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

The Vanishing (2007) by Bentley Little

The Vanishing (2007) by Bentley Little: This is either a terrible novel by the usually reliable Bentley Little or a terrific parody of a horror novel. The weirdness starts on the cover, where Stephen King proclaims Little "the poet laureate" of modern horror. Really? Because Little's prose is about as anti-poetic as it gets -- sometimes it's barely prose.

Little's strengths have been in his strange ideas and sudden plot twists. And those are certainly in evidence here. This is a novel that twists right at the title, which doesn't seem to have any major relevance to the novel it's the title of. So it goes. Is this too some sort of joke about Little's preference for one and two word titles for his novels?

Rich white men start going crazy and killing people. Children with the heads of animals are being found in various West Coast cities. A flashback narrative follows an early 19th-century wagon train into an American West found on no map. It all seems sort of intriguing.

Buckets of blood will be thrown about. Even vaguely alternate sexual practices will be linked to Evil. Some evil monsters will show up. But those monsters are also, and I quote, "sexy"! People will bang monsters. People will be banged by monsters. An elite force of mercenaries will suddenly show up to help set things right. They will be tempted to bang those monsters, but they will resist!

To summon these monsters people want to bang, one has to go to certain places and yell out at least slightly obscene rhymes. Or as one of the rhymes goes in the novel, "Engine Engine Number Nine, Take me quickly from behind." I'm not making this up. One of the sexy things these monsters do is a sexy dance consisting primarily of stripper-like gyrations. The monsters look like giant hybrids of lizards, people, and other animals, with Giant-Size sexual organs that everyone keeps staring at with lust. I told you they were sexy, and sexy means Big!

At one point, a character thinks the New York skyline at night looks like a bunch of rectangular Christmas trees, while the cars below look like glowing ants. I'm not making that up, either.

The monsters are a sort of quasi-mystical holdover, in a tradition going back in horror to Arthur Machen's malign little people. They live with their human sex-buddies in a magical land hidden in the Pacific Northwest in which a giant mountain of sewage and offal looms over the landscape. Sex and shit. Get it? Cloachal?

A trio of ten-year-old girls get raped by the monsters in a flashback. Women are kept as milking animals by one of the monster's half-human offspring.  Besides reciting some obscene rhyme, people who want to attract the monsters also rub themselves in their own urine and possible feces. Get it? Cloachal! Thank god for that mercenary group. They really come in handy for our protagonists, a reporter haunted by childhood trauma and a socially retarded social worker.

Did I mention that a priest gets raped to death in his church by monsters? Oh, yeah! If nothing else, The Vanishing makes Clive Barker's "Rawhead Rex" look like "The Turn of the Screw" by comparison. Not recommended, or recommended a lot.

The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen (2011); edited by S.T. Joshi

The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen (2011); edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following pieces:

Foreword: The Ecstasy of St. Arthur by Guillermo Del Toro: Nice, brief appreciation of Arthur Machen by the film-maker, whose works often refer directly or indirectly to Machen's work and concepts.

Introduction by S. T. Joshi: A usual excellent historical overview from Joshi.

The Inmost Light  (1894): Pseudo-science based horror with ties to the longer, creepier "The Great God Pan.".

Novel of the Black Seal  (1895): 'Novel' meaning 'Nouvelle' here and below, and not a matter of length. One of several Machen stories dealing with a survived, malign race of 'Little People.'

Novel of the White Powder  (1895): Another piece of pseudo-science based horror. As with the above 'novel,' this was also published as part of the actual 'novel'/short-story cycle The Three Impostors. The 'science' moves into the realm of the occult at the conclusion.

The Red Hand  (1895): A fine piece of horror which uses the style and structure of the mystery story.

The White People  (1904): A towering achievement in first-person narrative in the horror genre, framed by a somewhat wonky but necessary philosophical discussion of the nature of good and evil. One of the most unnerving stories ever told.

A Fragment of Life  (1904) : A slightly weird tale of a young couple chafing at life in a London suburb really grows on one as it builds to a climax reaffirming Machen's love/hate relationship with cities.

The Bowmen  (1914): That famous piece of accidental 'journalism' (it's a short story mistaken at the time for being real) that spawned the World War One legend of ghostly bowmen coming to the rescue of British soldiers.

The Soldiers' Rest  (1914): Another of Machen's brief newspaper short stories meant to buoy spirits during the early days of the Great War.

The Great Return  (1915): A weird tale without horror -- instead, it's a faux-journalistic piece on the Holy Grail in the Welsh countryside.

Out of the Earth  (1915): Very minor piece concerns Machen's underground, malign, and apparently foul-mouthed little people. 

The Terror  (1916): Written in a straightforward journalistic style that's unlike Machen's earlier works of weird fiction that include "The White People" and "The Great God Pan," The Terror is instead the great-grandfather of Max Brooks' World War Z. The Terror depicts its events as real, investigated by the unnamed narrator.  Those events aren't zombie attacks -- they're mysterious deaths breaking out in various locations throughout Great Britain during World War One. Have the Germans landed some sort of hidden force on the British Isles? Is someone using a mysterious 'Z-Ray' to smother people or send them running off cliffs to their deaths? Or is there something wrong with the animal kingdom Machen was writing furiously at this time in his life, forced into newspaper work in order to pay the bills. The Terror isn't the imaginative and literary triumph that the aforementioned stories were, but it's still an enjoyable and often weird book. It's also an important permutation in horror's long love affair with the pseudo-documentarian style. Where 'letters' and 'journal entries' once told us that what we were reading was 'real,' now the journalistic voice does. It's also a mutation of something going back to at least Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. In that early 18th-century work, DeFoe told a fictional 'you-are-there' story about a real event. Machen embeds The Terror in the real, early events of the Great War and then, like DeFoe, tells everything as a piece of actual reportage. It's a major stylistic leap. There are many fine moments of horror and pity throughout The Terror, along with some marvelously weird images. Machen captures the way fear can travel through gossip when the official channels are trying to hide the problem. A late-novel tableaux of horror at an isolated farm is especially well-managed through the description of the aftermath and through a dead man's journal describing the mysterious and terrible events that led to that aftermath. There are a couple of flaws to note. One isn't so much a flaw as a relative lack of closure. Things just sort of stop. This first flaw is exacerbated by the second, which is the narrator's jaw-dropping, climactic theory about why what happened, happened. It's an explanation totally in keeping with Arthur Machen's beliefs about society. But it's a moment of political and social commentary that will leave a sour aftertaste with anyone who doesn't long to live in a medieval fiefdom. I kid you not. 

