Deadman's Road (2010) by Joe R. Lansdale

Deadman's Road (2010) by Joe R. Lansdale, containing the following stories: Dead in the West (1986); Deadman's Road (2007); The Gentleman's Hotel (2007); The Crawling Sky (2009); and The Dark Down There (2010). Texas horror, Western and thriller legend Joe R. Lansdale gifts the horror reader with the collected adventures of Reverend Jedidiah Mercer here. Mercer stalks the Post-Civil-War American West in search of monsters to lay a beating on. The stories are ultraviolent and often bleak: the body count is high for friends and foes of Mercer alike. 

One could almost imagine Robert E. Howard smiling down (or up) at these stories as a bleaker, Western take on his 16th-century monster-fighter Solomon Kane. Mercer's religion is even darker than Kane's -- his God is no God of mercy, and Mercer does his bidding because he really has no choice in the matter.

Dead in the West: Lansdale's short novel introduces Mercer and about as much of his back story as we get. Conflicted about serving God, hitting the bottle hard, Mercer finds himself dropped unwillingly into a battle against zombie-vampire things raised against a town by the Native American shaman the town murdered. Dead in the West was meant to be a movie -- and it would make one gore-soaked Western.

"Deadman's Road": Mercer is now more sanguine in his monster-fighting duties, this time against a burrow-living zombie with a thing for bees. Mercer's problems keeping a horse alive continue through to the end of the collection. So, too, the terrible meals he's stuck eating in almost every adventure, described lovingly and in great detail by Lansdale.

"The Gentleman's Hotel": A pitched, weird battle against Undead Werewolves, sort of. Mercer's attempt to keep his horse alive does not go well.

"The Crawling Sky": A Lovecraftian whatsit haunts a house, and a well. Say goodbye, horse.

"The Dark Down There": Kobolds enslave silver miners. Explosions follow.

In all, a highly enjoyable collection that makes for a fast-paced, ultraviolent read. Makes the version of Christianity seen in Stephen King's The Stand seem like a happy circle singing "Kumbaya." But the horrors come razor-wrapped in grim good humour, often Mercer's. Highly recommended.

Haunted Legends (2010) edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas

Haunted Legends (2010) edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, containing the following stories:

Knickerbocker Holiday by Richard Bowes
That Girl by Kaaron Warren
Akbar by Kit Reed 
The Spring Heel by Steven Pirie
As Red as Red by Caitlín R. Kiernan 
Tin Cans by Ekaterina Sedia
Shoebox Train Wreck by John Mantooth
Fifteen Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku and the Jotai by Catherynne M. Valente
La Llorona by Carolyn Turgeon
Face Like a Monkey by Carrie Laben 
Down Atsion Road by Jeffrey Ford
Return to Mariabronn by Gary A. Braunbeck
Following Double-Face Woman by Erzebet YellowBoy
Oaks Park by M. K. Hobson
For Those in Peril on the Sea by Stephen Dedman
The Foxes by Lily Hoang
The Redfield Girls by Laird Barron
Between Heaven and Hull by Pat Cadigan
Chucky Comes to Liverpool by Ramsey Campbell
The Folding Man by Joe R. Lansdale 


An interesting idea for an anthology -- writers riff on personal, local, urban or even culture-wide legends -- yields mixed results. Many of the stories float away on New Weird tropes that include lack of closure, excessive cuteness, and excessive (indeed, obsessively so) obscurity. The best stories here offer up their legends, no matter how odd or obscure, straightforwardly. Some of the less successful stories remind one of Henry James' old dictum -- "Write a dream, lose a reader."

I inadvertently applied a 'Test to Destruction' protocol on this anthology as I set it aside for three months. Coming back to it, I soon discovered that I'd already read more stories than I believed: many of them had simply vanished from memory until I encountered them again. That's not an endorsement.

As to the good...

• "The Folding Man" by Joe R. Lansdale is brilliant, weird, gory, and absolutely of a piece with Lansdale's often brilliant, weird, and gory writing career. 
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• "Chucky Comes to Liverpool" by Ramsey Campbell takes on censorship in a riff on real-world events in his native Liverpool. 
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• "The Redfield Girls" by Laird Barron is a subtle and disturbing tale of a real lake in Washington State, with real events mixed in with the fictional ones. Caitlin Kiernan, Gary Braunbeck, and Jeffrey Ford also do commendable work here. 
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• "For Those in Peril on the Sea" by Stephen Dedman misses by that much -- that much being a developed ending rather than a sudden shift into a coy truncation of the story. 

