The Edge of Running Water (1939) by William Sloane

Even the cover is quiet. Too quiet...

The Edge of Running Water (1939) by William Sloane: William Sloane remains somewhat known today for this pseudo-science-fictional horror novel and To Walk the Night, another pseudo-science-fictional horror novel from the 1930's. They're both horror but very quiet horror -- Charles L. Grant would have been proud.

Filmmakers adapted The Edge of Running Water in 1941 as The Devil Commands, a solid and relatively faithful Boris Karloff movie with a completely anomalous title. 

The Edge of Running Water concerns the efforts of a scientist to build a machine that can contact the dead. He's motivated by the death of his wife from pneumonia. He has a strange woman as his helper. And he's called upon an old friend and former student he hasn't seen for years to provide some vital information needed to complete the experiment. Near a small town in the wilds of pre-Stephen-King Maine, the scientist's experiments have already attracted attention and rumour-mongering among that small town's residents.

And periodically, a strange thunder-like sound booms out from the scientist's house, a sound he will not explain to anyone.

The novel is long on mood and gradually-building suspense and somewhat short on actual scares. Sloane's first-person narrator -- that old friend -- can seem a bit glib at times, and perhaps even a little dense. However, that denseness works in the novel's favour when it comes to the cosmic horror that underlies the novel. 

Our narrator -- and, indeed, everyone else in the novel -- seems to be blithely unaware of the possibility that the experiment creates something much more disturbing than a telephone line to the dead. A terrible mystery may have been solved by the climax of the novel. But is a mystery solved when no one knows it, or at least admits to its solution?

Yes. Yes it is.

The Edge of Running Water is a quiet book, dominated at one point by an overly lengthy police investigation and throughout by the love story that develops between the narrator and the dead wife's sister, who has also come to find out what her uncle is up to.  Recommended.

Spirit (1995) by Graham Masterson

Spirit (1995) by Graham Masterson: For awhile, things go along really well in this increasingly odd ghost story from the prolific Mr. Masterson. The period details of 1940's and early 1950's small-town America seem solid. The main characters are convincingly drawn within the confines of the pulp melodrama. 

Our first sign of trouble is a fairly horrible bit of characterization centered around the female victim of statutory rape. And she's 11, so it's really, really, really statutory. But at this young age she knows that she holds the sexual power over her rapist, and not vice versa! Masterson isn't a good enough writer to pull this bit off. Instead, it's really, really, really icky, and later attempts to depict this mind-set as evidence of psychological trauma keep getting undercut by the text's more prurient sections. 

Our second sign of trouble comes with the increasingly ridiculous explanation for the hauntings and supernatural events surrounding this one family. As Ramsey Campbell once observed, "Explanation is the death of horror." And in this case it really, really, really is.

A third trouble occurs and recurs as various characters who should know better wander off alone and do stupid things so as to get killed. A fourth comes with a one-page Epilogue that might just as well have read 'Poochie died on the way back to his home planet,' so perfunctory and baffling it is. The character who was raped at 11 (or was it 10?) later gets anally raped at the age of 21, but only after she initiates sexual contact with her rapist because she really wants to make it in Hollywood. The rapist has a giant purple cock because of course he does. You know, this novel gets worse and worse the more I think about it. Not recommended, giant cocks and promiscuous tweens and all.

The Terror by Arthur Machen (1916)

The Terror by Arthur Machen (1916): Written in a straightforward journalistic style that's unlike Machen's earlier works of weird fiction that include "The White People" and "The Great God Pan," The Terror is instead the great-grandfather of Max Brooks' World War Z. The Terror depicts its events as real, investigated by the unnamed narrator. 

Those events aren't zombie attacks -- they're mysterious deaths breaking out in various locations throughout Great Britain during World War One. Have the Germans landed some sort of hidden force on the British Isles? Is someone using a mysterious 'Z-Ray' to smother people or send them running off cliffs to their deaths? Or is there something wrong with the animal kingdom?

Machen was writing furiously at this time in his life, forced into newspaper work in order to pay the bills. The Terror isn't the imaginative and literary triumph that the aforementioned stories were, but it's still an enjoyable and often weird book. It's also an important permutation in horror's long love affair with the pseudo-documentarian style. Where 'letters' and 'journal entries' once told us that what we were reading was 'real,' now the journalistic voice does.

It's also a mutation of something going back to at least Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. In that early 18th-century work, DeFoe told a fictional 'you-are-there' story about a real event. Machen embeds The Terror in the real, early events of the Great War and then, like DeFoe, tells everything as a piece of actual reportage. It's a major stylistic leap.

There are many fine moments of horror and pity throughout The Terror, along with some marvelously weird images. Machen captures the way fear can travel through gossip when the official channels are trying to hide the problem. A late-novel tableaux of horror at an isolated farm is especially well-managed through the description of the aftermath and through a dead man's journal describing the mysterious and terrible events that led to that aftermath.

