Superhorror

The Far Reaches of Fear (previously published as Superhorror [1976]), edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980) containing:

The Viaduct by Brian Lumley; Fog in My Throat by R. A. Lafferty; Christina by Daphne Castell; The Case of James Elmo Freebish by Joseph F. Pumilia; The Hunting Ground by David Drake; The Petey Car by Manly Wade Wellman; Wood by Robert Aickman; The Pattern by Ramsey Campbell and Dark Wings by Fritz Leiber.

Campbell's first original anthology really sees him come out of the gate running. Hell, his first three original anthologies (this, New Terrors and New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos) show a keen mind in the unfortunately not-all-that lucrative world of original horror anthologies. But the 1970's and early 1980's were somewhat financially kinder to the purveyors and writers of short stories.

As with New Terrors, the range of the stories is impressive: Castell's melancholy, M.R. James-tinged ghost story; Drake's terrifically tense tale of a wounded Viet Nam vet come home to a war with something inhumanly worse than the Viet Cong; Pumilia's homage to the EC horror comics of the 1950's; Lafferty's surprisingly understated (for Lafferty) tale of existential science-horror; Wellman's slice of homespun Appalachian creepiness; Leiber's X-rated tale of dopplegangers; Lumley's perfect, awful piece of childhood horror; Aickman's typically mysterious tale of clockwork toys and malign wood-working; and Campbell's own unusual take on predestination and fate.

It's a solid selection of stories under either this name or its original title of Superhorror (the latter hardcover has an awesomely creepy cover). I originally got the latter for 25 cents from the Tillsonburg library in about 1982. Highly recommended.

All the Darkness

DAW Year's Best Horror XIV (1985), edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1986):

Contents:

Introduction: Nurturing Nightmares by Karl Edward Wagner
Penny Daye by Charles L. Grant
Dwindling by David B. Silva
Dead Men's Fingers by Phillip C. Heath
Dead Week by Leonard Carpenter
The Sneering by Ramsey Campbell
Bunny Didn't Tell Us by David J. Schow
Pinewood by Tanith Lee
The Night People by Michael Reaves
Ceremony by William F. Nolan
The Woman in Black by Dennis Etchison
...Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea... by Simon Clark
Mother's Day by Stephen F. Wilcox
Lava Tears by Vincent McHardy
Rapid Transit by Wayne Allen Sallee
The Weight of Zero by John Alfred Taylor
John's Return to Liverpool by Christopher Burns
In Late December, Before the Storm by Paul M. Sammon
Red Christmas by David Garnett
Too Far Behind Gradina by Steve Sneyd

By 1985, the horror boom that had begun in the late 1960's was starting to ebb, though it would be another ten years before horror fiction started to become really scarce on the bestseller lists. However, a rich list of small and large press horror magazines were still extant, giving editor Wagner a lot to choose from while assembling the newly expanded DAW anthology.

As usual, his selections are excellent and wide-ranging, both in terms of source and in terms of sub-generic classification. Psychological horror dominates in stories that include the university-set "Dead Week", the mournful "Pinewood" and the creepy "The Night People." Short, Hitchcockian shockers are nicely represented by "Red Christmas" and "Mother' Day." The supernatural is mystifying in "John's Return to Liverpool", in which a resurrected John Lennon shows up at the house of the first Beatles fan, and in the lengthy and unnerving "Too Far Behind Gradina," about a British housewife's bizarre vacation in Yugoslavia.

More conventional supernatural horrors await in "The Weight of Zero", a dandy bit of cosmic horror in the tradition (and time-period) of Arthur Machen, the neo-William Hope Hodgson sea-faring terrors of "Dead Men''s Fingers", and William F. Nolan's "Ceremony", about a hitman who takes the wrong bus.

Writers who'd effectively created their own genres by this time, Dennis Etchison and Ramsey Campbell, weigh in with fine entries in which the psychological and the supernatural collide mysteriously and horrifically. Campbell's piece is one of a subset of his fine horror stories in which the problems of getting old are explored in ways that blur the line between the supernatural and the natural, all within that signature Campbellian landscape of off-kilter description and terrible things moving just at the edge of vision. All in all, highly recommended.

