The Stars at Noonday

Hiding in a Mountain: An Interview with Quentin S. Crisp

2013-04-18T08:43:00.000-04:00

Readers of this blog will know of my enthusiasm for the fiction of Quentin S. Crisp (who is, as every interview seems required to clarify, no relation to the gay writer and raconteur; unlike the latter, Quentin S. was born with the name). His novel "Remember You're A One-Ball!" was one of my favorite books of 2011, and his collection All God's Angels, Beware! contains one of my favorite classical weird tales of all time, "Ynys-y-Plag." His collection Morbid Tales also includes strong work. Quentin's new collection from Eibonvale Press, Defeated Dogs, is out this month. To accompany its release, I've interviewed Quentin on his life, his writing, his worldview, and his plans for the future. At about 10,000 words it's a long interview, but I think worth the space. Let's see if you agree:

What, aside from inertia, is keeping you alive these days?

This is very much to the point, which I appreciate. It has to be said, inertia definitely plays a part, and probably a very large one. Perhaps I should refer readers to the question in which I mention Dostoyevksy, and specifically his story ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, because I feel this has a lot of bearing on this question.

I feel I should be honest about this – the idea of ‘a reason to live’ is not something I take for granted at all. I struggle with it a great deal. Some time back, I read Tolstoy’s A Confession, and I see he also struggled very much with it. In that text, Tolstoy equates life itself with faith, and this is something I understand. To lack faith, for me, at least, is also to be deficient in life-force. And yet I do go on. Is it really just inertia?

I think I very much want to believe that there is good in people. If there is good in people, then there is reason to live. In fact, if we believe morality is possible, this surely involves a belief that there is good in people. Therefore, there’s a distinct case for saying that it’s the moral thing to do to believe that there is a reason to live. But, as we know, human experience is complex, and there are also plenty of reasons to doubt… For me, nonetheless, the good in people is inextricably linked with morality and a reason to live, and therefore, when doubt is cast on one of these, doubt is cast on all.

Similarly, when doubt is cast upon the doubt that has been cast upon one of these, then doubt is also cast upon the doubt that has been cast on all of these. Maybe doubt of doubt is one thing that keeps me going. I believe it is.

I think there’s also something to be said for relative truths, which are the realm of psychology. In ‘Residents Only’, which is, in my opinion, one of Aickman’s very best stories, there’s a line that goes, “Few transactions, in this world or any other, are more personal than a mediumistic séance. With great good fortune, the seeker may be told where to find the lost key to the medicine chest. He will not learn the secret of the universe…” To be able to use the key to the medicine chest, I think, we have to be able to feel that relative truth is of value. Perhaps it is of value because it has some relation to the absolute.

Anyway, I continue to seek out these keys for myself.

Describe some incident from your past that you think might sum up some aspect of your life, or reveal something about you that readers don't know.

Well, I hesitate before answering this, and for a number of reasons. In the UK, there was a recent news story about a 17-year-old police commissioner who had to quit her position because of some remarks she’d made years previously on Twitter. One of the big cons of the internet, of course, that we will increasingly be made aware of. So, I basically have a choice between stories that are compromising, embarrassing, boring, sound like I’m boasting, or some combination of those four.

So, after some thought, I’m going to go straight for the tabloid headlines and talk about an occasion when I had mushroom tea as a teenager.

I suppose I was about thirteen or fourteen. For reasons that I don’t now recall, I had the house to myself. I always managed to avoid the typical scenario where your place gets trashed by your drunken guests, because that’s the kind of person I’ve been, but on this occasion three friends (I won’t give their real names) came round to enjoy an evening of music and relaxation, and two of them brought what I recall as many hundreds of liberty caps. Tea was made, and the pot was full of them. I think we also ingested some without tea. I have a clear memory that, when the tea had been drunk by all, I scooped out the remains from inside the teapot and swallowed all I could.

Two friends, Dallow and Spicer, had to leave (or chose to) relatively early, leaving me with Pinky. As I recall, we were having a pleasant enough time until, for some reason, questions of identity began to arise in my head. I must have been recollecting past words and actions and wondering who they really belonged to, and I grew cold. Soon enough I was struck by a ghastly truth – my entire life had been one grotesque and abominable lie. The whole thing was impossibly absurd. I remember even now the taste of that feeling, though it is, in true Lovecraftian tradition, impossible to convey in words. I don’t know how long I was like this, since time had become very strange. It felt like many hours, but I think it must have been more like fifteen minutes. Anyway, things got pretty bad. I tried to convey to Pinky, who was sitting in the rocking chair, beaming, that I was losing my mind, but he just told me not to worry about it. Taking stock of the situation – my complete loss of identity and my inability to resume a life of grotesque and hollow lies – I decided that the only possible course of action was to make a phone call to one of my parents, explain the situation, apologise for not taking good care of my mind, and request that they please send me to a mental institution.

I was on the verge of doing this, but I hesitated. Was I missing something? I ran the situation over in my head. Was there some way that I could reclaim my sanity? Again, it’s impossible to reproduce my thoughts and sensations, but they went something like this: I asked myself, considering the fact that everything is a lie, anyway, is it really any better for me to live a lie by drooling in a padded cell banging my head against a wall than it is to live the lie of more or less fitting in with the daily absurdity that human beings call normal (although rather less fitting in in my case, which is another variant of this whole absurdity)? I concluded that there was no criterion by which I could say it was a better thing to live the padded cell lie. Well, I asked myself, was it all that unpleasant to live the lie I had been living? If I lived it again, would anyone notice I was living a lie, beyond them simply thinking I am weird in the way they already did? No, I concluded on both counts – it was not really so unpleasant, and no one would notice. Was I able to do it again? I did it before, I told myself, so why not? Why not live the lie and to hell with it? And that is precisely what I did. And do you know, that the moment I made that decision, I felt myself lifted up from the dungeons of damnation to the heights of mushroomy empyrean? Purple prose aside, it is true.

While I can’t exactly say ‘I’ve never looked back’, nonetheless, I can’t help thinking I made the right decision.

After recovering in this way, feeling myself overcome with relief and bliss, it occurred to me (because I’m not an entirely selfish person) to think of Dallow and Spicer, and I said to Pinky (having explained a little), “But, we’ve got to go to Dallow’s place now!!! Dallow and Spicer must be going through what I’ve just been through and they’ll need our help!” I urged him again and again, but somehow he dissuaded me. He, anyway, at no point had had a bad trip. Speaking to Dallow and Spicer about all this days later, I learnt that both of them had simply gone to bed, bored, rather disappointed that the liberty caps had not had the desired effect.

