Capsule Reviews - Movie Theater Edition

Hey, I’m back, with a blog post, even! And not one about how I haven’t blogged in a while! No, instead, since I’ve been going to the movies a lot lately, I decided to round up the last four films I’ve seen and review them in capsule form. By way of getting back on the horse, kind of thing. Some of these are probably out of theaters by now, but I really don’t give a shit.

Sinister (d. Scott Derrickson) - This horror film seems to be the Insidious of 2012, and this is not at all something to be proud of. Like Insidious, I was rooked into going to see it by lots of talk about it being a surprisingly effective piece of work, and I left thinking that there are a lot of people with depressingly low standards for their horror movies. It stars Ethan Hawke as a true crime writer who's on the scent of something big -- several families murdered in their homes over the span of a decades, and in each case everyone in the family was killed, except one child from each, who have all disappeared. Renting a home that once belonged to the most recent victims, and is therefore also a crime scene (all of this unbeknownst to his wife, played by Juliet Rylance), Hawke finds a box of home movies in the attic. These are all home movies taken by the murderer, and each one reveals some ghostly thrash metal guy lurking around the premises at the time of the deaths. All of this is a good enough premise, and I actually liked Hawke's performance well enough (along with Fred Dalton Thompsons' brief appearance as a sheriff, his was the only performance I did like). But Sinister is mostly idiotic. Attempts to show Hawke thinking hard about the facts of these cases settle on showing him pinning photographs of the victims to a board, and writing in his notebook things like "Who killed you???" and "Where is Stephanie???" If not for these notes, he might go off track and start trying to figure out if the company that made the camera is still in business. Beyond that, you have a twist that can only really be one thing, because -- and this is a spoiler, sort of -- somebody had to take the home movies, and if it wasn't the guy from Korn, then, well... Derrickson and co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill try to gussy it all up with a cameo by Vincent D'Onofrio as an expert on ritual murder, who kindly lays out the ancient mythology that ties the murders together, all of which, by the end, means precisely fuck-all. Add to all this Derrickson's fumbling, half-stupid (only half, because he must do as he's been taught) use of horror movie music stings, including a final one that is legitimately insulting, and I'm left thinking that horror movies with vaguely but meaninglessly creepy titles that too many people give a pass to are about to actually become a whole thing that I'll have to learn to put up with.

Argo (d. Ben Affleck) - So I guess this is what Affleck's doing now, and I have to say I'm not against it. I'm a pretty big fan of his directorial debut, the Dennis Lehane adaptation Gone Baby Gone, to the point that I think it's really underrated, you guys, and was at least halfway on board with his follow up, another crime thriller called The Town. If I take issue with how Affleck, in that case, adapted Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves (mainly I have trouble with a bank robber writing a letter about how we all have to pay for what we've done while kicking back on a beach in Florida), I do so while acknowledging that Affleck's filmmaking chops are genuine. Now, with Argo, he's making the kind of film that a director makes to prove to everyone that he's no longer new at this -- he's established. This time, he has a true story to work from, about a CIA agent named Tony Mendez (Affleck) who, in 1980, has been tasked with coming up with, and executing, a plan to safely extract six American diplomats who managed to avoid becoming hostages when the US Embassy in Iran was taken over only to wind up in a limbo situation that could possibly prove more dangerous. The plan Mendez hit on was sort of loony tunes: set up a fake film production for a science fiction film called Argo, complete with script, real Hollywood professionals (Alan Arkin as the producer, John Goodman as the make-up guy), and get the six diplomats out by going to Iran, making everyone believe this was a real movie, and then basically folding the diplomats into the production and getting the fuck out of there. And it's good stuff. The opening, which depicts the fall of the embassy, is extremely well done, and Affleck does a good job at playing up, but never overplaying, the comedy that is unavoidable in situation like this. Arkin, it shouldn't at this point surprise you to learn, walks away with the film in those scenes.

It ain't perfect. The ending, which of course milks for the greatest suspense possible the extraction of the diplomats, is a bit silly in the way Affleck piles on the obstacles. Two or three could have been left out with no problem, especially the ones you can tell never actually happened, such as Arkin and Goodman needing to get to their office so they can answer a very important phone call and being held up by a PA who's frankly too big for his britches, if you want the honest truth. Also handicapping things is Affleck himself. His performance as Mendez is probably the worst, or anyway least successful in the film. I know Affleck is a not-untalented actor, but he plays Mendez as a man with no muscles in his face and a throat condition that renders his voice incapable of inflection. Because I do know that Affleck is better than this, the question then becomes "Why?" and I have to figure, in keeping with certain ideas illustrated throughout the film, the thinking was that Mendez was just a guy doing his job. He wasn't a movie hero, in other words, and Affleck -- correctly, I'd say -- finds the truth of people like him to be more heroic. It's just that I imagine the real Mendez looks and talks like a person. But never mind -- it may be Argo's biggest flaw, but it's almost thoroughly overshadowed by an otherwise slick and entertaining thriller.

Seven Psychopaths (dr. Martin McDonagh) - I have, let us say, some pretty significant ideological differences with Martin McDonagh, the successful playwright and writer-director of the films In Bruges from 2008 and now Seven Psychopaths. It is to the credit of one or the other of us (I'll say me, because I've had a rough day and could use the boost) that I've so far been able to get past them and appreciate the truly original and even moving mayhem of his film work. And Seven Psychopaths is even almost trying to make me dislike it, just in terms of plot. I don't know what it is about wacky hitmen stories that are believed to be too outrageous once cute dogs are added to the mix, but it's a shortcut-to-lunacy I'm about done with. Yet McDonagh makes it work, or makes it not not work. Seven Psychopaths stars Colin Farrell as Martin (this name is significant) as a Hollywood screenwriter struggling to get moving on a film he's writing called Seven Psychopaths. As the film sets this up, it's also setting up the concept of seven psychopaths, both real and maybe not real, maybe fictional -- the first one, "Psychopath No. 1," is a masked figure we meet in the first scene as he kills two Mafia hitmen played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael Pitt. These two things converge once one of the numbered psychopaths, mob hothead Charlie (Woody Harrelson) enters the picture, trying to find his beloved dog which has been stolen by Martin's crazy friend Billy (a hilarious Sam Rockwell), as part of a dognapping operation that involves his weird friend Hans (Christopher Walken) bringing missing pets back to their owners and collecting hefty rewards, these pet owners being Beverly Hills-type pet owners, which Hans will then use to pay for his wife's (Linda Bright Clay) cancer treatment. And yes, I know, but McDonagh is the master of some weird kind of alchemy that allows such nonsense to work. Not only is the film entertainingly bloody, and very funny, and not only is it great to see Christopher Walken play one of the three leads and be allowed to go all Christopher Walken up in this business, and not only is Harrleson wonderful, as is Tom Waits (he's another one of the psychopaths, one with a particularly strange backstory), but this whole thing actually turns out to be a not very subtle but nonetheless entirely engaging examination of these kinds of movies. Violent movies, revenge movies, to be specific. And more interestingly still is the realization that for all its gooniness, Seven Psychopaths is actually an extremely personal film, made by a man known for writing plays and movies like this, and wondering, finally, what the hell he's been doing with his life.

