Monumental Sausage Party

Prime Evil edited by Douglas Winter, containing the following stories (1988):

The Night Flier by Stephen King: One of King's five or six worst short pieces (and it's a long short piece, by the way) seems to have been written solely for the central image. What a terrible, dumb, illogical story otherwise.

Having a Woman at Lunch by Paul Hazel: A weak bit of misogynistic whimsy from someone whom Winter notes has never written a horror short story before. It's like a bad EC Comics horror short, right down to the misogyny, but at least EC could defend itself by noting the time it existed.

The Blood Kiss by Dennis Etchison: Solid bit of Hollywood weird from Etchison, though with nothing particularly scary in sight.

Coming to Grief by Clive Barker: A fairly gentle Barker piece about loss and childhood fears.

Food by Thomas Tessier: Slight but enjoyable gross-out.

The Great God Pan by M. John Harrison: Subtle and elliptical novella about the aftermath of some sort of supernatural event that's never fully explained; the connection to the great Arthur Machen story of the same name seems to me to be so faint as to be perhaps problematic.

Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity by David Morrell: Brilliant horror piece from a writer generally known for his thrillers (and for creating John Rambo). Painting and secrets and the danger of seeing what cannot be unseen.

The Juniper Tree by Peter Straub: Disturbing tale of childhood sexual abuse could use a stronger, or at least more direct, conclusion, but still effective.

Spinning Tales with the Dead by Charles L. Grant: A representative bit of elusive, elliptical dark fantasy from Grant.

Alice's Last Adventure by Thomas Ligotti: Great piece from Ligotti, though in some ways it reminds me more of Ramsey Campbell than Ligotti in terms of subject matter and the treatment thereof.

Next Time You'll Know Me by Ramsey Campbell: A copy-editing mistake screws up some of the humour of the story, though it's still a droll (though non-frightening) bit of business.

The Pool by Whitley Strieber: Blech. Terrible stuff.

By Reason of Darkness by Jack Cady : Viet Nam horror evokes Conrad and Apocalypse Now in equal measure; its effect is weakened by an overly long climax when more development of events 'In Country' would have been far more welcome.

Beginning in the late 1970's, horror fiction seemed to cough up at least one attempt at a genre-defining/re-defining original anthology every decade or so. Notable entries in this accidental enterprise include Ramsey Campbell's excellent New Terrors, Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces, and Al Sarrantonio's 999.

Douglas Winter seems to have been going for the same thing with Prime Evil, though it's a much shorter anthology than any of those mentioned above. And it's also a bit underwhelming. There are good stories included here, the best being David Morrell's terrific novella about painting, madness, and the supernatural. In the end, though, Prime Evil is an interesting, deeply flawed snapshot of some of what horror fiction was up to in the late 1980's. Lightly 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.

Haunted

Dark Delicacies III: Haunted: edited by Jeff Gelb and Del Howison (2009) containing the following stories:

"Though Thy Lips Are Pale" by Maria Alexander
A Haunting by John Connolly
A Nasty Way to Go by Ardath Mayhar
And So with Cries by Clive Barker
Children of the Vortex by Simon Clark
Church Services by Kevin J. Anderson
Do Sunflowers Have a Fragrance? by Del James
Fetch by Chuck Palahniuk
Food of the Gods by Simon R. Green
How to Edit by Richard Christian Matheson
In the Mix by Eric Red
Man with a Canvas Bag by Gary A. Braunbeck
Mist on the Bayou by Heather Graham
One Last Bother by Del Howison
Resurrection Man by Axelle Carolyn
Starlets & Spaceboys by Joseph V. Hartlaub
The Architecture of Snow by David Morrell
The Flinch by Michael Boatman
The Slow Haunting by John R. Little
The Wandering Unholy by Victor Salva
Tyler's Third Act by Mick Garris

　

Fairly solid original anthology from editors Gelb and Howison, with a number of stories by writers and directors better known for their Hollywood work.

