The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 11: And Then He Just Cried Again

Genre writers deny that they are genre writers when they've convinced themselves -- and they may even be right about this -- that their fiction doesn't conform to whatever collection of formulas the writer has -- and they may be quite justified in doing so -- associated with the genre from which this writer is trying to separate himself.  And who am I, or indeed who is any of us, to tell any writer that they must be defined and categorized a certain way?  But this attitude represents a short-sightedness on the part of not just this hypothetical writer (not really hypothetical, there's a whole guy I'm getting ready to talk about), but of critics, those who focus their analysis on a particular genre and those who look down upon it from what they consider a great height, writers who adhere to formula and writers who disdain genre for that practice, and readers who have an idea of what genre needs to be.  All of this stuff generally doesn't gang up and kill a genre -- for the sake of argument, let's pick, say, horror -- but it inevitably leads to complacency and stagnation, and it can justify snobbery.  I know I said "let's pick horror" and everything, but Kurt Vonnegut worked hard to remove himself from the drawer of science fiction (a drawer he complained was too often used as a urinal) not by not writing science fiction, but by simply insisting upon it, and critics were happy to give him a hand out of there because they frankly preferred the separation of "Literary" and "genre" to stay in place.  It becomes too complicated otherwise.

The introduction to Remember Why You Fear Me:  The Best Dark Fiction of Robert Shearman is called "Not Really a Horror Writer," and in it editor Stephen Jones talks about his relationship with Shearman over the years, focusing primarily on his many attempts -- successful attempts, I should clarify -- to get Shearman to write something for one or another of Jones's many horror anthologies.  The argument was typically "I don't really write horror, I can't write to a specific theme, my stuff always turns out funny."  In fairness to Shearman, and at least according to Jones, he's never claimed he wasn't a genre writer, which would be a hard thing to deny as he's most famous for writing an episode of Doctor Who that brought Daleks back to the series, all of which you'll understand if you're a nerd, but rather that he's not a horror writer.  Jones presents this affectionately as a kind of stubborn denial, but it cheeses me off a little bit, if for no other reason that, at it's core, this attitude is rather condescending.  "Horror writers write stories like this, but now I write stories like this," kind of thing.  And despite a bit of a rough start, frustrated horror fan that I am, I'd like to have Shearman on my side.  I read two stories for today, "Damned if You Don't" and "Featherweight," both stories that I think are, by the end of each, undeniably part of the horror genre; they're just not the same part you're used to.

Regarding that rough start, "Damned if You Don't" starts rough.  If I have a big concern about Shearman at this early stage, it's that he's not as funny as he thinks he is (though one of his story collections is called Everyone's Just So So Special, which appeals to me enormously).  The story begins in Hell, where a damned soul named Martin is first seen addressing a demon at the Complaints Department because he, Martin, would like a new roommate.  Did you guys catch that this is a Complaints Department in Hell?  And what is this about roommates??  What is even going on!?  This kind of humor, the humor of easy incongruity, is not at all uncommon in the fantasy genre -- Terry Pratchett is to blame, if you care to blame anybody, but Pratchett is both good at it and funny in other ways, as well.  These are the pitfalls of influence, and Shearman falls right in.  The roommate he's trying to replace, by the way, is a dog -- a talking dog! -- named Woofie, and it is eventually revealed that Woofie is in Hell because he was Hitler's dog.  Hitler's dog can talk!  But I'm being unfair, because for all my exasperation at this old "demons who talk like us!?" nonsense (guys, hold up, check this out:  there's a Virgin Megastore in Hell) the fact that one of the main character's is both a dog and Hitler's dog is not at all irrelevant.  And it's when this element of "Damned if You Don't" gets beyond the tired jokes and into the next chunk of the plot that the story twists itself into something I've never read before.

