The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 23: Their Meaning Is Lost

Every year when I get the new edition of editor Stephen Jones's The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (now in its twenty-third year), I first browse Jones's novella-length year-in-horror introductions, to find out if I missed anything interesting, and then I depress myself by skimming the "Necrology" appendix that Jones puts together in collaboration with Kim Newman. This is a sort of in memoriam for everybody who had even a glancing relationship to genre, any genre, who'd passed away in the previous year. This one always contains a surprise or two. This time around, it was Martin H. Greenberg, a genre anthology editor who was, in his day, as ubiquitous as Jones is now. I hadn't seen Greenberg's name on a book in a while, but he'd put together many of the collections I hauled around with me in my younger days, and I didn't know he had died. RIP, Mr. Greenberg.

Anyhow. These best-of anthologies are always good for at least a quick post, so I was happy to see it in my local Barnes & Noble earlier today (a few days early? The publication date on Amazon is the 23rd...). I quickly scanned the contents, and very soon settled on two stories: "The Tower" by Mark Samuels, and "An Indelible Stain Upon the Sky" by Simon Strantzas. I was unfamiliar with Strantzas, but I'd been looking for even a thin excuse to return to Samuels all year (there were several thin excuses that offered themselves to me, but I landed on this one).

"The Tower" is not exactly your standard-issue horror story. It's barely a story at all. In the introductory notes, Samuels says of it:

Actually, this is more of an autobiographical piece than a work of fiction. In psychological and spiritual terms, every word of it is the truth.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that in terms of what happens in the story, which as I've indicated isn't much, is based on a particular event in Samuels' life. But evidently, Samuels has recently had cause to take some issue with the way the Western world conducts itself, and he has his narrator, a jobless, broke, isolated man, express these opinions:

...I encountered only those with television eyes whose own imaginative vision had dimmed, those whose values were formed by the irresistible tsunami of gossip and infotainment. Those whose gazes were fixed on bright plasma and LED screens, those addicted to shows where the value of a person was determined by his ability to entertain, to financially enrich or to sexually arouse, an agenda driven in turn by those who were drained of their own thought-processes by the media's mental vampires.

The people in question, those who he is encountering, are being sought out so that the narrator may slyly try to detect if anyone else is seeing, in the midst of these new modern buildings that obliterate the city's ancient spirit (London, I'm guessing) -- and this is the thing that initially sets him off -- the giant tower that suddenly appears whenever a mist creeps in. From the tower, he can hear bells toll, and later chanting, but whenever he tries to approach it he finds that the tower is stuck in a "fixed distance," so that he can walk forever and never get any closer.

"The Tower" is really a work of philosophy, but its a philosophy that's at war with itself. There's a lot of nonsense about the narrator seeking the purest form of asceticism -- my words, not his, and I imagine it's a pretty gross simplification of what Samuels is saying -- that would shed not only what one normally sheds at times like this, but the other, earlier, phonier types of asceticism that hadn't really managed to get to the heart of the matter. And I say "nonsense," but I'm by no means certain that Samuels doesn't realize it's nonsense. I'm also not altogether sure I disagree with the nonsense, at least not all of it. I mean, if I have a problem with the passage quoted above, it's not that I think it's bullshit, but rather that it comes awfully close to being a lecture. It is, in fact, not entirely unlike Fight Club in its root beliefs, though if Samuels is preaching anything, he's preaching, and then having second thoughts about, something quite different than what is being preached, and then thought twice about, in that film, even before they blow up buildings.

