Well, today's reading didn't quite go as I'd planned, and so the far-more-elaborate-than-this-one's-gonna-be post I'd been planning on will have to wait. As always in this situations, I turn to my old friend the short short horror story, which are plentiful. However, my last go 'round with these found me a little enervated, after years of loyal service, by the stories in either of my typical haunts, 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories and 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories -- I put up a brave front and didn't let on, but it's true. Of course, when I'm going through any other anthology, one not devoted to stories of that brevity, I'm always skipping pass various options as being too short for my purposes, and then forgetting about it them on occasions such as this. But not tonight! I remembered them!
And I've ended up with a curious grab-bag that I frankly plan on blowing right through. Because let's be honest, some of these stories are so short that it's nearly impossible to find anything to say about them. One such story is "Nellthu" by Anthony Boucher. Boucher was a famed genre editor back in the pulp days, as well as a respected practitioner of same, his most famous book being the collection The Compleat Werewolf, his most famous story from that being "They Bite", which pops up in lots of classic horror anthologies. That's certainly the one I remember most, that and the title novella which is not horror but, if I remember correctly, lycanthropic spy adventure, but I haven't read anything by Boucher in years. "Nellthu" reminds me of a Frederic Brown story -- Brown often wrote very short pieces, which often had a funny or nasty punchline. "Nellthu", which is about a demon who grants wishes, flips that trend by actually being rather sweet by the end. Well, sweet to a point as long as you don't think about it, because then it becomes a little more mercenary, but still sweet.
Also too short to really get into is Stephen Graham Jones's "Little Monsters", which is about a married couple creating a monster. Take that title and apply it to my briefest of descriptions and you might have some idea. A very literal pun, in other words, which, if that's your thing, okay, but the story's well-written -- I just don't know what to do with it at the end. Do I believe that what the couple claim will happen before the not-quite-twist occurs will still happen? I do believe I'm supposed to think so, but I do not believe it. But I also strongly suspect the story is just about its pun, which seems to me to be a waste.
Meanwhile, and moving on, a question I sometimes have when reading such short stories is what was behind the idea to keep the story so brief? It's a curious impulse that I, in my quite limited exerpience, have never felt, and I wondered about it again when reading Richard Adams's "The Knife". It's a story of revenge set in an English boys' school, and it's about three and a half pages long. The basic plot of "The Knife" could have been, and more than likely has been, stretched out to novel and film length many times before, or at the very least could be, very easily, and as long as a good writer was behind it you would never feel like the thing was being stretched past its breaking point. None of which is to say that "The Knife" should have been longer -- it's perfectly effective as it is. It's just interesting to me to read what really is a novel's worth of material so radically compacted. This is in sharp contrast to another story I read, Joe Lansdale's "On a Dark October", which is about as long, or a little longer, than Adams's story, but plays out like an isolated scene of a larger piece. It isn't that, of course, but that's how it plays. Adams's story may be effective, but Lansdale's is truly creepy, and I wonder if the different approaches to the short short might be behind that. Anyway, "On a Dark October" is in some ways vintage Lansdale, depicting a group of good old boys performing what the reader gathers is a human sacrifice on Halloween night. His way with violence is quietly devastating ("What they did took a long time"), and the way they talk to each other, and to something else ("All yours. Keep the years good, huh?") places the events in the real world among real people. Pretty wonderful, if that's the word.
Finally, or nearly, I read a story called "The Savage Mouth" by Sakyo Komatsu*, a writer I've gathered was at one point one of Japan's top science fiction writers (Komatsu, author of a famous novel called Japan Sinks, passed away earlier this year just months after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami). And this is what's interesting about "The Savage Mouth", which at ten pages is more than twice as long as anything else I read for this post: it is perhaps the one pure science fiction horror story I've ever read. Maybe that's going too far, but as I read it I thought about other famous examples of this genre hybrid, and all of them basically draw their horror from an alien monster killing astronauts or invading earth or something in that realm. "The Savage Mouth", meanwhile, contains nothing like that, and instead places its main character, who goes unnamed, in a world where certain technological innovations, of a medical nature, and in line with a particular real path of innovation the benefits of which have been enjoyed by many worthy souls, have progressed to a point where a soulsick misanthrope and nihilist is able do something quite horrible. I am hesitant to say more. I will say -- and this in itself may be too much -- that "The Savage Mouth" has the effect of rendering one of Stephen King's more notorious stories much less shocking than it was by revealing that King arrived here in second place, at best, and didn't go as far as Komatsu did anyway. "The Savage Mouth" steps wrong a bit right at the end by bringing in an official voice to bemoan the incident(s) we have just witnessed, but never mind -- the scene was unneeded, but is also easily ignored. "The Savage Mouth" is quite horrific, but is sadly correct in claiming that, as technology advances, the more we're able to do, the more awful things we will unquestionably do.
*I would like to thank Simon Abrams for steering me towards "The Savage Mouth", which I would not have know about otherwise.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 20: Feelings of Impending Doom
I do not know who Charles Black is, but I'm beginning to suspect he doesn't exist. I'm not going to go too far out on a limb here, but during some extraordinarily cursory research into the man behind the British anthology series The Black Book of Horror, I found a blog by horror writer Craig Henderson, who often appears within those pages, and his archive for the tag "Charles Black" is, indeed, labeled "Charles Black", with the quotation marks. See? Then, elsewhere, I found a brief interview, allegedly with Charles Black, in which he's asked "Who are ya?" and begins his answer by saying "Most people have no idea who I am..."
So I'm thinking a pseudonym, for a person or a horror writer collective. Right or wrong, does any of this matter? Almost certainly not, but these Black Book of Horror things are sort of weird. I don't know where I first heard about them, but it was probably when I was doing an Amazon search for Reggie Oliver, hoping maybe he'd published a book I could afford. Oliver gets a regular look in to these Charles Black books, and in fact has a story in each of the three volumes -- the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh -- I purchased last month. The regular presence of Reggie Oliver in any anthology series can only be good, and, also good, Mark Samuels is no stranger to those pages either. But they're not the only ones. Looking at the contents pages for my three volumes, it feels as though Charles Black, or "Charles Black", selects the stories that appear in his anthologies from a pool of maybe thirty, thirty-five writers. As I said, Reggie Oliver has a story in all three volumes. John Llewellyn Probert appears four times in three volumes. Paul Finch three times, Craig Herbertson and David Williamson three times, Anna Taborska three...you get the idea. These are short books, too, about 200 pages each, give or take 10 pages. People complain that Stephen Jones has too regular a stable, but he has nothing on Charles Black.
This quirk -- and by the way, no introduction to any of the books, and no author biographies, either -- did make choosing my stories for today fairly easy, though. I just picked three of the most regular contributors, three I'd never read before, and that was it. None of the stories in these books are long -- 17 stories making up a 200-ish page book means nothing is going to top 20 pages -- and each of the ones I read was pretty breezy, which is not necessarily a compliment but it certainly makes my job a little easier. And each story was, in the end, completely ridiculous.
We begin with a story I chose based on the title, "Hangman Wanted: Apply in Writing" by Paul Finch, from The Fifth Black Book of Horror. This story is what it seems to be. A man, calling himself Styles, puts an ad in the paper looking for a hangman, and finds one, named Gargan. Gargan admits to being wanted by the law, but this only sweetens the deal for Styles, as he wants someone desperate enough to actually do the job. The job, you should know, is to hang Styles. Styles is dying of cancer, of course, because as awful a disease as it is, it has been an absolute boon to fiction writers, and he doesn't have much time left. He wants to die his way, and his research has shown him that classical hanging, of the kind once practiced in England, is the quickest and least painful option available:
"You see, Gargan...when a person is correctly drop-hanged, he prepitates downwards over a scientifically measured distance, which has taken into account his exact weight and height. When he hits the bottom of the rope, his head is jerked sharply upwards with mathematically predetermined force, causing an immediate fracture-dislocation of the spinal cord and instant deep unconsciousness. Though it may take him a short while to actually expire, he'll know nothing about it."
The reason Styles doesn't act as his own executioner is because he's a devout Catholic who worries about the effect suicide will have on his eternal soul. He also believes in a loving God, and suspects that suicides aren't treated nearly as unfairly as some preach, but he still wants to cut into the risk factor by hiring someone to actually pull the lever. For this, he is willing to pay three million pounds.