There are a couple of flaws to note. One isn't so much a flaw as a relative lack of closure. Things just sort of stop. This first flaw is exacerbated by the second, which is the narrator's jaw-dropping, climactic theory about why what happened, happened. It's an explanation totally in keeping with Arthur Machen's beliefs about society. But it's a moment of political and social commentary that will leave a sour aftertaste with anyone who doesn't long to live in a medieval fiefdom. I kid you not. Recommended.

The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (1909)

The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (1909): William Hope Hodgson's brilliant short novel of the sea and its terrors is a fine, tightly plotted work of horror and disquieting weirdness. A careful, fairly slow build of suspense climaxes in a rapid-fire and horrifying climax. 

Hodgson's early days as a merchant sailor come into full play in this tale of the cargo ship Mortzestus, plying the seas some time early in the 20th century or late in the 19th. The Mortzestus is a sailing ship on an Atlantic run. But she's also a ship whose crews have felt her to be more and more strange as the years have passed. And strange she is, and becoming moreso.

The joys of The Ghost Pirates lie in a lot of areas, from the unusual but intelligibly delivered dialects of the sailors (and of this particular sailing milieu itself, really) to the gradual but accelerating accumulation of details and events that give the novel its name. 

From the beginning, we know something has happened -- the narrative is framed as being the written testimony of Jessop, last survivor of the Mortzestus. Jessop has been rescued by another ship. Rescued from what? Well, that's why there's a novel.

The Ghost Pirates is one of two Hodgson weird novels of the sea (The Boats of the Glen Carrig is the other). Hodgson also wrote dozens of other stories set at sea, from comic pieces to thrillers to horror and the supernatural. He also wrote in a sub-genre I'd probably call 'Fictional Sea Cryptids,' tales of unusual animals and other... things... which come into conflict with human beings. 

The Ghost Pirates is part ghost story, part cryptid fiction, part pseudo-scientific horror story. Perhaps. Jessop offers an explanation for the events of the novel that's not a tale of actual ghosts, but he doesn't necessarily know what really caused the events of the novel. 

Nonetheless, Jessop's quasi-scientific explanation of the horrors he and the rest of the crew of the Mortzestus are beset by is in line with many of Hodgson's other stories and novels in which supernatural events are given disturbing, visionary, cosmic explanations. A model of narrative economy, The Ghost Pirates is one of the treasures of weird fiction. Highly recommended.

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.

The Nature of Balance by Tim Lebbon (2000)

The Nature of Balance by Tim Lebbon (2000): An early novel from the prolific Tim Lebbon pits a small group of people against nature gone mad. Or at least intensely angry at human beings. 

There are elements of Arthur Machen's work throughout the novel, as one reviewer points out in a blurb on the back cover. Of course, Lebbon has a character talk about an Arthur Machen story early in the text, so there's a signpost here, brightly illuminated. It's Machen's "The Terror," in which animals launch an attack on humanity, that's referenced in the novel. 

However, there are other Machanesque touches as well that recall other works, especially a discussion of what true natural evil would look like ("The White People") and Machen's ideas of reality being perhaps too horrible to contemplate without some mediation ("The White People" and "The Great God Pan," among others).

Lebbon doesn't attempt to write like Machen. The Nature of Balance is more like SplatterMachen, with all the explicit blood and guts and gore and sexual ramifications shown where they were only (strongly) implied in Machen's early 20th-century work. It works because of Lebbon's strong hand at characterization more than anything else. 

The litany of horrors can get a bit repetitive after awhile (never have so many things smelled so "rich" and "meaty" -- the line between gross-out and dog-food commercial can be a thin one). But Lebbon also exhibits a great deal of creativity in depicting Nature gone mad at warp-speed. There's actually something Miltonic in some of the descriptions of what is, I suppose, a post-post-lapsarian landscape, a world in which once again everything has changed, changed utterly. But there's also hope, and hopeful characters amidst the rubble and the crawling tentacles of malevolent trees. Recommended.

Demon Night by J. Michael Straczynski (1988)

Demon Night by J. Michael Straczynski (1988): Babylon 5 creator  and long-time Spider-man writer J. Michael Straczynski has also written three horror novels over the years, with this being the first. It almost seems parodically like a Stephen King novel at points. It's laced with portentous and generally pretentious quotes at the beginning and at each section break, which is very much a King trademark (lest we miss the point,  Straczynski quotes King on the novel's main epigraph page). It's set in small-town Maine, it involves a former resident of that town as a child returning as an adult, and it involves an ancient evil awakening and transforming townspeople into monsters. Yes, it bears more than a passing resemblance to King's Salem's Lot, only with possession-crazy demons rather than vampirism as the culprit. 

The cast of characters who battle the evil includes a struggling writer, a Roman Catholic priest, and a medical doctor. OK, that's also quite a bit like the good guys in Salem's Lot. But wait, the protagonist has a wide array of psychic and telekinetic powers with which to battle the evil. So it's like Salem's Lot mashed up with Firestarter, The Shining, and The Dead Zone. There's also quite a bit of It. And there are Native American tribes mixed in because you can't have an American horror novel without a mysterious location tied into Native American spirituality.