In his introduction, Stephen Jones calls "Damned if You Don't" "one of the most disturbing, funny, and surreal stories I have ever read."  Leaving out the funny part, and setting "disturbing" aside as something that is more subjective than most effects a horror story can aim for, we're left with "surreal," and I agree with Jones on this one, but what's interesting is that the surrealism isn't achieved through phantasmagoric prose or imagery, but through actual plot.  Where the story seems to be going is not at all where the story is going -- I don't want to spoil it, because the pleasure of "Damned if You Don't" comes from the unwinding of the unusual narrative, but I will say that the action shifts out of Hell and back to our world (Hell is overcrowded, if God ever existed He's gone now, so the gates of Hell are opened:  "I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing hasn't shut down before too long," says Woofie) and the comedic elements begin to fade.  It reads like a story written with no end in mind, with only a very, very basic concept -- perhaps someone going to Hell's Complaint Department -- and Shearman simply made it up as he went along.  This is a not uncommon practice (supposedly Elmore Leonard wrote that way), but it rarely produces something this tonally and narratively off the wall.  Of course, I have no idea if Shearman produced his story this way, but the absorbing "anything goes" nature of it makes me wonder.

The other story I read, "Featherweight," is less concerned with trying to be funny, which is all to the good, and it, too, is thoroughly unusual.  Harry and Esther, a married couple, are traveling by car through Scotland on their anniversary when they get into a terrible accident.  Harry is pinned in agony behind the steering wheel and Esther, though alive, is bloodied and has a concerning twist in her neck.  She goes in an out of consciousness, though, and when she's awake she's lucid.  She feels no pain and can't move her arms ("I still have got arms, haven't I, darling?"), but she's with it enough to wonder, as Harry has wondered about himself, why she's not more scared.  Also, while she feels no pain, she does itch quite a lot, on her back, due to, she tells Harry, feathers.  "The feathers are tickling me."

So maybe not so lucid?  No, she's lucid.  The situation seems hopeless, and the two of them are trapped over a period of several days, to the point that starving to death becomes a concern. This bothered me a good deal because they'd both die of thirst well before that happened, but they're never shown drinking anything.  Do your research!  Although I guess it's a thematic thing, as, if you read it, you'll see, but that's no excuse.  Or not much of one, but I did like the story because, well, one night Harry hears a tapping on the car's back window.  He hopes it's a farmer, but we eventually learn that it's no such thing, but rather a cherub, a beautiful, perfect, be-haloed flying baby.  Harry asks if it can help, but:

And then the cherub opened its mouth.  And it wasn't a sigh, it was a hiss.  Hot breath stained the glass; Harry recoiled from it.  And the teeth were so sharp, and there were so many, how could so many teeth fit into such a small mouth?...The child attacked the window, it gnawed on the glass with its fangs...It glared, those bright eyes now blazing with fury, and the hissing became seething...

This isn't even the end.  The end isn't even what you're sure, after that, it must be.  "Featherweight" doesn't go mad in ways as various as those found in "Damned if You Don't," but it's still really odd, and, unlike "Damned if You Don't," genuinely moving, even sad, though the many ways one might choose to take the very ending could seem to severely conflict, in the best way, with each other.  And so, for all their differences, like "Damned if You Don't," "Featherweight" is a story I've never read before.  This is no small thing.

So Shearman doesn't write horror because it doesn't fit in with horror as it exists today.  Maybe if Shearman had been writing many decades ago, before the horror boom of the late 70s and early 80s homogenized the genre, when expectations for what horror was and could be had no particular agenda behind them, he'd have felt more comfortable with his place within it.  In truth, I can't exactly blame him -- if science fiction was a drawer people pissed in, horror is a drawer people shit in.  But it won't change if the original creative talents keep distancing themselves.  And despite my complaints here, Robert Shearman is an original, creative talent.

