The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 22: Bald and Fat and Not Rich

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One of the things I use October, and these posts, as an excuse to do is to catch up on the horror writers I grew up with, but never read. Like Thomas Tessier from the other day, there are a slew of horror writers who weren't household names when I was growing up in the 1980s, devouring Stephen King books and so forth, but whose names popped up everywhere a horror fan looked. My thinking has been, well, some of these guys must be good, right?
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Today's subject, Chet Williamson, isn't entirely alien to me, or even to this blog. Long time readers may, but almost certainly won't, remember that in 2008 I read a couple of his short short stories, in conjunction with similar stories by Steve Rasnic Tem and William F. Nolan, and that one Williamson story in particular, "The Assembly of the Dead", really struck a chord with me. And though this post wasn't really about Williamson, I did also make very favorable mention of his horror Western story "'Yore Skin's Jes's Soft 'n Purty'...He Said" at the end of this post last year. So I'm not exactly oblivious to the guy, and have read a couple more short stories outside of those mentioned above. But having liked what I've read up to now, I believe further investigation is warranted.
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And it'd be one of Williamson's novels, if I had the time, but sadly I don't, so it was back to scouring the anthologies again last night. The two Williamson stories I landed on are interesting in that they make me picture Williamson's career in terms of the classic pulp writers -- not people like Lovecraft, who only wrote one kind of story, but the guys who wrote Westerns, horror, romance, science fiction, even porn, whatever market was open that week. The difference being that Williamson is writing horror only (to my knowledge), but in my experience so far he's crossing lots of styles and subgenres within horror, as is illustrated by today's stories.
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First is "Blood Night", taken from the first of the Hot Blood anthologies edited by Jeff Gelb and various co-editors throughout the late 80s, mid 90s (or however long they lasted). These were, for lack of a better term, erotic horror anthologies, or at least so I believe was the intent. Meshing those two kinds of writing is ultimately going to shed a pretty dark light on the "erotic" part of this whole transaction, but I would still have a hard time calling "Blood Night" erotic, though it's undeniably abot sex. To each his own and all that, but the story is about Richard Bell, a single fellow who awakes one morning from an intensely sexual dream to find that not only did he apparently achieve completion while sleeping, but the dream woman who clawed his back drew real blood, as well. Not jumping to any conclusions, Bell simply marvels at his personal, slumbering vigor and goes about his day. Though it would appear from this description that "Blood Night" is going to turn out to be succubus tale, or something to do with some other type of supernatural night visitor, it's not. No, because when Bell gets to work and gets to chatting with a friend about what happened, the conversation turns towards dream control, and how a person can, supposedly, through certain planning and procedures and a lot of focus, dictate what he or she will dream about that night. So Bell decides he's going to read up on the great lovers, like Casanova and Don Juan, and let those stories and images dominate his mind while he sleeps. This works. It works really well. Then, in his ignorance, Bell moves on to De Sade.
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I appreciated, if that's the word, the De Sade section, because I feel like Williamson is playing with the popular perception of him (such as it is, these days), as personified by Bell and his expectations, and off-setting that with the reality. A reality which Bell doesn't entirely dislike, but this is a horror story, after all.
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Bell is not, nor does he become, a terrible human being -- rather, he's a guy who regards sex as a contest, and who loses all his control to this power he's suddenly located in himself. At one point, Williamson says that Bell feels "very sad", which is such a simple phrase, one you might use to describe a child, or a movie, but which can be very powerful in the right context, as it is here, because Bell's sadness is based on discovering that he harbors certain awful desires, ones he would absolutely rather not have. It's like he's become disappointed in himself, and dreads what this knowledge will mean down the line. It'll mean disaster, of course, and Williamson's ending is both surprising and a little...what? It's sort of a Twilight Zone twist, really, a stinger kind of ending, one that's a little overexplained, and maybe goofy, but I'll be damned if it doesn't also make a certain amount of sense. I mean, knowing what Bell is seeking to accomplish, and fast, at the end of the story, it seems like as good an idea as any.
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The other story, “The Return of the Neon Fireball”, surprised me by not being as pulpy as it sounded, or as “Blood Night” actually was. The title is, in fact, intended to sound like a throwback to a 1950s drive-in B movie (and an old Mickey Rooney film called The Fireball is referenced here) because the story is about Michael Price and his desire to buy, restore, and reopen The Fireball, a drive-in theater beloved in his youth (the “neon” comes from the marquee, of course). Not so much his desire, actually, but rather the fact that he goes ahead and does it – with the help of his more wealthy friend, Lenny – and the effect it all has on him. Price is a widower, and he complains to Lenny that his life isn’t fun anymore. He owns his own clothing store, but it’s nothing to him, even though he’s by no means wealthy, to sell it and funnel that money into the Fireball.
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The fact that Price is completely locked in, financially, to the success of the Fireball is not a big deal in this story – once they open, the place does pretty well. What does matter is that, on that first night, a group of kids show up driving a vintage – but not mint – Mercury, decked out in 50s styles, and paying with coins and bills dated from that decade and earlier. Price clues into what this is all about pretty quickly, or at least he gets a sense of it – certainly more quickly than I did, because I was expecting “The Return of the Neon Fireball” to have something of the loony vengeful-spirit-of-the-1950s feel of certain Stephen King works, like Christine or “Sometimes They Come Back”, but that’s not it at all. Instead, the story is steeped in the melancholy of a lumpish middle aged guy whose teenage years just happened to unfold in the 1950s. If the story was written by somebody my age, instead of a drive-in it would have been an arcade, and instead of the kids driving up in a Mercury, it would have been, I don’t know, a Buick Grand National or something. The point is the truth of Mike Price’s life, both as we see it, and as he saw it, or wishes it had been, in the 1950s. “The Return of the Neon Fireball” is ultimately a very sad story, its semi-pulp references – in the title, in some of the films set to play in the theater – only making us wonder if anything was ever as good as we remember it.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 29 - It's Important that We Talk