Planet Lovecraft

Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, edited by Robert M. Price (1992): This is a lovely historical exercise by editor Price, as it collects about 20 stories in the Lovecraft mode, primarily from the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's, when Lovecraft's widespread Affinity Group, created in large part by Lovecraft's own inexhaustible letter-writing to aspiring writers asking for advice, was still in its infancy. Never has so peculiar a writer-as-person been so generous of his time with other writers. It's all part of the weirdness of HPL.

Price does a nice job selecting little- or never-before-anthologized stories by both significant writers working with Lovecraft's concepts and cosmology (August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith) and by writers whose names and stories have been long forgotten. I can't say as I was scared by the stories here, but a lot of them do evoke that existential dread and instability that is one of the hallmarks of the "cosmic horror" that Lovecraft tended to prefer.

Price's lengthy introduction is also invaluable, as it sets forth both a timeline for extra-Lovecraftian additions to the Cthulhu Mythos and an explanation of the manner in which certain writers and editors (most notably Derleth, Lovecraft's unbelievably important literary executor and Boswell in all but title) helped shape the Mythos after Lovecraft's death in 1937, giving it the now-familiar shape and hierarchy it didn't have during Lovecraft's lifetime.

And there were turfwars over Lovecraft's legacy -- Derleth was quite possessive of the Mythos, for good and ill, though overwhelmingly good: without the publishing house, Arkham House, Derleth initially created to preserve Lovecraft's work in hardcover, both Lovecraft and a lot of other fantasy writers might have vanished forever before the early 1960's boom in fantasy brought them widespread renown and paperback sales for the first time in their careers.

If Lovecraft's work now seems potentially immortal -- and possibly the single most important American fantasy corpus of the 20th century -- then Derleth deserves a lion's share of the credit. Often compared to Edgar Allan Poe, HPL possessed one major, posthumous difference from Poe: he had a great and tireless champion of his work taking care of it. Highly recommended.

The Giant Penis That Ate England and Other Terrifying Tales

The Mammoth Book of Monsters, edited by Stephen Jones (2007):

Contents:
"The Horror from the Mound" by Robert E. Howard
"Visitation" by David J. Schow
"Down There" by Ramsey Campbell
"The Man He Had Been Before" by Scott Edelman
"Calling All Monsters" by Dennis Etchison
"The Shadmock" by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
"The Spider Kiss" by Christopher Fowler
"Café Endless: Spring Rain" by Nancy Holder
"The Medusa" by Thomas Ligotti
"In The Poor Girl Taken by Surprise" by Gemma Files
"Downmarket" by Sydney J. Bounds
"Fat Man" by Jay Lake
"The Thin People" by Brian Lumley
"The Hill" by Tanith Lee
"Godzilla's Twelve Step Program" by Joe R. Lansdale
".220 Swift" by Karl Edward Wagner
"Our Lady of the Sauropods" by Robert Silverberg
"The Flabby Men" by Basil Copper
"The Silvering" by Robert Holdstock
"Someone Else's Problem" by Michael Marshall Smith
"Rawhead Rex" by Clive Barker
"The Chill Clutch of the Unseen" by Kim Newman


Dandy, wide-ranging collection of (mostly) reprinted monster stories with monsters familiar, unfamiliar, and just plain bizarre. Jones has become the the premier anthologist of his generation when it comes to fantasy and dark fantasy, his selections canny and often peculiarly excellent (I'd include the Tanith Lee story in the latter category, along with another odd but effective Gemma Files story). There aren't any real stinkers here -- a couple of stories strain for sublime or poetic effect and don't quite get there, but overall this is a fine selection of stories that I was mostly unfamiliar with.

True to his two-fisted Conan form, Robert E. Howard devises a way to dispatch one traditional monster that is hilariously apt; fellow, later Texan Lansdale's Godzilla story is also both hilarious and apt; Robert Holdstock's eerily reimagined Selkies offer a disturbing twist on an old monster; Robert Silverberg one-ups the not-yet-written-at-the-time Jurassic Park with a truly dangerous 'park' of reborn dinosaurs; R. Chetwynd-Hayes gives us a bleakly funny take on the hybridization and classification of classic monsters. Clive Barker's "Rawhead Rex" brings us a 'real' British monster of legend reconfigured in that distinctive Barker way (omigod, it's a giant, child-eating penis!!!); and so on, and so forth. Highly recommended.