Overall: A selection that includes non-horror pieces makes for an interesting overview of Machen's career. Those interested only in Machen's horror output would be better served by seeking out a collection that includes "The Great God Pan" and "The Shining Pyramid." The end-notes to the stories are extremely useful. The cover is the only oddity, as it seems to have been commissioned for a collection that did include "The Great God Pan." Highly recommended.

The Terror by Arthur Machen (1916)

The Terror by Arthur Machen (1916): Written in a straightforward journalistic style that's unlike Machen's earlier works of weird fiction that include "The White People" and "The Great God Pan," The Terror is instead the great-grandfather of Max Brooks' World War Z. The Terror depicts its events as real, investigated by the unnamed narrator. 

Those events aren't zombie attacks -- they're mysterious deaths breaking out in various locations throughout Great Britain during World War One. Have the Germans landed some sort of hidden force on the British Isles? Is someone using a mysterious 'Z-Ray' to smother people or send them running off cliffs to their deaths? Or is there something wrong with the animal kingdom?

Machen was writing furiously at this time in his life, forced into newspaper work in order to pay the bills. The Terror isn't the imaginative and literary triumph that the aforementioned stories were, but it's still an enjoyable and often weird book. It's also an important permutation in horror's long love affair with the pseudo-documentarian style. Where 'letters' and 'journal entries' once told us that what we were reading was 'real,' now the journalistic voice does.

It's also a mutation of something going back to at least Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. In that early 18th-century work, DeFoe told a fictional 'you-are-there' story about a real event. Machen embeds The Terror in the real, early events of the Great War and then, like DeFoe, tells everything as a piece of actual reportage. It's a major stylistic leap.

There are many fine moments of horror and pity throughout The Terror, along with some marvelously weird images. Machen captures the way fear can travel through gossip when the official channels are trying to hide the problem. A late-novel tableaux of horror at an isolated farm is especially well-managed through the description of the aftermath and through a dead man's journal describing the mysterious and terrible events that led to that aftermath.

There are a couple of flaws to note. One isn't so much a flaw as a relative lack of closure. Things just sort of stop. This first flaw is exacerbated by the second, which is the narrator's jaw-dropping, climactic theory about why what happened, happened. It's an explanation totally in keeping with Arthur Machen's beliefs about society. But it's a moment of political and social commentary that will leave a sour aftertaste with anyone who doesn't long to live in a medieval fiefdom. I kid you not. Recommended.

Nameless: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbairn (2015)

Nameless: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbairn (2015): Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham forge a weird, somewhat non-linear journey into neo-Lovecraftiana in this six-issue Image Comics miniseries. Surprises are part of the package, so we'll stick with a bare plot description: something ancient and terrible is falling to Earth inside an asteroid, and only the eponymous Nameless and a crew of private astronauts can stop it. 

Nothing is really that simple, of course, as the graphic novel bounces off everything from Mayan mythology to the Arthur Machen horror story "The Black Seal" on the way to an apocalyptic climax.

Why Nameless is literally Nameless (or, as he notes, 'Nameless is a name!') is only one of the mysteries that may or may not be answered by the bulk of the miniseries. Morrison plays with narrative unreliability here, while artist Burnham does a nice job of illustrating moments of extreme grue, normal city streets, and the occasional squirmy Lovecraftian God-thing. The ending is tricky, like everything else, so pay close attention to what's happening in the concluding panels. Recommended.

The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein (1984)

The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein (1984): The Ceremonies isn't the greatest horror novel ever written, but it may be the greatest horror novel ever written in which the stakes are the survival of the world. There were a lot of those apocalyptic and pre-apocalyptic horror novels in the late 1970's and 1980's, during the later nuclear-war-fear years. I'd probably give the edge to The Ceremonies over all of them, 1980's or otherwise, though Ramsey Campbell's The Hungry Moon and Midnight Sun would offer stiff competition.

T.E.D. Klein is a Top-Ten American horror-writing talent despite his meager output: this novel; the four novellas collected in Dark Gods (1985); the novella The Ceremonies is based on, "The Events at Poroth Farm" (1973); and maybe 200 pages of ephemera. Horror readers sit and wait, hoping that second novel announced in 1985 will some day see publication.

The Ceremonies looms large for a number of reasons. It's beautifully written. Its allusions, intertexts, and interpolations of what sometimes seems to be the entire history of horror fiction are fascinating, keenly observed, and essential to the unfolding of the plot. The plot itself is expertly machined, building slowly until the climax explodes in the last thirty pages or so. The characterization of players minor and major is deft and witty and occasionally heart-breaking. The novel follows certain tropes and conventions while exploding others along the way. It's structurally and stylistically complex in an unshowy manner -- its use of three distinct, linked narrative streams in three different voices and tenses, for one, has thematic significance that only dawns on the reader gradually as the novel and its voices accumulate in one's head to increasingly disturbing effect. And it's capable of both cosmic uneasiness and gross-out horror, the latter used sparingly but to great effect, especially in the climactic scenes.

To appreciate The Ceremonies fully, one should read at least some of the texts it interacts with. But if one doesn't do so, one of the main characters labours away on a graduate English thesis on horror fiction throughout the novel. Along the way, we get his thoughts on texts ranging from The Castle of Otranto to The Haunting of Hill House. Some of these texts are important to the novel as a whole. All of the observations are, at the very least, interesting. Some are even hilarious. Because one can certainly agree with the protagonist's view that The Castle of Otranto sucks, or that Dracula stops being interesting once the novel exits Transylvania.

