Rabid (1977)

Rabid (1977): written and directed by David Cronenberg: [Cast and Crew]: Early David Cronenberg film features a fetching and sympathetic soft-core-porn actress Marilyn Chambers (topless a lot here) as a motorcycle crash victim who gets turned into a vampire by plastic surgery gone insanely wrong. And what a vampire! 

Chambers feeds on people with what is essentially a sharp-toothed penis that pops out of her armpit. Phallic mother, anyone? All that, and the penis turns its victims (sort of) rabid. Hence the title! 

Low-key and creepy in that patented Cronenberg manner, full of body horror galore and a semi-apocalyptic finale set in and around Montreal. Everyone speaks flat Ontario English, though, to a weird extent at times -- filmed in Quebec, the movie nonetheless feels like it's set in Cronenberg's Toronto.

 Extremely enjoyable, and with a last twenty minutes that expands upon and deepens the sadness of the fate of the last survivor of George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead. Highly recommended.

Videodrome (1983)

Videodrome (1983): written and directed by David Cronenberg; starring James Woods (Max), Sonja Smits (Bianca O'Blivion), Debbie Harry (Nicki), Peter Dvorsky (Harlan), Leslie Carlson (Barry Convex) , and Jack Creley (Dr. Brian O'Blivion): David Cronenberg's Lovecraftian tale of body horror, basic cable networks, sadomasochism, and transcending the body seems as fresh today as ever, even if the Toronto-based cable universe it depicts almost certainly seems quaintly foreign to most people under the age of 40. 

James Woods is tense and sweaty and confused as Cronenberg's semi-satirical take on Canadian TV pioneer Mose Znaimer, on the hunt in the early 1980's for the late-night soft-core pornography that pays the bills for his small TV station. In reality, these were City TV's Baby Blue Movies. In Videodrome, they become a gateway to another reality in which competing philosophies of New Humanity and its New Flesh are at war. 

Woods definitely delivers the greatest acting performance ever by someone playing a guy with a vaginal VHS slot in his stomach. Jack Creley is a hoot as Dr. Brian O'Blivion, Cronenberg's nod to the University of Toronto's media guru Marshall McLuhan, a media commentator who only appears on TV. That the malignant Videodrome signal emanates from Pittsburgh seems like another nod, to the hometown of horror/zombie-movie pioneer and visionary George Romero. Highly recommended.

The Rosedale Horror (1980) by Jon Ruddy

The Rosedale Horror (1980) by Jon Ruddy: This Canadian paperback original from defunct Canadian paperback imprint Paperjacks is shocking in its goodness. It's a haunted-house story with a twist, set in Toronto's tony Rosedale neighbourhood in 1974. Ruddy was a long-time newspaper reporter, and it shows: he grounds all the horror elements in detailed, specific, and often quite funny and illuminating glimpses of life at a failing Toronto newspaper in the 1970's. 

The specifics of newspaper work on a variety of fronts from daily news columnist to police reporter to freelance writer give the proceedings a real verisimilitude. That the book is often scathingly funny about life at a tabloid and about Toronto the Good really helps things.

Ruddy also carries off a difficult bit of structure. The Rosedale Horror is told in six sections, each focused in the third-person on a specific character, though there is also some first-person narration by way of a tape recorder. And it all works both as characterization and as a builder of suspense.

There are elements in the text which at times seem sexist. Some of them fall into the realm of a sort of R-rated Leacockian satire directed at certain men and women alike, including a female relationship columnist and a male news columnist. Ultimately, the novel isn't sexist, though some of its characters are sexist and, in a couple of cases, somewhat predatory.

Ruddy manages several scenes of horror shot through with the occasional bit of grotesque humour. That tape-recorded first-person monologue is one of the two deftest bits of horror, revealing gradually a mind both ill and toxically malign. A rape scene also manages to horrify without seeming exploitative -- no small feat in any novel, and Ruddy amplifies the effect by having the rapist himself under the malign mental influence of something awful.

The Rosedale Horror certainly has its pulpy elements, but they never undercut the horror and the comedic in Ruddy's novel. As both horror and pointed, satiric social commentary, The Rosedale Horror is far superior to many, many novels I've read by far more celebrated authors. It's also hard to go wrong with a novel in which a character is murdered by being telepathically forced to urinate on the third rail of the Toronto subway line. Recommended.