Mick Garris, who's directed about half of all Stephen King adaptations (with King's blessing -- Garris seems to be King's director and occasional screenwriter of choice), offers a caustic piece about the new realities of television and the Internet as seen by a screenwriter who's rapidly circling the drain; Eric Red, another prolific screenwriter, takes on the music industry instead.

The prolific Canadian-born and bred novelist David Morrell (forever to be blurbed as "the creator of Rambo") gives the reader the most original riff on the Haunted theme in a story that touches on the new realities of publishing and a celebrated, reclusive writer who resembles J.D. Salinger.

More traditional supernatural horrors are nicely rendered in "The Wandering Unholy" (Nazis vs. Something Awful). "Starlets & Spaceboys" is a lovely little zinger, as are the bioengineered terrors of Simon Clark's "Children of the Vortex." And Richard Christian Matheson, who's successfully straddled the worlds of print and screen horror for decades (much like his father, Richard Matheson), presents a horror-story about obsessive editing. Recommended.

Secrets and Histories

Novels:

Ground Zero: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson (2009): I've somehow avoided reading F. Paul Wilson novels until recently, perhaps because the film version of his novel The Keep was so traumatically bad that I subconsciously avoided Wilson's longer works. The Repairmen Jack novels tie into Wilson's Secret History of the World cycle of novels and stories, the major events of which are part of the Adversary Cycle, of which The Keep is one novel. The climax to these series has already been written (Nightworld), but will apparently be rewritten and re-released once the last two Jack novels appear in the near future.

The interlocking cycles cannily play with conspiracy stories, Lovecraftian alien 'gods' and lost civilizations. Repairman Jack -- Jersey born and bred, Manhattan residing -- is a knight errant 'fixer' of people's problems who finds himself drawn increasingly into the secret, universal war between The Ally and the invading Otherness. The Adversary -- Rasalom by name -- is a millennia-old servant of the Otherness, working tirelessly to bring about the corruption of the Earth, opposed throughout history by various champions.

Ground Zero pulls the events of 9/11 and the Truther movement into the massive, pan-historical conspiracy that underpins the Jack and Adversary stories. For a late novel in a lengthy series, it's extremely reader-friendly -- I was able to jump onboard without much effort, and the suspense and horror of the novel (along with its fascinatingly wonky explanation for 9/11) make we want to read more of Wilson's novels. Highly recommended.



Scavenger by David Morrell (2007): Morrell's emotionally wounded hero Balenger, from the earlier thriller Creepers, returns here in a fast-paced, thoughtful novel involving some truly interesting and odd facts about time capsules and video games. One might think that a thriller that uses the history of time capsules as a major plot element would be a tad boring, but Scavenger is anything but. One of Morrell's greatest strengths as a writer is his ability to make 'real-world' information a fascinating part of his thrillers.

Here, the history of time capsules made me want to know more about such ambitious projects as The Crypt of Civilization. Even better, time capsules work really well when tied into the video-game elements of the novel: a criminal mastermind sets several people on the trail of a lost thing known as the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires, a hidden memorial from the end of the 19th century that may explain how the residents of a mining town in the Rockies simply disappeared one winter, leaving no clue as to their whereabouts.

The hunt for a hidden item is a key element in many video games, as are the sort of trials and tests that await the various characters. The mastermind himself also has aspects of the traditional Dungeon Master figure of Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, these plot elements would be irrelevant if Morrell weren't capable of creating sympathetic, believable characters. He does that, while also supplying a 'set-piece' climax that combines horror with suspense. Highly recommended.

4 X 2

Books:



The Shimmer by David Morrell (2009): Technically speaking, Morrell is a Canadian writer, though he hasn't lived here since he was in his 20's. Since leaving Canada, he's managed to become both a university literature professor (now retired) and a best-selling thriller writer. Oh, and he created Rambo in the 1972 thriller First Blood. Quite a resume. Morrell is an almost preternaturally gifted writer of thrillers -- his prose is smooth, his characters are sympathetic when they need to be, his plots are tight, his pace relentless without seeming forced, and his research lends both interest and verisimilitude to even his most outrageous scenarios.