The protagonist of the novel, Jeremy Freirs, takes lodging on a farm near the small New Jersey town of Gilead for the summer in order to finish his M.A. thesis. His landlords are Sarr and Deborah Poroth, members of a small Christian sect that settled in the area more than a hundred years earlier. The sect bears some resemblance to the Pennsylvania Dutch or the Amish, though the Poroths have a truck and indoor plumbing. But it's not the Poroths or their sect or even Jeremy that are the real problem. 

The real problem is something that waited in the surrounding woods for 5000 years to be born again, something that spent centuries clinging to a tree branch in the distorted heart of a section of the forest initially called by the adjacent Native Americans "The Place of Burning." No one ever lived there or near there until settlers started to encroach in the 19th century. Then the thing's waiting ended, along with its life, and the Ceremonies began. And even in the 19th century, the forested heart of darkness sat only about 50 miles from New York City. 

Something beyond all measure fell into or broke through or seeped up into our universe; the novel leaves the thing's means of entry a "mystery." But the novel also suggests that the thing somehow also broke through into human mythology, folklore, rituals, stories, and even folk dances. Fragments of the rituals needed to resurrect the being hide in all these things, waiting to be reassembled and used so that the thing can be reassembled and reborn. Even a Coney Island Ferris Wheel and a grumpy cat fit into the Ceremonies.

One of the keen pleasures of The Ceremonies is its combination of mystery and precision. We're taken through various rituals and preparations and signs and portents. Strange, tarot-like cards are read. Complex ceremonies that must be followed with an anal-retentive attention to detail are enacted. But the mysteries of what awaits, of what will be done to the world and how it will change, remain to the very end of the text. At no time does Klein feel the need to have the ultimate antagonist of the novel deliver an expositional speech. 

And even the acolyte of the antagonist remains vague and refreshingly unglib to the very end. And this henchman, Rosie -- this short, fat, seemingly jolly old man -- is one of the novel's many terrific creations. He's awful. He's also pitiful, but only in terms of what he was before he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, nearly 100 years before the main action of the novel takes place. The third-person description of his thoughts doesn't give us the exterior charm of so many antagonists, from Hannibal Lecter all the way back to Milton's Satan. We see Rosie from inside, a manipulative and remorseless engine of death. Well, death for all humanity. If humanity were lucky. Which it probably won't be if Rosie gets his way. There are worse things than death.

The indispensable references for the novel are several late-19th and early-20th-century stories by the Welsh horror-writer/mystic Arthur Machen. The novel's title refers to three sets of ceremonies named but never fully explained in Machen's (mostly) first-person tour de force "The White People"; Machen's novella is also discussed by Jeremy in the novel itself. A short, cryptic Machen piece called "The Ceremony" also adds to one's appreciation of the novel, as do Machen's "The Novel of the Black Powder" and "The Great God Pan." These are all in the public domain, and worth reading regardless of whether or not you read The Ceremonies. 

But you should read The Ceremonies. You really should. It's both its own evocative, poetic, ruthless piece of horror and a terrific act of play with what sometimes seems to be every major horror and Gothic work ever written, either explicitly or implicitly. The Ceremonies rewards close and careful reading. It rewards multiple readings. And it has a killer inversion of a horror trope that horror readers will probably associate most with Stephen King's The Shining, as creatures almost never associated with goodness nonetheless ride to the rescue by accident, driven by instinctual fury, even as Nature itself comes under existential assault. Highly recommended.

Deep in the Darkness by Michael Laimo (2004)

Deep in the Darkness by Michael Laimo (2004): Solid and enjoyable horror-thriller walks in the footsteps of Arthur Machen and some H.P. Lovecraft (specifically "The Lurking Fear" in the latter case). A Manhattan doctor gets an offer he can't refuse: take over the rural New England practice of a recently deceased M.D. and get out of the city with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. What a deal!

Ha! The only place more dangerous than the city in a horror novel is the country (and paradoxically, vice versa). It might be more accurate to say that wherever you go, you should have stayed away. 

Laimo chose to tell this story within a frame narrative that establishes that something really terrible has happened from the beginning of the novel. I"m not sure it's a great choice -- it primarily explains 'where' the first-person narration comes from without adding much in the way of suspense. 

The antagonists of the novel straddle a line between 'natural' cryptid and supernatural boogeyman until very late in Deep in the Darkness. All is (sort of) revealed in a mostly satisfying manner. And Laimo has his sometimes muddle-headed protagonist of an M.D. realize that muddle-headedness, and ponder the source, as the novel progresses. People do some oddly stupid things in the course of the narrative, but there's actually an explanation for that, one that makes sense. And one that the narrator realizes, perhaps too late.

Laimo describes both the antagonists and their woodland haunts viscerally and grotesquely. The novel seems especially oriented to the smells of horror. It also gradually orients itself towards sexualized body horror as it progresses, leading to a couple of extremely graphic and disturbing scenes as the novel moves to a climax. And is a child in danger throughout the novel? Well, yeah. That never gets old.

Deep in the Darkness would probably work better if it were shorter. There's a dragginess to the middle section, a need to get on with it already given what we've seen so far.  And while the first-person narration allows for both unreliability and a refreshing dose of unlikeability in the narrator, it also makes the late-novel objectification of the female body more problematic than third-person would. Characters other than the narrator never really achieve any depth, making what happens to them, especially the wife, verge on gruesome exploitation rather than carefully constructed body horror. 

That there's a sequel to the novel makes a certain amount of sense -- Deep in the Darkness throws a twist in towards the end that allows for further expansion of the narrative while also recontextualizing everything we've read to that point. Though given that this is a first-person narrative recorded 'after' the fact, the revelation may unsuspend the disbelief of a certain portion of readers. Would a narrator lead with the revelation and explain things in terms of it? It certainly could be argued that this would be more believable, especially as the narrative is also framed as a warning to whoever finds it.  Lightly recommended.

