The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 31: My Fancy Grew Charnel

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Every horror writer, good or bad, of the 20th century is a spawn of Edgar Allan Poe. Even if an individual writer sees himself as more a descendant of H. P. Lovecraft, say, he is a child of Poe. The entire genre as we understand it now, at least in literature, probably wouldn't exist without him. Peter Straub not only sees the man as a patriarch to the genre -- he edited an anthology in 2008 called Poe's Children -- but as an entire time period, or perhaps more accurately, as a beginning: volume one of his two-part anthology American Fantastic Tales is subtitled From Poe to the Pulps.
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Frequently, Poe is as much of an agitator among his readers as he is for other writers. Who among horror fans cannot count Poe as one of his earliest literary loves? For myself, my connection to the horror genre began with Stephen King, but my reading of Poe ran almost parallel, to the point where the two authors may have passed under my eye concurrently. Among Poe's classic stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart" has been read by me more times than any other short story (not the kind of distinction on which reputations are built, but at this point Poe doesn't need my help anyway). The reason I returned to that story so often in my youth is because of lines like "I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?" Poe's words can carry a pretty deep chill, even divorced from any context, and "The Tell-Tale Heart", which is unquestionably the story of a homicidal madman praying on a defenseless old man, just happens to also work if the reader takes the narrator at face value. If you're such a reader, you might want to rethink certain things about your life, but the story still works.
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I said before that I returned to that particular story over and over again "in my youth", implying I haven't been back to it in a while. This is true. Also true is that the same thing could be said of my recent experience of Poe's fiction as a whole, which is to say, there hasn't been any. It's hard to say for sure why this is, but I think I may have convinced myself that I would now find Poe tedious, and didn't want my fond old memories of his writing to be overwhelmed by modern disappointment. Looked at logically, it doesn't seem terribly realistic that my better-read adult self would find a writer like Poe tedious while my attention-span deficient younger self didn't, but there it is. This sad story has a happy ending, though, as I've taken Halloween Day, 2010, as an excuse to reacquaint myself with the man, dead now these past 161 years, as of October 7.
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I chose a scattering of Poe stories, culled from both his more obscure titles and from his established classics that I simply hadn't read yet. Of that sampling, the two most obscure stories turned out to be comedies (though with an underlying horror premise), and it's interesting to note that this is a form Poe worked in with some frequency, but none of his humor is remembered with anything like the cultural absorption of something like "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". His most famous humorous story would have to be "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", and I sometimes think that more people have seen Federico Fellini's also obscure, very hard to find short film adaptation of that story (called Toby Dammit, and part of an Italian horror anthology film called Spirits of the Dead) than have actually read it. If one were to go solely by one of the comic stories I read for today, "The Devil in the Belfry", the loss of Poe as a comic voice wouldn't be that hard to figure, and wouldn't be that lamentable, either. "The Devil in the Belfry" is a weird, not very funny story that seems to exist solely to express Poe's dislike of either Germans, or the Swiss, or whichever one of those speaks German but is renowned for making great clocks. You might say "Those are both things that Germans do", but the story is set in a town called Vondervotteimittiss, which, I don't know, sounds Scandinavian to me. In any case, the story doesn't really merit much consideration, being, as it is, just a silly manifestation of Poe's xenophobia (which wouldn't matter to me so much if the story were funnier). But another of Poe's forays into comedy, called "Loss of Breath", does.
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"Loss of Breath" is a story about a man who quite literally loses his breath. He's in the middle of screaming abuse at his wife on the morning after their wedding ("Thou wretch - thou vixen! - thou shrew!") when the breath simply deserts him. He doesn't die, but he does momentarily lose the power of speech. Eventually he's able to work out a different way of speaking, one not dependant on the regular release of breath, and even trains himself as an actor specializing in a particular role for which his tone of voice is well suited. But this man's life -- the life of Mr. Lackobreath, as he comes to call himself -- turns into a series of grotesque disasters, including being hanged from the neck (though not until dead, as the restriction of the rope would not impede his quality of life), the severing of his ears, the severing of his nose, and his premature interment in a burial vault, after he was believed dead by fellow passengers in a train car.
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That interment is not the end of the story, and despite all the horror listed above, Poe relates the story in a light-hearted tone. And it's actually quite funny. At one point, shortly after losing his breath, Mr. Lackobreath tries to find it again, actually, physically find his lost breath, following William Godwin's view that "invisible things are the only realities". However:
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My exertions, as I have before said, proved fruitless. Closet after closet -- drawer after drawer -- corner after corner -- were scrutinized to no purpose. At one time, however, I thought myself sure of my prize, having in rummaging a dressing-case, accidentally demolished a bottle of Granjean's Oil of Archangels -- which, as an agreeable perfume, I here take the liberty of recommending.
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"Loss of Breath" is full of that sort of bizarre aside, or casual understatement, as when our narrator's skull is fractured "in a manner at once interesting and extraordinary." More interesting, perhaps, than evidence of Poe's comedic prowess, is this story's relationship with so much of his other, less whimsical stories, including many of the ones I read for today. The borderline between life and death is one that fascinated Poe, and its one that Mr. Lackobreath walks throughout "Loss of Breath". One of the traditional ways an amateur checks for life in a body in repose is to hold a mirror in front of its mouth. The absence of fogged glass that results when Lackobreath's train companions try this is what lands him in an early grave. This mirror trick is also used to bolster the terrible belief of a group of doctors and mesmerists in one of Poe's most chilling stories, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar".
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In this story, the title character is dying -- and the facts of his body's corruption are laid out by Poe in no little detail -- and as his future is hopeless he readily agrees to be used in the experiments of his friend and mesmerist, our narrator, known only as P____. Our narrator's idea is to entrance someone, as he puts it, "in articulo mortis", or literally "at the point of death". Valdemar's disease is such that the moment of his death can be pegged with some accuracy, and he remains contact with our narrator, and our narrator with Valdemar's doctors, so that the experiment can begin at the correct time, and so that this moment will not be missed.
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This moment is not missed, and when it arrives all the interested parties are gathered at Valdemar's death bed, and he is successfully mesmerized. Valdemar is terribly weakened at this point, but his mesmerist is able to control certain of his movements and even communicate. When asked if he's sleeping, Valdemar responds "Yes -- asleep now. Do not wake me! -- let me die so!" The astonishing thing, however, is that the hour judged by his doctors to be Valdemar's last comes and goes, yet Valdemar does not die, and instead remains mesmerized. He continues to answer questions, although his body seems to have shut down, so that his voice appears to come just from his wildly vibrating tongue, and from the depths of his throat, with no assistance from his entirely still lips. And eventually, when asked again if he's sleeping, he responds:
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Yes! -- no; -- I have been sleeping -- and now -- now -- I am dead.
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The question then becomes, should Valdemar be woken up? And if so, what will happen?
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"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is as despairing and dark as anything Poe ever wrote, with any gray area over the states of life and death representing shrieking horror. That middle ground is not an afterlife, or a living death, as with zombies or vampires, but instead being buried alive, as in "Loss of Breath", or, in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", a death that still permits communication, not from heaven, or from reanimation -- the story's climax removes all possibility of either of those -- but from delay. The more I read of Poe, the more explicit becomes the source of this terrible intermediate state: the human knowledge of mortality. This is the seed of the entire horror genre, and the disease of Poe's imagination.
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Never has this been as clear as it is in "The Premature Burial", a story that is not, as I'd always believed, simply the chronicle of a man who has been buried alive. Rather, it is about the idea of being buried alive, and the unthinkable terror that must be felt by anyone who experiences it. At first a series of anecdotes about those who have felt this horror -- some who never lived to tell of it, some who did -- "The Premature Burial" doesn't begin to reveal itself as perhaps the ultimate expression of despair in Poe's life, and even of the genre, in its final pages, when the narrator who has been pondering the idea of early interment reveals that, due to his own medical condition, the symptoms of which can be mistaken for death, he lives in constant fear of waking from one of his spells to find himself encased in wood and covered with closely packed earth.
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In all that I endured there was no physical suffering, but of moral distress an infinitude. My fancy grew charnel, I talked "of worms, of tombs, and epitaphs." I was lost in reveries of death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain. The ghastly Danger to which I was subjected haunted me day and night. In the former, the torture of meditation was excessive -- in the latter, supreme.
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So supreme, in fact, that at one point he experiences a horrible dream in which a man, or a kind of creature ("I was mortal," it says, "but am fiend.") takes our narrator on a journey of human misery, shown by his hideous guide in "the graves of all mankind":
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...and from each issued the faint phosphoric radiance of decay; so that I could see into the innermost recesses, and there view the shrouded bodies in their sad and solemn slumbers with the worm. But alas! the real sleepers were fewer, by man millions, than those who slumbered not at all; and there was a feeble struggling; and there was a general sad unrest; and from out the depths of the countless pits there came a melancholy rustling from the garments of the buried. And of those who seemed tranquilly to repose, I saw that a vast number had changed, in a greater or less degree, the rigid and uneasy position in which they had originally been entombed.
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And so within the story, the horrible but absurd implication is that more people are buried alive than are buried dead. In the world Poe, and the rest of us, lived and live in, however, this passage says that most of us can't sleep. Most of us are in a state of constant despair. Our beds are our graves, or might as well be, or will be soon enough. Few people who have ever walked the earth, Poe is saying, have ever really known peace. Why this should be is, as I've said, because we all know too well where it all leads.
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It's doubtful Poe would have thought of "The Premature Burial" this literally, and if he did it wouldn't have been in terms of genre, but rather his own brain. Even so, this story is as precise in its metaphor, not only of the story's horror, but of horror as a literary genre, as anything I've ever come across. "The Premature Burial" is horror, the entire history and philosophy of the genre concentrated into about ten pages. And, as horror sometimes does, it even offers, to those of us who love this genre but who may at times take it too close to heart, an alternative. After surviving a close call, our narrator finds his mood changing, his morbidity lifting, his approach to life more welcoming and curious and, simply, peaceful. As he reflects in the story's final paragraph:
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There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell -- but the imagination of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful -- but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us -- they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.
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Though Poe himself did not do so, these are words to live by, and as appropriate a sentiment on which to close out the month as I'll ever find.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 30: I Really Do Not See How I Can Ever Explain This

