Experimental Film by Gemma Files (2015)

Experimental Film by Gemma Files (2015): As brilliant a new novel Canadian or otherwise as I've read in a long time, Experimental Film is also a dandy horror novel. It's an almost perfect expression of the sort of documentary approach to horror that H.P. Lovecraft codified. It's also a moving character study of its narrator and her troubled relationships with pretty much everyone in her life, but most notably her young, autistic son.

Lois Cairns has lost her regular jobs as both a film journalist and as a teacher of film at a Toronto diploma factory dedicated to film. But a freelance assignment to review the latest experimental offering from a pretentious, obnoxious film-maker ends up revealing to Lois what appears to be footage from an unknown, early 20th-century Canadian director that the pompous contemporary film-maker has interpolated into his own work. And so the detective work begins -- and the eternal quest for grant money!

Cairns' investigation soon suggests that the mysterious footage was filmed by the even more mysterious Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb. Whitcomb was the wife of an early 20th-century Canadian businessman. She vanished without a trace from a sealed train compartment in the 1920's, leaving behind only a film projector. Decades earlier, her only son had also vanished somewhere in or around the Whitcombs' house in Ontario's cottage country. 

And we're off. Experimental Film does many things very, very well. Files' narrator earns our sympathy despite (and also because of) her bouts of self-pity, self-loathing, and nastiness. This sympathy comes in part because the narrator is intensely self-aware, and aware of her many moments of nastiness. She's also surrounded by keenly observed and rendered supporting characters, most notably a brilliant former student whom Cairns hires to work on the movie about the search for the movie and Cairns' autistic son.

The accumulation of documentary detail, and the details of the search for the lost movie or movies, all work very much in long-standing horror traditions. More importantly, they're expertly done in this novel. Files creates a convincing alternate history of Canadian film. And she does so in a gradually building horror narrative in which both sudden, almost epiphanic shocks and the creeping terror of the slow build are both given their moments. 

Perhaps most rarely for a horror novel, Experimental Film is genuinely funny throughout. And it's not the tiresome horror humour of the Crypt-keeper and his ilk, nor the deadly jolité of many an omniscient serial killer or Joker knock-off. It's just funny -- sardonic at certain points, cynical about the art scene.

In all, this is a fine novel, and one that will hopefully win readers and appear on courses of study for years to come. It's also a hell of a travelogue for certain portions of Toronto. It even has a scene set in Sneaky Dee's. The only thing it's really lacking is a climactic appearance by the helpful ghost of Al Waxman. Highly recommended.

Lovecraft Unbound: 20 Stories (2008): edited by Ellen Datlow.

Lovecraft Unbound: 20 Stories (2008): edited by Ellen Datlow.


I think this anthology, which consists of 16 new stories and 4 reprints, is the award-winning, veteran editor Datlow's finest anthology. It's not all killer, but there is no filler. Many of the stories that first appeared in this anthology have already been anthologized several more times since Lovecraft Unbound appeared in 2008. Highly recommended overall.

