The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 16: Love of Cruelty

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Well, the time has come for me to once again take the easy route and delve into the world of the short short story (seriously, is there no other name for this form?). As is my habit, I grab a handful of these things, read them, and do a usually not-literally bullet point run down of them. The last two years of The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! have been slightly hampered in this regard, from my point of view, by the fact that I have two big collections of these kinds of stories, but for the longest time could only find one, 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories, edited by Al Sarrantonio and Martin H. Greenberg. Well, in the time between last Oct. 31 and today, I found the other one, called 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and, yes, Martin H. Greenberg. I'm trilled, I must say, because not only do I have a new pool from which to draw, but these ones are about creatures.

I'll begin with the least of the bunch, "The Gargoyle Sacrifice" by Tina L. Jens. It's about a 14-year-old Goth girl named Marissa, whose 18-year-old boyfriend Rudy has pressured her to get her nipples pierced, and in the skeevy tattoo/piercing parlor and occult store where they've gone to have this done, Marissa finds her eye caught by clunky-sounding gargoyle necklace, the ruby stone prominently featured therein being "the size of the lenses in her Lennon glasses." It was right about here that I said "Oh, Jesus", and I was right to do so. Jens piles on the terrestrial horrors for Marissa to endure, before bringing in the dull otherworldly version. The shrug-inducing nature of "The Gargoyle Sacrifice" is highlighted by the big payoff at the end, in which a character we've never met and know very little about meets with a demon or Satan, and we find out why what just happened just happened. What's so goofy and anti-climactic about this scene is that the guy talking to the demon says "There, I've done this terrible thing a whole bunch of times, so that should cover my end of the deal," and the demon says "No, you haven't done it enough...you have to do it seven more times!!!" And that's it. The number seven, as opposed to eight, or six, is ,I suppose, meant to add that last little chill.

"The Gargoyle Sacrifice" highlights the dangers of the short short story by showing that the unusually abbreviated length is not always the result of having a particular idea that suits the form, or the wish to play with said form, but of having not much of an idea and not developing it enough to reach past three or four pages. Two stories that have a better grasp of the form are "Dark Brother" by Donald R. Bruleson and "The Feather Pillow" by Horacio Quiroga. The brevity of "Dark Brother" is justified in part by the fact that it's told from the point of view of a family cat. I most disdainful family cat, who is aware, while its lumpish owners are not, that a malicious spirit lurks within their home. The cat revels in the spirit's torment of the man and woman who foolishly believe they own their house, and "Dark Brother" chronicles the cat's truncated view of the proceedings. The story goes where you'd think, with no surprises, but the fate of the couple is describe with a disturbing restraint, and a lack of empathy, that is very effective:

[Dark Brother] shoots out a tendril to thicken upon her and take her down, moaning, in the hallway, where, pulsating, he worries at her face until the screaming stops.

That "worries at her face" is unpleasantly evocative, I think.

Like "Dark Brother", Qurioga's "The Feather Pillow" shrinks a fairly large chunk of time down to a few pages, and I find this approach to time to be the most effective in this format. It allows for a certain style and gloss that something like "The Gargoyle Sacrifice" doesn't understand. Qurioga's story is about a pair of newlyweds, Alicia and Jordan. Upon returning from their honeymoon, Alicia finds her new home badly contributing to her already nervous demeanor, to the point where she's first terrified, and then ill. "The Feather Pillow" charts her rapid decline, at the end providing evidence that what's behind her sickness is a horror staple before revealing a far stranger truth. What I liked best about "The Feather Pillow" is the last paragraph, which transforms the story from a straight piece of horror into an almost zoological cautionary tale.

To round things off, I went with two especially short stories, each one only two pages. Orlin Frederick's "The Throwback" is nothing too special, merging, as it does, the horrors of war -- World War I, in this case -- with the horrors of, I don't know, werewolves probably. It's not bad, by any means, but you have a character, Heinz, part of a German battery whose face is evil and who occasionally loses it completely, disappears for a night, and then the next morning someone has died violently and mysteriously. It's simply a brief metaphor for cruelty and bloodlust in war, and if you've read one of those, you've read "The Throwback".

