthology as a whole is stunningly comprehensive. Everybody gets a look in, from Machen and M. R. James to Stephen King and Clive Barker; Manly Wade Wellman and Theodore Sturgeon to Dennis Etchison and Ramsey Campbell; Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Aickman to Edith Wharton and Shirley Jackson. I could go on and on. Truly, if ever there was one horror anthology to get a new fan started, this is it.

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In his introduction, Hartwell talks about each stream of horror individually, defining it and describing what kind of horror stories would naturally be included. To me, this is where things get a little dicey. Essentially, Hartwell says that the stories found in the "moral allegorical" stream of horror fiction...
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...are characteristically supernatural fiction, most usually about the intrusion of supernatural evil into consensus reality, most often about the horrid and colorful special effects of evil. These are the stories of children possessed by demons, of hauntings by evil ghosts from the past...stories of bad places (where evil persists from past times, of witchcraft of satanism. In our day they are often written and read by lapsed Christians, who have lost their firm belief in good but still have a discomforting belief in evil.

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So far so good, as far as most of that goes, but I question that most such fiction is written by "lapsed Christians" -- is he that well versed in the theological biographies of horror writers the world over? -- and I certainly question that it's often read by the same kind of Christian, or any Christian at all. He offers no evidence of this, and it sounds as though he's being vague in order to make his point less assailable. Quoting Ginjer Buchanan to the effect that "all the best horror is written by lapsed Catholics" is meaningless, and at best is simply a statement of opinion.

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Last year, I wrote about Russell Kirk, and quoted him from the introduction to his book The Surly Sullen Bell, in which he argued that...

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To most modern men having ceased to recognize their own souls, the spectral tale is out of fashion, especially in America. As Manning said, all differences of opinion at bottom are theological; and this fact has its bearing upon literary tastes. Because -- even though they may be church-goers -- the majority of Americans do not really hunger after personal immortality; they cannot shiver at someone else's fictitious spirit.

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Kirk basically contradicts Hartwell -- the lapsed Catholics who write the best horror fiction should, according to Kirk, find such fiction out of fashion -- but they're both attacking the same question from the point of religious belief (or non-belief). I am not an atheist myself, but why does no one ever try to explain the appeal of horror fiction as it applies to mass humanity, the religious and the unambiguously atheistic? Large chunks of the horror-reading population are carved away in order to fit a given writer's answer to the question "Why do people read that stuff?" As a result, the answer would appear to remain "I don't know."

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Shortly thereafter, Hartwell says that the moral allegory stream is the most commercially popular form of horror fiction. Based on my own anecdotal experience over the years, I'd say this is probably true, or at least it was when Hartwell wrote the introduction. However, then Hartwell says that the audience for such fiction is "characteristically style-deaf (regardless of the excellence of some of the works)" and that they "[require] repeated doses of such fiction for its emotional effect to persist." I don't know...I have similar opinions and ungenerous thoughts about horror fandom these days, but goddamn do I hate the way he uses the word "characteristically". I probably hate it because he takes his shot, but then acknowledges that the fiction these style-deaf rubes are reading might well be terrific. So this means they're reading such fiction for the wrong reasons? It's also a highly ironic statement to make -- though Hartwell couldn't have possibly foreseen (or given a shit about) this irony -- given that the story I scooped from this stream for today's post is Michael Shea's "Autopsy", as aggressively stylized a horror story as I'm likely to read all month.
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"Autopsy" tells the story of a pathologist named Dr. Winters who has just arrive in an unnamed town at the behest of the county coroner to conduct autopsies on nine dead mine workers. The men were killed in an explosion, but the blast was not directly related to their work, and the coroner, a man named Waddleton, is looking for evidence to back this up. If the men died as a result of their job, the insurance company, to whom Waddleton feels responsible, for whatever reason, will have to pay out to the men's families. If the blast is unrelated, there is a clause in the policy that will free the company from financial responsibility. So Waddleton has pegged Winters for the job, and has made it clear what he expects the autopsy reports to reflect. What Waddleton doesn't know, however, is that Winters, a decent man, is dying of cancer, and no longer gives two shits about getting fired. He has no intention of helping out either Waddleton or the insurance company.

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When he gets into town, he goes straight to the sheriff, a man named Nate Craven, and an old friend of Winters's. Craven tells Winters how these men died, and the fact that the story Craven tells is basically background to the main action is sort of amazing.

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There had been a number of disappearances in the town recently. No evidence of foul play, or anything really, had turned up until one day a body is found in a tree. From roughly the shoulders down, the body has been stripped clean of skin, muscle, organs, blood, everything. About two-thirds of the body is just plain bone, and what meat and tissue is left has been utterly squeezed dry of all blood. One of the deputies recognizes the man's face, and connects him to a story he knew about the deceased leaving a bar, just a couple of nights previously, with a mine worker named Joe Allen. Various bits of evidence and connections are made, to the point where Craven believes bringing Allen in for questioning, and searching his home, is advisable. Both of these things being done, the most curious find is a strange, metal, apparently mechanical orb, located in Allen's house. This is seized, but Allen escapes, intentionally seeks out the orb instead of simply racing into the woods, and he takes the orb into the mine, where it explodes, killing Allen and nine other men. This is the case that the baffled sheriff has been left with. Eventually, Craven leaves Winters alone to his work. As a dying man, the oddly, almost affectedly sophisticated Winters feels a sympathetic pull towards the bodies unlike any he'd felt in his job prior to his diagnosis:

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His hands were fully themselves now -- fleet, exact, intricately testing the corpse's character as other fingers might explore a keyboard for its latent melodies. And the doctor watched them with an old pleasure, one of the few that had never failed him, his mind at one remove from their busy intelligence. All the hard deaths! A worldful of them, time without end. Lives wrenched kicking from their snug meat-frames. Walter Lou Jackson had died very hard. Joe Allen brought this on you, Mr. Jackson. We think it was part of his attempt to escape the law.

