Scary Stuff, Kids

Comics:


Haunt of Horror, written by Richard Corben and Chris Margopoulos, based on stories, poems and fragments by Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, illustrated by Richard Corben: Haunt of Horror brings together about two-dozen generally loose adaptations of an assortment of pieces by American horror-fiction Titans Poe and Lovecraft. Corben's best-remembered work is probably still Den, the sword-and-sorcery series from the 1970's that was adapted into the sword-and-sorcery segment of the Heavy Metal movie in which John Candy voiced the hero. Corben has become a supremely gifted horror and fantasy writer/artist over the intervening decades, and his work here really achieves some nicely creepy effects.

One of the decisions that makes this an interesting volume is that Corben doesn't try to adapt any of Poe's or Lovecraft's more famous, longer works. Instead, he focuses on short pieces that can be profitably adapted ("Dagon", "The Telltale Heart") and on poems and prose fragments which he adapts loosely, very liberally (Poe's "The Raven" doesn't much resemble its source, while several Lovecraft poems which were originally all about mood here become the inspiration for much more concrete scares.

Overall, I really liked this approach to adapting these two icons -- the pieces chosen were all of suitable length, and there are many suitably grisly, mysterious and cosmic vistas throughout the book. I wish Corben, who's already adapted William Hope Hodgson's minor masterpiece of a horror novel, The House on the Borderland, would turn his pen to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" or Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym." That would be sweet and tasty. Highly recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 6, written by Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, Joe Casey and others; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Jerry Ordway, Paul Gulacy and others: Among other pleasures, Alan Moore's America's Best Comics (ABC) imprint at Wildstorm offered tantalizing glimpses of what Moore's comics career might have been like had he not vowed to never again work for DC Comics after a dispute over money owed (or not owed, from DC's perspective) to Moore and artist Gibbons for various knickknacks derived from, and special editions of, Watchmen. Justifiably or not, DC managed to alienate their most popular writer over a matter of what was probably a few thousand dollars, scuttling at least two series that were already in the planning stages: the Watchmen prequel Minutemen and the dystopic, apocalyptic DC Universe 'What if?' series Twilight of the Superheroes.

Tom Strong, the adventures of a long-lived 'science hero' and his family and friends, reads a lot like Moore's take on pulp hero Doc Savage, but there's also a fair amount of Superman thrown into the mix. Is this what a potential Moore Superman project might have looked like, just as Moore's Promethea looks a lot like a metafictional, apocalyptic take on DC's Wonder Woman? We'll never know.

Of all the ABC-Universe books, Strong is the one that's both the lightest in tone and the "straighest", for lack of a better term (as this has nothing to do with sexual orientation). Moore plays his usual metafictional games throughout the book's five-year run, but Tom Strong is pretty much a cynicism, parody-free zone -- in this sense, it prefigures Grant Morrison's nouveau-Silver-Age All-Star Superman.

Here, in the final Tom Strong volume (for now, anyway) Tom and his family and comrades must deal with the end of the world. But prior to that, guest writers that include long-time British fantasy great Michael Moorcock (Elric) and several guest artists put Tom through a variety of crises -- the Moorcock piece brings in characters from Moorcock's own multiverse of characters, including a sinister descendant of albino sword-and-sorcery character Elric, along with what appears to be the soul-eating sword Stormbringer from the same Elric series. The art and writing are all top-notch throughout, though one probably needs to start earlier in the series to get a full grasp of the dynamics. Highly recommended.

Just Like Heaven

Books:


Getting into Death and other stories by Thomas Disch: Tom Disch's range as a writer was fairly breathtaking. He wrote in pretty much every genre imaginable, producing fine work in every case, including children's books (The Brave Little Toaster). Part of the American 'New Wave' of science-fiction writers in the 1960's, he never stopped branching out -- and he started branching out pretty early. This collection of Disch short stories from the 1970's shows off the writer at his wide-ranging best. The title story and several others have no fantastic elements at all, while other stories range from the darkly humorous rewriting of myth ("Apollo") to sad but weirdly funny ecodisaster ("The Birds").

All the stories are standouts, though some stories stand out more than others (ha ha). The title story gives one a dying novelist who can't really be said to have connected with anyone in her life, though her friends and children continue to attempt to connect with her (or believe they already have). "Getting into Death" ends in a thoroughly humane and human manner, though not in any way that one will see coming. "The Planet Arcadia" reads like a demolition of any number of standard science-fiction tropes (First Contact chief among them), its poisonous satire accentuated by the distancing effect of the elevated diction. "Slaves" reads like J.D. Salinger transplanted to the late 1960's college scene; "Yes" reminds one of the short stories of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick.

At least two of the stories could be seen as horror fiction. "Let Us Quickly Hasten to the Gate of Ivory" uses a basic situation we see in another Disch short story -- "Descending", not collected here. Quite simply, what happens when one can't find one's way out of what is supposed to be a finite space, in this case the graveyard where a brother and sister have gone to lay flowers at their parents' grave. It's a dandy and deceptively tricky story. Frankly, I have no idea what's really going on. "The Alien Shore", a novella of perhaps 15,000 words, is the masterpiece of the collection, a subtle and ultimately really disturbing tale of alienation, failure and the nature of reality. It's also a Grade-A mindfuck. This is pretty much as good as a collection of short stories gets. Highly recommended.


The Businessman: A Tale of Terror by Thomas Disch (1984): Disch produced a quartet of novels in the 1980's and eary 1990's that were marketed as horror (they'll return to print in August 2010, so mark your calendar). The Businessman was first, set at the dawn of the Reagan era. In it, the businessman of the title murders his wife Gisele and gets away with it until her ghost finally frees itself from its grave and begins trying to torment him.

Is it horror? Well, sort of. Horror elements abound (ghosts, a murderous husband, seances, ouija boards, psychic readings and a demonic possessing entity chief among them), as do horrific moments. However, so too do lyric moments, meditations on life and death, domestic comedy, farce, and the tragicomic presence of the ghost of the (real) poet John Berryman, who wanders the Earth as a ghost still bearing the injuries of his successful suicide, dying for a stiff drink or three.

Disch's book review columns for Twilight Zone magazine in the early 1980's repeatedly demonstrated that Disch had no time for certain horror-genre tropes (or most writers, for that matter -- Disch was an entertaining reviewer, but he was also a quintessential Mr. Grumpypants). The novel certainly takes the piss out of a lot of things -- ghosts and seances chief among them -- while managing to horrify at points even as it satirizes. For instance, stupid people make the best conduits for spiritual communication, we discover, while the purgatorial dyslexia inflicted upon Berryman's ghost makes his communications as seances pretty much completely nonsensical.

The most striking creation here is the afterlife, or at least the small portion of it that we see. See, there's what amounts to a greeting area, complete with recovery rooms where newly dead souls get used to their material deadness. The whole thing depends pretty much on the expectations of the dead person and the other souls he or she is dealing with, so that when Gisele's staunchly middle-American, middle-class Catholic mother arrives in first stage of the afterlife, she pretty much sees it as a cross between a hospital and a hotel. Some souls move rapidly on to the less corporeally oriented levels of heaven; some stick around in the waiting area for awhile; some are doomed to roam the Earth for one reason or another. Jesus makes a cameo, wearing a Salvation Army officer's uniform, flying in a dirigible. The gateway to heaven rests inside a potholder. It is, all in all, a wild and genre-busting ride. Highly recommended.