I think this little incident taught me a bit of a lesson about subjectivity. For one thing, influenced by the same chemicals, in the same room, the same person can experience both hell and heaven. Secondly, influenced by the same chemicals, one person might experience heaven and/or hell, and another might simply yawn and go to bed.

On the occasions I remember this adventure, too, it makes me think that, when people say, “There’s no going back once you’ve seen the void” that it’s really a load of rot. There is a going back. Not only that, but there’s a skating around, a zigzagging through, a dwelling within, a hopping in and out of, and many other things of that kind.

And, you know, U.G. Krishnamurti was very interested in dairy products. And that’s why we love him. And that’s the way life is.

I’m reminded of a story I was told of a hermit of some stripe – a good egg who wrestled with the madness of solitude. And, apparently, he always maintained a supply of Maxwell House coffee.

Just as a kind of p.s. to this, I don’t want to encourage the irresponsible use of etc., but for the sake of damage limitation, if any person out there does find themselves in the middle of a bad trip, wondering what to do, my personal advice is this – apart from the very basic thing of remembering that it’s a subjective state of mind that will pass, if there’s any way you can access the songs of Laurel and Hardy, please do. It is my belief there is absolutely no fuel for bad trips in them at all. I would especially recommend ‘I Want to be in Dixie’ (the title seems to vary) from the film Way Out West.

How did your aesthetics develop? That is-- putting the question less pompously-- how did you first encounter the forms and genres (Japanese literature, weird fiction, or any other influences) that shaped your notions of meaningful fiction? Do you think there's some link among those forms and genres that defines your aesthetic, or does it contain multitudes?

Potentially, the answer to this question could be a book, since aesthetics is a nebulous field, and I’ve had my whole life to be influenced by various things aesthetically. Therefore, the challenge for me is to give a simple answer, which I’ll attempt to do.

I think the following elements are the broadest, most general ones I can name, though some of them might be redundant if they are included in others: fantasy, shadow, the supernatural, beauty, imagination, dream. I suppose fantasy, imagination and dream are a kind of trinity, overlapping but with some distinction among them.

Now, I’ll try and put these terms into a biography. There are always chicken-and-egg, nature/nurture questions around early childhood, but it seems to me that if I have a nature (I don’t really believe in tabula rasa) then it was predisposed towards dreaminess. My earliest memory of a literary experience was my father reading Lord of the Rings to my brother and me. (I’m not counting things like The Hungry Caterpillar, though perhaps I should.) I think that experience was never duplicated – I was utterly transported, as if I no longer had a body and was in another world. This, to me, is really the model for literature.

I feel I have my own innate imaginative core that has nothing to do with genre, but this core was attracted to the more imaginative realms of literature. I call these, broadly, fantasy. When I was still quite young, I discovered the perverse attractions of the macabre, of sadness, of the minor key in music – these are all the things I am calling ‘shadow’. Fantasy + shadow = (any number of things including horror and Gothic literature).

As a teenager, I discovered, as many have, the quintessence, it seemed, of fantasy + shadow, in the form of H.P. Lovecraft.

But there’s another important element, which is beauty. I don’t know when I really became conscious of beauty, but there is a crossover between beauty and fantasy. Or rather, beauty is intrinsic to imagination, within which fantasy exists. I found I was able to be transported by beauty discovered – apparently – in this world, as much as (more than?) by the fantasy of another world. This is perhaps a slightly unfair statement. I think that somewhere in ‘The Journal of J.P. Drapeau’, Ligotti writes that the only value of this world is its power at certain times and under certain circumstances, to suggest the existence of another world. This is the perfect expression of something I’ve long felt. Beautiful literature, even of the least supernatural type, has something in common with fantasy literature in that the very beauty of it suggests another world.

I think with my discovery of Japanese literature, I became more interested in exploring another world through beauty rather than the more literal forms often taken in fantasy literature, not that I completely disdain those forms, and they do still hold some attraction for me. And I think that, in very basic terms, everything else has been an extrapolation of the evolution described above.

However, there’s still something about the term ‘supernatural’ that I feel I should address. I noticed it was applied to me on Wikipedia. Generally speaking – perhaps predictably – I don’t like labels, and I thought the supernatural tag was possibly misapplied when I first saw it there. However, I’ve come to think that there’s really something in it. And I don’t quite know what or why, but there is a recurrence of the supernatural in what I write. It’s not quite just ‘magic realism’ or that sort of thing. There’s an element to what I write that suggests the characters are aware of a normal reality and discover a supernatural one. Maybe that’s it – the two worlds idea. That’s why supernatural. This world and another.

And having said that, although I am clearly heavily influenced by, have one tentacle in the ‘weird’ tradition, etc., I also feel that there is some kind of element to what I do that is basically in tune with what I understand of postmodernism. I mean, I may not actually understand postmodernism at all. It wouldn’t surprise me. But there’s a continuous sense in which I see reality as competing fictions. Therefore, surrounding this ‘two worlds’ idea, I think is also a sense of radical plurality. The idea that no narrative has ultimate authority is, I believe, postmodern, but you can also find this wonderfully expressed in the writings of Chuang Tzu, and particularly the section of the Inner Chapters that is translated, in one of the books I have, as ‘The Sorting Which Evens Things Out’. In short, I do, very much, see life through the lens of story.

How does one remain committed to the recondite and the refined without becoming self-involved, elitist, or downright silly? Or should one even worry about that?

Well, of course, ‘being elitist’ is one of the big fears of our current age – it’s considered a very great sin. I think it was back in 1937 that Louis MacNeice wrote an essay with the title ‘In Defence of Vulgarity’. Now, of course, vulgarity doesn’t need any defending whatsoever, and is, on the contrary, practically obligatory. As your question suggests, it is anything that departs from populism that today we feel we must justify and defend.

We’re living in an age, to give what I think is a representative example of the current attitude, in which publishers are referred to as ‘gatekeepers’. I’m going to offer a kind of allegory here to give some idea of what I think of this attitude.