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One thing I don't like to do here, but do often anyway, is write posts about writers about whom I know very little, or have very little experience reading. It gives me less to write about, which might seem like a blessing until you find yourself trying to write some introductory paragraphs, and instead find yourself staring blankly at the computer screen, making "Uuuummmmmmmmmm" noises. Eventually, you might find yourself writing about how it's hard to write this stuff sometimes, just as a means to fill space. One does what one must.

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Anyway, that's the situation I find myself in today as I write this post about Gene Wolfe. 2010 was supposed to be my Year of Gene Wolfe, as I didn't so much plan as think there was a good chance I would read a fair amount of this heretofore unknown-except-by-reputation author of various science fiction, fantasy, and occasionally horror classics. The man is a giant in his fields. A critic for the Chicago Sun-Times once said of him "Gene Wolfe is as good a writer as there is today...I feel a little bit like a musical contemporary attempting to tell people what's good about Mozart." Ursula K. Le Guin said "Wolfe is our Melville." Gene Wolfe, meanwhile, might wish that these people would rein that shit in a little. But he's been around for decades, and can probably shrug off the good as easily as the bad at this point.

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My Year of Gene Wolfe did not pan out, as the whole thing threw a rod after I'd read only a handful of stories from the recently published book The Best of Gene Wolfe. His writing -- and I'd sort of suspected this -- is rather dense, and for me at least doesn't lend itself to quick reading. I'd become intrigued, for some obscure reason, with the fact that over the years Wolfe had published a series of short stories and novellas with titles like "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (the title story of the wonderfully named collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories), "The Death of Doctor Island", "Death of the Island Doctor", and so on. I wondered what in the world these could all be about, and how they might be connected outside of their mix-and-match titles. I imagined some thrilling pastiche on pulp horror-adventure stories, with some cerebral who-knows-what playing around beneath it all. Of those, I've only managed to read "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", and in that case I was almost correct in my assumption of its contents, except for the thing about it being a pastiche, and the cerebral elements are inextricably linked with the emotional, and the whole thing was just very odd, turning out to be a story more about a boy's unhappiness than anything the title might imply.

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Which might give you some idea of the nebulous, even fragmented relationship between Gene Wolfe and genre. I'm about to say something rather grand, considering my relative inexperience with the fiction of Gene Wolfe, but it seems to me that Wolfe will write whatever it is he feels like writing. You will then categorize it as you see fit, and you will sometimes have great trouble doing so. Basically, I don't believe Wolfe always gives a great deal of thought -- and why should he? -- about what genre he's about to write in, and the anthologists may sometimes have to scramble as a result.

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This theory might have explained how, in 1980, Wolfe's rather un-horrific story "The Detective of Dreams" ended up in Kirby McCauley's seminal horror anthology Dark Forces, except that each of those stories was written specifically for that anthology. Part of the point of Dark Forces is its variety -- it features stories by everyone from Joyce Carol Oates and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Edward Gorey to Dennis Etchison, Stephen King and Karl Edward Wagner -- but I wouldn't think that variety would extend so far as to include a story that didn't belong to the genre in question. Because "The Detective of Dreams" isn't a horror story. How could it be mistaken for one? In his introduction to the story, McCauley says:

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To the casual reader, it might seem a parody on a certain kind of nineteeth-century style and genre, but a closer look reveals a statement of deep personal belief and commitment, wrapped in the manners and atmosphere of another century, one [Wolfe] perhaps sees as especially significant to the close of this one.

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The parody part I get (actually, I don't disagree with anything McCauley says here): "The Detective of Dreams" is, in structure and tone, a classic mystery -- a "spiritual mystery", if that's actually a genre -- in which our narrator, the title detective, is called upon by the powerful Herr D____ to "find and destroy the Dream-Master", and this being one of those stories where certain characters may not be named, Wolfe goes ahead and doesn't name anybody, or any place, so that you sometimes get passages like this:
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I fell asleep that night with the descant of that icy purity sounding through the plainsong of the rails, and I woke in the station of I____, the old capital of J____, now a province of K____.

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So the detective travels through, I suppose, Germany, meeting with people Herr D____ has pointed him towards, people like Fraulein A____, Herr R____, and the Count and Countess von V____, asking them about their dreams, and of the man within their dreams, who seems to be controlling what occurs there, and who may exist in reality as well. All of the people who are having these dreams are frightened (the Count believes he and his wife are being targeted by assassins) and wish this Dream-Master to be stopped, and it is as they recount their dreams that you might see why "The Detective of Dreams" has been miscategorized by...who? Gene Wolfe? He wrote it for McCauley, after all. But yes, there is nightmare imagery in these dreams -- unknown creatures dwelling outside, blood, threatening statements by mysterious figures. But there is also judgment and forgiveness, and when I say that, you might remember that I called "The Detective of Dreams" a spiritual mystery, and that Kirby McCauley called it a "statement of deep personal belief and commitment". I'm not going to go ahead and give away the ending, but for a certain segment of the world's population "The Detective of Dreams" would be regarded as a beautiful declaration of faith. And also the blood in the dream was on a dude's palm.

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Purely as a story, "The Detective of Dreams" works better for me this morning than it did when I read it late last night, and I am indeed sympathetic at least to the story's philosophy. One thing I admire so much about it is that it's undoubtedly true that nobody but Gene Wolfe would have written a story with this kind of pay-off, wrapped up not only like a 19th Century detective story, but a parody of a 19th Century detective story (which is not to say that the story is written to be a laugh riot, but you get the idea). In a brief note about "The Detective of Dreams" in The Best of Gene Wolfe, Wolfe mentions G. K. Chesterton, and this would seem to be the strongest single influence on on Wolfe's story. Says the guy who's only read The Man Who Was Thursday by Chesterton, but that vibe is certainly in "The Detective of Dreams". So I think it's a fine story. It's only the idea that it's a horror story that baffles me.

