The Revelation (1989) by Bentley Little

The Revelation (1989) by Bentley Little: "The horror poet laureate!" a blurb from Stephen King tells us on the cover of every Bentley Little. Was King joking? Because poetry is Little's self-admitted non-starter of a skill. 

Little even goes on at length in the introduction to one of his collections about his dislike of poetry. And when your novel contains a great line like "the putrid stench of violence" -- well, yeah, poetry is not a strong suit. Though a reference in The Revelation to "air-borne winds" cracked me up more.

Little's first novel was The Revelation. It won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel in 1989. The Stokers can be pretty hit-and-miss. Or 1989 could have been a bad year for first-time writers. Though if I looked at the Stoker list, I'm pretty sure I'd find worse novels. Oh, look, the first First Novel award went to Lisa Cantrell's The Manse. OK, The Revelation is better than The Manse.

That's not to say that The Revelation isn't entertaining. Little is part of a sub-group of horror writers of the late 1980's that includes Richard Laymon and Douglas Clegg who combined the graphic horror and sexual violence of splatterpunk with Stephen King's normative settings and characters. The result isn't something I find all that appealing, as it often seemed to involve an awful lot of rapey monsters with barbed penises strolling through suburban America.

Little works best when he's just in there, shovelling like a madman. That doesn't make him scary, but it can make the gross-out parts compelling, though often in a 'WTF?' sort of way. A key component of The Revelation seems to have been inspired by the 'Dead Baby' jokes of the late 1970's. I kid you not. 

The characters here are pretty flat. The protagonist is an aspiring writer working for a Pepsi distributor (if nothing else, The Revelation probably sets the record for most uses of the word 'Pepsi' in a horror novel not written by Pepsico). There's a good sheriff, a mysterious travelling preacher, a telepathic priest with doubtful faith, a lovely wife, a telepathic boy with visions, and a lot of rural types who are there to get chewed up and spit out.

Everything builds to a climax that really seems like an advertisement for a really insane Pro-Life group. Actually, the whole novel seems like an advertisement for a really insane Pro-Life group. Why? Well, let's just say that dead babies and aborted fetuses fill the ranks of Satan's army! And what better tool to fight an evil fetus with than... a pitchfork! Oh, what a novel. So terrible and crazy I will lightly recommend it.

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.

Karl Malone's Crypt of Terror

The Mailman by Bentley Little (1991): Like several Golden-Age science-fiction writers, Bentley Little's style is plain while his ideas and plots are baroque and sometimes nearly absurd. This makes him the most interesting of contemporary American 'plain-style' horror writers. I honestly never know what paths his novels will take to their conclusions. Or what those conclusions will be.

The Mailman is about as 'normal' a horror novel as Little is going to write. A stranger comes to town and Bad Things Happen. That's the set-up for a lot of horror over the years. Hell, that's the last two-thirds of Bram Stoker's Dracula!

In the course of the novel, however, Little does a couple of things differently: he evades any and all explanations for why a seemingly supernatural, malevolent mailman is threatening a small Arizona town, and he has the townspeople realize very early on that something is really, really amiss. The novel's about (increasingly inexplicable) apathy in the face of mounting evidence, not the more standard 'wait for the evidence' plot. Why don't people act in light of overwhelming evidence? Good question.

The characters, especially the father, mother, and 11-year-old son whom the Mailman seems especially obsessed with, are keenly and sympathetically drawn. Little's prose is about as basic as prose can be, and he's got the unfortunate tic of using actor-shorthand to describe people ("He looked like Broderick Crawford"). Nonetheless, a more-than-competent horror novel, and one with a fascinatingly odd choice of villain (even moreso now than in 1991 when The Mailman came out, obviously). 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.

When Homeowners Attack

The Association by Bentley Little (2001): There's a great idea here, handled perhaps too much in the mode of occasionally clumsy social satire rather than straightforward horror. Barry, a horror writer, and his accountant wife Maureen move into what seems to be an idyllic gated community, complete with a Community Association, in Utah. But the rules for residents get stricter and stricter. People start dying mysteriously. And how does the Association always know when someone's violated its phonebook of rules?

One of the points of the novel is that 'groupthink' can cause even very good people to ignore the problems around them, to become passive. The gated community causes both Barry and Maureen to make bad decisions, and even bad indecisions, but this passivity in the face of an escalating threat becomes tiring after a couple of hundred pages. One one finds out that one's community association is mutilating and even killing troublesome residents, how long is one still going to fret about whether or not the association is going to play fair with oneself, or obey its own rules?

As social satire or even simply commentary on how good people can let bad things happen, the novel works, but the passivity and gormlessness of Barry and Maureen becomes wearisome as the danger to them and their friends escalates into all-out bloodshed, bloodshed they put up with because they're worried about how running away from their house (and their mortgage) would affect their credit rating. See what I mean about social satire?

Little's really in the territory of the late, great Thomas Disch and his four satiric horror novels of the 1980's and 1990's here, but the sharpness of Disch's wit and the efficient poeticism of Disch's prose allowed him to be scathingly funny and scary simultaneously. Little isn't a nuanced enough writer to pull off such a dual feat successfully.

The ending, when it comes, comes with a rush, and Little does a nice job of logicking out just how Barry can win against the sinister Board of the Association, though here, as in The Return, Little seems to be a little too enamoured of electricity as the great ward against evil. Tightened up and focused on either horror or more pointed social observation, this book could be terrific -- as is, the dragginess of the middle section caused me to skip entire pages of placeholder dialogue and description, which is what I call pages where we find out what everyone's eating and how they feel about it. Recommended with reservations.

Return of the Monster with the Orange Afro

The Return by Bentley Little (2002): So far as I can tell, this is the prolific Little's worst-reviewed novel. I thought it was great, though the gonzo, cuckoobanana stuff that I like probably turned a lot of people off. There haven't been a lot of supernatural beings in the history of literature who spend a fair amount of time turning people into porcelain-statue versions of themselves, or a lot of horror novels in which people get attacked by animated Anasazi mortar-and-pestles, fetishes, shards of pottery and assorted knicknacks.

Actually, none that I can think of. This is the only mainstream horror novel I've ever read which could realistically be described in a cover blurb as "Stephen King meets The Flaming Carrot."

Western writer Zane Grey (yes, the real Zane Grey) shows up early to be terrified by some crazy-ass something-or-other in Arizona back in the early 20th century. Then we jump to the present. Various Southwest-Native-American artifacts are starting to come to life across the Southwest. A mysterious monster kills a Boy Scout counselor. Dogs and cats are living together. Scary, non-human skeletons with still-growing orange afros have been excavated or found in various places. Denver is burning. Boulder is burning. Entire towns vanish from the map, never to return.

What eliminated the Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs, Anasazi, Olmecs and every other civilization ever, including perhaps the Hittites and Saxons? A race of superbeings with orange afros. And they are back with a vengeance!

Crazy shit happens. A plucky group of plucky people assemble to save humanity from these civilization-destroying creatures. Things get so rushed at the end that I'm going to assume editorial interference occurred. I'm not sure really how good this novel is, but it kept me reading quickly, and it was never boring. Recommended.