So there's your set up, and much of the story involves Gargan following Styles's spy movie-like instructions for getting to the place of execution. And then, if you managed to still be with Paul Finch up to this point, things go bonkers. And by "bonkers" I mean "stupid". There's a big twist ending here that is preceded by a series of events that feel like the result of Finch not believing that simply hanging Styles would be a satisfying enough end. In fairness, it wouldn't be, but it doesn't appear that Finch thought about this and then chose an ending, but rather just kept typing until something clicked. Styles pulls a gun and starts shooting at Gargan because if he doesn't fight back it's still suicide. Oh, and he doesn't have three million pounds. And then the twist, which I guess I won't give away, but suffice it to say that Gargan as portrayed up until the ending does not match in any way the Gargan we're now supposed to believe in. It's just a twist. The story exists to have a twist, come hell or high water.
Next, in The Sixth Black Book of Horror, is "Bagpuss" by Anna Taborska. This one comes closest to being good. It's a story of a young girl named Emily who is moving with her "uninterested" mother from the city to the country, the two of them fending for themselves since Emily's father up and walked out one day, an act writers employ on those occasions when cancer simply won't do. New York City, apparently, because there are references to Third Avenue and Fifth Avenue, which are not unique to New York, obviously, but nobody bothers to mention such avenues otherwise. I don't know Taborska's nationality, but it's hard to imagine "Bagpuss" as being an American story, considering that "Bagpuss", the title, refers to Emily's cat. And Bagpuss does not sound like the name of an American cat.
Anyhow, so Emily and Bagpuss and her mother travel by train to their new country home, which Emily does not care for:
And Emily finally understood the feeling in the pit of her stomach that she'd had since she was little -- the feeling that crept over her in the middle of the day or in the dead of night; the feeling that grew as she tossed and turned in her bed -- formless and indescribably until it took shape and found expression in her nightmares and anxiety dreams...
Emily trembled as she looked up at her new home.
By the end of "Bagpuss", this passage might manage to take on greater significance than it does at the time -- you're reading a horror story, after all, and such things are to be expected -- because like all three of today's stories, there is no supernatural element in "Bagpuss", despite the implication of Emily's sudden fears. No, "Bagpuss" would seem to be the story of a mind that either suddenly breaks or was always cracked, but in any case what follows that is so fast and out of the blue that I imagine a film version of "Bagpuss" would attract ironic fans to midnight screenings where everybody is dressed as cats or little girls or cab drivers or bankers driving SUVs, and they throw rocks and hot chocolate and shit at the screen during important moments. Taborska did succeed in making me like the cat, even though why it gets the title spot I don't know. It is significant, but by the end it's less specifically significant, as a cat and as a pet, than the title would lead you to believe. The story could just as easily, or more easily, be called "Emily". Or "Her Mom".
Finally, in The Seventh Black Book of Horror we have "It Begins at Home" by John Llewellyn Probert. This one is I guess a satire of some sort, a satire of charitable organizations and the way they try to make people feel bad enough about famine and poverty to give away their money. It's almost as if Probert believes charity is a bad thing, or that he resents being made to feel guilty, but in any case the story is about a near-impoverished (irony???) photographer whose pictures of starving children in Tansinia don't impress his boss because the children don't look as near death as one might consider desirable when their client, the charity, is looking for donations. Probert makes it clear that it's the, I guess, ad agency, and not the charity, who is to blame for what comes -- here's a hint: if you want someone to look dead in your photograph, what's the best way to insure that? -- but what any of this is in aid of I couldn't tell you, unless it is indeed that Probert thinks charities are a bunch of bullshit. Which is his right.
But need I go on. I do not believe I need. The one other thing I will say about all of these stories is that they feel very much like they were written by the same person, or, to put it another way, could have been written by anybody. If it wasn't for the presence of Reggie Oliver, Mark Samuels, Steve Rasnic Tem, and others in "Charles Black"'s series, I would really be wondering right about now.
So I'm thinking a pseudonym, for a person or a horror writer collective. Right or wrong, does any of this matter? Almost certainly not, but these Black Book of Horror things are sort of weird. I don't know where I first heard about them, but it was probably when I was doing an Amazon search for Reggie Oliver, hoping maybe he'd published a book I could afford. Oliver gets a regular look in to these Charles Black books, and in fact has a story in each of the three volumes -- the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh -- I purchased last month. The regular presence of Reggie Oliver in any anthology series can only be good, and, also good, Mark Samuels is no stranger to those pages either. But they're not the only ones. Looking at the contents pages for my three volumes, it feels as though Charles Black, or "Charles Black", selects the stories that appear in his anthologies from a pool of maybe thirty, thirty-five writers. As I said, Reggie Oliver has a story in all three volumes. John Llewellyn Probert appears four times in three volumes. Paul Finch three times, Craig Herbertson and David Williamson three times, Anna Taborska three...you get the idea. These are short books, too, about 200 pages each, give or take 10 pages. People complain that Stephen Jones has too regular a stable, but he has nothing on Charles Black.
This quirk -- and by the way, no introduction to any of the books, and no author biographies, either -- did make choosing my stories for today fairly easy, though. I just picked three of the most regular contributors, three I'd never read before, and that was it. None of the stories in these books are long -- 17 stories making up a 200-ish page book means nothing is going to top 20 pages -- and each of the ones I read was pretty breezy, which is not necessarily a compliment but it certainly makes my job a little easier. And each story was, in the end, completely ridiculous.
We begin with a story I chose based on the title, "Hangman Wanted: Apply in Writing" by Paul Finch, from The Fifth Black Book of Horror. This story is what it seems to be. A man, calling himself Styles, puts an ad in the paper looking for a hangman, and finds one, named Gargan. Gargan admits to being wanted by the law, but this only sweetens the deal for Styles, as he wants someone desperate enough to actually do the job. The job, you should know, is to hang Styles. Styles is dying of cancer, of course, because as awful a disease as it is, it has been an absolute boon to fiction writers, and he doesn't have much time left. He wants to die his way, and his research has shown him that classical hanging, of the kind once practiced in England, is the quickest and least painful option available:"You see, Gargan...when a person is correctly drop-hanged, he prepitates downwards over a scientifically measured distance, which has taken into account his exact weight and height. When he hits the bottom of the rope, his head is jerked sharply upwards with mathematically predetermined force, causing an immediate fracture-dislocation of the spinal cord and instant deep unconsciousness. Though it may take him a short while to actually expire, he'll know nothing about it."
The reason Styles doesn't act as his own executioner is because he's a devout Catholic who worries about the effect suicide will have on his eternal soul. He also believes in a loving God, and suspects that suicides aren't treated nearly as unfairly as some preach, but he still wants to cut into the risk factor by hiring someone to actually pull the lever. For this, he is willing to pay three million pounds.
So there's your set up, and much of the story involves Gargan following Styles's spy movie-like instructions for getting to the place of execution. And then, if you managed to still be with Paul Finch up to this point, things go bonkers. And by "bonkers" I mean "stupid". There's a big twist ending here that is preceded by a series of events that feel like the result of Finch not believing that simply hanging Styles would be a satisfying enough end. In fairness, it wouldn't be, but it doesn't appear that Finch thought about this and then chose an ending, but rather just kept typing until something clicked. Styles pulls a gun and starts shooting at Gargan because if he doesn't fight back it's still suicide. Oh, and he doesn't have three million pounds. And then the twist, which I guess I won't give away, but suffice it to say that Gargan as portrayed up until the ending does not match in any way the Gargan we're now supposed to believe in. It's just a twist. The story exists to have a twist, come hell or high water.
Next, in The Sixth Black Book of Horror, is "Bagpuss" by Anna Taborska. This one comes closest to being good. It's a story of a young girl named Emily who is moving with her "uninterested" mother from the city to the country, the two of them fending for themselves since Emily's father up and walked out one day, an act writers employ on those occasions when cancer simply won't do. New York City, apparently, because there are references to Third Avenue and Fifth Avenue, which are not unique to New York, obviously, but nobody bothers to mention such avenues otherwise. I don't know Taborska's nationality, but it's hard to imagine "Bagpuss" as being an American story, considering that "Bagpuss", the title, refers to Emily's cat. And Bagpuss does not sound like the name of an American cat.Anyhow, so Emily and Bagpuss and her mother travel by train to their new country home, which Emily does not care for:
And Emily finally understood the feeling in the pit of her stomach that she'd had since she was little -- the feeling that crept over her in the middle of the day or in the dead of night; the feeling that grew as she tossed and turned in her bed -- formless and indescribably until it took shape and found expression in her nightmares and anxiety dreams...