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 9: Human Marrow and Boiled Bones

In his new anthology A Book of Horrors, editor Stephen Jones, who has edited a very large number of horror anthologies and who, also, I'm given to understand, can be a mite prickly at times when it comes to his work and the state of his genre and so on, and why shouldn't he be, opens his introduction by asking "What the hell happened to the horror genre?" And I thought, okay, here we go, tear some shit up, Stephen Jones. Some years ago, as I've mentioned before, Peter Straub got a lot of angry glares cast his way when during a speech at the World Horror Convention he said that "horror was a house that horror had already moved out of," and then also explained what he meant by that. I sort of wish I'd been there for that speech, because if any genre needs a good swift kick in the nuts, it's horror, and Straub's point, of course, was that in his lifetime he'd been witness to this great genre's denegration by its very practitioners. Straub cares about good writing, and more importantly he knows what good writing is, and if I had to guess I'd say that it was this unspoken fact that drew the ire of Straub's, let us say, somewhat less talented colleagues-only-by-definition. So back to Stephen Jones, I was hoping that this guy, who's been a major part of the genre, and something of a tastemaker as well, was, in his introduction to A Book of Horrors, winding himself up to pull a Straub on everybody. But no, it turns out that the sole focus of Jones's disillusion is...is Twilight, basically. And True Blood too, I guess, but Twilight is I guess the modern day prototype of "horror-lite," which Jones points out is actually a publisher-created genre designation, which the knee-jerk side of me does recoil from, but at the same time Jones acknowledges that this stuff isn't really horror to begin with. So my question is, with everything that is wrong with what we all agree is actually horror, why zero in on the stuff that isn't?

The idea behind A Book of Horrors, then, is the same idea behind so many other horror anthologies, which is to say that the idea is essentially "You guys like horror well here's some real horror motherfuckers!" Not a compelling theme, and slightly more frustrating when you consider that, since this book is made up entirely of new stories by a host of writers from Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Marshall Smith, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Lisa Tuttle, and several more, no theme is needed, nor is there a need to pretend a theme exists. Jones was going to publish this anthology anyway, so why manufacture a justification for it? But whatever. I fear I've wandered into nit-picking at this point. I just wish more horror elder statesmen would go around kicking nuts, is all.

A nice segue would be if I could say that John Ajvide Lindqvist, the Swedish author of the first story I read for today from A Book of Horrors, was a fair representation of what was wrong with modern horror, but I can't, because he's not. This however does not mean that he's very much good. Lindqvist is kind of a hot name these days, having written the original novel Let the Right One In on which two very good (yes, I like them both) films have been based. Tomas Alfredson's original film did more for Lindqvist's name than anything Lindqvist actually wrote, although this is no crime -- the same could be said of Brian De Palma's film version of Stephen King's Carrie back in the old days. But I have a sense that Lindqvist, who has now published a few novels in the US since that first film, with more novels pending, is maybe struggling to maintain his status as one of the big new names in horror. His zombie novel Handling the Dead, at least in its premise, bears a striking resemblence to the French film They Came Back, a fact that I don't believe went entirely unnoticed at the time, and when recommending his more recent novel Harbor in the introduction to her 2012 edition of The Best Horror of the Year anthology, Ellen Datlow was still unable to refrain from pointing out that Lindqvist lets what had been in her view a very fine novel almost completely fall apart by the end. I myself have not read those two books, but I did read Let the Right One In, and I frankly don't think it holds a candle to either of the film adaptations. The gender ambiguity of one of the central characters, the importance of which is scaled way back in Alfredson's film and obliterated outright in Matt Reeves' American remake Let Me In, can stand for all my problems in that book. It's a meaningless detail, one that effects no one at any time, its ambiguity signalling possibilities that branch off into no particular direction, but is included because I guess raising questions of gender seems like a pretty interesting thing to do, maybe, who can say?

And his story in Jones's book, "The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer," is in some ways the damndest thing. It's fairly long at forty pages, and tells the story of a widower who bribes his eleven-year-old son Robin to start playing the piano. The father has recently become concerned about how much time the boy has been spending playing video games, and that as a result he won't experience any actual real-world life. On top of that, they own a piano, which had belonged to the boy's mother, Annelie, who recently died in a car accident. Robin agrees to take up the instrument only because his father raises his allowance, but soon enough he does appear to make some progress. But sometimes the father hears the boy playing some very strange notes while practicing, producing something which can't be called a melody but which he finds himself helplessly replaying in his head like it was something by ABBA. One night he also hears voices other than Robin's coming from the boy's room, voices that can't be coming from a TV or computer or anything else like that because the house has just lost power. Eventually the boy informs his father that their house, which they've only recently move into following Annelie's death, was once owned by a child-murderer named Benke Karlsson ("Benke," not "Bengt," but don't ask me) and that in fact Karlsson's bed was in the same place as Robin's own bed is now. Karlsson was a musician who, the father subsequently learns, took his wife's death badly, which I guess is one way of putting it, and the reveal of the mystery behind the source of the strange notes Robin has been heard playing on his piano is one of the truly effective moments in the story.