Basically, if you haven't gotten enough Stephen King, Maine-based horror over the years, this novel may be for you. Straczynski offers generally well-drawn, sympathetic characters. The antagonist leaves a bit to be desired -- its speechifying, when it comes, is something of a disappointment. There's also a description of the Thing in its final form that really, really seems to anticipate South Park's ManBearPig. Snakes, cockroaches, and what appear to be malevolent, wall-crawling lobsters (well, it is Maine) show up in such a cursory fashion as obstacles to our heroes at the end that they seem to have accidentally wandered in from an Indiana Jones movie. 

And it's interesting to see a Wild Talent novel collided with a horror novel in this way, at least at the end when a full array of telepathic and telekinetic powers are needed to combat the antagonist. There's maybe a bit too much superhero in the main protagonist, but he's a relatively likable fellow for all that he's a Chosen One in the long tradition of genre Chosen Ones (though the Chosen One tends more to the epic fantasy and science fiction areas of genre).

The gem of characterization is the Roman Catholic priest, however, who takes a beating without ever losing his stubborn dignity. Why do atheists write the best characters of faith? In any case, I enjoyed the novel, though there's nothing that really stands out about it. Lightly recommended.

Late-Early Robert R. McCammon Takes a Mystery Walk

Mystery Walk by Robert R. McCammon (1983): By the mid-1980's, Robert McCammon was a best-selling horror writer whose publishers very firmly positioned him in the tradition of Stephen King. He eventually got tired of being pigeon-holed and all but vanished for about a decade before returning in the early oughts. It's actually a brave moment for a writer -- McCammon could have kept writing contemporary horror for years, as he'd become a very popular writer when he changed. 

Mystery Walk is late-early McCammon, a big jump forward from his first few enjoyable but very pulpy novels of the late 1970's and early 1980's. Is it Kingian? Not consciously, I don't think, and McCammon was always interested in the nuts and bolts of things, whether those things were science-fictional or supernatural in nature. A fair bit of Mystery Walk explores how the supernatural powers of its linked protagonists work, and why, in a metaphysical sense.

The novel follows dirt-poor half-Choctaw Bill Creekmore and seemingly magical faith healer Wayne Falconer into their early twenties in the 1960's and early 1970's. Both hail from a racist, somewhat toxic small town in Alabama. Both must come to terms with supernatural powers: while Falconer can sometimes call upon healing powers, Creekmore can interact with the ghosts left behind by violent deaths and convince them to move on to the afterlife. Both are pursued by a malign supernatural other known to them as the Shape Changer.

McCammon's characters are finely and sympathetically drawn here for the first time in his career. There's a real sense of dread to the supernatural set-pieces that dot the novel. My favourite is a battle between Billy and a supernaturally infected carnival ride. McCammon manages to create sympathy for Falconer as well, as he goes down the wrong path for understandable reasons and ends up under the sway of a somewhat cartoonish Los Angeles mobster with a fear of contamination that makes Howie Mandel look like Pigpen.

Despite its scenes of horror, Mystery Walk occupies the borderlands between horror and dark fantasy. Even early in his career, McCammon resisted being just one thing, and the novel shows an affinity for Ray Bradbury as much as it does a resemblance to Stephen King. The Bradbury influence shows up in content, not in style, and it would again and again throughout McCammon's career. Billy's time spent working for a magician at a traveling carnival is the most Bradburyian stretch here, and it's the most enjoyable of the novel.

McCammon also does a fairly sensitive job of using Native American mythology (or at least the semblance of Native American mythology) to supply the underpinnings of the supernatural forces at work in the novel. The Shape Changer's motivations only come into complete focus in the novel's climax, and they make perfect sense. The journeys to self-awareness of Falconer and especially Billy are the eponymous 'Mystery Walk.' 

Certain things are problematic. The aforementioned mobster doesn't fit organically into the novel, and his almost cartoonish qualities make him seem like a James Bond villain from the Roger Moore era by the time we're done with him. The set-up for the climax stretches credibility to its limits, even in a novel in which we must accept the presence of the supernatural. But you're watching a young but capable writer figure out how to put things together. It all ends up feeling like the somewhat uneven but ultimately rewarding start to a series of novels that never materialized. Recommended.

The Stately Boobs of Ireland

Playmates by J.N. Williamson (1982): J.N. Williamson is a nice story -- a writer whose published career began in his late 40's with what soon seemed to be about ten horror novels a year. I assume some of them may have been written years or even decades earlier, but he may just have been incredibly prolific. Until now, I'd never actually read one of his novels. 

Playmates alternates between crazy, purple-prose badness and long stretches of tedium which, if you're like me, you'll skim like crazy. Set in Catholic Ireland, it's a horror story about Fairies and an old family secret. Intentionally or not, it also veers into anti-feminism in its choice of who dies and who lives, among other things.

Only a minor character who seems to have been intended for more, based on his lengthy introduction, is remotely sympathetic to anyone who's not a dink. We instead get a couple of selfish men, a fantasy woman for all those who dream of a wife who's delighted to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and a callous and horrible child. One roots for everyone to die. Spoiler alert: one does not get what one wishes.