The Nature of Balance by Tim Lebbon (2000)

The Nature of Balance by Tim Lebbon (2000): An early novel from the prolific Tim Lebbon pits a small group of people against nature gone mad. Or at least intensely angry at human beings. 

There are elements of Arthur Machen's work throughout the novel, as one reviewer points out in a blurb on the back cover. Of course, Lebbon has a character talk about an Arthur Machen story early in the text, so there's a signpost here, brightly illuminated. It's Machen's "The Terror," in which animals launch an attack on humanity, that's referenced in the novel. 

However, there are other Machanesque touches as well that recall other works, especially a discussion of what true natural evil would look like ("The White People") and Machen's ideas of reality being perhaps too horrible to contemplate without some mediation ("The White People" and "The Great God Pan," among others).

Lebbon doesn't attempt to write like Machen. The Nature of Balance is more like SplatterMachen, with all the explicit blood and guts and gore and sexual ramifications shown where they were only (strongly) implied in Machen's early 20th-century work. It works because of Lebbon's strong hand at characterization more than anything else. 

The litany of horrors can get a bit repetitive after awhile (never have so many things smelled so "rich" and "meaty" -- the line between gross-out and dog-food commercial can be a thin one). But Lebbon also exhibits a great deal of creativity in depicting Nature gone mad at warp-speed. There's actually something Miltonic in some of the descriptions of what is, I suppose, a post-post-lapsarian landscape, a world in which once again everything has changed, changed utterly. But there's also hope, and hopeful characters amidst the rubble and the crawling tentacles of malevolent trees. Recommended.

Revival by Stephen King (2014)

Revival by Stephen King (2014): Cruising in under the radar after the big splash that was 2013's award-winning Doctor Sleep, Revival is what Doctor Sleep purported to be: a return to full-blown supernatural horror by Stephen King. Like King's It, Revival is a horror novel that salutes a lot of other fictional horrors. It mainly concentrated on the horrors of the big screen in its overt references; Revival mainly goes after written horrors right from its Dedication page onwards, as King lists several horror writers and one horror novella (Arthur Machen's spectacular, more-than-a-century-old "The Great God Pan") to whom he's dedicated Revival.

We've seen King grapple with Machen's novella recently, in the mostly successful 2008 novella "N.", collected in Just After Sunset. And you don't have to have read "The Great God Pan" to enjoy Revival. Though you really should read it in any case. It's swell!

To use a baseball metaphor that seems appropriate to the baseball-loving King, Revival first appears to be a solid double hit by a slow-footed power hitter who's lost some bat speed in recent years. But the double falls into a gap between outfielders. Things start to happen. When the play is over, Revival's delivered a lurchy, gasping, but successful (and terrifically exciting) inside-the-park home run. It's not the sort of towering, out-of-the-park slam that was a novel such as The Shining. But it's impressive nonetheless, maybe more impressive for its relatively greater rarity.

Revival begins in very-small-town Maine. We're somewhere near other King towns such as Castle Rock, but Castle Rock or Derry would be a metropolis by comparison. King gives us something new with the Morton family, from which his narrator Jamie Morton springs: a family with more than one child, and the family dynamics this entails. It's rare ground for King, who's generally depicted one-child families (though sometimes, as in It and "The Body," families whittled down to one surviving child by tragedy). King is out of his comfort zone, which is good. The family stuff works. So, too, does having Jamie Morton grow up to be a recording engineer and occasional session musician rather than the standard writer-protagonist of so many King novels and short stories.

Told by Morton in the present day, Revival shows Jamie Morton's long, intermittent relationship with his town's preacher, from Jamie's boyhood in the 1950's and early 1960's to 2014. Three years into Preacher Charlie Jacobs' small-town tenure, a terrible tragedy ends his priesthood, and his belief in God.

The aftermath of this first tragedy (there will be many more, for many people) sees King write one of his finest scenes of non-supernatural horror. Jacobs gives a nihilistic, God-denying sermon at his church. That's not the horror. The horror comes with the townspeople's reaction to his sermon, a reaction that rings utterly true and horrible in its smug, nasty religiosity buttressed with the most awful, judgmentally toxic gossip. It's a great scene of horrific mourning, one to stand with the funeral scene in Salem's Lot.

Then... we're off. I'll leave the specifics of the plot for you to discover yourself. Jamie Morton's post-teen-aged problems parallel those of many other King protagonists; the solution to these problems is different from what we've seen before in King. Jamie and Jacobs form a twinned narrative, two addicts whose addictions ultimately merge into one.

Along the way, King nods both explicitly and implicitly to 200 years of written horror in English. Jacobs' obsession with electricity and what it can accomplish in the realms of life and death gestures towards that early megalith, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Obsessions with death, the dying, and what lies beyond death nod to Poe (perhaps most notably in one scene to Poe's short story "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"). 

And there are many, many others, including Machen, including H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury. King also nods to himself nodding to H.P. Lovecraft in one of the horrific images offered at the climax of the story, an image which echoes something in King's explicit Lovecraft homage, "Crouch End." 

There are other King-on-King moments dotted throughout Revival, mostly to good effect, from the tiny, sinister "Billygoats Gruff" door in It to the terrible, hidden invaders of "The Ten O'Clock People." And for those of you who've read King's non-fiction horror survey Danse Macabre, there's a notable riff on something King discusses therein -- the Ray Milland-starring horror movie X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Seriously. And it works. And HE CAN STILL SEE!

Certainly, the horror takes awhile to build in Revival. And you may at points think you know where the text is going. Does it go somewhere unusual for King? Good question. It goes where it goes. I think the climax is terrific and utterly earned by what's gone before. Implications for everything that happens earlier in the text allow for a re-evaluation of the events we've read about... and, possibly, a re-evaluation of the narrator. Possibly. In any case, really a terrific and enjoyable horror novel from young Mr. King. I hope we'll be seeing more from him! Highly recommended.