One, out of not many. As I've said, this story is the damndest thing, and what I mean is that at forty pages you'd think this would be somewhat dense, or eventful, or maybe, going the other way, bloated and dull. But in fact I raced through the thing, only to think by the end that I had no clue what all those pages had been expended for. "The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer" is the literary equivalent of a big budget film where very little of that money can be seen on screen, except in this case instead of money it's pages. It's not a lark, and the goal of the thing is to be fairly nasty and frightening; in the story notes Jones includes at the end of each story, Lindqvist says "...towards the end, I wrote on in a state of mild but constat horror. It was a relief when it was over." That's all well and good I suppose, but what about me? Until checking just now, I couldn't even remember how the story ended, and it turns out the ending is something you'd think I would have remembered, but the whole thing just goes by in a beige flash. It's a fairly standard ghost story in a lot of ways, but that's not something I've ever turned my nose up at, but it has to be a fairly standard ghost story that offers something beyond those standard elements. Lindqvist certainly doesn't provide a compelling style to get lost in. I'd be more willing to chalk this particular fault up to issues of translation, if not for the fact that "The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer" and Let the Right One In were translated by two different people, and the effect, or absence of same, of Lindqvist's prose is in each case pretty uniform. I can't think of another time when I've finished reading something only to wonder how did so many pages get filled with this, and to feel sort of rooked in the end. Not literally like I've been swindled, but sort of.

Given the length of Lindqvist's story, it had been my plan to stick with that one for today's post, take 'er easy, come back tomorrow, but then I frankly didn't have much to say about it, so I decided I'd better keep plugging along. Remembering that part of the point of this whole endeavor is to discover new writers, I chose another story pretty much at random. It's called "The Coffin-Maker's Daughter" by Angela Slatter. This is an odd one, much shorter than the Lindqvist story but quite a bit richer, although I was given reason to pause early on. For one thing, the main character, the title character, is named "Hepsibah Ballantyne." When I saw that on page one of the story, I said something like "Oh Jesus, oh Jesus God no." But what can you do? The idea behind the story is that in what I can only assume is some other version of our world, coffin-makers are revered as artists, as well as magicians, or perhaps witches, of some kind. Nothing is made explicit, but the burying of bodies does not merely entail putting someone underground, but keeping them underground. Hepsibah currently heads up the family business, following the death of her vile father, Hector, whose ghost still pays her unpleasant visits. The story is made up entirely of Hepsibah doing a job for the D'Aguillar family, and here Slatter describes her at work:

[Master D'Aguillar's casket] is now the required shape and dimensions, held together with sturdy iron nails and the stinking adhesive made of human marrow and boiled bones I'm carefully applying to the place where one plank meets another to ensure there are no gaps through which something ephemeral might escape. On the furthest bench, far enough away to keep it safe from the stains and paints and tints, lies the pale lilac silk sack that I've stuffed with goose down and lavender flowers. This evening, I will quilt it with tiny, precise stitches then fit it into the casket, this time using a sweet-smelling glue to hold it in place and cover the stink of the marrow sealant.

So the job is part funeral director, part clergy, part carpenter, part witch doctor. What exactly is expected to rise from the grave is never explained, and in fact is not even the thrust of the story. The thrust, curiously and interestingly enough, is Hepsibah's almost stalker-like pursuit of Lucette D'Aguillar, the daughter of the deceased. This also, curiously and interestingly enough, is where the horror comes from.