For about ten months during 2000 and 2001, I was resident in Taiwan. While I was there, I took the opportunity – and, for me, it seemed a quite tremendous opportunity – of visiting the National Palace Museum, which contains one of the most extensive and magnificent collections of Chinese art in the world. The museum has an interesting background. I believe most of what is contained there was originally in the Palace Museum in Beijing. The Japanese invasion of China prompted Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist government to move much of the content of the Palace Museum out of the way of harm. Eventually, a large amount of it ended up in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-Shek’s government also fled when the Communists took over. Some time after the Guomindang had taken refuge in Taiwan, the Cultural Revolution swept mainland China, with much upheaval, and with the widespread destruction of a great deal of the physical culture (temples, art, etc.) thought to represent the bad old times. Anyway, the artefacts that had been moved to Taiwan were safe from this particular storm. Later, of course, authorities on mainland China accused the Guomindang of having stolen these treasures. It was countered, not unreasonably, that if the treasures hadn’t been stolen they might not have survived – that, above all, they had been protected.

Assuming that the human race lasts long enough, I can envisage a time when the current triumphalism of vulgarity finally ebbs, and people begin to feel that it would have been of greater benefit to themselves if they had not, out of vengeful spite, trampled upon what they thought of before as elitist culture. At that time, if there is any vengeful spite left in such people, they may say, “You elitists! You stole this this from us, hiding it in your limited hardback editions and your coteries!” And the answer may be given, “We didn’t steal anything. We were the only people protecting this, and if we hadn’t you would have destroyed it. You made the coteries by refusing to join them. You created the limited hardback editions by refusing to read anything other than airport novels.”

Having said this, that we have ‘elitism’ on the one hand and ‘vulgarity’ on the other suggests to me that, in the English-speaking world, at least, we are dealing with cultural polarisation. There’s a whiff of Manichaeism here. I understand the attractions of Manichaeism, the stark call to arms, for instance, as found in the work of David Lindsay or William Burroughs, but I also have a recurring sense that Manichaeism is more a creator than a solver of problems in our world. As with many things, I feel ambivalent towards it. To live in reaction to something – that, though it is tempting, is something that I would like, ultimately, to avoid. The current triumphalism of vulgarity is a reaction. I don’t want to fall into a similar reaction against it, though I feel that I must do something also not to be swept along with it.

To return to the original question, I don’t think there’s any reason to be ashamed of finding meaning precisely where we find meaning, whether that be in something generally considered elitist or generally considered vulgar. I will add that I don’t think we should be ashamed of curiosity, either. Even pretending to find meaning where we really don’t, though it may be a sin of some kind, is surely venial rather than mortal. Or perhaps it will turn out to be the greatest sin of all.

On the question of finding meaning in various places, I am reminded of a line from the (now rather old) Tori Amos song ‘Happy Phantom’. She’s describing some kind of post-mortem state and declares, “There's Judy Garland taking Buddha by the hand.” My honest feeling is that even if Tori Amos had done nothing else at all in her life, that single line would have justified her existence. I feel like that’s pretty much the blueprint for my ideal universe.

Name three books you've read recently, and say a little about them.

As of the time of writing, the last book I finished was The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. I think I can truthfully say that this book has consumed me, in the last few weeks, like no book has done for many years. It’s not my first Dostoyevsky. In fact, there’s a sense in which Dostoyevsky was my gateway into literature. When I was fifteen or sixteen (I could probably calculate it properly if I had the time), I went to A-level college and one of my A-levels was English Language and Literature. I had always loved reading, but had generally just read unchallenging entertaining stuff (I’m simplifying things a little). Anyway, I decided it was time I challenged myself and really got to grips with Literature with a capital L. So, I went to the local bookshop, and really on the strength of the very dour cover (and, I recall, the quality of the paper and the close lines of print on the pages), I chose Crime and Punishment. I very much enjoyed it, too. Some time later I read The Idiot, which I considered one of my favourite books for a while, and also, a somewhat Dostoyevskian friend lent me Notes from Underground at some point. But all that was years ago, and it’s taken me longer than it should have to return to Dostoyevsky. For the first time in over a decade, I feel like I really want to exhaust a single writer’s oeuvre. Incidentally, I really want everyone to go to YouTube and look up the dramatisation of ‘The Dream of the Ridiculous Man’ with Jeremy Irons in it. Great performance from Mr Irons, of whom I’ve long been fond, but also, what a great, great storyteller Dostoyevsky is. He really wrote as if everything depended on it. I get the impression from that story of someone who has lived through a great deal, and is tired of hints and evasions, and really, even wearily, just wants to lay everything on the line.

Another book I finished recently was Inland, by Gerald Murnane – an Australian writer. His essay ‘The Breathing Author’ is viewable online, I think, and I would recommend reading it. I found Inland to be one of those books that is slow but worth it. Murnane has a very interesting style. He is one of these people who is obsessed with precision. What I mean by that is that we often make do with clichés when we express ourselves, and these, of course, are imprecise. In Inland, Murnane will say something, and then he’ll backtrack for pages about whether that was precisely what he meant or not, and in the meantime, he’s creating a kind of Indra’s Web of parallel universes out of the things he may or may not have meant. There were a number of moments during this book where I kind of sat back and just reflected for a while, as if struck by something.

So, this brings me to the third book I’ll mention here, which is Parmenides and the Way of Truth by Richard Geldard. This is a scholarly work, but with a hint of what I think Guardian readers refer to as ‘the Woo’. Recently, I am very interested in Parmenides, and I’ll probably be reading other books on him. The work in question is not bad, though here and there Geldard’s writing style is so poor – in a way that often happens with academics – that it’s hard to make out what he’s saying, or if he is actually saying something at all rather than just stringing words together. In The Little Prince there’s an episode where an astronomer – Turkish, I think – discovers a new star, and gives a conference on it, but his findings are laughed at because he is wearing Turkish national dress, rather than a formal suit and tie. I kind of hate academic language, because it’s the linguistic equivalent of wearing a suit and tie in order to impress your audience with the idea of your authority. This is something that I think happens to varying degrees in philosophy (it seems to me far more common in modern philosophy). At its worst, it’s really despicable. This book is not an example of the worst of that kind of thing, but it does have hints of it. There’s also that quandary that always occurs with studies of the ineffable, which might be summed up in the question, “If words are really all such bullshit then why did you write this book?” I’m torn, in such cases, between wanting to stay faithful to ineffability and so dismissing all that is written, and thinking, “Actually, this is not badly expressed, there’s something of substance here.” Torn, that is, if the work is not totally idiotic. So, this book, in my opinion, is not totally idiotic.

Incidentally, although Murnane claims not to understand the concept of philosophy, I think there is something Parmenidean about his writing, the way his alternatives branch and branch again into ‘all that there is’.