Lovecraft's Book

The World's Greatest Horror Stories (a.k.a. H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror): edited by Stephen Jones and Dave Carson (1993/2004) containing the following stories:


Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927/1935) by H. P. Lovecraft: pretty much an essential essay on horror in literature up to the mid-1930's;

The Signalman (1866) by Charles Dickens: understated and almost documentary in its approach, with Dickens striving for an understated realism that works extremely well;

The House and the Brain (1859) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (variant of The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain): haunted house story becomes almost New Age by the end as it moves into occultism and pseudoscience;

The Body Snatcher (1884) by Robert Louis Stevenson: classic and disturbing tale of 'Resurrection Men";

The Spider (1915) by Hanns Heinz Ewers (trans. of Die Spinne 1908): really odd and disturbing tale of suicides caused by... what. exactly?;

The Foot of the Mummy (1882) by Théophile Gautier (trans. of Le Pied de Momie 1840): whimsical dream-journey anticipates similarly themed stories by Dunsany and then Lovecraft ;

The Horla (1886) by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of Le Horla 1887): a really lovely tale of madness and alien invasion by de Maupassant, who was himself suffering from mental illness by the end of his too-short writing career;

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe: Poe's indispensable tale of rot;

The Damned Thing (1893) by Ambrose Bierce: Bierce's invisible monster in a somewhat slight tale that's not Bierce's best horror story;

The Upper Berth (1885) by F. Marion Crawford: justifiably in the running for Best Ghost Story Ever, a model of suggestion, pay-off, and chilly, water-logged creepiness;

The Yellow Sign (1895) by Robert W. Chambers: Chambers' scariest story helped set the stage for all the mysterious, forbidden volumes to come -- though his forbidden volume, The King in Yellow, is available in finer bookstores everywhere!;

The Shadows on the Wall (1903) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: a fine ghost story, subtle and concerned with the quicksand of family grudges;

The Dead Valley (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram: Wow! I hadn't read this concise voyage into a very bad place, and it's a doozy;

Fishhead (1913) by Irvin S. Cobb: A weird bit of American regional horror that looks ahead to Lovecraft's own squirmy human/fishmen hybrids;

Lukundoo (1907) by Edward Lucas White: Africa Screams. Not so much scary as inevitable;

The Double Shadow (1933) by Clark Ashton Smith: one of Smith's many, many great dark fantasy stories isn't so much scary as it is disturbing in its description. Smith's wizards were always doing something arrogantly stupid.;

The Mark of the Beast (1890) by Rudyard Kipling: A showcase of Kipling's attention to description of foreign lands (in this case India) and the British men stationed there. As in a lot of his work, the natives are much more sympathetic than many of the British;

 Negotium Perambulans (1922) by E. F. Benson: The description of place here is top-notch, though horror is somewhat absent due to both a sort of inevitable schematicism and a refusal to make the threatened parties sympathetic in any way -- they're really just sorta dumb;

Mrs. Lunt (1926) by Hugh Walpole: OK, this is a really solid ghost story with what seems to be an extraordinarily interesting psychological study of homophobia and masculinity;

The Hog (1915/1947) by William Hope Hodgson: Hodgson's gonzo masterpiece of cosmic forces manifesting as a giant, deadly, spectral hog, with only ghost-finder Carnacki and his crazy-ass ghostbusting technology to oppose that force, at least at first;

The Great God Pan (1894) by Arthur Machen: One of the all-time ten or 20 great horror novellas;

Count Magnus (1904) by M. R. James: Almost all of James' ghost stories are terrific, and this is one of the four or five best, with its mysterious undead Count and its hapless travel-book writer.

The entire anthology: H.P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" covers so much ground that one could easily assemble a dozen different anthologies by following its lead. This is one such anthology, and Jones and Dave Carson (who also illustrates) have done a fine job of mixing much-anthologized necessities with several stories that I haven't seen before (and I've read a bloody awful lot of horror stories). Each story comes with a relevant quotation from Lovecraft's essay, which is also reprinted in its entirety at the beginning of the book. Highly recommended.

"A Wicked Voorish Dome in Deep Dendo"

Tales of Horror and the Supernatural Volume 1 by Arthur Machen, containing the following stories: "The Great God Pan", "The Inmost Light", "The Shining Pyramid", "The White People", and "The Great Return" (This edition 1948): Arthur Machen remains one of the ten or so greatest and most influential horror writers who ever lived, more than 100 years since his greatest works were published. Both scientifically inclined and mystical in nature, Machen combined these two traits in stories that expanded upon the philosophical and scientific speculations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

This collection, long out of print, has been supplanted by more complete assemblies of Machen's greatest work. Nonetheless, four of the stories are among the prolific Machen's finest horror stories, while the fifth, the later "The Great Return", shows Machen's later-career move into non-horrifying Catholic mysticism.

"The Great God Pan" and "The White People" are the two titanic stories here. The first concerns a scientific experiment meant to bridge the gap between the material and immaterial world. To do so, the scientist performs a brain operation on a woman. All kinds of Hell result, though it takes decades for the full horror of the experiment to be revealed.

Collapsing the spiritual realm into the physical realm creates a being of sinister potency, and the novella explores not only the nature of evil, but what might be called the evil of nature in certain circumstances: the amoral physical universe is not something to be contemplated without some form of philosophical or ideological buffer between humanity and The Massive. Madness and self-destruction await those who confront the creature born of the experiment: traditionally, those who see the Great God Pan, die.

"The White People", framed by the drawing-room conversation of two men on the nature of true evil, is a stylistic tour-de-force. The main narrative takes the form of a teen-aged girl's journal. Educated from the age of three by a nanny who appears to practice some fairly disturbing witchcraft, the girl moves further and further into the realms of Faery -- the eponymous White People.