Finally we have Steve Rasnic Tem's "There's No Such Things as Monsters". I went with Tem, even though I've written about his work more than once, because the short short seems to be his chosen form, and I find him fascinating. Not that "There's No Such Things as Monsters" is a masterpiece, but it's a moving little bit of enchantment about the fears of a small child, storytelling, and a monster's restraint that confirms that Tem is a most unusual and unexpected talent. I'd love to see another major work from him soon, but there's still so much of his past fiction I've never read, there's no reason to look too far ahead just yet.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 10: The Black Scent of Clean Bones

Weekends, I think, are going to be relatively light, as far as posting for this horror project are concerned. Tomorrow I do plan on returning to a more adult-sized post, but for right now, considering that it's Saturday, and nobody is going to be reading this, I think another brief foray into the world of particularly short horror fiction is in order.

Luckily, I have a couple of books that cater to such stories, and the one I could easily find tonight is called 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories, edited by Al Sarrantonio Martin H. Greenberg. I think Greenberg has actually edited, or co-edited, every anthology that has ever been published, but we're not here to talk about that, so eyes forward.

I read four very short stories today. The first two I read are by Norman Partridge, a writer, I've gathered, who has been making his presence quite well known in the horror community lately. He's snagged awards, accolades, and all that there, and yet, somehow, his short novel Dark Harvest is one of the worst I've read all year. It's about a giant pumpkin man and a small town and mean adults. In other words, it's a horror novel written after 1980. But I decided to give him a sort of second chance -- knowing that these two stories, which combine to total about nine pages, would really prove nothing either way -- by reading the two stories he had published in the Sarrantonio/Greenberg collection. The first is called "The Hollow Man", and it ain't bad. Unexpectedly, it's another horror/Western hybrid, in this case about a creature holding one of its victims at bay (in what would appear to be the man's own home) while a group of four mean with rifles beg to be let in to share the man's fire and hospitality.

The creature is never named, or fully described, but we know it has wings and scales. It's plan is to simply toy with these four men, and then kill them. That's it, that's the story, and it's actually quite creepy. The creature keeps his victim, his "hollow man", docile and obedient by manipulating the series of rings attached to his neck. The hollow man is so docile, in fact, that he's apparently been won over to a degree to the creature's point of view:

I jerked one ring, then another. I cooed against the hollow man's skinless shoulder and made him pick up his rifle. When he had it loaded, cocked, and aimed through a slot in the door, I whispered in his ear and made him laugh.

Quite creepy, I think. Partridge's other story, "Treats", is somewhat less successful. It's about a woman named Maddie, who we meet shopping for candy, on Halloween, for her son. Not just her son, but his "friends". Maddie is clearly terrified of her son, and his friends, the latter of whom she seems to see everywhere: in her car, at work. Plus, while Maddie is shopping, we're told, Jimmy is at home training his friends for Operation Trojan Horse. So that's that, and the pay-off is, quite frankly, lame. It's ants. I'll just tell you: Jimmy's friends are ants. And it rains, so no Operation Trojan Horse. Also, when Maddie is in the store, she sees a kid grab a Snickers and prepare to eat it by "tearing open the bright-orange treat sack". Bright-orange treat sack. Bright-orange treat sack. I find that four word phrase unpleasantly hypnotic. And when were the "treat sacks" that Snickers come in bright orange?

Next, I randomly picked Avram Davidson's three-page story, "Witness". Davidson was not primarily known as a horror writer, but rather for his fantasy and science-fiction. And "Witness", as it happens, belongs to none of those genres. It's a cynical, nearly satirical, crime story, about a guy who sees an ad in a newspaper asking that anyone who witnessed a particular traffic accident call this number, etc. The man calls the number, described what he saw, asks for money for his trouble, and then meets a certain kind of fate. It's a good story, sharp and effective, but dark endings are not enough to qualify as horror.

