The Pet (1986) by Charles L. Grant

The Pet (1986) by Charles L. Grant: The late Charles L. Grant was a much-published anthologist, novelist, and short-story writer from the 1970's through the 1990's. He championed "quiet horror," a choice that set him vocally at odds with the rise of splatterpunk in the 1980's. He's probably most important now as an anthologist, especially as the editor of the long-running Shadows series of original horror anthologies.

The horror boom of the 1970's and 1980's also meant that Grant published a lot of novels. More than I was aware of, frankly. While I was a major consumer of those anthologies back in the day and read a couple of his short-story collections, I hadn't read a Grant novel until I recently finished The Pet.

I'm of two minds about The Pet, though these minds are not mutually exclusive. Wait, does that make three minds? So confusing.

Anyway, The Pet may be a satire of slasher movies and Stephen King novels of the 1970's and 1980's.

Or The Pet may be an attempt to replicate the success of slasher movies and Stephen King novels of the 1970's and 1980's by putting their elements into a blender and pressing the 'On' button.

Or it may be both. It's certainly not of a piece with those Grant short stories and novellas I've read.

OK, that's really three, isn't it?

So we have a bullied, withdrawn protagonist of high-school age. That's Donald 'Duck' Boyd. His parents are both over-controlling and under-caring. He has a dead younger brother. His Mom is sleeping with a high-school teacher who hates Don and keeps marking him unfairly. His Dad is the principal of the school Don attends. This gets Don bullied even more, especially because Don's father doesn't believe him when bullies start framing him for various misdemeanors. His parents both preferred the dead brother. Three years after the death, his Mom still occasionally calls Don by the dead brother's name.

Whew! That's about 35 King stories and novels right there!

A mean chemistry teacher also singles Don out for unwanted persecution. We can tell this chemistry teacher is bad because he's a confirmed bachelor who watches porn movies in his basement. 

IN HIS BASEMENT! PORN! 

Sorry.

A super-hot, 17-year-old cheerleader seems to be making advances on Don. Ha ha, she's also making advances on his Dad! Yes, a teen-aged girl who is sexually aggressive and makes advances on her teachers. Is this Grant's salute to the Police song "Don't Stand So Close To Me"? Or is it just a really unpleasant part of the novel that has not aged well?

So so unpleasant.

Then a serial killer dubbed The Howler shows up in Don's small town of Ashford, New Jersey. The Howler has killed and partially eaten several teenagers in New Jersey and New York. 

You might think this would cause the formation of some sort of police task force or even an FBI presence. 

You would be wrong! 

Dealing with The Howler in Don's town devolves down to that town's small police force of what seems like three idiots, which does a whole lot of nothing. Boy, is this part of the novel ridiculously unbelievable! And it gets worse!

The town's two high schools are remarkably modest in their response to two students being murdered and eaten in a one-month period. And the police. Really, everyone. Don survives an attack from The Howler and his parents have him back in school within 36 hours. Seriously, Grant is just phoning in this shit.

So, as the back-cover blurb tells us, Don's encounter with The Howler unleashes a supernatural monster that makes The Howler look like a fart in an elevator. And that monster has a connection to Don, targeting those who've wronged Don in some way. It's sort of Carrie by way of Christine, except it's a giant super-horse sprung full-grown from one of the animal posters on Don's bedroom wall.

Oh, yeah. Don loves animals and wants to be a vet. His parents think being a vet is a road to financial ruin, which shows how stupid they are. This is definitely the only novel I've ever read in which parents resist the idea of their son becoming a veterinarian for financial reasons. I mean seriously, parents, you're school teachers. In the United States of America. Your salaries are not that big!

If Grant is trying to emulate King in the next 200 pages or so, he's hamstrung by his "quiet horror" approach insofar as the novel pulls away from the attacks of the monster at the moment of attack, returning to show the aftermath without too much explicit description. Grant also can't bring himself to give the novel a big climax (remember Carrie's death march through school and town?) or even a physical confrontation between Don and the super-horse (remember the garage battle in Christine?). 

