The Cronenberg Series Part 7: God's Been a Real Sport to Me

Videodrome was a very heavy experience. If you're used to comedy, The Dead Zone is a heavy picture. But if you're used to Videodrome, The Dead Zone is not.

- David Cronenberg as quoted in Cronenberg on Cronenberg by Chris Rodley

Well, maybe. But maybe not. Depends on how you define "heavy." I probably could have taken a pretty good stab at writing about The Dead Zone without watching it again since I'd guess it's the Cronenberg film I've watched most often, which is a side effect of it being the first Cronenberg film I liked. Along with A History of Violence and, despite its extremely Cronenbergian qualities and high level of disgustingness, The Fly, this 1983 adaptation of a Stephen King novel is easily his most accessible film -- its plot is of a somewhat, what I guess you'd call, populist bent, and Cronenberg doesn't pull a Dr. Moreau-esque transformative vivisection on King's novel, as he did with the George Langerlan short story that was the basis for The Fly (and all other The Fly movies). The film is reasonably faithful to King's original book, and King's imagination, like Steven Spielberg's, is, not from cynicism but by nature, a populist one. All of this is perhaps what Cronenberg is talking about in the above quote. Later in the Rodley book, he says that anyone who believes that with The Dead Zone he was not "follow[ing] [his] own instincts...are completely wrong," and that, anyway, you can't chase popularity and expect to succeed. He made the film, he says, because it did strike a personal chord: "Personally the film is just like me, but filmically I suppose not." All of which adds up to a film, in the skilled hands of Cronenberg, screenwriter Jeffrey Boam, and a terrific cast, that is very easy to like.

The structure of The Dead Zone, which as I recall comes from King, is compelling. Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) is a small-town high school English teacher who, when we first meet him, is reading Poe's "The Raven" to his students, and then, as class ends, assigning them to read Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," just the film's way of tipping its hand a little bit. Johnny's in love with fellow teacher Sarah (Brooke Adams), and in the early goings of the film the two of them go on a date to a carnival, and after that Johnny takes her home. Sarah invites him to stay over for what we gather would be their first sexual encounter, but Johnny demurs, saying "Some things are worth waiting for." Which, okay, but Brooke Adams, and everything. But anyway he heads home, and on the way gets into a terrible car accident that launches him into a five-year coma. When he awakes, his life has changed in almost every conceivable way. His job, obviously, is gone, and Sarah has married someone else, with whom she has a son. On top of this, a latent psychic ability, a tiny hint of which we saw at the carnival, has come into full bloom -- in the hospital, when he touches the hand of his nurse, he sees that her house is on fire, and her daughter is inside. Johnny's warning to the nurse comes in time to save the little girl, and his fate is sealed. He is doomed now. So the structure, as I was saying, is almost that of an anthology film -- while The Dead Zone flows along as a straightforward narrative, Johnny is going from one scenario to another, a crisis that requires his psychic powers to avert danger, or solve a mystery, or even defeat evil. First he catches a serial killer that has been butchering young women in town for years, then when the notoriety of that event forces him into seclusion and a job as a private tutor, he bonds with one of his students, the son of a wealthy businessman (Anthony Zerbe). He sees that this boy is on the cusp of danger, has to deal with that whole deal, and drifts from there into the world of vile politician Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), who is running for the Senate. When Johnny shakes Stillson's hand at a rally, he sees that Stillson's political future will bring about a nuclear apocalypse.

Along with being an appealing way to tell the story of Johnny Smith -- which is really what The Dead Zone is, and less a plot-heavy thriller, though it puts on a pretty good show of being the latter as well -- this helps bring some of Cronenberg's particular interests into play. One constant in Johnny's life (Sarah drops in and out through the course of the film, and Johnny's father, played by Sean Sullivan, disappears from the action once Johnny flees town after the serial killer incident) is his doctor, Sam Weizak (Herbert Lom). One of the saner men of science to appear in a David Cronenberg film, Weizak has seen Johnny's powers work first-hand, and he takes both a professional interest as well as, because he likes Johnny, a personal interest in the man's life. Through their various conversations, we eventually learn that Johnny's psychic abilities are actually taking a physical toll on him, and it appears that the more he uses them, the faster he is killing himself. So again, in a Cronenberg film (this, by the way, is a slight change from the novel, though it all adds up to the same thing in the end) the body finds new ways to collapse in on itself. This is presented in terms...well, actually, it's not presented at all, in visual terms -- we're straight up told this by Johnny and Weizak. So the kind of grotesque imagery that Cronenberg put to such great effect in his previous two films, and would ramp up again in his next one, is completely absent from this film. Oh, there's blood, but it's of the more typical squib-and-blood-pack variety; everything else, the breakdown that is so in keeping with Cronenberg's films up to now, is completely internal. He does not, in other words, make the internal horrifyingly external, as is normally his wont, except to the extent that Johnny is told that he doesn't look well as the film goes on (this was less apparent to me, and I don't know if any makeup was used to illustrate this or not), so that his illness would seem, in the world of the film, to manifest itself the way illnesses do in our world.

If there's one person involved in the making of The Dead Zone who can really bring home what Cronenberg is trying to get at here, it's Christopher Walken. And thank God he's Christopher Walken. First off, what Cronenberg is interested in is not merely the physical aspect of Johnny's condition, which is a more or less arbitrary invention anyway, but the psychological blowback that a person with Johnny's powers would experience. The Dead Zone is a tragedy about a man who is destroyed by an ability that most people, if they didn't think about it too long, would consider an endless good. But Johnny seems to sense the potential for ruin right out of the gate, and Walken's performance is a relentless highlighting of the character's depression (which stems also from still living in a moment five years ago when he and Sarah were in love but now no longer can be), loneliness, and inability to be as selfish as he would so desperately like to be. Or anyway, to be devoted to his own preservation over all else. Walken's performance here is, I'd say, his best -- it's my favorite, anyway. In the early stages of the film, things skew a little awkward, and I believe this is because in an attempt to make Christopher Walken, who is after all playing a character named Johnny Smith, appear as a small-town everyman, Cronenberg accidentally made him seem even stranger. Walken is a strange person, his appearance is unusual, his voice and speaking rhythms are unlike anyone else, so giving him a goofball haircut and making him whoop it up on a roller coaster doesn't fly -- except in Catch Me If You Can, and even in that there are some qualifiers, Walken does not project normalcy. So it's not until Johnny is a shell of his former self that Walken comes alive, the same way some strange-looking young person might some day grow into their looks. Johnny has always been strange and haunted, but it wasn't until he awoke from his coma that he had the opportunity to live that life to the hilt.

