Without intending to, I seem to have chosen "science fiction/horror hybrid fiction" as my subject today. What happened was, I was struggling to choose a story, or two, to read for today when I happened to take from my shelves volume one of The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Scanning the contents for something that I wanted to read, by an author I haven't already covered, I noticed, for the first time since I was aware of his name, that the first story in the book, "Window", was written by Bob Leman. The second story is by Tom Reamy -- I don't think I'd ever noticed that, either -- and I know Leman's name for pretty much the same reason I know Reamy's, which is that Leman's one collection of stories, Feesters in the Lake and Other Stories, is often being tossed around as a must-read, though no one ever seems to want to go into too much detail about it. Unlike Reamy's two books, to buy Feesters in the Lake on-line I'd have to be willing to separate myself from more money than I'm prepared to at the moment, so I've been just sort of biding my time, waiting for something good to happen. But hey, look, there's one of his stories, right there. Why don't you read that one? Okay, I will.
According to Leman's Wikipedia entry (I promise this is the last time I'll fall back on that website), "Window" is his "best known" story, and was even nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Okay, though I've never heard of it, and also "best known" is subjective, but I'll go along with them for now. The Nebula is a science fiction award, and "Window" is, for most of its length, a science fiction story. It's about a secret military project whose function -- unbeknownst to much of the military, we discover -- is to find out if the notion of "magic spells" might actually have some scientific basis. The mad genius behind this project is a man named Culvergast who, as the story opens, has disappeared into thin air, along with the building he was in at the time. In place of the building is a window, of sorts.
The military base that houses this experiment is a scattering of small buildings built in the middle of a forest. Where the missing building was is now a house, in the Victorian style. There is a well-kept lawn surrounding this house, but only up to a point -- where the lawn stops and the forest floor begins is neatly divided by an invisible line. The main characters through whose eyes we view all this strangeness are Gilson, a government high-up whose exact function we're not told, though we know he's the new boss; Krantz, one of the head scientists; and Reeves, a young graduate student who is, or was, devoted to Culvergast's vision.
Reeves is also quite taken with the family who lives in the Victorian house, who come out periodically and live what would appear to by an idyllic life. The children are cute and affectionate, the parents strong and loving. There's even a dog. Everyone, but especially Reeves, is taken with the peace of the scene they seem to be witnessing -- a scene that must be from the past. The window, they've decided, is a glimpse into another time (it might also offer the beginnings of time travel technology) when things were easier, calmer, and generally more wonderful. Gilson himself is skeptical, but tempted:
[Gilson] was quite aware that the surge of longing and nostalgia he felt was nostalgia for something he had never actually experienced, that the way of life the house epitomized for him was in fact his own creation, built from patches of novels and films; nonetheless he found himself hungry for that life, yearning for that time. It was a gentle and secure time, he though, a time when the pace was unhurried and the air was clean...
And, wouldn't you know it, Reeves and Krantz have discovered that the window -- which seems at first to be an impenetrable one-way mirror, more than a window -- is, in fact, breachable. For five seconds, every fifteen hours.
This is a horror story, but I'm not just going to tell you the ending. You'll have to take my word for it. But when the story turns, it turns suddenly, and it's all rather bizarre. And boy howdy, Leman seems to be saying, don't get wrapped up in nostalgia, because whatever you're getting all moony over is just plain awful.
What's curious about Leman and his story is that "Window" was written in 1980, but the prose and dialogue feel like it's from the 50s. Which isn't to say it's corny, or bad, but plain and to the point, as so much genre fiction was back then. Frankly, I'm not complaining. It's even refreshing to read a story this straightforward, a throwback to a time that...whoa, there's that nostalgia again. I'm supposed to watch that. But it makes me wonder if the plainspoken nature of Leman's work might not have something to do with its relative unavailability. A lot of genre fans like to think they're above this sort of thing now, even while failing to recognize that something more superficially ambitious -- like maybe Bentley Little -- is actually more poorly written. Oh, I'm probably making baseless assumptions, but give me plainspoken Leman over the strained and "serious" prose of someone like Conrad Williams any day.
Which brings me to Brian W. Aldiss! I read a second story today, though I hadn't planned on it, but having never read anything by this particular science fiction legend before, and seeing a short little story called "Poor Little Warrior!" a few notches down on the table of contents, I figured what the hell. And I hated the story, frankly. I'm not writing off Aldiss on the basis of this throw-away piece, but the story -- about a man from the future travelling back to the Jurassic period to hunt a brontosaurus in order to blow off some steam generated by his crappy marriage -- contains prose such as this:
These beasts live up to two hundred years, says the time travel brochure, and this beast has obviously tried to live up to that, for its gaze is centuries old, full of decades upon decades of wallowing in its heavyweight thoughtlessness until it has grown wise on twitterpatedness. For you it is like looking into a disturbing misty pool; it gives you a psychic shock, you fire off both barrels at your own reflection. Bang-band, the dum-dums, big as paw-paws, go.
We're also treated to "Beowulfate", "orga(ni)sm", "that awful-jaw-full movement" and more. Aldiss was having a James Joyce moment, it seems, and I'm not very appreciative. The story's not really horror, either, except it does feature a Tales of the Crypt-ish ending.
Honestly, I might not have even mentioned this story, except that Aldiss did write a line that nicely, though inadvertently, sums up the state of modern horror fiction. Observe:
...here horror has reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter.
ZING!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 20: Her Flesh was Like Putty and Tasted of Soap
If memory serves, the first time I ever came across the name Tom Reamy was in the "Further Reading" appendix to the wonderful, essential book Horror: 100 Best Books, put together by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman. The Reamy book in question that made that list (and the "Further Reading" list to Jones and Newman's follow-up -- and equally essential and wonderful -- Horror: Another 100 Best Books) is called San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories. As I've mentioned before, I'm attracted to books of horror fiction, or horror stories, that don't sound like horror, so that one stuck in my mind, though it would be many years before I actually got my hands on a copy.
