Cutting Edge (1986): edited by Dennis Etchison

Cutting Edge (1986): edited by Dennis Etchison: Contains the following stories:

Blue Rose by Peter Straub; The Monster by Joe Haldeman; Lacunae by Karl Edward Wagner; "Pale, Trembling Youth" by W. H. Pugmire and Jessica Amanda Salmonson; Muzak for Torso Murders by Marc Laidlaw; Goodbye, Dark Love by Roberta Lannes; Out There by Charles L. Grant; Little Cruelties by Steve Rasnic Tem; The Man With the Hoe by George Clayton Johnson; They're Coming for You by Les Daniels; Vampire by Richard Christian Matheson; Lapses by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro; The Final Stone by William F. Nolan; Irrelativity by Nicholas Royle; The Hands by Ramsey Campbell; The Bell by Ray Russell; Lost Souls by Clive Barker; Reaper by Robert Bloch; The Transfer by Edward Bryant; and Pain by Whitley Strieber.


Excellent mid-1980's original horror anthology edited by Dennis Etchison, one of horror's greatest short-story writers. Stand-outs include "The Monster," a rare foray into horror from Joe Haldeman (The Forever War, Forever Peace) that embeds its supernatural horror in Viet Nam. 

There's also a superior tale of religious angst and the common fear of getting lost in Ramsey Campbell's "The Hands." Les Daniels journeys into short fiction for a weirdly hilarious take on EC Comics-style ghostly vengeance, "They're Coming for You." Chelsea Quinn Yarbro offers a disturbing tale of disintegrating memories and consciousness in "Lapses." In all, a solid anthology with very few misfires. Highly recommended.

Mrs. God (1990) by Peter Straub

Mrs. God (1990) by Peter Straub: If you've ever been immersed in the attenuated horror show that academia in the humanities can be, Mrs. God is your horror novel. Peter Straub probably drew on some of his own experiences as a graduate student in the 1970's. Even if not, the novel still makes terrific, witty horror out of a struggling academic's quest to finish his thesis.

All But Dissertation (ABD) Ph.D. candidate William Standish is hard at work on a thesis about an obscure female American poet who also happened to be his grandfather's first wife. He's also languishing at a small Ohio college, under pressure to finish, his wife in her third trimester, personal and marital problems still fresh in his mind.

Then he gets the call from Esswood House, an English estate where once literary giants that included Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford frolicked and fornicated and left rare manuscripts as thanks for the festivities to the Estate's library and Esswood's owners, the Seneschal family. Standish will have three weeks on a Fellowship at Esswood to go through his (sort of) grandmother's papers. It could be the academic break he's been pining for.

Well, it is and it isn't.

Mrs. God is a brilliant piece of academic horror. One wonders what horrors Straub himself faced during his years of graduate studies. The petty politics of Standish's life at small colleges in the United States ring true, providing a suitable backdrop to the increasingly weird and outlandish horrors and secrets of Esswood.

We also get a great scene in which Standish discovers what a Plowman's Lunch is, and is quite disappointed. Kippers also prove to be a small horror for the American. At least Esswood's wine cellar and whisky selection are both top-notch.

Straub is certainly nodding here to Robert Aickman's strange stories, ably, while mining his own territory of ancient evil, wryly served. Highly recommended.

Monumental Sausage Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pool by Whitley Strieber: Blech. Terrible stuff.

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

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

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

Mr. X-Men

Mr. X by Peter Straub (1999): Very much a transitional novel for Straub between his particular form of literary horror and a much more postmodern, self-reflexive mode of weirdness that persists in his fiction to this day. While there are scenes of graphic violence early in the novel, they eventually give way to an increasingly loopy narrative involving doppelgangers, psychics, superpowers, time travel, jazz, precocious children, and the enduring appeal of the supernatural fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.

Straub's novels since the late 1980's have been preoccupied with serial killers, for the most part in full pop-culture Omnipotent, Omniscient Killer Mode. Mr. X does play with that model to good effect at points, especially towards the end of the novel, as assorted secrets are revealed -- offering a mirror image to the hyper-competent serial killers of so many of Straub's previous and subsequent novels.

The narrator, who is (probably) not the eponymous serial killer, is an engaging fellow. There's a gigantic, never-explicitly-stated 'secret' to the characters in the novel which you may pick up as you're reading it, or if you consult interviews about the novel. I think the 'secret' causes more problems than it solves while also causing the novel to sidestep exploring the many ramifications of that secret, at least one of which actually needs to be addressed for the novel to fully make sense. It's a choice that's at once too clever by half and half as clever as it needs to be.

Other than that, readers may find that things get a bit twee as the novel progresses. Or a lot twee. There's a child character who is probably in the top ten of 'Most Annoying Peter Straub Characters Ever,' and a few eccentric aunts who come close. Your results may vary.