Flight (d. Robert Zemeckis) - The single best moment in Robert Zemeckis's new film Flight comes at the end of the plane crash sequence that sets the film's real plot in motion. The pilot, Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is, we know by now, a drunk, a drunk who has just been drinking and even sleeping off last night while his co-pilot (Brian Geraghty) takes the wheel. But when the plane begins to come apart during its descent, Whip snaps to, barking out instructions to his co-pilot and one of the attendants (Tamara Tunie), in an attempt to land the plane in a field. His plan is a crazy one and it pretty much works, but there's a moment when Whip can't do anything else, and the plane's mechanics have all shut down, and everything goes quiet. This massive aircraft is dropping into a field in complete silence, and it's very eerie, almost beautiful. Once that's over with, however...

Flight is not otherwise bereft of good moments. It's an intriguing story, too, a nicely ambiguous one about who is to blame for this crash, which, while successful in relative terms, nevertheless did take the lives of six people, including a flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) with whom Whip had been partying the night before. We know Washington's character is completely fucked up as a person, but nothing he did seems to have caused the plane to malfunction. But routine toxicology tests still reveal what he's been up to, and his guilt, his duplicity, and his eventual full-on scumbaggery can be pretty fascinating. Any scene Washington shares with Bruce Greenwood as his friend and union rep, and/or Don Cheadle as his attorney, are pretty much bound to be gripping on some level, just by virtue of the acting talent on display. But Flight is still a terrible mess, sometimes shockingly clumsy, sometimes shockingly thoughtless. An entire subplot involving Kelly Reilly as an ex-junkie exists only so someone can walk in on a drunk or blacked-out Washington and be disappointed in him. Worse, the use of songs, from "Gimme Shelter" to "Feelin' Alright" to "Under the Bridge" to "Sympathy for the Devil" (played first when we meet John Goodman's character, Washington's likable pusher (Whip's into cocaine, also)) is almost perversely literal. If the Rolling Stones had ever recorded a song called "Flying a Passenger Jet While Drunk," Zemeckis would have been all over that.

And while it’s bracing to see the lead character in an expensive studio film played by a major star as a complete piece of dogshit (and it's also interesting to see two men, the ones played by Cheadle and Greenwood, pursuing an immoral goal, but not as villains, rather as guys doing their jobs), it would have been nice if Zemeckis could have followed through. To be clear, I don’t so much mind the redemption we get, as such, and in fact I like what he and screenwriter John Gatins pulled from their back pocket by way of a catalyst for this redemption. But minutes before Whip’s conscience gets the better of him, we saw this man not only at the very nadir of his selfish and debauched existence (signaled, by the way, with some slow motion and, would you believe it, a horror movie music sting, except in this case the monster is vodka), we’d seen him rewarded for it with further debauchery. Nothing could stop or change him, which is precisely what he’d been angling for this whole time. But then, nope, changed my mind, I feel bad now. I’ve heard some complain that the depiction of Whip’s alcoholism is over the top, but he’s not shown doing anything that a real person who’d achieved that ranking in alcoholism wouldn’t do. The problem is that it would appear that Zemeckis has very little sense for this kind of thing – not in real life, because what do I know, but as a filmmaker. I feel like the whiplash of going from A Christmas Carol to Flight actually ended up on film somehow.

Okay, Naomi Watts, Okay...

...I'll take a break for a little while. And hey, Naomi Watts? Thanks for looking out for me.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 31: Till My Ghastly Tale is Told

I've decided, for this last post, to end at the beginning, the metaphorical beginning, sort of, anyway. In terms of modern horror, though, the night in 1816, in a house off of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, when Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, and one other person I don't care about, gathered together for probably all sorts of reasons, but left the rest of the world who couldn't get in on that action one of the greatest novels in the horror genre, and also a short story that's kind of a piece of shit. So let us hop into my Delorean and, as Christopher Lloyd once so famously urged, go "all the way backwards into the past."

Not that this post is going to be about that night. It's not even going to be about Frankenstein, or how much or how little credit Percy Shelley should get for that great novel. I know there's a push these days to shift focus away from Mary and over to Percy as the real brains, or at least the real stylist, behind Frankenstein, but for one thing, I simply don't care, and I will always consider Mary the author, and for another thing as terrific as the book is, almost front to back (it's not perfect, obviously, but whatever) the core brilliance of it is in the ideas. Frankenstein is one of those perfect ideas that is so rich that other writers have been able to play off it, quite rewardingly even, again and again in the almost two hundred years since, with the understanding, always explicit, that this is Mary Shelley's ground, we know that, but it can't be left alone. It's too good. No, this post is going to be about a later Mary Shelley story, as well as, apart from Frankenstein, the only other complete work of fiction to come out of that evening, John Polidori's The Vampyre: A Tale, which is now considered to be the first vampire story, as we might think of those, ever written. It gave birth to the genre, basically, so that's an accomplishment. But, you know...it's sort of lousy.

This is not an original opinion. I'm not sure anybody now really likes "The Vampyre," and having read it now I find no reason to push against that tide of negativity. The story is, two guys suddenly find themselves moving into London society at the same time. One of them, our hero, is Aubrey, a young man who fell ass-backwards into a pile of money when his parents died, and is beholden in any way only to his sister, who I guess also got a wad of cash out of the deal, so he, Aubrey, a romantic fellow, enters London society, and is found by the ladies of that society to be most winning:

He was handsome, frank, and rich: for these reasons, upon his entering into the gay circles, many mothers surrounded him, striving which should describe with least truth their languishing or romping favourites: the daughters at the same time, by their brightening countenances when he approached, and by their sparkling eyes, when he opened his lips, soon led him into false notions of his talents and his merit.

You get the gist: swelled head, handsome fellow, romping favourites. But he's no dummy, and the romantic notions of life and women that he'd picked up from books he soon realizes is maybe kind of bogus. However, then he meets Lord Ruthven, the other, more mysterious, person to recently enter high society. Lord Ruthven's face bears a "deadly hue," he has one "dead gray eye," (I think it's just the one) and he stares at people a lot, doesn't talk much, but the ladies seem to take to him, as well. For example:

Lady Mercer, who had been the mockery of every monster shewn in drawing-rooms since her marriage, threw herself in his way, and did all but put on the dress of a mountebank, to attract his notice: - though in vain: - when she stood before him, though his eyes were apparently fixed upon hers, still it seemed as if they were unperceived; even her unappalled impudence was baffled, and she left the field.

That is ice cold, baffling a lady's unappalled impudence like that. And perhaps you noticed that unbelievably goofball punctuation, that batshit colon-dash-colon-dash dump right in the middle there. And the commas! I thought I overused them, but Polidori scatters them like road spikes out of the back of James Bond's car (that's good, right?). The point is, very early in "The Vampyre" is all screwy and straining for the kind of educated and worldly prose that Mary Shelley achieved in Frankenstein. That's not to say Polidori wasn't educated, he was, but he wasn't much of a writer. To give you some better examples, I should inform you that Aubrey is fascinated by Ruthven, and accompanies him on a trip across mainland Europe. There, Aubrey clues into this weird power that Ruthven has of drawing women into his circle and, not turning them into vampires, or killing them, as you might expect, but rather turning them into slutty jerks. Aubrey's having none of that and tells Ruthven that he'd like to part company and go his own way. Ruthven says "Okay," and Aubrey moves on to Greece, where he meets a girl:

Under the same roof as himself, existed a being, so beautiful and delicate, that she might have formed the model for a painter, wishing to portray oil canvass the promised hope of the faithful Mahomet's paradise, save that her eyes spoke too much mind for any one to think she could belong to those who had no souls. As she danced upon the plain, or tripped along the mountain's side, one would have thought the gazelle a poor type of her beauties; for who would have exchanged her eye, apparently the eye of animated nature, for that sleepy luxurious look of the animal suited but to taste of an epicure.

