The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 3: What a Body

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As a horror writer, Suzy McKee Charnas is probably most closely associated with vampires, which may go some way towards explaining my general lack of interest in her work. Not that I've read a whole hell of a lot of it, but some time ago I did make my way through her signature novel, The Vampire Tapestry. The one thing that appealed to me about that novel was its structure -- the novel is, as the title might imply, made up of interlocking short stories about a single vampire, a professor named Dr. Weyland. I also liked that the morality of the book could shift from story to story, so that the reader could never be comfortable with some easy, phony subversive idea that the vampire was the real good guy. What I didn't like about The Vampire Tapestry is that I simply didn't think it was very well written, or compelling in most of its specifics, or an especially interesting new take on vampires, this last being a near impossible thing for Charnas to have achieved (not that she would have cared, but I have a point of sorts to make here), because I really do not find the vampire species to be as endlessly and transformably fascinating as half of men and I guess all women do. I know, I know, they're darkly erotic. Well, did you know that some people have a thing for licking their lovers' eyeballs? Where's their epic trilogy?

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Fortunately, neither of the Charnas stories I read for today's post have anything whatsoever to do with vampires. The first is a very recent story called "Lowland Sea", which was selected by Ellen Datlow for the second volume of her The Best Horror of the Year series. This is a plague story (the plague in question is nicknamed the "Red Sweat" and it, you know, kills you if you get it) that succeeds in staking out a reasonably unique setting -- the Cannes Film Festival -- and then doing nothing with that setting. For all Charnas seems to care, or know, about films, "Lowland Sea" could have been set anywhere that rich folks gather to flaunt their wealth and pretend to care about global catastrophes. Though I myself am not terribly fond of the way politics gets filtered through the self-righteousness and easy philosophy of the entertainment business, Charnas's stand-in for Hollywood hypocrisy, a writer-director known only as Victor (whose knew film, Hearts of Light, casts him as the white-skinned savior of impoverished African children) is so fantastical in his self-regard that I can't fully believe he's a fair representation of the common reality, even in a more low-key form that Charnas has expanded on for the sake of satire. When his estate has to shut its doors to keep the encroaching Red Sweat out, Victor has his army of showbiz hangers-on put on a show, acting out their own versions of TV shows and so forth, because the entertainment industry can soldier through anything. Or so is the cynical point I think Charnas is making.

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Even worse, the real focus of "Lowland Sea" is an African refugee named Miriam who as the story begins has completed her journey from Victor's lover, one he rescued from an abusive family life in a war-torn country, to housekeeper he's become bored with, to periphery figure he barely remembers exists. This current existence leads to her ultimate fate, and the retribution she's able to squeeze out of it, and element of the story that is reasonably effective. But if Charnas's idea is to blow the whistle on Hollywood waste, indifference, and lip service, all of which are certainly worthy targets, it might have helped if Charnas didn't simply sense that such things existed in the world, but actually understood how they worked, and looked, and sounded. In the story, Miriam expresses a complete indifference to films (because she knew too much about the tricks, both of technology and personality, that allow them to be made), and it's more than clear that Charnas shares this indifference -- twice the inhabitants of Victor's estate are described playing movie trivia games. In one, they're supposed to name as many deaths, and the particulars of said deaths, as they could remember from the Final Destination franchise. In another game, the goal is to list "which actors have played which major roles in green body make-up'. Okay, so, the Final Destination game is stupid, but some less stupid version of a game kind of like that has probably been played by somebody at some point. But the green body make-up one? Is that what Charnas really believes hardcore movie fans talk about? Green body make-up, and who has worn it? If she's so far removed from the world she's writing about that she doesn't even know what the people in that world talk about, why pick it as a target?

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The second story for today is much more successful, though a certain distance from her subject matter, and an unwillingness to engage that subject as it actually exists, can be detected, although this time around the result is just reader amusement, rather than a near complete derailment of the story (to dispense with it quickly: the story was written in 1989, and in it a girl in her early teens recalls the lyric "shoefly pie and apple-pan dowdy"). "Boobs" is the title of this one, and it takes one of the classic metaphors of werewolf stories, or stories of supernatural transformation in general, and makes it explicit. The narrator of "Boobs" is a young girl named Kelsey, and due to her early development, at school she's received the nickname of the title. Kelsey is routinely bullied, by one boy in particular, and despite her stepmom's sincere and good-hearted attempts to help, Kelsey can find no rest. Until one day when she gets her first period and simultaneously transforms into a werewolf. Kelsey takes to this new existence, and decides to use her sense of confidence, and very real physical power, and desires, to her advantage.

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As a narrative, "Boobs" could not be more simple. What's interesting about it where it ultimately goes. I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say that Kelsey, while she is our protagonist, and one we genuinely root for, she possesses a rather inconsistent morality. It's one thing, in fiction, to seek violent retribution against a merciless bully, but it's another thing to not stop there. My source for this story was the Stephen Jones-edited anthology The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men, and in his introductory notes to "Boobs", Jones notes a slight hiccup in the story's publication history, which to do with its first printing being possible only because Charnas agreed to soften the ending. Later, she was able to publish her preferred version (the one Jones prints, though he wasn't the first), and Jones quotes her as saying to her stepdaughter, who also objected to her original ending:
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I reminded her of: a) the tendency in the young toward a very narrow morality ("What hurts me is unforgivably awful and what I do is okay"); b) the surprising failures of empathy in children that can lead to the most shockingly loathsome behavior committed in a very casual manner...

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No argument from me, although the danger of presenting such things on the page -- depending on whether or not you care how people react -- is that since some acts are easier to justify as moral in a work of fiction, immoral acts in the same story performed by the same character, can seem not so different, or can feel like the cost of doing business, especially after our hero(ine) was treated so badly to begin with. But to travel to far in that direction is to engage -- and I'm going to go ahead and mix my metaphors here, because it's late and I'm sleepy -- in some rather tiresome hand-wringing. Besides which, "Boobs" is a first person story, and Kelsey's way of seeing things is simply her way of seeing things. Any attempt to express what Charnas herself believed would have been dishonest, and it's to Charnas's credit that she simply let Kelsey speak.