This is the sort of horror novel in which many terrible murders happen in a small town and no one outside that town takes any interest. Why should they? The people inside the town barely seem to notice. People do stupid things again and again. A child's fatness is short-hand for why he should die (and he does). Two young lovers die because of course they do.

Stylistically, Williamson throws some terrific howlers at us. The hills of Ireland are like many breasts being caressed by many hands. A naked woman's giant breasts remind our aroused protagonist of two scoops of ice cream with a cherry on top of each. Of course he marries her. Maybe he has an ice-cream fetish.

The greatest pleasure of the novel comes late in the game, with the revelation of the family secret that's been hinted at throughout the novel. It's a revelation so astonishingly unconnected to anything that's come before, and so ridiculous in its visual description and in its workings, that it helps end the novel on a high note of complete goofiness. 

The old SCTV show once did a skit called O. Henry Playhouse in which every story, regardless of its setting or content, ended with someone being killed by a tiger. Williamson's revelation of what's in the locked room of family secrets is at that level of unconnected shock value. Except that a tiger is straightforward. What's in the room makes about as much sense as The Devil's Coat-rack.

The fairies are pretty stereotypical when they show up. They're amoral and occasionally murderous. Hidey-ho. They also can't be fought in any meaningful way in the book's fantasy universe, so there's really not much point to any confrontation with them. In a move which gilds this awful novel with an extra layer of unearned pretension, every chapter ends with a lengthy quotation about fairy-riddled Ireland from writers that include Yeats and Colin Wilson. Got to use that research. Not recommended. 

Bathos in the North

The Dawning by Hugh B. Cave (2000): Born in 1910, Hugh Cave started his writing career around 1930. He worked in and out of genre, notably horror, for years before moving on to the slicks and to writing various books both fiction and non-fiction, including well-regarded non-fiction works based on his experiences in Haiti. He returned to horror and fantasy relatively late in life, in the 1970's, and ended up collecting a handful of lifetime achievement awards from various genre organizations.

I note all that because it seems a bit churlish to point out that The Dawning really isn't a very good novel. Published when Cave was 90, it's amazing that he was writing anything by then. 

One problem is that the novel is misidentified as horror by its publisher, the late and unlamented Dorchester Publishing. It has a few scenes of horror, but so too does James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It's really a tale of survival in a world teetering on the brink of environmental apocalypse. You know, just like James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

But boy, do things take their own sweet time. Most of the characters are sympathetically drawn, though often in a sickly sweet, sentimental way. There's a cute, overly intelligent dog. There's a lot of canoeing. There are some wise Native Canadians. There's a monster, or perhaps several monsters. 

One of those monsters is a skunk the size of a bear. It's really hard to suspend disbelief when dealing with a homicidal skunk the size of a bear. It just is. The house-sized, three-eyed frog doesn't help either.

Cave sends a disparate group of Americans, led by a wise old professor who turns out to be about 45, into the wilds of Northern Ontario to escape the breakdown of civilization. One of those recreational drugs that makes people homicidal but seems to have no other effects -- a type of drug seen only in fiction -- has helped accelerate societal breakdown. 

Early on, the group relies on the wilderness skills of an outdoorsman who is also a cruel lout, a spousal abuser, and a rapist. You can pretty much guess who the human antagonist of the novel will be on about page 20, when this character is first introduced. Don't wait around for any subtleties of character for this guy. You're not getting any.

Eventually, something starts stalking them. Well, occasionally stalking them. As it kills the least developed characters first, it clearly possesses a certain narrative sense. Eventually the novel ends. I skimmed a lot of pages. Cave's professionalism carries the novel about as far as polished, professional prose can carry a thing. 

The Dawning isn't badly written in a technical sense. It is stereotypical in much of its characterization and occasionally mawkish in its sometimes sunny, sometimes weepy sentimentality. The dog makes friends with a lovable doe. The dog, a miniature Greyhound, has been named Rambi by its owner because it's like a little doggy Bambi. There's 300 pages more where that stuff came from. Not recommended.

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1977)

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1977): The last of the prolific and long-lived Leiber's truly great horror-dark-fantasy novels, and for my money the best, Our Lady of Darkness plays with themes and concepts Leiber first explored nearly 40 years earlier in his seminal horror story "Smoke Ghost" (1940). 

In that dark and terrific story, we discover that the multiplying and expanding  urban landscapes of the 20th century breed their own peculiar types of ghosts, spirits, and perhaps even gods. In Our Lady of Darkness, we begin to learn just what sorts of entities may haunt the 20th century, and why, and to what ends. The list of writers who owe a debt to Leiber's concept includes such luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell, and a veritable plethora of others.

Leiber's semi-autobiographical stand-in of a protagonist, writer Franz Westen, is a recovering alcoholic who lives in a somewhat odd, old apartment building in San Francisco in the late 1970's. Two books he purchased while in a near-blackout state several years earlier begin to occupy his mind: a bizarre Depression-era screed about the supernatural dangers posed by the existence of cities, and an unsigned journal from the same time period which Westen comes to believe belonged to (real) horror writer Clark Ashton Smith. 