The idea behind the Jones and Newman books is that one hundred writers are asked to pick, and write a brief essay on, their favorite horror book -- anthologies, single-author story collections, novels, etc. Although I don't doubt that Reamy's book isn't alone in having this distinction, I find it slightly curious that it makes both appendices, but wasn't picked for any of the now two hundred essays that make up both volumes. To me, this indicated that, even with all the obscure authors and books being brought back to the forefront in the essays, Reamy's book was still hanging out on the very fringe. Not forgotten, entirely, but getting there. This idea intrigued me further.
One of the reasons for this continued obscurity, if not the reason, is that, sadly, Tom Reamy died far too young, with only two books to his name. One is San Diego Lightfoot Sue, and the other is a novel, published after his death, called Blind Voices. According to his surprisingly lengthy Wikipedia entry, Reamy died, at age 42, of a heart attack, and was found slumped over his typewriter, seven pages into a new story. That last bit sounds apocryphal, like the story of Blind Lemon Jefferson being found frozen to death, clutching his guitar, but I hope it's true. "Hope" sounds like the wrong word, but you know what I mean.
In any case, I finally got myself a copy of San Diego Lightfoot Sue. It includes what then (1979) would have been a ubiquitous introduction by Harlan Ellison, which is both distressingly focused on Ellison, and astoundingly laudatory of Reamy and his work -- both typical features of Ellison's introductions to other people's books. Ellison focuses, and saves his highest praise, for every story in the book -- "Twilla", "San Diego Lightfoot Sue" and "Under the Hollywood Sign" especially -- other than "Beyond the Cleft", which is the one I chose to read. Ellison mentions it, pointing out that he, Ellison, kinda sorta gave Reamy the idea, and he says it's "terrifying", but that's more or less it. So I'm on my own.
Everything happens at 2:17 PM on Thursday afternoon, or rather, everything begins at 2:17 PM on Thursday afternoon. Apart from the murder of Reverend Jarvis, at the nearby schoolhouse a mass of children attack and slaughter many of their teachers, and even their fellow students -- those that haven't also been infected anyway. Like pretty much all stories that involve people suddenly going wild and attempting to consume their brethren, there is some sort of transmittable disease involved, although the specifics of it -- even much that might be called "general" about it -- is left to our imagination. At nearly thirty pages, I'm tempted to think the absence of any sort of pay-off is a fault of "Beyond the Cleft", but any time I say such things to myself, I have to quickly ask, "Well, what kind of pay-off would satisfy beyond the often phony sense of closure that mars so much modern horror literature?" Since I almost never have an answer to that, I'm forced to slink off in embarrassment.
Like "Bindlestiff", yesterday's Depression-era werewolf story, "Beyond the Cleft" is a period piece, set sometime in the 1920s or 30s, in a part of North Carolina that Reamy goes out of his way to tell is deeply secluded:
After a brief consultation with the other families, Cleatus Morgan [founder of Morgan's Cleft] decided this rich and fertile valley, though practically insulated from the outside world, was a definite windfall. So they settled in and prospered by their own standards. Indian Creek, which ran pure and bright and teemed with fish, provided power for a gristmill; the valley and surrounding heights were thick with Virginia deer, wild turkeys, dove, and quail. Little was needed from the outside.
From a plot standpoint, this choice of place and time serves to make the lack of outside help, or contact of any kind, easier to swallow. With the small populations of places like Morgan's Cleft, it's also easier, and quicker, to get across the sudden decimation of an entire community. While we never see Morgan's Cleft at its peak, Reamy does still manage to drive home the idea that an entire town, once comfortable, is being rapidly and inexplicably destroyed.
There's something else, though, something more at work when you consider that Reamy set his story some forty years before he actually wrote it, and set it in a secluded environment. The last lines of the story -- which I hesitate, mostly out of habit, to reproduce here, but you'll be able to infer the content -- make it clear that whatever has caused this living horror to take place isn't done yet, and is, in fact stronger. So what does that mean, forty years, or seventy years, later? If no one outside of Morgan's Cleft knew this was happening at the time, and Morgan's Cleft no longer exists, and this...thing can be passed along from person to person, rather easily, than what damage has it done to the human race? What effects are we now experiencing, completely ignorant that there is anything unusual going on with our species? And wouldn't this, in fact, explain quite a lot?
The idea behind the Jones and Newman books is that one hundred writers are asked to pick, and write a brief essay on, their favorite horror book -- anthologies, single-author story collections, novels, etc. Although I don't doubt that Reamy's book isn't alone in having this distinction, I find it slightly curious that it makes both appendices, but wasn't picked for any of the now two hundred essays that make up both volumes. To me, this indicated that, even with all the obscure authors and books being brought back to the forefront in the essays, Reamy's book was still hanging out on the very fringe. Not forgotten, entirely, but getting there. This idea intrigued me further.
One of the reasons for this continued obscurity, if not the reason, is that, sadly, Tom Reamy died far too young, with only two books to his name. One is San Diego Lightfoot Sue, and the other is a novel, published after his death, called Blind Voices. According to his surprisingly lengthy Wikipedia entry, Reamy died, at age 42, of a heart attack, and was found slumped over his typewriter, seven pages into a new story. That last bit sounds apocryphal, like the story of Blind Lemon Jefferson being found frozen to death, clutching his guitar, but I hope it's true. "Hope" sounds like the wrong word, but you know what I mean.
In any case, I finally got myself a copy of San Diego Lightfoot Sue. It includes what then (1979) would have been a ubiquitous introduction by Harlan Ellison, which is both distressingly focused on Ellison, and astoundingly laudatory of Reamy and his work -- both typical features of Ellison's introductions to other people's books. Ellison focuses, and saves his highest praise, for every story in the book -- "Twilla", "San Diego Lightfoot Sue" and "Under the Hollywood Sign" especially -- other than "Beyond the Cleft", which is the one I chose to read. Ellison mentions it, pointing out that he, Ellison, kinda sorta gave Reamy the idea, and he says it's "terrifying", but that's more or less it. So I'm on my own.