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One other note: before reading "Boobs", I was reminded of its existence not by flipping through The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men, but rather a completely different lycanthropic anthology, this one edited by John Skipp, called Werewolves and Shapeshifters: Encounters with the Beast Within. "Boobs" is not included there, but in an introductory note to a story by Cody Longfellow called "Howl of the Sheep", John Skipp makes a passing and admiring reference to Charnas's story, and says that it was the inspiration for the film Ginger Snaps. Except that I've been able to uncover no credit for Charnas's story in the credits for Ginger Snaps. I don't necessarily blame Skipp -- he should have checked his facts, but it's a reasonable assumption to make, considering that the core idea of Ginger Snaps is, also, the core idea of "Boobs", except of course that Charnas's story came first. Ginger Snaps is a bit of a cult classic, having spawned at least two sequels. I wonder just how much tooth enamel Charnas has ground away in the years since its release.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 2: Decaying Vegetable Matter

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When you do an internet search for the name "Oliver Onions", you are more likely to gather information on the Italian folk music duo than on the English writer who actually had that name, and wrote dozens of books, and was best known for writing ghost stories. Why this should be, I don't know, although the Italian guys wrote a lot of soundtracks for Bud Spencer/Terence Hill movies, while most of the English guy's books have turned to dust. Of those books, the biggest exception, the great survivor, is a collection of short stories from 1911 called Widdershins (a word which means, according to Onions in his brief author's note, "contrary to the course of the Sun"). The story, or rather novella, that serves as Widdershins' launching point is called "The Beckoning Fair One", and if, as seems likely, Widdershins is the sole reason Onions is remembered today, "The Beckoning Fair One" is quite possibly the sole reason Widdershins is still in print.

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I say "quite possibly" because, first off, who among us can know such things, but also, and more to the point, because "The Beckoning Fair One" is thus far the only Oliver Onions story I've read (and that's pronounced "oh-nee-ons", by the way, not "un-yuns", which might be another reason his star has faded -- that's like having a last name spelled "Mouse" and insisting it be pronounced "moe-yoos". I'd refuse to reprint your books, too, Mr. Oh-nee-ons!!) But throughout my life as a reader of horror fiction, "The Beckoning Fair One" is one of those ubiquitous titles, along with "The Great God Pan" and "The Rats in the Walls" and The Turn of the Screw. If you hadn't read one of those stories, it was made abundantly clear that some day you damn well better, if you expected to have any authority in this field. "The Beckoning Fair One" is one of the tentpoles of horror literature, whereas the remaining stories found in Widdershins -- "Benlian", "The Accident", "Hic Jacet", for instance -- aren't, exactly. Which is no comment on their quality, because I'm in no position to make any such comment. But Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft and Henry James all had more than one story to live on. Onions doesn't, apparently, and I can't help but wonder if there's a reason for that.

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Because I didn't much care for "The Beckoning Fair One". I mean, it's fine. But it's also a bit exhausting. At 70-ish pages, the plot of "The Beckoning Fair One" requires almost no summarization, consisting, as it does of the travails of a novelist moving into a new flat, after which point he stops writing the novel he'd been working on, and slowly goes mad, or maybe he's being possessed by a ghost. Both of these things are equally likely! Who knows the real answer, and so on.

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The very idea of summarizing a story like "The Beckoning Fair One" defeats me, even though there are interesting elements here and there. I do like that our protagonist, Paul Oleron, is what we would now call a mid-list writer, who writes fiction very much as a profession, with one eye on artistic ambitions and the other on a living wage, and there was a time, after Oleron announces to his friend Elsie Bengough (whose love for Oleron is not only unreciprocated, but also unnoticed) that he plans on ditching the fifteen chapters of his novel, Romilly Bishop, he's already written so he can start from scratch, that I thought perhaps Onions was aiming to marry the themes plumbed so deeply in New Grub Street, George Gissing's 1891 novel of tragedy, ambition and pandering in England's literary world, with a classical ghost story, and I became quite interested (quite!). But Onions isn't doing that -- Oleron is a writer, I suspect, because so is Oliver Onions, and it just seemed like the thing to do. Plus, it simplifies things narratively, cutting out any co-workers that and otherwise employed Oleron -- who will become a recluse over the course of the story -- might have to deal with, and limiting his necessary social interaction to Elsie, and a nosy neighbor or two.

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Instead, the only thing that might count as interesting here is the -- sigh -- ambiguity regarding whether or not the ghost, who manifests itself as a female through action -- the house seems jealous of Elsie, Oleron hears the sound of a woman brushing her hair -- rather than appearance, is real. Because it might not be! When Oleron starts to go crazy, it may not be because a ghost is making that happen. He might actually be going crazy. And I'm just flat tired of this sort of thing. It can be handled brilliantly (see Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla"), but by and large it's something of a trick, even a cheat. The writer refuses to commit, so the reader, who may be biased, is able to choose the interpretation that best suits his or her taste. What's so wrong with that? you might ask. Well, it sticks in my craw more than a little when I hear that Edmund Wilson was fully on board with James's The Turn of the Screw, right up until somebody told him that James always intended the story to be taken as a straight-up ghost story, whereupon he grabbed his copy off the shelf and shit-canned it at once (I'm speaking figuratively here, at least as far as I know). It betrays a certain embarrassment about the very genre you're writing in, an embarrassment it is assumed the reader shares, and therefore a window is opened that will allow us all to scamper out the back, unnoticed by the Edmund Wilson's of the world.

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The other thing -- and I've mentioned this before -- is that stories like "The Beckoning Fair One" get praised, independent of their literary qualities, for the simple reason that they employ that most sought after creative device that we call "ambiguity". Ambiguity, I've come to learn, is an absolute good. Or so we're supposed to think. The sort of people who think that the absence of irony (which means there's an abundance of sincerity) is always a bad thing are the same people who think a fantastical premise presented with conviction and without ambiguity is a sign of artistic weakness. By this rationale, if you read a really good epistolary novel, no non-epistolary novel can possibly match up.