Are you a collector of anything? Books, artwork, stamps, teeth, crisp wrappers?

I don’t think I am, really, apart from books. But, if I’m not especially a collector, it has been suggested to me by someone who recently came to dinner, that I am a hoarder. I don’t think of myself that way, but it’s true that I tend to be horrified (and occasionally impressed) when people can blithely throw things away.

… Actually, on reflection, I think I’m a frustrated collector. If I think about my ideal life, it would, in fact, include a great deal of collection, but the circumstances of my life have never been conducive to maintaining collections of things. I’ve never had much money or space or secure lodgings. Therefore, rather than any virtue on my part (because I think collection is basically seen as a vice), it is merely because my spirit has been broken that I don’t now attempt to collect things. The truth is, I do like beautiful, fascinating objects, and I suppose that’s what collection is about. I’m very much drawn to ceramics and things like that.

What do you do to unwind? Is there a kind of entertainment-- books, movies, television, music, or otherwise-- or a hobby to which you turn when trying not to think?

I think I am, by nature, an enormously lazy person. At least, I have felt, almost for as long as I can remember, that whatever other people wanted me to do, it was for their good and not mine, so I am not enormously persuaded of the virtues of work. Having said that, if I think about it, I spend almost no time at all in a state of relaxation. I sometimes dream of relaxation.

In terms of how I attempt to relax, though, it’s all very simple stuff. I read. I read very slowly. I like to spend time talking with people, in person. These two things are the essentials in life, I think.

Also, I love the rain, and if there is no rain, there may be wind, and if there is no wind, if you’re very lucky, there may be silence. I hope that, before I pass from this Earth, I manage to spend some days just listening, with no aim at all in mind.

As far as films go, I enjoy them very much, the kind of glamour of it all, being ‘transported’, as it were, and being a passenger to the sensations and drama, and the incidental music, but I very seldom have time even to watch a film. As of the time of writing, the last film I watched was A Short Film About Love. That was some weeks ago. There are a considerable number of unwatched DVDs in my flat, and I have no idea when I’ll get the time to watch them.

I wouldn’t like to give the impression, however, that I don’t become fascinated by particular things, because I do. Perhaps the most recent thing to capture my imagination is this fellow called Busby Berkeley. I must have known about his work from my infant years without realising it, anyway, but it’s really just struck me what he did – he’s like M.C. Escher but with moving patterns of chorus girls. I mean, I can hardly think of anything more fantastic. Although I don’t often have time to watch whole films, I must admit to mind-snacking on YouTube clips quite a lot. It’s not unusual for me, for instance, to watch the same thirty seconds of Ginger Rogers singing backslang in the song ‘We’re in the Money’ about seven times in a row, trying to assimilate each nuance of her kooky lip and eyebrow movements, all the while enthralled by the podginess and brassiness and general glamour of the nineteen-thirties face shape. Sad, isn’t it?

How do you feel about the current state of the world? Politically, economically, culturally or otherwise?

I’m not a very worldly person, but I do occasionally notice the world. Al Gore, undoubtedly more informed than an obscure and introverted author of frivolous fictions, has written 592 pages in anticipation of ‘The Future’, apparently, and though I haven’t read it, I would guess it’s far more illuminating than anything I have to say about the state of the world.

Having said that, I do have my own version of ‘The Future’, which won’t take you as long to read, and which I sent in an e-mail to someone recently, as follows, presenting a list of 21^st century (and beyond) possibilities. I quote:

“And then, what lies ahead? None of the apparent choices are attractive to me:

a) Transhumanism, whereby tomorrow’s equivalent of Google, Microsoft, etc., basically have the monopoly on god-making technologies of longevity, virtual reality and so on.

b) Ecological Armageddon, which kind of speaks for itself.

c) An indefinite spread of mall culture, with science somehow managing to clear up after each disaster and patch things up into cosiness and muzak banality ‘forever and ever’.

d) Egoless utopia – a singularity of consciousness. Perhaps the most attractive of these options, it nonetheless could easily play out like a more smiley-faced version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

e) Hit by an asteroid, etc.

f) Cthulhu wakes.

g) The rapture.

h) The long ascent and descent into obscurity, never at any point coming close to a reason for it all.

i) Etc.”

On a more hopeful – in a sense – note, I do wonder about the kind of ‘White Man’s burden’ that it seems many of us increasingly feel towards the world in general. James Cameron (not the Canadian film director, but the British journalist and CND campaigner) once wrote, I believe, in reference to the US forces in the Korean War, something like: “What to think of a people who blow your legs off and then earnestly and helpfully go to the trouble of fitting you with shiny new artificial limbs?”

We could apply this to the human race in a larger sense, in our treatment of other people, of other species, and so on. It seems as if we – perhaps not all humans, but certainly the interventionist type – are in some way compelled to bring things to a terrible pass just so we can then heroically attempt rescue. If we go on being successful in this strategy, presumably it will culminate in us endangering the entire universe and then saving it from the danger we ourselves have created. And this seems to be the very strange thing that the knowledge of Good and Evil does to us.

Occasionally, though, I really do get the sense that things are just not up to us, and we should therefore relax a bit. The other day, walking along Catford Road as the rays of the sinking sun caught the rush hour traffic, I suddenly had this feeling: none of this really depends on me. In the same way that the universe doesn’t need us to explain it, but we feel compelled to try and do so anyway, I don’t think (whatever our compulsions), the world needs us to save it.

Then again, it’s certainly true that humans continue to engage in those endangering behaviours, and one way or another we’ll face the consequences.

Having got that out of the way, there is one observation I would personally like to make about what is happening in the world now, and this is to do with a growing impression that people are increasingly becoming petty puritans. And I very much dislike this.

I feel a general distaste for the battle between left and right, but I feel I can observe this much: If the right are becoming increasingly paranoid, then the left are becoming increasingly dogmatic and intolerant. It seems to me that I dislike left and right most where they have most in common, which is, one way or another, that the more people identify with either left or right, the less they can tolerate actual free speech or actual free thought. And perhaps since my peers are generally on the left, I feel this vile tendency more in the left than the right. It also comes out with excessive concerns about safety and hygiene, of course, and with the confusion of sexual hang-ups with morality – of any kind of hang-ups with morality.