The journal works its horrors in a number of subtle ways. The girl's impressions of the disturbing things going on around her are those of a naive innocent, thus leaving certain surmises about what's actually happening to the reader's imagination and deductive abilities. It's brilliantly and sensitively written -- the girl is one of the most heart-breaking narrators in horror fiction by the end of the story -- and the frame narrative, with her story recollected in tranquility, adds an extra layer of verisimilitude and philosophical depth.

Added to these things is a trope that writers such as H.P. Lovecraft would explore more fully -- the story repeatedly refers to rituals and concepts without ever explaining what they truly are. Terms such as 'Aklo' and 'voorish' and 'dhols' would show up in the work of other writers, as would the overall concept of fictional rituals and terms. The great T.E.D. Klein would go so far as to posit "The White People" as a dangerous supernatural text in its own right in his sublime 1984 novel The Ceremonies. There are the White Ceremonies, the Green Ceremonies, and the Scarlet Ceremonies...

Besides the joyful "The Great Return," in which the Holy Grail brings hope to the Welsh during World War One, we also get "The Shining Pyramid," with sinister doings in the countryside and sinister hidden races, and "The Inmost Light," which works as a companion piece to "The Great God Pan." Machen's potent combination of cosmic musings, philosophical enquiry, and mythologies both real and fictional would show the way for many writers to follow. H.P. Lovecraft and his 'disciples' would owe a lot to Machen, and Lovecraft himself praised Machen's work extravagantly in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." He's an indispensable part of the history of horror literature. Because sometimes you really don't want to know what a "wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo" is, yet you sort of do. Highly recommended.

Le Massif Attack

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison (1992): If you've read Harrison's novella "The Great God Pan" in the 1988 horror anthology Prime Evil, then you've read a chunk of this novel, though the characters' names differ. The novel also makes the title of the novel, an homage to the classic Arthur Machen story of the same name, abundantly clear in a way that the novella itself did not.

Machen's novella, first published in 1890, essentially involves a series of encounters with either Satan himself or with an amoral avatar of the natural world. Opinions differ. I tend to side more with the latter than the former, as Machen's story seems to me to foreground the possible metaphysical implications of the seemingly Godless natural universe being revealed to scientists in the 19th century. More than any other Machen work, "The Great God Pan" gestures forward towards H.P. Lovecraft's mathematically malign cosmos.

Harrison's novel deals with similar cosmic issues, though Harrison has always been one of the most mysterious and difficult to quantify of all writers of horror and dark fantasy. If that's even what he's writing. The movement to come up with a new way of categorizing certain stories that led to the concept of the 'New Weird' in the early 21st century oriented itself around Harrison and his body of work, at least initially. He is really a one-off: no one writes like him.

In The Course of the Heart, three British university students and a self-styled Gnostic magician conduct some sort of ritual back in the early 1970's. 20 years later, they're still dealing with the consequences of that ritual. Strange, seemingly supernatural events plague the three students. The magician himself has plunged further and further into the world of magic, though whether or not magic works remains a question throughout the novel.

Harrison can frustrate people in his short stories with the lack of answers to the questions his stories seem to pose. At the length of a short novel, that mystery grows accordingly. The Course of the Heart isn't exactly a horror novel -- it is, instead, a novel of Something Sublime interacting with the human world, and the multitudinous consequences of that interaction.

I can think of two recent novels -- Peter Straub's A Dark Matter and Joe Hill's Horns -- that seem to me to be much less successful attempts at what Harrison has succeeded in creating here: an existential mystery, a Sublime whodunnit, a Mysterium Tremendum. It might actually be a great novel. It might be an ultimately pompous and non-committal mess (though beautifully written in either case). I'm still digesting it. Or being digested by it. Highly recommended.

Houses on Borderlands

The House by Bentley Little (1999): A straightforward, meat-and-potatoes horror writer stylistically, Little tends to be innovative in terms of his subject matter and his approach to it. Magic and the supernatural can be jarringly weird in his novels, even as they also inspire more normative thrills and chills.

I don't know if Little has taken the conversation about what real absolute evil would look like in Arthur Machen's pivotal century-old story "The White People" as his model (real absolute evil would be a complete violation or inversion of accepted natural law: roses singing, or stones walking, for example), but the effect is sometimes the same. Though there's lot of more normal supernatural and natural horrors in The House as well.

We begin with four bizarre, seemingly supernatural and seemingly fatal occurences. Then we meet five seemingly disparate people from across the United States who turn out to have very similar memories of their weird and scary childhood homes, even though none of them lived in the same house. For the most part, they've repressed those childhood memories, and never gone home again. But now they have to go home again. Supernatural events have started to occur across America, and those childhood experiences somehow explain why.

Little is a dab hand at sympathetic characterization, even with characters who turn out to be increasingly unsympathetic as a novel progresses. It's that characterization that holds the novel together through its oddities and idiosyncrasies. The absolute weirdness of many of the supernatural events goes too far for scares at times (a rose in a block of cheese being the least scarifying of these things), a problem shared with another Little novel, The Return. But there are also many effectively horrifying bits, along with an adversary who really does make one squeamish whenever it appears.

Little's skill at plotting is also at work throughout -- the narrative rockets along, and while one may be underwhelmed by certain inventions, one won't stop reading. There's no poetry here, just muscular prose and invention that sometimes gets a bit out of control.

Little's tendency to two word titles can make it difficult to remember what novel is what -- this plain-style stuff can go too far, though calling a collection of short stories The Collection is pretty funny, given the number of The [Something] novels that preceded the publication of The Collection. Oh, well. Recommended.

The Darkest Part of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell (2002)

The Darkest Part of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell (2002): This novel, deliberately paced and filled to the bursting with unnerving, telling detail, is Campbell's most (Arthur) Machenesque long work, firmly in the tradition of that seminal horror writer's "The Great God Pan" and "The White People." There are cosmic, Lovecraftian elements as well -- Machen was one of the great influences on H.P. Lovecraft's conception of horror, after all.