"Beyond the Cleft" is an "evil child" story. There are all sorts of these, ranging from the child-as-cold-murderer of The Bad Seed to child-as-Satan of The Omen, to children-as-packs-of-ravening-cannibals. "Beyond the Cleft" belongs to this last category, and it begins, after the briefest of prologues, like this:
At 2:17 PM on Thursday afternoon, Danny Sizemore killed and ate the Reverend Mr. Jarvis in the basement of the Church of the Nazarene in the township of Morgan's Cleft, North Carolina.
Everything happens at 2:17 PM on Thursday afternoon, or rather, everything begins at 2:17 PM on Thursday afternoon. Apart from the murder of Reverend Jarvis, at the nearby schoolhouse a mass of children attack and slaughter many of their teachers, and even their fellow students -- those that haven't also been infected anyway. Like pretty much all stories that involve people suddenly going wild and attempting to consume their brethren, there is some sort of transmittable disease involved, although the specifics of it -- even much that might be called "general" about it -- is left to our imagination. At nearly thirty pages, I'm tempted to think the absence of any sort of pay-off is a fault of "Beyond the Cleft", but any time I say such things to myself, I have to quickly ask, "Well, what kind of pay-off would satisfy beyond the often phony sense of closure that mars so much modern horror literature?" Since I almost never have an answer to that, I'm forced to slink off in embarrassment.
Like "Bindlestiff", yesterday's Depression-era werewolf story, "Beyond the Cleft" is a period piece, set sometime in the 1920s or 30s, in a part of North Carolina that Reamy goes out of his way to tell is deeply secluded:
After a brief consultation with the other families, Cleatus Morgan [founder of Morgan's Cleft] decided this rich and fertile valley, though practically insulated from the outside world, was a definite windfall. So they settled in and prospered by their own standards. Indian Creek, which ran pure and bright and teemed with fish, provided power for a gristmill; the valley and surrounding heights were thick with Virginia deer, wild turkeys, dove, and quail. Little was needed from the outside.
From a plot standpoint, this choice of place and time serves to make the lack of outside help, or contact of any kind, easier to swallow. With the small populations of places like Morgan's Cleft, it's also easier, and quicker, to get across the sudden decimation of an entire community. While we never see Morgan's Cleft at its peak, Reamy does still manage to drive home the idea that an entire town, once comfortable, is being rapidly and inexplicably destroyed.
There's something else, though, something more at work when you consider that Reamy set his story some forty years before he actually wrote it, and set it in a secluded environment. The last lines of the story -- which I hesitate, mostly out of habit, to reproduce here, but you'll be able to infer the content -- make it clear that whatever has caused this living horror to take place isn't done yet, and is, in fact stronger. So what does that mean, forty years, or seventy years, later? If no one outside of Morgan's Cleft knew this was happening at the time, and Morgan's Cleft no longer exists, and this...thing can be passed along from person to person, rather easily, than what damage has it done to the human race? What effects are we now experiencing, completely ignorant that there is anything unusual going on with our species? And wouldn't this, in fact, explain quite a lot?
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 19: I'd Rather Be Where People is Friendly
For the next couple of days, I'm going to be flying totally blind. I have Lord only knows how many books and anthologies by, or containing stories by, writers I know virtually nothing about, and I'm going to be picking a few of those, more or less at random, and see how things work out.
Today's writer is Peter Crowther, a writer who, I suspect, is not exactly unknown in the horror community -- a community I sometimes feel is gated, although I'm probably not trying that hard to gain admittance. Oh, hell, I'm not trying at all. But I have known Crowther's name, as an editor, for some time. In the 90s, he produced a series of horror anthologies, many of them dealing with the theme of superstition: Blue Motel, Tombs, Knock Wood and so on. It was only recently that I discovered he was a writer himself, when I found a collection of his stories called The Longest Single Note. The title struck me, because I'm often drawn to horror books, and films, whose titles don't sound like they belong to that genre (see also Let the Right One In). Given that, you'd think I would have read the title story, and that had been my intention, until I was glancing at the back cover, where I found this brief summary of one of the stories: ...a dust-bowl werewolf traveling the shantytowns of the Great Depression...
Well, I mean! What choice did I have? Strangely, The Longest Single Note doesn't have any sort of introduction or story notes (strange because these are typical features of collections of genre stories), but I was able to locate, and read, the werewolf story in question, which is called "Bindlestiff". It's not often -- certainly not this month -- that I read a horror story and think it should be longer. Better, yes, but not necessarily longer. "Bindlestiff" is, in that sense at least, unique, because I think it should have been a good thirty pages longer. That's not because it was so incredible that I never wanted it to end, either. There are two basic problems with "Bindlestiff": it didn't need to be set during the Great Depression, and it's only 18 pages long. And expansion of the story would no doubt have solved the first problem.
Affectionately dedicated to all practitioners of the short story form...and to all those readers who support them. Small is beautiful -- spread the word!
Amen, but short doesn't have to mean too short. Crowther has written novellas -- or so the "about the author" page tells me -- and I'm flummoxed by the fact that he apparently didn't consider going that route with "Bindlestiff". As I said before, even another thirty or forty pages could have fleshed this out wonderfully. What we're left with is no more than a sketch of something greater. I don't get it.
I don't want to -- and can't, really -- come down too hard on Crowther, because "Bindlestiff" is just one story, and any short story collection, unless it was written by Tobias Wolff, is going to be uneven. They can't all be winners, and all that. But man, was this one frustrating.
Today's writer is Peter Crowther, a writer who, I suspect, is not exactly unknown in the horror community -- a community I sometimes feel is gated, although I'm probably not trying that hard to gain admittance. Oh, hell, I'm not trying at all. But I have known Crowther's name, as an editor, for some time. In the 90s, he produced a series of horror anthologies, many of them dealing with the theme of superstition: Blue Motel, Tombs, Knock Wood and so on. It was only recently that I discovered he was a writer himself, when I found a collection of his stories called The Longest Single Note. The title struck me, because I'm often drawn to horror books, and films, whose titles don't sound like they belong to that genre (see also Let the Right One In). Given that, you'd think I would have read the title story, and that had been my intention, until I was glancing at the back cover, where I found this brief summary of one of the stories: ...a dust-bowl werewolf traveling the shantytowns of the Great Depression...