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We're on much firmer ground with "The Tree is My Hat", written in 1999 for Al Sarrantonio's millennial horror anthology 999. This is the story of a man named Baden, an American, a government work -- what he does we're never told -- who suffers from some vague illness that could possibly cause him to hallucinate, and at any rate drives his temperature up as high as 109 at times. After being stationed in Uganda, Baden -- or "Bad" as he's called throughout-- has now been shipped to an obscure chain of islands in the Pacific rim, where he interacts with the natives and a man I have to assume is a Christian missionary named Rev. Robbins, though Robbins never seems to do much missionary-ing. Robbins will teach him much about the island, whose North Point is supposedly a sort of spirit land, and its people, who used to be cannibals. Baden will seek help for his illness from the tribal king, and from an American witch on the internet. He will also try, with apparent success, to reconnect with Mary, his ex-wife, who has been trying to find him during his travels for the government. He learns she followed him to Uganda, and hopefully will be joining him soon on the island. And he will meet a dwarf named Hanga, whose skin is whiter even than Baden's, and whose teeth are filed down to points, and who will become Baden's blood brother. Robbins will tell Baden that in the native tongue "hanga" means "shark".

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"The Tree is My Hat", like "The Detective of Dreams" takes a classic structure, being in the form of Baden's journal. This will certainly invite many readers to question how much of what eventually happens in the story can be taken as fact (within the world of fiction) and how much should be chalked up as the hallucinations of very sick man who sometimes suffers from terrible fevers? You guys can do what you want, but if you've read these posts with any regularity over the past three years you'll know my preference is to regard it as all true. Baden's illness functions in ways besides just making us wonder about what's really happening, and besides that Baden questions his own sight more than once, before being convinced that what he's experiencing -- and doing -- is real. This is good enough for me, and the story would not carry the power it does without that conviction. Not for me, anyway, and what's so remarkable about "The Tree is My Hat" is how willing Wolfe is to throw in any idea, however crazy, or nasty, or sentimental -- and that's all there -- and instead of them sticking out like badly-hammered nails, he manages to pound them home, with the result that "The Tree is My Hat" is an amazingly rich and eventful piece of storytelling -- grand, even, though grandly bizarre and dark. Even hopeless, which sets it up as the direct opposite of "The Detective of Dreams". So perhaps Wolfe contains multitudes.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 29: Fly Toward the Abyss

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If there’s one arena of horror literature I most regret not making more time for, it’s the vast world of non-English horror. I did write a post on Edogawa Rampo back in 2008, and another that dealt with a story by Jorge Luis Borges last year, but in each case those posts were only meant to be one, or two, among many. If I was a better planner, or any kind of planner, they might have been, but I’m not, so they weren’t. Translated fiction is pretty much a giant blind spot with me in any case – an occasional Georges Simenon novel or Kafka story will help me convince myself that I’m not completely missing the boat, and then I’ll read nothing but American or English or Irish writers for the rest of the year. This pattern is abundantly reflected in my October horror posts.
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But there’s always a token, isn’t there? This year, it’s a novella by Carlos Fuentes called Aura. While I was familiar at least with the existence of Carlos Fuentes, I’d never heard of Aura until it was recommended to me by Crake (presumably of Oryx &… fame) one of my fellow Palimpsesters over at the Palimpsest. Who, by the way, also pointed me towards the Borges story, which I really enjoyed, thereby setting a precedent of profitable recommendations. So Aura went on the list, I happened to snag a copy just about a week ago (before discovering I actually already had a copy, but that’s another story), and got it read between last night and, well, now.

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Aura begins in a manner that is most appealing to me: the protagonist, Felipe Montero, sees an ad in the newspaper placed by a private citizen, who requires the services of a historian. That kind of subtly Gothic, antiquarian-based set-up is absolute catnip for me, promising, as it often does, a series of grotesque family secrets soon to be unearthed by said historian. However, in Aura – which really is very brief, even for a novella, its story plowing heedlessly by any possible diversions – the historian aspect of Felipe’s job is place in the background, and his skill with French (the ad also specified this) become of primary importance. His job is this: he is to read and fill out the manuscript for the unfinished memoirs of General Llorente, long dead husband of Felipe’s new employer, the quite elderly Consuela Llorente. The home in which Consuela lives is steeped in perpetual darkness, or at least dimness, and initially Felipe needs spoken instructions just to navigate his way from the front door to Consuela’s room. Though he gets used to this, Consuela’s home – where Felipe is to lived for the duration of his job -- and hospitality is beset by small oddities: Consuela keeps a pet rabbit named Saga, and scatters the animal’s food across her bed; lunch and dinner are always, and only, liver; judging by the general’s memoirs, it is difficult to get Conseula pegged to a reasonable age, as the evidence found therein suggests something unlikely; and strangest of all is Aura, Consuela’s beautiful niece. Not that Aura herself is so very odd, but during meals Felipe begins to notice that the young woman eats when her aunt eats, meaning if Consuela brings the fork to her mouth, Aura does the same thing, with the same motions, at the same time. And it’s not just during meals – at one point, Felipe sees Aura butchering a lamb (for its liver, presumably), and when he walks upstairs to see Consuela, he finds her miming the same motions, alone and lambless, in her bedroom.

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Where this is all leading is described in terms that are both entirely clear, and fairly vague, which is to say that what the reader is meant to intuit about Aura and its characters is easy to grasp, but why and how any of this happened is left as curious scraps of the General's memoirs. As intended, this causes Aura to be forever above ground, never firmly planted, however clear we may feel about its final moments. However, doing most of the work to make Aura the trance-like, otherworldly book it is is Fuentes's decision to write not only in the present tense, but in the second person. Observe:

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You force yourself to go on workin on the papers. When you're bored with them you undress slowl, get into bed, and fall asleep at once, and for the first time in years you dream, dream of only one thing, of a fleshless hand that comes toward you with a bell, screaming that you should go away, everyone should go away; and when that face with its empty eye-sockets comes close to yours, you wake up with a muffled cry, sweating, and feel those gentle hands caressing your face, those lips murmuring in a low voice, consoling you and asking you for affection.

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This is the sort of thing that I would normally be inclined to write off as a needless affectation, or, perhaps, as tedious dicking around, but not here. Though I'm in no position to say for sure, being merely monolingual as I am, the translation by Lysander Kemp seems exceptional to me, utterly seamless, so that Fuentes's case-and-narrative mode choices don't come off as gimmickry, but rather as essential to Aura's chilly mood. In an odd way, the second person helps to personalize Felipe in a way he wouldn't be in, say, third person -- we learn next to nothing about the man, outside of how he reacts to the situation he's currently in, but every "you" Fuentes throws at us works to keep him from becoming only a cipher. He's just mostly a cipher, and I'm not sure there's anything those "you"s do that first person "I"s wouldn't, and, in any case, you could accuse Fuentes of taking a short cut, but if something works, it works, and I'm inclined to give credit on that basis.

