The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 8: In Bremen, Something Walked The Night

by Danny Bowes

Although better known for his alternate history science fiction and metafiction, Howard Waldrop works in and with a broad variety of genres, one of which—apropos of our purpose this month—is horror. In the four decades and counting in which Waldrop has been writing short fiction (and two novels: one, The Texas-Israeli War, was a collaboration; the solo effort Them Bones, an alternate history/time travel tale about Native American mound builders and their encounters with warring Aztecs, Arab traders, and a soldier from the future looking to escape certain annihilation, is under-appreciated SF and a fun read but not particularly germane to a discussion of horror), he's incorporated horror elements into a number of his pieces, while rarely if ever writing anything that stands on its own as outright horror. Still, his experiments with the genre are typically intriguing, erudite, and exciting.

One such is the marvelously titled “All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past.” This follows the Frankenstein template, the variation on which here being that all variety of classic movie monsters have come to life and are running rampant. The story is brief enough that neither back story nor resolution are particularly possible, which only adds to the story's effectiveness as horror. The suddenness of the monsters' ubiquity, and the utterly futile response humanity has mounted (the narrator is an AWOL soldier driving around on what little gas he has remaining and with whatever weaponry he can fine) lend a genuinely chilling edge to the story, which is not without the wickedly dark humor which is as much Waldrop's stock in trade as alternate history or metafiction.

The latter is on dizzying display in Waldrop's 1996 story “Heart of Whitenesse,” in which poet/playwright/spy Christopher Marlowe, with the biting wit and cynical point of view of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, mirrors the journey under taken by the narrator of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlow, in the midst of the Little Ice Age of the late 16^th century. Instead of Kurtz, being Christopher Marlowe, he is tasked by Queen Elizabeth (as played by Bette Davis) to venture upriver to investigate, confront, and do away with Doctor Faustus. The horrors Marlowe anticipates are counterpointed to terrific effect by the setting, with the glaring whiteness of the frozen environs the exact opposite of the expected darkness and shadows of horror.

Waldrop's most purely horrifying story is probably “Des Untergang Des Abendlandesmenschen,” a pla on the German title of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West intended to mean, roughly, “the end of the cowboy.” The seed of the idea, by Waldrop's own admission, was the realization upon looking at a photograph of silent cowboy film star William S. Hart that he would make an excellent Sherlock Holmes. The contemplation of silent film led to Weimar Germany, which led to Nosferatu. This, then, in the creepiest aspect of the story, led to an initially anonymous group of young radicals whom the Sherlock Holmes figure of William S. Hart encounters—not quite hinted to be the Baker Street Irregulars—who, in the end, once the vampire is vanquished, swoop in and appropriate its reign of terror for propaganda purposes . . . as they are they nascent National Socialist Worker's party. As an ending note, this induces chills, much in the vein of a monster story whose stinger is that a new monster ascends to take the old one's place. In this case, it's barely even metaphor.

The way Waldrop builds each of these stories, as is the case with most of his work, from the seed of an idea out of a structure of piles and piles of books, an endless reservoir of pop culture knowledge, and a keen eye for interesting juxtaposition. What makes Waldrop so delightfully smooth to read, despite the potentially intimidating erudition that goes into his work, is his nimble prose, adaptable to whatever genre or tone the particular story demands, to him, that it be written in. And so, rather than feeling like a stack of library books and notes on esoteric genre films and TV programs, Waldrop stories feel alive with the energy not only of his intellect but of his emotion. As conceived and constructed as they appear upon analysis, when being read a Howard Waldrop story is most profoundly felt.

For this reason, his forays into horror particularly resonate, since horror is—among all genres—the one most dependent on being felt rather than thought. There is no such thing as an effective horror piece that is dry, assembled from parts, contingent on being understood. Horror derives from the very things we do not understand, making something like the ending of “Des Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen,” where William S. Hart and his Watson, Bronco Billy, slowly realize what they're seeing when the Nazis slip a star of David armband onto the fallen vampire. They don't understand the totality of what they're seeing, nor are they able to grasp the manipulative sickness they observe. And so their hearts are filled with dread, the stuff of horror. Even if Howard Waldrop never addressed the genre at any other point in his career, the final image of that story would make him worthy of notice to any aficionado of the horror genre.


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Danny Bowes is a film critic, journalist, and essayist who contributes to RogerEbert.com, The Dissolve, Indiewire, and Tor.com, and formerly Premeire and The Atlantic. he is also the author of the aggressively out-of-print novel The Van Damme Papers, a tall tale about Jean-Claude originally serialized in the Bordeaux, France-based postmodernist literary zine Louis Liard between the years 2002-04.
(Everything in the second sentence is, gloriously, true.)

Nevermore

Hey jerks, today over at the new film discussion site To Be (Cont'd), a four-part discussion between Keith Uhlich and myself kicks off.  Our topic?  The much and unfairly maligned Twixt, Francis Ford Coppola's bizarre new horror film.  The first post is by me, next Monday it'll be Keith, then me, then Keith, and then it will be over.  Obviously time is of the essence!  Get over there NOW, you jerks!

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 7: Evening Dress with Decorations

The English writer Simon Raven, who died in 2001, seems to have made an impact in his day -- a late career book of reminiscences to be called Is There Anybody There? said The Traveller had to be withdrawn by the publisher over accusations of libel and threats of lawsuits -- but that impact has faded.  An informal poll of well-read UK natives I know didn't turn up anyone familiar with Raven's books, even though his ten-volume series of novels called Alms for Oblivion (which I'm currently in the process of gathering about me) brought him some notoriety over the course of their publication, from 1959 to 1976.  Also notorious was the man himself.  "[He] trailed an odour of brimstone," according to Gerald Priestland, a classmate of Raven's at Charterhouse, a preparatory school from which Raven was expelled for "serial homosexuality"; later, Raven impregnated a woman, and while he did marry her he evidently felt no obligation towards her or his child, since, following the marriage, he "studiously avoided her," going so far in the end to enter the army as a means of escaping "the pram in the hall" -- all of this according to the obituary of Raven published in The Guardian, and as obituaries of literary figures go, this one is pretty jaundiced towards the decedent, and no wonder.

Simon Raven lived his life in decadence as a pagan, sybarite, cynic, and possible misanthrope, each characteristic, from what I gather, appearing in abundance within his 25 novels, including the only one I've read thus far, a curious modern vampire story called Doctors Wear Scarlet, from 1960, that appears to be, right at this moment, the one novel by Raven that has enjoyed any kind of longevity.  A thin kind of longevity, as I only know of it through lists of "forgotten" horror novels, and the like.  But some well-known horror writers have banged the drum for Doctors Wear Scarlet, among them Karl Edward Wagner and Kim Newman (who cites it as one of the inspirations for his own Anno-Dracula), and even though Simon Raven strikes me as a person who, were he still alive, I would not care to know personally, his vampire novel is deserving of the desperate attempt to save it from the dust heap.