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Ambiguity's just a device, is what I'm saying, and when it's applied to a ghost story like "The Beckoning Fair One", it has the tendency, in my view, to render the whole thing meaningless. By the end of Onions's story, some rather unfortunate things have occurred, and these things are irreversible. Given that we don't know the answer and never will, what in the world does it matter whether there really was a ghost or not? More to the point, what good can "deciding for ourselves" do? And since this is a fiction anyway, which renders this next question the only one that matters, what does leaving the question hang add to the reader's enjoyment or appreciation or understanding of what's just been read? No new or extra or brighter light will be shone on the story's climax, whichever side of the ghost fence we find ourselves on. So what, finally, is the function of Onion's ambiguity? I submit that, whether writers like Onions and a host of others actually felt this particular motivation, the function is to allow those who would rather not think they've just read a horror story to convince themselves that they haven't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A few days later, after not seeing the sack:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

.

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

.

In the end, Harris lets it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 21: How Wrong Can You Be?

Without intending to, I seem to have chosen "science fiction/horror hybrid fiction" as my subject today. What happened was, I was struggling to choose a story, or two, to read for today when I happened to take from my shelves volume one of The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Scanning the contents for something that I wanted to read, by an author I haven't already covered, I noticed, for the first time since I was aware of his name, that the first story in the book, "Window", was written by Bob Leman. The second story is by Tom Reamy -- I don't think I'd ever noticed that, either -- and I know Leman's name for pretty much the same reason I know Reamy's, which is that Leman's one collection of stories, Feesters in the Lake and Other Stories, is often being tossed around as a must-read, though no one ever seems to want to go into too much detail about it. Unlike Reamy's two books, to buy Feesters in the Lake on-line I'd have to be willing to separate myself from more money than I'm prepared to at the moment, so I've been just sort of biding my time, waiting for something good to happen. But hey, look, there's one of his stories, right there. Why don't you read that one? Okay, I will.

According to Leman's Wikipedia entry (I promise this is the last time I'll fall back on that website), "Window" is his "best known" story, and was even nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Okay, though I've never heard of it, and also "best known" is subjective, but I'll go along with them for now. The Nebula is a science fiction award, and "Window" is, for most of its length, a science fiction story. It's about a secret military project whose function -- unbeknownst to much of the military, we discover -- is to find out if the notion of "magic spells" might actually have some scientific basis. The mad genius behind this project is a man named Culvergast who, as the story opens, has disappeared into thin air, along with the building he was in at the time. In place of the building is a window, of sorts.

The military base that houses this experiment is a scattering of small buildings built in the middle of a forest. Where the missing building was is now a house, in the Victorian style. There is a well-kept lawn surrounding this house, but only up to a point -- where the lawn stops and the forest floor begins is neatly divided by an invisible line. The main characters through whose eyes we view all this strangeness are Gilson, a government high-up whose exact function we're not told, though we know he's the new boss; Krantz, one of the head scientists; and Reeves, a young graduate student who is, or was, devoted to Culvergast's vision.

Reeves is also quite taken with the family who lives in the Victorian house, who come out periodically and live what would appear to by an idyllic life. The children are cute and affectionate, the parents strong and loving. There's even a dog. Everyone, but especially Reeves, is taken with the peace of the scene they seem to be witnessing -- a scene that must be from the past. The window, they've decided, is a glimpse into another time (it might also offer the beginnings of time travel technology) when things were easier, calmer, and generally more wonderful. Gilson himself is skeptical, but tempted:

[Gilson] was quite aware that the surge of longing and nostalgia he felt was nostalgia for something he had never actually experienced, that the way of life the house epitomized for him was in fact his own creation, built from patches of novels and films; nonetheless he found himself hungry for that life, yearning for that time. It was a gentle and secure time, he though, a time when the pace was unhurried and the air was clean...

And, wouldn't you know it, Reeves and Krantz have discovered that the window -- which seems at first to be an impenetrable one-way mirror, more than a window -- is, in fact, breachable. For five seconds, every fifteen hours.

This is a horror story, but I'm not just going to tell you the ending. You'll have to take my word for it. But when the story turns, it turns suddenly, and it's all rather bizarre. And boy howdy, Leman seems to be saying, don't get wrapped up in nostalgia, because whatever you're getting all moony over is just plain awful.

What's curious about Leman and his story is that "Window" was written in 1980, but the prose and dialogue feel like it's from the 50s. Which isn't to say it's corny, or bad, but plain and to the point, as so much genre fiction was back then. Frankly, I'm not complaining. It's even refreshing to read a story this straightforward, a throwback to a time that...whoa, there's that nostalgia again. I'm supposed to watch that. But it makes me wonder if the plainspoken nature of Leman's work might not have something to do with its relative unavailability. A lot of genre fans like to think they're above this sort of thing now, even while failing to recognize that something more superficially ambitious -- like maybe Bentley Little -- is actually more poorly written. Oh, I'm probably making baseless assumptions, but give me plainspoken Leman over the strained and "serious" prose of someone like Conrad Williams any day.

Which brings me to Brian W. Aldiss! I read a second story today, though I hadn't planned on it, but having never read anything by this particular science fiction legend before, and seeing a short little story called "Poor Little Warrior!" a few notches down on the table of contents, I figured what the hell. And I hated the story, frankly. I'm not writing off Aldiss on the basis of this throw-away piece, but the story -- about a man from the future travelling back to the Jurassic period to hunt a brontosaurus in order to blow off some steam generated by his crappy marriage -- contains prose such as this:

These beasts live up to two hundred years, says the time travel brochure, and this beast has obviously tried to live up to that, for its gaze is centuries old, full of decades upon decades of wallowing in its heavyweight thoughtlessness until it has grown wise on twitterpatedness. For you it is like looking into a disturbing misty pool; it gives you a psychic shock, you fire off both barrels at your own reflection. Bang-band, the dum-dums, big as paw-paws, go.