Before I close out here, I thought I'd mention that my copy of volume twenty of Best New Horror arrived, and the last story is by Steve Rasnic Tem, who I wrote about last year. It's called "2:00 PM: The Real Estate Agent Arrives", and it is exactly four sentences long. A curious thing about Tem is that the short short story seems to be his chosen form, but this is really pushing it, or it would be if the story didn't work so well. To describe anything about it would be silly, and to simply reproduce it here would probably constitute copyright infringment. The only thing I can think to say about it is that it reminded me of that six-word story that Hemingway may, or may not, have written: "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn." Tem's story is like the horror genre version of that. Unique, to say the least.

Top Books of the Year

I haven't seen enough new films to work up a best-of list, and I stopped keeping a list of all the films, from whatever year, I saw in 2008 awhile back. However, I do keep a running list of all the books I've read, so picking my favorite ten from that was relatively easy. Below, wouldn't you know it, I've posted the results. By the way, only two of these novels came out this year, but oh well. Live with it, suckers.

10. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

Foster's devestating suicide earlier this year spurred me to finally take a serious stab at his fiction. Following my usual pattern, I chose a collection of his short fiction. None of you know this, but I tried to hack out a whole post about this book, but the complexities, brilliance and occasionally infuriating gimmicks defeated me. This book is unlike anything else I've ever read. In all honesty, it's also not the sort of thing that would usually be a natural draw for me. But it's also clearly the work of a man who was feircely talented, incredibly smart, and, more likely than not, bound up too tightly inside his own head.

9. The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd

This novel tells the highly fictionalized story, based on fact, of Charles and Mary Lamb, two devotees of Shakespeare in 19th century London who, in Ackroyd's version of events, became involved with William Henry Ireland (another historical figure) best known for writing, among other things, entire plays which he was able, for a while, to pass off as lost works by Shakespeare. This book is quietly and darkly observant, and, by the end, more than a little chilling.

8. The Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry

I put off reading this sequel to McMurtry's masterful Lonesome Dove for, well, a really long time. I mean, it couldn't be as good as that first book, could it? McMurtry's just trying to soak up more of that sweet Lonesome Dove cash, isn't he? The answer to the first question is, "No, it's not." The answer to the second question is, "How the hell should I know?" But The Streets of Laredo is pretty great, whether you think it measures up to its predecessor or not. McMurtry's prose can be lean to a fault at times, but at other times, for long stretches, you have to wonder how he's able to do so much with so few words.

7. The Hunter by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake)

Finally -- finally! -- I was able to read the first book in the series upon which Donald Westlake's ultimate legacy will be based. The Hunter is his first novel (writing as Richard Stark) about Parker, a cold-blooded, amoral thief. Parker is a true anti-hero, in that nothing that he does can be considered morally good. If he lets someone live, it's only because killing them would cause him too much hassle. If he kills someone, he does so because letting them live would cause him more hassle. He's a stone cold bastard, but he's also smarter than everyone else. Westlake is a great writer, and The Hunter is a great place to start, if you want evidence of that fact. (Note: This year, I also read the second novel in this series, The Man with the Getaway Face. It wasn't as good as The Hunter, but it's still excellent.)

6. The Man in the Ceiling by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem

The best book I read for my The Kind of Face You SLASH!! series.

5. The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith

I read this novel, my first Highsmith, around the beginning of the year, so it's hard now for me to summarize what I loved so much about it, both as a story and a piece of prose. But I did indeed love it very much. Like McMurtry, Highsmith tells her chilling story about everything going to hell for a small group of people in very spare language, completely free of pretense, which forces you to focus on what matters most: the people, and what's happening to them.

4. In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff

Another writer I read for the first time this year is Tobias Wolff. I'd been hearing about how great he supposedly is for a long time, and the sheer volume of it eventually wore me down to the point where I said, "Fine, goddammit, I'll read one of his stupid-ass books". The one I chose, one of his several collections of short stories, knocked me out. There are few writers, of the short story or any other kind of fiction, as precise as Wolff. There are even fewer for whom the word "perfect" would seem like anything other than sheer hyperbole. But Wolff acheives perfection m0re than once, in this collection alone. Here, read the brilliant Hunters in the Snow for yourself. Tell me I'm wrong.