In the afterword for this story, Slatter does talk about her decision to keep the specifics of this world vague, describing her story as one with "layers of unspoken secrets." The result is that "The Coffin-Maker's Daughter" reads like something that might have been written by someone from, and for people in, the world in which it takes place, the same way a story in our actual world that's about a doctor could leave some details about that job as just understood. It's an interesting effect, even if that wasn't Slatter's conscious idea. Anyway, I'll admit it took me a little bit to get on Slatter's general wavelength here, but ultimately it's a rather good story. Slatter has published a few collections of short stories, and she says in the afterword that she doesn't consider herself a horror writer, though she did intend for this particular story to be of that genre -- she was submitting it to a horror anthology, after all. I find that, at least in films, an artist who isn't generally interested in horror being inspired to try their hand, because of a particular idea or script or novel that somehow ended up in their lap, that outsider view can produce something very interesting, perhaps because they're not aware of the expectations fans place on the genre, or they're not weighed down by the history. See Tomas Alfredson and Let the Right One In, as a matter of fact. I'm curious now to know what Slatter's other stuff is like, what genre she typically works in -- fantasy, I'm assuming, but I'm thinking closer to the Jeff VanderMeer side of things than Tolkien. This interests me. She has an imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 7: Big Red Demon Gods

Yesterday I began staging a duel between two rival (probably not really) horror anthology series: Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year and Stephen Jones’s The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. There can and will be no kind of control over this experiment (or duel, whatever), unless I was willing to read all of the stories in the two volumes Datlow has put out so far, as well as all of the stories from the last two Jones books. And I’m both unable and unwilling to do that! But this duel’s (or experiment’s) utter pointlessness aside, volume one of Datlow’s series made a very strong showing, with, out of three selections, one solid story from Trent Hergenrader called “The Hodag”, and a truly excellent one by Adam Golaski called “The Man from the Peak”. Now it’s Jones’s turn, and one can’t help but wonder -- can one? -- how today’s selections will measure up?

To make this whole thing even more pointlesser, the Datlow book I chose for yesterday is from 2008, while the Jones book – volume 15 of Best New Horror – is from 2004. So why bother. Well, because, is why. As a quick bit of ancillary business, I want to point out that book series feature a fair amount of valuable and interesting “extras”. Both Datlow and Jones include a “Year in Horror” kind of introduction, in which they lay out what was published in the genre, from the mainstream to the furthest, dankest corners of the fringe. Jones also talks about film and other media, and he tends to be a bit looser in what he considers relevant to horror, spending a lot of time, when there’s any reason to, discussing the Harry Potter phenomenon, and so forth. Even if you wonder what that stuff is doing in a review of a year in horror, Jones’s introductions can be upwards of 80 pages long, so he’s not leaving anything out in favor of that wizard guy. Jones also, in collaboration with Kim Newman, puts together a rather depressing “necrology” for each volume’s given year, which amounts to dozens upon dozens of mini-obituaries for artists of various media (and, again, various genres) who passed away. Depressing, but informative.

But enough of that. I read two stories today, the first by Jay Lake, called “The Goat Cutter”. This one is legitimately bizarre, in a way that removes it from the pool of "weird" or "strange" stories that count as their own horror subgenre. I don't know if anyone has really defined or categorized the kind of story "The Goat Cutter" actually is -- and I should add that I don't know why anyone would feel the need to do so, but clearly people do -- but it feels to me be kind of the literary equivalent of psychobilly (that's a kind of music, right?). There's a lot of this stuff in contemporary horror, and its best-known practitioner would have to be Joe R. Lansdale. Though I like a lot of Lansdale's short fiction, this kind of white trash freak show story is not something I'm likely to seek out, unless he wrote it.

But Lake's story is pretty good, I must say. For one thing, Lake is a good writer, the best evidence of this being that he writes in a deep Southern vernacular, but he does so without resorting to unreadable dialect. In other words, in "The Goat Cutter" you won't find anything like this: "Maw, I kin he'p yew wit' dat dang mule in jes' uh sekint! But fust I hafta plow me up s'm corn!" You all know what I'm talking about. It's sickening.

No, this is what you'll find with Lake:

Me and my best friend Pootie, we liked to run through the woods, climbing bob wire and following pipelines. Trees is smaller there, easier to slip between. You gotta watch out in deer season, though. Idiots come out from Austin or San Antone to their leases, get blind drunk and shoot every blessed thing that moves. Rest of the time, there's nothing but you and them turkey vultures. Course, you can't steal beer coolers from turkey vultures.