Experimental Film by Gemma Files (2015)

Experimental Film by Gemma Files (2015): As brilliant a new novel Canadian or otherwise as I've read in a long time, Experimental Film is also a dandy horror novel. It's an almost perfect expression of the sort of documentary approach to horror that H.P. Lovecraft codified. It's also a moving character study of its narrator and her troubled relationships with pretty much everyone in her life, but most notably her young, autistic son.

Lois Cairns has lost her regular jobs as both a film journalist and as a teacher of film at a Toronto diploma factory dedicated to film. But a freelance assignment to review the latest experimental offering from a pretentious, obnoxious film-maker ends up revealing to Lois what appears to be footage from an unknown, early 20th-century Canadian director that the pompous contemporary film-maker has interpolated into his own work. And so the detective work begins -- and the eternal quest for grant money!

Cairns' investigation soon suggests that the mysterious footage was filmed by the even more mysterious Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb. Whitcomb was the wife of an early 20th-century Canadian businessman. She vanished without a trace from a sealed train compartment in the 1920's, leaving behind only a film projector. Decades earlier, her only son had also vanished somewhere in or around the Whitcombs' house in Ontario's cottage country. 

And we're off. Experimental Film does many things very, very well. Files' narrator earns our sympathy despite (and also because of) her bouts of self-pity, self-loathing, and nastiness. This sympathy comes in part because the narrator is intensely self-aware, and aware of her many moments of nastiness. She's also surrounded by keenly observed and rendered supporting characters, most notably a brilliant former student whom Cairns hires to work on the movie about the search for the movie and Cairns' autistic son.

The accumulation of documentary detail, and the details of the search for the lost movie or movies, all work very much in long-standing horror traditions. More importantly, they're expertly done in this novel. Files creates a convincing alternate history of Canadian film. And she does so in a gradually building horror narrative in which both sudden, almost epiphanic shocks and the creeping terror of the slow build are both given their moments. 

Perhaps most rarely for a horror novel, Experimental Film is genuinely funny throughout. And it's not the tiresome horror humour of the Crypt-keeper and his ilk, nor the deadly jolité of many an omniscient serial killer or Joker knock-off. It's just funny -- sardonic at certain points, cynical about the art scene.

In all, this is a fine novel, and one that will hopefully win readers and appear on courses of study for years to come. It's also a hell of a travelogue for certain portions of Toronto. It even has a scene set in Sneaky Dee's. The only thing it's really lacking is a climactic appearance by the helpful ghost of Al Waxman. Highly recommended.

The Little Man: Collected Short Pieces 1980-1995 written and illustrated by Chester Brown

The Little Man: Collected Short Pieces 1980-1995 written and illustrated by Chester Brown (1973-2006/ This revised edition 2006): Canada's most lovable, prickly, occasionally misanthropic cartoonist collects a decade-and-a-half of short pieces here, along with new notes on the origins and meanings of those short pieces. 

Chester Brown also spends a fair bit of space writing about the significance of Doug Wright's Family in the End Notes. Truly, Chester is Canadian, born and raised in an Anglo Montreal suburb but more identified with Toronto, his home for much of the last 35 years.

The Little Man offers a pretty useful guide to the changes in Brown's cartooning interests over the 15 years covered by the book. His early work consisted of often grotesque, boundary-pushing fantasy and absurdism, embodied by his Ed the Clown series. Shorter pieces included here show that grotesque cartoony portion of Brown's body of work, with some very funny pieces and some of the more disturbing short horror pieces to ever appear in comic form. 

Indeed, the horror pieces involving funny animals Gerbil and Bunny become even more disturbing (as Brown acknowledges in his notes) when one discovers that 'Gerbil' and 'Bunny' were the pet names Brown and one girlfriend had for one another at the time the pieces were created. And around the same time, Brown was working on an illustrated story of Jesus from which we get an outlier -- a Gnostic story of Jesus and his twin. This is range, folks.