At one point, Don hears the screams in the town football stadium and believes the monster has attacked the football game. If you think, as I did, "Bring it on!" at this point, forget it. The monster is not there.

Part of the problem with the novel is that Don is an odd but sympathetic figure, with so many problems heaped upon his head by Grant, with Don's tormentors (including his parents) consistently shown to be selfish, brutish, thoughtless assholes. 

Another problem lies in peculiar absences. The dead brother is the worst of these: our sum total of knowledge about why Don's parents prefer the dead son to the live one is that the dead one was obedient. OK! A flashback showing rather than telling about the brother never materializes. Even the trauma that would come with a dead son and brother is muted, barely considered by parents or Don. 

Once the horse starts killing people -- well, who cares, really? Grant's small town is such an abysmal place that it deserves to get leveled. Other than Don and Don's two best friends, Tracey and Jeff, there are no sympathetic characters. Well, OK, there's an old guy and his daschund. But even Jeff is a cipher, there only to form a potential romantic triangle with Tracey and Don, who also has a crush on Tracey. 

Tracey is drawn somewhat sympathetically until the last ten pages or so, when she does something that is completely unbelievable given what she's learned about Don and the supernatural in the previous hundred pages. Unless she's suicidal.

At the end (which isn't even really an end but more of a pause), I"m left again wondering if this was a failed attempt by Grant to write a Stephen King novel, or a failed attempt at parody. Or both. Its flaws, large and legion in number, are fascinating enough to make it worth reading. And frustratingly good moments of tension and character-building keep floating to the surface before being submerged again in the slurry. Just don't expect to feel satisfied at the end. Lightly recommended.

Weird Detective Stories

Solomon Kane: based on the character created by Robert E. Howard and scripted by Michael J. Bassett; directed by Michael J. Bassett; starring James Purefoy (Solomon Kane), Max von Sydow (Josiah Kane), Rachel Hurd-Wood (Meredith), Pete Postlewaite (William), Alice Krige (Katherine), and Jason Flemyng (Malachi) (2009): A second time through, and I again concluded it's a damn shame Solomon Kane didn't get at least a couple of sequels. Writer-director Michael J. Bassett plays a bit fast and loose with Robert E. Howard's quasi-Puritan demon-hunter to give him an origin story with a redemptive arc, but as a whole the movie is fairly true to the character. 

For a fairly low-budget fantasy film, Solomon Kane looks great, is jam-packed with good actors who seem to be invested in their roles, and has a suitably haunted James Purefoy as Kane. In terms of both sword-and-sorcery movies and Robert E. Howard adaptations, I might actually rank this over the original Conan the Barbarian, if only because its lack of pomposity hews much closer to Howard's writing than John Milius's bellicose sturm-und-drang. Highly recommended.

Marlowe: adapted by Stirling Silliphant from the novel The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler; directed by Paul Bogart; starring James Garner (Philip Marlowe), Gayle Hunnicutt (Mavis Wald), Carroll O'Connor (Lt. French), Rita Moreno (Dolores Gonzales), Jackie Coogan (Grant Hicks), Bruce Lee (Winslow Wong), and Sharon Farrell (Orfamay Quest) (1969): Enjoyable, typically twisty Raymond Chandler mystery gets updated by 20 years to late 1960's Los Angeles. James Garner is his typically low-key self as Philip Marlowe -- you could see this as an audition tape for the later Rockford Files. Bruce Lee shows up as a mob enforcer; what happens to him is actually pretty hilarious. Recommended.