Emily trembled as she looked up at her new home.
By the end of "Bagpuss", this passage might manage to take on greater significance than it does at the time -- you're reading a horror story, after all, and such things are to be expected -- because like all three of today's stories, there is no supernatural element in "Bagpuss", despite the implication of Emily's sudden fears. No, "Bagpuss" would seem to be the story of a mind that either suddenly breaks or was always cracked, but in any case what follows that is so fast and out of the blue that I imagine a film version of "Bagpuss" would attract ironic fans to midnight screenings where everybody is dressed as cats or little girls or cab drivers or bankers driving SUVs, and they throw rocks and hot chocolate and shit at the screen during important moments. Taborska did succeed in making me like the cat, even though why it gets the title spot I don't know. It is significant, but by the end it's less specifically significant, as a cat and as a pet, than the title would lead you to believe. The story could just as easily, or more easily, be called "Emily". Or "Her Mom".
Finally, in The Seventh Black Book of Horror we have "It Begins at Home" by John Llewellyn Probert. This one is I guess a satire of some sort, a satire of charitable organizations and the way they try to make people feel bad enough about famine and poverty to give away their money. It's almost as if Probert believes charity is a bad thing, or that he resents being made to feel guilty, but in any case the story is about a near-impoverished (irony???) photographer whose pictures of starving children in Tansinia don't impress his boss because the children don't look as near death as one might consider desirable when their client, the charity, is looking for donations. Probert makes it clear that it's the, I guess, ad agency, and not the charity, who is to blame for what comes -- here's a hint: if you want someone to look dead in your photograph, what's the best way to insure that? -- but what any of this is in aid of I couldn't tell you, unless it is indeed that Probert thinks charities are a bunch of bullshit. Which is his right.But need I go on. I do not believe I need. The one other thing I will say about all of these stories is that they feel very much like they were written by the same person, or, to put it another way, could have been written by anybody. If it wasn't for the presence of Reggie Oliver, Mark Samuels, Steve Rasnic Tem, and others in "Charles Black"'s series, I would really be wondering right about now.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 19: Even Death May Die
One topic that I feel must be at least touched upon at some point, meaning now, in this series is the existence, as a thing that people do, of the continuing "Cthulhu* Mythos" stories, inspired by and in some ways just short of copied from the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The other day, in my post about two short stories inspired directly by classic horror films, a commenter named John said that one of the stories sounded like fan fiction. For whatever reason, I hadn't made this connection myself, possibly because, while I didn't care for the story in question, it was well-written and professionally published. Even so, John had a point, and I wonder why the Cthulhu stories, the modern stories written decades after Lovecraft himself was consumed by the Great Old Ones, are not similarly regarded.It can't help my thinking on this subject that I have, to date, read only one story, maybe two, that qualify. Although I guess that depends on what you consider the appropriate qualifications for a story to be part of the post-Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos ("mythos" is one of my least favorite words, by the way). Thomas Ligotti is blatantly inspired by Lovecraft, but to date I have not read a single story by him that actually referenced Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth or the Necronomicon or Abdul Al-Azred -- in short, nothing created by Lovecraft. What about Michael Chabon's two horror stories, which go so far as to include names that sound like they could have been created by Lovecraft? I don't know, but I feel like what counts is writing a story with Cthulhu in it (or what/whoever). By that standard, I haven't read much, and none of what I have read was written by August Derleth. If you're going to approach this subject, you should probably approach it through the door Derleth is holding open for you, and from the doorway of which he is signaling you wildly. But I just have never read the man. It's my impression that no one reads Derleth for pleasure anymore, and that the man, despite having a name that sounds like it should belong to an evil wizard, lives on as an enthusiastic promoter of Lovecraft and the kindly and endlessly helpful publisher and encourager of any number of young horror writers. Not because of his fiction, though. Yet it's Derleth, as much as, if not more than Lovecraft himself, who is the reason stuff like, say, Night Shade Press's The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart, even exists.
And why Brian Lumley exists, at least in the incarnation he currently enjoys. Lumley has written a lot of stuff, and is best known for his Necroscope series of novels about an occult investigator named Harry Keogh. He has also written a great deal of Cthulhu fiction, and is the author of the one unabashedly fannish story of that kind I've read (the other one, the one I'm not sure about, is Lawrence Santoro's "God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him", and I'm not sure simply because I can't remember if Cthulhu or any of the other Old Ones are specifically named, though I do remember the references could not have been clearer). That story is called "The Fairground Horror", and it is a disappointment. I've given much thought about why it is such a disappointment, and there are an unfortunate host of reasons. To begin with, as a fan of circus/carnival/fair-based horror stories, I was personally disappointed that the setting of Lumley's story was basically an afterthought. It gave him an excuse for his two main characters, brothers who ran a freakshow (about which we learn nothing) that eventually gets transformed into an attraction called "Tomb of the Great Old Ones", having been transformed by Hamilton Tharpe's global plundering of sites of great and ancient evil. Somewhat to his brother Anderson's chagrin, Hamilton supplants the old exhibits with these bizarre new artifacts, and also goes about attracting experts in the field of, I suppose, ancient evil, to come see them. Anderson can't help but notice that these experts -- who are basically their only customers by now -- follow Hamilton into the tent, but never leave.
One day, he witnesses the explanation:
[Anderson] could still listen...and now Hamilton's voice came strange and vibrant, though still controlled in volume -- in a chant or invocation of terrible cadence and rhythmic disorder. These were not words the younger Tharpe uttered bunt unintelligible sounds, a morbidly insane agglutination of verbal improbabilities which ought never to have issued from a human throat at all! And as the invocation ceased, to an incredulous gasping from the doomed explorer, Anderson had to draw back from his hole lest he become visible in the glow of a green radiance springing up abruptly in the centre of Hamilton's encircling relics.
So Hamilton lures these men back to be consumed in the green light of Cthulhu, because he, Hamilton, is a priest of the cult. Up to this point, Anderson thought his younger brother was involved merely in a murder-for-cash scheme.As a story, "The Fairground Horror" has a couple of big problems. The first is that it's told mainly from the point of view of Anderson, and in flashback as he watches a new scholar enter the carnival tent. We learn very early that Anderson had to kill Hamilton, and it's very clear that the person doing the luring in the very beginning is Anderson. So we know that he has usurped his dead brother, and for most of the rest of the pretty long story, Lumley just tells us that yup, that's the deal, all right. Anderson's inability to believe that the madness his brother has revealed to him, and the terrifying dreams of Cthulhu he, Anderson, now experiences, are actually real, do nothing for us as readers. We know already. Lumley wastes a lot of time acting as though H. P. Lovecraft fans need to be convinced of any of this stuff.
It's not that well written, either, and this becomes key in ways beyond the obvious. Lumley, I've gathered, is a very happy guy, and very thrilled to be doing something he loves for a living. He writes Lovecraft stories because he loves Lovecraft. He just seems like a nice person. However, this is a weird trait to have as one of H. P. Lovecraft's torchbearers. Lovecraft himself was a miserable human being, an unhappy bigot who funnelled his disturbed imagination into these classic stories. And he, too, had several faults as a writer. But read this, a passage, ostensibly from the Necronomicon, written by Lovecraft for his classic "The Dunwich Horror":
As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
And now this, from "The Fairground Horror":
"You have been warned, AND YET YOU MEDDLE! While the Great Rising draws ever closer and Cthulhu's shadow looms, still you choose to search out His secrets for your own use! This night there will be a sign; ignore it at your peril, lest Cthulhu bestir Himself up to visit you personally in dreams, as He has aforetime visited others!"