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And anyway, the primary function of the second person, at least here, is throw the reader off balance. That's the intention of nearly every aspect of Aura, and Fuentes never steps wrong there. I suppose it's easy to accomplish this when you throw in bits of untranslated French right at the moment where you'd really like to be reading your native language (provided it's not French), or force the audience to read lines like "You want to touch her breasts" (that's a paraphrase), but the truth is I felt as though I was walking through those shadowy rooms, smoking cigarettes in bed as cats fought outside, and sat down to another dinner of liver. And I felt the great unease, too.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 28: Just a Critic

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A quick one today, by design, because certain things are starting to catch up to me here, and besides that, I mean, seriously. Come on already.
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By way of introduction, I will announce that today's anthology, from which I pulled the stories under consideration, is The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural from 1967, anonymously edited by Ray Russell. I've had this book for some time now, though I've only read from it sporadically over the years. Even so, I'm coming to the realization that this is something of an essential volume, being, as it is, a terrific sampling of mid-20th century American (mostly, anyway) genre fiction. Glance at the contents, and you will see stories by John Collier, a couple each by Bloch, Matheson, Beaumont and Bradbury, Gahan Wilson's excellent "The Sea Was Wet as Wet Can Be", Fredric Brown, Ray Russell, and Charles Motherfucking Willeford. That list comes perilously close to Cream of the Crop status, and that's just for starters! If you can find this book, you should really pick it up. Casually, without seeming to go too far out of its way, it's fantastic.
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Of the two writers on deck for today, one is virtually forgotten, remembered now, if it all, for having written the novel on which a well-loved but not-often seen film, and the other is probably not well known outside of genre readers, but something of a cult giant within that world. And this is my first reading of either of them.
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The forgotten writer is David Ely. The film that was based on one of his novels is the strange and compelling Seconds, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Rock Hudson (and John Randolph, too, who doesn't usually get a hat-tip when the film is mentioned, but who I believe gave the strongest performance). The Ely story I read is called "The Academy", and it's a very interesting thing: for the vast majority of its eleven pages, "The Academy" is not a horror story. It's about a guy named Mr. Holston who is touring the titular school with a man referred to only as the Director. Holston's son has been accepted to the school, and he wants to check it out before signing his son over. It's a private school, obviously, one that may or may not have possess a military bent. It also has a statue outside of a man and a boy facing towards the school -- thereby putting their backs to the rest of the world -- and a plaque that has faded to illegibility.
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The tour goes quite well, so it seems, with the Director not only pumping his school up to the rafters, but providing ample evidence to support his claims. This place is ship-shape. And to be honest, I slumped a little when I started to wonder if "The Academy" was going to be some kind of easy money, anti-military bleat. Perhaps it still is, to be honest, but it could just as easily be read as an attack on the whole institution of private schooling. There's nothing explicitly militaristic about the Academy, and towards the end the Director offers some unprovoked consolation to Mr. Holston regarding the latter's misgivings about foisting off his son (who it seems has some mild behavioral problems) to a bunch of strangers.
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Still, though: not a horror story. But then there's that final paragraph, and within that paragraph are two words that change the whole texture of "The Academy". It's really sort of remarkable, given how common the two words are, and the fact that had Ely settled for just one of those two words the impact would have been erased. As I say, interesting.
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The second story is by Jack Finney, he of the grander stature. The story's called "Hey, Look at Me!", and it, too, is quite interesting, though for different reasons. It's narrated by Peter Marks, book editor and literary critic for a San Francisco newspaper. As the story begins, we learn that a man named Max Kingery has died, and that Marks has seen his ghost. Kingery was a writer, having published one novel which Marks remembered giving a mixed review to some time back. Both men live in a small town called Mill Valley, about which Marks says:
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A lot of writers live here, and whenever a new one arrives people love to introduce us and then stand back to see what will happen. Nothing much ever does, though once a man denounced me right out on the sidewalk in front of the Redhill liquor store. "Peter Marks? The book critic?" he said, and when I nodded, he said, "You, sir, are a puling idiot who ought to be writing 'News of Our Pets' for The Carmel Pine Cone instead of criticizing the work of your betters." Then he turned, and -- this is the word -- stalked off, while I stood staring after him, smiling. I'd panned two of his books, he'd been waiting for Peter Marks ever since, and was admirably ready when his moment came.
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Minus the fireworks, this basically similar literary connection is more or less how Kingery and Marks met. Kingery was a withdrawn, brooding sort, and he and Marks became friends out of habit. This friendship developed despite Marks certainty that Kingery had nothing but contempt for Marks's profession:
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Some writers are belligerent about critics, some are sullen and hostile, but Max was just contemptuous. I'm sure he believed that all writers outranked all critics -- well or badly, they actually do the deed which we only sit and carp about. And sometimes Max would listen to an opinion of mine about someone's book, then he'd shrug and say, "Well, you're not a writer," as though that severely limited my understanding. I'd say, "No, I'm a critic," which seemed a good answer to me, but Max would nod as though I'd agreed with him.
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There's lots of similarly good writing in "Hey, Look at Me!" that I could quote. It's a modest story, really, but I really loved it. Far more melancholy than frightening, as ghost stories can often be, "Hey, Loot at Me!" is fascinating because of the various things it manages to be about in its brief allotted space. For instance, it's about loss and dealing with sudden death, and the ways in which this can be difficult to absorb. Finney even ties this into the supernatural element of the story, as Marks and his wife are away on vacation when Kingery dies suddenly -- they even miss his funeral -- so when Marks first sees him on the street again it doesn't even automatically register for him that he shouldn't be seeing Kingery at all, ever again.
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But the fact that Marks is a critic and Kingery is, or was, a writer are what's essential to "Hey, Look at Me!". The key thing about Kingery is that however good or bad his first novel was, he knew full well that he would one day become one of America's great writers. And then he died. Then there's the question of what drove Kingery to write, a clue for which is in the title. Pushing still further is Marks's position as a critic, and how Finney views this. Sympathetically, it would appear, but Finney wasn't a critic, he was a fiction writer. And if Kingery's literary ambition was to have people notice him, and to see his name sprawled across advertisements and newspapers, something he never lived to achieve, what of Finney's success at the time he wrote it? I don't really know what kind of status as a writer Finney enjoyed, but by the time he wrote "Hey, Look at Me!" he'd already written his novel The Body Snatchers, and had a successful film made from it. In fact, he'd been adapted to film four times by then, so household name or not, he'd made his mark. He'd even achieved immortality through The Body Snatchers, though he obviously didn't know it.
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There's a lot going on in "Hey, Look at Me!", while managing to be funny, sad, and eerie, all within about fourteen pages. Not bad at all. The lesson I learned from all this is that I'd better read more Jack Finney.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 27: Your God and My Gods

I realized something surprising last night, which is that outside of a handful of his "Just So Stories" and a barely remembered reading of Captains Courageous many, many years ago, I mainly know Rudyard Kipling for his poetry. This is surprising because I don't really know anybody primarily for their poetry, and this includes people who write poetry and nothing else. It's simply not a literary form I've given much time to. But for whatever reason, Kipling's poetry, at least at one point in my life, drew me to him more than his prose did. I couldn't tell you why this was; all I can say is that when I was a teenager I read "Boots" over and over again.

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So when the ubiquitous Stephen Jones compiled Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror & Fantasy in 2008 (with a very nice introduction by the ubiquitous Neil Gaiman), I figured this would be a plenty nice way to ease my way into Kipling's prose. I was also a little surprised, because while I knew Kipling had written one horror story -- "The Mark of the Beast", about which more later -- I had no idea he'd written enough to fill up a nearly 800-page book. He did, though, and it's a beauty.

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You can probably piece together the rest, so let's jump right in. I only read two, which is, yes, my standard number, but I'd hoped to squeeze in at least one more. I chose "The Mark of the Beast" for obvious reasons, as well as "The Phantom Rickshaw" because it was a bit longer than the other story, and because I understood it to also be a reasonably famous story, but in his introduction Neil Gaiman raves about a story called "The Gardener", and says of yet another:

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...[A]t least one of the stories in this volume revolts me on a hundred levels, and has given me nightmares, and I would not have missed reading it for worlds.

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Well, thanks for keeping that title close to your chest there, Neil. For all I know, he's talking about "The Mark of the Beast" or "The Phantom Rickshaw", though I sort of doubt it.

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Anyway. A very illuminating bit of reading this was. Apart from the fact that I very much enjoyed both stories, and found Kipling's prose immediately appealing, it made me wish that the origins of certain story formulas were easier to trace, because both of these employ classic horror story structures, especially "The Mark of the Beast", and of course that story was written in 1890, and "The Phantom Rickshaw" in 1885. Were these plots original to Kipling? If so, his influence in the horror field is actually monumental, just based on "The Mark of the Beast". Of course, the late 19th century would have been well along in the history of horror literature; then again, the horror fiction written then could count as the foundation for modern horror, and "The Mark of the Beast" is, in fact, quite specific to certain changes in the world at that time, and forever after.

