Plague Books Part Something

The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964): edited by Robert Aickman: Solid 'Best of' collection apart from the annual, numbered Fontana Ghost Stories paperbacks. 

Edited by the great and idiosyncratic 'strange story' writer (and English Inland Waterway enthusiast) Robert Aickman, this collection contains many great stories, including Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo" and Walter de la Mare's "Seaton's Aunt" along with Aickman's own "The Trains." It includes one stinker, the twee and mostly unfunny funny ghost story "The Ghost Ship." Highly recommended.

In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe (2009): edited by Michael Connelly: A tribute to Poe from the Mystery Writers of America, whose annual award(s) is named the Edgar, after Poe. 

The early-20th-century illustrations by Harry Clarke are really nice. The stories are pretty much a 'Best of' Poe's greatest stories, along with poems "The Raven" and "The Bells" and an excerpt from Poe's great, truncated novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Also included are essays from members of the MWA on what Poe means (or doesn't mean) to them. As a Poe collection, you can certainly do worse. Highly recommended.

Under a Watchful Eye (2016) by Adam Nevill

Under a Watchful Eye (2016) by Adam Nevill: Best-selling horror writer Seb Logan has writer's block. Thankfully, a friend and mentor from his days in college returns to give him inspiration.

Ha!

Ewan is that friend -- unbathed, unkempt, drunk, and intrusive. Supernaturally intrusive. Ewan appears to have tapped into some underlying supernatural reality, one that he's pulled Seb into because Ewan wants a publishing deal. And someone to make his strange, scrawled manifesto publishable.

It's sort of the nightmare version of all those stories writers tell about people coming up to them at parties and saying, "I've got an idea for a story. You write it and we'll split the profits 50-50!"

Sen and Ewan's unpleasant reunion is only the beginning of Seb's forced plunge into a supernatural underworld of increasing malevolence. However, Ewan isn't the Prime Mover in these experiences. Who is, and why, starts to become apparent about a third of the way into the novel.

Under a Watchful Eye gradually builds one of the more unusual occult conspiracies I can think of in a horror novel or movie. The comedy may be bleak and black, but it's undeniably there, as Seb becomes aware. Once upon a time, a con-man and occasional horror writer created a psychic cult. The cult seems to have become defunct with the author's death in the early 1980's. But as Lovecraft might say, "That is not dead that can eternal lie..."

Nevill's recurring interest in portraying human suffering is a little muted here -- Seb's privation is more of a slow drip than a case of being repeatedly beaten about the head by a giant monster. It's still there, though. Stretches in the supernatural world are imaginatively constructed. So too many of the creatures lurking there, especially an awful, formerly human thing dubbed Thin Ned.

Nevill trades here in something close to the visionary horrors of Arthur Machen (referenced in the novel) and some of Algernon Blackwood's more rarified stories. There are horrifying sights and sounds in that underworld, have no doubt. But the overall arc is of a psychic, visionary quest that Seb is forced into by his human tormentors. His salvation, if salvation does indeed come, lies in understanding the rules of the supernatural better than his enemies understand them. And they've got a 30-year head-start.

Seb's chances for survival, though, rest on the novel's deflation of the trope of the all-powerful conspiracy, occult or otherwise. This is the chief delight of the novel's final third. What if that conspiracy was maybe, I don't know, run by idiots? Highly recommended.

The Ritual (2011) by Adam Nevill

The Ritual (2011) by Adam Nevill: English 30-somethings Dom, Phil, Luke, and Hutch were best friends in college. Every year since they go on a trip. This year, they've gone hiking and camping in Sweden's famed hiking and camping area, the name of which escapes me but which I know is very old-growth forest bordering Norway. 

Tensions run a bit high this year, especially between under-employed-singleton-with-rage-issues Luke and the married, seemingly comfortable Hutch, Dom, and Phil. Then they take a shortcut because Dom sprained his ankle. Thus ensues the horror.

