Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (2008) by John Langan, containing the stories "On Skua Island" (2001), "Mr. Gaunt" (2002), "Tutorial" (2003), "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of Purple Flowers" (2007), and "Laocoon, or, The Singularity" (2008):
John Langan's 2002 novella "Mr. Gaunt" is on my all-time list of the most startling 'first-time' reading experiences I've had with an author. It's a great, disturbing piece of horror that acknowledges the past (especially Henry James explicitly and J. Sheridan LeFanu implicitly) while being a fresh and contemporary take on venerable horror tropes. Langan makes the skeleton scary again. How improbable is that?
"Mr. Gaunt" was only Langan's second published story, but it signaled the arrival of a new master of horror. "On Skua Island" was his first work, a slightly more conventional take on horror tropes with a frame story that's as old as ghost stories and as post-modern as any nod to the storyness of a story.
There's only one problem with Langan's first collection. In going with a chronological approach, it puts the two most horrifying stories first. It's a problem that's easily rectified by the reader, of course -- start with "On Skua Island" but move "Mr. Gaunt" to the end of your reading of the five stories included in the collection. It's really a show-stopper.
"Tutorial" is a nice piece of academic horror/satire that takes shots at ideologically stagnant Creative Writing courses and the omnipresence of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Kudos, I say! Langan was and is in academia, and his observations about the terrors of the Ivory Tower are keenly observed and often darkly hilarious.
"Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of Purple Flowers" is both the most pulpy and the most avant-garde of the stories included herein. It's a collaboration between John Langan and his 10-years'-earlier self.
It's a propulsive running battle between a man and a woman on one side and a pack of mysterious monsters on the other. In media res is the order of the day, along with unanswered questions about the nature of the apocalypse these two humans have found themselves trapped within, all served up with the final cherry of an ending that offers no real closure. It's very enjoyable but also almost weightless.
"Laocoon, or, The Singularity" is the most recent of the stories in the collection. It's also previously unpublished, so, Bonus Content! Its portrayal of a depressed, dejected All But Dissertation (ABD) fine arts student trapped in the Hell of Sessional Lecturers rings absolutely true, says I, who once resided in English Literature's version of that Hell.
The novella manages the difficult task of moving a reader's feelings for the protagonist from sympathy to pity as the unacknowledged horror of his situation grows. The end can be taken straight up or as an allegory on self-destructiveness -- or as an allegory on the transformations that can be wrought on someone with an undiagnosed and unrecognized mental illness that gradually eats away the better self.
The collection also includes a generous Notes section by Langan on the origins and process of the stories. It's a fine collection overall, and you'll only heighten its overall effect if you leave "Mr. Gaunt" for last. Highly recommended.
Jason and the Argonauts: written by Jan Read and Beverley Cross; directed by Don Chaffey and Ray Harryhausen; starring Todd Armstrong (Jason) and Nancy Kovack (Medea) (1963): Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion wizardry gives various scenes in this mythological adventure movie the quality of a dream -- or a nightmare.
The actors may not be great, the plot may meander, but the film's stop-motion/live-action integration achieves remarkable effects. It's not that the creatures look realistic. It's that they look just realistic enough while maintaining a look that also suggests their otherworldly nature within the narrative.
Jason and the Argonauts contains two of Harryhausen's greatest achievements -- the giant bronze 'robot' Talos and the great skeleton battle. We also get a nifty battle between Jason and the Hydra and a somewhat disappointing sequence involving Harpies, who never seem to be integrated as effectively as the other stop-motion creatures. Oh, well.
Jason and his crew of merry Greeks search for the Golden Fleece, Hercules screws up, and many great battles are had with monsters while the Greek gods help or hinder Jason in his quest. The battle between Jason and several reanimated skeletons occurs at the end of the film, and it really is a show-stopper. Highly recommended.
Skeletons by Al Sarrantonio (1992): This wild, woolly, and marvelously imaginative novel takes the bare bones of the standard zombie epidemic narrative and makes them new. I've always viewed Al Sarrantonio as being a much more gifted writer of short stories than novels, but this dark fantasy novel is a real treat.
One day, all the dead on Earth rise from their graves. But they do so as skeletons held together by some inexplicable, translucent force field that resembles what they looked like (and what they were wearing!) when they died. Even if they died 3000 years ago. Even if they were dinosaurs.
And the skeletons possess their old personalities with one key difference: they're possessed of an almost-irresistable urge to kill the living. When the living die, their dead flesh vanishes and they, too, become Angry-Ass skeletons. It's the new circle of life! The skeletons can be killed, at which point they disintegrate into dust. But there are a lot of them. There are even insect skeletons. Ha ha whee!
With four first-person narratives telling the tale, Skeletons anticipates Max Brooks' multi-viewpoint World War Z in its structure to an extent, though certainly not in tone or content. We may start off with an apocalyptic war between the Living and the Dead, but the narrative soon starts building another narrative within that: a mythoreligious tale of a world periodically cleansed by a flood... of skeletons. It appears that God may have hit the reset button for humanity (not to mention most other species that aren't lucky enough to be plants). And not for the first time.
Sarrantonio's myth-building is faithful to the often unpleasant ramifications of myth and legend. There's a critique here of vengeful gods and chosen ones, of religious fanaticism and stories that reduce women to super-wombs. But that critique exists within a novel that scrupulously follows the ethos it creates to its logical end.
Though there's still room for a comical gorilla, a faithful wolf, and a drugged-out music promoter who somehow finds himself still human and stuck in the middle of things as the apocalypse heads to its end. Apocalypse, meaning 'the unveiling.' What's more unveiled than a person's naked skeleton?
And one first-person narrative consists of Skeleton Abraham Lincoln's story in the New World Order. Sarrantonio anticipates all those comic horror novels involving famous people, famous literary works, and newly added monsters. Though in this case, he's Abraham Lincoln, Human Hunter. It's a swell, bracingly comic novel. Highly recommended.