But if you want narrative closure, you should probably read another novel. As with so many of Straub's novels after this one, closure is not on the table, or certainty. We're questioning identity here, not resolving it. Recommended.

　

Harbinger: Children of the Eighth Day: written by Jim Shooter; illustrated by David Lapham and John Dixon (1991-92): Now that a rebooted Harbinger has been back in the comics marketplace for a year-and-a-half, it's interesting to look at Version 1.0. Created by ousted Marvel Comics EIC Jim Shooter as a theoretically more realistic riff on Marvel's X-Men, Harbinger is an odd mix of dense dialogue and sudden breakneck action.

One of the problems here, corrected in the reboot, lies with the antagonist, Harada, and his evil Harbinger Foundation, which among other things collects and trains people with super-powers ('psiots' in the terminology of the Valiant universe). We're told he's bad, and we get a couple of pro forma superhero battles between the 'Renegades' who are the protagonists and Harada's forces, but that's about it.

And suddenly, rather than developing the ongoing battle between the Renegades and Harada, the book suddenly takes off for a superhero battle with aliens on the Moon in issue 3. Then the group breaks up and reforms in the space of an issue.

Events move so quickly that characters, and their decisions, become weightless. It doesn't help that the Renegades, all of them teenagers, are neither written nor drawn as such. They're pretty much your standard squabbling superhero group, one of dozens. They just use words like "slut" and "hosebag" a lot more than the X-Men ever did, and tell a lot more fat jokes at the expense of one of the characters. Recommended for historical purposes only.

H.P. Lovecraft: Tales: edited by Peter Straub

H.P. Lovecraft: Tales: edited by Peter Straub (Collected 2005): If you're going to buy one collection of H.P. Lovecraft's horror and science-fiction stories, this Library of America volume is the one. While it omits the products of about ten years of HPL's apprenticeship learning to write, along with all of his Dunsany-era stories, it nonetheless does contain pretty much all of Lovecraft's essential fiction. The inclusion of his essay on supernatural fiction would have been nice, but the appendices make up for that exclusion.

More importantly, Straub uses the new standard HPL texts as assembled by S.T. Joshi from Lovecraft's original manuscripts and the original magazine appearances of these stories. As monumentally important as editor and publisher August Derleth was to the survival and posthumous propagation of Lovecraft's work, his editing instincts were always somewhat wonky. Derleth tended to think that italicizing key passages and putting exclamation marks after every third sentence made HPL scarier! It didn't. The much calmer, less obtrusive prose of these remastered stories restores a lot of the lost grandeur and sublimity of Lovecraft's greatest moments.

While Lovecraft made cosmic horror and imaginary gods a staple of American horror fiction forever after, he also made the documentary tone a mainstay of horror fiction. Most stories are first-person accounts given by a narrator who has survived the events (at least for a little while -- there's always a cost to saving the Earth) or who has collected information about events that he himself did not participate in. One of the odd things about the current horror boom in 'found-footage' and 'fake documentary' films is that HPL would have loved them: they, and not narrative horror, are the closest approximation on the screen of what the narration of stories from his mature writing period seeks to achieve.

As other critics have noted, one of the fascinating things about looking at HPL's stories in the order of composition rather than the order of publication is to see him gradually losing interest in horror. His work after 1931 or so (he died in 1937 at the age of 47) moves more and more towards being straight, though extravagantly cosmic, science fiction in which all the mythological elements have rational (albeit bizarre) explanations.

For example, the cosmic aliens of "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Shadow Out of Time" really aren't that menacing -- certainly not compared to the invading horrors in the earlier "The Call of Cthulhu" or "The Colour Out of Space." Indeed, the time-travelling Great Race of "The Shadow Out of Time" turns out to be relatively benign, while the Mi-Go of "Whisperer" seem more misunderstood nuisance than threat.

Another progression involves Lovecraft's oft-mentioned racism and bigotry. In his early 1920's story "The Horror at Red Hook", pretty much all the horror flows out of Lovecraft's then-deep-seated loathing of non-WASPy ethnic types, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and miscegenation. But by the last two chronological stories in this collection, Lovecraft presents Australian aboriginals as the only group with a rational response to the things that lurk in the cyclopean ruins of ancient cities hidden in the Outback, and working-class Italian Americans as the last line of defense against the resurrection of the extraordinarily dangerous Nyarlathotep. It's a welcome shift in attitude.

In any event, this is a fine collection with a decent bibliography, time-line, and annotations, though the last seems a bit scanty. Though it at least defines the word 'nefandous.' Highly recommended.