Well, I mean! What choice did I have? Strangely, The Longest Single Note doesn't have any sort of introduction or story notes (strange because these are typical features of collections of genre stories), but I was able to locate, and read, the werewolf story in question, which is called "Bindlestiff". It's not often -- certainly not this month -- that I read a horror story and think it should be longer. Better, yes, but not necessarily longer. "Bindlestiff" is, in that sense at least, unique, because I think it should have been a good thirty pages longer. That's not because it was so incredible that I never wanted it to end, either. There are two basic problems with "Bindlestiff": it didn't need to be set during the Great Depression, and it's only 18 pages long. And expansion of the story would no doubt have solved the first problem.
The central character, the werewolf, is a man named Walker Lange. Bitten by a werewolf in Manhattan, he now travels -- out of necessity, I sensed -- through the Hoovervilles located out west. His transformation from man to wolf appears to take a couple of days, as opposed to the few minutes those familiar with werewolf stories are used to. These means that Lange's hunger begins before the full moon, but his body and face change shape gradually, and he can't feed until the transformation is complete. He's at one of these awkward early stages as he wanders through a Hooverville, looking for a quiet place to complete his change:
A little farther on, a group of men were cooking a jack-rabbit on a makeshift spit. "Hoover Hogs" the hobos called them, welcome dinner "guests" since the collapse of livestock prices. One of them was talking, his eyes lost in the flickering embers of the fire. "Farmed shares in El Reno," he was saying as Lange shuffled by. "Dusted, busted, but never rusted," he finished off, the statement bearing all the hallmarks of careful rehearsal. The man chuckled to himself as he said it, looking up at the others for nods of approval. There were none. There was only the gentle heat of the morning. The man looked back at the fire and continued. "Drove west in '34. Picked peppers and butter beans at Oxnard, California." He shook his head. "Came home in '35. I'd rather be where people is friendly."
This is a good passage, possibly the best in the whole story, and one of the very few that concentrates on the specifics of the Great Depression. Elsewhere, poverty is described in terms that could apply today, if relocated to certain other parts of the country. Crowther sets "Bindlestiff" in so specific a time and place, and yet spends so much of his 18 pages describing Lange's transformation and desire for food. I think there is such great potential in Crowther's idea -- a guilt-ridden monster preying on the most vulnerable in a richly drawn historical setting -- but the details are too often standard werewolf story boilerplate. Lange must feed, yet he feels guilt over the murders he's committed. Certainly, something like this is to be expected, but why suck up so much of your time -- and my time -- when you have something truly unique, shoved into the background? And, at 18 pages, much of Lange's psychological torment must be taken as a given, because we know nothing about him. Obviously, this is one of the perils of short fiction, but a great short story strikes just the right balance. Here, the scales are all out of whack.
Crowther dedicates The Longest Single Note with this appreciation:Affectionately dedicated to all practitioners of the short story form...and to all those readers who support them. Small is beautiful -- spread the word!
Amen, but short doesn't have to mean too short. Crowther has written novellas -- or so the "about the author" page tells me -- and I'm flummoxed by the fact that he apparently didn't consider going that route with "Bindlestiff". As I said before, even another thirty or forty pages could have fleshed this out wonderfully. What we're left with is no more than a sketch of something greater. I don't get it.
I don't want to -- and can't, really -- come down too hard on Crowther, because "Bindlestiff" is just one story, and any short story collection, unless it was written by Tobias Wolff, is going to be uneven. They can't all be winners, and all that. But man, was this one frustrating.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 18: Gonads Small and Large!
The first novel I read by Bentley Little was called The Revelation. Had I been given the book in manuscript form, free from the knowledge that it had been published, and told that it was written by a teenage boy with a thing for gore films, I would have thought, "Yeah, that sounds about right." And, being naturally generous of spirit, I would have also given the plucky teen credit for seeing his book through to the end.
But The Revelation was not written by a teenager. It was published in 1990, when Little was thirty years old, and it won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. Maybe now you can understand my occasional frustration with this genre. You might also conclude that I have no one to blame but myself when I tell you that I continued to read Little after that experience. I think the next thing I read was a short story called "The Washingtonians", which centers around the revelation that George Washington was a child murderer and cannibal. That's sacrilege, I agree, but it's so bonkers a premise that had Little pulled it off, I would have had no choice but to tip my cap to him. Unfortunately, Little chose the least interesting approach to the material, by telling his story from the point of view of a contemporary man making the historic discovery, and then being set upon by rabid Washington cults, bent on keeping the truth hidden. Yawn. Tell that story from the point of view of George Washington himself, and maybe then you'd have something. Instead, Little cut his own idea off at the knees.
Then I went and I read another Little novel, this one called Dispatch. It's a horror novel based around letter writing (his second, it would seem, involving the postal service, as he wrote another novel called The Mailman, which I haven't read), and it, too, is pretty nuts. I also thought that one was largely successful, until an utterly ridiculous and bone-headed ending. But hey, I'd never read that novel before, at least. Credit where it's due, and everything. Little, it would seem, will write about whatever crazy thing enters his head, and I think this, more than anything else, accounts for his wide popularity in the horror community. You may not have heard of him yourself, but in certain quarters he's considered one of the big guns. Stephen King, for example, is extremely high on him, but that might just be because Little sometimes has his characters say things like "Eat my dick with brussels sprouts!", which is very much like something the Stephen King I don't like would write.
Most of Little's output has been novels -- and he's very prolific, with nineteen novels in as many years -- but he does have one collection of short fiction called, simply, The Collection (a title that is in keeping with most of his novel titles, like The Store, The Academy, The Policy, and so forth), and it is from whence I drew for today's readings. Ahem.