• "The Crevasse" by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey: Antarctic setting recalls HPL's At the Mountains of Madness, but this effective and low-key (in a supernatural sense) story also riffs on "Who Goes There?," the basis for The Thing movies.
• "The Office of Doom" by Richard Bowes: Never order the Necronomicon on an Inter-Library Loan. Just don't.
• "Sincerely, Petrified" by Anna Tambour: Elliptical tale of fictional myths attached to... The Petrified Forest? Yes. Unusual and very enjoyable.
• "The Din of Celestial Birds" (1997) by Brian Evenson: Interesting but a bit too murky for my tastes.
• "The Tenderness of Jackals" by Amanda Downum: Writers really get entranced by the idea of making HPL's ghouls into a fully realized society. Not a bad story, but crippled by those tricky ghouls, who have frustrated many a writer.
• "Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane: Moody, low-key riff on HPL's "The Shadow Out of Time."
• "Cold Water Survival" by Holly Phillips: Very science fictiony and of-the-moment as Global Warming releases monsters. Nebulous, Swiss-Army-Knife monsters when it comes to their skill-sets, which are too vast and ill-defined to allow me to suspend disbelief beyond page 3.
• "Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love" by William Browning Spencer: Another entry in Spencer's often serio-comic explorations of Lovecraftian themes and variations as seen in the terrific novels Resume with Monsters and Irrational Fears.
• "Houses Under the Sea" (2006) by Caitlin R. Kiernan: A solid mix of first-person narration and pseudo-documentary collage dissipates with the big reveal, which is amazingly underwhelming.
• "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" by Michael Cisco: Creepy bit of philosophical horror; slight but solid.
• "Leng" by Marc Laidlaw: Skirts the very edge of parody in its visit to Lovecraft's famous, infamous Plateau of Leng, which is not a place you want to visit. Hold the mushrooms.
• "In the Black Mill" (1997) by Michael Chabon: Chabon's story hammers on obvious parody during its first half, which is rife with winky, coy,  obvious shout-outs to various Lovecraftian names and places (a woman named Brown-Jenkin? Really?). The spell of HPL seems to overcome Chabon in the second half, as the story suddenly plays everything straight -- but the parody undoes any ability to take the story seriously while also being obvious and awfully thudding in its humour.
• "One Day, Soon" by Lavie Tidhar: Oblique, mysterious bit of cosmic horror involving a forbidden book.
• "Commencement" (2001) by Joyce Carol Oates: Deceptively light-hearted narration darkens throughout in a story that feels an awful lot like Oates doing a riff on Thomas Ligotti, who does this particular sort of thing better.
• "Vernon, Driving" by Simon Kurt Unsworth: Relationship horror with a sorrowful cosmic twist.
• "The Recruiter" by Michael Shea: Light black comedy with serious undertones ties in to several other Shea stories involving Lovecraftian beings.
• "Marya Nox" by Gemma Files: Files nails the documentary aspect of Lovecraftian horror while offering an interesting geopolitical setting for a tale of a buried church that should have remained buried.
• "Mongoose" by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette: Unusual space opera plays with Lovecraftian names while being tonally and thematically so far from HPL that the story (one of a series) could probably do without its space-traevling Arkhamites and reconfigured Hounds of Tindalos (now complete with Linnaean taxonomy -- Pseudocanis tindalosi).
• "Catch Hell" by Laird Barron: Oddly, one of Barron's least cosmic, least Lovecraftian stories. Good for Barron would be great for almost anyone else.
• "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas: Low-key, purposefully mundane slice-of-life from the days after the Great Old Ones rose to destroy humanity and reclaim Earth. 

Horrors Old and New

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (2012) (published 2013): edited by Stephen R. Jones with non-fiction material by Kim Newman, containing the following:

Witch Work by Neil Gaiman: It's a poem. And not a good one.

The Discord of Being by Alison J. Littlewood: Solidly written, but I actually can't remember what it was about. And I just read it a week ago.

Necrosis by Dale Bailey: Enjoyable, somewhat enigmatic "Club Tale."

The Hunt: Before, and the Aftermath by Joe R. Lansdale: Lansdale creates a plausible new horror for the Zombie crowd. The disturbing elements build throughout to a truly gut-wrenching final few pages.

The Cotswold Olympicks by Simon Kurt Unsworth: Nice variation on the whole Town With a Secret sub-genre of horror.

Where the Summer Dwells by Lynda E. Rucker: Well-written but fatally inconclusive bit of what I've started to think of as Lifestyle Horror rather than The New Weird. Something Happened, but Not Much, and It Didn't Really Change Anything Anyway.

The Callers by Ramsey Campbell: Campbell makes Bingo scary, and is that Tubby Thackeray from The Grin of the Dark as the bingo caller?

The Curtain by Thana Niveau: Deep-sea horror builds to an apocalyptic climax.

The Fall of the King of Babylon by Mark Valentine: Nicely written but underplotted and underdeveloped bit of Magical History.