This is a hard story to summarize; it's more of a story you argue with. Or, as I'm sure Samuels would see it, it's a story he had to spit out (it does seem more than a little angry), and he probably couldn't care less, or wish to argue, or even especially disagree, with any protests. It's the argument with itself that makes "The Tower" interesting -- and the quiet horror imagery that hangs over the debate -- and Samuels insistent plea that he knows this is hopelessly self-absorbed, he's trying to deal with that as well, just please let him finish. But honestly, though, the most fascinating part of the story is the narrator's opinions about pessimism as a philosophy, one he initially found comfort in before finally deciding it was a hoax, because a true pessimist would commit suicide without hesitation, but those who embrace pessimism as an actual philosophy, he says, never do that, and they excuse themselves for that "authentic act" because they don't wish to cause pain to those they would leave behind. To the narrator, this completely contradicts the entire point of pessimism, but to me what's so interesting here is that is exactly -- the "I would commit suicide in a second if not for" bit -- what Thomas Ligotti has said when asked about the seemingly logical next step from his antinatal worldview. I hesitate to say Samuels is challenging Ligotti specifically, but I do feel like these are two writers whose work bear certain similarities, who perhaps even have similar temperaments, but are fundamentally opposed in a great many irreconcilable ways.

Meanwhile, "An Indelible Stain Upon the Sky" by Simon Strantzas is garbage. I chose it because in his introductory notes, Strantzas says he was inspired to write it by a "horrendous" vacation experience he shared with his wife. While vacation-turned-nightmare is probably one of the most overused plots in all of horror, there are many versions of it that are genuinely great; the Colin Eggleston film Long Weekend, for instance, is marvelous, and even lowering the bar a little there have been dozens of thoroughly entertaining takes on it as well. So I'm a fan of this kind of thing. However, "entertaining" was clearly not on Strantzas agenda, nor, even more clearly, was "marvelous." The story is about a man returning to Port McCarthy, a vacation spot he and his girlfriend Suzanne had enjoyed ten years previously. In the time since, just weeks after they'd returned, in fact, Port McCarthy had suffered a horrifying disaster when an oil tanker had run ashore, spilling its contents and essentially ruining the community. The man, our narrator, is returning to Port McCarthy, and staying at the same inn he and Suzanne had enjoyed a decade past, so that he can be sad about it.

This is one of the most self-involved stories I've read in some time. If Samuels drifted into that realm in "The Tower," he knew it and he said so. Strantzas' whole story basically comes down to this: "Ten years ago an oil tanker crashed and destroyed the natural beauty of Port McCarthy and killed lots of animals. Economically the community was finished and will probably never recover. Also it made me break up with my girlfriend. Here's a ghost."

But let me quote Strantzas directly:

The town of Port McCarthy died slowly, choked in the darkness that rolled towards it without warning on waves as black as night. While the rest of the world saw this from a distance, Suzanne and I suffered the full brunt of the accident there, we suffered the crashing waves of darkness that would not stop, would not end, until it spread through our lives as surely as it had through Port McCarthy. Even now I feel it, and even now I wish I had known some way to halt its progress before it was too late. But that's the way with accidents; they come when we are not prepared, and in their wake they leave devastation and death. As soon as that black oil was spilled in Port McCarthy, there was no hope for me, for Suzanne, for us.

"That's really too bad," said the fisherman who lost his business. "I'm sure you'll find someone else. Also, fuck you." By the way, that "for me, for Suzanne, for us" business is exactly the kind of thing bad writers think counts as "literary" prose. Say two things, then a third thing that combines the two things. Give me my award, please.

Oh, and yeah, there's a ghost. When the guy goes back to the inn, it's once vibrant seaside atmosphere has paled into moldy desolation ("Your shattered lives reminds me of my ex-girlfriend. Sarah? Susan? I'm trying to think..."), and in his room there's a giant crack running up one wall. From that crack, at night, seeps a little kid oil ghost. A little ghost kid made out of oil. I don't know. I'm trying to figure out what it means, because there's nothing in the story about human lives actually being lost in the oil spill disaster. The only thing I can figure is maybe oil ghost kid is the ghost of the kid Sondra (Stephanie?) and this prick never got to whip up together. Personally, if there's an upside to all this, I'd say you're looking at it.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 28: Tell Me Tales of Inconceivable Fear and Unimaginable Love

