The Beetle (1897) by Richard Marsh

The Beetle (1897) by Richard Marsh; this 2004 Broadview Press edition edited by Julian Wolfreys: In 1897, Richard Marsh's The Beetle outsold that far-better-remembered horror classic, Bram Stoker's Dracula. It was a short-term victory. Nonetheless, The Beetle is a fascinating slice of fin de siècle Victorianism with an unusual narrative told by four different first-person narrators.

Julian Wolfreys' edition provides a lot of worthy commentary and context for the novel, especially in relation to the anxieties and obsessions of late-Imperial Britain. One should read his lengthy introduction after reading the novel, however -- it's one long Spoiler.

In sequence, the novel tells the story of The Beetle in the voices of a hapless, homeless, unemployed clerk; a gentleman scientist; a headstrong noblewoman engaged to a bedeviled Member of Parliament; and the Confidential Agent (what we would now call a Private Detective) hired to help sort out the Affair of the Beetle.

The eponymous Beetle is the star of the show, a shape-shifting, gender-bending emissary from demon-haunted Egypt -- as Wolfreys notes, Britain's travails in Egypt were a major source of Imperial agita in the latter part of the 19th century. Like Dracula himself, the Beetle is also a threatening Cultural Other, inscribed with a myriad of the fears of the period. 

Like X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Beetle ends with a train chase. At least it makes period sense here. Marsh's novel is a bit murkier in its climax than Dracula, but I'll leave that for you to discover. The narrative of the poverty-stricken clerk is certainly the most emotionally affecting of the four narrative streams. Marsh also does a fine job of writing a self-aware, independent woman's POV in the third stream. 

The second stream is enjoyably wonky -- Marsh's scientist, a friend of the female narrator since childhood, is a pompous goof who's working on weapons of mass destruction (specifically poison gas) for the British Army. All of this is treated in a strangely off-hand fashion, and I'll go just a bit spoilery to note that none of the weapons research pays off in the climax of things. It's just there.

Our narrating Confidential Agent brings things to a somewhat orderly close -- mysteries remain, but like Van Helsing in Dracula, the Agent marshals the forces of Order against the invasive Other. The Beetle doesn't have the pulpy, bloody heft of Dracula, but it does have its own charms, racist and bigoted though those charms may be when it comes to any and all non-WASP characters in the novel. 

Wolfreys finishes this edition with excerpts from a number of end-of-century source texts to situate the novel further in its context. In all, this edition and the novel, recommended.

Hollywood Undead

They Thirst by Robert McCammon (1981; this edition 1988): McCammon may have been the most Kingian (Kingesque?) horror novelist of the late 1970's and early 1980's, probably because of sensibilities shared with Stephen King and not out of simple imitation. He was good at creating sympathetic characters and then running them through the grinder, and most of his 1970's and 1980's output seems to echo one Stephen King novel or another, and sometimes two or three at the same time. They Thirst seems to have been bounced off both Salem's Lot and The Stand as well as Dracula. Certainly the Vampire King -- Conrad Vulkan, a Hungarian prince who 'died' in the 14th century -- recalls Bram Stoker's Dracula more than he does any of King's vampires. But this vampire has specific, on-stage help from Satan, or at least an adequate stand-in, as a powerful supernatural being referred to as the Headmaster (a name that doesn't really work in the 'Inspires Dread' category) is backing the Vampire King's play for earthly dominion with some heavy magical mojo.

McCammon's cleverest idea here lies in his choice of location for the Vampire King's D-Day: Los Angeles. McCammon's vampires can't tolerate sunlight, but Los Angeles appeals to the Vampire King because he/it, having been 'turned' at the age of 17, is forever obsessed with youthfulness. Los Angeles, home to both gleaming, artificial youth and a sordid, violent underbelly, is a perfect match for this vampire. No old people need apply for admission to this army of vampires. I'd guess no fat chicks either.

The vampires herein exist within a supernatural framework: they are most definitely not viral in origin. Set against the vampires are a ragtag but plucky mismatched group of heroes (is there any other kind of group in popular culture?) who must work together to save the planet from becoming a scrumptious, bloodsoaked buffet: a terminally ill Roman Catholic priest; an 11-year-old boy who loves monster movies; a successful but troubled young comedian; a middle-aged cop who escaped from vampires in his childhood home in Hungary; a mystical young woman; and a handful of other supporting characters. The last third of the book sails straight into the epic, recalling King's The Stand in its elevation of the stakes of the battle. The climax is apocalyptic: McCammon doesn't back down.

I can see why McCammon withdrew this, his fourth novel, from publication for nearly 20 years, citing the idea that his early novels, while good, marked a writer who was still learning. There's much that's derivative in They Thirst, and a bit that's silly, but McCammon's strength at propulsive plotting and at sympathetically drawn characters makes this well worth seeking out. Recommended.

Docudramamine

Paranormal Activity 3, written by Christopher B. Landon, based on characters and situations created by Oren Peli, starring Chloe Csengery (Katie), Jessica Tyler Brown (Kristi), Lauren Bittner (Julie), and Dustin Ingram (Randy Rosen) (2011): The 'documentary/found footage' subgenre of horror films, so popular right now, harks back to the 19th-century beginnings of what we now recognize as the horror story. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was told in the form of letters and diary entries; Bram Stoker's Dracula added fake newspaper clippings to that mix; Edgar Allan Poe played with fiction and fact within stories that were sometimes published as 'fact.'

H.P. Lovecraft moved the documentary style in a more holistic fictional direction, having his narrators tell ostensibly true tales about fictional events and mythologies and framing everything inside the conceit that the fiction was the real truth about the universe, and recognized fact the fiction.