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Now, "The Mark of the Beast" is very basic. A group of Westerners are carousing in an Eastern land -- India, in this case. They get terribly drunk, and two of them, our narrator and a "member of the Police" named Strickland, are left to help a third man, an Englishman (as they all are) named Fleete who owns property in India, get home. In doing so, they find themselves passing by a temple:

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Our. road lay through the bazaar, close to a little temple of Hanuman, the Monkey-god, who is a leading divinity worthy of respect. All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people -- the great grey apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.

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Well, all three of the men are absolutely blasted, however, and Fleete breaks away from his keepers and desecrates the temple by putting out his cigar on a statue of Hanuman. After doing this, from the temple a man devastated by leprosy, dubbed a "Silver Man" because of the state and color of his skin, assaults Fleete. Fleete is rescued by his companions, though in the days to come he will develop some sort of rash on his chest, where the leper "nuzzled" him, and will acquire a rabid taste for nearly-raw porkchops. And he will begin howling.

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As you can see, this story, as a piece of plotting, has influenced about every third horror novel or film since it first appeared, whether that was with Kipling or before. Any time a tourist thoughtlessly, foolishly, or callously trods over sacred ground, only to face dire consequences later, well...perhaps with "The Mark of the Beast" we have our source. Even if we don't, there's something interesting to Kipling's approach to the material. Frequently dismissed as a Right-wing Imperialist, Kipling shows an odd sort of respect to the cultures and beliefs of the "Subcontinent". The manner in which Strickland and the narrator ultimately deal with this situation could perhaps raise some eyebrows, at least as it relates to this argument, but the title of this post comes from a native proverb that Kipling uses to open the story:
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Your Gods and my Gods -- do you or I know which are the stronger?

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Their Gods, or so this story would seem to indicate. And anyway, if Fleete had been something more than a drunken, blundering pale face, none of this would have ever happened.

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"The Phantom Rickshaw" doesn't touch on these issues quite so directly: it's the story of Jack Pansay, an Englishman in India who is the kind of fellow that used to be called a "bounder" and his brief love affair with Agnes Keith-Wessington, his cruel dissolving of same, her succumbing to illness, and her subsequent post-mortem harassment of Pansay as he attempts to carry on a relationship with his new love. Not exactly the funny story that glib summation would imply, "The Phantom Rickshaw" is actually kind of funny, as well as eerie, and even a little angry. The anger is directed at men like Pansay, because though the story is told in his voice, Kipling allows him some blatantly phony moments of remorse over the manner in which he broke things off with Agnes, nor does he spare Pansay the opinions of others. After the haunting of Pansay by the title contraption begins, Pansay comes under the medical supervision of the wise, curious, and kindly Dr. Heatherlegh, who rarely fails to remind his patient that he's only bothering to treat him of his physical and psychological trauma (no one but Pansay can see the Rickshaw, or hear Agnes's voice coming from within, begging Pansay to forgive her -- for what??) because he's professionally interested. At one point, Pansay has become such a ghastly and down-trodden figure, that publicly he's come to be pitied:

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"And that's rather more than you deserve," [Heatherlegh] concluded pleasantly, "though the Lord knows you've been going through a pretty severe mill. Never mind; we'll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon."

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The last pages of "The Phantom Rickshaw" are quite something, as Pansay's relationship with Agnes's ghost, and with the rickshaw, change, and his terror mingles with acceptance and even a muddled sort of affection. All this, even though Pansay's quite certain that his fate is rapidly approaching, and will not be pleasant. Finally, in the last lines, Pansay is absolved of nothing, either by Kipling or by himself, and as he meets his end no one can doubt that it was his own brutal self interest that was the sole cause.

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Meanwhile, this horrid little man is given, by Kipling, certain opinions that flesh out his place in India, and even Kipling's as well, though it may go against certain popular perceptions of the man. Early in his haunting, Pansay tries to logically explain away the sudden appearance of a woman who looks exactly like his deceased ex-lover, riding in a rickshaw that is a duplicate of hers, and manned by coolies wearing the same uniforms as those men who served Agnes:

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[M]y first hope that some woman marvellously like Mrs. Wessington had hired the carriage and the coolies with their old livery was lost. Again and again I went round this tread-mill of thought; and again and again gave up baffled and in despair. The voice was as inexplicable as the apparition. I had originally some wild notion of confiding it all to Kitty [his new girlfriend]; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant of the rickshaw. "After all," I argued, "the presence of the rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral illusion. One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and carriages. The whole thing is absurd. Fancy the ghost of a hill-man!"

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Because, of course, non-Westerners can't have souls. Except Kipling shows that they do -- those are the ghosts of "coolies", after all. Take the spirits of others lightly at your own peril, Kipling is saying. And don't be glib about it, either. Curiously, in both stories someone half-quotes the line from Hamlet:

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

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Both times, the speaker only makes it to "There are more things..." before being cut off. In "The Mark of the Beast", it plays out like this:

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I said, "'There are more things...'"

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But Strickland hates that quotation. He says that I have worn it threadbare.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 26: A Kind of Winding Tunnel Through Tangled Undergrowth

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About the short novel The Sound of His Horn by Sarban (really John W. Wall), Kingsley Amis once wrote this:

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In its [the horn featured in the novel to signal the beginning of the hunt] archaic associations, its evocation of pageantry, its reminder of the hunter's carefree custo together with the terror of the hunted, it sums up the whole content and atmosphere of this novel, this strange combination of daydream and nightmare. So compelling is it that I shall always feel a slight twinge whenever I am reminded of the innocent English hunting song from which the title is taken.

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Some decades later, Suzy McKee Charnas had this to say about the same novel:

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The bloodthirsty, joyous call of the Count's [the novel's villain] hunting horn, the gold and green livery of his foresters, the sunlit glades of his carefully manicured woods, the gabbling yammer of the maniacal cat-women -- these flashes of from a vision at once false and true, enchantingly beautiful and starkly hideous, sink indelibly into the mind. A lasting, eerie echo is the mark of Sarban's achievement in this brief, unforgettable book.

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You'd be hard pressed to find two people less suited to agree on anything than the staunchly feminist, pretty-far-Left Charnas and the acerbic, fairly Right-leaning Amis, but look at that: they both love Sarban's The Sound of His Horn. And you know what? They're both wrong!!

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Now listen, I understand that no one likes to be disappointed, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I hate being disappointed more than anybody in the history of the universe. The Sound of His Horn disappointed me hugely. I've known about the book, and have wanted to read it, for at least twenty years, since first encountering it through Charnas's short essay on the book (from which I quoted above) in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's Horror: 100 Best Books. The later discovery that Kingsley Amis, a favorite of mine, was also a fan only sweetened the pot. But getting through this very brief novel was a terrible grind, and I would have abandoned it if I hadn't locked myself into it, with no fall-back, for this post.

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Written in 1952, Sarban's novel (one of only two he wrote, though he also published a scattering of short fiction over the years) belongs to many genres, and horror might actually be the least obvious, though I can see where that argument can be made. What it is primarily is an alternate history story, playing with the by-now-but-not-by-then age old idea that Germany actually won World War II. I wonder if it might not be the first such novel, but in any event it is, in concept, one of the strangest. The way the novel is set up, the hero, Alan Querdilion is gathered with family and friends, having returned home from a German POW camp following the end of the war, which, it is implied, ended the way we know it did. But after a dinner table discussion on the morality of hunting gets heated, and Alan -- very quiet up to this point -- suddenly says "It's the terror that's unspeakable", he then begins telling an old friend the true story of his POW experiences, which largely involved a bizarre leap through time (and apparently timelines, or dimensions, as well), one hundred years into the future, and one hundred years into Hitler's "One Thousand Year Reich".

We're a little slow getting to that realization, though this is fine. Sarban, I want to be clear, was not an obviously bad writer, and much of the set-up for The Sound of His Horn played pretty well to me. The accident that leads him into the future also lands him in the hospital, and I enjoyed his interaction with the various nurses, and especially with his physician, Dr. von Eichbrunn, with whom Alan has the interesting, subtly chilling conversation that leads to the novel's central revelation. But as the story's strangeness grows -- we learn that this hospital is on the grounds of an, I guess, estate, owned by Count von Hackelnburg, the Reich's Master Forester (a position once held by Herman Goering), and much of the estate's business and pastime is given over to the perverse hunting of humans, some genetically altered to resemble animals, some not, and to the various, audience-particapatory fates of the captured game -- The Sound of His Horn turns into more of a guidebook than a novel. And a really dry one at that.