The film as a whole has the same issues. As I've pointed out in other posts in this series, and will point out again, Cronenberg has a refreshing habit of cutting right to the chase in his films. There is a minimum of backstory, or set-up, or the establishing of much of anything in his films that precede The Dead Zone, other than setting and premise. He likes to dive right in because when you get right down to it, there's no reason not to. The Dead Zone doesn't allow for that, and the early scenes of Johnny and Sarah together are weird and cold, and not much of a shit seems to have been given. This is not because Cronenberg is adverse to, or unable to depict, human warmth and emotion; what he's adverse to is narrative formality, the doing of something in a story not because it is interesting but because it's the kind of thing that story's have in them. He likes to cut out what he doesn't need, which are those formalities. What's worse for him, I'd wager, is when those formalities are actually necessary, as they are in The Dead Zone -- obviously this is worse because that means he has no choice but to do them. And he races right through it all with his typical efficiency, but that doesn't serve to establish the kind of romance you might want down the line in a film like this.

But it doesn't matter, because of Walken. Cronenberg himself says he, Walken, is what the film is about:

The loneliness and the melancholy and the impossibility of dealing with things. And yet the necessity to do it. That's what it was. It's Chris Walken's face. That's the subject of the movie; that's what the movie was about. All the things that are in his face.

Walken plays Johnny, post-coma, as a man who is very nearly habitually rude. People will speak to him in a normal, polite kind of way, and he won't respond. He'll shake a hand but remain silent. His unhappiness over being outside his home, when he's visiting Zerbe's businessman, is apparent; he accepts a beer just to keep him from offering something else. When the deep-down truth of his situation as a man five years out of time really comes home to him, the shutting down begins. He quotes a line from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," about Ichabod Crane, that story's hero, to Sarah: "As he was a bachelor, and in nobody's debt, nobody troubled his head any more about him." Sarah asks "Is that what you're afraid of?" and Johnny replies "That's what I want." And this is precisely what Walken plays. He earns a living because he has to, but otherwise you get the feeling that the shot about midway through the film of Johnny lying silently on his couch depicts how he'd choose to spend all his time. He doesn't like to speak, and he's no longer good at it. Every so often, his situation will lead him into an outburst (most famously one that includes the line "The ice is gonna break!"), but he backs off from these as if ashamed. After one, he immediately apologies; after another, he changes his mind completely on the topic that led to his anger in the first place. But this power, and the lust by others to have this power work for them, is putting him in a spotlight he'd rather blow out with a rifle.

It's never said that Smith is suicidal, and since he's dying anyway you'd think the point would be moot. But who knows how long that will take? Among other things, I'd say The Dead Zone is a film about a man who develops a death wish. I suppose this is not quite the same thing as being suicidal, and plus being cripplingly introverted is going to cut down on the opportunities to try and fulfill that wish, but then he meets Stillson and Johnny's destiny is set on its course. Noted Pulitzer Prize-winning chowderhead Stephen Hunter once said that he thought The Dead Zone was a morally repugnant film as it seemed to him to justify or excuse political assassins. On numerous levels, this is rank nonsense. Also somewhat nonsensical is Rodley's (and Cronenberg's, actually) casual insistence that The Dead Zone contains actual politics in its makeup -- Rodley and Cronenberg bother to say this at all because politics are typically never a part of his films, but The Dead Zone is no different. Greg Stillson, we are told, is a third-party candidate, and his political beliefs are never laid out, other than that he believes that, as Johnny believes his own destiny is to die soon, Stillson's is to start a nuclear war. These are twinned destinies, you might say. In any case, nuclear war crosses the political aisles, and is an all-encompassing shadow. It's kind of a MacGuffin, or can be used that way. Anyway, it's the easiest way, plot-wise, for Stillson to fulfill his destiny, and the easiest thing for Johnny to understand so that he can decide to stop him. So again, Stephen Hunter, there's no excusing of political assassins here. Just because Stillson is an American doesn't change the fundamental idea, one expressed in a conversation between Weizak and Johnny, which is that this element of The Dead Zone's plot is a basic "if you could, would you kill Hitler?" scenario. And Stephen Hunter, if you're telling me that even if you could you would NOT kill Hitler, then fuck you, buddy, I guess you love genocide.

What I'm getting at, but not really, but what I mean to get at, is that Johnny is driven to his climactic actions only partly by his belief that it's the right thing to do. The rest of his motivation, which has been communicated over the last 90 minutes by Walken's face, is made up of what might even to him be a vague understanding that because he clearly won't get out of this mess alive, this mess is, therefore, his big chance. His death wish will be fulfilled. If you need to die, as Johnny does, but you're not suicidal, the moral imperative and martyrdom that Stillson has forced upon him is kind of a Godsend. "God's been a real sport to me," Johnny spits, sarcastically, at Tom Skerritt's sheriff when the man has the nerve to call Johnny's psychic abilities a gift from God. So maybe He hasn't been, but when that bullet passes through Johnny's chest, it could be His way of making it up to him.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 17: The Turkey Buzzards Perched

This is going to be a short one today. I'll explain why in a minute, but that wasn't my intention. My intention for today was to write a post not significantly different from most of the others I've written so far this month, with the potential there for something maybe a bit more interesting. This potential was there, I thought, because the source of today's stories was something I wasn't used to, specifically Granta, a UK-based literary magazine that subtitles itself "The Magazine of New Writing." It's a quarterly publication, roughly, and each issue had the length, physical dimensions, and heft of a trade paperback book. Each issue also has a central theme, and their Autumn 2011 issue was their horror issue. Observe:

You can see from that partial list of authors at the bottom there that a pretty diverse group of contributors has been represented. Given the fact that, as they say these days, I am "all about this, guys," I was cautiously excited about what Granta considered horror, the caution stemming from my uncertainty about what Granta considered horror. I chose to have it both ways by going the safe route with the Stephen King story, as well as the more unsure one with the Don DeLillo story. My instincts were dead on the money, as it turns out -- rather too on the money, because the King story is way too safe,and the DeLillo is so unsure, as a horror story anyway, that...well, it's not a horror story. It's dark, but so is Ragtime. Doesn't make it horror.

So that's why today's post is going to be short. I have almost nothing to say about either one, and am currently suffering from a mild bout of discouragement. Only in relation to this particular post and these particular stories (plus I'm having frustrating computer issues, but never mind), but it's enough to make me just shrug like a son of a bitch.

But anyway. The King story is called "The Dune." It's the second new King short story I've read in the past year and a half or so (and I expect a new fiction collection to be published just about any day now). The first one was "Herman Wouk is Still Alive," a non-horror story that was published in The Atlantic in May 2011. It's a great story, flawed, but fascinating, and finally in the last page, particularly the last couple of sentences, it becomes about as devestating and as angry as anything King has ever written. By contrast, "The Dune" reads like something he scribbled out over his morning cereal, in lieu of the daily crossword. It's about a 90-year-old conservative Southern ex-judge (his conservatism actually has no bearing on the story, it doesn't signal the man's villainy, which, given King's generally frothing political bullshit over the last few years, I was delighted by) who, as the story opens, we learn is addicted -- his words -- to rowing from his massive home across a short section of lake to a tiny island consisting almsot entirely of a single dune. There's a lot of stuff here about old age and mortality, common themes for King lately, though what the dune is, and why the judge is drawn to it, is saved for a scene that takes up the rest of the story, a long conversation between the judge and Wayland, his attorney. The purpose of the meeting is to finalize the judge's will, and along the way the judge decides, what the shit, I'll tell him about the dune. The dune, when you go there, you see a name written in the sand. Shortly afterwards, that person dies. You may know the person, you may not. But that's what happens. And then the story ends on a twist, the only twist a story like this could reasonably have, and King ends it with a EC Comics sting of italics. Okay, fine. Is this the best King had to offer Granta, or did he not care because he knew they'd publish whatever he gave them, or did Granta not care because they don't realize that King is capable of much better? I don't know, but it feels to me that King had an opportunity to restore some dignity to the genre and he muffed it. Maybe he thought talking about old age a lot would take care of that by itself.