Clark Ashton Smith began his literary career as a poet, and despite devoting much of his writing life to horror and fantasy fiction, it would have to be said that he remained so by inclination. His mentor was a man named George Sterling, who, when Smith first turned his attention to fantastic stories, applauded his efforts, but said:
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I don't advise you to devote much time to such things...the mind of man begins to smile at anything that is inherently absurd and outdated. Your faculties are far too fine to be wasted on such vacua...
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...You have squeezed every drop from the weird (and what drop!) and should touch on it only infrequently, as I on the stars. The swine don't want pearls: they want corn; and it is foolish to hope to change their tastes.
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Horror fans! We never get an ounce of credit! But, okay, I can't blame him.
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For the above chunk of background, I borrowed liberally from the story notes written by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, editors of the new five-volume edition of Clark Ashton Smith's collected stories. These are truly lovely volumes put out by Night Shade Books, and have provided me with my first taste of the fiction of Smith, about whom Gene Wolfe has said:
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Let us pause briefly to notice that although Lovecraft has had many imitators (he is in fact quite easy to imitate) and [Robert E.] Howard more than a few, no one imitates Smith. There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him.
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So it would seem. Having now read some of Smith's work, even if only the tiniest fraction, it seems very easy to not only trace certain influences, but also more or less coincidental similarities to contemporaries like Lovecraft, Smith's fiction is very much on its own, and the primary reason would be his style. I'll admit right off the bat that I already feel like I'm talking out of my ass, given how little I've read -- the truth is I would have read more, but time was unusually restricted today (I particularly regret not being able to fit in the stories "The Abominations of Yondo" and -- especially, because the title is so striking -- "A Murder in the Fourth Dimension"). Even so, I was immediately struck by Smith's writing, and instantly grateful to Connors, Hilger and Night Shade for refusing to let Smith sink, forgotten, into history, as so many other genre writers, good and bad, already have.
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All the fiction I read today comes from The End of the Story, volume one of this collection, and the main story I read is, indeed, called "The End of the Story" -- a rather curious and interesting title, it now occurs to me -- which, as a piece of plot-work, is very conventional. The reader is told right away that...
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The following narrative was found among the papers of Christophe Morand, a young law-student of Tours, after his unaccountable disappearance during a visit at his father's home near Moulins, in November, 1789...
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Morand's tale concerns his attempted journey home to visit his father. He is waylaid by a storm, and forced to seek shelter at a nearby monastery in the (fictional) region of Averoigne. There he meets a highly gregarious monk named Hilaire, who instantly befriends Morand, offers him food, a bed, and access to the monastery's vast library, which includes "the finest works of heathendom and Christendom, even...certain unique writings that survived the holocaust of Alexandria."
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Not only that, but Hilaire offers Morand -- a young scholar and lawyer -- the opportunity to read "an unknown dialogue of Plato", "two lost tales of Miletus", and so on. There is also a strange little six-page manuscript that immediately sparks Morand's interest, but about which Hilaire says:
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"There is a curse on the pages that you hold in you hand...Christophe, there are things beyond your understanding, things that it were not for you to know. The might of Satan is manifestable in devious modes, in diverse manners; there are other temptations than those of the world and the flesh, there are evils no less subtle than irresistible, there are hidden heresies, and necromancies other than those which sorcerers practice."
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He further implores Morand not to read the manuscript -- comes just short of forbidding him, in fact -- which, of course, makes it far more likely that Morand will read it, which he does.
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What he reads is a short account of the mysterious fate of Gerard, Comte de Venteillon, who, on the eve of his marriage, disappeared -- a point that puts me in mind of Shirley Jackson's "The Daemon Lover". The gist is, in the forest near his home, Gerard meets a "half-human creature with hoofs and horns". Appalled by the image, as a Christian, Gerard demands that the creature speak for itself...