This Novel Sucks

A Dark Matter by Peter Straub (2010): Peter Straub has been a fine writer of the supernatural for decades. A Dark Matter, though, is a dreadful piece of work. It's structurally and metaphysically ambitious -- I'll give it that -- but Straub's reach has far exceeded his grasp here.

The only horror novel from a major writer I can think of that's this bad in the same way is William Peter Blatty's exhausting, overly precious Legion, with its dollar-store profundities and its precious little toe-dips into actual philosophy, religion, and cosmology.

Yes. Of a certain type of horror novel, from 35 years of reading horror novels, I can say this is the second worst one ever. No wonder it won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel of 2010 from the Horror Writers Guild. It must have stunned the voters into a stupor.

Back in 1966, a group of high-school and college students were taken in by figuratively and literally rambling guru Spencer Mallon. They did something in a meadow. One person died. One person disappeared. Everyone was changed forever. Now, the one member of this group of students who didn't go into that meadow, novelist Lee Harwell, sets out to find out what really happened.

This isn't an unusual set-up for a horror story -- M. John Harrison's great novella "The Great God Pan" similarly and far more evocatively deals with the aftermath of such a supernatural event decades later.

A Dark Matter, though...phew. Lots and lots of telling rather than showing (to cite one example, we're endlessly and repeatedly told how everyone just absolutely loves "the wondrous Eel", Lee Truax, Harwell's 1966 girlfriend and 2009 wife, but her wondrousness is sparingly, parsimoniously, sketchily depicted).

We're told how magnetic and amazing Spencer Mallon was and is, but given very little to convince us that he is magnetic and amazing beyond everyone's love and adoration of him. And when we move into the more and more overtly supernatural...hoo boy. You'll never look at that iconic painting of dogs playing poker the same way again, let's just leave it at that. Or AstroTurf.

Silly, sketchy, ponderous, pretentious, pompous. Oh, and Lee Harwell, novelist and frame narrator, boy what a drag he is. He wears expensive shoes. He drinks expensive liquor. His horror novel once got him on the cover of Time magazine in the 1980's. He's a crashing bore who often repeats himself and doesn't seem to be gifted with an editor who will actually edit anything. And there's that wondrous Eel, doing nothing particularly wondrous until the very end. But she is so very wondrous, unlike this lousy novel. Not recommended.

Live Twee or Die Hard

Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology: edited by Peter Straub, containing the following stories:

The Bees by Dan Chaon
Cleopatra Brimstone by Elizabeth Hand
The Man on the Ceiling by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
The Great God Pan by M. John Harrison
The Voice of the Beach by Ramsey Campbell
The Body by Brian Evenson
Louise's Ghost by Kelly Link
The Sadness of Detail by Jonathan Carroll
Leda by M. Rickert
In Praise of Folly by Thomas Tessier
Plot Twist by David J. Schow
The Two Sams by Glen Hirshberg
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story by Thomas Ligotti
Unearthed by Benjamin Percy
Gardener of Heart by Bradford Morrow
Little Red's Tango by Peter Straub
The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet by Stephen King
20th Century Ghost by Joe Hill
The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
The Kiss by Tia V. Travis
Black Dust by Graham Joyce
October in the Chair by Neil Gaiman
Missolonghi 1824 by John Crowley
Insect Dreams by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

I'd like this anthology a lot better with 'horror' removed from the title, though what one would replace that word with could lead to some debate: several stories don't feature the supernatural, so that's out; ghosts don't appear in all the stories, so there goes 'ghost story.' Even The New Fabulists fails, despite the broad net of that term.

"The New Horror" seems to have started around 1980 for Straub, though several writers (Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, and Straub himself, among others) have published careers that stretch back up to 15 years before that. Again, odd: there are at least two generations of writers here, maybe even three. 130 years after Poe, the title seems a bit odd as well, and unintentionally dismissive of those 130 years of horror between Poe's death and the appearance of the first story here.

And horror, no -- about half the stories here fail to horrify, terrify, gross out or (per S.T. Joshi) unnerve. And not just because I've read too much horror. Some of the choices -- maybe none moreso than Straub's choice for his own story -- simply aren't horror, though all the stories in this anthology are well written.

One of the strangely dominant modes here is the sort of dark, fantastical whimsy that John Collier and Roald Dahl, among others, were masters of -- perhaps the most acceptable literary form of the fantastic through much of the 20th century if one bases one's analysis on the slick magazines and what they tended to publish for decades on end. Neil Gaiman, Straub, Jonathan Carroll and a few others offer this sort of project, in which the whimsy can sometimes be smothered in twee, never moreso than in Kelly Link's "Louise's Ghost", a treacly, twinkly botch of a story.

King's uncharacteristic entry here -- I can't recall ever seeing it anthologized since its first appearance in 1984 -- is much better than I remember it, but still undercut by the sheer, well, whimsy of the basic premise. The fantastic element simply can't bear the weight of the story's exploration of madness and addiction. The story would be better without any nod to the fantastic.

