The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) by Gene Wolfe

The Book Of the New Sun Volume 1: The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) by Gene Wolfe: Nearly 40 years on, The Shadow of the Torturer retains the power to startle with its virtuoso use of language and its detailed world creation. 

The Book Of the New Sun belongs to a relatively small but robust sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy set uncounted millions upon millions of years into the future of Earth, a time so remote that some of the beaches of this Earth are a rainbow of particles, the atomized remnants of the coloured glass bottles of our era. 

Wolfe's possible influences from this sub-genre include William Hope Hodgson's early 20th-century The Night Land, Clark Ashton Smith's 1930's tales of Zothique, and Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories that began in the 1950's. Those who would follow Wolfe into these strange lands would include Michael Shea in his 1980's tales of Nifft the Lean and China Mieville with the far-future Earth of Railsea and even the mysterious, probably non-Terran landscapes of Perdido Street Station and its sequels.

Such stories often nod to Arthur C. Clarke's Law -- any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hence the tendency to call such stories 'science fantasy.' Are the monsters actually the product of genetic engineering? Are the demons advanced aliens? And so on, and so forth.

This first novel of the tetralogy introduces us to young Severian, a member of the Guild of Torturers on the cusp of his elevation beyond the level of apprentice. We're shown his boyhood in the mostly deserted grounds of the once-thriving complex of the Torturers. All this occurs within the walls of the gigantic capital city of this world, whose walls reach the clouds.

Things change, of course, and a choice made by Severian sends him on his path beyond the Torturers' demesne and into that wider but still enclosed world of the city. He is to pass beyond the city's gates, but the sheer scale of the city will make that passage the odyssey of this first novel.

Wolfe masterfully summons sympathy for Severian, in part by having Severian tell his story from some remote future point, a sort of Great Expectations at the end of time. Severian's world is overflowing with strange and interesting characters, creatures, objects, and events. This is world-building on a massive scale, but world-building that always keeps its eye on the inhabitants of that world.

The Book Of the New Sun isn't an easy read. Wolfe offers a cascade of odd and offbeat and often archaic nouns to name the various oddities of this world at the end of time. It's a bit of a riff on the wild naming practices of Clark Ashton Smith and his stories of Earth's last continent Zothique. Regardless of how big your dictionary is, the names and nouns will soon flow smoothly through your consciousness. Part of Wolfe's magic here is to make the reader comfortably uncomfortable with the world of the far future. Highly recommended.

The Shining, Again

The Shining (1980) : adapted from the Stephen King novel by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson; directed by Stanley Kubrick; starring Jack Nicholson (Jack Torrance), Shelley Duvall (Wendy Torrance), Danny Lloyd (Danny Torrance), Scatman Crothers (Halloran), Barry Nelson (Ullman), Philip Stone (Grady), and Joe Turkel (Lloyd): Three times have we watched The Shining in the last seven years, as reviewed here and here. And that's not even mentioning Stephen King's novel. Or Doctor Sleep, King's sequel to The Shining.

One of the noteworthy things about The Shining is how many nutty interpretations (and even conspiracy theories) it has inspired. Many of these come from very literal-minded people who seem to be extraordinarily unfamiliar with the idea of sub-text, much less interpretations that don't rely on suppositions about what the director intentionally put there.

The best one -- that The Shining is Kubrick's subtle confession to the idea that he faked the Apollo 11 moon landing -- is all sorts of crazy. And that's leaving aside the fact that if Kubrick had been hired in 1968 to fake the 1969 moon landing, the 1969 moon landing wouldn't have occurred until at least 1973. Do you know how many retakes those shots would have needed? And do you really think Kubrick would have used the bit in which Neil Armstrong blows his first line on the Moon?

The Shining is, of course, both great and a complete departure from the Stephen King novel it's based on, which is also great (contra Kubrick, who thought the novel was weak). One view that works pretty well is that the whole thing is a satire of horror movies that also works as a horror movie. Well, whatever. The Sublime is conjured up, and even the looming, menacing Overlook Hotel finds itself dwarfed by that Sublime landscape. 

Some view the surprising death of a major character who doesn't die in the novel as one of Kubrick's 'Screw you!' moments addressed to Stephen King and fans of the novel. Is it? Because it looks an awful lot like Kubrick riffing on Hitchcock's use of Janet Leigh and her character in Psycho. To me, at least.

Lots of room for interpretation here. So it goes. Highly recommended.