For two bucks, Haunted Legends was a good buy. At full price, though, the book should be avoided -- the best stories are all available in other, better collections and anthologies now. Lightly recommended.

He is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson (2009), edited by Christopher Conlon

He is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson (2009), edited by Christopher Conlon with an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

Throttle by Joe Hill and Stephen King
Recalled by F. Paul Wilson
I Am Legend, Too by Mick Garris
Two Shots from Fly's Photo Gallery by John Shirley
The Diary of Louise Carey by Thomas F. Monteleone
She Screech Like Me by Michael A. Arnzen
Everything of Beauty Taken from You in This Life Remains Forever by Gary A. Braunbeck
The Case of Peggy Ann Lister by John Maclay
Zachry Revisited by William F. Nolan
Comeback by Ed Gorman
An Island Unto Himself by Barry Hoffman
Venturi by Richard Christian Matheson
Quarry by Joe R. Lansdale
Return to Hell House by Nancy A. Collins
Cloud Rider by Whitley Strieber 

Award-winning, enjoyable anthology celebrating the late, great Richard Matheson, whose horror and suspense work in print, in movies, and on TV helped define horror and suspense for two generations of readers and viewers.  Duel; The Shrinking Man; Hell House; I Am Legend; What Dreams May Come; Stir of Echoes; Somewhere in Time; episodes of The Twilight Zone, including the William Shatner-on-a-plane "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" remade with John Lithgow in The Twilight Zone movie; adaptations of Poe for Roger Corman's film studio: these are just some of Matheson's contributions to pop culture. 

The stories include homages, sequels, revisionist takes, and riffs on Mathesonian ideas. "Cloud Rider" by Whitley Strieber is the wildest riff in the anthology, inspired as it is by Matheson's entire Collected Stories. The other stories are a bit more specific.

Standouts include Nancy Collins' novella-length prequel to Hell House, that inspired haunted-house story of the 1960's. Collins shows us the events that preceded those in Matheson's novel, to good effect. Mick Garris also offers a prequel in "I Am Legend, Too," and it also offers a revisionist take on the original Matheson novel's vampire-fighting protagonist from the POV of his vampiric next-door neighbour. "She Screech Like Me" by Michael A. Arnzen effectively extends Matheson's stunning debut story, "Born of Man and Woman," while "The Diary of Louise Carey" by Thomas F. Monteleone retells The Shrinking Man from the viewpoint of his increasingly beleaguered, non-shrinking wife.

The venerable William F. Nolan offers a short, brutal sequel to another Matheson horror story, while Joe Lansdale presents a sequel/sidequel to Matheson's "Prey" -- a.k.a. the Matheson story adapted for the TV movie Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black does battle with a tiny, violent, highly animated African fetish doll in her own apartment. And Stephen King and son Joe Hill (King) collaborate on a story for the first time, a riff on "Duel" that involves a motorcycle gang and a transport truck instead of the original's station-wagon-driving salesman and a monster of a truck.

Overall, this is a fittingly strong anthology to honour such a major figure in the modern history of fantasy. As Ramsey Campbell notes in his introduction, Matheson helped move horror out of Gothic castles and into suburban bedrooms and America's endless blacktop highways. And because Matheson worked in television and movies so much after 1960, his works reached much larger audiences than those generally afforded writers of prose. Recommended.

The Nightrunners by Joe R. Lansdale (1987)

The Nightrunners by Joe R. Lansdale (1987): One of the prolific Lansdale's first novels (third by my count, if you are counting) is a gas-guzzling monster of horror. It fits comfortably into the splatterpunk sub-genre of horror, though it's also simply a gory, tightly plotted piece of supernatural horror. Its closest genre antecedent is Stephen King's early, flawed, but compelling novella "Sometimes They Come Back."

For all his goriness, Lansdale knows when to show and when not to show: a rape scene central to the novel never appears in its entirety, but the emotional horror of the rape victim is described throughout, and quite sensitively. But this is also a novel of revenge: the rape victim will stop being a victim before it's all over, or die trying.

The horrible gang of teens who act as antagonists throughout the novel are both natural terrors and supernaturally guided horrors. Through the 'present-day' events of the novel and the lengthy flashback sequence in the middle of the narrative, we see dead-end, lower-income teens turn into vicious rapists, killers, and necrophiliacs. But they're also increasingly in thrall to Lansdale's recurring supernatural entity The God of the Razor, who feeds on bloodshed and terror offered up to him.