Now which of those two passages better evokes a feeling of ancient terror and evil? It's not the one with all the exclamation marks, I'll tell you that. The best writing in "The Fairground Horror" are quotes from Lovecraft, including this post's title, which comes from the Necronomicon as "quoted" in Lovecraft's "The Nameless City": "That is not dead which can eternal lie/And with strange aeons even death may die." I don't really want to suggest that having a disturbed mind, as Lovecraft did (and as Poe did, and as Ligotti does), is essential to writing great horror fiction. Many great writers seem pretty well-adjusted, as far as I can tell -- M. R. James, Reggie Oliver, Mark Samuels, and so on. But Cthulhu and the rest of the Great Old Ones came specifically from the troubled mind of Lovecraft. To wander in, all happy-go-lucky and in possession of a perfectly healthy brain, and start trying to recreate what an unhealthy, but sincere, brain already made, must result in something that is pale and thin in comparison -- you weren't born with the problems that led to its creation in the first place. Ligotti has said that he believes the next great horror writer will come from the diseased fringes, the place where Lovecraft and Poe came from. I think that's hogwash. But I do believe the next great horror writer (after Ligotti and Samuels and Oliver, I mean) will create his own work. I don't say that to imply Lumley is stealing. He's not. He's created plenty of his own, and he bows to Lovecraft and Derleth. But this, stories like "The Fairground Horror"...it's only enthusiasm.
*By the way, according to L. Sprague de Camp, "Cthulhu" should be pronounced something like "T'luh-luh." This I learned from his Lovecraft biography. It reminds me of when I learned that Robert Louis Stevenson intended "Jekyll" to be pronounced "JEEK-il". My response to that was, yeah, good luck sellin' that one, gramps!
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 18: Should I See Him Smile Again?
In his introduction to Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories, Dahl talks about being shocked by the number of terrible ghost stories written by famous writers, a lesson he learned while reading through hundreds of them during the planning stages of a TV anthology series. He eventually starts to find the good ones, and after much talk of women writing ghost stories (he's in favor of it) and how difficult it is to write children's books (very), he says:Good ghost stories, like good children's books, are damnably difficult to write. I am a short story writer myself, and although I have always longed to write just one decent ghost story, I have never succeeded in bringing it off. Once I thought I had done it....But when it was finished and I examined it carefully, I knew it wasn't good enough....I simply hadn't got the secret...
He then claims:
The best ghost stories don't have ghosts in them. At least you don't see the ghost. Instead you see only the result of his actions.
This last bit is noteworthy for a couple of reasons, and I can't decide which to go with first. Okay, basically, what I find interesting about the idea that great ghost stories don't feature ghosts you can physically see is that, with stories like that, what the writer is edging into is the weird story, or stories of the unexplainable, by which I mean stories where something supernatural or otherworldly does seem to happen, but at the end you can't point to something specific and say "It was mummies," or whatever. "Ghost story", in this context, becomes both as vague and as intriguing to me as the concept of the weird story, itself quite broad in scope -- broad enough to take in the kind of ghost story, if we really still want to call it that, that Dahl is talking about.
The second interesting thing about what Dahl said is that neither of the stories I chose from Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories actually comes anywhere close to fitting that criteria. Another story from the anthology that I read some time ago, Robert Aickman's "Ringing the Changes", does, but the other two, one of which is among the most famous and beloved ghost stories of the 20th century, don't. And it's really very curious, because each might have gone that route, and the famous one in particular would have benefitted hugely from that decision.
I may take these two stories together, incidentally, because, while chosen almost completely by random, the number of similarities, or anyway the significance of those similarities, are such that running through them separately would feel redundant. First, to name them: "Th
e Corner Shop" by Cynthia Asquith, which I chose only because I have a great fondness for horror stories that revolve around mysterious shops; and "Afterward" by Edith Wharton, this being the famous one, and for roughly 28 of its 31 pages damn near perfect, as far as I can tell.The idea behind "Afterward" and its title is that the ghost that haunts the new, but very old, home of Ned and Mary Boyne is not, according to the friend who helped them acquire the place, one you will ever see, or ever know exists until, much later -- afterward, to put it another way -- you find yourself putting together the pieces and realizing that some other force was at play in your life. This is a brilliant concept, and almost impossible to pull off as advertised. Edith Wharton is Edith Wharton, and I'm just me, but I have to say she doesn't do it. But how could she? For her to succeed, I, or you, the reader, would have to have the exact same experience as the characters in the story, and would have to forget about the possibility of a ghost, and only after we'd read the story and been entirely puzzled by the events described therein, would we think "Hey wait a second!" as we flipped back through the pages to find the part where they talk about ghosts. So it's impossible, full stop, forget that "almost" hedging I tried before. You just can't do it.
This doesn't make "Afterward" any less great for much of its length. It is so quietly eerie, and is very delicate in its effects, much moreso than Asquith's "The Corner Shop". The haunting of "Afterward" involves a man seen in the distance, and later someone asking to see Ned Boyne and being told that he is in the library. It then ramps up into full-blown mystery from there, but even then a large piece of what the reader must note as strange is that Mary Boyne does not remember a crucial and entirely memorable event that would have happened only a bit earlier on the day her whole life falls apart. Is some sort of haunting force clouding her memory? Wharton never says, so the possibility is either that, or that Wharton is disregarding normal human thought patterns to an obscene degree. Myself, I have no trouble whatsoever buying the idea that Mary's memory has been supernaturally fiddled with, and I was left wondering whether, despite my insistence that just about any work of literature short of maybe Finnegans Wake is filmable, "Afterward" could ever be made to work on screen the way it does on the page.
The Asquith story, as I started to say, is much more obvious in its methods. It involves a poor young man who one night finds a very welcoming antiques shop run by two delightful young women, a shop being manned, he discovers on subsequent visits, by an ancient but very solicitous man, from whom our narrator buys a little jade frog for half a crown. He comes to learn the frogs true value, and of course he never sees the old man again. An act of generosity, which our narrator regards as one of simple fairness, brings to light who the old man really was and what led to the transaction of the jade frog, and the last pages of "The Corner Shop" consist of an explanation being told to us.
This is how "Afterward" ends, as well, although in that case the story being told is rather grimmer than in the Asquith story. What's surprising is that both stories revolve around business transactions, and morality and ethical behavior within business, and the importance of behaving well even when the law does not require it. This is a coincidence, and the moral question at the center of "Afterward" is much clearer than in "The Corner Shop" -- for the stakes to be raised in her story, Asquith finds it necessary to make several people die completely alone and destitute simply because, apparently, they sold some item for much less than it was worth. But this helps the story to some extent, because while "The Corner Shop" eventually let me down, it is an interesting example of beneficence in horror -- "The Corner Shop" is, in fact, in the final analysis, not a horror story, because there is no malevolence in it. It is unquestionably a ghost story, however, and I'm left wondering if there is any other horror subgenre where this could work. Is it possible to write a vampire story that is free of anything sinister? Even if you tried, the liebestod would still be thick as molasses, and therefore unavoidably creepy to many. No, only in ghost stories can forces beyond the grave work towards the betterment of, if not mankind, then at least the individual.
This is not the case in Wharton's story, however. There's something far more malignant at play there, although while maybe (maybe? One can only assume) punishment has been meted out somewhere along the line, the ghostly presences aren't out to harm just whoever. No, if there's a malignancy in "Afterward", it's elsewhere, and has less to do with the act that served as the catalyst to the whole chain of events, but the ability of he who performed that act to think nothing of it. This is a hidden theme in "Afterward", and it would sure have been nice if more about the story had been hidden. As I've said, much of Wharton's story, the vast majority of it, is as perfect a ghost/weird story, of the low-key variety, as I've ever read. Why this insistence on explaining what could already have been safely inferred is beyond me, and it left me feeling slightly disappointed. Not much would have been necessary to achieve perfection, either -- maybe lop off five pages and cauterize the wound. Other than that, it's all there.But I'm being greedy. It's still a terrific story, and the Asquith one really isn't bad either. Asquith wasn't the writer Wharton was, and when she makes the same mistakes as Wharton they tend to stand out more, but beyond that she does achieve a wonderful chill in the early going, and instilled in me a strong desire to know. The impulse to satisfy that desire has been the downfall of writers far worse than either Wharton or Asquith, and both of them finally rise above it.