Our narrator and Pootie are young men, just about to become sophomores in high school, and they like to spend their summers in the environment described above. Also found in that environment is one Doug Bob Aaronson, who, we're told, spends his time "roasting goats, drinking tequila, and shooting people's dogs." That "roasting goats" bit is the important part. His goat butchery is not just something he does -- it's a ritual. In Doug Bob's little patch of stolen land, there is also an old school bus, on which Doug Bob has written, or smeared, many things in goat blood, including Bible verses. The boys are not allowed inside the bus.


This is a short story, only about twelve or thirteen pages, but with that set up you can maybe imagine the gist of what's in store. The Devil is in that bus, is what's in store, and what works about "The Goat Cutter" is that Lake is not coy about it -- the Devil actually shows himself, and engages with the characters. And the scene where the boys and the reader first lay eyes on the Devil is something of a tour de force, a bit of mad brilliance that made me wonder why horror films are so bereft of this sort of thing. You take this story, and you take Golaski's "The Man from the Peak", and both are full of quite filmmable imagery, horror imagery that is lush and full and deeply bizarre. Where is this imagination on film?

So Lake has that going for him, and it's nothing to sneeze at. Where the story ends up is something I'm less sure about. It would be inaccurate to say that Lake ties things up in a neat little bow, but it wouldn't be off to say that all Lake's madness boils down a little bit small for my taste. Even so, there's much left unsaid, and the hints that what we're dealing with in "The Goat Cutter" is a full blown Biblical Apocalypse in the making is very intriguing.

The other story I read is called "Story Time With the Bluefield Strangler". It was written by John Farris, who is one of those writers who's pretty big time among horror fans -- at least during the 70s and 80s -- but is completely unknown to everyone else. Farris's best known work is probably The Fury, which was adapted to the screen by Brian De Palma (for the record, I've never read the novel, but have always really enjoyed that film). I know Farris best as the other of two novels I actually did read: All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, which I liked a fair amount, and is considered something of a modern classic; and The Axman Cometh, which I sort of hated. Whatever my amiguous take on Farris, and despite the fact that he's been around a long time (he started with crime fiction in the 1950s), one thing that seems clear to me is that he's sort of the quintessential 80s horror writer. Prolific, full of sex and violence, full of kids who can see shit other people can't, voodoo, possession; but also serious about what he's up to, not writing horror (or at least not writing genre fiction) because that's where the cash is.

So the story, "Story Time With the Bluefield Strangler" is...not bad. The second half that title should let you know where the horror is coming from (it's coming from a guy who strangles people), and the first half should indicate that a child is somehow involved. The child is named Alison, who, at least since she was six, has been able to see young man who she refers to as "Big Boy", but who we come to know as Walter Banks, aka the strangler of the title. Alison alternately regards Big Boy as a boogeyman and an ally, the latter coming out when the little girl finds herself in a children's mental hospital, due to past trauma and her stories about Big Boy.

All the background, about Banks and Alison's trauma, are related to the reader by two other characters, a police detective named Ed Lewinsky, and Alison's therapist, a woman named Lorraine. Farris alternates the Ed/Lorraine scenes with Alison's childish point of view, where the sentences become short and simple, as though we were being taught to read. This gimmick is not as cloying as it might sound because, for one thing, it lets up a bit as the story progresses and Alison gets a little older, and because the youthful simplicity of the language highlights a certain chilling effect.

The thing about "Story Time With the Bluefield Strangler" is that it's a very professional piece of work, written in the first place, I suspect, because Farris wanted to play around with story structure. The story itself isn't much, and I doubt Farris would claim otherwise, but it's interesting the way he shifts in and out of perspective, and even ages (specifically regarding Banks/Big Boy/The Bluefield Strangler). All of which combines for a strong and effective ending. It's all very well-polished, which sounds like a backhanded compliment these days, and I frankly find that to be a bit depressing. So no backhand intended. Polish and professionalism are gratefully noted.