Smith pretty much permanently moved to the country in the late 1930's, avoiding cities thereafter. Why? What did his brief friendship with the writer of the screed reveal? Looking out across San Francisco with his binoculars to the top of Corona Heights, a wooded hill in the middle of developed urban space, Westen sees a strange, brown figure capering and dancing -- and then taking notice of his attention.

And we're off. Leiber blends the real and the fictional into a fascinating mix of horror, dark comedy, and supernatural speculation. Jammed with enough material for a novel ten times its modest length, Our Lady of Darkness remains light on its feet throughout. Spiked with fine and occasionally shocking moments of horror, the novel nevertheless presents a protagonist who never stops trying to think his way through the bizarre events he's been dropped into because of these two books of (seemingly) accidental purchase.

Westen's friends in the hotel are also well-drawn, as is the libertine expert on the supernatural whom Westen turns to for information on San Francisco's occult past. Real-world figures that include H.P. Lovecraft, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce are woven plausibly into the story, their fictions and their lives making the events of the novel seem more plausible in a completely loopy way with each passing page. Leiber's fictional occult speculations become more convincing than most of our world's real occult writings.

Leiber was one of the 20th century's most gifted cross-genre writers. He helped create the sword-and-sorcery genre with his wry and long-running Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series, wrote piercingly good science fiction with his The Big Time, "A Pail of Air," and "Coming Attraction" (to name just three), and helped modernize horror in a way that still hasn't completely taken hold, as the current proliferation of all those tired vampires and werewolves continues to show. 

His theatrical background informed works that include "Four Ghosts in Hamlet," while his life-long fascination with chess gave us one of the two or three finest chess-horror pieces ever written, "Midnight by the Morphy Watch." That he could also do pitch-perfect homages to his old pen-pal H.P. Lovecraft or move seemingly effortlessly into post-modern strangeness while already in his 50's with stories that include "The Winter Flies" and "Gonna Roll the Bones" seems almost unfair to other writers. Our Lady of Darkness may be his finest novel -- in any case, it's one of no more than twenty or so of the finest novels ever gifted to the horror genre to call its own. Highly recommended.

Domain (1979) by James Herbert

Lair by James Herbert (1979): Late, prolific English horror novelist James Herbert really had a gift for blending left-leaning social commentary into his blood-spattered works. Lair, the second novel in his Rats trilogy, isn't quite as agit-proppy as The Rats or Domain. Nonetheless, it takes a lot of shots at upper-class twits, self-serving politicians, and money-grubbing corporate types.

The two co-dependent sub-species of giant rats that brought London to its knees in The Rats seem to have been vanquished when this novel opens. Four years have passed. But in the idyllic private forest of Epping Wood, a protected green space just a few miles from the centre of London, England, something is stirring. The two-foot-long black rats and their two-headed, nearly immobile overlords have adapted to life in the forest. And boy, are they hungry!

This time around, a plucky male biologist who works for the world's biggest rat-catching corporation (the Rat Invasion of London created some great business opportunities) and a plucky female forest guide are our main protagonists. This is an early James Herbert novel, so be assured that they will engage in a graphic five-page-long sex scene before the story's over. 

The super-rats soon create lots of mayhem and a lot of headless bodies stripped of all flesh. As a second book in a trilogy, Lair is a bit more restrained than the first and third novels. The action stays confined to the forest. Really, it's a pastoral from Hell. 

The gruesome scenes are very gruesome and quite inventive. The bureaucrats and politicians are dangerous idiots. The adaptation of the super-rats seems logical and well-thought-out, as do the social frictions between the two sub-species of super-rats. There's trouble in Rat Paradise! But they're still super-hungry! And, in what I think is a first for Herbert, the supporting pervert character doesn't die. Or does he? In any case, Herbert really didn't like Phys. Ed. teachers. Recommended.

Stoned Immaculate

Shrine by James Herbert (1983): Late British "chiller" writer James Herbert is in fine form here with this lengthy supernatural thriller about miracles and monsters and money-grubbing. In a small town near Brighton, a 12-year-old girl seems to start performing miracles, from levitation to healing the sick. She says she's operating on the behest of the Virgin Mary. But if so, why does she seem so focused on the ancient, weirdly twisted oak tree near her parish church?

Herbert deftly juggles a fairly large cast of characters, keeping things in the air while he also develops the supernatural and possibly psychic manifestations that begin to cause people from across Great Britain and, ultimately, the world, to flock to the small church. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic authorities fast-track their investigation into whether or not these events can be classified as 'true' miracles worthy of endorsement by the Church.

The miracles are a bonanza for the town's businesses and for the Roman Catholic Church. But as the girl seems to become more powerful, the skeptical parish priest seems to noticeably weaken and wither the longer he remains in close proximity to either her or the church. And whenever the girl heals people, terrible things happen to nearby livestock, a fact that goes unobserved by the general population.

A strange alliance will be created between the two priests who are skeptical of the whole affair and the ambitious, agnostic small-town journalist who first reported the story and has become famous because of it. But their efforts may be impotent, given the power the girl appears to possess.