3. Lush Life by Richard Price

Richard Price is one of America's greatest living writers. His mastery of dialogue is the equal of David Mamet's, and his observation of human behavior is as keen as any I've ever encountered. His last four novels can be roughly categorized as crime novels, but, while I bristle at the idea of calling them "more" than that, I would have to say that they are crime novels while also being several other things. Lush Life tells the story of a random, senseless murder and its investigation and consequences. If that sounds like old-hat to you, than you're going to miss out. Price is a genius, simple as that.

2. Old School by Tobias Wolff

Wolff is primarily a writer of short fiction, but a few years ago he did publish Old School, his "first" novel ("first" in the sense that it's actually his second, but it's the only one he's willing to acknowledge), about the narrator's experiences in a private school in the 1950s and 60s. Each year at this school, a distinguished writer is invited to speak to the students. Each year also brings with it a writing contest, the winner of which will be able to have a one-on-one meeting with the visiting author. Roughly speaking, the novel follows the narrator as he tries to win each contest, and an opportunity to meet, respectively, Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. Wolff proves with this that he should write more novels. It's really exquisite -- beautiful and funny, and it has one of the most moving final paragraphs I've read in a long time.

1. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

See below. How's that for an anti-climax?

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 31 - Everything We're Telling You Here is True

Prior to reading The Man on the Ceiling, I had read four short stories by Steve Rasnic Tem, and not one word of fiction by Melanie Tem. That was a mistake, because this book -- which is part memoir, for lack of a better word, and part novel, also for lack of a better word -- is about them, and their lives together with their five adopted children, and why they write what they write. And what they write, for the most part, is horror. So, not being overly familiar with their fiction before tackling this book was a mistake, but not a fatal one, because despite that I found the book to be absolutely gripping, unsettling, and deeply moving.

The dedication page for The Man on the Ceiling says this:

For our children, who gave us their blessing

The very next page also contains one sentence only:

Everything we're about to tell you here is true

This second line, in one form or another, will pop up again and again throughout the book, although not everything within its pages is actually, literally true. The Tems describe The Man on the Ceiling as a"biography of their imaginations", and that's about as good a way to describe this highly unusual book as any I could come up with. It begins, for instance, with Steve (the book, incidentally, sometimes alternates between his point of view and Melanie's, while other sections are written by them together) describing a car trip with his family, Melanie riding shotgun, and their children piled in the back.

Along the side of the road, as far as the eye could see, the children waited. Some of them were babies, owning nothing but the baskets they were in and their own dirty blankets. Sometimes the older kids -- and by "older" I mean two or three years of age -- would take care of them, holding and singing to them because that came instinctively, feeding them out of other people's garbage cans.

...Outside the car windows the children came in droves. Some had barely escaped house fires: you could see places on their necks bubbled like a plastic toy left on the stove. Some had crawled out of floods or earthquakes, their faces smeared and broken.

...There was no more room in the car. I wanted to stick my head out the window and tell them that, and somehow apologize for it, but frankley there were so many I was afraid...

All of their children, as I said, were adopted: Gabriella, Joe, Veronica, Chris and Anthony. Chris, they tell us, has spent most of his adult life in prison. Anthony died. And it's possible -- though his parents will never know the truth -- that this nine year-old boy committed suicide.

This book is exceptionally difficult to describe. There is no straight narrative line, it bounces from the childhoods of the Tems, to their feelings about Anthony's death, to the future, to a recounting of the worsening Alzheimer's of Melanie's father, to the death of their cat, to their grappling with the man on the ceiling, who follows them wherever they go.

To say that the man on the ceiling is a personification of the fear the Tems feel not only for their children, but for themselves and the disasters that occur within every family at some point, would be accurate, as far as it goes. But the Tems never state that plainly, and it feels somehow wrong for me to do it in their place. This is how Melanie describes her relationship with the man on the ceiling:

The man on the ceiling gives my life an edge. He makes me uneasy; he makes me grieve. And yet he also fills me with awe for what is possible. He shames me with his glimpses into the darkness of human cruelty, and he shocks me when I see bits of my own face in his. He encourages a reverence when I contemplate the inevitability of my own death. And he shakes me with anger, pity, and fear.