The first story is called "The Man in the Passenger Seat", and it's about a guy named Brian who, on his way to work one morning, pulls up to an ATM in order to make a quick deposit to cover some outstanding checks, but before he has a chance to do that, he sees a very fat man approach his car, open the door, and climb into the passenger seat. Brian tells him to get out, but the man only berates him with the aforementioned brussels sprouts zinger and tells him to drive. Even though the man appears to have no weapon, Brian does what he's told.
"The Man in the Passenger Seat" tries to be a kind of Patty Hearst/ambiguously anti-corporate America satire, but it doesn't have any kind of narrative drive, or electricity to the prose, to achieve much of anything. Brian waffles between being terrified of the man, and wanting to escape, to wondering what, really, there is for him to escape to. Here's some of that ambiguity in action:
The would have to stop for gas soon -- at the next town, if they weren't pulled over first -- and he knew that he would be able to escape at that time. He would be able to either run away or kick the shit out of the obese bastard.
But though he wanted desperately to kick the crap out of the crazy fucker, he wasn't sure he really wanted to escape.
I wonder if Little considered, and then rejected, variations like "He really wanted to kick the poop out of the fat crazy person" and "He sure wanted to kick the stool out of that portly loony toon" before picking the two versions you see above. Also, Brian wants to escape...or does he??
No, he, he doesn't. In the end, although the tubby person with a severe mental disorder does some pretty creepy things in the course of their time together, Brian decides that he's never felt more alive, however wrong or dangerous his newly chosen path might be. Because, you see, he believes that his co-workers have probably not even noticed that he's gone missing:
They'd be temporarily inconvenienced by his absence, would curse him for not being there to perform his regular duties, but they would not miss him.
They would not care enough to call and see if he was all right.
Yeah, because apparently you're a sociopathic loner! They're probably relieved you didn't show up with a gun!
The next story is called "The Show", and it's about a teenager whose parents are always fighting and drinking, and he just can't take it anymore, so when his friend invites him to come with him to this weird club where you can pay to witness a live murder, he says okay. Later on, though, he feels bad about it, and then something else bad happens.
That's your story, folks, and I wish I was kidding. Now, I'll admit, viewed as an outline, something good could easily come from that idea, but Little is content to simply go through the motions. I'm not quite sure what his first mistake is, but I think it might be the revelation that both our narrator and his friend witnessed a grotesque traffic accident when they were young, and each has been drawn towards violence ever since. As psychological insight, this is so rinky-dink that the story would have been better off without it -- at least then there would have been a hint of mystery. Little's biggest mistake, however, can be found in his attempts to depict the narrator's feelings about having paid to witness a murder. Here's what we get:
I felt filthy, unclean, covered with blood although none of the flying blood had touched me.
Merely seeing [Jimmy] again made me feel unclean...and my stomach started churning.
I could not imagine anyone wanting to sit through that butchery more than once.
I wondered how he slept at night. I wondered if he had nightmares.
Outside of a brief description of a nightmare the narrator has, that's literally it. That's the kind of creative power Bentley Little is willing to bring to the table here. It's as though he simply wrote down what he wanted to describe, rather than actually describing it. And that's his prose style, as best I've been able to tell.
Each story in The Collection is preceded by a brief introductory note from Little. Neither of the notes for the stories discussed here are worth mentioning, but there's another story in the book called "Blood", and here's what Little has to say about it:
Before I moved in with my wife, I lived on macaroni and cheese. I spent so much time standing in front of my stove, stirring pots of boiling macaroni, that I used to stare down into the swirling, roiling water and imagine that I could see shapes in the foam the way some people see shapes in clouds.
I decided to write a story about it.
How could you possibly resist the urge to keep reading after that? I didn't read the story he's selling so aggressively here -- and clearly I should have -- but I think that little introduction highlights a couple of things that somebody (an editor, maybe?) should try to impress upon Bentley Little. One is that not everything is a story idea, and the other, more importantly, is that a story idea does not count as a story. And stretching out a description of that idea to ten pages is not writing. You'd think someone would have thought to mention this to him at some point over the last nineteen years, but I guess not.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 17: A Confirmed and Studied Misanthrope
Very often, I experience pangs of nostalgia for a time period I didn't even live through. Speaking very broadly, I would love to have been able to experience America from the 1890s through the 1940s. I know that's a pretty hefty chunk of time, but just imagine being born in, say, 1880, and then experiencing the the color, culture, history and progress over the next seventy years.
..
The color and the culture, though, is really what I'd like to experience -- the day-to-day life of the first half of the 20th century. Greg and I have talked about this before, but both he and I share a fantasy of having a diner, or coffee shop, that was our place, circa, say, 1943 (for me -- I think Greg would prefer sometime in the 50s, but you'd have to ask him), and in the morning we'd go in, and greet all the other regulars, and we'd order our coffee and eggs, chat up the snazzy tomatah at the counter, and be at peace. I don't know what Greg would bring for reading material -- he and I would not be going to this diner together, or, if we did, we would not be on speaking terms -- but I'd bring Weird Tales. Or Collier's. Or Astounding. Or Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Anything with short stories, basically, the kind of stories that everybody read and would later talk about over, I don't know, pickled lettuce at the local eat-center. I don't really know much about history. Regardless, I'm talking about the kind of stories that I imagine being read in diners, or on buses on the way to or from work, or school; the kind of stories with strange premises and stingers at the end; the kind of stories that predated and inspired Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.
One of the writers I'd be sure to read while I scarfed down my eggs would be Davis Grubb. Almost entirely unknown today, and therefore unread (including by me, until about three hours ago), Grubb's most famous work is the novel The Night of the Hunter, which, of course, was adapted into the much more famous Charles Laughton film, starring Robert Mitchum. Because that's one of my favorite films, I've always been curious about Grubb, but apart from idly buying several of his books as I came across them over the years, I'd never taken the most important step of actually reading a word he'd written. Fortunately, one of those books is called Twelve Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural, so this horror project dealie I got going here is the perfect excuse to finally give him a look.