The Rosedale Horror (1980) by Jon Ruddy

The Rosedale Horror (1980) by Jon Ruddy: This Canadian paperback original from defunct Canadian paperback imprint Paperjacks is shocking in its goodness. It's a haunted-house story with a twist, set in Toronto's tony Rosedale neighbourhood in 1974. Ruddy was a long-time newspaper reporter, and it shows: he grounds all the horror elements in detailed, specific, and often quite funny and illuminating glimpses of life at a failing Toronto newspaper in the 1970's. 

The specifics of newspaper work on a variety of fronts from daily news columnist to police reporter to freelance writer give the proceedings a real verisimilitude. That the book is often scathingly funny about life at a tabloid and about Toronto the Good really helps things.

Ruddy also carries off a difficult bit of structure. The Rosedale Horror is told in six sections, each focused in the third-person on a specific character, though there is also some first-person narration by way of a tape recorder. And it all works both as characterization and as a builder of suspense.

There are elements in the text which at times seem sexist. Some of them fall into the realm of a sort of R-rated Leacockian satire directed at certain men and women alike, including a female relationship columnist and a male news columnist. Ultimately, the novel isn't sexist, though some of its characters are sexist and, in a couple of cases, somewhat predatory.

Ruddy manages several scenes of horror shot through with the occasional bit of grotesque humour. That tape-recorded first-person monologue is one of the two deftest bits of horror, revealing gradually a mind both ill and toxically malign. A rape scene also manages to horrify without seeming exploitative -- no small feat in any novel, and Ruddy amplifies the effect by having the rapist himself under the malign mental influence of something awful.

The Rosedale Horror certainly has its pulpy elements, but they never undercut the horror and the comedic in Ruddy's novel. As both horror and pointed, satiric social commentary, The Rosedale Horror is far superior to many, many novels I've read by far more celebrated authors. It's also hard to go wrong with a novel in which a character is murdered by being telepathically forced to urinate on the third rail of the Toronto subway line. Recommended.

Bethany's Sin (1980) by Robert R. McCammon

Bethany's Sin (1980) by Robert R. McCammon: Horror vet McCammon's second published novel is a loopy, often purple piece of pulp horror. It's almost endlessly fascinating. I'm also pretty sure it holds the record for most uses of the phrase "female musk" in a non-pornographic novel. 

The novel pits a Viet Nam vet with childhood trauma issues (and Viet Nam torture issues... and psychic precognitive ability) against a supernatural cult of killer women who control the small Pennsylvania town of Bethany's Sin he and his wife and daughter have just moved to. The supernatural cult rides around on horses at night killing and dismembering men. And they intend to induct his wife and daughter into their ranks.

There are many flaws in this novel, a fact of which McCammon himself was later much aware -- for awhile, he all but disowned his first four novels. The wife especially is a narrative problem, a plot object rather than a convincingly realized character. The psychic abilities of the protagonist ultimately seem gratuitous -- the plot could unfold without them, and there's more than a hint of the wild talent vs. supernatural menace concept used much more expertly and organically in Stephen King's earlier The Shining. 

McCammon also severely undercharacterizes any possible allies the protagonist might find in Bethany's Sin: there are a lot of characters here, but the novel seems severely underpopulated. And the explanation for the name of the town, when it comes, would only really make sense if the town's origin came at least 100 years earlier. As is, the revelation provokes a bemused, "Really?", primarily because the explanation has been pounded into the wrong-shaped hole by a plot decision that isn't necessary or all that convincing.

But there's also a certain amount of fun here, and signs of a writer finding his voice at points. There's a highly unpleasant rape scene, but it non-stereotypically involves the rape of a male character by a trio women. Scenes set at the blighted wasteland of the dump depict a well-conceived Hell-in-miniature. And the protagonist is an almost emblematically tormented McCammon male protagonist. 

The climax owes too much to a few too many action movies and certain pulp cliches, especially those in which a character suddenly turns into a cross between Batman and Sgt. Rock after hundreds of pages of more realistic depiction. That could have been solved with a few more allies for our hero (Stephen King understood this in 'Salem's Lot), but McCammon wouldn't figure out how to create a group hero for purposes of verisimilitude for a few more books. 

The wife remains an annoying cipher to the very end, trussed up like Penelope Pitstop when she isn't repeatedly denying the town's essential weirdness. There's a certain amount of enjoyment here, clouded somewhat by some luridly purple descriptive passages and a whole lot of female musk. Lightly recommended.