On the 1^st of March, I attended a Momus gig with some friends, in Dalston, London (incidentally, a blindingly good gig). On the train back, slightly the worse for alcohol, I’m afraid I must have bent the ear of Joe Campbell (who recorded the interview I did with John Elliott), because conspicuously left-leaning as he is, Momus has not succumbed to the creeping ghastliness of political correctness, and this is not only evident, but even explicit in his songs, and this prompted a long lament on my part about what the world’s coming to. There was one example, in particular, from that evening, which expressed my feelings on the subject precisely – a song by the title of ‘The Cabinet of Kuniyoshi Kaneko’. Again, I quote:

“In life remain considerate, in art the Devil's advocate

Why deny that Pegasus has wings

In life remain considerate, in art the Devil incarnate

Why deny the siren when it sings?

In games there must be no forbidden things”

It seems as if people, even supposed artists, have mostly forgotten this way of being and expressing yourself today.

Anyway, a day or so after my drunken peroration on this subject, I came across a review of Bowie’s The Next Day, by Michael Hogan, in which he quoted Yeats’s ‘Politics’ and described it as being “as alarming as it is amusing”. Why? Because “Yeats was in his early 70s when he wrote this, and it's gross to imagine him leering at some unsuspecting young woman.” Is it gross? (A word, incidentally, that I despise.) The whole hypocrisy of this is visible in the clause “gross to imagine him”; in other words it’s Hogan’s imagination, rather than the reality, that is gross, but Hogan is blaming Yeats for this. And why the word “unsuspecting”, which makes the woman into an automatic victim? Why “leering”? This is pure ‘what will my neighbours think?’ writing on the part of Hogan, and this is the kind of priggishness we’re being subjected to more and more. I mean, Michael Hogan’s review is not even the best example of this (he is actually praising Yeats’s poem in the end, etc) – it only struck me because it followed so closely on the heels of my harangue on the subject. Hogan’s conformism here is of a fairly mild and fairly non-toxic kind – but I do believe that this same tendency is becoming very toxic right now.

In an essay called ‘The Prevention of Literature’, published in 1946, George Orwell wrote that “it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity”. Orwell also observed what I’m talking about, so clearly it’s not a new tendency, but it seems to me to be getting stronger. As Orwell goes on to say, referencing the hymn ‘Dare to be a Daniel’, “‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous.” But I am heartily sick of those who huddle together under their ideology, finding safety in numbers, and bolstering their own position with witch hunts and accusations of one kind and another. What most of this amounts to is the craven attitude, “It wasn’t me, it was him!”

Your new collection, Defeated Dogs, is out from Eibonvale Press soon. The stories in it are uncollected but not necessarily unpublished. What, if anything, guided your selection of the contents? Do you think the stories have a unifying sensibility, beyond that which all your work will naturally possess? How do you think Defeated Dogs compares to previous collections? Does its retrospective quality inspire any meditations on your development as a writer?

Well, I basically sent David Rix everything I thought was presentable that didn’t belong, in my mind, to some future collection. He made a selection from this. There was one story he suggested I re-write. Taking a closer look at it, I decided it needed pretty radical re-writing, and, sadly, in the event, I haven’t had time, so that one was dropped. A couple of others also didn’t make the cut. So, the final contents have been arrived at, as it were, by a simple process of elimination. Having said that, I do feel like this collection has an identity. To me it feels like a b-sides album. (Incidentally, I love b-sides, which, often enough, and depending on the artist, are more interesting than a-sides.) I suppose I would say that as a collection it is somewhat (though not entirely) subdued. Although it is not a chronological sequel to All God’s Angels, Beware! in a sense, nonetheless, I see it as a kind of sequel. All God’s Angels has a defiant quality to it; Defeated Dogs is, I feel, overall, somewhat more fatalistic, as the title suggests. I’d like to mention that the previously unpublished Lilo is the oldest piece in the book, dated from some time in the nineties. In fact, it must have been written in 1998, I’d guess, as I remember that both The Matrix and eXistenZ came out the next year, and I was really pissed off that now, any time I published this, it would probably be considered a copy of the former. Of those two films, by the way, I much prefer the latter. Re-reading Lilo now, I don’t think it comes across as a copy of either – thankfully – despite the huge overlap in themes. At the time of writing, it’s also one of my own pieces of which I’m fonder. There was one part that really needed rewriting, and I did that. Also, some of the language is overdone, but I left that, as I didn’t want to tamper too much with the feel of the thing. On the whole I was struck by the fact that even when I wrote the story – I am often struck by this – I knew what was wrong with it, but I just didn’t know at the time how to fix it.

Regarding my development as a writer, proofreading these stories does give me some ideas about this. I think, generally speaking, I have been improving over the years. It’s been a painstaking process. I do actually think I started, in some sense, badly, and that I am a slow developer.

In his review of Aleister Crowley’s The Drug and Other Stories, in the journal Wormwood, Reggie Oliver mentions a fact I haven’t heard of elsewhere, that, apparently, “The critic and novelist C.S. Lewis once described the brief period when he became insane as the most boring of his life.” This is quite a suggestive idea, and I think I understand it. Sometimes, reading over my old work, I feel as if I am reading a diary written during a period of mental illness. There’s a flatness which is paradoxically also disturbing and quite intolerably embarrassing. How, I wonder, did my passions and my ideas and so on, spike into such repugnant forms, so grotesquely meaningless? There’s something about it of the mania of the narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ – this terrible detachment, and the detachment itself becoming an itch, a terrible, disturbing itch, and then, everything seeming terribly wrong and upside-down and unendurable. This is the feeling I get, sometimes, as I say, re-reading an old story of mine.

There’s a struggle here, that for me is the very heart of writing, and may well be the heart of my whole life. I started off childishly in my writing, but to write well the socialising superego must have a hand – the critic who tells you this is a cliché, that is bad characterisation, something else is unrealistic, and so on and so forth, because he doesn’t want you to be laughed at and hurt and trampled. He is ‘cruel to be kind’. But, in order to protect you, the superego hides you away, like a hideous child. This is the dilemma – to write well, you must listen to your superego/critic who wishes to protect you. But to write truthfully (which is the ultimate way of writing well), you must let your hideous child out of the room in which, for his own good, he has been locked up.

