The fourth oversized paperback issue of the late, much-lamented Taboo contains a wealth of great horror and weird comics material. The high point is a reprint of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius's 1978 collaboration "The Eyes of the Cat," a lengthy weird horror tale made up entirely of gorgeous and occasionally disturbing full-page panels by Moebius. Combined with interviews with the two, it makes for quite a treat. Spain Rodriquez's odd 'tie-in' to the Jodorowsky film El Topo completes this part of the package.
The rest of the anthology is excellent as well, from the third serialized chapter of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's epic graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, From Hell, to a horrifying bit of insect craziness from underground comix mainstay S. Clay Wilson. Elaine Lee writes a fascinating new-wave fairy tale illustrated by Charles Vess in his old-school, Hal Foster by way of N.C. Wyeth style. Most of the short pieces are genuinely horrific, and it's interesting to see relatively early, non-Sandman Neil Gaiman as illustrated by the fine, overlooked Michael Zulli, and very early Phil Hester writing and drawing. Taboo was very much cutting-edge horror for its time, and rewards reading now if one can find issues of it. Highly recommended.
The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron (Collected 2007) containing the following stories: Old Virginia (2003); Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001); Procession of the Black Sloth (2007); Bulldozer (2004); Proboscis (2005); Hallucigenia (2006); Parallax (2005); The Royal Zoo is Closed (2006); and The Imago Sequence (2005): Barron's fictional cosmos, in which most and possibly all of these early stories take place, exudes dread. Barron himself is a marvelous writer who seemed to arrive fully formed in 2000, as good or better than all of his contemporaries, and then proceeded to get better over the following decade.
As with H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Barron's fictional cosmos deploys many of the trappings of supernatural fiction in service to what is really science-fictional horror. What seems to be supernatural is really the result of beings and sciences too far beyond humanity to be fully fathomed by Barron's protagonists. None of the seemingly supernatural beings we encounter is remotely benign.
Humanity isn't so much cattle to many of these beings, per Charles Fort's classic construction, as it is game. Modern, 21st-century game animals, hopelessly doomed by the firepower of the modern hunter, still striving to escape while terrible things laugh at their impotency in the face of torture, death, dismemberment, or worst of all, transformation at the hands and tentacles and proboscises of their tormenters.
What helps set Barron apart from the majority of those who have followed in Lovecraft's squamous, gambrel, rugose footsteps is the nature of many of his protagonists. Most tend to be the hardest of hard-cases: professional killers, enforcers, former soldiers, Pinkerton men. When they come face to face with the ravenous, cloachal, aggressively sadistic god-monsters that populate the dark place of the Earth, they find themselves punching way, way above their weight class. But by God, many of them keep punching. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Barron's keen eye for both psychological and physical description is a joy to behold, regardless of the awfulness of what it is he's beholding. Even the worst protagonists seem benign compared to what they're facing.
There's a real sense of pathos in "Hallucigenia," to cite one example, in which a millionaire real-estate developer whose business practices are mostly loathsome but legal -- he specializes in displacing the poor in places such as Viet Nam so as to build factories -- comes up against...something. Something in an abandoned barn in the Pacific Northwest, where many of Barron's stories are set. Is he being punished? Well, no, I don't think so: Barron's universe, like Hemingway's, doesn't discriminate morally in terms of who it kills. Or eats. Or tortures. Or transforms.
There are awful wonders here, and marvelous images, and a measured approach to the accumulation of psychological detail. There are oddities I can't recall reading in any other horror writers. And there's a tremendous amount of re-readability, both to catch all the things you missed the first time, and to make the connections among the stories collected here and elsewhere. The stories can all stand alone, but the various intersections of characters, names, and locations often add extra levels of dread and delight. Highly recommended.
Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell (1939; revised 1948): Probably the first science-fiction novel to be based on Charles Fort's pseudo-scientific speculations that human beings are the property of something alien, and Sinister Barrier is not shy about its influences -- there are pages of direct quotes from Fort's work, excerpts which consist mainly of quotes from various newspapers and what-have-you about unexplained phenomena. Specifically, Russell uses Fortean clips about flying energy balls (!!!) and mysterious disappearances to concoct a tale of flying energy balls that occasionally make people disappear.
Well, OK, there's more to the novel than that. And it's set in the then-far-flung future of 2015, when humanity has developed gyrocars and video-telephones but not television. Hunh?
Anyway, leading scientists start dropping dead from either heart attacks or suicide. A hyper-intelligent government investigator tries to find out why. They were experimenting with a drug combination (which included mescaline and methylene blue!). It caused the human eye to be able to see more of the visual spectrum. And what they saw killed them!
Enjoyable, fast-paced, and paranoid fun in its first half, the novel drags a bit when humanity launches its attack on the things that it couldn't previously see. Invisible balls of energy have been feeding on humanity's emotions for millennia. There's certainly more than a whiff of such later paranoid classics as They Live here, though both horror and social commentary are soon replaced by the mechanics of the science-fiction thriller. And several pages of quotes from Charles Fort. In any case, a lot of fun, and something Hollywood should look into adapting. It would make a great movie. Recommended.