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Laughing wildly in the twilight, the bizarre being capered before him, and cried:
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"I am a satyr, and your Christ is less to me than the weeds that grow in your kitchen-middens...
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"Stay, Gerard de Venteillon, and I will tell you a secret, knowing which, you will forget the worship of Christ, and forget your beautiful bride of tomorrow, and turn your back on the world and on the very sun itself with no reluctance and no regret."
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The satyr does tell him the secret, and Gerard does turn his back on everything, making his way not towards his bride but to the mysterious ruins of the Chateau des Faussesflammes (literally "House of False Flames"). These ruins, Morand believes (correctly), might well be the same ruins he's noticed on a hill near the monastery. And, of course, he's drawn to them himself.
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The evil in this story is as ancient as that found in Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", and, of course, it is quite intriguing how Machen's story hangs over so much horror fiction that came after, particularly the fiction I've read this month. Not only are there mysterious satyrs in Smith's forest, but Pan is mentioned in Laird Barron's "The Imago Sequence" ("The panpipes went wild") -- sorry I forgot to mention that one -- Machen himself was referred to in Mark Samuels's "The White Hands", and there is yet more to come. But Smith's belief and reliance on the ancient past for his source of evil seems somehow more genuine -- and don't forget, I really liked all those other stories. Perhaps this is due to Smith's vocabulary. Here, Morand reflects on his desire to visit the ruins near the monastery, despite the warnings that Hilaire has just given him:
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Before he had finished speaking, a resolve had sprung to life full-born in my mind: I felt that I must go to the Chateau des Faussesflammes and learn for myself, if possible, all that could be learned. The impulse was immediate, overwhelming, ineluctable; and even if I had so desired, I could no more have fought against it than if I had so desired, I could no more have fought against it than if I had been the victim of some sorcerer's invultuation.
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This language sounds like it was itself drawn from some ancient spellbook. I mean, "invultuation"? But it works. The language drew me back centuries, or more, to the time of the evil which Morand will soon face (though he won't quite see it as evil).
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In another story I read, "The Epiphany of Death" (another title more intriguing after you've read the story than before), Theolus, the narrator discusses his strange relationship with a man named Tomeron. Tomeron thinks very highly of Theolus, but, while fascinated by him, Theolus's opinion of him is somewhat different:
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Though he fascinated him at all times, there were occasions when my interest was not unalloyed with an actual sense of repulsion. At whiles, his pallor was too cadaverous, too suggestive of fungi that have grown in the dark, or of leprous bones by moonlight; and the stoop of his shoulders conveyed to my brain the idea that they bore a burden of centuries through which no man could conceivably have lived.
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Later, the two enter a tomb where...
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The air was increasingly dank, chill and miasmal; and mephitic shadows crouched or swayed before our torches in every niche and corner.
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I didn't even know what "mephitic" meant until about five minutes ago, but I instantly knew I loved it. And it's such a crazy word, by the way, that even the definition includes the word "noisome".
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I won't describe "The Epiphany of Death" beyond that -- it's a very short story that lives off its own language. If you're as taken with the examples I've provided above, then you probably already know that you want to read it. And, actually, the only other story, if it can be referred to as such, that I read today was a half-page piece of work called "To the Daemon" (there's that word, or rather that spelling, again). It's from there that I pulled the quote I used as the title for this post. One interesting detail about "To the Daemon", and its place in The End of the Story is that it's the only story in the book that doesn't get its own story notes from Connors and Hilger. It's almost as though they don't know where it came from -- perhaps it was found, old and dried out, in an old desk that belonged to Smith, the details of its discovery not unlike Morand's uncovering of the manuscript that sends him to the House of False Flames. "To the Daemon" begins:
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Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently.
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Perhaps it's a manifesto.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 2: How I Detest Those Fools