So what you're saying is, she's pretty. Also, in the next sentence Polidori just drops the fact that her name is Ianthe so casually that I thought at first that "Ianthe" was another reference, like "Mahomet" (Lord Ruthven's name is revealed in a similar way). Anyway, the story is packed with this kind of writing. All it is, is this kind of writing. Everything that can be stated not only can but should be overstated; anything that can be stated plainly can be obscured by nonsense. Or, now and then, what you can do is, you can state something so plainly that the reader is somehow, against all logic, left wondering what you meant. So, Ianthe's not long for this world, Lord Ruthven also kills women and he kills her, and when Aubrey is there, cradling her dead body, her parents show up:

To describe their grief would be impossible; but when they ascertained the cause of their child's death, they looked at Aubrey, and pointed to the corpse. They were inconsolable; both died broken-hearted.

What, right then? Are we meant to think that, many unhappy years down the road, Ianthe's parents slipped sadly into the Great Unknown, thoughts of their lost daughter never far from their minds, or there, that night, they pointed at Ianthe's body, went "Ack! Grief!" and then died? Obviously, my preference is for the latter, but I would have liked to read another giant block of text barely explaining it in further detail. Polidori did manage to appease me with his ridiculous ending, however. It's all so stupidly overheated, and I've rambled about this one long enough, but I'm going to skip ahead and spoil it. Basically, Ruthven sets his evil eye on Aubrey's sister, she falls for him, Aubrey's all "We'll see about that!", everybody else is all "You're crazy!" so that by the time Aubrey tracks down his sister, who has by now married Ruthven, it's too late. The last line of "The Vampyre" is:

Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey's sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!

Like the reveal that Ruthven's a vampire is a shocking twist. Not only has Ianthe already indirectly clued Aubrey, and therefore the reader, into this, but the story is called "The Vampyre." That exclamation point did make me shit my pants, though. The funny thing is, Polidori had to fight for the credit of having written this, because at the time (it was published in 1820) people naturally assumed Lord Byron was the real author (all these people, Shelley, Byron, Polidori, were connected, and Polidori was reworking a basic idea from Byron). Lord Byron, less surprisingly, was frustrated over having been linked to "The Vampyre." "Thanks, but no thanks," is what I imagine he said about fifty times a day, through gritted teeth.

Moving on to finer things, lastly we have Mary Shelley's "Transofrmation." Written in 1831 (nine years after Percy Shelley died, making it impossible for him to shepherd her through the writing of this (or any number of other novels and stories) very good story, as Stuart Gordon, of all people, notes in his introduction to The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, where you can find "Transformation," so take that, you stupid jerks), it tells the story of Guido, an Italian orphan taken in by the Marchese Troella, a kind and wealthy man -- Guido himself is due a very decent inheritance down the line -- whose daughter Juliet catches young Guido's eye. Shades of Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth, there, but this romance goes rather differently. Guido's affections are reciprocated, but the problem is, Guido is kind of a shithead. A different kind of shithead from Victor Frankenstein, I should note. "I desired to see the world," Guido says, "and I was indulged":

I was arrogant and self-willed; I loved display, and above all, I threw all control far from me. Who could control me in Paris? My young friends were eager to foster passions which furnished them with pleasures. I was deemed handsome -- I was master of every knightly accomplishment. I was disconnected with any political party. I grew a favourite with all: my presumption and arrogance were pardoned in one so young: I became a spoiled child. Who could control me? not the letters and advice of Torella -- only strong necessity visiting me in the abhorred shape of an empty purse. But there were means to refill this void. Acre after acre, estate after estate, I sold. My dress, my jewels, my horses and their caparisons, were almost unrivalled in gorgeous Paris, while the lands of my inheritance passed into possession of others.

He gets worse, too. He burns through his inheritance and can't support Juliet without hand-outs from Torella, and any plea for sensible behavior is at best scoffed at, at worst it results in violence. Eventually, Guido is cast out, though he knows that a changing of his ways and mind will bring him back into the fold, and he will be free to marry Juliet. But he resists, and becomes bitter and impoverished, until one day, while witnessing a horrible shipwreck from a rocky shore, he meets a strange dwarf who seems to have scrambled to safety from the sinking ship. The first words the dwarf says are "By St. Beelzebub!", which, right there, is a clue. Seeing an evil in Guido's heart similar to his own "To what saint did you offer prayers, friend -- if not to mine?") the dwarf listens to Guido's tale of self-made woe and makes a curious offer: the dwarf while inhabit Guido's handsome body for three days; Guido will inhabit the dwarfs somewhat demonic form for the same period of time. Guido's reward will be the dwarfs wooden chest filled with gold and jewels, which he can use to fund his revenge against those who he, Guido, feels have done him wrong. Guido is unsure, but agrees. And guess what? After three days, the dwarf doesn't show up to switch back. He did leave the treasure, and food, but now Guido is stuck in a body that Mary Shelley describes in uncharitable terms (I myself have chosen to go easy in that regard). Furious and frustrated, and also coming to realize that this mess, the whole mess of his life, is his own fault, Guido twigs to what the dwarf is probably up to, and he chases after him, back to Genoa.

"Transformation" offers up a number of possible endings, and I frankly believe that Shelley chose the easiest one. It's not that the ending doesn't work, but the moral lesson being taught -- and I'm not against that, particularly since the lesson is essentially "Don't be an asshole" -- might have carried with it a few more barbs. It's described rather well, and rather interestingly, and anyway I hope that you, like me, can easily see the difference between Shelley's prose and Polidori's, but though he's filled with remorse, Guido comes out of this rather more unscathed than I think is appropriate. Or, I don't know..."appropriate" doesn't sound right. But something more visceral. Still, he has to live with himself, which as Shelley sees it constitutes a wound that won't heal.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 30: It is All Disease and Nobody Will Know

When I wrote briefly about Ray Bradbury last October, circumstances dictated that I focus on those aspects of his writing about which I'm less than fond -- the particularly Spring-choked nostalgia, the cuteness, his special brand of densely sentimental prose. I haven't warmed to those aspects since he passed away earlier this year, but the story under discussion last year, "The Tombling Day," offered the opportunity to talk only about those things, and while I tried to temper my negativity with a "but I like these ones" list of Bradbury stories I was quite fond of, the overall impression I gave was not what I would call sympathetic to Bradbury's vast body of work. Given that vastness, I might have tried to temper things a bit more, but for what it was, the post was an honest one.

When Bradbury died on June 5, like the rest of you I read a lot about him on-line, and along with coming across this quote...

I learned that I was right and everyone else was wrong when I was nine. Buck Rogers arrived on the scene that year, and it was instant love. I collected the daily strips, and was madness maddened by them. Friends criticized. Friends made fun. I tore up the Buck Rogers strips. For a month I walked through my fourth-grade classes, stunned and empty. One day I burst into tears, wondering what devastation had happened to me. The answer was: Buck Rogers. He was gone, and life simply wasn’t worth living. The next thought was: Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies.