30 years prior to the main events of the novel, biologist Lennox Price attempted to discover and contain whatever psychoactive agent had been mentally crippling generations of people unfortunate enough to encounter it in the small, ancient grove of Goodmanswood in the Severn Valley near Campbell's fictional city of Brichester.

Lennox apparently succeeded, but at the cost of his own sanity. Now, he and other similarly compromised men and women live in a mental hospital in Goodmanswood. His eldest daughter, wife, and grandson live nearby.

But a widening of the highway around the wood -- and the destruction of several of the trees therein -- seems to have awakened something. Or maybe it was never asleep. And while his younger daughter, wife, and grandson all seem to have been mentally influenced by the wood, it's eldest daughter Heather who will ultimately have to piece together what's been going on in the woods since before the Romans came. Birds fly over the wood, but they refuse to land anywhere in it, and wildlife has always been strangely absent.

This is Campbell's most densely descriptive novel, one with a fairly straightforward plot but an immensity of destabilizing descriptions and things almost but not quite seen. The wood itself was planted by the Romans to obscure or erase something that was there before, something the people we call the Druids either worshipped or feared. Or both.

Campbell's cheeky sense of humour occasionally shines through -- there's a particularly funny bit about religious book-burning -- but for the most part this is serious stuff. As Heather discovers early on, the Devil was often placated by being referred to as 'The Good Man.'

Readers who require subtext will certainly find some here (some of the effects of the thing or things in Goodmanswood closely resemble global warming, while others evoke the impact of non-indigenous plant and animal species on new environments). But the horror here is ultimately the Thing itself, and the price required to acknowledge it, much less stop it. Highly recommended.

NEONOMICON: written by Alan Moore with Antony Johnston; illustrated by Jacen Burroughs

Neonomicon: written by Alan Moore with Antony Johnston; illustrated by Jacen Burroughs (2003, 2010-2011): Winner of the first-ever Bram Stoker Award for a Graphic Novel (from the Horror Writers' Association), Neonomicon is Alan Moore's dark valentine to the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft. 'Neonomicon' is a play on the title of Lovecraft's famous, imaginary volume of terrible knowledge, the Necronomicon.

All the sexual horrors that were vaguely implied in many of Lovecraft's stories are here made manifest, often in graphically disturbing fashion, all of them delineated in a razor-sharp quasi-realistic mode by Jacen Burroughs. It's a spectacular, and spectacularly disturbing, graphic novel that rewards multiple re-readings.

Burroughs's art complements the story beautifully, giving us a Cthulhu Mythos story with both the suggestiveness and the painful exactness necessary to certain sections. The relatively realistic nature of Burroughs's art may be seen as the equivalent of the faux-documentary stretches of many of Lovecraft's finest works, in which an accumulation of 'real' detail from interviews and newspaper articles served the construction of that awful Cthulhuian world.

This collected volume actually contains both the miniseries named Neonomicon and the earlier, shorter set-up, The Courtyard. On a slightly different alternate Earth where the major cities are domed so as to cut down on pollution and the telephones contain fax machines (!), three FBI agents at two different times try to seek out the origins of a strange rise in mass killings by people who seem totally unrelated.

While there are cloachal horrors and sexual horrors awaiting, there are also gratifyingly disturbing moments of weirdness that evoke the sort of cosmic horror Lovecraft strove for throughout his work, a breaking-down of existential categories, a collapse in causality. Moore's humour also plays out, sometimes in perfect harmony with the horror (as one cop says about a disturbing bit of graffitti/art, "I hope that's a tree." It isn't.).

The personal problems of the characters tie directly into the ideas Moore explores in the course of this dark odyssey: The Courtyard's protagonist is a hard-core racist, and his story plays out in the Red Hook district of New York, setting for Lovecraft's early, racist fear-of-miscegenation story, "The Horror at Red Hook." Neonomicon's protagonist is a female FBI agent whose career and personal problems with institutional sexism and exploitation will ultimately play a terrible role in the story's resolution. Lovecraft's stories didn't have female protagonists, and generally didn't have female characters with speaking roles.

This isn't a volume for everyone: it's vicious and boundary-pushing. But it's also an astonishing addition to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Highly recommended.

Occultation and Other Stories by Laird Barron (2010)

Occultation and Other Stories by Laird Barron (2010) containing the following: "Introduction" by Michael Shea; "The Forest", "Occultation", "The Lagerstatte", "Mysterium Tremendum", "Catch Hell", "Strappado", "The Broadsword", "-30-", "Six Six Six.": Barron really is a relatively new wonder in the horror world, an American writer who's been greeted with the sort of astonished critical praise I last remember being attached to a young John Varley in science fiction in the 1970's.

Barron works in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, but he brings to the cosmic tradition of horror his own muscular, cloachal, sadomasochistic vision of evil. Many of his stories take place on an Earth much like ours, only behind the walls lurk the horrifying emissaries and representatives of the Children of Old Leech.

There's much that's Cthulhian about Old Leech, a world-ravaging god-monster whose followers have a pronounced fondness for torturing and eating children. But many of Barron's stories center around the horror of metamorphosis -- the Children want some humans to become them and share in their terrible ecstasies. There aren't many heroes in Barron's stories, but there are a lot of victims, and a lot of normal people doing the best they can when faced with evil of sublime and abyssal gravity.

Barron also makes some truly bizarre forays into more traditional supernatural tropes here, but they're as distinctive as the tales set in the world of Old Leech. He's got the fearlessness and the distinctiveness of a truly great writer, and his horrors aren't quite like anything I've read before. And trust me, I've read a lot of horror. Highly recommended.

Where the Summer Ends: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner Volume 1

Where the Summer Ends: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner Volume 1 edited by Stephen Jones (2012): Centipede Press has done readers of horror and dark fantasy a tremendous service with the release of the two-volume collection of the late Karl Edward Wagner's best horror fiction. This is by far the strongest of the two volumes, collecting Wagner's longer short works, including his finest stories -- "Sticks", "In the Pines", "Where the Summer Ends", and "Beyond All Measure."