I have a great fondness for these attempts at documentary horror -- at their best, they're much better than almost every other filmed attempt at horror in the last twenty or thirty years, in part because they move so resolutely away from the grapohic violence of the slasher films that have dominated the horror film genre since the late 1970's. Suggestion and subtlety are what work best in these movies, and Paranormal Activity 3 comes up with some lovely moments of 'found' horror.

The fictional backstory of the three Paranormal films situates the entire narrative within the subtext of long-term child sexual, physical and emotional abuse, abuse that spans generations and is part of the horror. It's a classic example of Stephen King's 'sub-text school' of horror, in which the supernatural stands in for something too mundanely awful to be depicted on film.

Thankfully, one can also say 'pooh!' to sub-text and simply enjoy the movies as a depiction of the pervasive and perhaps unkillable influence of supernatural evil. That the threatened protagonists are spiritually and intellectually unsuited to a confrontation with elemental and generational evil is part of the point of the movies, I think -- no one is coming to save them because they're too dumb, or too conditioned to an unintellectual passivity, to make any real effort to save themselves. They're reactive, not pro-active.

I won't bother with the plot of the movie, or even the characterization. It all makes more sense if you've seen the first two films, though if you haven't you may be a lot more shocked at some of the plot developments. There is clever, killer use of a camera mounted on a rotating fan within the story world, with menace building as we move at a set pace back and forth from foyer to dining room and back again, and things start to appear that shouldn't be there.

There's also one of the smarter, more realistic character reactions to a haunting that I've seen in some time -- a secondary character seems to have seen Eddie Murphy's hilarious bit about The Amityville Horror and reacts accordingly when threatening weirdness occurs. Highly recommended.

Vampire Juice

Dracula (World's Classics edition), written by Bram Stoker, edited and introduced by A.N. Wilson (1897; this edition 1983): Tom Wolfe told us that great pilots have "the Right Stuff." Great pitchers have that mysterious "stuff" that very good pitchers never have. Or so we've come to believe. And some writers have "stuff" too, though for the sake of variety, I'm going to call it "juice." Juice has absolutely nothing to do with technical proficiency -- if art and literature came into existence solely through the mastery of formal and techical matters, then university professors would be the greatest writers and artists of them all. They're not, and it doesn't.

Bram Stoker, late middle-aged when he came to write Dracula, had juice for this novel and very little else. But what a crazy novel! Out of previous vampire stories, a smattering of mostly wrong Eastern European history and myth, and his own personal interest in (mostly paid for) sex, Stoker formed one of the most influential novels of all time. It isn't even a very good novel -- but boy does it have juice! The story of British estate lawyer Jonathan Harker's encounter with Dracula still resonates today because it's great, juicy, tranformative pulp.

Formally speaking, Dracula is almost archaic for its own time, much less ours. It follows the epistolary format of many early English novels, telling its story through letters and journal entries and the occasional newspaper clipping. This is all done ostensibly to add verisimilitude to the proceedings, and a lot of great horror from Frankenstein to Paranormal Activity has adopted a faux-documentarian format as part of an attempt to suspend disbelief.

There had been vampire novels and stories in English before, and Stoker lifts elements from many of them. His genius lay in bringing a foreign vampire to England, and in wedding the near-pornographic to both violence and a melodramatic depiction of morality. One attempted vampiric seduction plays like a thinly veiled blowjob scene (as Stephen King and hundreds of other critics have noted); another seems to parody Catholic Communion. Virginal British womanhood appears to be Dracula's target once he reaches England, the sexual threat of the Other made manifest and deeply kinky. And in a parody of the marriage bed, one male character has to stake his transformed beloved, with copious gushings of fluid concluded by a chaste kiss. Meanwhile, Professor Van Helsing's whale-oil candle drips "sperm" all over a female vampire's tomb. Great GooglyMoogly!

And there are also almost endless numbers of scenes in which men and women weep in despair, or clutch hands and swear allegiance before God -- sentimental Victorian melodrama at its wooziest, not helped in the slightest by the modular interchangeability of the four main male characters.

Moments occur which stretch and even break credibility. The insect-eating madman Renfield sets a modern-day record for most escapes from a mental institution in one novel. Dracula, in one of the great bait-and-switches in literary history, goes almost entirely offstage after the first 60 pages, his presence made known almost entirely by the effect he has on others. Babies are fed to vampires, and grieving mothers to wolves. Heads are chopped off, the mouths stuffed with garlic. Dracula does his own dishes and searches for his own money and makes Jonathan Harker's meals. He really seems like a helluva guy. Too bad he stinks like a rotting corpse.

And the whole thing ends with a lengthy, continent-wide chase scene by ship, boat, rail and horse. It's all completely ridiculous, and ridiculously entertaining. Even the Dutch Professor Van Helsing's garbled English becomes almost hypnotic in its lack of resemblance to any English ever spoken or written by anyone in the history of the English language. But Stoker keeps throwing Van Helsing's comments in there, sometimes with the caveat that even the other characters have trouble understanding him. It's a decision born of mad confidence.

There are several truly riveting and horrifying sequences in the novel -- Harker's initial ride to Castle Dracula and his subsequent adventures there; the diary entries of the Captain of the doomed Demeter; and the references to the "bloofer lady" who preys on children being three of them. Elements of the adventure novel, the thriller, the romance, the Gothic...all get synthesized by Stoker's lurid, imitative imagination, which remains, 115 years later, a greater imagination than that of most of his best-selling vampire-loving, novel-writing brethren and sistren. Highly recommended.