I went back to collecting Buck Rogers. My life has been happy ever since. For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction. Since then, I never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

...which is unimpeachably magnificent, I also picked up a lot of recommendations for Bradbury stories I hadn't read. That night, I scoured through my collection of his books and picked two of those stories, "The October Game" and "Heavy-Set," and read them. Both are terrific, "The October Game" being an especially nasty horror story of unconscionable revenge, and "Heavy-Set," while not horror, turned out to be a pitch-black chronicle of a mother and son relationship that ends, I suspect, right before it did, in fact, become a horror story. I loved "Heavy-Set" in particular -- there was no genre category in which it could be slotted, it didn't deal with imagination, there was no hint of fantasy, even in a metaphorical sense, which in my experience of Bradbury was up to then unheard of. That one opened up the possibilities of Bradbury for me a bit, that for every story I disliked there could be one or two or three that hit me like a brick across my jaw. The fact that both stories were rather chillingly bleak did not escape my notice, and did not strike me as coincidental. I hope that doesn't say anything about me.

I read four Bradbury stories for today, but one of those wasn't horror, and I plan on dispensing with it quickly. Also, I didn't like it. While "The Haunting of the New" is certainly not a happy story (I'm not sure Bradbury wrote a lot of those, to be honest), in terms of the prose it does make room for just about all of the things about Bradbury I don't like. Nearly a ghost story, but a self-conscious flip on the idea, "The Haunting of the New" describes characters who live lives of unending and frivolous decadence, the globally scattered crew coming together every few years at Grynwood, the home of Nora, the chief and most enabling sybarite. But Charles, the narrator, arrives one day after being invited to another blowout only to be told by Nora that Grynwood burned down four years ago -- the identical structure he can see and walk through is a complete, exact-to-the-last-dust-speck replica. And this house being new, despite looking old, it doesn't want them anymore. Nora says that people like her and Charles are "evil" (a strong word that I doubt even Bradbury means) and is forcing her to leave. She offers the house to Charles, but the house wants him gone, too. A fine enough idea for a story, I suppose, except:

"There are a thousand young men in me, Charles.

They thrust and buried themselves there. When they withdrew, Charles, I thought they withdrew. But no, no, now I'm sure there is not a single one whose barb, whose lovely poisoned thorn is not caught in my flesh, one place or another. God, God, how I loved their barbs, their thorns. God how I loved to be pinned and bruised. I thought the medicines of time and travel might heal the grip marks. But now I know I am all fingerprints. Their lives no inch of my flesh, Chuck, [that] is not [in the] FBI file systems of palm print and Egyptian whorl of finger stigmata. I have been stabbed by a thousand lovely boys and thought I did not bleed but God I do bleed now. I have bled all over this house. And my friends who denied guilt and conscience, in a great subway heave of flesh have trammeled through here and jounced and mouthed each other and sweat upon floors and buckshot the walls with their agonies and descents, each from the other's crosses. The house has been stormed by assassins, Charlie, each seeking to kill the other's loneliness with their short swords, no one finding surcease, only a momentary groaning out of relaxation."

So. Lots of metaphors in there. I won't try to sort through them all, but I'm pretty sure "barbs" are penises. So are "thorns" and "short swords." This story made me groan and squirm and fire buckshot at crosses, and I was very glad to realize it wasn't a horror story and I could flee from it in good conscience.

But the Bradbury stories that were horror? Or near enough anyway? Those are something else again. Taking the stories in the order of least to most horror, I'll begin with "A Touch of Petulance," first published in Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces anthology. This story exemplifies one of Bradbury's greatest strengths, which was to take an old idea and employ it towards an end no one had thought of before. "A Touch of Petulance" begins this way:

On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Johnathan Hughes met his fate, commuting from another time, another year, another life.

His fate was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island.

That "fate" turns out to be Hughes's future self, an old man who has traveled from 1999 (that Bradbury doesn't waste a second with some useless explanation of the mechanics of time travel is also to his credit) just a few days after murdering his wife, a woman that present-day Hughes has only been married to for one extremely happy year. It is the goal of future Hughes to make current Hughes aware of this, and to plant the seeds that will stop this from happening. What could have gone wrong in their marriage, the current Hughes wonders, and his older self really doesn't have an explanation. All he can say is that over time, Hughes will come to hate his wife, and he must avoid this at all costs. To say more about the plot would be to ruin it, but this story did wind up in a horror anthology. I'm not sure it is horror, really, but it's black, all right, even hopeless. The old man is referred to as Hughes's "fate," after all. That's no accident.

Better still is "The Women," from his 1969 collection I Sing the Body Electric!. If "A Touch of Petulance" is a great example of one of Brabury's creative gifts, "The Women" is an example of what may have been his greatest gift, which was to imagine something entirely new, to look at something ordinary and imbue it with a mystery that is unique. In "The Women," a man and his wife are near the end of their vacation at a beach-side hotel. They are on the beach, and the man is anxious to take one last swim before they have to leave, but his wife keeps finding ways to distract him, by asking him to do a favor, or getting him talking about some other topic. She does this because she knows she has a romantic rival, namely, the ocean.

This sounds absurd when phrased bluntly, but at his best, Bradbury's magic was to take the most wild and ridiculous fantasy or horror ideas and make them seem, if only for the span of a ten page story, entirely believable. Not to beat a horse I'm sure I killed years ago, but one of the keys to this is to not explain himself. Bradbury doesn't tell us why or how the ocean can love anything (the thinking and feeling part of the ocean is described only as "the phosphorescence"), let alone this particular man, whom Bradbury describes as having a "cow body," nor does he let us in on how the man's wife clues into this. That's just how it is, and the world is a mysterious place. Bradbury writes:

Each day he should have come down to the water, to bathe, to swim. But he had never moved. There was a woman on the sand with him, a woman in a black bathing suit who lay next to him talking quietly, laughing. Sometimes they held hands, sometimes they listened to a little sounding machine that they dialed and out which music came.

The phosphorescence hung quietly in the waves. It was the end of the season. September. Things were shutting down.

So from the ocean's point of view, it's now or never. Well, it turns out to be now, and the end of "The Women" is brutal and tragic and free from any maliciousness or villainy. Like any natural disaster, it just is.

Finally, there's "Fever Dream," an eight-page bit of awfulness and horror that seems to have been written specifically to terrorize all of Bradbury's young readers the next time they got sick. Available any number of places, but read by me in The Vintage Bradbury, "Fever Dream" is about a young boy named Charles, who is sick. With a cold, maybe, or maybe, according to his genial but possibly arrogant doctor, scarlet fever. Charles is convinced something else is going on, something much worse. He sees his hands and legs changing color and twitching, and he forms a theory that he explains to his doctor this way:

"I've been thinking...Do germs ever get big? I mean, in biology class they told us about one-celled animals, amoebas and things, and how millions of years ago they got together until there was a bunch and they made the first body. And more and more cells got together and got bigger and then finally maybe there was a fish and finally here we are, and all we are is a bunch of cells that decided to get together, to help each other out. Isn't that right?"

"What's all this about?" The doctor bent over him.