The X-Files: Goblins by Charles L. Grant (1994): The first original X-Files novel has its pleasures. Released midway through the second season of the series, Goblins was written by veteran horror scribe Charles L. Grant. As with Grant's own work, Goblins is quiet horror for the most part, implying a lot and showing very little. Unfortunately, the 'monster' in Goblins would barely support an hour-long episode of the series, much less a nearly 300-page novel. Grant does a nice job of capturing the Mulder/Scully dynamic and the paranoid tone of the series. Suffice to say, though, that as in the dreadful movie Hollow Man, 'invisible' apparently means the same as 'invincible.' Lightly recommended.

Department 18: Night Souls by L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims (2010): Night Souls tools along for its first three-quarters as a fairly soapy occult procedural that's light on horror and originality and really long on really short chapters, I assume because it was meant to be read in installments during every trip to the bathroom.

Alas, with about 75 pages to go, it completely craps the bed. Despite the fact that its climax is rushed and sketchy and amazingly satisfaction-light, Night Souls nonetheless finds the space for back-to-back chapters in which major female characters are raped, murdered, and dismembered in graphic detail. Then it throws in the dismemberment of an old homeless guy in a subsequent chapter because the writers seem to have lost all interest in the procedural aspects of their own narrative. As we've already been shown how bad the antagonists can be, these chapters don't tell or show us anything we don't know -- and the later fate of the rapist-murderers comes and goes with so little effect that there's no sense of catharsis or justice or really much of anything.

Oh, and one of the women is raped by a lizard-like monster which we're told on more than one occasion has a foot-long penis with giant barbs on it. Hooray! As the only other horror-novel rape scenes involving monsters with barbed penises that I recall happen in terrible Richard Laymon novels (yes, more than once, barbed-penis-rape-scene fans!), I can only assume this is a grotesque tip of a grotesque hat. There are horror novels that effectively portray rape scenes; Night Souls is not one of them unless you're a rape fetishist or a connoisseur of unusually large barbed penises. Not recommended.

Doomsday Books

The Year's Best Horror Stories: XX-1991 (1992) containing Ma Qui by Alan Brennert; The Same in Any Language by Ramsey Campbell; Call Home by Dennis Etchison; A Scent of Roses by Jeffrey Goddin; Root Cellar by Nancy Kilpatrick; An Eye for an Eye by Michael A. Arnzen; The Picnickers by Brian Lumley; With the Wound Still Wet by Wayne Allen Sallee; My Giddy Aunt by D. F. Lewis; The Lodestone by Sheila Hodgson; Baseball Memories by Edo van Belkom; The Bacchae by Elizabeth Hand; Common Land by Joel Lane; An Invasion of Angels by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; The Sharps and Flats Guarantee by C. S. Fuqua; Medusa's Child by Kim Antieau; Wall of Masks by T. Winter-Damon; Moving Out by Nicholas Royle; Better Ways in a Wet Alley by Barb Hendee; Close to the Earth by Gregory Nicoll; Churches of Desire by Philip Nutman; Carven of Onyx by Ron Weighell.

Horror was in a boom period in 1991, with splatterpunk rising to the fore. Wagner's selections here in the tenth volume he'd edited of DAW's annual Year's Best Horror is solid and occasionally eclectic and broad of range, with M.R. James-influenced 'traditional' ghost stories rubbing shoulders with splatterpunk, existential horror, sexual horror, and surreal, unease-making entries by Nina Kiriki Hoffman and D.F. Lewis. Alan Brennert's story is a fine bit of Viet Nam horror, while Ramsey Campbell's story suggests that some Greek islands should not be visited by tourists. Recommended.