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In her essay, Charnas actually touches on this when she says:

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Prodigies of economy are achieved with a deceptively artless style. The gradually accelerating [You can say that again! - Ed.] narrative becomes not only an observer's tour of his own nightmare, but a love story and a headlong adventure tale as well.

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Okay, but that hardly prepares the reader for passages such as this:

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It was such a butt as no preserver of game in England would ever have contrived. A little copse, from the centre of which the undergrowth had been carefully cleared, leaving the saplings standing, was surrounded by a breast-high bank of earth well grassed over and topped by a fringe of low bushes...It was, in fact, more a ride, or alley, than a glade, for the opposite side was a continues thick hedge of bushes, looking natural enough to the eye, but no doubt layered and interlaced artificially in order to confine the game to the ride and force it to run straight past the butt within easy range. We were in the valley, and the ride, running lengthwise up to...

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Oh for fuck's sake, enough already! And yes, on the one hand, such writing is necessary to give the reader some idea of the physical landscape being dealt with, but on the other hand, or on the other two hands, must the prose be so barren, and must there be so much of this kind of thing? I swear to you, at times it felt like this was half the book, and it may well have been. An "observer's tour", indeed! Well, who asked for that?? There is so little in the way of character -- something Charnas also acknowledges -- that when a bit of Alan's feelings about all this, about being hunted and everything, actually appears right there on the page, in print, I was a little startled. "What happened to all the that stuff about brushes and clearings and treelines?" I wondered. "Also, who's this Alan person?" Not to mention that referring to what occurs in the final thirty pages as a "love story", as Charnas does, is an astonishingly generous leap on her part. Imagine taking a long bus trip, and in the seat next to you was an attractive woman who you learn went to the same high school as you. The two of you talk about many things, for several hours, and at one point the bus almost gets hit by a van. Then she gets off the bus in Topeka, and you travel on to your home in Sacramento. After you get off the bus, you call your parents and tell them that you're pretty sure you just got married. In that same way, The Sound of His Horn contains a love story.

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And "deceptively artless prose"...I know what Charnas means, and for the first third of this book I might nod my head in agreement, or at least understanding, but at times Sarban's descriptive powers desert him so completely than I wonder if he ever had them in the first place. When we finally meet Count von Hackelnburg, he's described as being enormous, gigantic:

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He was a bigger man than any you have seen: a giant who made the great throne he sat on and the mighty oaken board before him look like things of normal size...

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Indeed. I mean, now that's big! All of this, by the way, is occurring as the reader, and Alan, is learning of the depths of future Nazi perversity, giant-Roman-dining-hall-orgy style, and some of this stuff is quite insane. But it all reads with the same verve as that goddamn "copse" passage I quoted before, and my eyes glazed over just as often during this portion of the book as anywhere else. And believe me, that accounts for a lot of eye-glazing.

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The Sound of His Horn is a book whose cult reputation quite baffles me. I'll admit that twenty-plus years of anticipation on my part couldn't have helped me approach the novel on its own terms, but I can be a pretty forgiving reader. If some of this interminable grassland shit had just been broken up by some interesting dialogue, I might be writing a very different -- or somewhat different, anyway -- post, but there's almost no dialogue of any kind to speak of, and after about thirty or so pages, what there is is purely functional. As is so much of the book: you need to know what this land looks like because in the last twenty pages that main guy is going to be hunted on it, so here it all is. You're going to need to know what future Nazis are up to, otherwise when that one guy gets hunted, you won't know why it's so scary, so here it all is. That's it. That's your book.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 25: Who Knows the Stench of God?

Dark Awakenings by Matt Cardin is an unusual book. Not that I've read it all, but you can tell by the way its contents break down that it's not a typical horror collection. First off, you have your horror fiction, separated into a section called, appropriately enough, "Fictions". There are seven of these, including a novella called "The God of Foulness" (which I'm afraid I did not read for today, something I, having read the first few paragraphs, now rather regret), and they take up about 180 of the book's 300 pages. The remainder of the book is taken up with a series of academic essays by Cardin about the horror genre, and religion, and where the two converge in art and -- so I've gathered is the idea anyway -- in real life. Meanwhile, the dust jacket copy reads, in part:
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[A]uthor and scholar Matt Cardin explores this ancient intersection between religion and horror in seven stories and three academic papers that pose a series of disturbing questions: What if the spiritual awakening coveted by so many religious seekers is in fact the ultimate doom? What if the object of religious longing might prove to be the very heart of horror? Could salvation, liberation, enlightenment then be achieved only by identifying with that apotheosis of metaphysical loathing?
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Could be. All sorts of things are possible. But who can know? So that's Cardin's angle anyway, and I'm honestly quite intrigued. As it pertains to a real world philosophy, I believe Cardin is a bit, I don't know...fucked in the head, I think is the term, and more than likely doesn't even mean it, but as a literary philosophy to be applied to the writing of horror fiction, then okay, pal, let's have it. Plus, it's not hard to see from the above why Cardin -- whose second book this is, his first being the 84-page Divinations of the Deep, the contents of which I haven't been able to ascertain -- is often mentioned in the same breath as Thomas Ligotti (and also Reggie Oliver, although in that case the connection isn't as obvious. Anyway, I heard about Cardin in relation to Oliver, when horror critic Jim Rockhill said that Cardin and Ligotti were the only modern horror writers capable of writing at Oliver's level).
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For the record, the reason I now regret not reading "The God of Foulness" is because of the two Cardin stories I did read for today, one plays as a sort of declaration of intent, or as Cardin's personal horror manifesto, while the other seems to bear no clear relation to that manifesto, and is merely an excellent piece of horror writing (it's better than the manifesto, actually). "The God of Foulness", on the other hand, from my brief scan of its opening pages, is evidently about a religious cult who seeks out disease as a means of spiritual completion. So there you go, that probably would have been good to read, but no, I had to fuck it all up. But enough: let's get to what I actually did read, and see what shakes out.
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I'll begin with the manifesto, which is called "The Devil and One Lump". This is the story of a man named Evan, who was once "king of the mid-list horror writers", specializing in a brand of religious horror that sounds very much like the dust jacket flap of Dark Awakenings. As a character in the story describes it:
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You have created protagonists whose very search for salvation produces a backfire effect that damns them to a worse hell than they had ever imagined. You have speculated that the Bible contains a hidden subtext that runs between the actual printed lines and undermines the surface message at every turn. You have written of a narcissistic demiurge who is so enraptured by the beauty of his own creation that he represses the memory of his birth from a monstrous prior reality, so that when he is forcibly reawakened to this memory, he suffers a psychological breakdown that generates cataclysmic consequences both for himself and for the cosmos he created.
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This description of Evan's work is delivered by the Devil, and "The Devil and One Lump" is the sort of sardonic, one-room-setting, horror story version of movies like Bedazzled, where the Devil forces his point of view onto the misbegotten hero, and tests that hero's feeble philosophy, meanwhile revealing the Great Chess Match between Satan and God that uses folks like Evan as their pawn, and et cetera. Which means that "The Devil and One Lump" is sort of a comedy, and this is too bad. Though I hate this word, and am not in agreement with the philosophy, there is something truly subversive about "The Devil and One Lump" and the way it plays out, particularly the ending -- the material is here for a truly disquieting horror story. Unfortunately, the story takes place on two different planes of reality, and the connective tissue between the two is Evan's quest for his morning cup of coffee. This might put you in mind of the kind of mundanity mixed with cosmic absurdity for which Douglas Adams was so renowned, but "The Devil and One Lump" is minus all those pesky laughs Adams kept cramming in there.
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It's possible I'm being too harsh here -- "The Devil and One Lump" isn't written to be a romp -- but it's hard for me to take Cardin's approach to horror seriously when this is my first exposure to him. Possibly this is my fault, as I made the choice of where to begin, but all I'm getting here is an announcement hidden in a story, and one that's not particularly illustrative of Cardin's ideas. It's fairly explicit about those ideas, but that's not quite the same thing.
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One the other hand, we have "Blackbrain Dwarf", a story chosen by me because I thought that title was quite the grabber. As I mentioned before, this story is not especially in line, or not obviously in line, with Cardin's religion-horror philosophy, but that's only a problem for me, as far as writing this post goes, not for Cardin. Where's it written that you have to write the same kind of story all the time, even if you always wrote within one genre? And why exactly would you want to? If you're Robert Aickman, you can pull it off, but, as a matter of fact, if Thomas Ligotti has one serious problem as a writer -- and I'm an enormous admirer of his work -- it's that he's in danger becoming a bit of a self-parody. It's all strange towns with faceless citizens and psychotic businesses and mad art, and so on -- when he breaks out of it with a story like "Alice's Last Advenutre" or the deeply interesting and unnerving "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story", it's jarring because I'm simply not used to it. So get it together, Thomas Ligotti. What the fuck. And good job Matt Cardin for mixing up your shit a little. Probably, I guess -- I've only read the two so far.
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So "Blackbrain Dwarf". This story is about Derek Warner, and the last day in which he experiences any moments of sanity. And there aren't many of those. Here's how it begins:
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But of course everything was all wrong. Derek knew it the minute he opened his eyes and perceived the vileness resounding from every angle and object in the room. Indeed, how could it be otherwise in a red-glowing world where the stench of blacksouls mounts to a deadening sky?
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When Derek's mind slips from our reality, it's signalled by those italics, and sudden Dark Ages/Lovecraftian bursts of thundering, blood-and-doom-soaked language. I have to say that "Blackbrain Dwarf" -- which is nothing to speak of as a plot, nor does it suffer for that -- is actually a pretty bracingly chilling story. The dwarf of the title is an evil little man who whispers the terrifying words into Derek's ear that lead to his total absorption into that fearsome world that keeps breaking into his daily reality as an unhappy lawyer in an unhappy marriage. The language of that other world has an awful poetry to it, and the idea that it didn't come from within Derek's mind, but was indeed from elsewhere, and was burrowing into Derek's mind made "Blackbrain Dwarf" all the more effective, as was the detail of a victim of Derek's late-story violent impulses repeatedly crying out "What's wrong!?", because their fear-blasted mind could find nothing else to say.
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So I was very impressed with "Blackbrain Dwarf", much less so with "The Devil and One Lump", but my only regret about this attempt to discuss the work of Matt Cardin is that there's a great deal of depth being implied in descriptions of what Dark Awakenings is, and what Matt Cardin is all about, and it may well all be true, but my choice of stories for today didn't really give me an opportunity to explore any of that. I read a couple of horror stories, as usual. But I don't think there's much that's usual about Cardin, for better or worse, so I'll keep reading.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 24: Resurrection Man

