The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 26: A Kind of Winding Tunnel Through Tangled Undergrowth

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About the short novel The Sound of His Horn by Sarban (really John W. Wall), Kingsley Amis once wrote this:

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In its [the horn featured in the novel to signal the beginning of the hunt] archaic associations, its evocation of pageantry, its reminder of the hunter's carefree custo together with the terror of the hunted, it sums up the whole content and atmosphere of this novel, this strange combination of daydream and nightmare. So compelling is it that I shall always feel a slight twinge whenever I am reminded of the innocent English hunting song from which the title is taken.

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Some decades later, Suzy McKee Charnas had this to say about the same novel:

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The bloodthirsty, joyous call of the Count's [the novel's villain] hunting horn, the gold and green livery of his foresters, the sunlit glades of his carefully manicured woods, the gabbling yammer of the maniacal cat-women -- these flashes of from a vision at once false and true, enchantingly beautiful and starkly hideous, sink indelibly into the mind. A lasting, eerie echo is the mark of Sarban's achievement in this brief, unforgettable book.

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You'd be hard pressed to find two people less suited to agree on anything than the staunchly feminist, pretty-far-Left Charnas and the acerbic, fairly Right-leaning Amis, but look at that: they both love Sarban's The Sound of His Horn. And you know what? They're both wrong!!

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Now listen, I understand that no one likes to be disappointed, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I hate being disappointed more than anybody in the history of the universe. The Sound of His Horn disappointed me hugely. I've known about the book, and have wanted to read it, for at least twenty years, since first encountering it through Charnas's short essay on the book (from which I quoted above) in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's Horror: 100 Best Books. The later discovery that Kingsley Amis, a favorite of mine, was also a fan only sweetened the pot. But getting through this very brief novel was a terrible grind, and I would have abandoned it if I hadn't locked myself into it, with no fall-back, for this post.

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Written in 1952, Sarban's novel (one of only two he wrote, though he also published a scattering of short fiction over the years) belongs to many genres, and horror might actually be the least obvious, though I can see where that argument can be made. What it is primarily is an alternate history story, playing with the by-now-but-not-by-then age old idea that Germany actually won World War II. I wonder if it might not be the first such novel, but in any event it is, in concept, one of the strangest. The way the novel is set up, the hero, Alan Querdilion is gathered with family and friends, having returned home from a German POW camp following the end of the war, which, it is implied, ended the way we know it did. But after a dinner table discussion on the morality of hunting gets heated, and Alan -- very quiet up to this point -- suddenly says "It's the terror that's unspeakable", he then begins telling an old friend the true story of his POW experiences, which largely involved a bizarre leap through time (and apparently timelines, or dimensions, as well), one hundred years into the future, and one hundred years into Hitler's "One Thousand Year Reich".

We're a little slow getting to that realization, though this is fine. Sarban, I want to be clear, was not an obviously bad writer, and much of the set-up for The Sound of His Horn played pretty well to me. The accident that leads him into the future also lands him in the hospital, and I enjoyed his interaction with the various nurses, and especially with his physician, Dr. von Eichbrunn, with whom Alan has the interesting, subtly chilling conversation that leads to the novel's central revelation. But as the story's strangeness grows -- we learn that this hospital is on the grounds of an, I guess, estate, owned by Count von Hackelnburg, the Reich's Master Forester (a position once held by Herman Goering), and much of the estate's business and pastime is given over to the perverse hunting of humans, some genetically altered to resemble animals, some not, and to the various, audience-particapatory fates of the captured game -- The Sound of His Horn turns into more of a guidebook than a novel. And a really dry one at that.

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In her essay, Charnas actually touches on this when she says:

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Prodigies of economy are achieved with a deceptively artless style. The gradually accelerating [You can say that again! - Ed.] narrative becomes not only an observer's tour of his own nightmare, but a love story and a headlong adventure tale as well.

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Okay, but that hardly prepares the reader for passages such as this:

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It was such a butt as no preserver of game in England would ever have contrived. A little copse, from the centre of which the undergrowth had been carefully cleared, leaving the saplings standing, was surrounded by a breast-high bank of earth well grassed over and topped by a fringe of low bushes...It was, in fact, more a ride, or alley, than a glade, for the opposite side was a continues thick hedge of bushes, looking natural enough to the eye, but no doubt layered and interlaced artificially in order to confine the game to the ride and force it to run straight past the butt within easy range. We were in the valley, and the ride, running lengthwise up to...

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Oh for fuck's sake, enough already! And yes, on the one hand, such writing is necessary to give the reader some idea of the physical landscape being dealt with, but on the other hand, or on the other two hands, must the prose be so barren, and must there be so much of this kind of thing? I swear to you, at times it felt like this was half the book, and it may well have been. An "observer's tour", indeed! Well, who asked for that?? There is so little in the way of character -- something Charnas also acknowledges -- that when a bit of Alan's feelings about all this, about being hunted and everything, actually appears right there on the page, in print, I was a little startled. "What happened to all the that stuff about brushes and clearings and treelines?" I wondered. "Also, who's this Alan person?" Not to mention that referring to what occurs in the final thirty pages as a "love story", as Charnas does, is an astonishingly generous leap on her part. Imagine taking a long bus trip, and in the seat next to you was an attractive woman who you learn went to the same high school as you. The two of you talk about many things, for several hours, and at one point the bus almost gets hit by a van. Then she gets off the bus in Topeka, and you travel on to your home in Sacramento. After you get off the bus, you call your parents and tell them that you're pretty sure you just got married. In that same way, The Sound of His Horn contains a love story.

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And "deceptively artless prose"...I know what Charnas means, and for the first third of this book I might nod my head in agreement, or at least understanding, but at times Sarban's descriptive powers desert him so completely than I wonder if he ever had them in the first place. When we finally meet Count von Hackelnburg, he's described as being enormous, gigantic:

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He was a bigger man than any you have seen: a giant who made the great throne he sat on and the mighty oaken board before him look like things of normal size...

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Indeed. I mean, now that's big! All of this, by the way, is occurring as the reader, and Alan, is learning of the depths of future Nazi perversity, giant-Roman-dining-hall-orgy style, and some of this stuff is quite insane. But it all reads with the same verve as that goddamn "copse" passage I quoted before, and my eyes glazed over just as often during this portion of the book as anywhere else. And believe me, that accounts for a lot of eye-glazing.

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The Sound of His Horn is a book whose cult reputation quite baffles me. I'll admit that twenty-plus years of anticipation on my part couldn't have helped me approach the novel on its own terms, but I can be a pretty forgiving reader. If some of this interminable grassland shit had just been broken up by some interesting dialogue, I might be writing a very different -- or somewhat different, anyway -- post, but there's almost no dialogue of any kind to speak of, and after about thirty or so pages, what there is is purely functional. As is so much of the book: you need to know what this land looks like because in the last twenty pages that main guy is going to be hunted on it, so here it all is. You're going to need to know what future Nazis are up to, otherwise when that one guy gets hunted, you won't know why it's so scary, so here it all is. That's it. That's your book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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