Then we have DeLillo's story, "The Starveling," which can also be found in his recent story collection The Angel Esmerelda. For the record, I've read three DeLillo novels: Libra, which, despite my virulent hatred of conspiracy theories and theorists, I thought was actually kind of magnificent; Underworld, his 800-page monster, about which I don't remember a great deal, other than that, like pretty much everyone else who read it, I thought the sections that took place in the 1950s were so much better than everything else that it wasn't even a contest; and White Noise, the book that, if you've read one DeLillo novel, well, it's this one. And while that one got under my skin in certain personal ways, I largely did not care for. Smug and unfunny, even though it was supposed to be funny, mostly. So I'm undecided on the guy. Oh, plus, I read half of Mao II. My opinion of that oneis that I chose to only read half of it. "The Starveling," I must say, reminded me of Mao II more than anything else.

I don't know what to say about it, to be honest. It seems to have been inspired by this documentary I saw once about a particular kind of film fanatic, mostly New Yorkers apparently, who plan their entire lives around seeing several films a day, scheduling each day in a notebook and plotting the subway and bus routes to get from one screening to another, planning things out to the minute (I searched my Netflix rental history to find the title of this thing, and I can't -- strange). A strange and sad bunch, and the main character of "The Starveling," Leo Zhelezniak, is one of them. Leo lives with his ex-wife and the two barely get by, but still Leo chooses to spend most of his time this way. Nothing else matters, and his brain is so given over to it that he can't remember the haircut he got three days ago. One day, his schedule is disrupted when he sees a woman leaving the same screening as him, and he begins to follow her. He recognizes her as the same kind of film junkie as him, and knows that her next destination will be another movie theater. Turns out he's right, but along the way there's lots of this:

Always the sense of anticipation. To look forward to, invariably, whatever the title, the story, the director, and to be able to elude the specter of disappointment. There were no disappointments, ever, not for him, not for her. They were here to be enveloped, to be transcended. Something would fly past them, reaching back to take them with it.

That was the innocent surface, on loan from childhood. There was more but what was it? It was something he'd never tried to penetrate until now, the crux of being who he was and understanding why he needed this. He sensed it in her, knew it was there, the same half life. They had no other self. They had no fake self, no veneer. They could only be the one embedded thing they were, stripped of the faces that come naturally to others. They were bare-faced, bare souled, and maybe this is why they were here, to be safe.

Maybe this all means something to you, I don't know, but it reads like grasping phony garbage to me. Movies, as movies, mean nothing in this story -- only two, Apocalypse Now and The Passenger are mentioned by name -- and DeLillo's attempts to understand this very specific, outsider kind of filmgoer doesn't communicate to me any actual curiosity, and certainly no insight. That kind of filmgoer, if nothing else, absolutely knows their shit when it comes to the artform they obsess over. "Their shit" might be pedantic minutiae, but they know it, and it obsesses them. DeLillo can't really be bothered to even mimic that obsession, because, I suspect, he's not genuinely interested. He thinks it's odd, but every attempt to see through their eyes or think with their minds results in vague, "Movies take place in the dark, what about that, that do anything for you?"-style inanities.

As for horror...this isn't a horror story. That's not DeLillo's fault, I have little doubt that this was never his intention. I guess I blame Granta, but whatever. I don't care. Pffft.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 20: Please God Don't Let It

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I think what I'm going to do now, at least to close out the week, is slip back in time for a little while by revisiting horror writers I've already covered during past The Kind of Face You SLASH!!!es. The reason for this is twofold: first, last night I found myself in a bit of a panic because I hadn't picked out anything to read for today, and had no good ideas. There are always stories to choose from, but any sort of specific reason for choosing a given story was absent, and it's helpful to have one of those. The other reason is that, in some case, I feel like I've given major horror writers pretty short shrift -- I aboslutely gave both Peter Straub and Clive Barker short shrift last year, but in this instance I'm thinking of guys who aren't quite so close to being household names. So I have a couple of these posts on deck, and this weekend I'll be able to finish a couple of longer stories I'm reading, and hopefully be full of fresh ideas for the final week.

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To begin this miniseries of posts, however, I've chosen writers who aren't covered by either reason for doing this I've given above. The first writer, Ramsey Campbell, I devoted two posts to in 2008, or a post and a half: one he shared with M. R. James, and the other was all about his novel The Face That Must Die. Meanwhile, today's second author, Michael Chabon, has only written two horror stories his entire career, and after today I'll have covered both of them. My excuse is that I simply really wanted to read the two stories in question here, saw no reason to deny myself, and so there, that's it, that's all.

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But back to Ramsey Campbell. My problems with his writing -- and I mean that very specifically, because much of what stops me short with him is his actual prose -- are, I would think, pretty well chronicled in the two posts linked to above. I think I've flat-out stated that I don't really know how to describe the problem, but in thinking about this post, and the Campbell story I read for today, I hit on a sort-of explanation, which is this: often with Campbell, I'm convinced that what I'm seeing in my head as I read is not what he's intending me to see, because what I'm seeing is far more clunky and not so evocative as what he must have been shooting for. This, I'll grant you, is a supremely unhelpful bit of criticism, and entirely unfair to Campbell, probably, but it happens to some degree every time I read him. For instance, in today's story, "The Companion", Campbell writes about a "green glow" (only once, I believe, and it's not a vital piece of the story, but more on that later). Now, green glows in horror fiction are among my most hated things. Nothing that glows green is ever going to read to me as anything other than a cheap special effect, and wherever that glow is coming from is immediately divorced from any reality that I can at least buy into for the time it takes me to read the story or novel. This is the closest I can come right now to illustrating why Campbell often makes me grind my teeth, although it's more than that -- he can be talking about something mundane, but describe it in such a way that it fills my head all lopsided and full of needless corners. I don't know if anyone else has ever had this experience reading anybody, but that's where I am with Campbell.

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However, in "The Companion", there's also writing like this, decribing Stone, our protagonist, entering a "funfair", or amusement park:
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But there wasn't much to see. The machines looked faded and dusty. Cars like huge armchairs were lurching and spinning helplessly along a switchback, a canvas canopy was closing over an endless parade of seats, a great disc tasselled with seats was lifting toward the roof, dangling a lone couple over its gears. With so few people in sight it seemed almost that the machines, frustrated by inaction, were operating themselves. For a moment Stone had the impression of being shut in a dusty room where the toys, as in childhood tales, had come to life.