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But what a botched flight! The unreason of it -- more than baffling -- was eerie in its colossal futility.

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Here, Winters begins to wonder about Allen's actions. Why seek out the orb instead of merely escaping? What evidence could that orb have provided to the police that would have condemned him more completely than he already was? Well, Winters finds out soon enough, and, to be brief about it, Joe Allen was a host. His actions were not his own, but rather the actions of something else, who animates Allen's autopsied corpse, before Winters's eyes, and begs him for further sustenance.

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It's around here that "Autopsy" really begins to resemble an unfilmed David Cronenberg script that has been translated into prose by Michael Blumlein. I'll be blunt here: a large portion of this thirty-some page story is taken up by the creature, the host -- okay, it's an alien -- explaining why his race does what it does, and how. And this is what it's explanations sound like:

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"For in this form we have inhabited the densest brainweb of three hundred races, lain intricately snug within them like thriving vine on trelliswork. We've looked out from too many variously windowed masks to regret our own vestigial senses. None read their worlds definitely. Far better then, our nomad's range and choice, than an unvarying tenancy of one poor set of structures. Far better to slip on as we do whole living beings and wear at once all of their limbs and organs, memories and powers -- wear all as tightly congruent to our wills as a glove is to the hand that fills it."

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Significantly, the autopsy of the title is not one performed by Winters, but rather one the alien performs, for all intents and purposes, on himself, or, more exactly, Joe Allen's corpse (though we learn that Allen is not quite dead), in preparation for switching to Dr. Winters body. Here's a representative passage of the autopsy/body transference sequence:

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The parasite had traced and tapped the complex interface between cortical integration of input and the consequent neural output shaping response. It had interposed its brain between sharing consciousness while solely commanding the pathways of reaction...It was the host's own hands that bound and wrenched the life half out of his prey, his own loins that experienced the repeated orgasms crowning his other despoliations of their bodies. And when they lay, bound and shrieking still, ready for the consummation, it was his own strength that hauled the smoking entrails from them, and his own intimate tongue and guzzling mouth he plunged into the rank, palpitating feast.

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After the alien has laid down a particularly dense speech, Shea writes that Winters experienced it "with the detached enthrallment great keyboard performers could bring him", which sounds to me like Shea's way of telling us we're supposed to like this stuff. And it's not that I don't like it -- it's that I don't know. Shea's prose here is practically Modernist, and it's in the service of a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Which probably sounds dismissive, but the truth is that while reading "Autopsy", my brow may have been furrowed for great stretches, but I was intently trying to absorb what I was reading. Because nobody is writing like this in horror fiction these days, and maybe they never have. Like it or not, writing like Shea's deserves attention (and it gets it: Shea has had a pretty healthy cult following for a good couple of decades).

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"Autopsy" does fit quite nicely into Hartwell's "first stream" of horror fiction in a couple of ways, but misses in one big one. First off, I found the set-up of this story -- bizarre serial murder, the aftermath of which connects with an amoral attempt to skip out on paying out life insurance -- to be immensely intriguing, and, in trying to parse out how the insurance subplot did not, in fact, entirely fall away, I figured that Winters's ultimate reaction to this alien is simply an extension of how he planned on dealing with the autopsies, and Waddleton. That's a moral point, though the "moral allegory" Hartwell talks about has to do with the idea of metaphysical evil, and here Shea is building off of Lovecraft's cosmic evils, his Great Old Ones, those monstrous gods who live in the void of outer space (one of Shea's novels, The Color Out of Time, is a sequel to Lovecraft's story "The Color Out of Space"). The difference here, though, is that when Shea wrote "Autopsy", man had walked on the moon and traveled into space several times over. When Lovecraft wrote his stories, outer space was, comparatively, an utterly unfathomable idea, an almost abstract symbol. It was Unknown. By the time Shea came along, he was writing science fiction, in addition to horror, and the alien is a monster based in the kind of imaginative science that is SF's lifeblood. Hartwell, however, claims that the first stream is dealing with supernatural ideas: ghosts and witches and the like.

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But that's not the source of Shea's horror in "Autopsy". All that means to me is that Hartwell's attempts to categorize, explain, dissect and lay bare horror fiction's meaning, while interesting, eventually sputter out when faced with the strangeness and terrible wonder that is being offered by the very best writers. As it should and always will be.

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Which is a pretty definitive thing to say while knowing full well that I have two more whole posts to write about Hartwell and The Dark Descent, but fuck it. What's done is done.