Monday, October 17, 2011
The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 17: His Head Like Melted Wax
Well, this is awkward. Way back in 2008, in my first go ‘round with this October hullabaloo, I wrote a post about Glen Hirshberg, focusing on his story “Mr. Dark’s Carnival.” I wasn’t terribly fond of that story, and felt particularly disappointed given how big a name Hirshberg has become in the world of horror fiction. He hasn’t published too many books, just two story collections, a suspense novel about childhood secrets and whatnot called The Snowman’s Children, and a more recent novel, apparently based in fantasy more than horror, about, of all things, the Federal Writers Project called The Book of Bunk(the unwillingness of any big or mid-sized publishers to take on something as oddball as The Book of Bunk apparently stalled Hirshberg’s career for a while). But he publishes stories at a steady clip (his next book is supposedly another story collection), and is a perennial name in all the round ups of best fiction from a given year. He is without question one of the Serious Writers in contemporary horror, more mainstream and less esoteric than, say, Thomas Ligotti or Mark Samuels, and closer in spirit to Stephen King with his regular fallbacks to idyllic-on-the-surface childhoods, and the world of the American family as maybe not the source of, but the victim of, his horror. Glen Hirshberg is respected and accessible and he cares about what he’s doing. He is a real writer. And I feel like I just dismissed the guy. I won’t pretend that I liked “Mr. Dark’s Carnival” more than I let on, but I’ve long felt that Hirshberg deserved a fairer shake than the one I gave him. Not that he cares, mind you, but I do, and so this year I decided to set things right, at least by reading more of his stuff – I would simply try again (and I did read The Snowman’s Children, which I liked well enough, as I believe I covered to some mild degree in the older post). So now I have tried again. Same results.
I chose two stories, one, the longer of the two called “Struwwelpeter”, from the era of The Two Sams, his first collection, and the other, “Miss Ill-Kept Runt” from just a few years ago and as yet uncollected. Everything I have now read by Hirshberg, one novel and three short stories, is the same in a few crucial ways: each has a morose approach to childhood that it can’t shake, each attempts to shake it, or leaven it, with talk of kids’ games and general rascalry that never, at any point, feels genuine, and each features children that behave like children only when they’re around grown-ups, and even then only barely – among each other, though, they talk and act like slightly stupid adults (also, two of the four short stories I’ve read revolve around Halloween in some way, but for now I’m chalking that up to coincidence). King has his own issues in this realm, but like another artist with whom King seems to occasionally share a soul, Steven Spielberg, he’s never forgotten the energy of childhood, the chaos and inventiveness of it -- or the sheer ridiculousness of it -- and he never has to pretend that he knows what’s talking about, because he remembers. Meanwhile, on the evidence of his fiction, which seems stubbornly rooted to this realm, I’m convinced that at the moment of his birth Glen Hirshberg was no younger than 26 years old. In his stories, all the ten-year-olds appear to constantly be thinking that graduate school is all well and good, but then what?
Admittedly, this last problem is less apparent in today’s first story, “Miss Ill-Kept Runt”, but Hirshberg has other problems to fill the gap. A short one, about ten pages, “Miss Ill-Kept Runt” is told from the point of view of Chloe who, if my math is correct, is just shy of five years old as she and her family pile into the car -- the entire story consists of the family on the road -- leaving their house and moving elsewhere to be near Chloe’s, as she calls them, “Grammy and Grumpy.” This, by the way, is the kind of concession towards childhood thinking that Hirshberg is willing to make – the insufferable cuteness. "Miss Ill-Kept Runt" is full of this, disjointed weirdness such as a game Chloe invented called the "silly-rhyme-pencil game", which consists of saying something, in this case "Bye, house", and is answered by someone else with a rhyming phrase that begins with the word "pencil", like, in this case, "Pencil mouse." "Bye, house." "Pencil mouse." You know, like kids do. This reminds me of that moment in Signs when Mel Gibson says of his children "They should be outside playing Furry Furry Rabbit" and Joaquin Phoenix asks "What's Furry Furry Rabbit?", to which Gibson replies "It's a game, isn't it?"
Plus there's Chloe's brother, who we know only as The Miracle, because he survived a life-threatening head injury when he was five, and who says to his father at one point "Dad, Gordyfoot." First of all, "Gordyfoot" turns out to be a reference to Gordon Lightfoot, a CD of music by whom The Miracle (or perhaps The Miracle!?!?) would like to listen to. I thought maybe "Gordyfoot" was a nickname Mr. Lightfoot once had thrust upon him by his fans, but I looked it up and, the heavens bless us and keep us, it wasn't. So this is one of those things where a family creates some kind of delightful shorthand for themselves, but, as with the pencil rhyme game, Hirshberg has a particular knack for making all this allegedly personal, individual stuff sound hopelessly manufactured. I don't believe a word of any of it. "Miss Ill-Kept Runt" goes horror late, and not very effectively. It's a story with a twist, one I should have seen coming, and one that left me unmoved. "Oh," was all the reaction I could muster.
"Struwwelpeter", the longer story, has many of the same problems, though I must say it starts off quite well. For one thing, here Hirshberg manages to justify the sluggishness that hamstrings all his fiction, especially his characters, and especially his children characters, by setting "Struwwelpeter" in a wet little town near Puget Sound. This, from Andrew, our young narrator:
For hours, we'd prowl the green hillsides, watching the sailors yell at the invading seals from the top of the locks while the seals ignored them, skimming for fish and sometimes rolling on their backs and flipping their fins. We watched the rich-people sailboats with their masts rusting, the big gray fishing boats from Alaska and Japan and Russia with the fishermen bored on deck, smoking, throwing butts at the seals and leaning on the rails while the gulls shrieked overhead.
I think Hirshberg does a terrific job of establishing a setting here, and I was quite intrigued by how this setting would factor into a horror story. "Not very much", turns out to be the answer, and that is really too bad, but Hirshberg also, better than in anything else I've read by him, develops a world of children that seems genuine, and specifically believable. It's nothing elaborate -- four friends, sort of outcasts, a little bit, meet at the home of one of their number, named Peter Andersz, to play Atari. Peter lives alone with him father, a kindly, lonely older man who hangs out with a couple of Serbians and dresses in thin gray and black clothes that are always soaked through. Peter, meanwhile, is kind of a dick, and everyone knows this, and he can sometimes lash out for no good reason at his father ("Hello, Dipshit-Dad," Peter says at one point, an example of Hirshberg's sharp ear for the way kids talk). When this happens, his father refers to him as Struwwelpeter, from a German children's book that taught lessons about bad behavior.
This is left alone for most of "Struwwelpeter"'s thirty-odd page length, most of the rest of it being taken up by the recollections of Andrew and Peter, who Andrew has gravitated to at least partly because his occasionally cold recklessness, about a local eccentric named Mr. Paars, the grounds of whose home the two boys once snuck onto and found a gazebo-like structure housing a large white bell. Upon this discovery, Mr. Paars himself appeared, terrifying the children, and informed them "That bell raises the dead." And then some years later, the two boys, along with their friends the Mack sisters, Jenny and Kelly, decide to go back.
So there's your set up. And to me, this whole idea of a white bell in a gazebo that can raise the dead, along with other details such as a strange pattern in the grass and a few other things, all seem so arbitrary. It reads like a jumble of vaguely weird things to which one could reasonably apply words like "dead" and phrases such as "raise the", and come out feeling as though you've just created the environment for a horror story. Maybe someone could have shaped this stuff into something truly creepy, but Hirshberg just makes it feel like a pile of random crap. No explanation is offered, which I'm perfectly fine with, but on the opposite end no mystery is able to form that would make us want an explanation and, in the face of its absence, wonder to ourselves.
Then there's the kids, none of whom register. The two girls are notably smart (I'm not sure I've come across a young girl in horror fiction who was not notably smart) and Andrew is a blank. Peter's the troubled one, and the center of it all. Well, obviously, he's right there in the title. But despite some interesting use of the idea of doubling introduced by the reference to the Struwwelpeter story, nothing ever sinks in. "Sinks in" as in it's understandable, yes, okay, but "sinks in" as in effected me intellectually or emotionally or in any way that made me respond to its artistry, no. Hirshberg's prose is good insofar as it's not actually bad, but little more can be said for it. It's all just a march of words.
The ending to "Struwwelpeter" generated some interest in me. It is, I guess, a twist, and some would no doubt claim it's a tacky one. They may have a point, I don't know, but I didn't think it was. I thought it actually effectively justified the story's title, and also proved that some ghostly connection between the story at the Paars' house and the actual personality of Peter, if not him specifically, was in place. At this level, it's a smart story -- plus I liked the very last line -- that I didn't buy for half a second.
I tried, Glen Hirshberg. I really did.