And there you have it! The great Jones/Datlow War That Never Even Really Happened is at an end! Man, what a bloodbath. I can't even tell who won, there's so much blood. That sure was crazy. Etc.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 6: Filthy With Blood

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In the absence of any better idea, I decided to spend the next couple of days staging a showdown of sorts between two “best of” anthology series, both of which think they’re so big. The only criterion I’m going to use is one of taste, and also all I’m really going to be doing is reviewing stories from random editions of each series, and the resulting posts will be no more or less meaningful than anything else I write for this place, but…but I mean, might as well pretend this is something other than it is, right?

The two series in question are The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, edited by Stephen Jones (formerly edited, under a slightly different title,
Karl Edward Wagner, later by both Jones and Kim Newman, I think maybe by Ramsey Campbell for a little while…) and The Best Horror of the Year, edited by Ellen Datlow. The Best New Horror series has been around for many, many years, but Datlow’s series is only on volume two. You might be tempted to consider The Best Horror of the Year the young gun upstart, but, like Jones, Datlow is a perennial figure in the world of horror editing, with a slew of titles to her name. In fact, she used to edit, or co-edit, a whole different, but similar, series called The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. That series folded, I guess, and she recently shifted gears to this new one, but the point is that Datlow knows her business.

It might have been nice to select stories from the current editions of each anthology, but the most recent volume of The Best Horror of the Year came out in some goofball month like April or May, and the next edition of Best New Horror is slated to hit stores in November. Which is stupid. It might be easier to schedule these things if there was some time of year that was in any way associated with horror, but with those lamebrains in Congress doing all that shuckin’ and jivin’, I don’t think that will ever happen, so we’re stuck with these arbitrary release dates. Furthermore, this means that I just randomly grabbed a volume of each series and picked stories from those. So now you have a little window into my process.

I’m going with volume one of Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year first, because whatever, and a couple of things struck me. One is that while certain newly established writers are likely to show up in both series (Glen Hirshberg, Laird Barron, and so on), Datlow seems much more likely to use stories by unknown writers, while Stephen Jones’s series is going to be packed with stuff by Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman – in other words, Jones uses the big names as his base, from which he can build a (possibly) more diverse volume of stories. Datlow doesn’t seem to care so much about that. I certainly don’t know that she’s intentionally ignoring the Campbells and Barkers of the world – she clearly doesn’t do that in her other anthologies – but it’s an interesting difference to note, anyway. It’s possible that Datlow takes the word “new” as meaning something more than just “published recently”.

Another difference I noticed is that the stories that Datlow chooses tend to be, on average, a good deal shorter than those chosen by Jones. This means nothing I can see, as far as Datlow vs. Jones goes (other than that maybe Datlow favors shorter stories), but for my purposes it did allow me to read three whole stories for today’s post. And so I did.

 

The first story is "The Rising River" by Daniel Kaysen, and if any of the three are going to get short shrift today, it's this one. It's not a bad story, and I felt Kaysen got across a nice sense of the environment in which our two main characters, roommates Amy and Tish, lived (which is just a flat, in some unspecified area of England). And Kaysen's appropriation of James Ellroy's telegraph style of prose -- somewhat de-toughened for his purposes -- keeps things moving. But the story revolves around ghosts and/or madness, both revolving around Amy and her possible ability to see spirits, and the dark truth of her childhood, and so on. Ghosts and madness are themes that, when paired off, have grown tiresome to me. Not only that, but, like many contemporary horror writers, Kaysen has a tendency to match off his bleak story with moments of childish sentimentality, as in:

 

She brought a teddy bear. That made me smile. Gifts are always better when they're furry.

 

Yes, well, fine. It just doesn't go down smooth, is what I'm saying.

 

Next up is a curious little number by Trent Hergenrader called "The Hodag". A hodag, so you know, is actually a thing, in the same way that the Loch Ness Monster is "actually" a thing. This particular legendary creature roams the wilds of Wisconsin, and a, I guess, sculpture, or something, of a hodag can be seen below:

 

And that's not too far off from they way Hergenrader describes it in his story:

 

The face looked hauntingly human despite its oblong shape, the mouth crowded with sharp teeth, and its black leathery skin. The eyes burned like embers and there was an unmistakable intelligence behind them, perhaps even cunning. Worse, the face was grinning in pure malice.