The story is told from the point of view of Anthony Seymour, graduate of Lancaster College, Cambridge, and friend of Richard Fountain, a current student of that institution, though as the novel opens the two men haven't seen each other in some time.  Seymour is compelled to give his history with curious Fountain by a police inspector named John Tyrrell.  Fountain, it turns out, is currently in Greece conducting research on his great academic subject, which, broadly, is ancient religions and paganism.  However, just at the moment the Greek police are seeking to throw Fountain out of their country due to, as Tyrrell puts it, certain "discoveries" and "peculiar, not to say abnormal, conduct."  So the first quarter of Doctors Wear Scarlet is given over the background of Richard Fountain.  Seymour didn't first meet him at Lancaster -- Fountain is a few years younger than Seymour, and their lives at Lancaster didn't overlap much -- but when they were much younger at Charterhouse (Raven's own school in his early days).  Seymour describes a man who was a nearly perfect student, but not a grade-grubber, a rule-follower but not one to tattle on his fellow students, stand-offish, even cold, but also kind, and a man who loathed bullies.  Yet Seymour and others close to him always believed there was something wrong with Fountain, even slightly disturbing, which makes Seymour more willing to accept the implications of Tyrrell's vague story.

In the course of Seymour's story we will learn of Walter Goodrich, a professor of classics at Lancaster whom Seymour regards as a terrible phony and manipulator, and who didn't so much take Fountain under his wing as envelope the young man with both wings and attempt to feed him from his own mouth.  Seymour describes Goodrich's plans to not only control Fountain's academic future, but to pair Fountain off with his daughter Penelope, a young girl who falls instantly in love with Fountain, and takes his abuse when his initial meek attempts to rebel against Goodrich (whose influence allows Fountain to publish a couple of volumes of poetry that are met with some critical acclaim, though both Seymour and Tyrrell regard the acclaim as misguided), but who nevertheless is not without backbone.  The final key relationship is that between Fountain and another student named Piers Clarence, a man who seems to resemble, in educational laziness, natural intellect, and his devotion to pleasure above just about anything else, Simon Raven himself.  Goodrich regards Clarence as a hideously bad influence on what he wants out of Fountain's life, and indeed some damage has been done.  What rebellion Fountain has mounted against Goodrich, including extending his research trip to Greece from one year to two, has in fact been influenced by Clarence.

So those are the key relationships in Doctors Wear Scarlet.  As a horror story, it doesn't quite begin, outside of those hints dropped by Tyrrell, until, at Tyrrell's behest, Seymour, Clarence, and one of Fountain's old Army friends, Major Roddy Longbow, travel to Greece to find and retrieve Richard Fountain.  There they learn that Fountain has been seen with a young woman as they bounce from island to island, attempting to elude the police but not Seymour, with whom Fountain has been corresponding, wanting his friends to find him.  Which, eventually, they do.

How much further should I go?  Not much, I don't think.  Doctors Wear Scarlet is essentially broken into three parts:  Seymour telling Tyrrell everything he knows about Richard Fountain; Seymour, Clarence, and Longbow's adventures in Greece; and a third section that finds the surviving characters back at Lancaster.  This last section, about which I really shouldn't describe more, is easily the most distinctive, and what makes the novel such an individual achievement.

There are several things that are interesting about the way Raven approaches vampirism and the horror genre as a whole.  In some ways, it's quite traditional -- the Greece adventure recalls Dracula enough that I wondered if the heroes of Raven's novel could be matched up with Harker and Seward, or Holmwood and Morris, or some other combination thereof (at least one did occur to me, but it would count as a spoiler so never mind).  It's a fun section of the novel -- each section has much to recommend it -- but one thing that stuck out as interesting, though possibly insignificant (or not?) is how Raven describes Seymour and his companions in the early stages of their quest, before the truth of Fountain's activities are revealed to them, simply enjoying themselves as travelers, drinking and eating and joking, basking in the novelty and pleasures of a new country.  This state of mind is not something typically addressed in horror novels of this sort.  The heroes are quite often very single-minded, and distractions are seen as deadly.  This is not to say the men become debauched, but simply that Fountain is only a destination, as perhaps Athens might be if they were simply traveling for its own sake.

And of course, this all feeds into Raven's general philosophy of life.  In the Guardian obituary, there's a quote from Raven that ends "...enjoy yourself now, and sod anyone who tries to stop you."  Okay, though when this quote is set against the particulars of, say, Raven's attitude towards his wife and son, it's bound to raise an eyebrow.  As it pertains to Doctors Wear Scarlet, though, it's quite logical.  The villain in the novel is, in fact, Walter Goodrich, who doesn't believe what he says, uses what and who he needs, and will squeeze the life out of a young man if it means a stronger hold on Lancaster down the road, and that his admittedly good-hearted daughter finally gets married.  But if Goodrich is responsible for Penelope's wedded bliss -- something that I think we can agree is debatable, and Penelope might well be stronger and more popular and even already with someone she loves if she had any father other than Walter Goodrich -- he is unquestionably not responsible for Fountain's.  It's only because, as Seymour pointed out to Tyrrell, there is something twisted inside of Fountain that the whole house comes down.

But this is a book about vampires, I thought.  Well, it is.  Perhaps most fascinating of all is Raven's take on vampirism, which he attempts, with some success, to explain away psychologically, much as Richard Matheson attempted to explain it scientifically in I Am Legend.  Somehow, Raven is completely logical about this, and I will go ahead and spoil it.  Tyrrell and Seymour meet with a Dr. Erik Holmstrom (possibly the novel's Abraham Van Helsing) who acknowledges the existence  of vampires but does not allow for any supernatural source for it.  Instead, in keeping with the novel's not graphic but not at all veiled sexual...not subtext, but sexual backdrop almost, Holmstrom says that vampirism is a result of sadism, masochism, and abuse.  One mortal human with the urge to drink the blood of another finds a masochist who allows it.  Later, that masochist develops his or her own sadistic desires, and having learned vampirism, falls back on it as their own preferred method of inflicting pain and suffering:

"...Nor is his addiction in any way lessened by the knowledge that what he does not only humiliates his victim but may even kill him, for he is seeking, among other things, to revenge himself on his kind for his own predicament and his own sufferings..."

Leaving aside the implied consensual nature of the beginning of this chain, by the end Holmstrom's explanation resembles some basic things we now understand about why victims of child molestation often become molesters themselves in adulthood.  And Fountain, as vaguely twisted and possibly even cruel as he may have been in his youth, is a classic victim of abuse, psychological abuse from Goodrich that in turn makes him an easy mark for the vampire (there is one) in Greece.  It also sets him up for a grand act of rebellion, which takes two forms, and strangely combines what Simon Raven constantly argued as a way of life, the only way of life, and either the dark extremes of following his advice, or the dangers of not doing so at all.  The final stretch of the novel could be read either way, though I suspect Raven only meant it to be taken as a caution against not doing as he did.

Nevertheless, Doctors Wear Scarlet is a fascinatingly conflicted novel (notice, too, for instance, how often the topic of homosexuality is broached, and how often it is denied, though never condemned).  And for all it's psychological and philosophical richness, it's never less than a good read, a good yarn, with adventure, a lot of humor, death and horrible retribution.  It deserves to live on.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 6: Secret Movies

by Dennis Cozzalio

“Tell me again, what’re we lookin’ at here, man?” he asked, peering, tilting his head this way and that.

“Secret movies,” I answered in a hushed tone, trying to sound as mysterious as possible.