Well, this day's not going the way I'd planned. One of my big posts for this month was going to be about Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", as well as M. John Harrison's story of the same name -- you know, a compare and contrast kind of thing. Well, before the month had even quite gotten started, someone told me that they thought Harrison's novel The Course of the Heart was an expansion of that short story. I didn't bother verifying this until last night, when I was going to begin reading Machen's story. It would be a little hard to explain to you why this knowledge has put me off reading these two short stories (not forever, just for now), but suffice it to say that for the sake of my own reading interests I want to put them off for another time.

So what do I read now? I haven't decided yet. In the meantime, here's another half-assed post about a few stories that are only about three or four pages in length (I was going to do this today anyway, in addition to a larger post, in order to get the post count to 31). You might remember that the first time I did this I read a story each by Steve Rasnic Tem, William F. Nolan and Chet Williamson. Well, I've decided to stage a rematch, and read another story each by those guys. Last time, Chet Williamson smoked the competition with his terrific "The Assembly of the Dead". Who will win this time!?

First up is Chet Williamson, and his story "Ants". Williamson's not going to repeat his victory, I'm afraid. This is one of those stories about a down-on-his-luck asshole who cheated on his wife, so she divorced him, and now he's poor and has very few pleasures in life. But among those few pleasures is the delight he takes in killing ants. And the ants, as you know without me having to tell you, don't like that, so they take the battle to him. And so on. The copyright for this story is 1987 -- I would have thought this particular horror sub-genre had been exhausted at least twenty years before that. Actually, it probably had, but people kept writing the stories anyway.

Next is William F. Nolan's "Dead Call". Our narrator, Frank, receives a call from his old friend Len. The problem is that Len has been dead for several months. Frank was under the impression that the car wreck that killed Len was an accident, but Len informs him that he is mistaken. Len actually killed himself, because his life was falling to pieces. And, Len points out, isn't Frank going through some pretty rough times himself?

You may be able to tell where this one's going. At three pages, though, I think that's to be expected. It's a pretty creepy little story, though Nolan's dialogue skills are fairly pedestrian. Still, this one's eerie, and it might make you pretty uncomortable if you sit and think about it for too long.

Finally, we have Steve Rasnic Tem's "At the Bureau". It concerns a man who works for a government licensing bureau. The function of this office has changed repeatedly over the many years he's worked there; last time they issued fishing licenses, but they're about to change again. The narrator seems content with his job, even though it's a dead end. There's no room for advancement beyond his current position, and there will be no more raises. His wife wants him to quit. And the guy in the office next door keeps standing in front of the narrator's frosted-glass office door, casting his shadow as he tries to peer in. Whenever the narrator tries to catch him at it, the guy hurries back to his own office.

The twist to all this is pretty bleak and hopeless. I would say this is the best of the three, as it's the most interesting, and it's better written than the other two, though I still prefer Nolan's central idea. But I don't believe these stories were intended to do much beyond sending a brief shiver through their readers, so it's best to end things here...

There will be another, more substantial post later today.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 22 - Is Death Not Wonderful Here?

Oh, what a shitty day. Now, now, don't panic, I'm fine. Or fine enough, at least. The only way my day (and tomorrow, if I'm being honest) will affect us at the moment is how my day relates to my posting-energy levels. And today has really done a number on those levels. The bad news is that, even though I finished reading enough substantial, interesting fiction for a full-length post, I'm not going to. That will come tomorrow. Or the next day. The good news, though, is that I own a book called 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories, which is a 500-page anthology filled with horror stories no longer than about eight pages. I've read three of those, so that I could put up this half-assed post.

First up is Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Giveaway". This one's about four pages, and deals with the stories children make up to threaten each other with, and what it might be like if those threats turned out to be true, and/or how those threats work on the children who receive them. This is a sad little story that is unfortunately marred, in my view, by clanging dialogue. I've read a little Tem before (and more on him next week, by the way), and I'm very intrigued by his work. This one just jars the ear.

Next is "He Kilt It With a Stick", by William F. Nolan. It deals with a man who has spent his life keeping one part of his life hidden from everyone he knows, and that is his passion for killing cats. What is it with horror writers and cat-murder? I can't tell if these writes particularly hate cats -- they always describe the animals as cold, cruel, and dishonest -- or they particularly love cats, and want to purge their anger against those who would hurt them. After all, the bad qualities being attributed to cats always comes from the point of view of their attackers. Anyway. The cat-murderer also has a severe heart condition. God only knows if that'll come into play.

It's not a bad story, really. I just feel like I've already read it a few times this month. And several more times in all the years previous.

Lastly, we have Chet Williamson's "The Assembly of the Dead". It's a bit of a stretch to call this one a "horror" story, but if you cast your net wide enough to include the idea of "existential dread" in your definition of the genre, then it fits nicely. And it's a terrific story. Really. It's about an American Congressman who has traveled to a corrupt and unnamed country in order to recover the body of one of his constituents. That's pretty much it, as far as plot. As I said, it's a wonderful story. It reminded me a little of Tobias Wolff. I know, but shut up, because it did. If you can get your hands on this one, do so. Williamson's story really caught me of guard -- it's both chilling and moving.

That's it for now. More tomorrow.