Houses Without Doors

Houses without Doors by Peter Straub: The title, from Emily Dickinson, suggests the desperate straits of many of the characters in the novellas and short stories contained herein. In horror, Straub's concerns have often been with presenting the wonder that can accompany terror, which is to say that his works attempt to suggest the Sublime and the unknowable. This collection, Straub's best, is pretty much unrelenting in its depiction of characters trapped within various circumstances, supernatural and natural, that cannot easily be escaped, if at all.

The short novel that closes the collection, Mrs. God, owes a lot to Robert Aickman's eerily ambiguous horror stories, as Straub notes in the afterword, but the novel is a bit more 'muscular' than Aickman, if that makes any sense -- the situation is a bit more explicable than that in many of Aickman's great stories, and the whole thing is rooted in a particular type of Hell that anyone who has gone through graduate studies in English with an eye towards making a career in academia will recognize. Mrs. God is also weirdly funny, though it's certainly not a light romp. And while there are explanations for many of the odd events that plague an American sessional lecturer during his stay at an English mansion that was once the playground of the literary and artistic elite, some things can't be explained -- which is fine because, per Ramsey Campbell, "explanation is the death of horror."

In another long piece, "The Buffalo Hunter," Straub gives us a lonely, emotionally damaged young man with an extremely odd fetish (he's obsessed with baby bottles) and an even odder 'power' (he can be transported into the pages of the books he reads). I find the awfulness of several pages of this story almost unreadable, not for supernatural horror but because of the abject vicarious embarrassment created by the protagonist's attempt to have a normal date with a normal woman. It's pretty much all the squeamish social moments in a typical episode of The Office dialed up to 11. The ambiguous ending of this story defies easy judgment.

Straub has had a long and distinguished career -- if he didn't work primarily in horror fiction, the mainstream would celebrate how good he's been both here and in the fine novels he's been writing since the 1970's (Ghost Story, Shadowlands, Mr. X, Koko, Mystery, The Hellfire Club...the list goes on and on). And he can be funny amongst the horrors, the hauntings and the haunted. Highest recommendation.

Movie, Movie

Paranormal Activity written and directed by Oren Peli, starring Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat (2007): A pretty effective horror movie, especially at the bargain basement price of about $15,000. We're back in Blair Witch Project territory -- a fake documentary made up of 'found' footage, in this case of a couple dealing with an increasingly hostile supernatural entity that's attached to the woman and not the house in which all the action takes place. If you're like me, you'll eventually find the camera-obsessed boyfriend so annoying that you'll start to root a bit for The Thing.

Misdirection and suggestion carry the day here -- we never really see what's menacing the couple, and the horror of most scenes lies in relatively small actions caught by the camera, and not by big visual effects moments. The couple are curiously dopey when it comes to trying to combat the entity -- we've all seen enough horror TV shows and movies to at least try salt, iron or the always reliable cedar wood, or at least we'd probably look up and try such remedies by, oh, about Day 10 of the haunting.

Still, very effective. I'm glad Paramount didn't try to remake the movie with name actors (apparently, Stephen Spielberg helped get the movie released with its original cast but with a new ending he suggested) -- the anonymity aids suspension of disbelief. One bit of action, though -- an object igniting while both people are away but the camera is still rolling -- goes a bit too far in terms of the creature's powers, and not far enough in terms of a realistic reaction to the event. I'm pretty sure finding out you've got an entity that can light things on fire in your house might elicit more than the 'ho-hum' that happens here. All in all, highly recommended.


Away We Go written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, directed by Sam Mendes, starring John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels, Catherine O'Hara and Maggie Gyllenhall (2009): Cutesy and somewhat pretentious in the Mighty Mendes (American Beauty) Manner. Krasinski and Rudolph, both quite good, play a boho couple expecting their first child. They end up trekking across the US and into Canada and back, in part to see how other families handle child-rearing. The verdict: everyone's cuckoo, though some are more cuckoo than others -- Alison Janney as a falsely jolly harridan and Maggie Gyllenhall as a bonkers New Agey mother lead the pack of undesireables. There are enough laughs and cringes here to keep one interested, along with a creepy out-of-left-field set piece with a creepy child who blurts out a really creepy speech about babies and breathing. Recommended.