--Theodore Roszak, Flicker

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, one in which the movies had a much different relationship with their audience (and vice versa) than they do today, Pauline Kael suggested, in her review of Robert Altman’s Nashville, that it was “an orgy for movie lovers.” She meant, among other things, that the movie was capable of providing a level of ecstasy and engagement for the viewer, through its almost off-handed command of all of the elements of character and vision and performance that typically make audiences bliss out on the possibilities within the movies, that was practically guaranteed to elicit a rapturous response comparable to her own. I thought of Kael and her Nashville review when I first began reading Theodore Roszak’s Flicker (1991), a tantalizing, immersive and sometimes maddening investigative fiction revolving around a metaphysical mystery that traces deep into the musty corridors and crypts of ancient religion and of film history itself. (And it would not be the last time the book would evoke the spirit and the specter of the late and great film critic.)

Flicker is an orgy for movie lovers too, but not precisely the kind Kael was suggesting. Roszak isn’t a humorless writer, but he’s not given to flights of fancy either-- in some circles he might be considered a bit of a scold—and the book, in its own dispassionate way, indulges in some of the sort of excess Kael praised Nashville for lacking. Much of Flicker, especially in the book’s first half, is given over to analytical ruminations on the way cinema is processed, by cultists, academics and poseurs. Through a group of entirely concocted scenesters and various hangers-on, the author has a condemnatory boatload to say about the burgeoning avant-garde movement of the ‘60s, and Roszak isn’t much easier on what he sees as the indiscriminate, self-flagellating tastes of the cult cinema devotees who emerged in the wake of the reflection inspired by pieces like Kael’s “Trash, Art and the Movies.” Here he, as elsewhere in the voice of his narrator/protagonist Jonathan Gates (think “film gate”), names names:

“Watching a cult favorite like Jodorowsky’s El Topo-- it screened regularly once a month—I would have said this is the antipodean swamp, the absolute, godforsaken edge of the world. Mayhem, mutilation, rape, surrealistic sadism. Beyond this, nothing.”

But years later, when the world really does seem to be circling the drain in the presence of a strange new cult director sensation (or is that apocalyptic perception just the residue of all the imagery searing into the eyes Gates has managed to perhaps regretfully sensitize?), the post-punk aesthetic of a Super-8 production entitled American Fast Food Massacre manages to cut through Gates’ disgust, compelling him toward a hesitant level of respect:

“In its up-close details, the film was a stomach-turner, no question. But it moved briskly and with great precision, so that, in spite of myself, I was beginning to find it satirically effective. A great American cannibal feast as Mack Sennett might have handled it if he lacked all inhibition.”

For Gates, such concessions would have been unthinkable before discovering Max Castle and the world beneath.

On its most inviting level Flicker seems to be written to delight serious film buffs, critics and historians who will dig the cinephiliac name-dropping that begins within the first few paragraphs of the book’s dense 608 pages -- the book’s chronology begins in the mid ‘50s, when movies began to evolve into “films” worthy of increasingly serious academic study. But the book’s orgiastic impulses almost immediately extend beyond that sort of facile fun and toward the dark shadows and dank atmosphere of the lost, perhaps sinister ambitions of a past represented only by fragile plastics and nitrate, the fleeting images committed to film by a low-rent auteur who may have pioneered filmmaking techniques that might possibly have gained access to the darkest impulses laying dormant within the movies themselves.

That past includes the sketchy history of repertory and revival house culture, specifically represented by a fictional Los Angeles cinema called the Classic, a skuzzy 200-seat auditorium fashioned from the moldy basement of a once-opulent movie palace of the ‘20s. The art-deco glory of the Classic, gutted by fire and eventually overtaken by soup kitchens, medicine show hucksters and fly-by-night evangelists, has been lost, but its basement is eventually reclaimed by the movies and refashioned into the vessel which facilitates Gates’ revival house refinement. Gates traces his own path down into the basement Classic, from childhood fascination with the exploits of a fictional serial heroine, busty Nylana the Jungle Girl, through an adolescent fixation on James Dean and Marlon Brando. But it’s the inevitable revelatory, college-age breakthrough, when he stumbles into Louis Malle’s The Lovers-- a more adult consideration (with subtitles!) of the erotic tremors Nylana had first snapped into action-- that precipitates his more serious immersion into the movies.

Afterward, Gates becomes a fixture at the Classic, under the guidance of Sharkey, the theater’s good-humored, burnt-out projectionist, and Clare, a proudly brusque would-be film historian (and failed student) who manages the cinema and writes its long, expressive, brutally honest program notes. Our narrator soon falls under the influence of Clare’s persuasive intellect, fired by the erotic spell she casts simultaneously for him as lover and teacher, the conduit for exposure to entirely new facets of film experience. (Clare’s personal history and temperament, as described by Roszak and his narrator, are clearly meant to invoke Pauline Kael, even though Kael herself is referenced later on as existing separately in Flicker’s parallel universe.)

One night, after having dismissed his work in the presence of some French enthusiasts, Gates discovers Clare viewing a tattered print of a low-budget horror film by one Max Castle, a minor and largely forgotten German expatriate whose trashy, poorer-than-Poverty-Row horror films of the ‘30s—Edgar G. Ulmer with a tendency toward the transgressive impulses of a Herschell Gordon Lewis—were largely lost or left to indifferent decay. Intrigued by her casual, dismissive interest in Castle’s Feast of the Undead, which seems to mask a strange fascination/revulsion for the movie’s surprising technique and grotesque imagery, Castle and the output of his marginal career-- which ended under mysterious, undocumented circumstances in the early ‘40s-- becomes Gates’ pursuit, his way of validating his own intellect in the shadow of Clare’s influence and ambition. What about the way Castle’s camera moves proves so mesmerizing, even when what he’s showing is, atypically for the time in which it was shot, the goriest sort of impaling and other violence? Why is the viewer left with the feeling, during the vampire seductions he choreographs, that there might be real sex going on beneath the veneer of familiar horror iconography? Gates can’t stop asking these questions, and his initially tentative curiosity becomes full-blown obsession, the apocalyptic celluloid through which Flicker casts its plays of light and ever-deepening shadows down into a seemingly bottomless rabbit hole.

To speak in much more detail about what comes of Gates’ pursuit would be to rob those inclined to gobble it up of the surprises set within the deliberate, yet intricate levels of metaphysical development, critical commentary and even historical inquiry into the cold clutch of religious zealotry (and its practical applications) that Roszak brings to the table. But I don’t think it’s unfair to reveal that woven into the thicket of Gates’ gradual understanding of the basis of his helpless attraction to Castle’s imagery, and the unshakable feeling of uncleanliness that it inspires, is a sort of playfully lingering commentary on, of all things, the viability of the auteur theory.