We're also treated to "Beowulfate", "orga(ni)sm", "that awful-jaw-full movement" and more. Aldiss was having a James Joyce moment, it seems, and I'm not very appreciative. The story's not really horror, either, except it does feature a Tales of the Crypt-ish ending.

Honestly, I might not have even mentioned this story, except that Aldiss did write a line that nicely, though inadvertently, sums up the state of modern horror fiction. Observe:

...here horror has reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter.

ZING!

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 20: Her Flesh was Like Putty and Tasted of Soap

If memory serves, the first time I ever came across the name Tom Reamy was in the "Further Reading" appendix to the wonderful, essential book Horror: 100 Best Books, put together by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman. The Reamy book in question that made that list (and the "Further Reading" list to Jones and Newman's follow-up -- and equally essential and wonderful -- Horror: Another 100 Best Books) is called San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories. As I've mentioned before, I'm attracted to books of horror fiction, or horror stories, that don't sound like horror, so that one stuck in my mind, though it would be many years before I actually got my hands on a copy.

The idea behind the Jones and Newman books is that one hundred writers are asked to pick, and write a brief essay on, their favorite horror book -- anthologies, single-author story collections, novels, etc. Although I don't doubt that Reamy's book isn't alone in having this distinction, I find it slightly curious that it makes both appendices, but wasn't picked for any of the now two hundred essays that make up both volumes. To me, this indicated that, even with all the obscure authors and books being brought back to the forefront in the essays, Reamy's book was still hanging out on the very fringe. Not forgotten, entirely, but getting there. This idea intrigued me further.

One of the reasons for this continued obscurity, if not the reason, is that, sadly, Tom Reamy died far too young, with only two books to his name. One is San Diego Lightfoot Sue, and the other is a novel, published after his death, called Blind Voices. According to his surprisingly lengthy Wikipedia entry, Reamy died, at age 42, of a heart attack, and was found slumped over his typewriter, seven pages into a new story. That last bit sounds apocryphal, like the story of Blind Lemon Jefferson being found frozen to death, clutching his guitar, but I hope it's true. "Hope" sounds like the wrong word, but you know what I mean.

In any case, I finally got myself a copy of San Diego Lightfoot Sue. It includes what then (1979) would have been a ubiquitous introduction by Harlan Ellison, which is both distressingly focused on Ellison, and astoundingly laudatory of Reamy and his work -- both typical features of Ellison's introductions to other people's books. Ellison focuses, and saves his highest praise, for every story in the book -- "Twilla", "San Diego Lightfoot Sue" and "Under the Hollywood Sign" especially -- other than "Beyond the Cleft", which is the one I chose to read. Ellison mentions it, pointing out that he, Ellison, kinda sorta gave Reamy the idea, and he says it's "terrifying", but that's more or less it. So I'm on my own.

"Beyond the Cleft" is an "evil child" story. There are all sorts of these, ranging from the child-as-cold-murderer of The Bad Seed to child-as-Satan of The Omen, to children-as-packs-of-ravening-cannibals. "Beyond the Cleft" belongs to this last category, and it begins, after the briefest of prologues, like this:

At 2:17 PM on Thursday afternoon, Danny Sizemore killed and ate the Reverend Mr. Jarvis in the basement of the Church of the Nazarene in the township of Morgan's Cleft, North Carolina.

Along with being, I think, a pretty effective "grabber", as they used to call them in the business, that sentence gives you a pretty good sense of Reamy's tone and style, at least in this story. Outside of the dialogue, of which there's not a hell of a lot, the story reads almost as non-fiction. It's entirely dispassionate, nearly clinical, and all the better for it. Deaths are sudden, and not lingered over. A major character's fate is thrown away, so that the fictional death effects us, in one very small way, as a real death -- in other words, as an actual stoppage of something. We are not following this person anymore, because this person no longer exists.

Everything happens at 2:17 PM on Thursday afternoon, or rather, everything begins at 2:17 PM on Thursday afternoon. Apart from the murder of Reverend Jarvis, at the nearby schoolhouse a mass of children attack and slaughter many of their teachers, and even their fellow students -- those that haven't also been infected anyway. Like pretty much all stories that involve people suddenly going wild and attempting to consume their brethren, there is some sort of transmittable disease involved, although the specifics of it -- even much that might be called "general" about it -- is left to our imagination. At nearly thirty pages, I'm tempted to think the absence of any sort of pay-off is a fault of "Beyond the Cleft", but any time I say such things to myself, I have to quickly ask, "Well, what kind of pay-off would satisfy beyond the often phony sense of closure that mars so much modern horror literature?" Since I almost never have an answer to that, I'm forced to slink off in embarrassment.

Like "Bindlestiff", yesterday's Depression-era werewolf story, "Beyond the Cleft" is a period piece, set sometime in the 1920s or 30s, in a part of North Carolina that Reamy goes out of his way to tell is deeply secluded:

After a brief consultation with the other families, Cleatus Morgan [founder of Morgan's Cleft] decided this rich and fertile valley, though practically insulated from the outside world, was a definite windfall. So they settled in and prospered by their own standards. Indian Creek, which ran pure and bright and teemed with fish, provided power for a gristmill; the valley and surrounding heights were thick with Virginia deer, wild turkeys, dove, and quail. Little was needed from the outside.

From a plot standpoint, this choice of place and time serves to make the lack of outside help, or contact of any kind, easier to swallow. With the small populations of places like Morgan's Cleft, it's also easier, and quicker, to get across the sudden decimation of an entire community. While we never see Morgan's Cleft at its peak, Reamy does still manage to drive home the idea that an entire town, once comfortable, is being rapidly and inexplicably destroyed.

