The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 26: Smoke and Flying Salt

Every year, at around this time and in some cases several months earlier, readers of horror fiction can be sure that soon they will be able to wallow in the pages of a variety of "best of" anthologies. By "a variety" I do only mean three, but they're reasonably jam-packed, and there's a lot less cross-over, in terms of stories appearing in more than one of them, then you'd probably think. Of course it's all objective, but the editors have access to a good deal more horror fiction in a given year than I do, and I've always regarded these things as handy sampler platters, which is probably the secret intent anyway. So every year, like I'm saying, these things come out, and I devote at least a couple of posts to a small fraction of what these backs have to offer. Now, there's three big ones, editor Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year, Stephen Jones's The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror (a somewhat distinctive title that I believe translates to "horror"), but right at the moment I have in my possession only the Datlow and Guran books.  Jones's anthology won't hit stories until October 29, which makes sense in its relation to October 31, but right at the moment does jack-shit for me.

Today I'm going to focus on the Datlow volume, which, like Jones's, offers a nice little overview of the previous year in horror, and I've already ordered a copy of Your House is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye which is mentioned therein, so thanks for that.  Outside of that, it's all stories, you guys, and I, as is my wont, selected two.  To begin with, I homed in on Jeffrey Ford's name in the table of contents, because even though I've never read him before he wrote a book of short stories that looks like this:

If you don't want to read that book just after looking at that picture, then fuck you.  I'm hoping though that the whole idea that sometimes good writers write bad stories holds true with him, because the one I read, "A Natural History of Autumn," was rather disappointing.  The story is set in Japan, and I think Ford wants you to know that he has just returned from Japan.  Which would have been entirely fine if he'd taken his knowledge of certain Japanese traditions and myths and created something unique, but instead he took it all and sprinkled it like wasabi, a traditional Japanese spice, over a story that is almost depressingly ordinary.  Even drinking sake, a Japanese rice win, afterwards can't make this story work.  Also have you guys heard about that weird suicide forest they got over there?

"A Natural History of Autumn" is about Rinko, a kind young man who might work for a gangster, and Michi, a young woman who works at a hostess bar.  Rinko likes her because she seems shy and sweet, and as they talk at the bar he learns that her ambition is to write a book called A Natural History of Autumn, sort of philosophical non-fiction examination of her favorite season.  She says that she asks the men she meets at the bar about their most pronounced memory -- happy, sad, or otherwise -- of autumn, and this she does by way of research.  Rinko says that he can tell her a story, and take you to a location especially lovely in an autumn sort of way.  It's called an "onsen" and that's a kind of spa.  So they go, fall in love, wonder about the old woman who runs the place, and then at night Michi sees the old woman fucking her dog, and the dog smiles at Michi, and she wants to leave, just all out of the blue.  The dog, we learn, is ajinmenken, which I looked up.  Jinmenken are dogs with the faces of humans.  These are basically a Japanese version of chupacabras, in that their legend consists mainly, from what I can tell, being seen (or "seen") and reported and not believed in by the majority of Japan's population, but once they're introduced in Ford's story they become just interchangeable monsters trying to kill Michi and Rinko.  At this point, it's just a run-from-the-monster story, one with a twist at the end that helps nothing (in fact it brings the story down further), so the Japanese-ness -- the onsen, the jinmenken, the hostess bar, some other minor bits -- is finally completely irrelevant.  It's maybe a nice setting, but why do nothing with this?  Why do nothing with jinmenken other than say "You know what, they're sort of like werewolves" and then make then sort of like werewolves?  Not to mention that title, "A Natural History of Autumn," implies I'm not sure what, but something, that Ford apparently had no intention of following through with.  It's a story about monsters eating people dressed up in a kimono, which is a traditional Japanese gown.

The other story is by Adam L. G. Nevill called "Pig Thing."  Obviously I'm going to read a story called "Pig Thing," but I also wanted to read it because of Nevill, and holy shit I just realized something.  Okay, I wanted to read the Nevill story because I thought "Hey, he wrote those novels I want to read, this will be a good way to get some idea about his writing and if I'd like him or not" but I just remembered that I did the exact same thing last year in a post about John Oliver's anthology The End of the Line; from that collection I chose, among others, Nevill's story "On All London Underground Lines."  So I already went through all this with Nevill.  How am I supposed to lead into "Pig Thing" now?  Goddamnit, I've been doing this too long.  Jesus Christ.  Fucking hell.  Shit.

Well, there's your lead-in, I guess.  "Pig Thing" is about an English family who has moved to a home in the wilds of New Zealand.  As the story opens, the three children -- Hector, who is ten, Jack, who is nine, and Lozzy, who is four -- have just watched their parents, Dad first, then Mom to search for him, leave the house and not return.  And they won't return.  Dad was going to go for help, but no help is coming.  There is a pig thing outside, a creature that has haunted their home since they moved in, but now appears to want in, and to eat.

The pig thing looks almost like you might expect -- it has a "snouty face" -- but with some disturbing details -- it has "thin girlish hair that fell about its leathery shoulders."  Nevill does a good job of sketching the thing in, so that a not quite fully seen, but massive creature is burned into the reader's brain as he otherwise focuses on the three children.  He does good work with them, too, not making them unreasonably adult in their behavior, which is so often the approach to these things.  Horror writers write about kids quite a lot, but they often write about them in a way that makes me think they'd rather be writing about adults, and Nevill doesn't do that.  In fact there's an element to all this that really highlights how ruthlessly he does not do this, but I'd have to tell you the whole story, so maybe check it out yourself.  Otherwise, it's a good story from an old tradition that, again, like the Ford story, tries to draw from a relatively exotic locale.  But Nevill pulls it off better by not making a big deal about it, and by making "Pig Thing" part of two traditions, the other being that those not familiar with the wilder parts of nature should take them very, very seriously.  Simple, perhaps, but sometimes that's just the thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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