The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteriess of Kyle Murchison Booth by Sarah Monette

The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteriess of Kyle Murchison Booth (2007/ 2nd edition 2011) by Sarah Monette; containing the following stories:

• Introduction by Sarah Monette
• Introduction to the Second Edition by Lynne M. Thomas
• Bringing Helena Back (2004)
• The Venebretti Necklace (2004) 
• The Bone Key (2007) 
• Wait for Me (2004) 
• Drowning Palmer (2006)
• The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox (2004) 
• Elegy for a Demon Lover (2005)
• The Wall of Clouds (2003)
• The Green Glass Paperweight (2004) 
• Listening to Bone (2007) 
• Story Notes by Sarah Monette (2007)

Overall: A well-written, revisionist 'nod' to the hermetic narrators and haunted academics in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. Monette notes in the introduction that she wanted to bring psychological realism and more fully realized characters to stories in the tradition of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft. 

She succeeds in terms of psychological realism and character-building, with the caveat that it seems to me that Lovercraft was far better at characterization when a story called for it than Monette's dismissive evaluation suggests. Oh, well. 

Our first-person narrator is Kyle Murchison Booth. He lives somewhere in New England in the first half of the 20th century in an unnamed city. He works as an archivist of rare books and documents at a fictional museum. He has a tormented family past. In his early 30's in the first story, he's morbidly shy, agoraphobic, and a closeted homosexual who seems to be a virgin when the book opens.

Booth checks a lot of the boxes for various characters in James and Lovecraft. Whether any of James' or HPL's characters were closeted homosexuals is a matter of interpretation. In any case, Booth is a sympathetic fringe figure, albeit one locked in personality stasis for much of the ten stories. He's pretty much the same character at the end as the beginning, though he's got a little better at dealing with the supernatural because the supernatural is what he deals with over those ten stories.

The horror elements are where the stories generally disappoint. In riffing on a variety of standard tropes, the stories often lack both actual horror and a sense of the unusual or new. We open with a demon-raising gone wrong in the way demon-raisings pretty much always go wrong. We have ghosts, bodies sealed behind walls for years, a poltergeist, a ghostly memory, a ghost whose attempts to kill people are really sort of pathetic, an incubus, and an evil paperweight. 

OK, I like the paperweight, though as its victim is a dick, one doesn't feel much horror about the whole thing. So, too, the fate of several other victims of the supernatural. If the supernatural kills a lousy person, does anyone care? The most M.R. Jamesian story in the collection, "The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox," suffers from a similar problem. The supernatural ends up seeming like comeuppance for venial sins in this story and others. It's a sort of EC Comics-lite.

Throughout, though, the characterization of Booth makes him a compelling narrator. His isolation and self-loathing are the real horrors here, to the extent that the supernatural could be eliminated from the stories without any real loss of narrative power. This is a good collection. As horror is a subjective quality, you may find it scarier than I did. Recommended.

Crooked Tree by Robert C. Wilson (1980)

Crooked Tree by Robert C. Wilson (1980): I'll buy almost any horror paperback with a lurid cover if the price is right. At 50 cents, and with the luridness hidden inside the cut-out cover (and a cutout cover with a full-page illustration inside just screams 1970's and 1980's), Crooked Tree fit that bill. I also thought it was an early novel by Canadian SF writer Robert Charles Wilson, but it wasn't. This Robert C. Wilson is a Michigan lawyer with three published novels over the last 35 years.

Well, would that he published more. This is really a terrific little horror novel. Set in and around the Crooked Tree State Park in the northwestern part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, Crooked Tree sees ancient evil resurrected and set loose. Yes, this actually is the 'Indian burial ground' trope in action. It works here -- as does any tired trope -- because Wilson invests time and sensitivity in exploring the Native-American culture of the Ottawas whose burial ground it was, and in making Native Americans non-stereotypical characters in the drama.

For the most part, the novel's descriptions of the natural landscape work, with only a few slips into the purple. A real sense of menace builds, and the supernatural menace, once revealed, is fully worked out and logically combated within the rules Wilson has created for this particular manifestation of the supernatural. The tiredness of the Indian burial ground trope also loses its exhaustion by making the unburied menace something that once threatened the Ottawas as well. This puts the whole thing more in line with the mainstream of supernatural literature, in which danger comes from Something Awful that was buried, and not from the vengeful spirits of once peaceful beings.

Wilson doesn't go as far as Martin Cruz Smith did in the excellent, nearly contemporaneous Nightwing: Crooked Tree's protagonist is still a white American and not a native. But the plethora of well-realized native characters makes the novel something special. So, too, the sensitive use of black bears as the main weapon in the menace's revenge: the novel explains many of a black bear's more dangerous attributes while also making it clear throughout that their danger to humanity in this novel has also been caused by humanity. Or the once-human, anyway. The bears, unlike the shark in Jaws, explicitly are described as acting against their nature in their attacks on humans. Naturally, they are shy and only dangerous in very specific interactions with human beings.