Much of the book is like this, which is to say a description of the way the Tems's imaginations shape their experiences and filter into their fiction, although at no point do they explicitly tie their experiences, fears, or losses to any particular novel or story that one or the other of them has written. They never even mention a single title. However, scattered throughout this book are little short stories that each has written to illustrate, or extrapolate from, an idea, as with Melanie's story "Just Her Size", which imagines an encounter she never had with a neighborhood teenager she barely knew when she was a child, who she later learned might have been a pedophile, or in "The Yellow Dog", when Melanie wonders about how her daughter Gabriella must have processed the fact that, as a young girl, she was a witness to the deaths of both the family cat and Melanie's father.

As for Steve, I felt a particular kinship with him. He is a man who lives in an almost constant state of fear and worry -- sometimes a mild form, sounding somewhere in the back of his mind like the background hum of an air conditioner, sometimes clanging like a fire alarm -- that something terrible is about to happen to someone he loves. Hints are given in the book that Steve had a very rough childhood, and I had a very happy one, but I still understand living inside your own head like that. In one of the sections that seems to have been written by both of them, they talk about how, when the fear and worry gets too strong for him, Steve gets into his car and goes for a drive:

The man on the ceiling is out there, on the ceiling of the world, masquerading as a star or a flock of night birds or the wingtip of lights of a doomed plane, just waiting for the right moment to squash itself against Steve's windshield and make him drive off the road or into oncoming traffic, into the path of cars carrying everyone he's ever loved.

Okay, I'm not as bad as all that, but I do understand it. Hell, everyone does, to one degree or another. Some people are just better than others at turning down the alarm.

Steve writes about writing more than Melanie does (though I feel like most of the short stories included here were written by Melanie), and when he does this his prose turns towards the surreal -- which, I'm lead to understand, is not an unusual direction for his fiction to take). And when he writes about his life as a father, he is absolutely heartbreaking:

My baby. You hold their small hearts, their lungs in your hands and it is unimaginable: both their lives and their deaths are unimaginable. How they came to be out of nothing and how this miracle has been put into your undeserving hands to nourish or to fail. Sometimes it brings the absolute best out of people and sometimes the absolute worst. I've seen people snap under the pressure, we've all seen them, dissolving in the presence of a miracle.

Clearly, I've let the Tems write a fair chunk of this post, but I feel as though that's as it should be. The Man on the Ceiling is so completely theirs that to try and interpret or analyze it would be a greivous error. What you do is, you just let the book absorb you into it. And you learn, among many other things, why the Tems write horror. This book is not a horror novel, but it was borne from horror. It doesn't explain why everyone writes horror, nor does it explain why readers such as myself read it (though it comes closer than anything else I've ever read). And quite frankly, to say -- as I very nearly did -- that this book was produced by the horror genre would be to give that genre far, far more credit than it deserves. This book was written by the Tems, and I feel like it would exist, as would their other books, whether the genre existed or not.

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Well, that's it, folks. The end of The Kind of Face You SLASH!!. And thank Christ for that. It's been fun (sometimes), and educational (for me, anyway), and long as shit. And now it's over. And I am never doing this again.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 29 - It's Important that We Talk

Well, this day's not going the way I'd planned. One of my big posts for this month was going to be about Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", as well as M. John Harrison's story of the same name -- you know, a compare and contrast kind of thing. Well, before the month had even quite gotten started, someone told me that they thought Harrison's novel The Course of the Heart was an expansion of that short story. I didn't bother verifying this until last night, when I was going to begin reading Machen's story. It would be a little hard to explain to you why this knowledge has put me off reading these two short stories (not forever, just for now), but suffice it to say that for the sake of my own reading interests I want to put them off for another time.

So what do I read now? I haven't decided yet. In the meantime, here's another half-assed post about a few stories that are only about three or four pages in length (I was going to do this today anyway, in addition to a larger post, in order to get the post count to 31). You might remember that the first time I did this I read a story each by Steve Rasnic Tem, William F. Nolan and Chet Williamson. Well, I've decided to stage a rematch, and read another story each by those guys. Last time, Chet Williamson smoked the competition with his terrific "The Assembly of the Dead". Who will win this time!?