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The back cover of my Wildside Press edition of Hugh B. Cave's Murgunstrumm & Others bears this admonition:
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BE WARNED. THIS IS A COLLECTION OF HORROR TALES.

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Which I rather like, for a bunch of reasons, among them that it somewhat ironically signals to the reader that this book is actually intended to be fun -- the spooky, creaking-stairs kind of fun, but fun -- and also because Cave, who lived to the enviable age of 94, was a veteran of the pulp magazines of the 20s, 30s, 40s, and onward, living through the horror boom of the 80s, publishing a number of voodoo novels along the way, and still onward, his last book being released in 2004, the year of his death. And there's something so delightfully old-fashioned in that playful warning that seems to beckon to readers with old-fashioned tastes, so that the result is the precise opposite of a warning: "Here: This is What You've Been Seeking". Murgunstrumm & Others is the single largest collection of Cave's fiction published to date, and it's a vast, wide-reaching best of anthology that was first published in 1977. Who knew Cave would go on to live another 27 years?

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And Englishman, Cave spent a number of years in Haiti following World War II, travelling later to Jamaica where he ran a successful coffee plantation. This lasted into the 1970s, and all the while, beginning in 1930, he churned out his pulp stories and novels. Many, as I've implied, had a Caribbean, often a voodoo, flavor to them, but his most famous single piece of writing, the short novel Murgunstrumm (from 1932, first published in Strange Tales magazine) is set, I suppose, in America, though the evidence for this is limited to small things, like a reference to nickels. This is pretty convincing, I'll admit, but certain rural characters speak with what read like English accents ("I'll show ye to your rooms, and then I'll be makin' out the register."), and anyway the point is that geographically Murgunstrumm is a bit nebulous -- America, okay, fine, but where in America? It doesn't matter. The part of America, or England, where there are mental hospitals, and cities, and outside of those cities there are dark woods, and down the roods that go past or through those woods are inns. And if you've reached the Gray Toad Inn, then brother, you've gone too far.

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This is what happened to Paul Hill and Ruth LeGeurn some months before Murgunstrumm begins. The story of their subsequent escape from the Gray Toad Inn is met by listeners not with horror, but with complete disbelief, with the result that Paul -- and, we learn later, Ruth as well -- lands himself in a mental asylum. But at the story's beginning, he's successfully escaping the hospital, and with the help of Ruth's brother Martin, and her wealthy father Armand, Paul embarks on a quest to return to the Gray Toad Inn, trick the two doctors who've wrongly committed he and Ruth to accompany him, and prove his sanity, and Ruth's, and expose to the world this ancient horror that exists and thrives unchecked.

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Murgunstrumm is not that ancient horror. Murgunstrumm is sort of the butler of that ancient horror, and once I realized this I became terribly curious, because he's the title character. What could this mean? Where could this be going? How it got there is, Paul, the two doctors, and Jeremy (Armand LeGeurn's driver, and the kind of loyal gentleman who'd rather meet evil with his fists than talk about it) make it to the Gray Toad Inn, having witnessed some strange things along the way, and are greeted by dwarfish, toadlike, possibly inhuman Murgunstrumm (who, fortunately, doesn't recognize Paul). This is Murgunstrumm:

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In the dining room of the Gray Toad Inn, Murgunstrumm agrees to serve the four men, but as they wait for their food, they take note of the pretty young woman who preceded them inside sitting with a strange man in evening clothes. Paul knows this woman is in grave danger, and as he and his compatriots sit in agitated contemplation, another man in evening wear appears to speak with Murgunstrumm:
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The man was in black and white, the contrasting black and white of evening attire. But there was nothing immaculate about him. His hair was rumpled, crawling crudely about his flat forehead. His chalk covered face was a mask, fixed and expressionless. He walked with the exaggerated stride of a man steeped, saturated with liquor. His eyes were wide open, gleaming. His lips were wet and red.

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If the guy's drunk, it ain't off booze, but off the red stuff. We'll soon learn that the Gray Toad Inn is a haven for vampires -- there are several -- and that Murgunstrumm, a human mortal, visual evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is paid for his Renfield-like duties with leftovers from the vampires' feast. It's left to Paul and crew to bring this infernal madness to a halt, and quick-like.

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In his introduction to Murgunstrumm & Others, Karl Edward Wagner, who put the book together (and whose relationship with illustrator Lee Brown Coye -- whose take on Murgunstrumm the character is seen above -- and Cave's own relationship to this book and that illustrator, certainly brings to mind Wagner's "Sticks", though that story is supposedly based on other incidents in Coye's life) quotes from a letter he wrote to Cave:

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You wrote some excellent weird-fantasy stories. A good example is Murgunstrumm, which you did for the last issue of Strange Tales. I doubt if many readers today have read this, and yet I would consider it a classic...paced with a relentless ferocity that few writers have ever brought off.