The first story is called "One Foot in the Grave", and it's...odd. It's about a guy named Henry who manages a sawmill in the South who suffers a very nearly fatal accident. He's saved by one of his employees, Ed Smiley, but though Henry survives, he still loses a foot. As the story opens, he's recuperating in the home/office of Doc Sandy, and immediately Henry finds himself suffering from "phantom limb" syndrome: his missing foot itches, or gets cold. Doc explains the reason for this as best he can, and urges Henry to relax, because soon he'll get used to the crutches, and not long after that they'll have him fitted with a prosthetic, and that'll be that. In the meantime, Henry is visited by Ed Smiley, and Margaret, another sawmill employee who is going out with Ed.
Things are going well enough, until Henry starts to sense that his missing foot is actually moving around...walking through town, as a ghost. Not only that, but apparently it's been following, and frightening, Margaret.
I know -- pretty stupid. But still, the thing works okay. It's the kind of story you find yourself wanting to finish despite yourself. You shouldn't care about what happens in a story with such a goofy central idea, but I, at least, found myself eagerly turning the pages anyway. It doesn't hurt that Grubb ain't a bad writer. His skills are better represented in the second story I read, but even in "One Foot in the Grave" his storytelling skills are on clear display.
That second story is called "The Horsehair Trunk" and, interestingly, it also deals with illness and jealousy. The illness in this case is typhoid fever, and the man suffering from it is named Marius Lindsay. Marius is a rotten bastard who mocks and accuses his unhappy wife, Mary Ann, of wanting him to die, even as she cares for him. He doesn't die, and, in fact, as he breaks through the worst of the fever, to the recovery on the other side, he finds that he can actually detach his spirit from his corporeal body, and move invisibly around, causing havoc. Why Marius is suddenly able to do this isn't really explained -- it's vaguely hinted that he very nearly did die, but snapped back just as his soul was preparing to ascend -- but Grubb doesn't need to, either. The story is short and to the point, so he throws the idea out there and runs with it, expecting the reader to follow along. I did.
Marius Lindsay was already a rotten person, but his newfound power -- which he obviously tells no one about -- makes him worse:
...[E]ven those who knew him least were able to detect in the manner of Marius Lindsay that he was a changed man -- a worse one. And those who knew him best wondered how so malignant a citizen, such a confirmed and studied misanthrope as Marius, could possibly change into anything worse than he was. Some said that typhoid always burned the temper from the toughest steel and that Marius' mind had been left a dark and twisted thing.
Quite possibly, because when he discovers that her poor wife -- whom he despises -- is planning to leave him for another man, he devises a plan to get revenge. As you knew he would, but the outcome of his plan is, I must say, handled so well that I actually chuckled out loud while reading the last few lines, nasty though they are. "The Horsehair Trunk" would have made a perfect Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and it makes me wonder if any of Grubb's other stories were ever adapted for television...
So then, I'll finish reading the story, and I'll elbow Greg, sitting next to me at the counter, and say, "Hey, chumley, did you ever read anything by this Davis Grubb character?" "Naw," he'll say. "Readin's fer old ladies!"
Silently, I will pity him, and cover the awkward silence by quickly changing the subject to Secretariat, Hitler, Dick Powell and cabbage. Or whatever, what am I, a time machine?
..
The color and the culture, though, is really what I'd like to experience -- the day-to-day life of the first half of the 20th century. Greg and I have talked about this before, but both he and I share a fantasy of having a diner, or coffee shop, that was our place, circa, say, 1943 (for me -- I think Greg would prefer sometime in the 50s, but you'd have to ask him), and in the morning we'd go in, and greet all the other regulars, and we'd order our coffee and eggs, chat up the snazzy tomatah at the counter, and be at peace. I don't know what Greg would bring for reading material -- he and I would not be going to this diner together, or, if we did, we would not be on speaking terms -- but I'd bring Weird Tales. Or Collier's. Or Astounding. Or Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Anything with short stories, basically, the kind of stories that everybody read and would later talk about over, I don't know, pickled lettuce at the local eat-center. I don't really know much about history. Regardless, I'm talking about the kind of stories that I imagine being read in diners, or on buses on the way to or from work, or school; the kind of stories with strange premises and stingers at the end; the kind of stories that predated and inspired Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.
One of the writers I'd be sure to read while I scarfed down my eggs would be Davis Grubb. Almost entirely unknown today, and therefore unread (including by me, until about three hours ago), Grubb's most famous work is the novel The Night of the Hunter, which, of course, was adapted into the much more famous Charles Laughton film, starring Robert Mitchum. Because that's one of my favorite films, I've always been curious about Grubb, but apart from idly buying several of his books as I came across them over the years, I'd never taken the most important step of actually reading a word he'd written. Fortunately, one of those books is called Twelve Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural, so this horror project dealie I got going here is the perfect excuse to finally give him a look.
The first story is called "One Foot in the Grave", and it's...odd. It's about a guy named Henry who manages a sawmill in the South who suffers a very nearly fatal accident. He's saved by one of his employees, Ed Smiley, but though Henry survives, he still loses a foot. As the story opens, he's recuperating in the home/office of Doc Sandy, and immediately Henry finds himself suffering from "phantom limb" syndrome: his missing foot itches, or gets cold. Doc explains the reason for this as best he can, and urges Henry to relax, because soon he'll get used to the crutches, and not long after that they'll have him fitted with a prosthetic, and that'll be that. In the meantime, Henry is visited by Ed Smiley, and Margaret, another sawmill employee who is going out with Ed.
Things are going well enough, until Henry starts to sense that his missing foot is actually moving around...walking through town, as a ghost. Not only that, but apparently it's been following, and frightening, Margaret.