"I've got to tell you this. Doctor oh, I've got to!" he cried. "What would happen, oh just pretend, please pretend, that just like in the old days, a lot of microbes got together and wanted to make a bunch, and reproduced, and made more--"

Of course, no one else can see these changes in Charles's body, which leaves the door open for more than one explanation for what's going on here, but the best-case scenario is that a thirteen-year-old boy has gone insane. The worst case scenario is one of the blood-chilling "Patient X" scenarios I've ever read, and, like I say, "Fever Dream" is all of eight pages long. It really is a superior story, and the last page or so is so wonderfully precise in its clinical horror that I had to smile. Wonderful, and terrible. That, to me, was Bradbury's greatness.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 29: She's In Her Coffin, Laughing Merrily

Perhaps you'll recall the many times this month when I've expressed some amount of displeasure over the sanity-crushing grip the eldritch immensity of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's influence has on modern horror fiction. I haven't changed my mind about that, and in fact I'd rather all influences, whatever or whoever they happen to be, would be shoved more aggressively into the attic rather than set with a proud wink on the desks of horror writers everywhere. I can't change the world, alas, but what I can do is point out other stories by writers who have been influenced by someone who, in my opinion, is more deserving, and has a greater claim, on the souls who toil within the genre than Lovecraft (yeah, I'm sick of him! What of it?!). That writer is, well, look:

It hardly needs to be said that without Poe there would be no Lovecraft, or at least not the Lovecraft we know. This is not to say that the two writers are all that similar, and as for Poe himself I'd appreciate it if you'd allow me to link to this post, and let what I wrote there suffice. The gist is, in terms of modern horror, at least in America, Poe's shadow looms larger than a lot of people, including people who write in and about horror, seem willing to admit. To the degree, I should say, that the existence of editor Ellen Datlow's Poe feels like kind of an anomaly. Even Straub's anthology Poe's Children only really took Poe's name as a symbol in the title -- it didn't look for stories that explicitly absorbed Poe as Datlow attempted here. Striking a note that was slightly worrisome, in her introduction Datlow writes that she told her writers that she didn't want pastiches (fine, good) but "I asked each writer to tell me in advance what work of Poe's was to be riffed on..." Oh, hm, well. Why does a specific Poe story have to be riffed on? Why can't something wholly new be written in his spirit? I don't know, you're asking the wrong guy, but based on what I read for today I can't say that Datlow's choice is giving me a great deal of heartburn.

As far as whose stories I chose to read, I had several options, including a number by writers I'd never covered on this blog before. This normally would have been my preference, but in the end I was too strongly pulled in by stories by two guys, Laird Barron and John Langan, I've dealt with before, more than once in the case of Barron. About Laird Barron's "Strappado," I'd only heard it was a good one, and I've been wanting to ramp up my reading of Barron's fiction, so that's that one taken care of, and as for Langan's "Technicolor" I knew that it dealt in some way with Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," and it was told entirely as a lecture delivered by an English professor. Barron I already liked, but what I knew of Langan's work hadn't impressed me, and I suspect it would be lying to myself as much as you if I claimed part of my interest in "Technicolor" wasn't to see if Langan sprawled face-first into a giant table full of pies after the seat of his pants split in front of everybody. Which...more about how that turned out in a little bit.

Barron's "Strappado" is actually fairly close to being in the spirit of Poe than being a straight riff. Reading this removed from the context of Datlow's anthology, I don't believe I would have automatically made the connection to "The Cask of Amontillado" that comes through reasonably strongly once you know the idea. Still, Barron's excellent story stands firmly on its own two legs. It's told from the point of view of Kenshi Suzuki, a man who's ashamed of his lack of connection to Japan, the home of his parents, and overall has a quietly nervous, not withdrawn, but unsure-of-himself demeanor. Kenshi is nevertheless successful, his vague Hollywood production job taking him all over the world on various junkets, during one of which he had a brief but torrid affair with an Englishman named Swayne Harris. As the story opens, the two men find their paths crossing again in an Indian tourism mecca. After sex, they head out for a night on the town, eschewing Kenshi's suggestion of a popular disco in favor of Swayne's of a more hole-in-the-wall location. Kenshi's discomfort with exploring the fringes of foreign countries is overcome by his inability to assert himself, and much of the rest of the story will find him following along. In the nightclub Swayne picked, the two men find themselves in a group of mixed European high-rollers (including one American, who is of course fat and loud and bigoted, Barron choosing to stick with the tiresome "Ha ha ha we're terrible!" self-xenophobia that I find so obnoxious; also, one of the characters is named Luis Guzman, which, I feel, is a strange choice). Swayne adds to the electricity so far generated by money, booze, and vague hints of sex by announcing that he can get them all into the new exhibit by guerrilla artist Van Iblis. This is a big deal -- Van Iblis's work has been banned in England, and his stuff work is often dark and disturbing and is often of an extra-legal, if not quite criminal -- if you get my distinction -- nature. So like Banksy, essentially, but more likely to be focused on death.

But they all go, and are quite excited during the journey to the hidden away warehouse where the exhibit will take place, a journey which is long enough that it's dawn by the time the two cars carrying the wealthy international group arrives. But Barron gets at something very appealingly specific when he writes:

Guzman and Rashid's groups climbed from the vans and congregated, faces slack and bruised by hangovers, jet lag, and burgeoning unease. What had seemed a lark in the cozy confines of the disco became a more ominous prospect as each took stock and realized he or she hadn't a bloody clue as to north or south, or up and down, for that matter. Gnats came at them in quick, sniping swarms, and several people cursed when they lost shoes to the soft, wet earth. Black and white chickens scratched in the weedy ruts.

Embarking on drunken adventures you soon wish you'd been sober enough to decline (as Kenshi actually wanted to) is universal, although the adventures open to these characters is a bit beyond what most people are used to. Which is not beside the point, I suppose, but given Kenshi's head-down, charmingly shy demeanor, their wealth becomes irrelevant pretty easily, if you choose to make it so. In any case, the "adventure" continues when outside the warehouse, associates of Van Iblis instruct the partygoers to strip naked. They're paired off -- due to an odd number of people, Kenshi is alone at the end of this process -- and two by two, they're ushered into the warehouse. And since Barron is vague about what goes on inside, I'll leave it even more vague by telling you nothing. But, you know, it's not good. However, what makes "Strappado" stand out from other horror stories to which it might bear some similarity (I can't think of a specific one, but "Strappado" does not bowl you over with its originality, nor does Barron mean it to) is that in this case, there is actually room for an aftermath -- typically the aftermath in stories like this is someone feasting on corpses or something, but with "Strappado" Barron is at least a little bit interested in the kind of effect horror can have on somebody, the anger and disgust and even upending of basic personality that can follow. In a very subtle way, Barron's story achieves a greater sense of dread than if it had ended with everybody getting their heads split in two, because in Barron's story, for some people the dread doesn't end. An obvious idea, you'd think, but just as obviously an idea few writers have, or at least had and then didn't reject.