Herbert really does a lovely job here of mixing deft characterization, social commentary, occasionally gruesome horror effects, and more rarefied moments of existential and psychological terror. A scene in the church basement amongst ancient, broken statues really does the job. So, too, does the finale, an apocalypse that manages to evoke pity as well as horror. Highly recommended.

Dark Seeker (1987) by K.W. Jeter

Dark Seeker (1987) by K.W. Jeter: Subtle and gradually building horror novel about the aftermath of a California incident that managed to combine something like the Manson Family with a psychoactive drug that seemed to create a shared consciousness among those who used it.

The charismatic, insane psychiatrist who ran the drug trial -- and created the murderous group -- now languishes in an asylum for the criminally insane. Several of the participants who did not actually murder anyone are free, but they need to take a pharmacopia of drugs several times a day to remain sane: the consciousness drug's effects on the human body are permanent and persistently intrusive.

While the main narrative thread follows recovering cult member Michael Tylers's attempts to remain sane and build a new life with his girlfriend and her son, other plotlines (all of which will eventually dovetail with Tyler's story) show us the journalist who made a ton of money with the True Crime book about the cult and a homeless man named Jimmy who's been enlisted by one of the most dangerous, uncaptured cult members to take care of a mysterious child stolen by that cult member from Michael's ex-wife, who's finally been re-arrested by the police after hiding out in L.A. for several years.

Jeter does a nice job of keeping things at least somewhat ambiguous throughout. Those who take the drug believe that they encounter a being they call the Host, which exhorts them to commit terrible acts. But is it real, and if so, is it supernatural (which is to say, some sort of demon), or is it some sort of psychic projection of the shared consciousness of the drug users? From the outside, though, the verdict of the legal system, and of popular opinion, is that everything about the drug is fake, including the shared-consciousness effect. The cult members went bananas. That is all.

Dark Seeker manages to make even the mercenary, grasping journalist sympathetic, at least towards the end, as he finally gets to experience violent events first-hand. Jeter's characterization of the occasionally unlikeable Tyler, homeless Jimmy, and girlfriend Steff, who's recovering herself from a life of terrible relationship choices and physical abuse, is both strong and subtle. The Host itself is a disturbing presence when it appears (or seems to appear), and Jeter describes the sensory distortions of the drug with hallucinatory elan. And the book ends with a stunner of a final ten pages.

Problems? I'd have liked some more development of what exactly happened with the cult and its charismatic leader -- it almost seems as if some more heavily expository sections were cut so as to keep the page count down. The only other real problem is the title, which really should be something like The Host or The Dark Host. Again, this seems like decision-making at the publishing or editorial level. Recommended.

Bedford Falls

The Keeper by Sarah Langan (2006): This atmospheric and chilling horror novel features first-rate characterization and the development of a real sense of place. Langan sets her first novel in the small, depressed Maine town of Bedford -- and over the course of the novel, Bedford falls. Ghosts and monsters walk the streets.

Indeed, the sheeted dead really do squeak and gibber in the Bedford streets at points, along with other monsters. The monsters of Bedford, though, are the manifestations of all its buried secrets. They have not invaded from Outside.

Langan uses third-person narration to delve into the inner lives of several characters, and does so skillfully without neglecting the atmospheric description necessary to showing the physical and social disintegration of the town as a whole, as both place and imaginative gestalt. At points, she "cuts loose" with visceral, physical horrors, but these things never take over the narrative. This is not a gross-out.

As with so much horror, supernatural events arise from human failure. Child abuse and alcoholism are the chief sins explored here, along with the morally corrosive effects of keeping secrets on both the personal and civic level. Bedford has its own skeletons, literal and figurative, in its closet. The closing of its primary industry before the novel begins becomes, over the course of the novel, a judgment on the town's failings -- and then it becomes something more complex and affecting.

Langan's characters are nicely developed, and their fates, for the most part, evade boiler-plate horror conventions. Startling moments in which the supernatural bursts into the "real" world abound. Through it all, Langan builds a convincing supernatural world populated by flawed human beings. There's evil here, but also hard-won goodness, very faint, very human, absolutely necessary. Recommended.

Rats and Wyrms

Death Drives a Semi by Edo van Belkom, containing the following stories: The Rug; But Somebody's Got to Do It; Death Drives a Semi; The Basement; Mother and Child; Mark of the Beast; Scream String; S.P.S.; The Cold; Blood Count; Ice Bridge; No Kids Allowed; The Piano Player Has No Fingers; And Injustice for Some; Roadkill; Lip-O-Suction; Afterlife; Family Ties; Rat Food (with David Nickle); and Baseball Memories (Collected 1998): Prolific Canadian writer Edo van Belkom's first collection of short stories is terrific, a fine assortment of horror stories from the first ten years of his writing career.

Robert Sawyer's introduction strains a bit in its attempt to compare van Belkom to too many disparate writers. The range of stories here, in terms of style and approach, probably most resembles the early stories of Richard Matheson, or Robert Bloch after his initial Lovecraftian pastiche stage, or even New England horror writer Joseph Payne Brennan. Van Belkom is very much plot-oriented, and very much a writer in the plain style favoured by so many genre authors.