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Pretty good, I think. I chose "The Companion" because in the comments section of an earlier post, someone (I believe it was Bryce Wilson, but forgive me if I'm wrong) brought it up, saying that it was an exceptional story that might free me a little bit from my Campbell aversion, and also pointing me towards a passage in Danse Macabre, Stephen King's analysis of horror's history, in which King says:

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Several collections of [Campbell's] stories are available, the best of them probably being The Height of the Scream. A story you will not find in that book, unfortunately, is "The Companion"*, in which a lonely man who tours "funfairs" on his holidays encounters a horror beyond my ability to describe while riding a Ghost Train into its tunnel. "The Companion" may be the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years; it is surely one of half a dozen or so which will still be in print and commonly read a hundred years from now.

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As a plot synopsis, that's actually pretty much it, or as close to it as you should be willing to get regarding a story that's only about twelve pages long. I also share his reticence to describe the story's final horror, though less because I don't think I could -- hell, I could just quote it! -- but rather because, well, that's the big moment. It's the story's whole reason for being. It's the reason it's called "The Companion". And reading that moment last night, I thought "Okay. I get it. This time, at least, I get it. It wasn't entirely smooth, getting here, but if I read more stuff by Campbell that was as eerie as this, or this close to just plain terrifying, it would be much easier for me to understand his reputation." I probably didn't think all that in just those words, but so what. "The Companion" is a very fine story that needs to be read to have any sense of why it's so good. King's praise for it is perhaps a bit excessive in my view, but matters of degree such as these are not worth arguing about.

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So on to Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who I feel is quite overrated, but who has written a grand total of two short horror stories that I like very much. The background to Chabon's interest and dabblings in horror are discussed in the above-linked post, but basically this is something Chabon has been working through at least since Wonder Boys, before he'd revealed how heavily into genre fiction this capital "L" literary writer really was. He even announced a collection of horror fiction was in the offing soon after Wonder Boys was published, but it never happened. Still, Wonder Boys was 1995, and when his collection of stories Werewolves in Our Youth appeared in 1999, it contained a horror story called "In the Black Mill" (it was also attributed to August Van Zorn, for reasons also covered in that earlier post). That's the story I read in 2008, and I was pretty fond of it, despite making a sort of gimmick, or gag, out the Lovecraft influences, such as naming the region in Pennsylvania where the story takes place "Yuggoghenny", which is a very Lovecraftian way to spell something. But Chabon powered through those nervous tics to produce a story of real originality and strength, with a killer ending. "More!" is what I demanded.

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Well, it's 2010, and here we have a whole brand new short story called "The God of Dark Laughter" (don't know where it first appeared, but I read it in the second volume of Peter Straub's American Fantastic Tales). Here's how it begins:

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Thirteen days after the Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. Circus left Ashtown, beating a long retreat toward its winter headquarters in Peru, Indiana, two boys out hunting squirrels in the woods along Portwine Road stumbled on a body that was dressed in a mad suit of purple and orange velour.

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I don't know about you, but that's a story I'm going to want to finish. Which I did, obviously, and what we have is Chabon attempting -- with some success, I believe -- to advance, or flesh out, his own version of Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories, complete with his own race of maniacal gods who live in space, and whose return to Earth will signal doom for us all. The way Chabon sees it, there is (at least) Ai, "the God Who Mourns", and what Ai mourns is the fact that the universe is a meaningless whirlpool of suffering; and then there is Ye-Heh, "the God of Dark and Mocking Laughter", and what he's mocking is the same thing that Ai is mourning. All of this comes from the acts of Yrrh (again, these letter combinations are all very familiar to readers of Lovecraft), the "father-god", who:

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...an eternity ago, tossed the cosmos over his shoulder like a sheet of fish wrap and wandered away leaving not a clue as to his intentions...

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Ai and his followers think that's terrible. Ye-Heh and his followers think it's hysterical. The murder of the clown, and its investigation by Ashtown's district attorney (our narrator) form the point at which those followers clash. And it all takes place in the Yuggoghenny region of Pennsylvania.

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I still think Chabon should shed a bit of his, I believe, nervous and self-conscious attitude towards writing this stuff. It does seem to make him insecure, and if his ambition in this arena is to create a cycle of stories similar to Lovecraft's, then he should probably produce them at a rate faster than one every eleven years. But these are excellent stories, both of them, and I'm much more keen to see what this Michael Chabon does next than the one who rakes in the prizes and scales the bestseller lists and all that. This is the really interesting Chabon. More, please.

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*The story can, however, be found in his later collection Dark Companions.

Very Poor Devil

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Moral gray areas. That's what serious artists often claim they like to examine. "Here," they say. "Here's a movie I wrote. What it does is, is it presents you with a man who does things that are so awful that you know you should be plainly disgusted by him. But you find yourself rooting for him, despite everything. Why is that? What is it about us that we can so easily find a link to such men? Are we all beasts inside? Or do we at least recognize the potential for violence, under certain circumstances, within each of our breasts? Also, it stars Antonio Banderas." So you take the the movie they wrote, and you watch it. Turns out it's about this hitman, a brooding, tortured man who has found, perhaps to his dismay, and against his own values, that the work he's best at is killing other human beings. This work proves highly remunerative, but his soul is dying. Except that, by the way, he does have his own private code under which he works, which says that he will only execute other killers, assassins less scrupulous than he, or tyrants, or members of secret government cabals who plot to blow up all the oceans so that they can become even richer! This hitman won't kill just anybody. And that movie is called Grosse Point Blank, and it stars John Cusack, not Antonio Banderas.

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The point is, all that "moral gray area" bunk the guy was peddling was pure snake oil. We're not stupid. We know we're watching a movie, so a little violence directed towards those who would perpetrate cold-blooded, black and white evil on the world is something we can accept, especially if the person dealing that violence is a bit conflicted about it. "Oh, look," we might think. "He doesn't even want to be doing this. It's tearing him up inside! I'm really glad he shot that one guy, though, the one who recorded himself torturing single mothers, and then sold the videos to heads of corporations who think such things are funny. That guy was a real fucker."

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So we're complicit in this hypocritical bullshit, but Grosse Point Blank, for instance, had the good grace to be funny, and I wish I had it on DVD, because that might be good to watch tonight. Be funny, be entertaining, and I'll probably nod along with all the phony moralistic hokum that you didn't have the balls to go all the way with. I just won't take you that seriously.

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Where was I going with all this? Oh, right. Horns, by Joe Hill.