Two out of Three are Bad

Book:

The 13th by John Everson (2009): Everson's first novel, Covenant, was an interesting horror novel with a bit too much sexual violence for my tastes. His second, Sacrifice, was something of a bollocks -- the characters were paper-thin and annoyingly giggly and coy at the most inappropriate points in the narrative, and it seemed like the only two constants in the novel were increasingly grotesque yet oddly perfunctory scenes of sexual atrocity, and the construction of protagonists who were as banal as they were incompetent. 'People who get hit in the head a lot' seems to be Everson's second-favorite trope, right after 'Every female character will get sexually assaulted.'

There were enough flashes of originality in the first two novels (and especially the first) that I figured I'd give Everson a chance when his next novel came out. And for the first 200 pages of this 320-page novel, it seemed like I'd made the right choice. Oh, the heightened level of sexual violence was still there, but it at least seemed to be hitched to an interesting story that justified the events, if not the lengthy descriptions of some of them. And then, around page 200, The 13th went off the rails as completely and spectacularly as any novel I can remember reading.

The 13th is a gobbledegooky, supposedly Babylonian ritual meant to incarnate the Babylonian god Ba'al in human form. To do so requires human sacrifice. A lot of human sacrifice involving mothers and babies. Fun stuff. 25 years before the main narrative of the novel, a cult in a small town tried and failed to complete the ritual. Now, the cult is back, kidnapping and impregnating women in order to try again. And only a callow, Olympic-level bicyclist and a plucky but inexperienced female cop can, maybe, stop the ritual.

What threat does a completed ritual pose to the world? I have no idea. The novel never lays out the stakes. I have a feeling that it may guarantee a good corn harvest, but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. And I READ the fucking novel.

Everson's most annoying tics throughout his three novels are that no major female character can be anything less than spectacularly alluring, male protagonists have great difficulty controlling their libidos, and the heroes, perhaps in a nod to realism gone horribly wrong, generally prove to be amazingly incompetent by the time the novel ends. The 13th adds a new toy to Everson's toybox: the 120-page climax.

Yes, more than a third of this novel can justifiably be called the climax. That's a lot of climax. And almost all of it takes place in basement of the evil hotel where an evil stem-cell researcher is attempting to finish the ritual of the 13th with the help of the evil cult which turns out to comprise pretty much everyone in the stupid small town the novel is set in.

During those 120 pages, which take place over the course of about 6 hours, the heroes get knocked out and imprisoned at least twice; they pretty much fail to save any of the imprisoned women and babies from being tortured, mutilated and killed; and the disembodied gods Ba'al and Astarte show up to spout dialogue that sounds like rejected wacky-god dialogue from Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And the heroes run around in circles a lot, in the nude (don't ask), getting sexually assaulted by incorporeal gods and demons, while various awful things are described at great length. But really, once you get to the third or fourth sacrifice scene, not only is the power to shock gone, but the whole megilla starts to feel more like an outsized parody of your typical torture horror film than it does like serious horror.

Everson also gives us another relatively new trope that I reflexively blame on Buffy, specifically Season 7 -- that's the obligatory Half-Assed Internet Search Scene. Certain horror stories once relied on forbidden occult knowledge that one at least had to go to a library to access. Unfortunately, the age of the Internet has brought us the scene in which a character learns everything he or she needs to know by typing in a few terms on Google. I realize that if The Necronomicon existed it would be available for download on Project Gutenberg, but the search scene here rivals Buffy's Season 7 Google of 'evil' for 'search least likely to yield the results you need without further clarification.' Give me a moldy set of the Revelations of Glaaki any day.

On the bright side, the hero now drinks a lot of Guinness. Everson's protagonists in his first two novels spent so much time ordering Miller Genuine Draft that I began to wonder of the Miller Brewing Company was a sponsor. So I guess that's a step up. Really, not recommended at all except as a study in how a horror novel can go horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly wrong.


Comics:

Essential Captain America Volume 2 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, Gene Colan, John Romita, Frank Giacoia, Joe Sinnott and others (1967-70): Captain America becomes increasingly Spider-man-ized in this second collection of his early post-1960's-resurrection adventures. Translation: he's plagued by various self-doubts and woefully hung up over a woman. Thankfully, he also has a number of cool adventures with great art by Kirby, Steranko and Colan, though if you're like me, you're starting to wish Modok and the Red Skull would take a vacation for several years, and that the Cosmic Cube, one of Marvel's all-time Ultimate Plot Devices, would never, ever, ever appear in a comic book again. No such luck. Fun, though occasionally a bit grating.