In the category of the modern weird story, it’s hard to know quite where to place Mark Samuels. This is probably because, outside of Thomas Ligotti and a few others, very few contemporary horror writers do anything more than dabble in this vaguely defined subgenre – it can’t help that, in my case, I only read my first pair of Samuels stories a few days ago, a fact which is, itself, explained by the troubling rarity of his books. His first collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales was first published in 2003 by Tartarus Press, and is currently out of print. His most recent book, Glyphotech, was published by PS Publishing in 2008, and it, too, is out of print. Used copies of each, as well as the two Samuels books that were published in between, fetch a very steep price, unless you happen to luck out (as I did, in the case of White Hands, at least). What this says about the state of the modern horror fiction market – both Tartarus and PS Publishing are very small presses – is both very clear and entirely depressing, so it’s best that we move on.

I first heard about Mark Samuels a few years ago when, in the early throes of my newfound passion for the fiction of Thomas Ligotti, I read an interview with the latter writer, in which the two were roughly compared. Essentially, Ligotti acknowledged Samuels as someone he was in tune with, but wondered if writers like Samuels were disturbed, and cut off from regular society, enough to achieve the stature in the horror field enjoyed by the likes of Poe, Lovecraft and (he doesn’t say but implies) himself.

Probably not, is the answer. Samuels, as it happens, is that rarest of creatures: a 21st century writer of horror fiction who is also a Christian – a Catholic, to be exact. On his website, Samuels writes:

Frankly, one has to tread carefully on horror messageboards if one admits to having faith. Particularly if you’re a Catholic (which I am, albeit not much of a churchgoing one). Once this fact is discovered it seems to be the case that it’s open season on your beliefs. I guarantee you’ll be the target of all sorts of wily attempts to draw you into an argument designed to make you see the errors of your ways and embrace the “rationality” of atheism (or agnosticism, most of whose adherents are, it seems, practically 99% atheist, but hold back a 1% doubt in order not to appear too judgemental).

And elsewhere on the site:

God, for me, is the fundamental core of reality itself. God does not exist, in the way we know a certain mountain exists. Without God there is no reality; God is the prime consciousness. God is infinite and eternal. He (I use the term “he” only for convenience) is not able to be directly understood by man, although we have intimations that allow us to conceive of his nature.

Science is not incompatible with belief in God. Since God is eternal and infinite, a process such as evolution, which may seem an incredibly inefficient way of producing humankind, is only inefficient from our temporal perspective.

Science cannot tell us why there are laws of physics. If one responds that this question is an irrelevance, since science makes no claim to explain the why in this instance, then it is an example that science cannot explain science. No closed system can explain a closed system.

If you don’t spend a great deal of time reading contemporary horror fiction -- and so it would follow you wouldn’t be spending any time on horror messageboards – you’ll have to take my word for it that Samuels is absolutely correct about the ways in which faith is treated in that community. Ligotti, the writer to whom Samuels is most often linked, is a full-bore atheist, at one point accepting the purely metaphorical existence of a creator only so that he could blame someone or something for the nightmare of human existence.

So all of this places Samuels in a unique position. In his faith, and fictional subject, he really does hearken back to the old days of Machen and M. R. James, a comparison that isn’t coincidental once you actually start reading Samuels’s fiction. His Catholicism isn’t exactly explicit in his story “White Hands” – a story I’ll get to in a bit -- though once you know his faith, the reader can sort of say, “Oh, okay. Sure.” Which is completely fine, and serves the story, or doesn’t, depending on what you want. Unfortunately, Samuels attempt to place his faith front and center doesn’t pay off too well in the other story I read, called “The Grandmaster’s Final Game”. Though the truth is that the Catholic nature of the story isn’t the problem – not only is that hardly the kind of thing that I, personally, am likely to complain about, but where would The Exorcist be without its faith? – but rather Samuels’s inability make the elements of this story cohere. Essentially a story of demonic possession and chess, most of “The Grandmaster’s Final Game” is told in the form of a confession told to Father Mooney by a man named Leonard Hughes. Hughes has specifically sought out Father Mooney to deliver his confession because, he says, “I know you were one of the finest chess players in Europe before you were called to holy orders.” Hughes goes on to tell of his life as a professional chess player, a career which didn’t take off until he found a bizarre chess set being sold for next to nothing in a local bookshop. The set was made unique by, among other things, featuring only black chess pieces. As I’ve already revealed that this is a story of possession, you can probably guess where we’re heading, and you’ll be correct.