The Nightrunners follows the gang's pursuit of the rape victim and her husband, trying to pull themselves and their marriage back together months after the rape. The novel takes shots at right-wing bigots and left-wing apologists for criminals along the way -- it's an equal-opportunity scream of outrage.

There are dire economic, social, and familial reasons for the way the teens turned out, but they are still responsible for their actions. Or at least the non-psychotic ones are. Their leader and his lieutenant appear to be sadistic sociopaths from the beginning. Some of the rest of the gang is dead inside; the others, to their cost, just went along for the ride.

Everything builds to a climactic siege that's gratifyingly messy and, at points, almost slapstick in its portrayal of the occasional clumsiness of desperate people. Despite their supernatural backing, the teens aren't the hyper-competent, indestructible killers of so many slasher movies. There's a fog of violence to the last thirty pages or so, a realistic portrayal (in its supernatural, blood-soaked way) of the manner in which the plans of both protagonists and antagonists can go astray. It's like that old chestnut about warfare: no battle-plan survives intact the first moment of engagement with the enemy.

There's an admirable ruthlessness towards characters here, bolstered by Lansdale's already solid grasp of characterization. The scenes of real-world violence can be jarringly sudden. The scenes of supernatural congress with The God of the Razor work nicely as well (which is to say, not nicely at all) -- it's a god of violence that seems almost plausible in a religious sense, and eclectically imagined in a visual sense. A couple of years after this novel, Lansdale would pit the God of the Razor against Batman in a prose anthology. Batman would prevail there. Here, there's only ordinary people faced with extraordinary cruelty. Who or what will prevail here? Recommended.

100 by 54

100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories: edited by Al Sarrantonio and Martin Greenberg with stories by Washington Irving, Chet Williamson, Steve Rasnic Tem, Donald A. Wollheim, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Al Sarrantonio, Henry Slesar, Richard T. Chizmar, Avram Davidson, Gary L. Raisor, E. F. Benson, Saki, Frances Garfield, Mark Twain, Phyllis Eisenstein, William F. Nolan, Ed Gorman, Eric Frank Russell, Melissa Mia Hall, Joe R. Lansdale, Ruth Berman, H. P. Lovecraft, Edward D. Hoch, James E. Gunn, Robert Sheckley, Barry Pain, Fritz Leiber, Richard Laymon, Jerome K. Jerome, Ramsey Campbell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Norman Partridge, Juleen Brantingham, Barry N. Malzberg, Thomas F. Monteleone, James H. Schmitz, Frank A. Javor, E. G. Swain, Bernard Capes, Nancy Holder, Charles Dickens, William Hope Hodgson, David Drake, Mort Castle, Bill Pronzini, Dennis Etchison, Charles L. Grant, Susan Casper, Rudyard Kipling, Sharon Webb, F. Paul Wilson, Manly Wade Wellman, and Stephen Crane (1993).

Fun, long anthology of horror stories of ten pages or less, arranged alphabetically. The book covers a range of about 150 years, starting with Dickens and Poe and ending up in the early 1990's with Norman Partridge. It's entirely inevitable that I'll find some of the selections odd and some of the omissions odder.

What I do like, though, are the multiple selections from Donald A. Wollheim, known much better now as the founder and name-giver of DAW Books, but also a fine short-story writer. "The Rag-Thing" is a terrific little piece, as is "Babylon: 70 Miles." In a perfect world, I suppose one could ask that every story be written by a different person. And in my perfect world, the parodies would be in their own anthology, as neither a Twain nor a Jerome K. Jerome piece raise any hair at all (nor are meant to, as they parody the form and content of ghost stories).

I've noticed this penchant in a lot of horror anthologists -- there's always a couple of parodies that aren't scary and were never meant to be. But there they are in something labelled 'horror.' I actually don't get it. There are great humourous horror stories of various types, and there are extremely subtle parodies that can still work as a horror story.

However, the overt 'ha-ha' stuff just seems out of place in a horror anthology because it isn't actually horror. Is there some unconscious nervousness about horror's respectability that causes the insertion of the parody into a non-parodic anthology? I don't know. I also dislike not knowing the year a story was published, but I seem to have grown resigned to anthologies generally omitting what I think is a necessary piece of editorial machinery. In any case, recommended.