Nightside Eye by Terry Dowling: Interesting use of a paranormal detective with an extremely odd power within the long-standing trope of the Haunted Hotel.

The Old and the New by Helen Marshall: Nicely written but seriously underdeveloped bit of relationship horror somehow makes the bone-filled catacombs of Paris seem mundane.

Waiting at the Crossroads Motel by Steve Rasnic Tem: Creepy bit of American Lovecraftiana with some startlingly odd images.

His Only Audience by Glen Hirshberg: Fun paranormal detective adventure riffs on The Deal with the Devil.

Marionettes by Claire Massey: Weirdly, this is basically a much better version of "The Old and the New." Compares favourably to the work of Robert Aickman.

Between Four Yews by Reggie Oliver: A prequel to M.R. James' "A School Story" works well in the shadow of James by dealing with a facet of the supernatural that James himself would have avoided because of era and inclination.

Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars by Gemma Files: Marvelous homage to The King in Yellow via Pitcairn Island.

The Other One by Evangeline Walton: Posthumous doppelganger horror.

Slow Burn by Joel Lane: Police detective investigating the paranormal; you'll wish it were longer.

Celebrity Frankenstein by Stephen Volk: Funny commentary on our current celebrity/reality-show culture.

Blue Crayon, Yellow Crayon by Robert Shearman: Weird, not entirely successful piece starts strong and then takes the train to WTF?

October Dreams by Michael Kelly: Solid little mood piece tips a Halloween hat to Bradbury.

The Eyes of Water by Alison J. Littlewood: Build-up of mystery and suspense ends in a sort of nothing rather than the Sublime it seemed to be aiming for. Let-down.

In all: Lots of good and nothing really 'bad,' though the fatal inconclusiveness of the New Weird appears to be seeping more and more into the choices. As always, the Necrology listing of deceased writers, artists, actors, and others is comprehensive and useful. Recommended.


Witch House by Evangeline Walton (1945): Almost forgotten Haunted House novel reads like an odd sort of bridge between sub-genre Megaliths The Haunting of Hill House and Hell House. Walton's version of the supernatural would now be called New Agey, though it really draws on a long tradition of mysticism and pseudo-science that's been cropping up in horror stories and novels since J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Familiar" and "Green Tea."

What this means for the novel is that the supernatural, while not having a scientific basis, nonetheless obeys mystical rules rather than the basic rules of the Personal Haunting. Walton's psychic investigator herein has a solid grounding in both Eastern Mysticism and pseudo-scientific technobabble. He's also a little too infallible to allow for much suspense, a trait shared by Algernon Blackwood's similarly hyper-competent mystic John Silence.

Walton's interest in building a consistent mystical background to explain the goings-on at Witch-House leaves the novel oddly sketchy in the development of a historical narrative for the house in question. The horror doesn't really build -- it just flares up, only to be dealt with again and again by the psychic detective.

The engine of the plot is a little girl in peril who only sporadically seems to be really be in peril. But this is really a Novel of Ideas, expounded upon at length. Walton throws in reincarnation, Buddhism, telepathy, a brooding seascape, Orientalism, telekinesis, poltergeists, a couple of wizards' battles, ectoplasm, a giant black rabbit, a supernatural kitten, paintings that seem to look at people, a Family Curse, a malign Will, sadomasochism, and a bunch of other stuff. The novel might actually be twice as good at twice the length. Lightly recommended.