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Nothing says I'm required to agree with Wagner on everything, and here I don't, fully. There's an awful lot of set-up in the first chunk of Murgunstrumm that feels a bit turgid, and worse, once our primary characters are gathered at the Gray Toad Inn, one of the doctors, Allenby, attempts to escape, but is brought down by Paul, and brought back to the Inn. This escape attempt achieves nothing for anyone, least of all the story, and when Allenby and Paul return everything carries on as if neither had ever left. In other words, Murgunstrumm seems well padded in its first half, indicating to me that Cave was intent on squeezing as much scratch out of that penny-a-word rate he was no doubt being paid by Strange Tales as he could. More power to him, I suppose, but like a lot of pulp, it can read a little long. There's also the occasional knees-and-elbows kind of phrasing, where, for instance, the definition of "bore" Cave is trying to evoke is the "make a hole" one, and so a character is described as having "boring eyes". Well, hmm.

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But so what? Or so I think anyway, because the second half of Murgunstrumm, which is pure capture/escape/horrifying discovery/good vs. evil momentum, comes pretty close to matching Wagner's description of the whole. I can't claim there's a great deal of depth here, or even much to delve into as a bit of analysis -- it's a plain old good time.

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Then again, what of Murgunstrumm, he of the unexpected titular reference? He is a rather grubbily fascinating character, in no way morally redeemable, but who he is and where he comes from would seem to completely outstrip the vampires and our heroes in terms of reader interest. Cave knows this, and wants us to wonder about it, and wants us to think about him at the end, and why he's deserving of having this whole short novel named after him. I'm reminded a little bit of old Hollywood horror movies in general, but specifically -- because this is my go-to example for this kind of thing -- Val Lewton and Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher, in which Boris Karloff's John Gray and Henry Daniell's Dr. MacFarlane are the diseased and rotting heart and soul of the film, and Russell Wade's Donald Fettes, our hero, is tedious blank who's only there because it's rare that you're allowed to get away with placing your villains front and center and free of any moral balance.

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Such is the case, I imagine, with Murgunstrumm, who's grovelling servitude masks both a hideous craving that can't even be justified by an undead curse and a manic rage, and who wonders in an out of the story, or is forced through it at gunpoint, carrying the majority of the weight by virtue of having that title hanging over his head. The story's ending, which hinges on Murgunstrumm, is unforgettable in its Grand Guignol chaos, and you can practically feel Cave's interest dwindling as Murgunstrumm recedes from the closing moments and the lovers step into the limelight again. Lovers are a dime a dozen, after all, but when will there ever be another Murgunstrumm?

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 23: Eat Good and Healthy

I only read one short story for today, and that story is "Pig", by Roald Dahl. I like Dahl very much, but it may be that I'm a slightly off brand of Roald Dahl fan in that I didn't grow up reading his children's books, and to this day haven't read a single one of them. Not because I don't want to -- quite the contrary! I simply haven't yet. I'm intrigued by the sinister qualities I'm told are apparent in these books. Such qualities are often praised in children's fiction to a degree greater than how they're actually represented in the book (Neil Gaiman's Coraline, good as I thought it was, was not quite as dark as I'd been told), but having read a pretty healthy handful of Dahl's horror and suspense and just-plain-odd fiction, I believe his often cruel sensibility would be quite something to encounter in whatever form.

In 2006, Roald Dahl: The Collected Stories was published, and I read a review of it in The New Yorker. I can't find that review now, so I can't quote from it or attribute it to anybody, but I distinctly remember the reviewer singling out two of Dahl's stories as going too far, being simply too cruel. Not badly written in any way, but nasty and morally off-putting. Well, I am perhaps putting words in the reviewers mouth by slipping the word "morally" in there, but if a story about cruelty is being objected to because of that cruelty, and it's not being objected to on moral grounds, then on what grounds is it being objected to? Is the question I'm asking you. In any case, that's how I remember it, and upon reading about these two stories I naturally decided that I must read them both, and soon.

The stories in question were "The Last Act" and "Pig". I was very pleased to find both stories in a collection I had called The Roald Dahl Omnibus, and since the reviewer had sort of spoiled the ending of "Pig", I decided to go ahead and read "The Last Act" first. My memory of it is a bit hazy now, but glancing at it again earlier today I was reminded of the gist of its plot, and, anyway, the ending to "The Last Act" had always hung pretty strong in my brain. Because that fucker is pretty goddamn cruel, chronicling a depressed woman's complete psychological dismantling at the hands of one of the single worst human beings in all of literature (the part of all of literature that I've read, anyway) -- Neil Labute could never create anybody to approach him. And as I recall, this man does what he does just to do it, because it's the kind of thing he likes to do. Which I guess is what makes "The Last Act" so cruel, and I suppose now my question to that New Yorker reviewer would be "What makes it too cruel? What constitutes 'just cruel enough'? Should a story like 'The Last Act' soften its impact with some sort of redemption or retribution, and if it did, would it be memorable, or would it be forgotten because it ultimately lacked a spine?" That's at least three questions, and I can't ask any of them since I don't even remember who the reviewer was, but had I the opportunity, you can be assured that ask those questions I, indeed, would.

I couldn't say why, exactly, it took me four more years to get around to reading "Pig", but it did, and here we are. "Pig" is a somewhat different situation, though in some ways it's no less alarming than "The Last Act". Whereas "The Last Act" begins in a more or less standard way, with a description of the main character preparing dinner for her husband (who won't be coming home), "Pig" begins like this:

Once upon a time, in the City of New York, a beautiful baby boy was born into this world, and the joyful parents named him Lexington.

That "Once upon a time..." can lead you anywhere, and collectively we know that, and so realism is not what we would expect from a story that begins this way. That's not to say that "Pig" is a fantasy, but those joyful parents will go on to be killed by the police after a mix-up ("[T]hey succeeded in scoring several direct hits on each body -- sufficient anyway to prove fatal in both cases.") and the boy, Lexington, will be whisked off to Virginia by his Aunt Glosspan, a merry spinster and vegetarian who teaches young Lexington to cook, and, later, Lexington, age seventeen, will walk from Virginia to New York in sixteen days. So "Pig" has a bit of a fair tale air to it, and you all know how nice those can be.

The boy has an astounding gift for the culinary arts, it turns out, though throughout his childhood with Aunt Glosspan he's never tasted meat, nor is he even aware that people eat the stuff, until he asks his aunt about it. Full of disgust and disdain, she informs him that cows and chickens and pigs are all eaten by most of the rest of humanity, and they the poor animals' throats are slit, and that "they love to eat lumps of cow's flesh with the blood oozing out of it." More fascinated than revolted, Lexington nevertheless sticks to his brilliant vegetarian meals, and even develops plans to write a cookbook, when his aunt drops dead. Finding a note of instructions from Aunt Glosspan detailing what he needs to do in the event of her death, Lexington first buries her, and then goes to the medical examiner to get a death certificate:

"Old Glosspan?" the doctor said. "My God, is she dead?"

"Certainly she's dead," the youth answered. "If you will come back home with me now I'll dig her up and you can see for yourself."

"How deep did you bury her?" the doctor asked.

"Six or seven feet down, I should think."

"And how long ago?"

"Oh, about eight hours."

"Then she's dead," the doctor announced. "Here's the certificate."

It's at this point that Lexington travels to New York City, collects a sliver of his inheritance, and has his first taste of pork. The ending that the New Yorker ruined for me will not be ruined here for you. It's enough, I think, to say that "Pig" is a pretty fucked up story, as is "The Last Act", as are any number of Dahl's stories for adults. He had a particularly merciless imagination, one that was equally vibrant -- this story's grotesque conclusion is set up by a very weird conversation Lexington has with a waiter and a cook, a conversation whose weirdness is never commented upon, the weirdness not being weird in the New York City where "Pig" takes place. And "Pig", at just under thirty pages, makes room for quite a lot of stuff, including a long encounter with an attorney that would appear to not have all that much to do with what the story is ultimately about.

It's a full story, a complete one, and, yes, a cruel one. But my questions about "The Last Act" would apply to "Pig" as well, because to complain about the cruelty of "Pig" is to complain that "Pig" is not a completely different kind of story. Of the kind of story "Pig" actually is, it is a brilliant example -- it rolls on with a great narrative force, wit, shock, horror and elegance, with a last couple paragraphs, and especially last line, that are exquisite. Exquisitely cruel, yes, okay, fine. But still exquisite.