The author’s conceit is that lying almost imperceptibly beneath the visuals of vampires and werewolves and human sacrifices that make up the core of Castle’s disregarded American output are levels of imagery-- or perhaps more precisely levels of manipulation of imagery-- that express Castle’s specific point of view, or personality, about matters of, shall we say, urgency to the director. (Forgive me as I try to remain as spoiler-free and vague as possible.)  It was Castle’s particular talent to bend the narratives and visual style of the piecemeal low-budget assignments he received as a bottom-rung Hollywood director to accommodate, in a manner both obvious and simultaneously subliminal, his own personal concerns. This is certainly nothing if not Roszak’s pointed attempt to position Max Castle as perhaps the most extreme, and maybe even the most successful expression of critic Andrew Sarris’ assertion, in his “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” that "the way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels.” When Sarris wrote, “Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material,” he might, if the man had actually existed, have been thinking of Max Castle, who Gates comes to realize is in some very important and horrifying ways the ultimate auteur. But Roszak, thankfully, is not a wielder of frying pans in the manner of a Paddy Chayefsky-- given the way the book plays out, whether or not Castle’s status as an auteurist poster boy is something he should be proud of is left to the wisdom and consideration of the reader.

Flicker trades in a sort of free-floating anxiety about our relationship with classic cinema, meaning not just the movies that have been deemed “classics” by the usual cultural gatekeepers, but in a more sweeping and general sense the films of a classic era, the films that have spoken in echoes to us, some strong and bold, some faint and dying, from ever since the first films were made. Part of the experience of watching old films, especially on TV in the days predating VCRs and the home video movement but even during the heyday of revival theaters, was the feeling of being visited by ghosts, by thoughts and intentions and expressions that lay just outside of articulation, generated by people on and off screen who were often years, decades dead. Seen from this perspective, the whole of cinema history can be painted, if not with the malevolent strokes hinted at by Max Castle and his legacy, then at least with a sort of gothic mournfulness, pictures of a past that cannot entirely accurately represent or express the intricacy of their origins. The films have their own purpose, their own urgency, but they also call to us like a lighthouse through a very thick fog, and perhaps only part of that purpose makes it through the mist.

As one moves through Flicker it becomes clear that, for Roszak, some things should be unclear, should be left unseen. Even so, Roszak’s narrative, as it moves simultaneously forward and backward through time—a simple effect achieved without the clever structure of chronological compressing and stretching that marked  Steve Erickson’s also-marvelous Zeroville—preserves not just the feeling that we, as the audience, cannot help but look. It’s also saying that the ominous shiver which makes us suspect that what we’re watching is somehow watching back, through time itself, is well justified. Flicker’s progression through the mysteries of Max Castle, the world that spawned him and the world that now seeks the successor who will fulfill his ominous potential, will seem at times perhaps a bit too dense and schematic, Roszak too in love with extrapolating the complex history that serves as a backdrop for his particular brand of anxious dread. But if this is so, it is also true that the author has reserved his most awful, frightening joke for last, and patience will reward the reader who makes his way toward the light at the end of the tunnel, and the dimming of that light, pinched off as if by the closing of an iris.

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This piece was written for Bill Ryan and his annual month-long, Halloween-inspired consideration of horror fiction at The Kind Of Face You Hate. When Bill assigned me the task of writing about Flicker, I did so with eagerness, but also with a modicum of puzzlement, because even though it deals with the work of an ignored purveyor of horror schlock who turns out to have invested much more into his work than the studios or his public would have ever realized, it’s not, in a strictly Stephen King-ish way, what I would think of as a piece of horror fiction. It’s certainly horrific at times, but it’s a horror novel in the same way I would describe The Conversation or Berberian Sound Studio as horror movies. I mean to imply no condescension toward the form in saying that— I only mean to imply that, for the most part, even in the discovery of Flicker’s particular aesthetic nightmares those nightmares remain largely of the interior sort, ruminations on fear and collapse from a largely personal perspective, like Harry Caul’s guilt or the tortures eating away at the sound designer Gilderoy’s fragile sanity. Castle’s vampires and werewolves never jump off the celluloid and invade three-dimensional space, and the book is, dare I say, better for that.

It’s been kind of an ongoing joke between Bill and I as to whether I would ever even finish reading Flicker—I first started it, on Bill’s recommendation, probably five years ago, and bailed out, falling victim to the usual distractions that keep me from finishing books, after only about 150 pages. So when I finally got through it earlier this year—It’s a long book, but believe me, I’m making it sound like much more of a chore than it was—Bill was the first person I contacted, and a tiny little cheer went out over the information superhighway. This relatively brief essay may not be the chapter-by-chapter exegesis we once imagined I might try and write about Flicker, but I hope in the eyes of Our Humble Blog Host that it will suffice.

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Dennis Cozzalio hoes the rows of his most sincere pumpkin patch of a blog SergioLeone and the Infield Fly Rule (characterization courtesy of Bob Westal) from a remote outpost in the uncharted wilds of Glendale, California, where life is cheap, rent is ridiculously expensive and daydreams of Claudia Cardinale are easy to come by.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 5: Where I Am Now It Is Very Hot

There's a story about the ridiculously prolific writer Georges Simenon that claims he would sometimes write novels in bookstore windows, as a kind of exhibit, and to draw in customers.  It was a marketing gimmick and a kind of performance art, and the man wrote notoriously fast.  I'd been hearing this story for years before I learned, not all that long ago, that it's apocryphal, or probably is.  Considering that my source for this story had always been Harlan Ellison, this is perhaps not too surprising, but Ellison liked and believed in the story enough to actually do it.  On more than one occasion, Ellison did in fact set up a desk in the window of a, I believe, Los Angeles science fiction and fantasy bookstore, and would start a story from scratch and finish it sometime before the store closed up for the night.  I believe every time Ellison did this, the briefest and most basic of story ideas would be given to him in the morning, from one preordained source or another, and on this idea he would base his story.  In one case, the story idea came from Robin Williams, who through some confluence of event I can't even speculate about came to know Ellison, and on the slip of paper Williams handed Ellison -- before a teeming crowd -- he'd written "The byte that bites."  Because Robin Williams, you never know what that guy's got going on up in that brain of his.  The resulting story is called "Keyboard," and it ain't one of Ellison's best, though it was never intended, I don't think, to be anything more than a trifle.

The quality of "Keyboard" aside, I was thinking of this because I have here before me a very curious horror anthology that seems to have grown from an impulse similar to the one that led Ellison, not to write in public, but to accept the barest of story ideas from somebody else and see what could be built from it.  The editor of this anthology is D. F. Lewis, who in 2011 put together another conceptually bizarre anthology called The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies that I wrote about here.  He has another one which is sitting there behind me called The First Book of Classical Horror Stories, which is actually made of new horror stories each of which, evidently, deal in some way not with classical horror concepts or themes, but classical music.  So that's unusual.  However the one under discussion today beats them both, and the title lacks any ambiguity regarding the core idea.  It's called Horror Without Victims.  Or maybe it is ambiguous, I can't tell yet.  But Horror Without Victims.  D. F. Lewis doesn't include an introduction or any story notes -- this seems to be a running thing with him, and I don't believe the absence of these standard horror anthology features is an accident -- so when it comes to what led to this book's existence, all the reader has to go by is a brief statement on the back cover, which reads:

Twenty-five original Horror Stories written independently by twenty-five different authors who responded to the theme 'Horror Without Victims.' Their serendipitous gestalt seems to aspire towards a curative force for all of us.