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Joe Hill's new novel begins with our protagonist, Ignatius Perrish (or "Ig", as I rapidly tired of seeing him referred to), finishing up a colossal drunk by urinating all over the plastic religious icons set out in the woods, as a memorial to Ig's murdered girlfriend. It is at this spot that Merrin Williams was murdered, by Ig, or so many people in the town believe. But there is no proof, so Ig is never charged. Yet he's tortured by the circumstances that led him to leave Merrin alone that night, a year ago, when she was killed, as well as his new role as town pariah, so he "spends the night drunk, doing terrible things", such as urinating on her memorial, and then when he wakes up in the morning, he has two horns growing out of his head.

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So far, so good. That was my reaction anyway, because as a sometime fan of Hill's short fiction, I thought a novel about a formally ordinary man, beat to the ground by grief and spiritually wrecked, transforming into a demon, or maybe even the Devil himself, is a pretty terrific premise. But as you might have guessed by now, Hill is playing the same spurious game as I described earlier. Ig is, after all, a demon, or becoming a demon, when we first meet him. And everyone he meets senses this, and after a blinking, confused reaction to his horns, proceed to confess to him all of their worst, most secret urges. Here, Ig is trying to get help regarding his horns -- he thinks he might be hallucinating due to a brain tumor -- from a local clinic, but the doctor has other things on his mind:
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"To be honest," Renald said, "it's a little hard to concentrate on your problem. I keep thinking about the [Oxycontin] in my briefcase and this girl my daughter hangs out with. Nancy Hughes. God, I want her ass. I feel sort of sick when I think about it, though. She's still in braces."

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"Please," Ig said. "I'm asking for you medical opinion -- your help. What do I do?"

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"Fucking patients," the doctor said. "All any of you care about is yourselves."

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See? So at least he's trying to be funny. This kind of exchange, by the way, almost completely accounts for the novel's first forty pages, and I may not have to tell you that it gets really damn old, really damn fast. But in that time, it's not hard to notice a certain trend, which is that all the worst confessions come from people that Hill has decided we shouldn't like. And not just the specific characters, but rather the kinds of characters. The doctor, a man of authority, is a pervert. The nurse Ig met just moments before confessed merely to wanting to take her anger at a neglectful parent further than society would deem appropriate. Ig's girlfriend only wanted to eat a whole box of doughnuts, while the policemen he meets later want to brutalize him -- beat him with their nightsticks and possibly, what the hell, rape him. A nun confesses to being lonely, oppressed, a closeted lesbian who only wants to be happy. The priest, on the other hand, blithely confesses to screwing the mother of Ig's murdered girlfriend. So Ig leaves the priest gasping under a barbell, and helps the nun escape to a new life, aided by stolen church funds.

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And so it goes, throughout the novel, the plot of which, by the way, revolves around Ig's discovery of who actually murdered Merrin -- it was Lee Tourneau, his best friend from childhood, a fact you learn early on, before you even meet the character -- his quest for justice, and a series of idyllic, bittersweet flashbacks to his younger days, his life with Merrin, and Lee, and Ig's family, especially his brother Terry, now, like their father, a successful trumpet player (horns, you see) and late night talk show host.

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I'm not sure that Hill had any idea what kind of character he was creating with Ig. When he leaves the priest under the heavily-weighted barbell, I got the sense we weren't supposed to care much what happened to the priest, because Hill already told us what a dick the guy was. Plus, he helped that sad nun! Not long after, however, he pushes his elderly, wheelchair bound grandmother down a steep hill outside his family home and watches her frail body crash into a fence at, he guesses, about forty miles-per-hour. Ah, but here's what he learns about his grandmother after touching her wrist (another one of his powers):

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His grandmother, he learned then, had no hip pain at all but liked people pushing her here and there in the wheelchair and waiting on her hand and foot...She especially liked to order around her daughter, who thought her shit didn't stink because she was rich enough to wipe with twenty-dollar bills...It was Vera's [the grandmother] privately held belief that Ig knew what his mother had been -- a cheap whore -- and that it had led to a pathological hate of women and was the real reason he had raped and killed Merrin Williams...[who] had been a frisky little gold digger...

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So she hates everybody, and faked her way into that wheelchair. But hold on, she's still a frail eighty-year-old woman, and Ig still pushed her down a hill and into a fence. Unpleasant as she may be, that still makes Ig pretty hard to root for. Well, Joe Hill has anticipated your uncertainty, and we learn some time later that the old bat's fine! A little banged up but, crucially, Ig didn't kill her. Shouldn't have done it, maybe, but no real consequences to be het up about, so you can put your rooting caps back on.

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Much later in the book, Ig is asked by another character how he came to have those horns, these new powers, such a devilish appearance and demeanor. Ig says "Without Merrin in my life...I was this."

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The Devil is in us all without true love and whatnot, except for two things: Hill goes out of his way to make a case for the goodness -- of a sort -- of the Devil, Biblically speaking, and he also seems to forget that he's painted a reasonably full portrait of the young Ig, before he had Merrin, and guess what? He was a fucking peach! He helped people, giving Lee (who he believes saved him from drowning when they were teenagers) money and CDs when he thought Lee had nothing. Hill repeatedly tells us -- and I mean, repeatedly -- that Ig was a terrible liar, because lying made him sick. In short, he was a good kid. Oh, sure, we're told that the young Ig does some maneuvering so that the young Lee won't pursue the young Merrin, but he doesn't maneuver dishonestly, and besides, given that years later Lee will rape and murder Merrin, Ig wouldn't have been out of line if he'd skipped past the aforementioned maneuvering and simply pushed Lee under a train. So what's all this "I was this" business? You were what? A nice guy whose horns hadn't grown out yet? Physically grotesque, but still a person who would forever prove that it's what you're like on the inside that really counts? I mean, it's not like you were a priest, or a cop, or anything like that.

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Horns is really, for all it's profanity and perverse sexual shenanigans, something of a PC joke. The truly good guys are given nothing truly bad to live down, and the bad guys are never given anything truly good to cloud our view of them. Men are the worst, authority figures worse yet, and there's not a moment of gray in the whole damn thing.

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(In fairness, I must add that there is a scene involving a Christian Conservative politician, and Hill portrays the man with a surprising amount of sympathy. It's brief, however, and the implications of the scene go a pretty far way towards erasing that sympathy, at least in my eyes.)

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To truly illustrate this, late in the book Hill gives us a scene with Merrin's still-grieving father. Since this is a pretty good guy, Merrin's dad, he doesn't confess anything too bad to Ig, and later becomes a bit philosophical:
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"...My father wouldn't let me take the theology course I wanted, but he couldn't stop me from auditing it. I remember the teacher, a black woman, Professor Tandy, she said that Satan turns up in a lot of other religions as the good guy..."