Which is obviously a problem, but is not the problem, and, in fact, didn’t need to even be a problem at all. Though I strongly resist the idea that genre fiction – and, really, pick your genre, because this is said about them all – must necessarily follow formula and pay off in the way the reader expects, and that the only thing that can distinguish one genre writer from another is style and technique, I also know full well that great, brilliant work can be done while adhering to a given formula. So Samuels, a good writer who is a Catholic, and who, additionally, is very knowledgeable about his chosen genre, should have sailed through “The Grandmaster’s Final Game”. But he doesn’t. For one thing, there is no genuine sense of the infernal, something you obviously can’t say about The Exorcist, so that the inevitable final chess match feels as though it’s being waged between a priest who really wants to win, and a guy who really hates to lose.

On a much more encouraging note, the other Samuels story I read was “White Hands”, and it follows a familiar track of weird fiction in that it concerns itself with horror fiction and scholarship. The story is about an ambitious unnamed narrator who seeks out Alfred Muswell, at once a well-known academic and scholar of of “literary ghost stories”. Muswell was a disgraced former don at Oxford, who instructed his students to focus their reading on the works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Vernon Lee, M. R. James and Lilith Blake (Blake being the one fictional character on this list, and, the reader discovers, the source of the story's horror). Though Muswell is a scholar of all of these writers, when Muswell meets our narrator and discovers that he prefers the work of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, Muswell immediately dismisses those other writers (of Machen he says, "That red-face old coot with his deluded Anglo-Catholic rubbish!") and says:

“…No, no. Believe me, if you want the truth beyond the frontier of appearances it is to Lilith Blak you must turn. She never compromises. Her stories are infinitely more than mere accounts of supernatural phenomena…”

As the reader will shortly learn. Despite his ambivalence about her, our narrator is looking to make his name by writing a monograph on Lilith Blake, a proposition that becomes more and more likely the more time he spends with Muswell. He sought out Muswell in the first place because Muswell is the foremost – and probably only – expert on Blake’s life and writing, and once our narrator has gained his confidence, the older scholar makes his collection of pictures, biographical material and unpublished writing free to the young man. Everything except one unpublished book called The White Hands and Other Tales. Muswell explains:

”This volume…contains the final stories. They establish the truth of all that I have told you. The book must now be published. I want to be vindicated after I die. This book will prove, in the most shocking way, the supremacy of the horror tale over all other forms of literature. As I intimated to you once before, these stories are not accounts of supernatural phenomena but supernatural phenomena in themselves.”

Samuels’s terrific story – both old-fashioned and unique – is one of those small but intriguing number of works of horror fiction that seems to take the horror genre itself as its subject (others in this category that I can think of off the top of my head are Joe Hill’s chilling “Best New Horror”, Ligotti’s bizarre “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”, and the Amicus film The Skull). Lilith Blake is clearly bad news, and at least two men, two fans, get sucked far too deeply into the genre’s genuinely black heart. Muswell, in fact, disdains all other kinds of fiction, and the title of this post, How I Detest Those Fools, is taken from a line delivered by Muswell about a group of scholars studying James Joyce. Horror is all to him, and it will become all for our narrator. The nastiness and violence and hopelessness of horror consumes them. Had they enjoyed some other kind of reading material, there would be no “White Hands” by Mark Samuels. Though I suppose there still would be a “White Hands” by Lilith Blake, waiting for some other poor curious soul to take things too far.

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UPDATE 10/12/09: In the comments section, a fellah by the name of "tartarusrussell" informs me that not only is Mark Samuels's The White Hands and Other Weird Tales not out of print, but is available for a very reasonable price through Tartarus Press here. Call me a shill if you must, but Samuels deserves to have somebody shilling for him. Even if it's only me.

You Can't Stop What's Coming

Since Greg has already been teasing his October project, I figured I might as well do the same. I got some nice feedback last year, but I didn't spend much effort building up to it, which, had I done so, could possibly have enticed new readers to join in. So this year, I think I'll drive the whole idea into the ground before we even get started.
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If you were around here last October, you'll know what to expect. If not, here's a little taste of what you can look forward to...

And much more! Good Christ, so much more. So very, very, very much more...

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Anyway, join me this October, as I wallow in the best and, more than likely, the worst (though I won't be going out of my way to find it) of horror literature. All month, every day. Seriously: every day!