This is the struggle I am constantly engaged in while trying to ‘develop my writing’. And the truth is, I think my own hideous child is particularly hideous and particularly childish. Sometimes when I re-read things I’ve written, well, I can’t really describe it. I feel myself shrivelling up like a threatened spider. There is a real question as to whether I should continue. But then again, I do feel as if writing is my life, so to continue living is probably to continue writing. If we see our personalities as four dimensional, by which I mean, one aspect of personality is the shape it makes in time, then, as reflected in my writing, one aspect of my own personality is a staggered slowness and lateness of development. This might sound like I’m repeating myself, but what I mean is: I believe (hope) that I do have something to contribute to the world of fiction, literature, or whatever you wish to call it, but part of the very character of what I have to contribute is this late-developingness of its shape. This has been very painful for me, as perhaps can be imagined, but I carry on partly from lack of choice, and partly from belief in this late-development-shaped unique something.

You've indicated, in preliminary discussions about this interview, a dissatisfaction with the current state of your writing, and a possibly related desire to make a change, in a variety of senses. Is there anything you'd like to say about that?

Yes. I think that I should, though I’m not sure how coherent I will be. It is partly because I am sensing an accumulation of incoherent – or at least inchoate – new things in me that I am trying to make changes at present.

Maybe I can start by saying that the world itself seems poised on the brink of change to a degree that is arguably unprecedented in terms of human history. My own part in all this is infinitesimally small, but for me, of course, is everything (more or less everything, depending on how Jungian one wants to get). So, some of the small things that loom large for me are necessarily to do with books and writing.

Recently, I announced (on my blog) that I was ending my blog, basically because of disillusionment with the Internet. I suppose it could easily come across that I’ve made up my mind what’s what concerning the internet, new technology and so on, but that’s not true. What I have made up my mind about is that I don’t want to remain unquestioning and increasingly exhausted on the treadmill of so-called progress. I don’t want to live by default, which the current marriage of capitalism and technology seems to encourage us to do.

If I don’t want to remain unquestioning, naturally that means I want to question. One of the things most necessary for me to question is the value of my own writing. Does it have value? Is it relevant? Is it merely some kind of vice that distracts me and possibly others from the truth? In the world out there, so to speak, I get the impression that books (real books that is, by which I mean both in a physical sense and a literary sense) are seen more and more as archaic. This may indicate that they really are becoming obsolete (as in, no longer relevant to human needs), or, it may simply indicate to me that the human race is tending in a direction that I must consciously deviate from. Either way, there are implications for me in how I face the future.

A relatively brief way of expressing this might be that I have come to one of those periods that visit sometimes in the life of a writer (more often with some writers than others) when all one’s doubts and suspicions that what one has been engaging in is “vanity of vanities” gather together and swell into a kind of crescendo. Yes, you ‘always knew it was vanity, but…’ It is precisely at the time when the hollowness of it all becomes unignorable, that you begin to think more urgently about the purpose it might have. I suppose the purpose must be either to live, or to find some alternative to life, but then the question is how to do this most effectively and fully.

I was wondering how to bring this answer to a conclusion that wouldn’t be entirely vague, and a juxtaposition of things has helped me slightly. I was re-reading an article in Spike Magazine about Houellebecq and Gnosticism, and I had Sufjan Stevens playing in the background. I was reading the bit about Dostoyevsky and the Gospel of Philip when Mr Stevens sang, “Still I go to the deepest grave/Where I go to sleep alone.”

On the entry for the 8^th of March, on his Tumblr feed, Momus reproduces his article about comebacks. He argues there against comebacks – that one should simply never go away. It’s an interesting read, but, for myself, I think ‘going away’, or “hiding in a mountain”, as Momus calls it, is essential. Partly, this is probably, anyway, something that is different between making music or films, and writing books. Books are generally written in solitude and read in solitude – a message in a bottle from one solitude to another.

I also think, however, there is a general value in the whole “hiding in a mountain” thing, and a value that is even perhaps more important now than it has been for some time. You might also call “hiding in a mountain”, “going offline”. The internet, among many things, is a kind of consensus machine – you can see this, for instance, in the feature of the ‘like’ button on Facebook. This aspect of the internet is like a non-stop talent show, the kind with a ‘clap-o-meter’, where the applause is measured second by second, and if your tap-dancing lets up in entertainment value for a moment, you are, as they say ‘nowhere’. There’s a kind of closed circuit that is created by this – a feedback loop, I think it might be called. And I don’t think that’s conducive to originality, to innovation, to deep reflection, to genuine morality. Recently, when I think of the internet, various ominous analogies come to mind. One of them is the feast that Vlad Tepes laid on for the poor and sick in Targoviste. They were ushered into a great banquet hall, and the doors were bolted behind them, and then the hall was set on fire. I suspect that we are being encouraged to invest everything – our hopes, our way of life, our souls, if we still believe in them – in technologies that will ultimately be disastrous. At the very least, I want to keep a little back. And to that end, and other ends, I intend to spend some time hiding in the abovementioned mountain.

Are you writing now? If so, what have you been working on? If not, what was the last thing you wrote?

I am, though it’s going much slower than I would like. After Defeated Dogs, there should be something else coming out (fingers crossed), about which I am not yet at liberty to say anything. I’ve been typing up and revising a final story for this. The story in question, which I hope makes the cut, is novella-length, and is called Blue on Blue, after the Bobby Vinton song. I hope after that finally to revise The Hideous Child, a novel whose first draft I finished early in 2011, and to submit it formally for publication somewhere, but I don’t know how long that will take. There are, in fact, numerous bits and pieces I’ve been taking up and putting down again. Recently, I started a new notebook for a new idea, which I hope will come to something. The original title was Winter, and then Winter Carousels, but now I’ve changed the title again, but I don’t want to reveal it yet. If I ever finish it, it will be a massive and huge science fiction novel set largely in London.

I’d also like to mention the fact that I am busily involved in a collaborative project, under the aegis of Daniel Corrick’s Hieroglyphic Press, through a special imprint called Snuggly Books. Justin Isis, Brendan Connell and myself are finishing a novel begun some years back under the title of The Cutest Girl in Class. This will be a limited edition, all going well, available for pre-order before long, with the goal of financing my trip to Japan to meet Justin Isis for the first time (after seven years or more of knowing each other, we still haven’t actually met). The book has to be limited edition, because that’s the only way of actually raising any money in the small press. The online publicity material describes the project thus: “Fraught with double crosses and missing mannequins, this is Waiting for Godot meets Beach Blanket Bingo.” I’m feeling startlingly good about this project, and can’t wait for the book to be officially released into the wild.