　

The Year's Best Horror: XVII-1988: edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1989) containing Fruiting Bodies by Brian Lumley; Works of Art by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother by Harlan Ellison; The Resurrection Man by Ian Watson; Now and Again in Summer by Charles L. Grant; Call 666 by Dennis Etchison; The Great God Pan by M. John Harrison; What Dreams May Come by Brad Strickland; Regression by R. Chetwynd-Hayes; Souvenirs from a Damnation by Don Webb; Bleeding Between the Lines by Wayne Allen Sallee; Playing the Game by Ramsey Campbell; Lost Bodies by Ian Watson; Ours Now by Nicholas Royle; Prince of Flowers by Elizabeth Hand; The Daily Chernobyl by Robert Frazier; Snowman by Charles L. Grant; Nobody's Perfect by Thomas F. Monteleone; Dead Air by Gregory Nicoll; Recrudescence by Leonard Carpenter

　

1988 was a transitional year for horror in general. Slasher movies were on the wane, while the ultra-violence of splatterpunk was on the wax in written horror. Wagner's selection here is mostly solid, though two pieces by the usually solid Ian Watson are startlingly ineffective as horror. Three novellas -- "Fruiting Bodies", "The Great God Pan", and "Recrudescence" -- are the high points here, along with one of the better NuCthulhu stories I've read in awhile, "Souvenirs from a Damnation", and one of Elizabeth Hand's first published stories, "Prince of Flowers." Dennis Etchison is solid and disturbing as always. Recommended.

Fear in the 1980's

Fears: edited by Charles L. Grant (1983) containing:

Surrogate by Janet Fox; Coasting by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro; Spring-Fingered Jack by Susan Casper; Flash Point by Gardner Dozois; A Cold Day in the Mesozoic by Jack Dann; The Train by William F. Nolan; The Dripping by David Morrell; The Ragman by Leslie Alan Horvitz; Deathtracks by Dennis Etchison; Father Dear by Al Sarrantonio; As Old as Sin by Peter D. Pautz; Fish Night by Joe R. Lansdale; Remembering Melody by George R. R. Martin; The Pond by Pat Cadigan; The Beasts That Perish by Reginald Bretnor; Cassie, Waiting by Julie Stevens; and High Tide by Leanne Frahm.

Dandy anthology comprising both reprints and originals from the heyday of anthologized horror, and the heyday of horror great Charles L. Grant. There's something very Bradburyesque about many of these stories. Early, nastier Bradbury, that is, before the whimsy curdled, back when nostalgia worked alongside horror and the fantastic to conjure up that distinctive Bradbury glow that could suddenly be shot through with terror. Certainly the stories by Joe Lansdale, Jack Dann, Al Sarrantonio, and Pat Cadigan operate within the parameters of that Bradbury without slavishly imitating him stylistically or even thematically.

The anthology also gives us a mournful horror dandy from George R.R. Martin when he was a science fiction and horror writer, and not a best-selling epic fantasist. Reginald Bretnor's entry seems like it would make a dandy pitch for a TV show. Susan Casper gives us a prescient horror story about video games (prescient enough to anticipate a subplot on this season's Dexter, pretty good for 1983); Janet Fox leads with a prescient shocker about surrogate parenting. Dennis Etchison is represented here with one of his 1980's classics, and the anthology ends with a nice, Wyndhamesque bio-disaster piece by Leanne Frahm, an Australian writer I'm unfamiliar with. Recommended.

Edge of Night

Cutting Edge: edited by Dennis Etchison (1986) containing the following stories:

Blue Rose by Peter Straub; The Monster by Joe Haldeman; Lacunae by Karl Edward Wagner; "Pale, Trembling Youth" by W. H. Pugmire and Jessica Amanda Salmonson; Muzak for Torso Murders by Marc Laidlaw; Goodbye, Dark Love by Roberta Lannes; Out There by Charles L. Grant; Little Cruelties by Steve Rasnic Tem; The Man With the Hoe by George Clayton Johnson; They're Coming for You by Les Daniels; Vampire by Richard Christian Matheson; Lapses by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro; The Final Stone by William F. Nolan; Irrelativity by Nicholas Royle; The Hands by Ramsey Campbell; The Bell by Ray Russell; Lost Souls by Clive Barker; Reaper by Robert Bloch; The Transfer by Edward Bryant; and Pain by Whitley Strieber.