As for Langan's "Technicolor," I...okay, I'll just relieve whatever meager suspense I've managed to build up and say that Langan wins this round. I'm not entirely convinced that he brings his very complicated story all the way home, but he at least comes damn close. And anyway, he may have -- a reread someday will decide that for me. But what Langan pulls off here is fairly extraordinary. I'm wary of overselling this, but when you consider that the story, as I've said, takes the form of a college English lecture, and that I, at least, rarely failed to believe the language used, I could picture the professor, any male English professor I ever had, really, saying these very things (well, up to a point), and was moved by the end to pull my Poe biography off the bookshelf to see how much, if any, of what the professor is going on about was based even a little bit on truth (one important element does seem to have come from Poe's delirium in the hospital shortly before his death), and read, and read, and read on fascinated by the strange alternate partial biography of Poe that Langan was laying out, clueless as to where this was all going, I'm fairly confident has achieved something quite admirable with "Technicolor." And he does that, by the way, with a story that finally feels a bit less like something Poe would have written than fuckin' Lovecraft! But I'm not even angry about that!

"Technicolor" is a hard story to summarize, primarily because I'm loathe to spoil the narrative force of it. Langan very seamlessly carries his story from an interesting analysis of the color scheme at play in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," told in a thoroughly convincing impersonation of academic speak, into the shadow inspiration for Poe's classic story, who the man was who inspired it, what the man did that inspired it, what the man was trying to do when he did the thing that inspired it, and where this led, and left, a drunken, tumor-addled, and grief-stricken Edgar Allan Poe in his final days. Langan even drops a throwaway bit of classroom atmosphere that pays off quite fairly later on. All structured like a lecture. And it's no small feat -- one I honestly didn't believe Langan would bring off -- that the language necessary for this premise never drives into a ditch. There's interaction between the professor and his students, and the students' words are not given to us, yet at no point does Langan resort to "What's that you say? You want to know what Poe meant by placing the braziers where he did in each of the colored rooms? Well, I'll tell you..." He might skirt that once or twice, but never goes off the road. Plus, the ending, which I think is fairly strong (if I have an issue with it, it's that for as present as Poe is in this story, there's not much of Poe's specific imagination in the ending) somehow feels even more chilling knowing that it's occurring somewhere as innocuous as a college classroom. Not sacred, mind you, because, well, anyway...no, it's that it's so ordinary and everyday, and I can pull up a vision of one of several versions of that place in my head at any time. This is like the idea of horror being more frightening in daylight, but in this case it's more like horror being more frightening in a barbershop. So I guess you may have had the last laugh, John Langan.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 28: Some Appalling Violation of Myself

Editors Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's anthology The Weird strikes me as hands down the most significant horror collection published this year. I think they might resist the idea that the stories gathered together in their book are simply "horror" stories, or even horror at all (I have my own doubts in this regard about one the stories I chose for today), but early in their introduction to the 1,100-plus page volume, they set about defining the "weird" story in terms that not only sound pretty good to me, but render the core goals of weird fiction as inseparable from what horror is, at its best. They write:

With unease and the temporary abolition of the rational, can also come the strangely beautiful, intertwined with terror. Reverie or epiphany, yes, but dark reverie or epiphany -- not the lightness of "I wandered softly as a cloud" but the weight of, for example, seminal early twentieth-century writer and artist Alfred Kubin's sensation of being "overcome...by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations." The Weird can be transformative -- sometimes literally -- entertaining monsters while not always seeing them as monstrous. It strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges failure as sign and symbol of our limitations.

I don't really know what else I have to add to that. Good night, folks. Ha ha no, but seriously, the VanderMeers then go about providing the reader with 110 examples -- that's how many stories this book contains -- of the above written by authors like Franz Kafka, Mervyn Peake, William Gibson, Marc Laidlaw, Clive Barker, Shirley Jackson, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Bloch, Thomas Ligotti, Brian Evenson, and, well, shit, I'm not going to name them all. And obviously, I've only read a sliver of this thing, but as far as I'm concerned weird fiction is the wing of the horror genre that offers up the most potential for unease, and the greatest opportunity for writers to unchain their imagination -- it's where the real thrill of the genre comes from, so if you're maybe not sold on horror as an artform, maybe this is the book that can make you feel like a stupid idiot.

Now, I have to confess, I chose the stories for today in something of a panic. Since purchasing The Weird, partially with an eye towards this current project, I had one story pegged as my number one choice. I'd never heard of it, or of the author, it sounded strange and beguiling and eerie, it was long and I felt it could stand in for the book as a whole, or anyway I'd do my damnedest to force the issue. But then I started it this morning, and I just couldn't hack it. Not today, anyhow. I could tell early on that this story, which I won't name for fear of putting readers off it, through no fault of its own, was too dense and disorienting for my current state of mind, which, if you're curious, is "blown out and useless." So I was scrambling, but as luck would have it I ended up landing on two quite good ones that illustrate rather well what the VanderMeers are trying to illustrate.

The first is "The Hell Screen" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Akutagawa killed himself in 1927, at age 35, claiming in his last words that he felt a "vague insecurity," which I'd say is about as sad and skin-crawling, when you think about it, a final emotional state as I can think of. Akutagawa is best known as the author of the source material for Akira Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon. The two Akutagawa stories adapted by Kurosawa for the film were "Rashomon" and "In a Grove." There's a hefty dose of confusion here when you realize that the story of Kurosawa's film is taken entirely from "In a Grove" whereas from "Rashomon" Kurosawa only took the title. I'm not going to be able to explain this to you, but I remember being baffled by this as, some years ago, I read a slender volume of Akutagawa stories called Rashomon and Other Stories. That book (and if you've ever seen Jim Jarmusch's film Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, you may remember Forrest Whitaker's character reading a book with that title; he was reading the exact same edition I read, and so when I first saw Ghost Dog when Forest Whitaker was shown reading it I said "Hey I read that book." True story) is a little bit lost to memory now, but I do remember the story "Yam Gruel," which I enjoyed considerably, and overall I was fascinated by Akutagawa's very clean, fairy tale-like prose. The simplicity of his style made his fiction live in a way that a more insistently baroque approach would not have achieved. "The Hell Screen" is very similar, though it is a quite a bit darker than anything else I can remember reading by Akutagawa.

The story is about the benevolent Lord Horikawa, a man who:

...had a kind and generous heart that would partake in the happiness and distress of all, even the humblest among his subjects. For these reasons, when he encountered a procession of ghosts in the large palace of Nijo, he was able to pass through them unscathed. And when the spirit of Secretary Tooru prowled every night the Kawaranoin Palace in Higashi-Sanjo, famed for the garden inspired by the marine landscape of Shiogama in the Michinoku province, the Lord reprimanded it, after which the spectre vanished forever. Of course, as soon as the people of Kyoto, young and old, men and women, heard Horikawa's name, they would genuflect as if they had seen Buddha's avatar.

Among Lord Horikawa's subjects is Yoshihide, a great painter, and a terrible man. "He was avaricious, mean, cowardly, lazy and insatiable, but above all he was insolent and conceited," Akutagawa writers. Many stories exist about Yoshihide abusing, even torturing, his models in order to get the painting he wants, based on his belief that he has to see a thing actually happening before he can paint it. He is despised by everyone. In turn, he despises everyone, except for his daughter Yuzuki. Yoshihide adores her so much that he scares and chases off any potential suitors, because he never wants Yuzuki to leave her side -- whether I should be reading something more into Yoshihide's love of his daughter, I don't know. Similarly ambiguous is the relationship between Lord Horikawa and Yuzuki, after the girl, against her father's wishes, though he's powerless to stop it, goes to work for Horikawa. The narrator of the story, a servant who doesn't factor into the plot but is around to observe much that goes on, mentions the gossip that Horikawa harbored a love for Yuzuki, but the narrator refutes this as impossible. Though I don't think it's impossible.