I don't know, kinda sounds like some hippie bullshit to me, but, to me, deeply intriguing.  I'm going to spoil an aspect of a book I've never read here, but Kim Newman once said of his novel The Quorum that it's a horror novel in which nobody dies.  Now this is fairly unusual, but it's not unheard of, but a horror story in which there are no victims?  It certainly sounds oxymoronic to me, but in a way that I appreciate, at least the notion, very much.  What could such a story, one that regarded the task set by "horror without victims" literally, be like?  Well, "Survivor Type" by Stephen King, maybe...if the narrator of that story is a victim, what is he a victim of?  Himself?  And if so, does that start to redefine or turn nebulous the idea of the victim?

And so on.  As I typically do when reading short stories for this project, from Horror Without Victims I chose two, which means, therefore, that my overall feelings about the relative success or failure of the book sort of don't exist.  I can only have an opinion on how the writers in question -- in this case David Murphy and Charles Wilkinson, with whom I'm otherwise entirely unfamiliar -- managed to deal with must count as a rather extreme limitation, given the genre.  And one story, David Murphy's "We Do Things Differently Here," strikes me as an almost complete failure.  The plot is this:  a woman named Sophie travels with the man she plans to marry, Richard, to his home country.  It seems to be a country anyway, but it may be a particular village.  In any case, this place, called Efferentia, is known throughout the world, or the region, for its very peculiar differences.  For instance, Sophie meets Richard's delightful parents, and Richard shows her some of the books in their library, which includes biographies of Efferentine artists, books published within Efferentia, with titles like The Life of Humphrey Heseltine 2003 - 1936.  Why flip the birth and death years?  It's a stylistic choice common in Efferentia, says Richard.  So there's little things like that, and then one night Richard tells Sophie that they're going to go to "the afters of a funeral."  Sophie is put off by the idea, not knowing precisely what it is, though when they arrive it seems to be a fun party, of the "Irish wake" variety.  Though there is a corpse of an old man in a coffin, something that doesn't delight her.  And then the corpse opens its eyes, and the old man sits up.  Sophie faints.

I'm going to spoil the ending of this story.  I see no way to deal with either story in terms of its approach to "horror without victims" if I don't spoil them, "We Do Things Differently Here" in particular.  So, everybody in Efferentia suffers from that Benjamin Button thing where they're born old and age backwards.  The "afters of a funeral" is really a birth celebration.  This is a conclusion Sophie jumps to herself, though I'm willing to let that unlikelihood slide, because there are hints that the novelties of Efferentia are not necessarily a local secret.  Anyhow, so she figures it out, and then after she's just had sex with Richard, she goes "Hey, but what if I get pregnant?" and Richard says "That's a funny story, I'll tell you tomorrow." I'm paraphrasing slightly.  But his reticence to own up is enough to drive Sophie away the next morning, telling Richard's mom to pass on the message "Go fuck yourself" to Richard, and hops a train back to London.  Because why?  Well, she has her reasons, but it's a fruitless endeavor, as the story's ending reveals that she is, in fact, pregnant, and what that means for someone inseminated by an Efferentine man (and by the way, this story is told in the first person):

...the thing within would grow and grow, taking up more and more of my insides the way all Efferentine babies consume their mothers, until the mother dies and the baby does too, or so it seems, and both are buried together for the few weeks it takes the newborn to consume its host completely.

With the realisation of that, my rationality flew out that window.  And with it, what remained of my sanity.

The end!  BOO!  Now, first of all, that "what remained of my sanity" bit is almost infuriating.  There are first person stories at the end of which the narrator is actually killed, and these, the good ones, are easier to accept than "And now I'm a crazy person."  It's all in how you do it, of course, and maybe there's a story that ends with the narrator saying "One thing I forgot to tell you is that I'm insane now" that actually works, but this?  This is nonsense.  Part of it might be that as far as I can remember, the first person narrators who die are describing the events that lead up to their deaths as they happen, but in "We Do Things Differently Here" Sophie is clearly looking back (from the grave? She apparently is also dead, or soon will be), describing what led to her madness not in the moment but at some remove.  Is she writing this story in shit on her loony bin wall?  Beside the point, perhaps.

But that's the least of it.  How is this horror without a victim?  What it is, essentially, is The Wicker Man.  Sophie is very plainly being set up by Richard and his parents to give him a child, knowing what this will mean for her.  In The Wicker Man, Sgt. Howie is lured to Summerisle so that he can be burned alive.  The hope is that his death will help the island's apple crops, and the residents of Summerisle think this is all a good thing, but that doesn't somehow mean that Howie isn't a victim, just because his killers have decided it's all for the best.  Clearly Richard and his folks think him having a kid is worth Sophie's life, but so?  The Manson family believed they'd had a pretty good idea, too.  This story completely disregards the concept of "horror without victims" to the point that it's almost insulting.

A much better story in many ways is "Night in the Pink House" by Charles Wilkinson.  It's much better written, for one thing, the narrator in this case being Richard Topcliffe, an erudite and affected young graduate student who, I get the feeling, allows Wilkinson to flower things up a bit, linguistically speaking.  But it's fun to read.  Topcliffe works for an old, blind, rich, wheelchair bound man named Mr. Slater, and the work Topcliffe does for him is rather unusual.  Before Wilkinson gets to that, we're tipped off a bit by the story's first sentence:

The day we went down to the beach Slater insisted that his interest in torture was of a scholarly nature.

A little bit later, it's implied that Slater often requires Topcliffe to pelt seagulls with rocks.  We also learn, incidentally, that one reason Slater is drawn to Topcliffe is because the young man is the descendant of another Richard Topcliffe, a real Richard Topcliffe, who was a torturer for Elizabeth I.  Slater is working on a book, some kind of scholarly, academic thing, on torture, and one thing he believes he needs for his work is audio recordings of people actually being tortured.  Topcliffe, the young man who works for him, has presented himself as someone who can make such recordings.  He will torture people, record it, and play it for Slater.  Which he does, except he's not actually torturing anybody.  He pays a young woman named Rose to scream and essentially play the role of a victim, and Slater will never know the difference.  So this seemed to be horror without a victim, because no one's being hurt, but given the pleasure Slater takes in the recordings, there's some actual horror, too.  This struck me as a bit of a cop out, but an honest one, and one that could actually transcend its cop out nature, as long as Wilkinson dealt straight on with the concept of a man taking depraved pleasure in something horrible that, unbeknownst to him, wasn't real.

But the story doesn't really deal with that.  It instead becomes much stranger, as Topcliffe discovers in Slater's home -- the "pink house" of the title -- a bizarre cupboard the back of which seems made of something fleshy, something bloody.  The aftermath of this discovery is what the story winds up being about, and Topcliffe's torture fakery kind of drifts away.  Other fakery -- that he is not, in fact, descended from that Richard Topcliffe -- does, but even that's kind of a red herring.  It serves as the basis for Slater to fire Richard, but in itself it doesn't matter a great deal.  Thematically I believe Wilkinson believes it does, but I can't see how.  Especially when, at the very end, we learn that Richard has gone from Slater's house to somewhere in Africa, where he has become an actual, no-foolin' torturer.  Which would mean there are victims.  Not within the main body of the story, maybe, something Wilkinson awkwardly highlights when he has Richard think back on his job with Slater and say "I think it strange that I cannot name one person who fell prey to the horrors of that time."  See, guys?  That's the premise of this book!