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And stop. Now, listen. Joe Hill's dad is Stephen King, and King has in the past been called out by critics for portraying his minority characters, specifically his black characters, as one-note saints, magical souls whose only purpose is to help the more important white characters. Though I personally think a bit too much is made of this, it's not like those critics are basing it on nothing -- there's Mother Abigail in The Stand, Halloran in The Shining, John Coffey in The Green Mile, and possibly others I'm forgetting. But at least in King's novels the black characters get a look in. Despite what the critics say, even despite the validity of what they're saying, Mother Abigail, Halloran and Coffey are allowed to be more than just black. Joe Hill turns the only reference to a black person in the entirety of Horns into a politically correct non sequitor. Why would Dale Merrin feel it necessary to point out, apropos of not a goddamn thing, that the professor in question was a black woman? Because she's the one, indirectly, whose going to explain the whole thematic structure of the book, and you can't have a white guy do that. What would people say? The fact is, the race (or gender) of this never seen, and never again referred to, professor is entirely irrelevent. Why does Hill seem to think it is?

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Well, so that's it. Oh, the book ends with a sort of chase, and snake bites and stabbings, and it's all pretty tedious, but at least it signalled to me that the end was nigh. And to that, I say "Thank God."

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 22: We Are Ambivelant About Violence

After writing about Stephen King the other day, I figured it was only fair and reasonable to take a look at two other horror writers who came along in his wake, achieved a great deal of success, but are both still oddly considered more cult figures that best-selling authors. The thing is, they both are best-selling authors, but because, rightly or wrongly, each is considered better King: these guys are sometimes talked about as the real artists of the genre, as compared to the more populist King..
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I'm talking, of course, about Peter Straub and Clive Barker. The three writers were commonly lumped together in the old days, often by critics, and often for the purposes of denigrating King. Of course, King is inextricably linked to both men, because he's co-written two novels with Straub (The Talisman, which did neither author any favors in my view, and its sequel Black House, which I haven't read, but I've always thought it sounded kind of interesting), and when Barker's series of story collections, The Books of Blood, first hit American stores, they were emblazoned with the now rather infamous King quote: "I have seen the future of horror, and its name is Clive Barker."

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I've read a certain amount of both Straub and Barker's work, though in my younger days I was never anywhere near as devoted to them as I was to King (I didn't even think I liked Barker very much, until I got older). Straub, I always thought -- and still do, sometimes -- was a tiny bit ponderous, though I suspect that, at his best anyway, he's really just demanding patience from the reader, which, at my worst, is something I'm sorely lacking. The point is, his books don't start off guns a-blazin', and since, like King (and Barker, while I'm at it) his books have a problem with bloat, it's sometimes hard for me to work up a head of steam while reading him. And, for the record, I've never read his most famous novel, Ghost Story. I saw the film, which no doubt has delayed my reading of the book, but it's still kind of inexcusable. But, so you know, I've made my way through Shadowlands, If You Could See Me Now and The Hellfire Club, and I've run hot and cold on each of them. Shadowlands had a wonderful sense of place and character, but the ending was too big and neat, a complaint, in fact, that could apply to the other novels I've read, as well -- If You Could See Me Now ends with fireworks, betraying the quiet dread that preceded it, as well as an intriguingly flawed hero, and The Hellfire Club squandered a great villain and great premise on a standard thriller ending. However, I've also read a novella by Straub called Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, from his collection Magic Terror, and although I didn't then, and don't now, quite know what to make of it, it is by a huge margin the best and most interesting piece by Straub I've read. And Straub himself has admitted to a particular fondness for that story. The evidence is strong that long horror novels are a dead end, and perhaps many of the people who write them know that, as well.

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Clive Barker's another story. His stuff was strange and unpredictable right from the beginning, and even though it was full of the kind of sex and violence that has become too much of a staple in the genre, in a carrot-that-wags-the-dog kind of way, you also never knew how far he would go. More importantly, when you read a story like "In the Hills, the Cities", with its feud between two villages acted out in the most berserk fashion imaginable, or "The Body Politic", with its sea of disembodied hands, you know full well that he's not clinging to the coattails of a past master. Even though I've always had issues with Barker -- those early stories weren't all winners, for instance, and his take on Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is, frankly, plain stupid -- he was always thrilling to read. The very act of reading his work, as a young kid, felt positively transgressive, in fact, "In the Hills, the Cities" and "The Skins of the Fathers" in particular. But guess what happened when I started reading his novels? Great ideas with a lot of padding. Barker himself has said of The Damnation Game, his first novel, that he thought at the time that he was writing a real page-turner, until he went back to it years later and found it kind of a slog. Well, me too! Due to the Hollywood backdrop, his later novel Coldheart Canyon, flies along much more smoothly, but is also not as successful. The right people live, and the right people die, and Barker's transgressions begin to seem more calculated.

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All of which sounds a great deal more negative than it probably should. The fact is, I truly like both these writers, and admire the hell out of them, too. Neither of them write to a market (though it could be argued that Barker has all but created his own market), and both stand apart from the crowded world of horror fiction as being eminent talents who, frankly, probably are better than Stephen King. But a frustration with their work remains.

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The Barker story I chose for today is a relatively recent one called "Haeckel's Tale" (it can be found, among other places, in volume 17 of Stephen Jones's Best New Horror series), and what I found sort of odd about it is that it's probably the most traditional horror story I've seen from Barker, at least as far as its structure is concerned, while retaining the outre' sex and violence he's known for. The story is told as a double flashback: it's narrated, ostensibly, by an aging scientist and philosopher who we know only as Theodore, who tells the story of a night in 1822 when his circle of philosopher pals got together, as they often did, to get drunk and talk politics, science, and so on. On that night, spurred by a discussion of a man named Montesquino (I must admit that at first I very nearly read that name as "Mansquito") who'd recently Hamburg -- where the story is set -- claiming to be a necromancer, or a "scientist" who supposedly could commune with, and raise, the dead. Completely dismissed by the majority of the group, including Theodore, one among them wonders if maybe they're not being too hasty. His name is Ernst Haeckel, and, after some pressure, he agrees to tell them why he thinks necromancy might be legitimate.

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"Then listen," Haeckel said. "What I'm about to tell you is absolutely true, though by the time I get to the end of it you may not welcome me into this room, because you may think I am a little crazy. More than a little, perhaps."

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And his story is quite something. Briefly, ten years ago, Haeckel was obliged to walk back to his hometown of Luneburg to visit his ailing father. This journey would take days, and at one point he was caught in a terrible rainstorm. Attempting to bed down among trees by the side of the road, he was warned away from doing so by an old man named Walter Wolfram, who tells him, "It would not be wise for you to sleep here tonight." The reason it wouldn't be wise is because the spot Haeckel has chosen is actually part of an old graveyard. Made uneasy by this fact, against his scientific nature, Haeckel agrees to accompany Wolfram to his own, where he will have a hot meal and a bed. He will also meet Wolfram's beautiful young wife, Elise; hear, in the night, Elise's baby crying (a baby he was not told about during the trio's conversations before bed); and secretly witness a curious exchange of money between Wolfram and a mysterious and off-putting Englishman named Doctor Skal. Later that night, Elise leaves the house. Where to, Haeckel doesn't know.