There's something else, though, something more at work when you consider that Reamy set his story some forty years before he actually wrote it, and set it in a secluded environment. The last lines of the story -- which I hesitate, mostly out of habit, to reproduce here, but you'll be able to infer the content -- make it clear that whatever has caused this living horror to take place isn't done yet, and is, in fact stronger. So what does that mean, forty years, or seventy years, later? If no one outside of Morgan's Cleft knew this was happening at the time, and Morgan's Cleft no longer exists, and this...thing can be passed along from person to person, rather easily, than what damage has it done to the human race? What effects are we now experiencing, completely ignorant that there is anything unusual going on with our species? And wouldn't this, in fact, explain quite a lot?

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 19: I'd Rather Be Where People is Friendly

For the next couple of days, I'm going to be flying totally blind. I have Lord only knows how many books and anthologies by, or containing stories by, writers I know virtually nothing about, and I'm going to be picking a few of those, more or less at random, and see how things work out.

Today's writer is Peter Crowther, a writer who, I suspect, is not exactly unknown in the horror community -- a community I sometimes feel is gated, although I'm probably not trying that hard to gain admittance. Oh, hell, I'm not trying at all. But I have known Crowther's name, as an editor, for some time. In the 90s, he produced a series of horror anthologies, many of them dealing with the theme of superstition: Blue Motel, Tombs, Knock Wood and so on. It was only recently that I discovered he was a writer himself, when I found a collection of his stories called The Longest Single Note. The title struck me, because I'm often drawn to horror books, and films, whose titles don't sound like they belong to that genre (see also Let the Right One In). Given that, you'd think I would have read the title story, and that had been my intention, until I was glancing at the back cover, where I found this brief summary of one of the stories: ...a dust-bowl werewolf traveling the shantytowns of the Great Depression...

Well, I mean! What choice did I have? Strangely, The Longest Single Note doesn't have any sort of introduction or story notes (strange because these are typical features of collections of genre stories), but I was able to locate, and read, the werewolf story in question, which is called "Bindlestiff". It's not often -- certainly not this month -- that I read a horror story and think it should be longer. Better, yes, but not necessarily longer. "Bindlestiff" is, in that sense at least, unique, because I think it should have been a good thirty pages longer. That's not because it was so incredible that I never wanted it to end, either. There are two basic problems with "Bindlestiff": it didn't need to be set during the Great Depression, and it's only 18 pages long. And expansion of the story would no doubt have solved the first problem.

The central character, the werewolf, is a man named Walker Lange. Bitten by a werewolf in Manhattan, he now travels -- out of necessity, I sensed -- through the Hoovervilles located out west. His transformation from man to wolf appears to take a couple of days, as opposed to the few minutes those familiar with werewolf stories are used to. These means that Lange's hunger begins before the full moon, but his body and face change shape gradually, and he can't feed until the transformation is complete. He's at one of these awkward early stages as he wanders through a Hooverville, looking for a quiet place to complete his change:

A little farther on, a group of men were cooking a jack-rabbit on a makeshift spit. "Hoover Hogs" the hobos called them, welcome dinner "guests" since the collapse of livestock prices. One of them was talking, his eyes lost in the flickering embers of the fire. "Farmed shares in El Reno," he was saying as Lange shuffled by. "Dusted, busted, but never rusted," he finished off, the statement bearing all the hallmarks of careful rehearsal. The man chuckled to himself as he said it, looking up at the others for nods of approval. There were none. There was only the gentle heat of the morning. The man looked back at the fire and continued. "Drove west in '34. Picked peppers and butter beans at Oxnard, California." He shook his head. "Came home in '35. I'd rather be where people is friendly."

This is a good passage, possibly the best in the whole story, and one of the very few that concentrates on the specifics of the Great Depression. Elsewhere, poverty is described in terms that could apply today, if relocated to certain other parts of the country. Crowther sets "Bindlestiff" in so specific a time and place, and yet spends so much of his 18 pages describing Lange's transformation and desire for food. I think there is such great potential in Crowther's idea -- a guilt-ridden monster preying on the most vulnerable in a richly drawn historical setting -- but the details are too often standard werewolf story boilerplate. Lange must feed, yet he feels guilt over the murders he's committed. Certainly, something like this is to be expected, but why suck up so much of your time -- and my time -- when you have something truly unique, shoved into the background? And, at 18 pages, much of Lange's psychological torment must be taken as a given, because we know nothing about him. Obviously, this is one of the perils of short fiction, but a great short story strikes just the right balance. Here, the scales are all out of whack.

Crowther dedicates The Longest Single Note with this appreciation:

Affectionately dedicated to all practitioners of the short story form...and to all those readers who support them. Small is beautiful -- spread the word!

Amen, but short doesn't have to mean too short. Crowther has written novellas -- or so the "about the author" page tells me -- and I'm flummoxed by the fact that he apparently didn't consider going that route with "Bindlestiff". As I said before, even another thirty or forty pages could have fleshed this out wonderfully. What we're left with is no more than a sketch of something greater. I don't get it.

I don't want to -- and can't, really -- come down too hard on Crowther, because "Bindlestiff" is just one story, and any short story collection, unless it was written by Tobias Wolff, is going to be uneven. They can't all be winners, and all that. But man, was this one frustrating.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 18: Gonads Small and Large!

The first novel I read by Bentley Little was called The Revelation. Had I been given the book in manuscript form, free from the knowledge that it had been published, and told that it was written by a teenage boy with a thing for gore films, I would have thought, "Yeah, that sounds about right." And, being naturally generous of spirit, I would have also given the plucky teen credit for seeing his book through to the end.

But The Revelation was not written by a teenager. It was published in 1990, when Little was thirty years old, and it won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. Maybe now you can understand my occasional frustration with this genre. You might also conclude that I have no one to blame but myself when I tell you that I continued to read Little after that experience. I think the next thing I read was a short story called "The Washingtonians", which centers around the revelation that George Washington was a child murderer and cannibal. That's sacrilege, I agree, but it's so bonkers a premise that had Little pulled it off, I would have had no choice but to tip my cap to him. Unfortunately, Little chose the least interesting approach to the material, by telling his story from the point of view of a contemporary man making the historic discovery, and then being set upon by rabid Washington cults, bent on keeping the truth hidden. Yawn. Tell that story from the point of view of George Washington himself, and maybe then you'd have something. Instead, Little cut his own idea off at the knees.