I did enjoy many of the stories I'd never encountered before, even many of those that aren't really horror at all. But it's a darn peculiar anthology: peculiarly skimpy on contextual material, and peculiarly spotty in terms of satisfying the 'horror' portion of its title. Lightly recommended.

Green Hell

The Green Woman, written by Peter Straub and Michael Weston, illustrated by John Bolton (2010): I hesitate to use the word 'dandy' when praising such a violent and disturbing graphic novel, but there it is. Straub, Weston and Bolton continue the story of uber-serial-killer Fielding 'Fee' Bandolier (a.k.a. a host of other names, all with the initials 'F.B.'), who we've seen previously in Straub's novels Koko and The Throat.

Viet Nam vet killing-machine Bandolier, now in his 60's, apparently seeks retirement to whatever rewards a seemingly supernatural being inhabiting the closed-down bar The Green Woman just outside Straub staple Millhaven, Illinois. Or is it Wisconsin? An obsessed, debauched cop called Bob Steele, named after an old-timey cowboy actor, has been pursuing Bandolier for years, tracking him by recognizing similar signatures in a host of seemingly unconnected serial killings across America. Two other serial killers are also operating, both obsessed with Bandolier's body of work. Two seemingly haunted bars -- The Green Woman and The Black Galleon, the latter in Ireland -- are also linked by the ship's figurehead, taken from the Galleon and relocated to The Green Woman some time in the past.

The Black Galleon was built from the timbers of a ship upon which all the sailors went mad and killed one another (as one character muses, the lumber probably came cheap). The Galleon wants its figurehead back. And Bandolier believes that his decades of killing have all been in service to some seemingly malign, female supernatural entity that demands he murder and mutilate women. As you can see, this is a light-hearted romp. The writing is crisp and evocative, the violence horrifying but not exploitative, Bolton's mostly photorealistic art jarring and occasionally disorienting to terrific effect. Not for the squeamish, but highly recommended.

The Old Gods Waken

Books:

The Lurker at the Threshold by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (1945): I'm not sure how much Lovecraft is really in this novel -- I'd guess Derleth fleshed out some prose fragments and possibly a short plot outline. In any event, it's steeped in the Cthulhu Mythos, following the ill-fated relocation of a retired British man to his ancestral mansion near the fictitious New England city of Arkham. I think this may be Derleth's strongest work as a writer (his status as a publisher who kept the work of Lovecraft and others in print until it came back into style in the 1960's has never been in doubt; Derleth is an incredibly important figure in American fantasy fiction for that reason alone).

The structure is interesting and effective (three narratives, each picking up where the last one leaves off), and Derleth controls his tendency to over-explain everything to do with Lovecraft's fictional mythology-that-isn't-really-a-mythology (because the gods are really aliens and their powers ultimately derive from vague but potentially explicable sources). The result is an enjoyable novel of doomed genealogy and ancient evil, similar in many ways to Lovecraft's short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, only not as intentionally funny.

As the events of the novel take place near fictional Dunwich and involve the always entertaining Great Old One Yog-Sothoth (both the gatekeeper and the gate to the other-dimensional realms where the Great Old Ones were imprisoned by the relatively benevolent aliens traditionally known as the Elder Gods), the novel also works as a companion piece to Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror," in which Yog-Sothoth gets up to all sorts of shenanigans in the hills surrounding decayed and inbred Dunwich. I can't say as I was ever scared, but I was entertained. Recommended.


Pork Pie Hat by Peter Straub (1999): Straub's novella gives us the reminiscences of a former graduate student who, on one fateful night, interviewed a great jazz saxophonist named here only as 'Hat' (for his ubiquitous, eponymous hat) just months before that musician's death. The student, looking back twenty years later in the retrospective narrative mode I always think of as Great Expectations Structure, tells us the disturbing story-within-a-story the saxophonist told of one strange Hallowe'en night in Mississippi when the musician was 11.

One of Straub's great narrative gifts has been to make what should be complex and perhaps distancing narrative structures seem instead organic, natural -- 'non-threatening', if you will. His novels and short stories have always been invested with a wide and deep concern with The Matter of Story, how to tell stories, how to create narrative from existential chaos. But Straub does these often-metafictional things without distancing the reader from the characters or the densely described world they inhabit. It's a hell of an accomplishment, one that most postmodern writers never come close to achieving. Pork Pie Hat is an affecting story about stories in which Hat's Hallowe'en story opens a door onto one of Straub's major thematic concerns -- the Sublime, the wonder and terror of existence, and how the Sublime can arise out of the normative and even the most base human actions. Highly recommended.