First up is Chet Williamson, and his story "Ants". Williamson's not going to repeat his victory, I'm afraid. This is one of those stories about a down-on-his-luck asshole who cheated on his wife, so she divorced him, and now he's poor and has very few pleasures in life. But among those few pleasures is the delight he takes in killing ants. And the ants, as you know without me having to tell you, don't like that, so they take the battle to him. And so on. The copyright for this story is 1987 -- I would have thought this particular horror sub-genre had been exhausted at least twenty years before that. Actually, it probably had, but people kept writing the stories anyway.

Next is William F. Nolan's "Dead Call". Our narrator, Frank, receives a call from his old friend Len. The problem is that Len has been dead for several months. Frank was under the impression that the car wreck that killed Len was an accident, but Len informs him that he is mistaken. Len actually killed himself, because his life was falling to pieces. And, Len points out, isn't Frank going through some pretty rough times himself?

You may be able to tell where this one's going. At three pages, though, I think that's to be expected. It's a pretty creepy little story, though Nolan's dialogue skills are fairly pedestrian. Still, this one's eerie, and it might make you pretty uncomortable if you sit and think about it for too long.

Finally, we have Steve Rasnic Tem's "At the Bureau". It concerns a man who works for a government licensing bureau. The function of this office has changed repeatedly over the many years he's worked there; last time they issued fishing licenses, but they're about to change again. The narrator seems content with his job, even though it's a dead end. There's no room for advancement beyond his current position, and there will be no more raises. His wife wants him to quit. And the guy in the office next door keeps standing in front of the narrator's frosted-glass office door, casting his shadow as he tries to peer in. Whenever the narrator tries to catch him at it, the guy hurries back to his own office.

The twist to all this is pretty bleak and hopeless. I would say this is the best of the three, as it's the most interesting, and it's better written than the other two, though I still prefer Nolan's central idea. But I don't believe these stories were intended to do much beyond sending a brief shiver through their readers, so it's best to end things here...

There will be another, more substantial post later today.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 22 - Is Death Not Wonderful Here?

Oh, what a shitty day. Now, now, don't panic, I'm fine. Or fine enough, at least. The only way my day (and tomorrow, if I'm being honest) will affect us at the moment is how my day relates to my posting-energy levels. And today has really done a number on those levels. The bad news is that, even though I finished reading enough substantial, interesting fiction for a full-length post, I'm not going to. That will come tomorrow. Or the next day. The good news, though, is that I own a book called 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories, which is a 500-page anthology filled with horror stories no longer than about eight pages. I've read three of those, so that I could put up this half-assed post.

First up is Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Giveaway". This one's about four pages, and deals with the stories children make up to threaten each other with, and what it might be like if those threats turned out to be true, and/or how those threats work on the children who receive them. This is a sad little story that is unfortunately marred, in my view, by clanging dialogue. I've read a little Tem before (and more on him next week, by the way), and I'm very intrigued by his work. This one just jars the ear.

Next is "He Kilt It With a Stick", by William F. Nolan. It deals with a man who has spent his life keeping one part of his life hidden from everyone he knows, and that is his passion for killing cats. What is it with horror writers and cat-murder? I can't tell if these writes particularly hate cats -- they always describe the animals as cold, cruel, and dishonest -- or they particularly love cats, and want to purge their anger against those who would hurt them. After all, the bad qualities being attributed to cats always comes from the point of view of their attackers. Anyway. The cat-murderer also has a severe heart condition. God only knows if that'll come into play.

It's not a bad story, really. I just feel like I've already read it a few times this month. And several more times in all the years previous.

Lastly, we have Chet Williamson's "The Assembly of the Dead". It's a bit of a stretch to call this one a "horror" story, but if you cast your net wide enough to include the idea of "existential dread" in your definition of the genre, then it fits nicely. And it's a terrific story. Really. It's about an American Congressman who has traveled to a corrupt and unnamed country in order to recover the body of one of his constituents. That's pretty much it, as far as plot. As I said, it's a wonderful story. It reminded me a little of Tobias Wolff. I know, but shut up, because it did. If you can get your hands on this one, do so. Williamson's story really caught me of guard -- it's both chilling and moving.

That's it for now. More tomorrow.