One day Horikawa hires Yoshihide to paint for him a vision of Hell, and Yoshihide agrees. Much of the painting Yoshihide -- who now is almost frothing with rage at Horikawa -- is able to complete from memory, of fires, of dead bodies seen on the street, and so forth, but there is one detail that he can't complete, involving a royal carriage, that he must ask Horikawa to provide for him -- not just the carriage, but what Yoshihide imagines happening to the carriage in his painting of Hell. Horikawa agrees, and this is as much as I'm prepared to reveal about the plot of "The Hell Screen." Where it goes is genuinely shocking and horrific, but, it must be noted, it is not supernatural. So what makes "The Hell Screen" a "weird" story? The key is the ambiguity in various relationships Akutagawa has set up, but also in what one character does in the end. Why would this person do this thing? There is no explanation, not provided by Akutagawa, and not known by the nearly all-seeing narrator. But the narrator cannot see what's hidden inside a person's mind, and he can't hear what's never said aloud. If "The Hell Screen" was ever turned into a movie, it would never survive the motivation whores who demand nothing less than irrefutable logic, clearly stated, supporting the actions of every character in every film, but it is precisely the absence of that that makes "The Hell Screen" both so terrifying and so weird. Actions are performed in the story that in practical, and mechanical, terms could be carried out by any living person, but nevertheless they make no goddamn sense.

More traditionally weird, in that it is both bonkers and provocative, is M. John Harrison's "The New Rays." Harrison almost found his way into an earlier iteration of The Kind of Face You Slash through his novel The Course of the Heart. That book is a kind of philosophical expansion of Arthur Machen's classic horror story "The Great God Pan," and back when I wrote up that story, I thought hey, this'd be good. Well, it wasn't. Not because the novel is bad , but rather because I truly did not, and do not, know what I thought, or think, of it. The Course of the Heart defeated me in a way -- my delight in noticing that Harrison was mirroring Machen's enigmatic references to the Jack the Ripper murders (then not far in the past) in his story by referencing with similar mysteriousness the notorious Moors Murders in his novel, was short lived, due the sudden realization that wherever Harrison was going, I was unable to follow. For the time being, I'm willing to blame myself for this, but if I ever try to re-read The Course of the Heart, I'll be going in punching.

For now, though, I can heartily recommend "The New Rays" as a wonderful example of the weird story, and as something that is quite unlike what I imagine anyone unfamiliar with the genre might expect. The main character is a woman, who is dying. The disease that is killing her we might assume to be a form of cancer, though we're never told specifically what it is. Perhaps it's the idea of cancer. Anyway, she's visiting a clinic run by Dr. Alexandre, assisted by "a beautiful crippled girl," and in back of the clinic is a treatment shed where his unusual methods are put into practice.

In the black and chaotic moment when the rays arrive, Dr. Alexandre and his assistant struggle into their loose yellowish rubber suits and round tinted goggles. Once they are covered from head to foot like this all their kindness seems to be replaced by panic. They grab you roughly: there is no turning back: up on the table you go, trembling as you help them fasten the straps...

If you are getting your treatment free of charge, you have to agree to have it without an anesthetic. You mustn't pass out.

Through the most abyssal vomits and discharges, when the rays seem to be laying down a thick coat of poison in every organ, you can still hear the urgent, earnest voice of the crippled girl. 'Are you conscious? Can you raise your head? Are you aware that you have lost control of your bowels? We must know.'...

Sometimes the rays don't arrive at all. What bliss to be let off with a cup of tea in the reception room and told to go home again!

Obviously, there is a parallel here with chemotherapy, but Dr. Alexandre's treatment is much stranger than this. Another part of it is the "blue bodies," little smooth, faceless, translucent creatures, the use or importance of which remains unclear right through to the end of "The New Rays," even when an actual physical use of them is described. For the most part, these blue bodies sound kind of, you know, cute, and are treated in relaxed moments as charming lab animals. But it's clear that the clinic creates these things, and the narrator gets some cold glares and a verbal dressing down for wondering about the fates of the blue bodies after they've served their bizarre medical purpose.

What is weird, the story seems to think, is medical science, medical treatment, the experience of a dying person moving through these strange rooms and being enveloped by massive humming machines. It would be rather difficult to make that work completely, though, since as unpleasant and frustrating, even infuriating, as such experiences may be, the reason behind it all could be logically explained. Not so in "The New Rays." The story does seem to invite such readings, but then what of the blue bodies? The story was written in 1982, so even the contemporary and controversial medical issues that might provide "The New Rays" with a convenient metaphorical explanation for its strange goings-on, would not have applied then. But the uneasiness remains the same, the desire to be made well and the desire to escape the things and the people that are supposed to make you well, are all the same. The desire to maybe just go home and sit in a room and maybe die, rather than put up with all of that, remains. There's no real plot to "The New Rays," outside of the consideration of those desires.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 27: Lord of the Desert

It's very easy to forget how many different areas of horror Robert Bloch managed to cover in his long career. At some point in his career, unquestionably after Hitchcock's adaptation of Psycho was released, Bloch became known primarily as a writer of non-supernatural horror and suspense, but you didn't even have to know his work solely through that film or novel. When I was growing up, my reading of Bloch was restricted to what I could find in used bookstores, which tended to mean that I was reading the various Tor reprints of suspense novels Bloch wrote in the 1950s, 60s, and, well, so on -- the Tor reprints covered a lot of years. But among those novels, none of them (that I read), not The Kidnapper or Firebug or The Night of the Ripper or Night-World or American Gothic, involved any kind of supernatural element. One Bloch novel that Tor published at around that time, Lori, was a ghost story, but it was at the time a new novel (1989), plus I didn't read it until many years afterwards, and, not that this is exactly relevant to my point, it was far from Bloch's finest hour.

Bloch's specialty, the popular perception went, was writing about killers, not exactly of the everyday type, but at least of the technically possible type (another contributing factor to this was the amount of Jack the Ripper-related fiction Bloch wrote). He also gained a reputation for writing short stories that ended with a kind of punchline, some horrifying revelation in the last sentence that gave the whole thing its punch. The first Bloch books I ever read, before I even read Psycho, were a pair of story collections from the 1980s, published by Tor, called Midnight Pleasures and Fear and Trembling, and the two stories I remember best are "Nocturnes" and "The Night Before Christmas," both of which end in punchlines, neither of which are supernatural, and, for the record, both are terrific. So he was good at this stuff, but it might surprise some people -- not you, probably, but some people -- to learn that Bloch was originally another, albeit earlier than most, Lovecraft acolyte. Lovecraft even replied to a young Robert Bloch's fan letter with writing advice. And that Lovecraft influence could be found rather heavily in his early work. (By the way, I know that there are plenty of supernatural stories in both Midnight Pleasures and Fear and Trembling -- I just don't remember them.)