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Confronting Wolfram about the scenes he has witnessed -- which also include seeing a desperate and wild-looking Elise staring out the window while rubbing her crotch -- he learns that Elise's first husband died, and that Doctor Skal is a necromancer. Believing this "science" to be pure fraud, intended, by the perpetrator, to not only separate women from their money, but often from their clothes and, let's say, dignity, Haeckel races after Elise, imagining himself rescuing her for the depraved Doctor Skal. What he eventually finds belongs to the category "things that can't be unseen".

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It occurs to me that anyone reading this summary might come to a pretty accurate assumption about what Haeckel sees, but that's okay. As I said, this is, in its own way, a very traditional horror story, pulling its structure from the classic works of writers like M. R. James. I've never been entirely clear what the originators of this kind of second-hand narrative felt was the benefit of this structure, but, for whatever reason, it's absolute catnip to me. I think one thing it achieves is a plain telling of the story, and the horrors that lie within, while maintaining a distance by regarding everything at the level of a rumor. And the distance doesn't relate to intimacy with the characters -- Haeckel's emotions are palpable, as are Wolfram and Elise's -- but rather to reality. Again, what happens in these stories, at least the modern versions, is often made more or less explicit, but not only is it being told to you after the fact -- it's being told to you by someone who wasn't even there in the first place. He just heard it from a guy. It's like an urban legend, in that sense, and, as such, allows the mystery to remain, despite the fact that we've "seen" everything. Of course, the way such stories manage this is to basically cheat, but if it works, it works, and Barker's story works.

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Is "Haeckel's Tale" all that original? No, which is the other odd thing about it. Barker's been dining out almost exclusively on his truly formidable imagination for decades. After something like "In the Hills, the Cities" -- which I view as his signature story, despite the fact that the films Hellraiser and Candyman are based on his fiction, -- he was almost obligated to. But "Haeckel's Tale", however graphic, in a very modern way, its final pages, is very intentionally part of a form, and a tradition. His creative mind doesn't get much of a peak in, and yet he's able to find in tradition the fundamental effectiveness of the genre, and the story, ultimately, just sails.

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Meanwhile, the story I read by Peter Straub is...what is it again? It's called "A Short Guide to the City" (it can be found in his collection Houses Without Doors) and I'll be straight with you -- there's not a whole lot I can say about it. There is no story, as such, and while there are people in it, there are no characters. "A Short Guide to the City" is what the title says it is: a guide through an American city, albeit an unnamed one, that seems to be written with the intent to lure tourists, while achieving the opposite effect. This description makes it sound a little like a gimmick, but it's far from that.

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We are introduced to this city by being told about the "viaduct killer", a serial murderer who is plaguing the town:

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The viaduct killer, named for the location where his victims' bodies have been discovered, is still at large. There have been six victims to date, found by children, people exercising their dogs, lovers, or -- in one instance -- by policemen. The bodies lay sprawled, their throats slashed, partially sheltered by one or another of the massive concrete supports at the top of the slope beneath the great bridge. We assume that the viaduct killer is a resident of the city, a voter, a renter or property owner, a product of the city's excellent public school system, perhaps even a parent of children who even now attend one of its seven elementary schools, three public high schools, two parochial schools, or single nondenominational private school.

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From there, we are, indeed, guided through the city, where we learn about the different districts and enclaves, subcultures and historic buildings, as well as all their strange rites and legends. Broadly realistic in much of his description of the city, occasionally -- and increasingly, as the story goes along -- Straub will add a bit of information that is pure dark fantasy, though not, technically impossible. Such as the stories about the rich citizens owning private zoos, or the bohemian "memorists" who live in the ghetto, who memorize the work of all the artists in the area, regardless of the medium, in order to preserve the work. This is in lieu of painting on canvas, or writing on paper.

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There is much that is darker about this city, about how violence permeates it, and how its citizens deal with that violence ("The ghetto's relationship to violence is unknown"). Some handle it badly, and throughout our guide, whoever he or she may be, will pause in their tour to tell us whether or not the viaduct killer is believed to hail from a particular part of town. And then there is the bridge, the great unfinished bridge, which serves as the city's symbol of violence, due to its relation to the idea of this "interrupted or left undone". The citizens regards the "Broken Span", as some call the bridge, with a great deal of trepidation; meanwhile, the bridge seems to have exacted a psychological toll on those gaze upon it:
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In the days before access to the un-bridge was walled off by an electrified fence, two or three citizens each year elected to commit their suicides by leaping from the end of the span; and one must resort to a certain legical violence when referring to it.

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"Elected to commit their suicides"...what a wonderful, horrible, strange little turn of phrase that is. Overall, "A Short Guide to the City" is very reminiscent of the fiction of one of my favorite writers, Steven Millhauser, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler is about a man who builds elaborate hotels, and large chunks of the the book are given over to intricate, awed, but clinical descriptions of these amazing buildings. Many of Millhauser's stories, in fact, simply describe entirely imagined towns and societies, often with a tinge of unease. Straub, who has expressed a great admiration for Millhauser in the past, has written his own version of such a story: a narrative without people and whose true story is hidden. And while violence permeates "A Short Guide to the City", it is kept "off-screen", as it were, and is only one source of the horror. The other source, we learn, can be found in the act of waiting. You can read the story to find out what I mean by that, but I think we can all agree that this should be regarded as unusual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"Did you know you were going down?"

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

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

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

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

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 12: You Don't Really Know Either of Us

I approached the prospect of writing about Joe Hill today with a curious enthusiasm. "Curious" because I felt his much-praised first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, threw a rod no later than the halfway mark, and went from a bit of an intriguing high-wire act -- which I say based on its fairly absurd premise -- to an utterly rote spook-show full of mysterious green glows and convenient talismans that are put to use just in the nick of time. However, by that time I'd also read his short story called "Best New Horror", a story I've mentioned in passing around here once or twice. That was such an unusual, unnerving and wonderful story that I knew it couldn't have been a fluke. And I knew that his collection of short fiction, 20th Century Ghosts, was full of stories that have had horror fans, critics and fellow writers absolutely unable to contain themselves about this incredible new talent. I'm not even really being sarcastic -- the praise has been effusive. But so it was with Heart-Shaped Box. Hence, "curious" and "enthusiasm".

The other thing about Joe Hill is that he's Stephen King's* son. I don't know when he copped to this exactly, but I think it was right around the time that Heart-Shaped Box came out, and after I'd read "Best New Horror". Whether that was planned on his part, or whether people started actually seeing pictures of the guy and saying "Hey, wait a minute", I don't know. The beans were going to be spilled eventually, unless Hill wanted to truly commit hardcore to the life of a pseudonymous writer, which he obviously didn't, and I can't blame him. The thing is, though, he's Stephen King's son. And he writes horror fiction. Martin Amis -- son, of course, of the great Kingsley Amis -- once said that as the child of a famous author who himself becomes a writer, you get "one free book". Meaning that, unlike so many struggling writers, you will get your first book published, but after that you're on your own. I don't remember if Amis has ever addressed the question of fairness with which that first book is received, but Hill might well have either been unfairly shat on, or unfairly fawned over. Clearly, the former didn't happen, and, despite my reservations, I don't really think the latter has happened, either.
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So I pulled 20th Century Ghosts off the shelf, and the good news is that "Best New Horror" wasn't a fluke. The bad news is that neither was Heart-Shaped Box. The bad news comes in the form of "The Black Phone", a story about a kid named Johnny (not "John", of course. If you're a kid in a horror story, you'll go by the diminutive form of your name, and you'll damn well like it) who, while waiting outside a convenience store to be picked up by his father, gets kidnapped by a fat guy named Al. A feature of the con Al uses to entice Johnny towards his van is a flock of black balloons, released from the van's rear door, and here Hill does show his writing chops by describing the balloons as being the color of "sealskin", and making Johnny think of "poisoned grapes".