Brown would get bored with fiction as the 1980's waned, turning instead to often painfully honest and closely observed chronicles of his own life. But he'd also become interested in comics as a vehicle for historical and social observation. Sometimes he melded general discussions with the personal. Here, Brown discusses theories about schizophrenia in concert with a discussion of his own mother's struggles with schizophrenia; we would see this structure again in the graphic novel Paying For It. Brown would also do a relatively 'straightforward' historical graphic novel in the oughts, Louis Riel, but even that meshed at points in the text with the piece about his mother's schizophrenia through Brown's discussion in the notes of his theories about madness, whether that madness was Riel's or his mother's.

In the short pieces, one also sees the changes in Brown's artwork. He becomes looser and more adept at a simplicity of linework as time goes by. Nonetheless, it's all of a piece artistically, even the very early stuff. The Notes are generous in their contextualization of the works, and in Brown's deadpan, prickly self-evaluation. He will pick his nose. He will eat it. He will draw it. He will publish that drawing. And you will go, 'Eeww!'. Highly recommended.

Paying for It: written and illustrated by Chester Brown (2011)

Paying for It: written and illustrated by Chester Brown (2011): This autobiographical comic from Toronto's own Chester Brown (Yummy Fur, Ed the Clown, Louis Riel) details more than a decade of Brown paying for 'it' -- 'it' being sex. Paying for It is  certainly not salacious: Brown strips his style down to near-minimalism, limiting the eroticism. We observe meetings with more than 25 prostitutes over the years. Worried about 'outing' any of the women, Brown neither shows faces nor, as he notes in the introduction, gets too specific with the details of what they talked about. The conversations with the assorted prostitutes are therefore more of a representative amalgamation of more general observations and opinions offered in different encounters.

The book is really more of a philosophical exploration of Brown's libertarian-based views on prostitution, offered to the reader through both Brown's internal monologues and his conversations with friends that include fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth and former Bob's Your Uncle frontwoman and Muchmusic VJ Sook-Yin Lee, Brown's girlfriend at the beginning of the book, which starts in 1997.

As noted, the graphics are minimalist, and represent some of Brown's cleanest linework. They're also quite funny at times. As Robert Crumb notes in his introduction, Chester Brown the cartoon character has a face that never changes expression regardless of the situation. Over the course of the book this becomes quite droll even as it offers a commentary on Brown's own apparent emotional reserve. 

Complete with lengthy notes and an appendix, Paying for It offers a pretty convincing argument for decriminalizing prostitution in Canada without legalizing it (which is to say, without the government regulating it). Brown's sweeping generalizations can become exhausting every once in awhile (he really, really hates romantic love) as certain elements, especially his arguments against romantic love, get stated and re-stated over the course of 300 pages. 

The strongest element of Paying for It remains Brown's depictions of the encounters with the prostitutes, all of which have the absolute and minutely observed status of engaging and rewarding verisimilitude regardless of the edits and conflations and omissions Brown chose to make to protect the identity of the women. Highly recommended.

The 2009 Horror

The Best Horror of the Year Volume 2 (2009) edited by Ellen Datlow (2010) containing

*Lowland Sea by Suzy McKee Charnas
The End of Everything by Steve Eller
Mrs Midnight by Reggie Oliver
*each thing i show you is a piece of my death by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer
*The Nimble Men by Glen Hirshberg
*What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night by Michael Marshall Smith
Wendigo by Micaela Morrissette
*In the Porches of My Ears by Norman Prentiss
Lonegan's Luck by Stephen Graham Jones
*The Crevasse by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey
The Lion's Den by Steve Duffy
Lotophagi by Edward Morris
The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall by Kaaron Warren
Dead Loss by Carole Johnstone
*Strappado by Laird Barron
*The Lammas Worm by Nina Allan
*Technicolor by John Langan

Big, big improvement on the first volume of this series, with a lot more excellent stories and fewer boring ones. I've starred the high points, which run the gamut from near-future apocalypse ("Lowland Sea" by Suzy McKee Charnas) through a bad night at the movies ("In the Porches of My Ears" by Norman Prentiss) to, well, a bad night ("What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night" by Michael Marshall Smith).

The Toronto-set Gemma Files/Stephen J. Barringer story does a lovely job of combining both the structure and the content of new media with one of the oldest structures for a horror story (the epistolary format), while John Langan's story presents us with a mountingly dread-filled college classroom lecture on Poe. Recommended.