And no, no one is a victim of "that time," but there's an additional horror at the very end, and victims are heavily implied there.  The ending of a horror story is generally the place where the horror's main gut punch can be found, and that's the case with "Night in the Pink House."  And it's littered with victims!  We never meet them, we never see what's done to them, but we sure know what's up.  Richard has one major encounter with the strange...thing in, or behind, that cupboard door, and this is the story's climax.  Going from there to Richard's firing, as Wilkinson does, could have ended things on a nice note of anticlimactic uncertainty -- a powerful tool in horror -- but it's like he can't help himself.  And clearly, the ending we get was always the intention, but it obliterates D. F. Lewis's idea.  If the book had been called Horror With Victims, then okay, now we got something.  Otherwise it's a well-written story -- in fact, despite my complaining, we have a good story, but one that doesn't deal honestly with the potentially fascinating parameters Lewis set up.

Oh well!  This book has twenty-five stories in it, and I read two.  I obviously can't say the other twenty-two don't have a better creative handle on the concept, and I hope to find out that, indeed, many do.  But it's tough work Lewis set for his writers and at least with these two, it's a job some would rather avoid.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 4: Haunted by the Devil

by Jose Cruz

One of the best things about horror is its diversity. This was—beyond the superficial trappings like bats and cobwebs and creaky houses that stirred a loving tingle in my breast—what drew me to the genre as a young person in the first place. The vastness of it made me dizzy with glee.

The Goosebumps series by R. L. Stine, held by many today, it seems, at a nostalgic distance with just the tiniest amount of condescension, really opened up my mind about this particular facet of horror. Each book was like a Monster-of-the-Week episode from “Insert Your Cherished TV Show Here.” There were walking scarecrows, vampires, dog ghosts (ghost dogs?), green slime, basement creatures that were the manifestation of a boy’s head trauma…

Holy cow! I thought. Can they ever run out of ideas?

Well of course, they can. But that enthusiasm, that constant sense of discovery, has stayed with me since that time. I’m always eager to seek out new twists and turns on the genre’s themes and conventions, sniffing each dusty page with all the reverence and passion of a wine connoisseur. I need a little taste of whatever I can find.

This is why horror anthologies, especially, have meant so much to me. They’re my buffets, each table of contents a menu of dark delicacies cooked up by master chefs who add their own spice to old dishes. That’s what brought me—and brings you too, you rascals—here, to today’s smorgasbord.

The tome in question is Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown: A Treasury of Bizarre Tales Old and New, rockin’ awesome Edward Gorey cover art and edited by none other than Mr. Marvin Kaye. I first encountered Kaye through a coverless edition of his volume Ghosts that I obtained, I’m guessing, through one of my grandfathers, two people who were both always happy to feed my morbid interests.

As I became more acquainted with short horror fiction, it became apparent that Kaye was a heavyweight in the anthology department, compiling books that seemed to specialize in gathering the more obscure and dusty stories that skittered about on neglected shelves from established genre writers, one-off scribes, and more “mainstream” ink-slingers alike. Along with a with its older companion piece, Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, Kaye edited similar volumes of shuddery yarns and theatrical pieces including Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies, 13 Plays of Ghosts and the Supernatural, and The Ultimate Halloween. You can peruse his website here.

Perhaps more than anything else, these books schooled me on the old masters, molding my genre tutelage and exposing me to prose and poetry that ranged from affecting delicacy to surprising gruesomeness. In trying to determine which stories I would cover for this post, I tried basing my decision on different factors (intriguing titles, little-known authors, etc.) and read a few selections in preparation. One story covered today I intended to write about from the start; the other was a very happy accident that occurred during my casual reading. So, here we are, finally.

Up first: “In Letters of Fire” by Gaston Leroux. This one we can certainly file in the “Intriguing Titles” folder. Just what do these letters proclaim? Who wrote them? Why are they on fire? Mystery abounds!

Leroux is most famous for writing The Phantom of the Opera, a novel published in 1910 and one that still serves as the go-to fountain of inspiration for all theatrical-based terrors. Leroux was also fairly well known for his mysteries of the locked-room and murderous sort like The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) and The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1908). Another interest-piquing title (he was good at those), The Man with the Black Feather (1903), was included in one of Bill’s Best Books of the Year countdowns on this very site. Kaye’s introduction to the story, alluding to Leroux’s use of such Gothic mainstays as brooding castles and devilish pacts, only made me salivate more in anticipation.

A group of friends are hunting for wild boar in a European forest when a storm breaks out. Taking shelter in a cave, the group is warned by a Faithful Ethnic Companion that the nearby manor and its master are reputed to be “haunted by the devil.” And who should show up right then and there at the mouth of the cave than the gentleman himself!

He’s a kind enough bloke though, a little world weary, but he’s more than gracious enough to provide the men with a roof to sleep under. They oblige, but our nameless narrator makes the mistake of haughtily requesting to spend the night in the manor’s famously haunted room. This perturbs the elderly host just a bit, for it was in that room that his great misery and loss were born. As a bitter, suicidal young man, he stared into the mirror of a wardrobe in an attempt to conjure a vision of Satan. You know, just for kicks. And it works:

Yes, then, in the mirror, side by side with my form, something superhuman—a pale object—a mist, a terrible little cloud which was soon transformed into eyes—eyes of fearful loveliness. Another form was standing resplendent beside my haggard face; a mouth—a mouth which said to me, “Open!” At this I recoiled. But the mouth was still saying to me, "Open, open, if you dare!” 

Then, branded into the wooden wardrobe the man sees his fortune written in letters of fire: “Thou shalt win!”*

And win he does. Eternally does our host win; every gamble, every roll of the dice brings him limitless riches. Things have been fairly ordinary up to this point, but then Leroux incorporates one of my favorite narrative devices: the acid test. Naturally the hunters dispute the old man’s claims, so they all sit down to a final game of cards to see if their host truly has His Infernal Majesty’s Luck.

To go much further would spoil the fun. Suffice it to say that Leroux’s story managed to do all the right things in that it had the hoary (he said with love) decorations of Gothic horror while crafting a decidedly unique spin on the favorite “devil’s-pact-ain’t-all-it’s-cracked-up-to-be” theme that even the man beating the dead horse would have to agree has been used quite a lot. The story’s closing moments are extremely cunning, moreso because one of the twists is a not-uncommon one, but the momentum and peculiarity of Leroux’s writing makes you forget some important details that might have been made more obvious by a less skilled writer.

I found myself giving mental vocalizations of “Ha!” every time Leroux led me to believe one thing before showing me something quite different. My pre-determined image of the cloven guy with the horns was usurped by Leroux’s sensual lady of the mist; his introduction of such disparate elements of foreboding (the whispers of the haunted room, the host’s rage at his guests playing poker) surprisingly coalescing into a satisfying and organic backstory. Not to mention the whole affair ends on a char-black note that occurs almost as an afterthought. Call me sick, but it made me laugh. Grimly, but laugh all the same.

This particular translation of the story stirs up some unintentional comedy as well, specifically when the old host discusses the malady that has led his dog to become mute. Here the word “dumb” is used to describe the dog’s lack of voice, as was fairly common during the time Leroux penned his tale. But this leads to an amusing conversation wherein the old man goes on to say (I’m paraphrasing) how the dog “has been dumb her whole life” and that “her mother was dumb, as was her mother before her.” This would normally just make the reader crack a smile of “Oh, the past” except Leroux goes on for a damn good while so that it almost gets to the point of absurdity. Not only that, but I think the translator must’ve been screwing around because, literal translation or not, I think we can safely assume that Leroux meant to refer to the dog as “bitch” as opposed to “slut.” Unless there’s something I’m missing about how the French feel about their canines.