Once Johnny is again of clear mind, he immediately realizes who Al is -- which, in brief, is the serial killer who has been targeting kids in the area. Johnny even vaguely knew one of Al's earlier victims, a guy named Brian Yamada, against whom Johnny once faced off in baseball. Since Brian is dead, Johnny knows that he will rapidly follow suit unless he can think of some way out of the basement Al has locked him in. But the basement is, of course, virtually barren, save two things: the mattress Johnny sleeps on, and an old black rotary phone mounted on the wall. Al tells him that the phone doesn't work, although it does occasionally ring -- due to static electricity, Al believes. Obviously, the phone rings for Johnny, too, and while he occasionally puts the receiver to his ear only to hear dead air, he does eventually hear a voice on the other end.
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As you knew he would, and I bet you also know who those voices are. The truth is that I was attracted to "The Black Phone" by the title. In an indefinable way, I just thought it sounded creepy. I thought there would be much more to what Al was about than simply another in a long line of John Wayne Gacy stand-ins, and that the phone would be something more interesting than a conduit for helpful ghosts. In fairness, of its type, "The Black Phone" is a decent story, but it's also not the kind of story you're likely to remember, or tell anyone about, unless you're the proprietor of a blog that requires you to. Furthermore, I'm aware, or at least suspicious that this is a possibility, that my demand for pure originality in horror fiction might sound both unreasonable and slightly rabid (at least, I sometimes think it does). An entirely original story, or as near as is possible, is not something I find myself demanding of crime fiction, my other favorite genre. But of course, the crime genre allows for a very finite amount of imagination -- there are only so many types of crimes to write about, and once you cut out things like trespassing and drunk in public, you're left with, like, two around which you can reasonably construct a story, whereas in horror fiction you're limited only by your own creative powers.

Not only that, I've always been struck by something Hemingway once said, which of course I can't find now, but basically he said that a writer needs to create something new every time out, but if you can't do that, you at least need to beat the guys who came before you. I would change that slightly to say that you at least need to want to beat the guys who came before you. Which is mighty big talk coming from me, an "aspiring" writer who has never published a word professionally, but, damn it, I know what I think is good, and with the "The Black Phone", Joe Hill wasn't trying to beat anybody. You read "The Black Phone", and you think, "Oh, yeah. I've read bunches of stories like that. What this is, is another one of those, I guess." And that's exactly how I felt about Heart-Shaped Box.

Ah, but wait, because I also read a story by Joe Hill called "My Father's Mask", and that, my friends, is a story I'd never read before. I picked it because, in his introduction, Christopher Golden says that "'My Father's Mask'" is so weird and upsetting that it made me giddy." And I'm here to tell you that it's both of those things. I didn't quite become giddy, but I can at least understand Golden's reaction..

In this story, a 13-year-old kid named Jack is traveling with his parents to an old family vacation home, left empty following his grandfather's sudden and unpleasant death. This death -- brought about by accidentally falling into an empty elevator shaft -- happened some years ago, and the trip to the vacation house comes, for Jack, completely out of the blue. He had plans for the evening that have now been scuttled by his parents, who are a bit cagey about the motives behind the trip. But they're also entirely chipper about it, especially Jack's mother, who tries to pass the time by playing a strange game with her son, involving a story, apparently created off the top of her head, about Jack's father being harassed at work by rumors spread by the "playing-card people". The playing-card people have caused his well-to-do parents to lose all their money, and will soon be coming after Jack. This is why Jack and his parents are now going to the vacation home. This game -- not this exact game, but ones like it -- appears to be something of a common thing between Jack and his mother. By the end of this story, this fact, as well as the fact that Jack's mother gently cuts off her husband when he attempts to take part, gains a bit of significance that is only just unexplainable.
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When they reach the house -- a place Jack hasn't been to since he was very young -- they find the walls festooned with party masks, the small ones you wear over your eyes; all different colors and styles, hanging everywhere. When Jack asks what the masks are for, his mom says:
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"Every vacation home ought to have a few masks lying around. What if you want a vacation from your own face? I get awfully sick of being the same person day in, day out."
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Jack will go on to find another mask in his own room, which his mother will talk him into wearing. He will also have what he believes to be a nightmare, in which a boy in a white nightgown, with silver eyes and teeth, rides an old-fashioned bicycle into the vacation home's front yard. This dream will drive Jack into his parents' bed, and when he wakes in the morning, he will be alone in the bed, but will see his dad unzipping a suitcase, while standing completely naked, wearing only his own mask -- a clear one that "squashed the features beneath, flattening out of their recognizable shapes." His father's expression is otherwise blank, and the two do not exchange words. When Jack hurries down to the kitchen, he finds his mother, wearing a "sex-kitten" mask of her own, a long t-shirt, and suggestive black panties. The conversation between the two that follows between mother and son is both natural on the surface, and, somehow, entirely wrong.
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There is much more that is deeply weird about this story, but I'm not going to tell you about it, so I hope that I've given you some sense that this story is about as far removed from "The Black Phone" as it's possible to be, and still be of the same genre. Joe Hill has a solid talent for evoking strangeness, the kind that is perhaps not immediately threatening, but which can freak you out more than the most lovingly described decapitation. As a reader of contemporary horror fiction, you may not even be aware that you miss this kind of writing, until you find yourself reading it for once. It's hard to explain why this sort of thing, when done well, is so effective and not sound hopelessly boring about it, to the point that you come close to castrating the story itself. The truly strange in art is at its most compelling, in my view, before people like, well, frankly, like myself have had a chance to really get their hooks into it and rob it of its power by trying to infuse it with meaning. Which is not to say that it must be meaningless, but you should never feel comfortable that the meaning you've carved out of the story, or film, is "correct". It's the assault against what we take to be normal and proper, the chaos of "My Father's Mask" that lingers. As Christopher Golden said, this story is weird and upsetting. To me, that is what the story means.
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And, though not in quite the same way, that's how I feel about Hill's "Best New Horror". Hill is a writer of real talent, and great potential, a potential that has occasionally been realized. He has a new novel in the pipeline, and whatever I might have thought of his last one, Joe Hill has earned another look.
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*I've thought about doing a post about Stephen King, but I'm worried that no one cares anymore. What more needs to be said, pro or con, after all? Any thoughts?