 

As you see. Hergenrader's story takes place in Oswego, WI, before World War II. It opens with a dog named Maggie, who belongs to a boy named Whitey McFarland, staggering out of the woods, ripped open. The story's narrator, his friend Whitey, and a bunch of other kids are playing baseball, and they come together to save Maggie (the fact that this is a story about a vicious creature, and a beloved animal doesn't die at any point, is, in itself, unique), but of course the question of what attacked the dog lingers. Also lingering is Whitey's father, a boozer who abuses both his son and the dog.

 

It's not uncommon, I've found, for horror writers to match up some kind of violent, otherworldly mystery with real-world childhood trauma. In fact, this could probably describe 90% of all horror fiction published since Carrie came out. What makes "The Hodag" interesting is its lack of resolution, and its relation to Wisconsin folklore. Obviously, it's discovered who attacked Maggie, and who is behind subsequent violent attacks on men and animals, but where that discovery takes anyone is anyone's guess. The resolution of Whitey's abusive homelife is left similarly ambiguous, because what a frustrated, impotent child might wish to see happen in such a situation may not actually benefit anyone -- then again, with that alternate future unwritten, maybe it would.

 

Finally, I read a story called "The Man from the Peak" by Adam Golaski. And let me just tell you, this story is pretty stunning. It's the best piece of horror fiction I've read so far this month: so precisely written, so effortlessly evocative, and so confident of its eventual effect that I became a bit giddy as I read it. It's a story I'd hate to spoil for anyone who might follow my recommendation, but briefly Golaski tells the story of a party. Richard, who is wealthy, is taking a job in Boston, so his friends, also wealthy, are gathering at his place in the mountains to send him off in style. Our nameless narrator wants mainly to discover if Richard's girlfriend Sarah is going to Boston, as well, or if she's staying to pursue the flirtatious relationship the narrator's had going with her for, apparently, a long time. When the narrator is unable to spend time with her, he spends time with a busty woman in a bikini who says her name is Prudence ("Of course it is," the narrator says).

 

There are satellite partygoers, but mainly, there is the stranger, the man from the peak. The peak of the mountain, that is, where everyone agrees nobody lives. But he's there -- the narrator first saw his shadow descending from the peak, and then heard him being issued into Richard's home by someone who said "What, you need a formal invitation? Sure come on in, you are welcome to come in."

 

The man from the peak brings horror with him, and the way Golaski quietly insinuates that horror, here and there in patches, as the story progresses is a marvel, and clearly the work of a writer who knows what he's doing. The ghastliness of it all just stays in the background for a while, until it's the only thing left, and the man from the peak has control of everything.

 

Again, I hesitate to say any more than that. It's too good a story for my gushing to ruin it for you. But one thing that's especially important to note is that Golaski is simply a very good writer. He can toss off lines that sum up not only the person being observed:

 

...one unfortunate looking girl (pasty, a large flat nose and hair forced into a strange shade of red).

 

...but the person doing the observing. He also has a clean, sardonic way with human behavior, as in this bit, where Prudence, rising from a hot tub full of men, accepts a beer from the narrator:

"Thank you so much," she said, and took the beer. The guys in the tub were happily gazing up at her tiny bottom -- those men were nothing to her, made to carry her bags and perform rudimentary tasks while she gazed off in other, more interesting directions.

 

Plainly speaking, you don't see that kind of writing in horror fiction very often. Almost worse than that is the acceptance of this fact, and the apparent belief that good writing in horror fiction must necessarily be different -- in other words, worse -- than good writing anywhere else. The expectations for quality horror prose have descended to such a low level that competency has been celebrated as brilliance. I myself am so unused to anything of genuine quality from contemporary horror that a story like Golaski's can stop me dead.

 

It is a brilliant story, wonderfully unsettling, with a final three or four pages that I simply want to just type out here for you, as it will make my point better than I ever could. But I can't do that, so you should go and seek this out.

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 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?