Adapted into a pretty solid movie, The Ritual nonetheless is much different than that movie, especially in terms of character motivations. Well, and the last third. The last third of the novel is crazy, a bit too verbose, and perhaps a bit too invested in the suffering of one of its characters.

Or perhaps not. I could argue that the last third of the novel torments that character very intentionally as a nod to Christ's sufferings on the road to Calvary. The four friends are pitted against Something in the woods that is very un-Christian.

Anyway, it's a terrific novel of horrors both cosmic and visceral (very literally visceral at points), better on my second reading of it. The dynamics of how the four men stupidly take a shortcut to disaster is convincing in its human-scale hubris. The Creature and all the horrors surrounding it are convincing. Did I say Creature? Or is there a Creature? Could it just be humans who are bedevilling our Fractious Four? Highly recommended.

See Also

Night Monsters (1974) by Fritz Leiber

Night Monsters (1974) by Fritz Leiber containing the following stories: The Black Gondolier (1964); Midnight in the Mirror World (1964); I'm Looking for Jeff (1952); The Creature from Cleveland Depths (1962); The Oldest Soldier (1960); The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (1949); and A Bit of the Dark World (1962) .

Leiber was probably the best writer of all those science-fiction and fantasy writers who collectively formed the 'Golden Age' of science fiction (basically, the 1940's) and went on to continue to define the genre(s) in the 1950's and 1960's. Indeed, his cynical, often dystopic takes on the future in his 1950's and 1960's work make him more at home in the company of writers who came of age in those decades, when Leiber (born around 1910) was already middle-aged and older.

Leiber came from a theatre family, and while that isn't much of a factor here, it was in other stories. He also corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft in the 1930's. He wrote several Lovecraftian stories over the course of his career, some pastiches, some revisionist takes that explored what one could do with cosmic horror.

"The Black Gondolier" was written for an Arkham House anthology, and it pays homage to Lovecraft in structure (and concluding italics) while nonetheless situating the horror within Leiber's expert, long-time evocation of terrible horrors with new, modern incarnations and meanings. Here, that places a strange and creeping horror somewhere in or below California's Venice (Beach) in the early 1960's, that odd and rundown simulacrum of Italy's Venice, but with way more oil wells.

Leiber ranges far throughout this collection, which samples Leiber's dystopic, sarcastic science fiction ("The Creature of Cleveland Depths," which somehow manages to satirize the current culture of the Smartphone), and his grimy urban twists on traditional horror tropes (the Ghost in "I'm Looking for Jeff" and the Vampire in "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes").

We also get cosmic horror that seems closer to Algernon Blackwood in "A Bit of the Dark World," all of it occurring in the sun-drenched hills above Los Angeles, a sort of cosmic Noonday Devil. Leiber's affection for mathematical problems and chess manifest in the oddly moving ghost story "Midnight in the Mirror World." Finally, we visit the time-spanning, reality-changing war of his Changewar series in "The Oldest Soldier," as the war between the time-travelling groups known as the Snakes and the Spiders wanders into a neighbourhood bar.

In all, this is a fairly representative sample of the breadth and depth of Leiber's decades of writing, with only his seminal and the career-long influence on sword and sorcery fiction being truly neglected. Highly recommended.

The Wendigo in the Willows

The Ithaqua Cycle: edited by Robert M. Price (1998), containing the following stories:
The Wendigo (1910) by Algernon Blackwood; The Thing from Outside (1923) by George Allan England;; The Thing That Walked on the Wind (1933), The Snow-Thing (1941), and Beyond the Threshold (1941) by August Derleth; Born of the Winds (1975) by Brian Lumley; Spawn of the North (1975) by George C. Diezel, II and Gordon Linzner; They Only Come Out at Night (1975) by Randy Medoff; Footsteps in the Sky (1986) by Pierre Comtois; Jendick's Swamp (1987) by Joseph Payne Brennan; The Wind Has Teeth (1990) by G. Warlock Vance and Scott H. Urban; Stalker of the Wild Wind (1993) by Stephen Mark Rainey; The Country of the Wind (1994) by Pierre Comtois; and Wrath of the Wind-Walker (1999) by James Ambuehl.