I know -- pretty stupid. But still, the thing works okay. It's the kind of story you find yourself wanting to finish despite yourself. You shouldn't care about what happens in a story with such a goofy central idea, but I, at least, found myself eagerly turning the pages anyway. It doesn't hurt that Grubb ain't a bad writer. His skills are better represented in the second story I read, but even in "One Foot in the Grave" his storytelling skills are on clear display.
That second story is called "The Horsehair Trunk" and, interestingly, it also deals with illness and jealousy. The illness in this case is typhoid fever, and the man suffering from it is named Marius Lindsay. Marius is a rotten bastard who mocks and accuses his unhappy wife, Mary Ann, of wanting him to die, even as she cares for him. He doesn't die, and, in fact, as he breaks through the worst of the fever, to the recovery on the other side, he finds that he can actually detach his spirit from his corporeal body, and move invisibly around, causing havoc. Why Marius is suddenly able to do this isn't really explained -- it's vaguely hinted that he very nearly did die, but snapped back just as his soul was preparing to ascend -- but Grubb doesn't need to, either. The story is short and to the point, so he throws the idea out there and runs with it, expecting the reader to follow along. I did.
Marius Lindsay was already a rotten person, but his newfound power -- which he obviously tells no one about -- makes him worse:
...[E]ven those who knew him least were able to detect in the manner of Marius Lindsay that he was a changed man -- a worse one. And those who knew him best wondered how so malignant a citizen, such a confirmed and studied misanthrope as Marius, could possibly change into anything worse than he was. Some said that typhoid always burned the temper from the toughest steel and that Marius' mind had been left a dark and twisted thing.
Quite possibly, because when he discovers that her poor wife -- whom he despises -- is planning to leave him for another man, he devises a plan to get revenge. As you knew he would, but the outcome of his plan is, I must say, handled so well that I actually chuckled out loud while reading the last few lines, nasty though they are. "The Horsehair Trunk" would have made a perfect Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and it makes me wonder if any of Grubb's other stories were ever adapted for television...
So then, I'll finish reading the story, and I'll elbow Greg, sitting next to me at the counter, and say, "Hey, chumley, did you ever read anything by this Davis Grubb character?" "Naw," he'll say. "Readin's fer old ladies!"
Silently, I will pity him, and cover the awkward silence by quickly changing the subject to Secretariat, Hitler, Dick Powell and cabbage. Or whatever, what am I, a time machine?
Friday, October 16, 2009
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..
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.
.
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.
..
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.
..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.
.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.
.
.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.
."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.
.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.
.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:
.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...)
.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":
."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."
.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.
.
.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:
.After twenty years I am delighted to finally welcome the world's most successful, popular and influential horror writer to these pages.
.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.
.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:
.
"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.
..
"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.
"Did you know you were going down?"
."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."
.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.
.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.
.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.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 15: An Orchid Thus Come By
Glancing over the contents page of my copy of John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights is kind of depressing. It's dotted with hashmarks, indicating which stories I've read so far. Not counting what I've read over the last couple of days, there are a total of eighteen hash marks, which is over half the stories. And what do I remember from all that reading? I remember a reasonable amount of "Evening Primrose", and the ending of "Witchs Money", and what kind of story "Back for Christmas" is...and that's about it. Nothing whatsoever remains in my brain of "Squirrels Have Bright Eyes" or "Thus I Refute Beelzy" or "A Touch of Nutmeg Makes It" or "Wet Saturday" or "Another American Tragedy" or "Without Benefit of Galsworthy". I do have a vague sense of two other stories that I'm pretty sure were by Collier, but I don't remember what they were called. I think one might have been "Bottle Party" and the other "Little Memento", but I don't know for sure..
I read all those stories many years ago, so I suppose it's not so strange that my memory can't hold onto all of them. But it's depressing -- and it's only so depressing, because I can, you know, just read the stories again if I want to, which I do -- because Collier is one of those writers that I'd heard about for years, first from Harlan Ellison, and then as I researched the name and tried to find Collier's books, from a host of other writers who praised the man almost as highly as Ellison himself, if not more. And as big a pain in the ass as Ellison can be, anyone who's read him knows that when he recommends other writers, he recommends the shit out of them, to the point where you almost can't sleep until you've at least gotten a taste (see also: Gerald Kersh). Then, when you finally track down some of the writer's work, it's like you've just won something. You're not only about to read something really good, but considering how hard you've worked to get to this point, you're going to be in on something, as well. Pretty soon, the number of people who've read John Collier and who are still alive will swell by one. It'll be Harlan Ellison, maybe three other guys, and you.
.So, having ascended to that magical sphere as it pertains to John Collier, it's kind of a pisser that I can't remember very much of what I've read. I do know he's good, though. I know this despite the almost inevitable twinge of disappointment that follows the completion of the sort of quest described above, a twinge I do remember feeling when I first started reading Collier. Because of course I expected him to be the most unusual and brilliant writer I'd ever read -- if you don't have unreasonably high expectations for this sort of thing, you'd give up in a week. One of the reasons I think I remember "Evening Primrose" better than many of the other Collier stories I've read is because that was the first one that I finished without any of that twinge remaining ("Witchs Money", too), though it would return in a little while.
.The main reason that I know John Collier is good is because of a book called His Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp. This is one of Collier's novels -- his first one, in fact -- and I think that title speaks for itself. That title is what the book is about, as a matter of fact, and it's a stunning piece of work. His Monkey Wife is basically a send-up of English, upper-class, early 20th Century romance novels, where one member of the loving couple is from some class below said upper-class. In the case of Collier's novel, that class is the ape class. Except the novel isn't quite the goof that description implies. It's also weirdly dark, beautifully written, discomfiting, and you almost can't quite believe the damn thing ever got published. My edition of Fancies and Goodnights, by the way, is part of an old Time/Life series, and in the preface, some chowderhead who identifies himself as "The Editors" calls His Monkey Wife "not very remarkable", outside of its basic premise. He can't have actually read the book, or he'd never say that. Then again, Collier himself wrote a review of the book -- privately, for himself only -- in which he said of the author of His Monkey Wife:
.From the classical standpoint, his consciousness is too crammed for harmony, too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humour is too hysterical, too greedy and too crude.