Van Belkom has a droll, black sense of humour that suits some of the stories, and his attempts to breathe new life (or unlife) into tired horror tropes such as the Vampire reflect that sense-of-humour, as we encounter vampires in the professional wrestling circuit and in the weight-reduction business. While many of the stories are gruesomely graphic, others are more traditional suspense ("Ice Bridge"), science fiction ("S.P.S."), or plain-style Bradburiana ("The Basement") with a touch of the gentler Twilight Zone episodes.

Some stories would make fine tales in the old E.C. horror comics of the 1950's, centered as they are around ironic supernatural revenge ("The Rug", "Roadkill"). Three of the best stories -- "The Rug," "The Basement," and the award-winning "Rat Food" -- sympathetically portray the plight of the elderly. "Rat Food" is one of those horror stories that may not be horror at all: I guess it depends on one's tolerance for rats crawling all over one's body. In summation, a collection that any serious reader of horror fiction really should pick up. Highly recommended.

　

　

The Wyrm by Stephen Laws (1987): Page-turner of a horror novel in which a terrible Something (the eponymous "Wyrm") escapes from centuries of imprisonment to takes it vengeance on the small Northern English bordertown whose residents defeated it in the early 17th century.

While The Wyrm doesn't have the depth or complexity of similar novels of the 1980's that include Stephen King's It and Ramsey Campbell's The Hungry Moon, the novel nonetheless kept me reading quickly through to the end. The characters are sympathetic if a bit flatly drawn at times.

The Wyrm itself is an interesting creation, though as with other such super-monsters (such as Pennywise in It), it talks too much and the novel reveals too many of its thoughts, making it less terrifying than a more silent creature might have been. Still, a worthwhile light read. Recommended.

The Night Boat by Robert R. McCammon (1980)

The Night Boat by Robert R. McCammon (1980): This enjoyable, overstuffed, pulpy as all get-out early novel from McCammon gives us a World War Two U-Boat filled with undead Nazis terrifying a Caribbean Island in the late 1970's after the explosion of an old depth charge releases the U-Boat from its burial beneath tons of sand on the ocean floor.

One of McCammon's strengths throughout his career has been the density of his inventiveness in his novels -- stuff just keeps on happening even when it doesn't necessarily build from anything or to anything. Here, that density gives us three Ahabs in search of their great black-hulled Nazi whale, one of them suddenly appearing with about 60 pages to go. It also gives us a former Nazi Ishmael who shows up and then has almost nothing to do. Was this novel edited down from a much longer manuscript? I wonder.

Anyway, an expariate American scuba diver with a tragic past which will, of course, become a vital part of the story's machinery is compelled to unearth the submarine that's lain on the sea floor since 1942. It's the same sub that shelled the small Caribbean island of Coquina during World War Two before being sent to its apparent death by several sub-chasers and a lot of depth charges. But rise it does, to the astonishment of all, whereupon it drifts into the harbour and gets stuck on a reef. So the good people of Coquina elect to tow it into an abandoned military dock despite the fact that the sub managed to kill one fisherman during its trek into the harbour.

And from within the decades-sealed submarine...is that the sound of someone pounding with a hammer? Well, let's open it up and find out!

Did I mention that Voodoo plays a role as well? Of course it does. And undead zombie Nazis with an unquenchable thirst for blood and the ability to use tools. They can smash you with a hammer or fix a submarine. These are not your garden-variety stupid zombies. They have an ethos, and it's called National Socialism!

All in all, The Night Boat is a wild romp that pays off on enough plot threads to be pretty thoroughly enjoyable. McCammon would write much better novels, but no more enjoyable ones on the basic level of pulp melodrama. Recommended.

Hell on Wheels

Christine by Stephen King (1983): King's novel about an evil car has one of his more potent evocations of high-school life, as amiable jock Dennis Guilder tries to protect longtime friend (and outcast geek) Arnie Cunningham from bullies and jerks galore. And a domineering mother. And a guy selling a rundown 1958 Plymouth Fury for too much money. And the supernatural. And, ultimately, Arnie himself.

The big mistake here isn't, as some critics claim, that King never solved a narration problem involving Dennis being sidelined for the middle of the story. Dennis narrates parts one and three in first person, while part two comes at us in third person, mostly omniscient narration that is nonetheless also 'written' by Dennis after the events of the story. The third-person narration allows us to follow characters other than Dennis -- most notably Arnie himself and the fascinating auto-yard owner Will Darnell -- when Dennis isn't around.

This third-person middle section solves two problems -- one, the depiction of events Dennis isn't present for, including a spectacular car chase; two, the problem of Dennis's own narration. Set in 1978 and narrated from late 1982, Christine gives us a narrator who reads a lot more like someone in his mid-thirties in terms of vocabulary and observation. Dennis just isn't credible as a 22-year-old narrator. But setting the main events of the book in 1968, or moving the frame narrative to 1992, would both have created new problems. So it goes.