Then I went and I read another Little novel, this one called Dispatch. It's a horror novel based around letter writing (his second, it would seem, involving the postal service, as he wrote another novel called The Mailman, which I haven't read), and it, too, is pretty nuts. I also thought that one was largely successful, until an utterly ridiculous and bone-headed ending. But hey, I'd never read that novel before, at least. Credit where it's due, and everything. Little, it would seem, will write about whatever crazy thing enters his head, and I think this, more than anything else, accounts for his wide popularity in the horror community. You may not have heard of him yourself, but in certain quarters he's considered one of the big guns. Stephen King, for example, is extremely high on him, but that might just be because Little sometimes has his characters say things like "Eat my dick with brussels sprouts!", which is very much like something the Stephen King I don't like would write.

Most of Little's output has been novels -- and he's very prolific, with nineteen novels in as many years -- but he does have one collection of short fiction called, simply, The Collection (a title that is in keeping with most of his novel titles, like The Store, The Academy, The Policy, and so forth), and it is from whence I drew for today's readings. Ahem.

The first story is called "The Man in the Passenger Seat", and it's about a guy named Brian who, on his way to work one morning, pulls up to an ATM in order to make a quick deposit to cover some outstanding checks, but before he has a chance to do that, he sees a very fat man approach his car, open the door, and climb into the passenger seat. Brian tells him to get out, but the man only berates him with the aforementioned brussels sprouts zinger and tells him to drive. Even though the man appears to have no weapon, Brian does what he's told.

"The Man in the Passenger Seat" tries to be a kind of Patty Hearst/ambiguously anti-corporate America satire, but it doesn't have any kind of narrative drive, or electricity to the prose, to achieve much of anything. Brian waffles between being terrified of the man, and wanting to escape, to wondering what, really, there is for him to escape to. Here's some of that ambiguity in action:

The would have to stop for gas soon -- at the next town, if they weren't pulled over first -- and he knew that he would be able to escape at that time. He would be able to either run away or kick the shit out of the obese bastard.

But though he wanted desperately to kick the crap out of the crazy fucker, he wasn't sure he really wanted to escape.

I wonder if Little considered, and then rejected, variations like "He really wanted to kick the poop out of the fat crazy person" and "He sure wanted to kick the stool out of that portly loony toon" before picking the two versions you see above. Also, Brian wants to escape...or does he??

No, he, he doesn't. In the end, although the tubby person with a severe mental disorder does some pretty creepy things in the course of their time together, Brian decides that he's never felt more alive, however wrong or dangerous his newly chosen path might be. Because, you see, he believes that his co-workers have probably not even noticed that he's gone missing:

They'd be temporarily inconvenienced by his absence, would curse him for not being there to perform his regular duties, but they would not miss him.

They would not care enough to call and see if he was all right.

Yeah, because apparently you're a sociopathic loner! They're probably relieved you didn't show up with a gun!

The next story is called "The Show", and it's about a teenager whose parents are always fighting and drinking, and he just can't take it anymore, so when his friend invites him to come with him to this weird club where you can pay to witness a live murder, he says okay. Later on, though, he feels bad about it, and then something else bad happens.

That's your story, folks, and I wish I was kidding. Now, I'll admit, viewed as an outline, something good could easily come from that idea, but Little is content to simply go through the motions. I'm not quite sure what his first mistake is, but I think it might be the revelation that both our narrator and his friend witnessed a grotesque traffic accident when they were young, and each has been drawn towards violence ever since. As psychological insight, this is so rinky-dink that the story would have been better off without it -- at least then there would have been a hint of mystery. Little's biggest mistake, however, can be found in his attempts to depict the narrator's feelings about having paid to witness a murder. Here's what we get:

I felt filthy, unclean, covered with blood although none of the flying blood had touched me.

Merely seeing [Jimmy] again made me feel unclean...and my stomach started churning.

I could not imagine anyone wanting to sit through that butchery more than once.

I wondered how he slept at night. I wondered if he had nightmares.

Outside of a brief description of a nightmare the narrator has, that's literally it. That's the kind of creative power Bentley Little is willing to bring to the table here. It's as though he simply wrote down what he wanted to describe, rather than actually describing it. And that's his prose style, as best I've been able to tell.

Each story in The Collection is preceded by a brief introductory note from Little. Neither of the notes for the stories discussed here are worth mentioning, but there's another story in the book called "Blood", and here's what Little has to say about it:

Before I moved in with my wife, I lived on macaroni and cheese. I spent so much time standing in front of my stove, stirring pots of boiling macaroni, that I used to stare down into the swirling, roiling water and imagine that I could see shapes in the foam the way some people see shapes in clouds.

I decided to write a story about it.

How could you possibly resist the urge to keep reading after that? I didn't read the story he's selling so aggressively here -- and clearly I should have -- but I think that little introduction highlights a couple of things that somebody (an editor, maybe?) should try to impress upon Bentley Little. One is that not everything is a story idea, and the other, more importantly, is that a story idea does not count as a story. And stretching out a description of that idea to ten pages is not writing. You'd think someone would have thought to mention this to him at some point over the last nineteen years, but I guess not.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 16: I Can Bear It

