Grubbian?

Twelve Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural by Davis Grubb, containing the following stories: Busby's Rat; The Rabbit Prince; Radio; One Foot in the Grave; Moonshine; The Man Who Stole the Moon; Nobody's Watching!; The Horsehair Trunk; The Blue Glass Bottle; Wynken, Blynken and Nod; Return of Verge Likens; and Where the Woodbine Twineth (1964): Davis Grubb was a fine regional writer whose excellent novel The Night of the Hunter had the good fortune to be made into an excellent movie directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish. Grubb wasn't exclusively a genre writer, but he did write a lot of stories that could be classified as such, 12 of which are collected here.

The Night of the Hunter's dense, almost Faulknerian prose wasn't Grubb's normal style. The stories here are smooth and flavourful, touched with the rustic and the colloquial but never overpowered by metaphor or the twee the way Bradbury could be. Fantastic horror appears in several stories, though others ("Radio", for example) are psychological suspense that wouldn't have been out of place on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Stories chronicle rural life in the Midwest and the Southern United States, but are not limited to it. "Radio" is an urban horror; "Nobody's Watching" is a comic bit of science-fiction whimsy set in the broadcasting business; it's the sort of story that Kurt Vonnegut would make his career on. "The Man Who Stole the Moon" also reads like a lost Kurt Vonnegut piece of a gentler sort. Though I compare these stories to the work of others, however, they really are written in a distinctively Grubbian (!) voice, deftly switching among emotional states.

Grubb's flair for combining the horrifying and the absurd stands out in several stories. At times, he resembles the droll John Collier; at others, Ray Bradbury in full nostalgia mode: both contemporaries. "One Foot in the Grave" would have made a great EC Comics horror story. "The Rabbit Prince" is probably the most Bradburyian bit of whimsy here, featuring as it does a magical travelling carnival, a summer vacation, and a young boy as its protagonist. It's a funny story, tinged with a bit of sadness, and should probably be anthologized a lot more often.

So, too, should "Where the Woodbine Twineth" be better known. I've actually seen this story imitated almost verbatim a couple of times, but its own fresh horrors remain singular and oddly disturbing. It's a humdinger. Highly recommended.

A Time of Running

The Night of the Hunter, written by James Agee, based on the novel of the same name by Davis Grubb, directed by Charles Laughton, starring Robert Mitchum (Harry Powell), Shelley Winters (Willa Harper), Lillian Gish (Rachel Cooper), Billy Chapin (John Harper), Sally Jane Bruce (Pearl Harper) and Peter Graves (Ben Harper) (1955): This dark American fairy tale was the only movie Charles Laughton ever directed, as it bombed at the box office. In the decades since its release, it's come to be acknowledged as a classic, its influence seen in such filmmakers as David Lynch and the Coen Brothers (the latter of which would be the only filmmakers I'd trust with a remake).

Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a Depression-era itinerant faux-clergyman and serial killer who murders widows for their money (and because he gets off on doing so). While in jail for a car theft, he learns that his cellmate -- set to be hanged -- stole and successfully hid a big wad of cash somewhere on the outside.

So Powell woos his cellmate's widow (Shelley Winters) while trying to ferret out the location of the money from the only two living people who know -- Winters's son and daughter. Powell fools everyone with his schtick except the boy. Soon there will come, as the Faulkneresque Davis Grubb novel the film's based on notes, "a time of running."

Mitchum's performance is singular and stellar -- he's a charming, creepy monster with a (real) tremendous singing voice. Billy Chapin, playing the 10-year-old boy, does lovely work as he defiantly opposes Powell while trying to keep his younger sister -- and the money -- safe. Their escape down the Ohio River, with Powell always somewhere close behind, is staged as an almost mythic journey.

Laughton uses a lot of silent and early sound film in-camera visual effects to achieve certain things (forced perspective being the most notable, but he also deploys the 'iris-in', a silent-film technique not much used since, oh, about 1929). The black-and-white cinematography glistens. The characters straddle the line between verisimilitude and allegory (or in the case of some supporting characters, caricature). And somewhere at the end of the line waits silent-film star Lillian Gish, embodying canny good. An odd, great film. Highly recommended.