In addition to producing The Call of Cthulhu rpg and its offshoots (tendrils?), Chaosium Press also releases mostly reprint volumes of Cthulhu Mythos and Cthulhu-Mythos-adjacent short stories. So kudos to them!

This anthology focuses on one of the more minor Mythos beings, Ithaqua, added to the Mythos by August Derleth and not H.P. Lovecraft himself. It's a wind deity and a spirit of the North. It's also a weird and accidental illustration of how myths -- real myths -- can alter over time, represented in the condensed timeline of 80 years of stories.

Because it all starts with Algernon Blackwood's very European reconfiguration of the myth of the Wendigo, a story with variants among various Native-American peoples of North America's Northcentral and Northeast. As generally constituted in those myths, the Wendigo is both a legendary reinforcer of the taboo against cannibalism and a cautionary fable about the evils of greed and hoarding.

Blackwood, though, reconstitutes the being as instead a sort of embodiment of the dangerous appeal of Going Wild, of surrendering to a sort of Rapture of the Empty Woods and running away from civilization. Blackwood also beefs up the idea of the Wendigo's association with the wind.

And we're off.

Derleth takes some of his cues from Blackwood and further distances his Wendigo (known now also as Ithaqua the Wind-Walker) from its mythological roots. Now it's a malign wind elemental. And that, pretty much, is what the post-Derlethian stories in this anthology work with, to lesser or greater effect.

The stories are all enjoyable, though none are major -- most are pastiches of Lovecraftian style and structure rather than their own unique takes on the Mythos, and that's true of Derleth as much as anyone else. Great post-Lovecraftian stories in the Cthulhu Mythos tend to strike out on their own paths, finding personal approaches. Letting some air in.

Nonetheless, the anthology is quite enjoyable, as noted. The most startling story herein is George Allan England's "The Thing from Outside" -- it's basically a Cthulhu Mythos story before Lovecraft had truly begun the Mythos, a sort of bridge between Blackwood's proto-Lovecraftian "The Wendigo" and "The Willows" and H.P.L.'s "The Call of Cthulhu" and everything after. Recommended.

Short Horrors

Masters of Terror Volume 1: William Hope Hodgson: edited by Peter Tremayne, containing the following stories: "The Voice in the Night", "A Tropical Horror", "The Mystery of the Derelict". "The Terror of the Water-Tank", "The Finding of the Graiken", "The Stone Ship" and "The Derelict" (1905-1914; Collected 1977): This 1970's collection concentrates on early 20th-century horror and science-fiction writer William Hope Hodgson's fantastic tales of the sea. Well, OK, and a water tank. That seems a bit anomalous. But water! His great stories about ghostbuster Carnacki are collected elsewhere.

Hodgson spent years as a sailor before turning to writing, so the tone of the stories rings true even when the events become improbable. Two of the stories deal with the debris and seaweed-choked Sargasso Sea, a location Hodgson would often use for his tales of horror. His fine horror novel The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' also spends some time there among crabs the size of houses; giant, man-eating octopi; hordes of rats; and an assortment of other awful animals, plants, and dire weather and oceanic conditions.

One of the great lessons learned from these stories and other Hodgson work is that if you're not sure what it is, don't poke it with a stick. And if a 100-ton carnivorous sea-monster invades the deck of your ship, stop running around on the deck.

Besides their dialogic verisimilitude, Hodgson's stories excel in their depiction of the weird and sublime creatures and events on Hodgson's wide and fear-haunted ocean. The finest and most-anthologized stories herein are "The Voice in the Night", a seminal story about a particular type of oopy goopy monster, and "The Derelict", a nice bit of science-fictional horror. Hodgson's major horror stories and novels are well worth seeking out in newer editions than these, or older. Highly recommended.