Horror Lessons

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (2011): edited by Stephen Jones (2012) containing

Ramsey Campbell - Holding The Light
Christopher Fowler - Lantern Jack
Paul Kane - Rag And Bone
Gemma Files - Some Kind Of Light Shines From Your Face
Joel Lane - Midnight Flight
Tim Lebbon - Trick Of The Light
Gregory Nicoll - But None Shall Sing For Me
Alison Littlewood - About The Dark
Daniel Mills - The Photographer's Tale
Mark Samuels - The Tower
Peter Atkins - Dancing Like We're Dumb
Simon Strantzas - An Indelible Stain Upon The Sky
Joan Aiken - Hair
Steve Rasnic Tem - Miri
Geeta Roopnarine - Corbeaux Bay
Michael Marshall Smith - Sad, Dark Thing
Robert Silverberg - Smithers And The Ghost Of The Thar
Reggie Oliver - Quieta Non Movere
Joe R. Lansdale - The Crawling Sky
Conrad Williams - Wait
Simon Kurt Unsworth - The Ocean Grand, North West Coast
Evangeline Walton - They That Have Wings
Thana Niveau - White Roses, Bloody Silk
John Ajivide Lindqvist - The Music Of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer
Ramsey Campbell - Passing Through Peacehaven
David Buchan - Holiday Home

　
Enjoyable and somewhat controversial entry in Mammoth's Best New Horror series because of editor Stephen Jones' introduction, critical as it was of certain award winners in genre competitions, among other things. The anthology's lengthy Year in Horror and Necrology sections have also stirred controversy for being too...long.
　

Apparently, long anthologies are a problem for people reading things on e-readers, and make them want to stop reading because, um, I guess they're really stupid and lazy. When I don't want to read the introductory and framing material in an anthology, I generally just skip past it. Apparently this represents some kind of terrible burden for both e-readers and a few people using paper, as I assume their arms have atrophied to be more like a T. Rex's arms because they're all hunched over and texting all the time in between keeping their heads in their asses.

Seriously, people? I can think of a lot of major criticisms of this anthology series, but the non-fictional material isn't the source of any of them.
　

I don't know that there's anything surpassingly disturbing in this year's selection, but there also aren't any real stinkers. A couple of stories end with clunky twists, but that's about it. And not only do you get two Ramsey Campbell stories, you also get two posthumous publications, a nice little Joan Aiken story and a marvelous Evangeline Walton novella involving some particularly awful figures out of Greek mythology. Recommended, unless you're an idiot with little T. Rex arms.

A Clutch of Vampires by/edited by Raymond T. McNally (1970): Enjoyable anthology/commonplace book of fiction and historical accounts of vampires dating back to classical Greece. The whole thing is dominated by (most of) J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," the first great work of vampire fiction. What one gathers from the various non-fiction accounts from a dozen different cultures is that vampires really have odd habits in some countries. The ones that try to kill you by lying on you are surely the most annoying; the Chinese vampires that can't make 90-degree turns are probably the easiest to thwart. Recommended.

The 2009 Horror

The Best Horror of the Year Volume 2 (2009) edited by Ellen Datlow (2010) containing

*Lowland Sea by Suzy McKee Charnas
The End of Everything by Steve Eller
Mrs Midnight by Reggie Oliver
*each thing i show you is a piece of my death by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer
*The Nimble Men by Glen Hirshberg
*What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night by Michael Marshall Smith
Wendigo by Micaela Morrissette
*In the Porches of My Ears by Norman Prentiss
Lonegan's Luck by Stephen Graham Jones
*The Crevasse by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey
The Lion's Den by Steve Duffy
Lotophagi by Edward Morris
The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall by Kaaron Warren
Dead Loss by Carole Johnstone
*Strappado by Laird Barron
*The Lammas Worm by Nina Allan
*Technicolor by John Langan

Big, big improvement on the first volume of this series, with a lot more excellent stories and fewer boring ones. I've starred the high points, which run the gamut from near-future apocalypse ("Lowland Sea" by Suzy McKee Charnas) through a bad night at the movies ("In the Porches of My Ears" by Norman Prentiss) to, well, a bad night ("What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night" by Michael Marshall Smith).

The Toronto-set Gemma Files/Stephen J. Barringer story does a lovely job of combining both the structure and the content of new media with one of the oldest structures for a horror story (the epistolary format), while John Langan's story presents us with a mountingly dread-filled college classroom lecture on Poe. Recommended.