I chose two stories, one, the longer of the two called “Struwwelpeter”, from the era of The Two Sams, his first collection, and the other, “Miss Ill-Kept Runt” from just a few years ago and as yet uncollected. Everything I have now read by Hirshberg, one novel and three short stories, is the same in a few crucial ways: each has a morose approach to childhood that it can’t shake, each attempts to shake it, or leaven it, with talk of kids’ games and general rascalry that never, at any point, feels genuine, and each features children that behave like children only when they’re around grown-ups, and even then only barely – among each other, though, they talk and act like slightly stupid adults (also, two of the four short stories I’ve read revolve around Halloween in some way, but for now I’m chalking that up to coincidence). King has his own issues in this realm, but like another artist with whom King seems to occasionally share a soul, Steven Spielberg, he’s never forgotten the energy of childhood, the chaos and inventiveness of it -- or the sheer ridiculousness of it -- and he never has to pretend that he knows what’s talking about, because he remembers. Meanwhile, on the evidence of his fiction, which seems stubbornly rooted to this realm, I’m convinced that at the moment of his birth Glen Hirshberg was no younger than 26 years old. In his stories, all the ten-year-olds appear to constantly be thinking that graduate school is all well and good, but then what?
Admittedly, this last problem is less apparent in today’s first story, “Miss Ill-Kept Runt”, but Hirshberg has other problems to fill the gap. A short one, about ten pages, “Miss Ill-Kept Runt” is told from the point of view of Chloe who, if my math is correct, is just shy of five years old as she and her family pile into the car -- the entire story consists of the family on the road -- leaving their house and moving elsewhere to be near Chloe’s, as she calls them, “Grammy and Grumpy.” This, by the way, is the kind of concession towards childhood thinking that Hirshberg is willing to make – the insufferable cuteness. "Miss Ill-Kept Runt" is full of this, disjointed weirdness such as a game Chloe invented called the "silly-rhyme-pencil game", which consists of saying something, in this case "Bye, house", and is answered by someone else with a rhyming phrase that begins with the word "pencil", like, in this case, "Pencil mouse." "Bye, house." "Pencil mouse." You know, like kids do. This reminds me of that moment in Signs when Mel Gibson says of his children "They should be outside playing Furry Furry Rabbit" and Joaquin Phoenix asks "What's Furry Furry Rabbit?", to which Gibson replies "It's a game, isn't it?"
Plus there's Chloe's brother, who we know only as The Miracle, because he survived a life-threatening head injury when he was five, and who says to his father at one point "Dad, Gordyfoot." First of all, "Gordyfoot" turns out to be a reference to Gordon Lightfoot, a CD of music by whom The Miracle (or perhaps The Miracle!?!?) would like to listen to. I thought maybe "Gordyfoot" was a nickname Mr. Lightfoot once had thrust upon him by his fans, but I looked it up and, the heavens bless us and keep us, it wasn't. So this is one of those things where a family creates some kind of delightful shorthand for themselves, but, as with the pencil rhyme game, Hirshberg has a particular knack for making all this allegedly personal, individual stuff sound hopelessly manufactured. I don't believe a word of any of it. "Miss Ill-Kept Runt" goes horror late, and not very effectively. It's a story with a twist, one I should have seen coming, and one that left me unmoved. "Oh," was all the reaction I could muster."Struwwelpeter", the longer story, has many of the same problems, though I must say it starts off quite well. For one thing, here Hirshberg manages to justify the sluggishness that hamstrings all his fiction, especially his characters, and especially his children characters, by setting "Struwwelpeter" in a wet little town near Puget Sound. This, from Andrew, our young narrator:
For hours, we'd prowl the green hillsides, watching the sailors yell at the invading seals from the top of the locks while the seals ignored them, skimming for fish and sometimes rolling on their backs and flipping their fins. We watched the rich-people sailboats with their masts rusting, the big gray fishing boats from Alaska and Japan and Russia with the fishermen bored on deck, smoking, throwing butts at the seals and leaning on the rails while the gulls shrieked overhead.
I think Hirshberg does a terrific job of establishing a setting here, and I was quite intrigued by how this setting would factor into a horror story. "Not very much", turns out to be the answer, and that is really too bad, but Hirshberg also, better than in anything else I've read by him, develops a world of children that seems genuine, and specifically believable. It's nothing elaborate -- four friends, sort of outcasts, a little bit, meet at the home of one of their number, named Peter Andersz, to play Atari. Peter lives alone with him father, a kindly, lonely older man who hangs out with a couple of Serbians and dresses in thin gray and black clothes that are always soaked through. Peter, meanwhile, is kind of a dick, and everyone knows this, and he can sometimes lash out for no good reason at his father ("Hello, Dipshit-Dad," Peter says at one point, an example of Hirshberg's sharp ear for the way kids talk). When this happens, his father refers to him as Struwwelpeter, from a German children's book that taught lessons about bad behavior.
This is left alone for most of "Struwwelpeter"'s thirty-odd page length, most of the rest of it being taken up by the recollections of Andrew and Peter, who Andrew has gravitated to at least partly because his occasionally cold recklessness, about a local eccentric named Mr. Paars, the grounds of whose home the two boys once snuck onto and found a gazebo-like structure housing a large white bell. Upon this discovery, Mr. Paars himself appeared, terrifying the children, and informed them "That bell raises the dead." And then some years later, the two boys, along with their friends the Mack sisters, Jenny and Kelly, decide to go back.
So there's your set up. And to me, this whole idea of a white bell in a gazebo that can raise the dead, along with other details such as a strange pattern in the grass and a few other things, all seem so arbitrary. It reads like a jumble of vaguely weird things to which one could reasonably apply words like "dead" and phrases such as "raise the", and come out feeling as though you've just created the environment for a horror story. Maybe someone could have shaped this stuff into something truly creepy, but Hirshberg just makes it feel like a pile of random crap. No explanation is offered, which I'm perfectly fine with, but on the opposite end no mystery is able to form that would make us want an explanation and, in the face of its absence, wonder to ourselves.
Then there's the kids, none of whom register. The two girls are notably smart (I'm not sure I've come across a young girl in horror fiction who was not notably smart) and Andrew is a blank. Peter's the troubled one, and the center of it all. Well, obviously, he's right there in the title. But despite some interesting use of the idea of doubling introduced by the reference to the Struwwelpeter story, nothing ever sinks in. "Sinks in" as in it's understandable, yes, okay, but "sinks in" as in effected me intellectually or emotionally or in any way that made me respond to its artistry, no. Hirshberg's prose is good insofar as it's not actually bad, but little more can be said for it. It's all just a march of words.
The ending to "Struwwelpeter" generated some interest in me. It is, I guess, a twist, and some would no doubt claim it's a tacky one. They may have a point, I don't know, but I didn't think it was. I thought it actually effectively justified the story's title, and also proved that some ghostly connection between the story at the Paars' house and the actual personality of Peter, if not him specifically, was in place. At this level, it's a smart story -- plus I liked the very last line -- that I didn't buy for half a second.
I tried, Glen Hirshberg. I really did.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 16: Thermoclines of Particulate Matter
Another quick one today. Way the hell back in September, as I was browsing my various anthologies for ideas about what to read, I came across two in separate books that seemed written specifically to be paired off by me in an easy display of my eagle-eye for thematic dovetails. Something like that, anyway, both stories are retelling of classic horror films from the point of view of the creature, kind of pop culture variations in miniature on John Gardner's great novel Grendel. I was quite excited to read both stories, because in theory this sort of thing can and should be a lot of fun, though how seriously any of it should be taken I couldn't and haven't decided (for myself, I mean -- you guys should decide for yourself, by all means!) -- there's not really much difference between this sort of fiction and the rash of film remakes we/you have been intermittently enjoying/suffering through. But good is good, I always say, and as often as I dig my fingernails into the flesh of my upper leg until I bleed to keep from lashing out at those around me every time I'm in a bookstore and see the three-dozenth Mr. Darcy, Mad Scientist or Hester Prynne, Witchfinder chunk of bullshit, I was, I must say, game.