Monster Mix edited by Robert Arthur containing the following stories: The Day of the Dragon by Guy Endore (1937); Mrs. Amworth (1922) by E. F. Benson; Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent (1937) by Stephen Vincent Benét; Creature of the Snows by William Sambrot; Aepyornis Island (1894) by H. G. Wells; Fire in the Galley Stove (1937) by William Outerson; The Mannikin (1937) by Robert Bloch; The Wendigo (1910) by Algernon Blackwood; The Derelict (1912) by William Hope Hodgson; O Ugly Bird! (1951) by Manly Wade Wellman; Mimic (1942) by Donald A. Wollheim; The Hoard of the Gibbelins (1911) by Lord Dunsany; and Footsteps Invisible (1940) by Robert Arthur (Collected 1968):

Fun Young Adult-directed horror anthology edited by the prolific writer and editor Robert Arthur, who ghost-wrote a lot of the early Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators novels and ghost-edited a lot of Hitchcock-brand short-story anthologies.

And yes, "Mimic" by Donald A. Wollheim was adapted into the movie of the same name, though the movie has a much different take on the whole affair. Guy Endore, prose source of the 1930's Wolfman movies, could probably have sued the makers of Reign of Fire over his dragon story here. Or his estate could have, anyway.

The monsters in this anthology aren't all bad (the Benet story is comedy, not horror), though most of them are. Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo" is one of his two undeniably pivotal novellas (the other being the even-better "The Willows"). While Blackwood wasn't Canadian, many of his horror stories were set in Northern Quebec. It's interesting to see how he reconfigures the Native-American legend of the Wendigo to fit his own fears about the dangerously Sublime wild country of Canada. In its original, the Wendigo story is a cautionary legend about the dangers of greed and gluttony, not about getting spiritually overwhelmed by the wilderness.

Arthur's own story, "Footsteps Invisible," is one of my favourite short stories about Egyptian curses: I'd actually forgotten who'd written it until I read it again here for the first time in thirty years. Recommended.

The Croning by Laird Barron (2012)

The Croning by Laird Barron (2012): Laird Barron has fairly quickly made a name for himself in horror fiction with a unique blend of cosmic horror, graphic depictions of horrific violence, and a constant concern with masculinity and its discontents, satisfactions, and challenges when faced by maggot-like, child-eating horrors from beyond the rim of conventional space-time. Some of Barron's male protagonists (sort of) break even in their confrontations with gibbering, capering, nigh-omnipotent horrors, though generally only through escape or death. Most of them are either destroyed or subverted.

Many of Barron's stories share the same mythology, in which a race of cosmic horrors collectively known as the Children of Old Leech lurk in the lost places of the Earth, spiritually and physically feasting on humans while occasionally offering a small handful of people the "honour" of joining them. Technically speaking, the Leech are both endo- and exocolonists: they conquer from without and within, all in preparation for the day Old Leech itself wakes up hungry and devours the populations of whole planets. Which is what happened to the dinosaurs, among other lost Earth populations.

Yes, he's the feel-good writer of 2012!

The Croning is Barron's first novel, and it's a doozy. For the most part, the narrative follows hapless geologist Don Miller who, in the present day, is in his 80's and plagued by gaps in his memory that, when encountered, his mind scrambles to either explain or forget that such a discovery ever happened (he's even forgotten that he ever knew Spanish well enough to translate Spanish documents).

Don's uncannily young-looking wife of more than 50 years, Michelle Mock, has always pursued the anthropology and archaeology of "lost" tribes, periodically leaving Don for weeks or even months at a time. And as the narrative swings back and forth in time and space, we begin to see why Don's mind is so screwed up -- and why, despite his great love for Michelle, he also occasionally fears her.

The horrors here are indeed horrible, the worst coming from the failures of human morality when confronted by terrible tests. Barron weaves history and mythology and legend (including a crackerjack origin for the story of Rumplestiltskin) into this backwards-and-forwards-looking opus, presents the horrors of the flesh and the soul, and gives us scant light in the face of world-annihilating darkness. It's a brilliant debut, but not for the physically or philosophically squeamish. Highly recommended.