The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 14: Gargantuan Tombs Of Monstrous Vertical Coffins

by Bryce Wilson

Cities have their own personalities. This is so evident that it seems redundant to even write. Los Angeles has a permanent low level mania. Its sprawl causes an odd claustrophobia, driven by the knowledge that at any given point in the city you could drive for hours and still be within its borders. Then there’s San Diego, its underachieving little brother. A place, where, to borrow a phrase from Don Winslow, “Time reached 1973 and just said, ‘Fuck it.’” The proud rustbelt grandeur of Cleveland, Austin’s lazy pace and its counter current of invigorating, occasionally desperate polyculturalism. The only thing surprising about this sentiment is that it isn’t surprising at all.

Think about it, if I was to claim in all solemnity that a single inanimate object had a personality, say that my couch was ornery and opinionated, I might not be locked in a rubber room but I probably wouldn’t be invited to the best parties.  Yet if I claim that a collection of inanimate objects that just happen to house, transport, and entertain a group of people not only has a collective personality but that said personality affects the inhabitants in a kind of feedback loop, it’s not a bit odd. I suspect that is the primary reason that Our Lady Of Darkness is held in such regard. Unlike most horror fiction, we know subconsciously that Our Lady Of Darkness isn’t really fiction at all.

Leiber isn’t the only one to mine this territory. The story bears a certain fraternal resemblance to Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper Of Whipped Dogs.” And stories about London serving as some sort of Masonic/Gnostic engine that uses people as fuel are practically their own subgenre. But there’s a lot going on in Our Lady Of Darkness. For a book that doesn’t run two hundred pages even in its most generously spaced editions it’s strangely dense. Autobiographical, intertextual, and filled with anecdotes and subplots that are often only partially resolved (truth be told this last feature is a bit overused, for example there’s a suspicion touched on that a key supporting character may be a pedophile. The reaction of the main characters and by extension the book can pretty much be summed up as, “Oh well.”)

The story follows Franz Western, a horror author in his forties, living in San Francisco, recovering from the death of his wife from brain cancer and a particularly nasty bout of alcoholism (it should surprise you not at all that all of these things correlate to Lieber’s life). Franz has become mildly obsessed with an odd journal he has found that he is convinced belonged to Clark Ashton Smith,one of the dominate weird fiction writers of the pulp era. The journal was paired with an even odder book from the turn of the century, detailing the theory of Megapolisomancy, the theory that the great cities of the world are achieving a rudimentary kind of sentience, and manifesting strange parasitical creatures referred to as Paramentals. One day looking out his apartment window, Franz sees a strange figure in a nearby city park. On a lark he goes looking for it. When he reaches the park he finds the creature has vanished, only to turn around and see it staring at him from his own window. Things deteriorate rapidly from there.

Leiber has always been a master of paranoia, notably in Conjure Wife (one of those books that plods along for two thirds of its page count before abruptly shifting into high gear, finishing things off with a last act that to put it crudely is a mother fucker), where the vastness of the central conspiracy is only matched by the pettiness of its aims. And as an exercise in urban paranoia Our Lady Of Darkness is arguably superior even to Rosemary’s Baby, the gold standard of the subgenre. Indeed the two works are almost at cross purposes. The joke of Rosemary’s Baby is that a nice young would be cosmopolitan girl like Rosemary Woodhouse shouldn’t have to deal with nasty things like Satanic covens, in the sophisticated modern city. The Castevets and their withered clan have staged an ambush. They have used their environment as camouflage, but they are ultimately intruding predators in the sane world. There is no such intrusion in Our Lady Of Darkness. For the first, superior, half of the novel the threat does not come from any sort of invasion into the environment by malignant forces but from the environment itself. Franz is literally under attack by the stuff the city is made from. Shaped by a free floating malevolence that has latched onto a singularly unlucky fellow for its prey.  Even the more conventional second half of the book where the whys and wherefores are dug into the incredible amount of ill luck required to jump start the narrative never allows that sense of dread to dissipate. The events of Our Lady Of Darkness may have an ultimate cause but they are still happening to Franz for no greater reason than he happens to live in the city.

The first half of the book is the best, intercutting ever escalating bouts with the inexplicable with Leiber’s thoughts on life, writing and the strange inescapable toll that writing horror seems to take on people. Leiber seems to regard the act of putting pen to paper as scarcely less dangerous an idea than Megapolisomancy. Clark Ashton Smith is central but just about every genre author of note up until the time gets a mention and parts of the book read like an exceedingly grim roll call of authors who died in the first half of the twentieth century. On the whole it is one of the most oddly jaundiced books about writing that I can recall, its attitude less, “This will save you,” as it is “This will kill you.” If writing brought Lieber any satisfaction it seems to have brought him little comfort. Notably while he highlights music, mathematics, and science as order giving forces to the chaos of the universe and the supernatural, writing is regarded solely in terms of its destructive power and even ends up being one of its primary engines.

This is sadly were I relate that the events in the book do indeed have an explanation and a cause. At the midway point of the book Franz begins investigating just what’s happening and unfortunately finds answers in the form of a rare book dealer explicitly modeled after Vincent Price. The book dealer launches into a mammoth bout of exposition that ends up running nearly a quarter of the books length, detailing the dark dealings of the author of the book on Megapolisomancy and his cadre of influential famous followers WHO DIED UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES and other things you’ve read a billion times before.

The book never recovers. And while it would be unfair and untrue to say that there are no fine moments in its aftermath, it is no less frustrating to watch the novel trade its sense of dread and mystery for an explanation as unsatisfying and arbitrary as literally having its characters say, “A wizard did it.”

For all the flaws of its ending, it is still the first chilling half of the novel that ultimately lingers in the mind. It’s the work of a writer at the top of his craft, building a meticulous cage for the reader. A world where horror is inescapable, as much a part of us as the air we breathe. 

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Bryce Wilson is the author of Son Of Danse Macabre, a personal history of the last thirty years of horror fiction. It is available on the Kindle and Nook. He writes a weekly column for The San Luis Obispo New Times and is a contributer to Paracinema Magazine. You can find his personal blog at thingthatdontsuck.blogspot.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A few days later, after not seeing the sack:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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