New Terrors

New Terrors II, edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980; 1984), containing:

Sun City by Lisa Tuttle; Time to Laugh by Joan Aiken; Bridal Suite by Graham Masterton; The Miraculous Cairn by Christopher Priest; The Rubber Room by Robert Bloch; Drama In Five Acts by Giles Gordon; The Initiation by Jack Sullivan; Lucille Would Have Known by John Frederick Burke; The Funny Face Murders by R. A. Lafferty; Femme Fatale by Marianne Leconte; Can You Still See Me? by Margaret Dickson; One Way Out by Felice Picano; The Ice Monkey by M. John Harrison; Symbiote by Andrew J. Offutt and Across the Water to Skye by Charles L. Grant.

Second half of Campbell's British New Terrors anthology of original horror stories divided for American paperback publication. The stories range from the solid and familiarly M.R. Jamesian "Lucille Would Have Known" (though James never wrote a ghost story about bus tours) to the brooding, Kafkaesque "The Miraculous Cairn" and the post-modern prose-poem "Drama in Five Acts." Range is indeed what we have here, without sacrificing terror, horror or the occasional gross-out seen most prominently in "Bridal Suite." "Symbiote" and the grotesque "Femme Fatale."

Several of the stories are almost perfectly representative of their authors, especially M. John Harrison's "The Ice Monkey" -- suggestive but ultimately nebulous terror set in a relentlessly broken urban wasteland counterpointed with the dangerous Sublime of nature --and R.A. Lafferty's weird-ass, Chestertonian "The Funny Face Murders." Old masters like Aiken, Bloch and Lafferty rub shoulders here with both the up-and-coming (Masterson, Tuttle, Harrison and Priest) and the relatively obscure to the horror genre (Dickson, Picano and Gordon). In all, a wide-ranging and often deeply disturbing anthology. Or at least half of one. Highly recommended.

Soft Monsters

DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories Series IX (1980), edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1981):

Introduction: The Year of the Anthology and Beyond by Karl Edward Wagner
The Monkey by Stephen King
The Gap by Ramsey Campbell
The Cats of Pere LaChaise by Neil Olonoff
The Propert Bequest by Basil A. Smith
On Call by Dennis Etchison
The Catacomb by Peter Shilston
Black Man with a Horn by T. E. D. Klein
The King by William Relling, Jr.
Footsteps by Harlan Ellison
Without Rhyme or Reason by Peter Valentine Timlett

As the introduction notes, 1980 was the year of the anthology in horror, with three 'one-off' original horror anthologies (Dark Forces, New Terrors and New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos) and the continuing Shadows series hitting the bookshelves. Wagner's selection here runs to some lengthy novelette-to-novella length entries (those by Klein, King and Smith) occupying about half the page length of this anthology.

King's "The Monkey" offers a King trope, childhood horror invading the world of the once-terrified child, in the titular toy, a cymbal-clashing mechanical monkey that causes people to die when those cymbals clash. It's a dandy. "The Propert Bequest," a posthumous appearance by Smith, manages a tricky feat -- expanding an M.R. Jamesian-style antiquarian ghost story to novella length -- and does so superbly (Peter Shilston's "The Catacomb" also walks in James's footsteps at less length but equal efficacy, as an English tourist makes an unfortunate unscheduled visit to a mysterious Italian church. France turns out to be even more unfortunate for an American in "The Cats of Pere Lachaise", while a visit to a medical clinic moves into undefined modern horrors in Dennis Ethison's piece.

The biggest gun here is T.E.D. Klein's "Black Man with a Horn", originally published in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. In 1979, a (fictional) former associate of American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, returning from a disappointing horror convention in London, England, accidentally stumbles across a missionary who's returning to America from the Worst Missionary Posting Ever in Malaysia.

The narrator's realization that he's gradually being pulled into someone else's H.P. Lovecraft tale makes the story an occasionally sardonic delight, while Klein's careful delineation of the narrator's pervasive, systematic racism both makes cultural (the narrator was born in 1900) and narrative sense (Lovecraft was a notorious racist, and that racism informs certain aspects of his Cthulhu Mythos). And the black man with a horn -- not a man, and not actually carrying a horn -- is coming, stalking forth from a Lovecraft reference that the narrator had, until now, thought to be just another of Lovecraft's fictional creations. This story, and the anthology, highly recommended.