There are flaws. The climax could use a few more pages. As in many Stephen King novels, characters with viewpoints contrary to the author's -- in this case pro-leisure-hunting white men -- are drawn as gross, completely unlikable caricatures who meet their just rewards in being killed. They're as bad as the hillbillies in Deliverance, but the hillbillies in Deliverance were at least competent and sketched-in as being resentful of these rich(er) suburbanites vacationing in the place they called home. And Wilson's protagonist travels around so much in the concluding pages to assemble the necessary information to combat the evil that these pages start to feel like a Michigan travelogue.

However, despite its flaws, Crooked Tree is a surprisingly good horror novel from a little-known writer. It skilfully weaves together supernatural horror with natural horror (the menace must work through living beings to get its vengeance). Some segments suggest Jaws on land, but with animals that have become much more dangerous with a human will guiding and manipulating them. And a couple of the carnage-laden set-pieces are startlingly well-done and refreshingly unsentimental about who will die without being exploitative. Recommended.

Closet Case

Boogeyman, written by Eric Kripke, Juliet Snowden and Stiles White; directed by Stephen Kay; starring Barry Watson (Tim), Emily Deschanel (Kate), Skye McCole Bartusiak (Franny), Tory Mussett (Jessica), Lucy Lawless (Tim's Mother) and Charles Mesure (Tim's Father) (2005): Somewhat blah horror film with a screen story and partial screenplay credit for Supernatural TV series creator Eric Kripke. Childhood boogeyman kidnaps young Tim's father and, as it turns out, dozens of other people over the intervening years until Tim returns home upon the death of his mother to finally confront the creature that's made him afraid of closets for the last 15 years.

There are some solid scare moments here that don't simply rely on Old Reliable 'something jumps out at you!!!', but not enough of them. Barry Watson is curiously bland as the protagonist, while the decision to have two female leads (played by Tory Mussett and Bones's Emily Deschanel) means that neither of them has enough lines to make much of an impact, though it is nice to see Deschanel in a role that doesn't require her to speak like a human computer.

The ending, apparently much-hated by everyone on the Internet, actually goes somewhere interesting, though a greater fleshing out of how and why Tim finally turns the tables on the boogeyman might have helped things. Nonetheless, it's a use of logical magic, and may have signalled what was to come in Supernatural. Well, if Kripke actually wrote the ending. Somehow they followed this with two sequels. Not recommended.

My Bloody Hand!!!

My Bloody Valentine, written by Todd Farmer and Zane Smith, based on the screenplay for the 1981 film of the same name written by John Beaird and Stephen A. Miller, directed by Patrick Lussier, starring Jensen Ackles, Jaime King and Kevin Tighe (2009): 11 years ago, Tom Hanniger (Ackles) accidentally caused an explosion at the mine his father owned. One man survived by killing all the other trapped miners so as to conserve oxygen, though when he was found, he was in a coma. Ten years ago, that man awoke from his coma and went on a crazy killing spree, nearly killing Hanniger before being forced to flee into a collapsing mine tunnel.

Now, Tom Hanniger is back to sell the mine. Selling the mine will put everyone in town out of work because I guess in the universe of this movie, mines can be packed up and moved elsewhere, just like factories. This last is not the dumbest thing in this slasher-movie remake.

According to some wag on the Internet, the original My Bloody Valentine (1981) is one of the neglected high-points of the 'Golden Age of Slasher Movies', by which I assume he means the late 1970's and early 1980's, and not the age of 17, which is really the age at which these things seem interesting. Never has a Golden Age of any cinematic sub-genre produced fewer truly good films, though. That said, this is a pretty inept entry in the recent slasher-film boomlet.

Tonal shifts from horror-comedy to apparently serious melodrama jar the viewer right out of any ability to enjoy the movie on either level. Some of the CGI comes across so laughably that the gold old days of on-set special effects look awfully good by comparison -- a shot of a woman's head bisected by a shovel looks like something a talented 12-year-old whipped up in between Pizza Pops, for instance, while the nods to the 3-D this film was screened in are the same old throwing-stuff-at-the-camera crap we've been seeing from 3-D movies since the 1950's. ZZZZZZZZ.

Jensen Ackles, best known for TV's Supernatural, looks embarrassed and out-of-place here -- indeed, he looks like he's stuck in the Supernatural episode "Hollywood Babylon", in which his character hangs out on the set of a slasher movie that looks way more interesting than My Bloody Valentine. Some of the surprising slasher-film tropes expounded upon the the terrific film-criticism text Men, Women and Chainsaws play out here -- ultimately, the true protagonist (and only competent 'good' person in the entire movie) turns out to be a woman; Ackles, though he headlines the picture, is only in about half the movie, and his character is something of an incompetent boob. So it goes. Not recommended.