And, on the subject of Hieroglyphic Press, I’d like to take this chance to make it known that I have a piece in Sacrum Regnum II. It’s not fiction, as such, and it’s unlikely to appear in any collection of mine in any kind of foreseeable future.

After a few years and nearly two dozen books, how do you feel about the state of Chômu Press? Has it achieved what you hoped it would? What, in both concrete and abstract senses, does the future hold for Chômu?

Life is uncertain at the best of times, and I think the ecological niche of the literary small press has always been especially precarious. For that reason, I can truthfully say, I have very little idea what the future holds. In David Copperfield, after the hero has returned from his travels in Europe, he goes for a meal at Gray’s Inn, to meet his old friend Traddles who “works in the law” or something. He finds the waiters of the inn peculiarly unimpressed regarding just about everything and concludes, “…both England, and the law, appeared to me to be very difficult indeed to be taken by storm”. Sometimes it seems like, if you work in a populist medium like… well, pop music, or some areas of the art world, all you have to do is wear a dress made of frogs or something and “the world freely offers itself to you to be unmasked”. But I think writers and publishers are far more familiar with the experience known to David Copperfield of the unimpressed waiters. All this is just my way of saying, it’s really much harder than you might imagine – and I won’t go into details on that score.

Those who have supported us, however, have been very supportive indeed, which is very gratifying. What’s more, if I put on my ‘half-full glasses’, although there is certainly much more it would be great if we could do, I am proud to be associated with all the titles that we’ve put out. Some of our authors who I also know to a degree as people, and who are probably not as well known to the readers who are primarily familiar with the scene in which I’ve had my own work published, I view as neglected national treasures, and living repositories of the flaming lore of literature, etc. That may be a convoluted way of saying something quite personal that won’t be widely understood. Let me put it more simply: there is a flame that gets passed on. Some of this is more widely known, and some of it less. The flame I’ve had the privilege to act as custodian for with Chomu is generally less well known, but it’s burning, and, in my estimation, more brightly than flames around which larger numbers of people are gathered. I am glad to be a part of that.

At present, we don’t have a lot actually scheduled, but after P.F. Jeffery’s eccentric and beguiling Jane, the next thing we put out should be a new novel from Michael Cisco. We have other plans, too, which we haven’t put on the schedule yet. Things remain fairly open, but what I mainly hope is that we’ll be able to go on showing that the really interesting stuff in contemporary literature is not happening where people thought it was happening. In other words, I hope we continue to celebrate diversity and off-centredness.

Given my appreciation for your novella "Ynys-y-Plag," I can't resist asking what you recall about that story's genesis and development.

Some of this is lost now – perhaps sadly. I can say with some certainty that the story would not have happened if a reader of my blog had not re-directed my attention to Algernon Blackwood – to ‘The Wendigo’, I believe. I remember reading this and thinking, “I really should have another crack at the old weird fiction thing”, or something to that effect.

I can’t remember now the initial germs of the story, except that it was to do with the landscape where I was living at the time (in Wales) and also a general sense of creepiness, by which I mean the wanting-but-not-daring-to-look-over-your-shoulder feeling that is lacking in much modern horror, where the emphasis has now long been on simple gore, torture and so on. I am interested in creepiness, and I do think this is distinct from visceral horror or the horror of the daily news. I have experienced ‘the Hag’ a couple of times in my life, and it seems to me, to put this in slightly materialistic terms, that whatever part of the brain produces the Hag (presumably a very ancient part), it’s also what lies behind all the most compelling and mysterious horror tales. I think this is why Lovecraft (rightly) stresses that a ‘Weird’ tale should be judged purely on the pitch of otherworldly terror and strangeness it reaches at its least mundane point, because this kind of creepiness is a distinct effect that is hard to mix with and to judge alongside other effects and aims (although I do like to mix up different elements).

Anyway, early on, as I was contemplating this story, I was getting quite powerful creeps and shivers. It was all about fleeting shadows, shapes at windows, suggestion, that kind of thing, but it was strong and distinct. There was something particular in the midst of all this shadow for me to work with. And the strength of the feeling was a good sign to me – that’s what I wanted to get on paper. Precisely that. My estimate is that, somehow, I only managed to get, say, one third of that feeling into the story itself, but even so, that’s pretty good going.

I’ve just dug up my initial written notes for the story. There may be more somewhere, but what I’ve found is one page of notes. (It varies, but usually, for a story the size of ‘Ynys-y-Plag’, I’d write at least ten pages of notes.)

So, I won’t copy out the whole page, but it begins (some may consider these notes as spoilers): “A kind of imp or sprite. Spiky face. Something appears to be hanging on the end of the rope. Lost things. Weedy manhole cover. One night I heard a terrible caterwauling, like that of children, seem to echo from the manhole. My own voice as a child. I heard it. Lonely places. Nature overgrows things. Gates. Bridges. Places to piss. The smell of piss.”

What these notes remind me of is this interesting (to me, at least) fact: The original idea for the story split into two. The caterwauling ended up in the story ‘The Were-Sheep of Abercrave’. ‘Ynys-y-Plag’ and ‘Were-sheep’ are basically monozygotic twins, though, as with the brothers in ‘The Dunwich Horror’, ‘Ynys-y-Plag’ “looks more like the father”.

Now, the page of notes I have before me is divided into two halves – one in black and one in blue ink, obviously written on different occasions. The second half, in blue ink, mainly concerns the character Buddug (who, in the notes, is referred to as ‘Ruth’). Incidentally, Buddug is a Welsh name pronounced ‘bee-thig’, with a ‘th’ as in ‘them’. My main objective was really just to make my own attempt at getting that creepy Hag feeling on the page that is the essence of good ‘Weird’ fiction. It was a totally traditional thing (I think) that I was attempting. In your review of the story you have mentioned, I believe, its modern psychology. This is not something I consciously set out to achieve, but if it has something of the sort, and if, in doing so, it contributes something original to this area of supernatural fiction then I’m very glad.

I’d also add that, I think I know what aspects you are referring to, and for me these are largely (though not entirely) facilitated by the Buddug character. I knew that the creepy entity – the monster – in the story had to have a secret, and Buddug knows the secret. I didn’t want to cop out by not telling what the secret was, and I also did not want to cop out with something stupid like ‘it’s allergic to [insert arbitrary substance or symbol]’. I wanted the secret to be real in some way. So, I lay down and let myself go deeply into the story and after a while, all of a sudden, I knew what the secret was. And that is the last thing that is written on this page of notes, and also, of course, the last thing in the story.