In short, this Leroux fellow has my attention. “In Letters of Fire,” along with information I’ve gleaned from his other narratives, shows that despite an almost pulpy aesthetic Leroux was a deft craftsman, taking familiar concepts and smashing them together to give you something utterly different and at times just plain bonkers in the most delightful of ways. And being of the vintage that his writing is, I can assure you that that is a definite accomplishment, brother.

Speaking of definite accomplishments, look, it’s our next story: “The Lost Room” by Fitz-James O’ Brien. The author’s name may be familiar if you’re an unapologetic anthology-hoarder, no doubt due to his famous tale “What Was It?” cropping up in many and sundry compilation. A contemporary of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” “What Was It?” is a weird little tale playing on the “invisible thing from yonder” motif to head-scratching effect. Bierce’s wit and cracker barrel narration is traded in for a general atmosphere of oddness and uncertainty in O’Brien’s story, the titular unseen bogey the possible product of too much opium-smoking on the part of the protagonists. So as you can see, O’Brien’s approach can be a little off the beaten track.

And thank St. Beelzebub for that. “The Lost Room” similarly confounds Mr. Kaye, who calls the story “difficult to describe and, once read, impossible to forget.”  I’ll do my best to defy the first point, but regarding the second: hell yes.

Our hero, again nameless, sits in reverie inside his bedroom, the summer heat taking much of the joy from his evening smoke. He looks upon  his treasured items, recalling the rich histories as represented by everything from his family crest to an antique dagger that goes all the way back to a royal Irish ancestor. Feeling the light breeze from the garden, the man decides to seek cool sanctuary amongst the shrubbery, a passage of evocative prose that O’Brien perfumes with a sinister air:

It was very dark. The tall-growing flowers that bordered the path were so wrapped in gloom as to present the aspect of solid pyramidal masses, all the details of leaves and blossoms being buried in an embracing darkness, while the trees had lost all form, and seemed like masses of overhanging cloud. It was a place and time to excite the imagination; for in the impenetrable cavities of endless gloom there was room for the most riotous fancies to play at will. I walked and walked, and the echoes of my footsteps on the ungravelled and mossy path suggested a double feeling. I felt alone and yet in company at the same time. 

Just as the creeping vine of dread begins to encircle the man’s spine, he practically runs into another idler in the garden. The stranger seems peculiarly short, and when he asks for a light for his own cigar, our hero catches sight of the stranger’s unnatural face in the glow of his match. The little man asks much about the other boarders of the large house the narrator lives in, but he also has much to tell about the man’s seldom-seen neighbors:

“O, but you will care. You must care. You shall care. I’ll tell you what they are. They are enchanters. They are ghouls. They are cannibals. Did you never remark their eyes, and how they gloated on you when you passed? Did you never remark the food that they served up at your table? Did you never in the dead of night here muffled and unearthly footsteps gliding in the corridors, and stealthy hands turning the knob of your door?” 

So, this is news. The narrator promptly calls the stranger a fool and a fiend, but when he reaches out to the little man he notes how his skin feels like glass right before the stranger promptly shrieks in rage and flies away in a burst of light. Fairly ruffled by these recent developments, the man returns to the house to find… not his room. The door from which he came opens upon the space that was previously his bedroom, but all the furnishings have been replaced and it is now filled with beautiful, strong, robed women and men who wear half-masks. A lavish banquet has been laid out and the man’s grand piano is now an imposing organ. The man’s insistence on his ownership of the room is met with eerie revelry:

“Yes,” I continued, as soon as the noisy mirth had subsided, “yes, I say, leave my room instantly! I will have none of your unearthly orgies here!” 

“His room!” shrieked the woman on my right. 

“His room!” echoed she on my left. 

“His room! He calls it his room!” shouted the whole party, as they rolled once more into jocular convulsions. 

It’s a truly discomfiting scene, as both we and the narrator try to get a grip of what on earthly hell is going on. Are these people indeed cannibalistic sorcerers? Ghosts from the past? Satan worshippers? We never find out. When our hero is pressed to join the group’s mysterious ranks, his possession of the room is determined by a game of dice, drawing a nice parallel to the never-bet-the-Devil-your-head antics of “In Letters of Fire.” In the end, a winner is claimed and we are left to ponder the image of sharp-toothed butler giggling at the hero’s misfortune.

Wooph. There you have it. Sometimes compilers of anthologies have a habit of overselling the stories when they provide introductions, but Kaye’s modest declaration is more than apt. Though “The Lost Room” appears in the section of the book titled “Ghosts and Miscellaneous Nightmares,”—and Kaye states it as the latter—O’Brien’s story is a weird tale through and through in the most pure sense. If Leroux performed a sleight-of-hand with his upturning of Gothic conventions, O’Brien knocks them (and the reader) on their ass.

The bizarre logic at work perfectly composes an atmosphere of dreadful discovery that comes from the most deliciously terrifying kind of nightmare. Who can say how long the man lived in that house. Is he even awake, or alive? Why do these sinister figures want to possess his room, and to what ends? Thankfully no answers are ever given for O’Brien knows that they would be nowhere near as interesting as the questions.

Reading “The Lost Room” reminded me of the story I had heard about Robert Louis Stevenson’s initial composition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stirred from slumber by a vivid dream, he dashed to his writing desk and started writing every last detail he could remember before the story could leave him in that wispy way that dreams so often do. I can’t help but imagine that the same might have occurred to O’Brien, for his tale at times seem to be a bit autobiographical (perhaps the anecdote about the Irish ancestor was a memory of a family legend), the other strange details of the story bubbling up and running together with his thoughts until they all fused together to form this intoxicatingly powerful tale.

I doubt my words are enough to convey the truly alluring nature of either of these stories, so I feel it best to end with an entreaty to seek them out and read them yourselves. Don’t let their aged quality turn you off either. Or do. You’ll only be more surprised that way anyway.

So look back, and drink deep of that horrific vintage.

*Just try to keep yourself from hearing the ghost’s voice from The Amityville Horror (1978) shout those fiery words. 

-----------------------------------

Jose Cruz is a New York-born freelance writer and blogger, but both those descriptors are much too prestigious for him so he won’t use them. His blog The Grim Reader hums with the current of intermittent activity, and he has also written film and literature critiques for Classic-Horror.com, The Terror Trap, and Paracinema Magazine. He composes prose fiction and theatrical plays in his spare time, but nothing has happened with those, so who cares? If you find him, give him a hug. He needs friends.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 3: And What Would Be Left Would Stick to the Ground

As a genre designation, "suspense" has always struck me as a bit vague -- "thriller," too, now that I'm thinking about it, and in fact those two are pretty much interchangeable.  But "suspense," the psychological effect that both real-life situations and narrative art can have on a person, can be brought about by all sorts of stories.  Notorious is suspenseful, and would be categorizes as a "suspense film," but also extremely suspenseful is Gallipoli, a film that is pretty far away in terms of genre from not only Notorious but anything else Hitchcock ever made.  Hell, you know what else is suspenseful?  Christmas in July.  From the moment Preston Sturges kicks that plot into gear, the viewer knows the other shoe's going to drop, and you don't want it to, but you also want to see what happens when it does.  That's suspense.  The fact that Sturges is making you laugh the whole way changes nothing.