Solid original horror anthology from Etchison, a fine and unjustly neglected horror writer in his own right. There's violence, and sexual violence, here, but most of it seems justified by the context of the stories (though "Goodbye, Dark Love" seems a wee bit problematic). The writers basically comprise a who's who list of 1980's horror writers, along with some genre long-timers (Nolan, Johnson, and Bloch). Etchison's revealing introduction grants an insight into his career, and into his thoughts on the state of horror and other genres as of 1986. Recommended.

1979

Shadows 2: edited by Charles L. Grant (1979; this edition 1984) containing the following stories:

　

Saturday's Shadow by William F. Nolan
Night Visions by Jack Dann
The Spring by Manly Wade Wellman
Valentine by Janet Fox
Mackintosh Willy by Ramsey Campbell
Dragon Sunday by Ruth Berman
The White King's Dream by Elizabeth A. Lynn
The Chair by Alan Dean Foster and Jane Cozart
Clocks by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini
Holly, Don't Tell by Juleen Brantingham
The Old Man's Will by Lee Wells
The Closing Off of Old Doors by Peter D. Pautz
Dead End by Richard Christian Matheson
Seasons of Belief by Michael Bishop
Petey by T. E. D. Klein

The late Charles L. Grant was both a talented writer and one of the four or five finest anthologists the horror genre has had. His original anthology series -- Shadows -- was a high point for horror short fiction in the late 1970's and early 1980's, sometimes reading more like a 'Best of' than anything else. Most stories in Shadows are contemporary in setting, as the mandate seemed to focus thereon, but beyond that, anything seemed to go.

There isn't a clunker in the bunch in Shadows 2. Moreover, there are at least two all-timers that appeared here for the first time: Ramsey Campbell's unnerving tale of childhood horror, "Mackintosh Willy", and T.E.D. Klein's "Petey," a novella about a house-warming party that plays enjoyably as both social satire and a Lovecraft-infused horror of suggestion and accumulation of detail. Entries by Michael Bishop and William F. Nolan are also excellent, and the whole anthology is well worth the read. Highly recommended.

New Terrors

New Terrors II, edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980; 1984), containing:

Sun City by Lisa Tuttle; Time to Laugh by Joan Aiken; Bridal Suite by Graham Masterton; The Miraculous Cairn by Christopher Priest; The Rubber Room by Robert Bloch; Drama In Five Acts by Giles Gordon; The Initiation by Jack Sullivan; Lucille Would Have Known by John Frederick Burke; The Funny Face Murders by R. A. Lafferty; Femme Fatale by Marianne Leconte; Can You Still See Me? by Margaret Dickson; One Way Out by Felice Picano; The Ice Monkey by M. John Harrison; Symbiote by Andrew J. Offutt and Across the Water to Skye by Charles L. Grant.

Second half of Campbell's British New Terrors anthology of original horror stories divided for American paperback publication. The stories range from the solid and familiarly M.R. Jamesian "Lucille Would Have Known" (though James never wrote a ghost story about bus tours) to the brooding, Kafkaesque "The Miraculous Cairn" and the post-modern prose-poem "Drama in Five Acts." Range is indeed what we have here, without sacrificing terror, horror or the occasional gross-out seen most prominently in "Bridal Suite." "Symbiote" and the grotesque "Femme Fatale."

Several of the stories are almost perfectly representative of their authors, especially M. John Harrison's "The Ice Monkey" -- suggestive but ultimately nebulous terror set in a relentlessly broken urban wasteland counterpointed with the dangerous Sublime of nature --and R.A. Lafferty's weird-ass, Chestertonian "The Funny Face Murders." Old masters like Aiken, Bloch and Lafferty rub shoulders here with both the up-and-coming (Masterson, Tuttle, Harrison and Priest) and the relatively obscure to the horror genre (Dickson, Picano and Gordon). In all, a wide-ranging and often deeply disturbing anthology. Or at least half of one. Highly recommended.