Here, Morrell gives us a small Texas town with an open secret: weird lights appear outside the town on a mostly nightly basis, and have been doing so for as long as people have lived in the area. This aspect of the novel is pretty much true -- there is a small Texas town outside which weird lights, not yet satisfactorily explained by science, put on a nightly show for residents and tourists alike. Morrell combines elements of the supernatural thriller, the military-operation-gone-wrong and the historical into a pleasing melange. Our protagonists -- a nearly burned out LA cop and his wife -- are drawn to the town, she by some force emanating from the lights, he in pursuit of her. Others are also drawn there. A secret governmental installation registers an increase in the lights' energy levels which may portend a disaster on par with previous incidents dotted over the decades, incidents of mass hysteria. Inevitably, all hell breaks loose.

As I noted, Morrell shines when it comes to pace and versimilitude: what happens in The Shimmer is probably hooey, but it's convincing hooey. There's even a weird, thinly disguised (really thinly -- Morrell explains it all in the afterword) historical section devoted to the filming of the James Dean/Rock Hudson film Giant, though it's not called that here. But Giant was filmed near 'our' world's version of the lights, and Dean was fascinated by them. Weird stuff indeed. Highly recommended.


The Protector by David Morrell (2004): Don't call them bodyguards. They're personal security experts. And one of them is about to lose almost everything while trying to protect a scientist who says he's fleeing from Colombian drug gangs, but really isn't. Morrell's attention to detail drives a lot of the appeal of this book, as he explains (or, for safety's sake, explains with necessary omissions of detail) the ins and outs of car chases, exploding cars, proper handgun maintenance, surveillance techniques and witness protection over the course of this long but taut thriller. One of the appealing things about Morrell's tough and competent hero is his care in relation to innocent bystanders -- he actually works to avoid getting them hurt in the middle of his own adventures, something a lot of movie and TV heroes no longer seem to find necessary. Highly recommended.


Fireworks by James A. Moore (2001): Moore's horror-thriller shares certain elements with Stephen King's later Under the Dome (2009) -- the small Georgia town of Collier becomes isolated because of the incursion of an apparently extraterrestrial threat, though in this case a shadowy government agency called ONYX does the isolating after a UFO crashlands in the lake near the town during the fireworks celebration on the evening of July 4. The crash kills hundreds, and ONYX moves in almost before the emergency vehicles have started ferrying casualties to the local hospital. Cut off from the rest of the world, Collier begins to simmer as ONYX suspends basic rights while it tries to dig the UFO out of the lake. Some people behave well; other people behave badly.

And then...well, and then things just sorta sputter out. I don't know if the lack of a climax came about because of editorial interference or authorial choice (the novel's structure initially suggests a much longer work, as we spend nearly half the novel focused on Collier's police chief, move to much shorter sections focused on an abused woman and one of the soldiers with an underwhelming secret, and then shudder to a halt with unlimited 3rd-person narration). In any case, while Moore is a skilled writer of characters, overall the novel seems frustratingly unfinished. Not recommended.


Possessed by James A. Moore (2004): This supernatural thriller seems almost like a structural apology for Fireworks: this novel is almost ALL climax, the last couple of hundred pages spent in an interconnected series of scenes of escape and battle, capture and escape. I enjoyed the vaguely Lovecraftian shenanigans (actually, this is almost H.P. Lovecraft's The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in the Mystery of the Magical Necklace, albeit rated PG-13), though I was a tad exhausted by the time things wrapped up in a series of explosions and monsters and baleful extradimensional entities.

The 18-year-old male protagonist's mother dies at the start of the novel, setting off a wacky chain of events centered around a necklace the mother was hiding from forces serving Something Awful. Hilarity ensues. And indeed certain elements are hilarious, mostly intentionally -- the main character takes more physical punishment than Ash in the Evil Dead movies but keeps getting off the mat to Save the Universe. Or something. The whole thing almost seems written with more than one eye on a Hollywood treatment. So it goes. Recommended.