.Oh, what does he know*.
As a writer of short horror fiction, the best, and laziest, way I can think to describe Collier is as a cross between P. G. Wodehouse and Roald Dahl. Dahl's fiction for adults was often incredibly nasty and dark (and, while I'm at it, pretty terrific, too), while Wodehouse's stories were all light and froth, and, most importantly, lifted up by a mastery of the language, an ability to show that the English language was the greatest comedic tool ever devised. Collier possessed Wodehouse's skill with words, and Dahl's sardonic mean streak. At its best, it's an awfully nice marriage..The first story I read is called "Bird of Prey", and it tells the story of Jack and Edna Spalding, and of their parrot Tom. One day, Tom is attacked by something; he's not killed, but Jack and Edna find him sprawled on their front porch, a clump of feathers ripped away. Edna believes a cat did it, but Jack saw something else:
.
He went to the rail and looked out and around, but there was no sign of a cat. Of course, it was not likely there would be. Jack was more interested in the fact that the swaying vines were spread over a length of several feet, which seemed a very great deal of disturbance for a fleeing cat to make. Finally he looked up, and he thought he saw a bird -- a big bird, an enormous bird -- flying away. He just caught a glimpse of it as it crossed the brightness of the moon.
..
He went to the rail and looked out and around, but there was no sign of a cat. Of course, it was not likely there would be. Jack was more interested in the fact that the swaying vines were spread over a length of several feet, which seemed a very great deal of disturbance for a fleeing cat to make. Finally he looked up, and he thought he saw a bird -- a big bird, an enormous bird -- flying away. He just caught a glimpse of it as it crossed the brightness of the moon.
And that giant bird didn't exactly attack Tom, either. What it did do, and what comes of it, parallels, at least thematically, a particular rift in the Spalding's marriage, a rift that is ultimately exploited in an ending that is both horrible, cruel, detached and bizarre. This story is only ten pages long, and to quote more -- to quote the best of it -- would be to spoil it, but there is a particular description of action, thrown away in the middle of a sentence, in the last paragraph that I've read over several times, because its very vagueness is so awful. I sit there imagining what Collier could mean, while Collier sits back chuckling at what people are willing to do to each other, and themselves.
.As good as "Bird of Prey" is, the other story I read, "Green Thoughts", is something of a small masterpiece, and is closer in style and effect to His Monkey Wife than any other Collier story I've read (at least that I can remember). Our hero is Mr. Mannering, an amateur but enthusiastic botanist, who, at the story's beginning, receives a very special flower in the mail:
.The orchid had been sent among the effects of his friend, who had come by a lonely and mysterious death on the expedition. Or he had brought it among a miscellaneous lot, "unclassified," at the close of the auction. I forget which it was, but it was certainly one or the other of these. Moreover, even in its dry, brown, dormant root state, this orchid had a certain sinister quality. It looked, with its bunched and ragged projections, like a rigid yet a gripping hand, hideously gnarled, or a grotesquely whiskered, threatening face. Would you not have known what sort of an orchid it was?
.Mr. Mannering did not know. He read nothing catalogues and books on fertilizers. He unpacked the new acquisition with a solicitude absurd enough in any case toward any orchid, or primrose either, in the twentieth century, but idiotic, foolhardy, doom-eager, when extended to an orchid thus come by, in appearance thus.
.
.I've quoted the beginning of "Green Thoughts" so extensively because how often, when reading horror fiction, do you get to revel in the language itself, to be so grabbed by the words, as Collier allows you to be here? I wasn't even sure I was going to read "Green Thoughts" -- technically, I'd read enough other Collier stories to get by tonight -- but when I read about Mannering's particular doom-eagerness when faced with an orchid thus come by, I was set. I thought, "This is my story."
.The orchid first takes out a cat belonging to Mr. Mannering's Cousin Jane, with whom he lives, and then Cousin Jane herself. And then -- I'll just tell you -- Mr. Mannering himself. Each are consumed, though not killed, and while much of their bodies are subsumed into the giant plant, their heads bloom again, fully formed, as flowers. And that's actually the story -- it's not about a monster plant rampaging through Torquay (yep, Torquay), but rather what would it be like to find yourself turned, literally, into a vegetable? Mr. Mannering handles it pretty well, initially, with some exceptions:
.The impossibility of locomotion, for example, did not trouble him in the least, or even the absence of body and limbs, any more than the cessation of that stream of rashers and tea, biscuits and glasses of milk, luncheon cutlets, and so forth, that had flowed in at his mouth for over fifty years, but which had now been reversed to a gentle, continuous, scarcely noticeable feeding from below. But the physical is not all. Although no longer a man, he was still Mr. Mannering. And from this anomaly, as soon as his scientific interest had subsided, issued a host of woes, mainly subjective in origin.
.Eventually, a more objective woe will appear, in the form of Mannering's miserable no-good nephew, who takes legal possession of Mannering's home and all his possessions, including his greenhouse, in which he makes a fairly shocking discovery. And this strange and amusing story about death, rebirth and plants turns very cold-blooded and distanced. As in "Bird of Prey", what the reader becomes witness to is made all the more unhappy and unpleasant because Collier holds us back, with him, watching it from a hill. Even the words don't seem to care that much. They're interested, of course, but that's hardly the same thing.
.Thinking about it now, I'm reminded of another masterpiece of this kind of writing: Richard Hughes's A High Wind Jamaica. That brilliant novel could be reasonably termed a horror story, as well (if we're going to expand the definition to include Lord of the Flies, then throw Hughes's novel in there, too: it's twice as frightening, and ten times better). Both Hughes and Collier are on that hill with us, watching the nightmare unfold, and they show us where to look, and tell us what it all looks like, so that we may see it more clearly. They're smiling, but we're not. Except when we are.
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*Information on Collier's self-review is taken from Paul Theroux's introduction to His Monkey Wife, published by Robin Clark Books.
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