And the first story justified my optimism. Called simply "The Creature from the Black Lagoon", it was written by Jim Shepard, a "mainstream" writer who I've long wanted to read, and who is no stranger to incorporating existing films very prominently in his fiction (though I don't believe either of these is as literal in its associations as "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" is, two of his novels are titled Project X and Nosferatu). This story is simply what I've described: a retelling of the 1954 Jack Arnold film, as viewed by the creature. Near the beginning, Shepard writes:
My mouth was razored with shallow triangular teeth. I lived on fish that I was poorly equipped to catch. I killed a tapir out of boredom or curiosity but it tasted of dirt and parasites and dung. For regularity I ate the occasional water cabbage. I'd evolved to crack open ammonites and rake the meat from trilobites. Instead I flopped around after schools of fish that moved like light on leaves. They slipped away like memories. Every so often a lucky swipe left one taloned.
Shepard's prose is full of this kind of conversational poetry, and the creature, while a primitive animal, nevertheless believably, somehow, possesses this vocabulary. And sardonic wit, too -- his name for the character Richard Carlson played in the film is "Baby Sloth" because he "watched his own arms whenever he moved." The creature thinks little of the humans who have suddenly invaded his home, but he does become enraptured by the woman among them (Shepard wonderfully recreates the famous underwater dance/mirror scene). Shepard does want to humanize the creature, but he doesn't blink at its savagery (on killing two men: "I enjoyed throwing them about"), nor does he create a creature who rages against injustice, like Gardner's Grendel; by the end, the creature's sense of the overwhelming vastness of biological history is against him, and even he is "rooting against me", and mocking himself as an "oafish variant on a theme." Shepard's "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" is a terrific story, changing nothing from the film, expanding only on things that could be assumed, and adding a beating heart that Arnold's, to my mind, hugely enjoyable film doesn't make much room for.
Then we have Peter Watts' "The Things". This is, of course, a retelling of John Carpenter's The Thing, itself less a remake of the Hawks/Nyby film than a straighter adaptation of the origin story for both, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" So Watts' story is a little bit...well, "What's new?" is sort of what I asked myself. And why ask it of Watts' story and not Shepard's? My reaction, I submit, is actually not fair, but knowing this did not keep my eyes from glazing over as I read passages in "The Things" such as this:
I'm used to finding intelligence everywhere, winding through every part of every offshoot. But there was nothing to grab onto in the mindless biomass of this world: just conduits, carrying orders and input. I took communion, when it wasn't offered; the skins I chose struggled and succumbed; my fibrils infiltrated the wet electricity of organic systems everywhere. I saw through eyes that weren't yet quite mine, commandeered motor nerves to move limbs still built of alien protein. I wore these skins as I've worn countless others, took the controls and left the assimilation of individual cells to follow at its own pace.
This is Watts writing from the mind, or hivemind, or Grand Collective Consciousness, or whatever, of Carpenter's The Thing, and there is a great deal of this in the fifteen page story. I acknowledge that this passage may not actually seem bad to you, and I would agree that objectively, it probably isn't. "The Things" is by no means badly written. Or even, within the, by definition, rather unimaginative sub-sub-subgenre "The Things" (and Shepard's story) is a part of, actually unimaginative (relatively speaking). But it is a story I don't care about.
The approach Watts takes to the film's action will no doubt interest a lot of people, and I gather already has. First off, Watts makes clear right from the opening where he stands on the whole "Has Childs been taken over by the end?" question when he writes: "I am being Childs. I am guarding the main enterance." This question, by the way, seems to have been answered to the satisfaction of almost everybody, since nowadays ambiguity is not a possible end to itself, but an enemy that must be defeated. But from Watts' point of view, and for the sake of his story, he really couldn't go any other way. But is it necessary to make it clear that Copper, the doctor who gets his arms bitten off by the guy's chestmouth, was also assimilated at one point? Doesn't that sort of mess with the suspense? Does that matter, this being a retelling of a film Watts' readers will know very well? The whole idea seems to be to simply contrast how this alien being exists, and how we exist. Its life compared to our lives. And while the alien clearly thinks its brand of Biological Space Communism is the way to go, Watts, by the end, just as clearly thinks human beings are pretty nifty. But sort of doomed, as Watts' pseudo-shocking last line conveys.
I just don't like what Watts is doing with this material, and worse, I can't make it matter. I love Carpenter's film, and it's such a well-made piece of work that even Watts' obvious skill can't dint or alter it. No, I think as I read Watts' claim that basically everybody but MacReady has been assimiliated before they ever sit down for the blood test, that doesn't happen in The Thing. It will not color my thinking of the Carpenter film. You flew hard, but you bounced off.
And the first story justified my optimism. Called simply "The Creature from the Black Lagoon", it was written by Jim Shepard, a "mainstream" writer who I've long wanted to read, and who is no stranger to incorporating existing films very prominently in his fiction (though I don't believe either of these is as literal in its associations as "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" is, two of his novels are titled Project X and Nosferatu). This story is simply what I've described: a retelling of the 1954 Jack Arnold film, as viewed by the creature. Near the beginning, Shepard writes:My mouth was razored with shallow triangular teeth. I lived on fish that I was poorly equipped to catch. I killed a tapir out of boredom or curiosity but it tasted of dirt and parasites and dung. For regularity I ate the occasional water cabbage. I'd evolved to crack open ammonites and rake the meat from trilobites. Instead I flopped around after schools of fish that moved like light on leaves. They slipped away like memories. Every so often a lucky swipe left one taloned.
Shepard's prose is full of this kind of conversational poetry, and the creature, while a primitive animal, nevertheless believably, somehow, possesses this vocabulary. And sardonic wit, too -- his name for the character Richard Carlson played in the film is "Baby Sloth" because he "watched his own arms whenever he moved." The creature thinks little of the humans who have suddenly invaded his home, but he does become enraptured by the woman among them (Shepard wonderfully recreates the famous underwater dance/mirror scene). Shepard does want to humanize the creature, but he doesn't blink at its savagery (on killing two men: "I enjoyed throwing them about"), nor does he create a creature who rages against injustice, like Gardner's Grendel; by the end, the creature's sense of the overwhelming vastness of biological history is against him, and even he is "rooting against me", and mocking himself as an "oafish variant on a theme." Shepard's "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" is a terrific story, changing nothing from the film, expanding only on things that could be assumed, and adding a beating heart that Arnold's, to my mind, hugely enjoyable film doesn't make much room for.
Then we have Peter Watts' "The Things". This is, of course, a retelling of John Carpenter's The Thing, itself less a remake of the Hawks/Nyby film than a straighter adaptation of the origin story for both, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" So Watts' story is a little bit...well, "What's new?" is sort of what I asked myself. And why ask it of Watts' story and not Shepard's? My reaction, I submit, is actually not fair, but knowing this did not keep my eyes from glazing over as I read passages in "The Things" such as this:
I'm used to finding intelligence everywhere, winding through every part of every offshoot. But there was nothing to grab onto in the mindless biomass of this world: just conduits, carrying orders and input. I took communion, when it wasn't offered; the skins I chose struggled and succumbed; my fibrils infiltrated the wet electricity of organic systems everywhere. I saw through eyes that weren't yet quite mine, commandeered motor nerves to move limbs still built of alien protein. I wore these skins as I've worn countless others, took the controls and left the assimilation of individual cells to follow at its own pace.
This is Watts writing from the mind, or hivemind, or Grand Collective Consciousness, or whatever, of Carpenter's The Thing, and there is a great deal of this in the fifteen page story. I acknowledge that this passage may not actually seem bad to you, and I would agree that objectively, it probably isn't. "The Things" is by no means badly written. Or even, within the, by definition, rather unimaginative sub-sub-subgenre "The Things" (and Shepard's story) is a part of, actually unimaginative (relatively speaking). But it is a story I don't care about.The approach Watts takes to the film's action will no doubt interest a lot of people, and I gather already has. First off, Watts makes clear right from the opening where he stands on the whole "Has Childs been taken over by the end?" question when he writes: "I am being Childs. I am guarding the main enterance." This question, by the way, seems to have been answered to the satisfaction of almost everybody, since nowadays ambiguity is not a possible end to itself, but an enemy that must be defeated. But from Watts' point of view, and for the sake of his story, he really couldn't go any other way. But is it necessary to make it clear that Copper, the doctor who gets his arms bitten off by the guy's chestmouth, was also assimilated at one point? Doesn't that sort of mess with the suspense? Does that matter, this being a retelling of a film Watts' readers will know very well? The whole idea seems to be to simply contrast how this alien being exists, and how we exist. Its life compared to our lives. And while the alien clearly thinks its brand of Biological Space Communism is the way to go, Watts, by the end, just as clearly thinks human beings are pretty nifty. But sort of doomed, as Watts' pseudo-shocking last line conveys.