But "suspense" is a genre anyway, I guess, and maybe the way to define it is to say it's like Christmas in July except there usually aren't as many jokes and somebody gets killed.  Of course the very haziness of "suspense" as a genre allows it, or forces it, to blend and mix with other genres.  Most often, it mixes with mysteries, but it can also mix with horror, to the point where the suspense and the horror become the same thing.  Horror writer and critic Douglas E. Winter often likes to point out that horror isn't a genre, it's an emotion.  Well, so is suspense, kind of -- it's at least a symptom of any number of emotions.  So reading today's topic for discussion, Thomas Hinde's The Day the Call Came, I can be very conscious that whatever the genre "suspense" is, it is this, certainly.  At the same time, however, it's a suspense novel that evokes dread in a way that directly conflicts with the way suspense, as we think of it, typically does.

I hope that was just confusing enough.  The Day the Call Came, which has just been reprinted by Valancourt Books, was first published in 1964.  It was the seventh novel written by Thomas Hinde, whose real name is Sir Thomas Willes Chitty (there are at least two of historical Thomas Hindes, one a newspaper editor and minister, the other a surgeon, both American; I don't know if Chitty took his pseudonym from either one).  Hinde is still with us, but around 1980 he mostly abandoned fiction (the one exception is a 2006 novel called In Time of Plague) and moved on to writing non-fiction about, among other topics, gardening and the English countryside.  This is a very English thing to do, which I mean in the best possible way, akin to Derek Robinson writing about rugby and Robert Aickman's books on local waterways, though Hinde's gardening and countryside non-fiction is possibly closer, in a way, to Kingsley Amis's drinking guides, because those topics are to The Day the Call Came as booze is to just about every novel Amis ever published.

The story of The Day the Call Came is elegantly and malevolently simple:  Harry Bale lives in a British country suburb.  He's a skilled gardener and farmer, and is married to Molly with whom he has two children, Dan and Peggy.  Bale is our narrator, however, and right off the bat -- even before we know the details of his job and family life -- he lets the reader know that all that stuff is secondary.

That was the day the call came.  It came without warning.  For years I'd known it would come, sooner or later.  I'd got used to knowing it would come.  I'd stopped expecting it.

Bale informs us, not in so many words but still very clearly, that he works for somebody, some organization or shadowy group, someone behind the curtain, possibly a part of the government, possibly not, there's no indication either way.  What, exactly, they want Bale to do is also uncertain -- to us, not to Bale.  But everything in his outer life, though he says he loves his family, is a mask for this other mission, and as we meet him he has been given his orders.  The call of the title is not a phone call, but rather a typewritten note Bale finds on his mantel, which, when he finds a private moment to read it, says "Stand by."  As a call to arms, this wouldn't seem to offer much in the way of motivation, but it changes Bale utterly, or unleashes something that has been pent up within for years.  What it unleashes in an unending paranoia.

The truth about Bale and his "mission" is never very much in doubt (I tried doubting it for a while, just to see what would happen, but I couldn't really make a go of it).  We are certain of who Bale is when he begins to think about the note, the envelope it came in, and its source:

It was late that evening, as I was tapping the barometer in the farm office, that it occurred to me that I might have typed that note myself.  The idea seemed to float into focus as if I had been half seeing it all day.  You may think that once I had recognized it I should have been able to accept or reject it at once.  It wasn't so simple as that.

Though this kind of thinking, and a certain level of self-awareness about his own brain and memory lapses, is always somewhere within Bale, he either forces himself to push through it for what he believes is the greater good (whatever that can mean in his particular case); either that, or it drifts away once he locks on to a new target for his paranoia.  Along with Bale's family, the cast of characters in The Day the Call Came is filled out with his neighbors, a swath both broad and narrow of personalities, many of whom Bale personally likes.  Indeed, much of the action, such as it is, in the novel takes place around cocktail parties, both thrown together and planned, during which Bale comes to suspect that each neighbor, each friend, is in fact on the opposing side of the group, whatever it is, that Bale "works" for.  He'll see one couple outside whispering, and he will simply know that they aren't discussing some private domestic matter, but rather they are talking about him.  Crucially, Bale's paranoia doesn't only make him believe that his neighbors are villains of some sort, but that they are making fun of him.  The two things are inextricably bound up.  They're against his cause, and they don't like him.  These are the same thing.

As with any good piece of fiction about mental illness (well, about is maybe not quite right, but anyway), there's a strong sense of sadness mixed with whatever level of danger is being aimed for.  In The Day the Call Came, the danger, or the potential of it, feels considerable -- what will Bale's paranoia drive him to?  That it will drive him to something bad is inevitable.  Yet throughout the novel he seems curiously helpless -- if the job he believes he has was a real one, he'd be terrible at it.  He has no confidence in what he's doing, and, on top of that, as I've mentioned he's not always even confident that he's right.  If this isn't common among real paranoiacs, it nevertheless feels heartbreakingly right.

Yet the book -- which is quite short for all it manages to do -- is also very funny.  Hinde has a gift for the perfectly compact comic description, as when he describes a pekingese dog, owned by one of Bale's neighbors, entering a room full of people:

After Percy came his peke, trotting with busy efficiency, stopping and standing as if to say, 'All right, explain if you can.'

Or later, when Bale, with ulterior motives, visits the Draycotts, the neighbors about whom he first becomes suspicious, to lend them camping equipment as they're in the midst of packing their car for their trip.  Having packed the car, and with the family itself now entering the car, Bale observes:

Rene, in front, was sitting on a pile of rugs so that her head was close against the roof and forced forward on to her chest.  In this position she had turned it sideways to peer at me through the top inch of the window.  I thought something might be preventing her from turning it straight again.

It was all their own work.  Alone and with no vindictive outside interference they had spent two hours working themselves into this condition.

Along with being funny, this passage also indicates that the truth of what he considers the veil of their daily lives is still something Bale takes at face value.  It's something he'd like to be able to do all the time, but he can't.

This kind of writing also helps feed the horror of The Day the Call Came, which is quiet, mostly hidden, and only once front-and-center.  But the dread of what Bale is possibly capable of, and even of what, as we read his story, may have already done, is a constant underlying hum.  In his introduction to the Valancourt Books reprint, horror writer Ramsey Campbell mentions his appreciation of a line the significance of which blew right by me:  "I'd liked my family."  The final pages of the novel are both grotesque and then more subtly horrifying -- Hinde is always blending so many things, so many tones and thoughts and ways of thinking, that both sympathizing with Bale, even to the extent that you might actually hope he's right, and fearing that he'll finally go too far, can run along parallel lines, at roughly the same speed, through the reader's mind.  Or not -- the success of the novel doesn't depend on this.  But it does lose you in the head of one man, and in his eyes, and his observations and calculations can only be your own, in the sense that they're the only ones you truly know.  Bale is unquestionably wrong, and he's also dangerous, but only because he cares.