Well, here he is. The elephant in the room. Talking around Stephen King for the last half month (or month and a half, if you count last year) seems not only a little snooty -- I want to talk about real horror, not that commercial trash! -- but also completely dishonest, because as a kid, my gateway into horror fiction, as well as a whole lot of other kinds of fiction, was Stephen King. I don't remember what urged me to finally want to read his books -- it was probably a movie adaptation -- but I know that I was around ten years old. It's very possible that the first King novel I read was Cujo, because even in those days it was one of the shortest books he'd written (he could be verbose even then, but that aspect of his fiction hadn't yet gone wildly out of control). Cujo is a mighty strange book for a ten year-old to be reading. As I remember it, not a hell of a lot happens of a particularly horrific nature for about the first half, and there's a great deal of stuff about failing marriages, and children's breakfast cereals that cause kids to throw up red and terrify their parents. There is also a sexual reference in the book that, while not graphic, describes a particular act that I've long since learned is common, but which my pre-pubescent self had never even considered, and it freaked me out. But that's neither here nor there.
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I would move on through all the early books, becoming very excited every time a new novel was set to drop -- I honed in on the typically big, bright red STEPHEN KING on the front cover of the Viking hardcovers when I entered the bookstore (or Price Club, as the case may be) -- and until some time in college I would say there were very, very few of his books that I hadn't read (The Tommyknockers was, and remains, one of the major exceptions). Despite this, looking back now it's a little difficult to pinpoint what, exactly, I found so overwhelmingly appealing about King. Well, the books were almost guaranteed to be violent, and that didn't hurt at all. I think the promise of graphic violence is typically what draws young folks, mostly boys, to the horror genre, especially in the 80s, when I was growing up. But obviously that wasn't all -- King hit big with audiences other than teenage boys.
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What it is exactly that King has is something that has been much discussed over the years, and the reason anybody cares to ask such a question is that, in the modern world, no other writer has had such enormous commercial success for so many years (what I think he has or doesn't have might as well be saved until I eventually get around to talking about the stories I read for tonight). We're at thirty-five years and counting, and a new King book still has the potential to be a major event. His upcoming novel, Under the Dome, is being hyped so breathlessly that the cover has been publicly unveiled in pieces. Because to reveal the entire book jacket at once would simply be too much: brains would fry in their skulls, the seas would dry up, the land would lie fallow. Now that, bit by bit, the whole cover has been exposed, everybody just has a boner, I guess.
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But all that's not King's fault. Or probably not, anyway. The essential, positive fact about King is that he writes because he loves it, and because he can't not. And when he says that, I believe him, which I don't necessarily believe about other writers who've enjoyed something akin to his level of commercial success, because I've read King, and I've read them (a little of them, anyway), and brother, the differences are really striking. The guy can, or could, tell a hell of a story -- Stanley Kubrick said that one of the reasons he chose to adapt The Shining was because the novel was so meticulously worked out -- and he's also the one bestselling author I can think of who is willing, and even very much wants, to experiment. Not in a Joycean sense, of course, but you open up one of his early collections of stories -- I'm thinking here of Night Shift or Skeleton Crew -- and you'll find a pretty wide variety of styles and stories. You'll see traditional horror like "Gramma" and "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands"; quiet stories of grief like "The Woman in the Room"; surrealist nightmares like the giddily bizarre "Lawnmower Man", or the reasonably inexplicable pair of "Milkman" stories; and pure pulp gore like "The Mangler" and "Survivor Type". In his longer work, you'll find science fiction (The Running Man), fantasy (Eyes of the Dragon, the Dark Tower series) and non-genre fiction (the novellas in Different Seasons), as well as the horror and suspense novels he's best known for. You'll also find Gerald's Game, a book that is, essentially, about a woman handcuffed to a bed for 300 pages. And The Regulators and Desperation, two novels released on the same day that feature the same cast of characters in entirely different stories. And by the way -- and quite possibly I shouldn't even be mentioning this, in case my antennae are all out of whack -- I believe that, in the later Dark Tower books, King does something that, right now, as we speak, J. M. Coetzee is being called audacious for doing in his new book Summertime.

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So all that, in my view, is pretty damn impressive. But of course there's a problem. For instance, I have no idea how ultimately successful the Desperation/The Regulators gambit was, because I couldn't get through the wildly turgid Desperation and therefore never bothered with The Regulators. The last two I actually finished, Cell and The Colorado Kid, were, frankly, disasters. Neither one was any less tedious than Desperation for being considerably shorter -- the only difference is that at the point, by which I mean the page number, in Desperation where I eventually crapped out, Cell and The Colorado Kid were already over. And he seems to have an incredibly stubborn cluster of stock characters, as well as prejudices, that he is either unwilling or unable to put to pasture: the good old boy who hates authority; the manic Christian hypocrite; the Orwellian US military figure; the young, but not-too-young, woman who struggles against this Man's world; the magic black person; the cute kid who is brave as shit, and so on. Not to mention his exhausting and aggravating tendency to have his characters say things like "fiddley-fuck", and then have the balls to expect us to laugh.

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But while his novels seem to have entirely skipped into orbit, his short stories actually have remained fairly strong. I know, because I occasionally read them -- Everything's Eventual, from 2002, contains at least a good handful of excellent stories (The O. Henry Prize-winning "The Man in the Black Suit", "Lunch in the Gotham Cafe", etc.). Which, at long last, brings us to tonight's reading.

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I chose two stories, one from his 1993 collection, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and another from Just After Sunset, which came out last year. This proved to be a fortuitous pairing, because the earlier story, "Home Delivery" is fairly typical of the kind of fiction King is broadly known for, while the later story, "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates", is more in line with what might be referred to as his more contemplative phase, which is a phase he's been in and out of for a good couple of decades now (it produced Gerald's Game, for instance, which, for the record, I liked), though lately it appears to be a style he's become more comfortable with, and, with Lisey's Story, he's actually getting some recognition for.

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"Home Delivery" is a zombie story. Pretty much all zombie stories are zombie apocalypse stories, but what makes "Home Delivery" unique is that it focuses on the experiences of a Northern rural lobstermen community located on two small islands off the coast of Maine. Most of you are probably aware that the vast majority of King's work takes place, in whole or in part, in Maine, but what's interesting here as that the two islands -- one called Little Tall, the other called Gennesault Island, or Jenny, for short -- are more or less completely isolated. In other words, they're protected from the apocalypse. They each deal with their own little part of it, but it's actually fairly manageable. Gennesault Island, as a matter of fact, contains only one small graveyard, and since many of the men buried there were lost at sea, not a few of the buried caskets are empty.