Onslaught: The Complete Epic Volume 4 (2nd edition) by everyone at Marvel and their dogs (1996): Onslaught was meant to be the Marvel crossover to end all crossovers (well, at least for a year), as a villain born in the X-Men books would ultimately threaten the entire Earth. Part of the editorial mandate of the crossover was to set up Marvel's 'Heroes Reborn' titles, with new adventures of non-X-men Marvel heroes to take place on a new Earth sans X-Men. Marvel's top-selling books (basically the Spider- and X-titles) would steam along on their own in the regular Marvel universe along with all those Marvel characters deemed too minor to reboot (hey, Dr. Strange!).

Sometimes one can only evaluate a megacrossover constructed as much by marketing and sales decisions as by artistic decisions the same way Samuel Johnson evaluated a dog that can walk on its hindlegs -- one isn't amazed that it does it well but that it does it at all. The plot mechanism that creates two different Marvel universes doesn't make a lot of sense, and has the added misfortune of setting up a final battle that would be completely incomprehensible without an awful lot of captions to explain what's going on.

Oh, yeah -- Onslaught is an evil psionic being created when Professor Xavier's evil impulses collide with Magneto's evil impulses. So he's sorta like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, only nigh-omnipotent. As ultimate comic-book villains go, he makes the Anti-Monitor look and sound like Milton's Satan. Not recommended.

The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror edited by David Hartwell

The Dark Descent is a peculiarly difficult anthology to review because if it had a different title and reason-to-be, I'd be a lot less judgmental about it. Let's say the title is '60 Horror Short Stories and Novellas that David Hartwell Really Enjoyed.' Fine. I can get fully behind that anthology. So if that anthology were this anthology, contents unchanged, I give it a solid A- and request that in subsequent printings of this enormous trade paperback, TPTB print it on lighter paper.

This is, quite seriously, the heaviest 950-page book I have ever read. My forearms grew three sizes from reading it. It's so big and heavy, it was broken up into not two but three volumes for its mass-market paperback edition (for the record, those paperbacks -- with the titles of the three thematic sections of the HC/TPB -- are The Color of Evil, The Medusa in the Shield and A Fabulous Formless Darkness).

However, this anthology is supposed to be a useful all-in-one-volume survey of horror literature from its beginnings to the present day, the present day being the early 1990's, when the book was published. And as a survey, it's a bit of a bollocks on three fronts.

1) Thematic Organization: Generally speaking, I'd say historical surveys need to follow some semblance of chronological order. You can play with this a bit by having lots of sub-categories with, say, three representative stories in chronological order. Having no discernible order, though, and only three vague categories of horror, really doesn't help the hypothetical reader who's new to horror. I can figure out when certain things were published, sort of, and how they link together, because I've read a bloody awful lot of horror. A new reader can't, and thus can't actually get much of an idea of how M.R. James leads to, say, Robert Aickman.

2) Dates: Unless I missed them somewhere, this anthology doesn't provide a clear and consistently deployed explanation of when the stories were published. This is a really irritating omission, and one easily remedied by putting dates on the various stories.

3) ...But He Sure Loves Robert Aickman: Of the 60+ stories in this anthology, three are by Robert Aickman and three are by Stephen King. So 10% of the history of horror is tied up in Stephen King and some British guy no-one who doesn't read a lot of horror has ever heard of.

This wouldn't be as much of a problem if Hartwell hadn't bewilderingly left out Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson and limited M.R. James to the short and somewhat second-tier "The Ash-Tree." Machen and Hodgson and James are as central to the development of the horror story in English as Dickens and Thackeray and Joyce are to the development of the English novel. Maybe moreso. But they're only represented by one measly James story.

Now, this anthology deserves some love, not as a useful or even decent survey, but as an occasionally eclectic assortment of horror stories. And unlike the woeful, smug Masterpieces of Horror and the Supernatural survey anthology edited by the woeful and smug Marvin Kaye, The Dark Descent confines itself to stories that can actually inspire horror and terror and unease. So kudos to the unlikely but apt inclusion of Thomas Disch's "The Asian Shore", Gene Wolfe's "Seven American Nights", Philip K. Dick's "A Little Something For Us Tempunauts" and Michael Shea's "The Autopsy", among others.