As I noted, King's evocation of high-school life is mostly first-rate stuff. Arnie is one of King's most tragic characters, a good kid whose moral sense has been toxically compromised by incessant bullying and by his parents' obsessive, meticulous micromanaging of his life. When the intoxicating, demonic Christine comes along, a car only its owner could love, Arnie is pretty much doomed. That the 1958 Fury was not a popular or a particularly good-looking car is really part of the point: Arnie has fallen in love with an automotive outsider.

As with many of King's novels, the supernatural functions like a surrogate for addiction: the car becomes Arnie's obsession, and its corrosive effect on his own personality goes mostly unchecked by him, though much commented upon and protested by everyone around him. Like King's Carrie (or a thousand real-world high-school shooters), Arnie's been primed to be a murderer in the name of vengeance.

And he's ultimately the foil not just of the demonic car, but of her awful, bullying, resentful, deceased owner -- King's other great creation here. Christine's first love, Roland LeBay, manages to embody murderous obsession and self pity. His catch-all term for anyone who crosses him in any way -- "shitter!" -- is a small Kingian gem of condensed characterization.

There are a few narrative hiccups and at least one 'Wow!' moment of unbelieveable character stupidity towards the end of the novel, stupidity that serves only the plot and not common sense or what's been established up to that point. It's a novel that could have used more thinking through, but the scenes of high-school life -- and Arnie's squirm-inducing outcast status -- represent some of King's finest character work. Recommended.

Hebrew for 'Lord'

Ba'al by Robert R. McCammon (1978): McCammon's first novel and first published novel is a humdinger with a lot of flaws and a lot of raw energy and ambition. The influences -- conscious or otherwise -- initially seem to be The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, and The Omen. By the end, though, McCammon has staked out his own odd territory with a climax on the Arctic ice during the long night of the North Pole.

A terrible baby is born sometime in the late 1950's, at least partially the product of a supernatural rape. It's Ba'al, the human-sacrifice-loving god of the Canaanites, a Christian demon known as Beelzebub. Shenanigans ensue. People die. The kid creeps everyone out. By the time he's an adult, apocalyptic cults will form around him. More people will die. And Ba'al's long grudge against the Jews and their god will drive his (or its) actions.

Of course, a ragtag group of heroes will form to face this foe, the most interesting an aging theology professor who initially gets pulled into events while on a search for a colleague gone missing while investigating the rise of the Ba'al cult in Kuwait. The globe-trotting aspects of the novel bear more resemblance to the sort of plotting seen in a spy thriller than in a typical horror novel. McCammon's influences are never programmatic, or programmatically used, even here at the beginning of his writing career.

All in all, I enjoyed this novel. There are flaws, though I'm not sure whether the main flaw is McCammon's fault or his publisher's. Simply put, the novel doesn 't have a middle. We basically jump from the end of the beginning to the beginning of the end, from Ba'al at 10 to Ba'al ascendant. As there are textual references to a confrontation with Ba'al in Mexico and the American Southwest during the 'ascending' portion of the being's development, I really do wonder if this section (also cited in a later, otherwise unrelated McCammon novel, They Thirst) was cut by an editor with the mandate of a specific page length.

In any case, the novel -- and McCammon's brief but illuminating 1988 afterword to the novel -- both make for a diverting experience with much more depth and scope than the similarly themed Omen. Recommended.

Sins and Portents

The Long Lost by Ramsey Campbell (1993): Married couple David and Joelle Owain take a weekend trip to Wales from their home in Chester, a suburb of Liverpool. While David is of Welsh background, he doesn't speak the language -- really, they're just doing the bed-and-breakfast thing. But while hiking around, they find an abandoned village, and beyond the abandoned village, a small island that they can walk to when the tide's out.

And on the small island, a small house, and in the small house an old woman who seems somewhat addled and in need of help. And she says she's a distant relative of David's, and shows him a photograph that seems to confirm this. So after checking with local authorities, they take Gwendolyn back to Chester with them, and install her in a retirement home near their house.

Needless to say, bad things start to happen soon thereafter, for pretty much everyone in the Owain's social circle. But they seem to be doing the bad things themselves. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn (if you want to have fun, go look up the possible meanings of the Welsh name 'Gwendolyn' or 'Gwendolen'), while occasionally socializing with the other residents and with the Owains and their friends, mainly stays in her room and waits.

While The Long Lost is a tale of supernatural horror, that horror plays itself out in the terrible things people can do to other people, especially loved ones. And many of these horrors may simply arise from happenstance. In this way, The Long Lost is a companion piece to Campbell's earlier Obsession, in which the source of what seems to be evil turns out to be far murkier than either the reader or the characters assume. Where does sin come from, and how much blame does any person assume for being unable to resist it?

There are several lengthy setpieces of wrenching horror in the later stages of the novel, made more horrific by Campbell's skill at creating sympathetic victims and perpetrators. And as is perhaps proper in a novel dealing with Wales, birthplace of seminal, often mystical horror writer Arthur Machen, the climax of the novel is more of a mystery than anything that has come before as the mystic and the sublime move into the forefront. Those seeking horror with a clearcut resolution are warned to stay away. Highly recommended.