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Told through the eyes of Maddie Pace, pregnant widow of a recently deceased lobsterman named Jack, "Home Delivery" is an unusual and occasionally infuriating story. Growing up in an environment so old-fashioned and insular ("[O]n Jenny and Little Tall," King says, "you had your choice when it came to religion: you could be a Methodist, or if that didn't suit you, you could be a lapsed Methodist") as to be considered backwards, Maddie is a woman who has needed to have a man in her life to keep her not only grounded, but even capable. When her father died (while bowling, mid-roll, in typically too-colorful King fashion), both Maddie and her mother were completely at sea. It wasn't until Maddie met Jack that she was able to exist with some direction again. However, after Jack dies, and after the zombie apocalypse is in full swing, she finds herself able to cope, finally, on her own. Even though the men of the town take it upon themselves, excluding the women, to deal with the zombies, Maddie discovers that she can handle herself just fine. At the same time, she loves the men of the town for their bravery and sacrifice, and overall "Home Delivery" shows King celebrating small-town ways, with the occasional wry knock towards the downside.

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As usual when King is in this mode, his prose takes on the local color. Sometimes, this is effective, as in this passage describing the rising of the first reanimated corpse in Gennesault Island's small cemetery:

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Dave told Maddie that he heard a sound like the wind wailing in the chimney on a gusty night, and then the gravestone marking the final resting place of Mr. and Mrs. Fournier's boy Michael, who had died of leukemia at seventeen (bad go, that had been...)

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Elsewhere, however, King's love of broad stereotypes and colloquialisms practically kill the story. There's a lengthy section of "Home Delivery" describing the zombie apocalypse as it applies to the rest of the world, and here he describes one of the final US news reports, delivered by a young man who had been "pressed into service as a CNN reporter":

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"I want to repeat this," the accidental reporter had said..."I want to repeat that a bunch of corpses have just lunched up on the President and his wife and whole lot of other political hotshots who were in the White House to eat poached salmon and cherries jubilee."

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I would say that this is in keeping with the only half-serious tone of the story, if King hadn't been doing this sort of thing for the entirety of his career. And in fact, King's mocking (some would say "satirical") approach to the world outside of Little Tall and Jenny has the residual effect of making his beloved rural lobstermen, including Maddie, look cold-hearted. Their islands are more or less safe, so damn the rest of humanity. Still, this is generally a sharp, well-paced and engaging story, with a truly new spin on a horror subgenre that, as I read it in 2009, would otherwise seem to be entirely played out. Judging from King, though, maybe not.

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The next story, "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates" (a title which will make no sense to anyone only reading this summary, but which completely works in context) is quite a bit different. Collected in Just After Sunset, it also appears in the 2009 edition of Stephen Jones's anthology series Best New Horror, and in his introduction to the story, Jones says:

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After twenty years I am delighted to finally welcome the world's most successful, popular and influential horror writer to these pages.

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You gotta love that "finally". Does Jones think that, in his tenure as editor of Best New Horror that King has been churning out two decades worth of dreck? For one thing, in the short fiction form, King has, as I've said, done some very good work, and some of it is much better than the story that finally forced Jones to cave and include him. All of this is a bit of a digression, except that I truly am a bit perplexed over why this is the story that broke the dam. It's a pretty good story, but it's not actually horror, but more of a melancholy, spiritual fantasy, dealing, once again, with a widow, named Anne, learning to deal with the loss of her husband.

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In this case, she doesn't have to do it in the context of a zombie apocalypse, but rather as any other human being would: through simple grieving. Except, of course, while breaking away from the funeral planning to take a shower, Anne gets a phone call, and it's from her deceased husband, James. James died in a plane crash, and he seems to be calling from Heaven's waiting room ("'Well, I tell you what', he says. 'I don't know exactly where I am.'"). James doesn't seem too terribly upset about his own death -- a feature of the afterlife that I hope would be common -- and he speaks to Anne in a calming, off-hand fashion that has the effect of making her, at the same time, relatively at ease, and somewhat manic. But when and if the reader is able to buy into the reality of the conversation, King is able to achieve a kind of simple poignancy through little details that, at his best, has always been one of his main strengths:
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"Jimmy, did you know?" This idea has been the hardest and most terrible part for her -- that he might have known, if only for an endless minute or two. Others might picture burned bodies or dismembered heads with grinning teeth; even light-fingered first responders filching wedding rings and diamond ear-clips, but what has robbed Annie Driscoll's sleep is the image of Jimmy looking out his window as the streets and cars and the brown apartment buildings of Brooklyn swell closer. The useless masks flopping down like the corpses of small yellow animals. The overhead bins popping open, carry-ons starting to fly, someone's Norelco razor rolling up the tilted aisle.

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"Did you know you were going down?"

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"Not really," he says. "Everything seemed all right until the very end -- maybe the last thirty seconds. Although it's hard to keep track in situations like that, I always think."

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Situations like that. And even more telling: I always think. As if he has been aboard half a dozen crashing 767s instead of just the one.

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I love this passage -- particularly that "instead of just the one" -- because King somehow manages to recognize the common quirks of human speech in a conversation that no one on the planet has ever had before. At his most reined in, King has this kind of gift. Unfortunately, in this story, he also adds a subplot about James enigmatically warning Anne of future disasters that she needs to avoid. These disasters aren't of the global, mass-death variety, but more intimate tragedies -- even so, it's a completely unnecessary element that seems to be there just to convince Anne that she really had the conversation. But since I was already convinced of it, for the purposes of the story, James's prognostications were a tired distraction from an otherwise simple and moving story.

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Oh well, I guess. It only proves something I already knew, which is that Stephen King is a legitimately talented writer who sometimes -- often, even -- can't get out of his own way. But he's also, at his very core, a born storyteller, and for that reason alone I can never really dismiss him. Well, obviously, since I keep buying his books, with every intention of reading them. It's just that lately, I don't. Except for the short stories. Which is interesting.