Wagner started his writing life as a dynamo, both in horror and in heroic fantasy, much of the latter featuring his time-jaunting anti-hero Kane. He also worked on his own short-lived specialty press (Carcosa), wrote a licensed Conan novel (The Road of Kings), and took over editorship of DAW Books' excellent Year's Best Horror series in the early 1980's, a job he'd hold until his death in 1994.

Along the way, something happened. It involved the consumption of astounding amounts of alcohol and the growth of an intermittent writer's block that would persist from the late 1970's until his death. Trained as a psychiatrist, Wagner must have known something was going on. But what? We'll never entirely know, and the prose pieces in these two volumes by Wagner's friends suggest that he was ultimately a mystery to them as well.

But we do have the stories, and more than ten years of the DAW anthologies. At his best, Wagner conjured up an extremely specific and detailed sense of place populated with psychologically complex characters and character interactions. While I tend to associate his best work with the American Southeast, "Sticks" actually takes place in and around the Hudson River Valley. The first half of that award-winning novelette represents Wagner's high point, a pitch-perfect evocation of horror centered around a hiker's discovery of odd-looking arrangements of sticks. If the second half moves into too-literal Lovecraftiana -- well, it's still a competent finish to a brilliant beginning.

"Beyond All Measure" gives the reader one of the more fascinating spins on vampires I can recall, while ".220 Swift" plunges into the backwoods of the American Southeast in search of creatures and situations that recall some of the tales of Arthur Machen. "In the Pines" is a harrowing tale of ghostly obsession, maybe Wagner's most sustained work, and one fit to stand beside similarly themed stories that include "The Beckoning Fair One" and "How Love Came to Professor Guildea."

I'm not as stuck on the two dream-odyssey stories included here -- Wagner's greatest strengths didn't lie in the surreal or the purposefully vague -- and one later novelette suggests a massive deterioration in skill. But the riches here, handsomely assembled and with generous accompanying prose pieces and illustrations, are worth your time. Highly 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.

Adaptations and Mutations

Fright Night: written by Marti Noxon, based on the 1985 movie written by Tom Holland; directed by Craig Gillespie; starring Anton Yelchin (Charlie Brewster), Colin Farrell (Jerry), Toni Collette (Jane Brewster), David Tennant (Peter Vincent), Imogen Poots (Amy) and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Ed) (2011): Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran Marti Noxon manages to rewrite Fright Night so as to make it a lot better than its original. Only Roddy McDowall's delightful horror host Peter Vincent is sorely missed here, though former Doctor Who David Tennant does the best he can with a somewhat unfocused role as a Criss Angel-like Vegas magician who's also an occult collector a la Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page.

Frankly, the Vincent role would be funnier (and truer to the original) if we had someone like Steve Coogan playing Vincent as an aging, occult-obsessed rock star suddenly faced with the real thing. Oh, well. Tennant does have a terrific smoking scene. But I'd still like to see an old rock star with a fetish for Aleister Crowley and The Lord of the Rings taking on the hounds of Hell. Wouldn't everybody?

The bare bones of the story remain the same as in the original: geeky Charlie Brewster comes to believe a vampire has moved in next door to him. Almost no one believes him, but he's right. Vampiric shenanigans ensue.

The movie cleverly moves the action to Las Vegas, where despite the anti-vampiric sun, there's lots of good eating in a town with a lot of itinerants and a large population of people who are already nocturnal due to their night jobs at the casinos and hotels. There's real wit in our first look at Charlie's subdivision, which seems to sit in the middle of an empty desert.

Yelchin and the other actors do nice work here, though the character of 'Evil' Ed gets shoved off-stage rapidly so as to focus more on Charlie's ass-kicking girlfriend Amy, played by hellacute Brit Imogen Poots (!). The always reliable Toni Collette, who now seems to be the go-to actress for American single moms, also gets to be a bit more pro-active on the vampire-fighting front.

Colin Farrell plays the vampire (incongruously named Jerry) as an Alpha Male thug, and it works nicely as a counterpoint to all those more refined vampires out there. Director David Gillespie stages some nifty setpieces, most notably a funny/scary car chase in which a realtor's sign makes a surprisingly welcome appearance. All in all, an enjoyable romp. Recommended.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark: written by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins, based on the 1973 movie of the same name written by Nigel McKeand; directed by Troy Nixey; starring Bailee Madison (Sally), Katie Holmes (Kim) and Guy Pearce (Alex) (2011): As with Pan's Labyrinth, this film can either be viewed as a fairy story told not to but by a child, or it can be viewed as a story with annoying plot holes and lapses in character motivation.

I'd go with the first choice, as the tone, the atmosphere and even the performances would support such a view even if one didn't know that Guillermo del Toro had something to do with this.

Based on a 1973 TV movie that got del Toro interested in horror in the first place. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark features plucky, misunderstood 10-year-old Sally, a girl suffering through the divorce of her parents and, soon, persecution by tiny monsters living beneath the basement of the old New England house her father is renovating for profit.

Oh, it's Rhode Island -- that an H.P. Lovecraft allusion whether one wants it or not. Explicitly referenced in the film is Welsh fantasist Arthur Machen, whose stories often featured the monstrous real creatures behind the myths and legends (Machen's "The White People" and "The Shining Pyramid" are the two stories most relevant to this one). A doomed 19th-century painter and naturalist gets named (Ralph Waldo?) Emerson (Algernon?) Blackwood. Hoo ha.

The father is distant and somewhat thick (remember the fairy tale elements here or you'll obsess over stupid parents a bit too much), his new girlfriend sympathetic to Sally and, ultimately, an ally. The little, talkative monsters are a bit of a letdown -- they're basically Gollum crossed with a rat -- but occasionally scary, though if someone had the sense to buy a tennis racket, they'd be a lot less dangerous. Troy Nixey summons a lot of atmosphere and a real sense of place; the opening titles (directed, I assume, by someone other than Nixey) are stunning. Recommended.