I just don't like what Watts is doing with this material, and worse, I can't make it matter. I love Carpenter's film, and it's such a well-made piece of work that even Watts' obvious skill can't dint or alter it. No, I think as I read Watts' claim that basically everybody but MacReady has been assimiliated before they ever sit down for the blood test, that doesn't happen in The Thing. It will not color my thinking of the Carpenter film. You flew hard, but you bounced off.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 15: The Great Kitchen
Say what you will about Bentley Little's fiction (as I have done), but the man seems to have very good taste. Of the ten novels chosen by Little for his submission to the 2008 book The Book of Lists: Horror, called "Bentley Little's Ten Horror One-Hit Wonders That Everyone Should Read", I've read seven, I've liked six, and of those I think four are flat-out brilliant. Two of them I'd never heard of until reading Little's list, the first being Joan Samson's The Auctioneer which I wrote about last year, and the second is Harry Kressing's The Cook, a novel I finished reading earlier today.The books on Little's list were written either by writers who only wrote one horror novel either because it was a fluke in their career, otherwise made up of other kinds of novels, or because, for one reason or another, they only wrote one novel. Joan Samson died shortly after The Auctioneer was published, for example. In the case of Harry Kressing, many other novels may well have been written by the same person, and many of them may have even been horror, but it's possible we'll never know. The last page of my 1984 edition of this 1965 novel, and no doubt all other editions, says only this:
Harry Kressing is a pseudonym.
Well, what more is there to say, but at the same time, those five words surrounded by blankness comes off as sort of sinister, especially coming immediately after the book it's attached to. According to Little:
"The rumor in the early 1960s was that this was John Fowles writing under a pseudonym...and Fowles blurbed the book, which was thought at the time to be a clever bit of self-referential post-modernism. It turned out that Kressing wasn't Fowles..."
How do we know that? From what I've seen, Kressing's real identity has never been revealed, so what's the proof that he wasn't Fowles? Did Fowles say "Nope, not me"? My own instinct tells me it isn't Fowles, only because I read The Collector, and The Cook is loads, loads better.
So what is this book, exactly? Well, it's a brief novel, 244 pages in paperback and made up mostly of very short chapters. It has the air of a story being related to you, almost like either a fairy tale or a parable, though what the moral would be I couldn't tell you. The Cook tells the story of Conrad, a cook, who applies for a job as personal cook for the Hill family. The Hill family shares a status as the richest and most respected family in the town of Cobb with the Vales, with whom they have a long history of feuding, though by the time the novel begins this has cooled considerably. What feud remains manifests itself as a competition between the two clans over who has the better cook, and in fact the families, who were once intertwined, would like to be joined again, through the marriage of the Hill heir, Harold, and Vale daughter Daphne. Once this happens, both families will be able to leave their respective mansions and move as one into the massive castle which the families once shared, known as the Prominence. When we first meet Conrad, before he has been seen by a single soul in the town of Cobb, let alone anyone from either family, he is walking around the base of the hugely steep hill atop which the Prominence sits:
After circling the most several times he sat down and looked at the castle. It was essentially Gothic, constructed of blue-gray stone, rising in hexagonal design some four stories from the ground. It was very big, about two hundred rooms. It was also in an excellent state of upkeep.
The grounds were also beautifully kept.
"Why then," he asked himself, "do I have a feeling no one lives up here? And if no one lives up here, why is it all kept up so?"
Several miles in the distance a small town, spired and pastel-shaded, nestled in a wooded valley.
"That must be Cobb," Conrad thought.
He would ask someone in Cobb about the castle.
That passage, which is on page two, should give you a good idea of the prose style. It is very plain, although, as that sounds negative, perhaps "clean" conveys what I mean better. Kressing is somehow able to build an atmosphere of dread throughout the book by apparently never doing anything. The simplest phrases take on a foreboding vibe purely through context. Nothing is forced, the manipulation completely invisible. I mean, I guess it's invisible, because it has to be there, because The Cook is a fictional construction and therefore by definition manipulative. But I don't know that I could point to an example anywhere in the novel.
What that passage might give you the wrong idea about is how Kressing treats the inner lives of his characters. Now, Conrad gets the job as the Hills cook, of course, and Conrad also must count as our point of view character -- he's barely ever off-stage. But his thoughts, his motivations, and, for the most part, his emotions come across only, again, through what is happening. In some ways, Conrad is very much a surface, not character, but person. If Kressing writes that he's smiling, you can assume he's smiling sincerely. Conrad, the cook, unlike The Cook, the novel, is deeply manipulative, but if he ever lies, like bald-faced lies, then he does so very, very rarely, and I can't think of a single instance of it in any case.
And what is Conrad's manipulations in aid of? And if he doesn't really lie, how does he do it? To answer the second part first, he uses food, and insinuation, and self confidence. The food thing is interesting, because The Cook is actually not really a food book -- what Conrad makes is described as magnificent, better than anything anyone has eaten before, but Kressing only says that he's making roasts, or soups, or sauces, or biscuits. What it is is less important than what it does, and what it does, apparently, is addict those who eat it so that any other food disgusts them, and it effects their weight. Both ways. If you're too skinny, it will make you gain weight. If you're fat, it will make you lose weight. No matter how much you eat, by the way -- you can gorge yourself on Conrad's food, as poor, heavy Daphne Vale does, and still shed pounds like mad.Again, though: why?
"I've sent Betsy [the maid] to bed," Conrad went on after a moment. "She'd be at it all night, and then be of absolutely no use tomorrow. Harold was too tired to help. He worked very hard this evening."
Mrs. Hill pursed her lips: she had made a decision.
"Well I'm not too tired." She started toward the pantry. "Are the aprons still kept in here?"
"Only Harold's."
Mrs. Hill found Harold's apron, wrapped it around her, tucked it in and made it very neat. "There!" she said. "It will do just fine. Now, I'll be back in a minute."
Mrs. Hill, remember, is the mistress of the house. Harold is her son, who has been taking rigorous cooking lessons from Conrad. Mr. Hill, the patriarch and Conrad's boss, finds himself happily pitching in as well. And Conrad wonders if maybe Betsy shouldn't be fired. Or Maxfield, the butler. Or...
The Cook would probably be embraced and easily read as a black comic satire of class issues, although boy, do I think that's an oversimplification. Not one member of the Hills or the Vales is ever depicted as rooking or oppressing or being cruel to anyone, for one thing, and then there's where the novel ends up, a grotesque and chillingly bizarre place so far away from whatever hazy upstairs/downstairs dynamic you might be tempted to root out in the beginning. So as a class satire, I wonder what The Cook could have in mind, and therefore must doubt that has a hell of a lot to do with Kressing's ambitions. Of course, it's quite possible that the current low state of satire is causing me to badly underestimate the breadth of Kressing's own definition of the word. This is borne out by my belief that the artist's work The Cook most closely resembles are, in fact, the class satires of Luis Bunuel, The Exterminating Angel more than anything else, but few people would be content to talk about that film as simply a class critique -- it would be like saying The Milky Way is a satire on religion and act as though this somehow told the whole story (and what the whole story actually is with that one is something I'm still working on).
Conrad, we will learn, is probably not of a class lower than the Hills, and may in fact come from some higher societal realm. And the laborers are dispensed with by him with as little care as the most mustache-twirling union buster. But who suffers more, the Hills, the Vales, or the Maxfields and Betsys? Well, I know the answer, actually, and in any case I resist the urge to reduce The Cook to something easy. It's wonderfully suspenseful, though, and thrillingly original, and finally, in its quiet, casual way, even shocking. Not to mention out of print and largely forgotten. So it goes.
Quick note: The Cook was adapted into a film in 1970 under the title Something for Everybody. Directed by Harold Prince, screenplay by Hugh Wheeler (who apparently had a habit of writing under pseudonyms, so hmmm....) and starring Michael York and Angela Lansbury, and featuring not one character who bears the name of any corresponding character from the novel, Something for Everybody was released on VHS, but never on DVD. Anybody out there seen it? I can't imagine it follows the novel very closely, at least not by the end.
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