It was not my intention today to write about Robert Bloch's Lovecraftian fiction. As I think I've made clear this month, the whole world of Lovecraftians, and even Lovecraft himself to a degree, is starting to wear me out. My intention was only to write about Bloch, a man I wrote only a glancing post about several years ago. Since I've gone back to several other horror writers since loosening up the restrictions I originally placed on myself, I figured Bloch was more than deserving of a second go 'round, and so from my bookshelf I removed my old Belmont paperback copy of his 1962 collection Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (that title story is probably the most famous and most influential thing Bloch ever wrote, outside of Psycho, of course). I picked two stories I hadn't read, based on their titles, and have only myself to blame if I somehow didn't wonder to myself "I wonder if this Robert Bloch story called 'The Faceless God' is going to be anything like H. P. Lovecraft, who Bloch so admired." I must have. This was just yesterday, so I should remember, but I must have.

The other thing is, also unplanned, both the stories were set in Egypt (there's at least one other Egypt story in this book, called "Beetles"). The setting of one of those, "The Eyes of the Mummy," could be assumed. The plot is very basic: our narrator is fascinated by Egypt and its strange myths, but following a strange and fatal incident that occurred before the story's action, one involving a possibly supernatural occurrence the resulted in the death of a colleague, he withdrew from this field of interest. Until, that is, one day when another colleague, Professor Weildan, approaches him with an opportunity that seems hard to resist. Basically, go to Egypt, where there's this tomb that has a mummy in it, a mummy of a priest from an ancient, diabolical cult. But because of this priest's outcast status at the time of his death, the tomb is for all intents and purposes unknown, and Weildan assures our narrator that there will be jewels a-plenty. Once in Egypt, though, things get dicey when Weildan meets with their contact and spy, who our narrator overhears the two men arguing -- the spy seems afraid. And although the narrator doesn't see this, it's pretty clear that Weildan murders the man. The fact that Weildan does this, and the narrator knows he did it and doesn't flee, should tell you something about both of them.

They get to the tomb, and things are looking up when they throw off the mummy's lid and see two astonishing jewels in place of the corpse's eyes:

Two great yellow disks burned up at us through the darkness. Not diamonds or sapphires or opals were they, or any known stone; their enormous size precluded any thought of inclusion in a common category. They were not cut or faceted, yet they blinded with their brightness -- a fierce flashing stabbed our retinas like naked fire.

These were the jewels we sought -- and they had been worth seeking. I stooped to remove them, but Weildan's voice restrained me.

"Don't," [Weildan] warned. "We'll get them later, without harming the mummy."

I heard his voice as though from afar. I was not conscious of again standing erect. Instead I remained stopped over those flaming stones. I stared at them.

So the narrator is pretty taken with these jewels, and I'll halt the plot summary right there. What I found interesting about this one -- and this is a very solid story overall -- was its treatment of the mummy. It's not a shambling, be-bandanged pseudo-zombies, it's a much more psychological thing here, but then, early on, mummies usually weren't shambling, be-bandanged pseudo-zombies. The original Freund/Karloff 1932 film feature the mummy that way very briefly, as a highly effective early mood-setter, but after that Karloff's Imhotep can pass as living. Those bandages became a staple later on in the Universal films, but then those stopped, and more recently in those iffy Stephen Sommers mummies are like ghost demons or something. Yet the bandages are what we think of when we hear the word. Isn't that interesting? No? Well, I thought it was.

"The Eyes of the Mummy" connects to "The Faceless God" beyond the shared Egypt setting. This plays into "The Faceless God" more, but in both you have protagonists who are morally questionable. Typically, it's my belief that having basically evil characters (the narrator of "The Eyes of the Mummy" isn't evil, but he is greedy) face, and lose to, the horror of your story or novel is a little bit of a cheat, in that seeing a villain get their comeuppance can rob the horror of its horror. EC Comics did this time and time again, but they had such a bright and vividly salacious way of going about it that it was essentially the house style, and quite entertaining. The problem is that it can turn horror into just another kind of revenge story. But with "The Faceless God," which features a truly awful piece of filth as its main character, Bloch makes it work. The character is Doctor Carnoti, a man with archaeology and anthropology in his background, but who is introduced to the reader in the first paragraph as he is torturing a man for information -- this is medieval, bloody, disabling torture -- and, once Carnoti gets what he wants he orders the man killed by one of his servants. What he wants is information on the location of a massive statue buried in the middle of nowhere, Egypt division, but which was briefly and partially uncovered by accident by a passing caravan. Carnoti is interested because it's supposedly very well preserved, the Egyptian god depicted is unknown (and three-headed), and all of this comes together to cause Carnoti to believe this discovery will make him rich and famous. The problem is, the Egyptians who hire him know that this is a statue of Nyarlathotep, a walking nightmare of a god whose existence has been wiped away from Egyptian mythological texts, and whose specific attributes were disbursed to other legends of other gods. It is best, it had been decided, that no one speak of Nyarlathotep.

"The Faceless God" is basically a Lovecraft story written by Robert Bloch, which for me at least means that it goes down a lot more smoothly. But it's very explicitly Lovecraft. First there's Nyarlathotep, which is a Lovecraft creation, and then there's this passage, one of the most interesting in "The Faceless God," where Bloch turns briefly away from Carnoti to create a scholarly history that combines our world and Lovecraft's:

[Nyarlathotep] is mentioned cryptically in the Necronomicon, for Alhazred heard it whispered in tales of shadowed Irem. The fabulous Book of Eibon hints at the myth in veiled and diverse ways, for it was writ in a far-off time when it was not yet deemed safe to speak of things that had walked upon the earth when it was young. Ludvig Prinn, who traveled in Saracenic lands and learned strange sorceries, awesomely implies his knowledge in the infamous Mysteries of the Worm.

But his worship, in late years, seems to have died out. There is no mention of it in in Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough, and most reputable ethnologists and anthropologists are frankly ignorant of the Faceless One's history...

For whatever reason, I really like that mention of The Golden Bough, even if it's only to point out how strange that Frazer never mentions Nyarlathotep. But of course that's the point: The Faceless God is sadistically and diabolically and hatefully powerful, he cannot even exist in legend. And uncovering that statue is a form of blasphemy, and will bring him down on you.

Which is what happens to Carnoti. The reason this story can put a villain like Carnoti front and center without seeming like a cheat is that only someone like Carnoti would go after this statue, his avarice driving him straight through any objections offered up for his own good. And simply freeing a portion of that giant statue from the sand is actually sort of the end of the story, even though there are several more pages to go. But he's doomed, and in the rest of "The Faceless God," Bloch merely chronicles, with no little satisfied cruelty, Carnoti's descent into madness and finally a kind of reverent death. Along the way, Bloch writes in a way, and about things, I'm simply not used to from him; however often he may have done it, it's outside of my experience of his work. But his handle on this sort of thing, giant evil gods who live only to destroy men and make them suffer, is quite firm. It's like Lovecraft, but without the turgidness. "The Faceless One" is swift that Lovecraft only achieved in his very short stories, like "Pickman's Model" and "The Music of Erich Zann." It's really, really effective, this story, and genuinely horrifying. In fact, that's another reason Carnoti's villainy doesn't really cut into the terror: the terror of Nyarlathotep is so immense, that the Earthly evil of Carnoti feels almost like nothing. Carnoti doesn't become humanized by the end of "The Faceless One," and he's not redeemed at all, but he becomes such a helpless insect under the magnifying glass of a sadistic god, that from a certain distance he could be any one of us.