Is there anything else you'd like to say?

Well, there is something I’d like to say, for my benefit rather than anyone else’s (which I suppose is true of this whole interview). I had the feeling recently that I want to stop doing online text interviews, but I felt I still had a little something to say, so I’ve made a kind of pact with myself that this will be the last online text interview I do this decade except in the case that I’m only talking about Chômu Press. This may seem ridiculously specific, but, apart from anything else, specific resolutions are easier to keep. Also, if I state it publicly, as here, then I am more likely to hold myself to it.

I can only hope that, if Quentin's resolution to abandon online text-based interviews holds, this has made for a worthwhile "last interview." Readers who want to explore his writing can buy the Chômu Press editions of "Remember You're A One-Ball!" and All God's Angels Beware from Amazon.com, and Morbid Tales is available in paperback and e-book from Tartarus Press. Defeated Dogs, which is currently at the printer and should be released very shortly, can be ordered from Eibonvale Press.

The Ghosts of Rathmines

2013-04-03T21:28:00.003-04:00

I don't get much enjoyment out of folkloric ghost stories. Nor do I typically like ghost stories written prior to the 20th century, even those of acknowledged masters like J. Sheridan Le Fanu. So I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories and Old Albert: An Epilogue, two books by Brian J. Showers I recently picked up as part of a set of titles from and related to Showers' Swan River Press. The Bleeding Horse is a set of linked ghost stories set in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines, influenced by local history and in the spirit of Le Fanu's "Ghost Stories of Chapelizod," while Old Albert is a novella that returns to that setting. I expected I might find the stories overly traditional, straightforward, uninvolving, and only vaguely frightening. I needn't have worried. The Bleeding Horse (with Old Albert) is one of the finest ghost story collections I've read in some time, so good that it made me break the six-month gap in horror reviews on this blog just so I could rave about it. Showers uses the conventional folkloric ghost story as a jumping-off point for a set of progressively ambiguous, modern, and frightening tales that are much more than the sum of their parts.

At first the book seems to be the sort of thing I was anticipating, charming but basically empty, beginning with the title story's account of a historic battle and its ghostly echoes in a pub with a peculiar name. "Oil on Canvas" would be a similar trifle, about the afterlife of Jack B. Yeats, painter and brother of the famous poet, except for an unacknowledged connection to the first story that slightly heightens the chill factor. Not by much, but enough, especially since the collection is only beginning. "Favourite No. 7 Omnibus" ups the ante further, and is the first demonstration of Showers' remarkable skill at giving the ordinary business of the ghost story an atmosphere of profound supernatural awe. What happens in "Favourite No. 7 Omnibus" is unsurprising, but the structure, and the decision not to make certain connections explicit, lends the story an unexpected eerieness.

I should say something here about Showers' command of humor and narrative distance as they relate to the subtle ghost story. The greatest practitioner of these virtues was M. R. James, and while the voice of Showers' narrator is not exactly James', they have in common a dry, precise-verging-on-pedantic quality that makes the horrors that much more effective by contrast. The Bleeding Horse is nominally a guidebook to Rathmines, complete with footnotes, and the juxtaposition of supernatural peril with the kind of vaguely-interesting trivia one gets on walking tours is at once hilarious and unsettling. ("On the night of 15 April 1921, a company of IRA men knocked on his door. Feeling that Vicars had been too sociable with the local British officers, they set fire to the house and dragged Vicars out to the lawn where they shot him in the head." I don't think there's a word in the English language that would work better in that second sentence than "sociable.") Showers also has James' gift for pastiche of different kinds of documents from the past-- newspapers, diary entries, and so forth. These aren't antiquarian ghost stories, but readers who admire James for style rather than trappings should give Showers a try right away.

Comparison to James is perhaps most appropriate in the case of "Quis Separabit," a story that terrified me more than any ghost story has since the time I really thought about what it would be like to be in the room with the creature from "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad." I would love to quote the description of the ghost from this story, but I'm not sure that it would work out of context, and in any case you deserve to experience it for the first time as part of the full tale, which takes the known history of the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels and links it to the figure that appears in a flea market after the sun has gone down. The fair closes at dusk, and you ought not to linger, unless you want to meet the Blackberry Man.

The final story, "Father Corrigan's Diary," completes an internal evolution that has encompassed the ghost tale of early modern folklore, the traditional nineteenth-century ghost story, and the Jamesian revolution by offering an ambiguous, psychologically suggestive story so rich in a sense of the vast and inexplicable terrors of the world that the only thing I can think to compare it with is Edith Wharton's masterpiece "Afterward." The conceit is, again, familiar: entries from the diary of a Victorian clergyman. But the force that haunts him and his colleagues is hard to pin down. It might even be Father Corrigan himself. All I know is that I wouldn't want to meet it, even with the wall of a confessional between us. I always think it's a cop-out to say the effect of a story can't be conveyed in words, but so it is with "Father Corrigan's Diary."

Part of the reason for that is the mood that has been built up across the stories of The Bleeding Horse. It's not so much the literal connections among the stories, though those help, as it is the sense of a metaphysically coherent world of darkness and danger. Unlike a conventional ghost story collection, this one doesn't allow you to escape its various presences by turning the page and entering a space whose demons are, if similar, distinct. In this way, The Bleeding Horse combines the best features of a collection and a slow-building novel. Old Albert extends the experience with several more stories, linked this time not only by the setting but by the.. thing that can be found in Larkhill House. I don't know what it is, and I don't want to. Different in tone from the stories of The Bleeding Horse but thematically and atmospherically simpatico, Old Albert is further enhanced by an "afterword" from Adam Golaski that demonstrates Golaski's own impressive brand of modern-yet-classically-inspired supernatural fiction. Taken together, these two books are like a history of the ghost story from the middle ages to the present day.

The use of Rathmines is no mere device for increasing spookiness. It's a matter of recognizing that some places have an air about them, a hauntedness that is larger than any one restless spirit or chained demon. The weight of history can be present in a place, a perpetual reminder of human smallness:

Most people do not realise as they go south along South Great George’s Street from Dublin’s city centre that they are walking a very old path. It is one of the four roads to Dublin, a highway of pre-Norman origin that still feeds the city like a great tributary. This particular road connects Dublin with the not far-distant neighbourhood of Rathmines. At one time Rathmines was a desolate morass of scrub and gorse, of swampy ground and wandering, unbounded rivulets. But from this unwelcoming terrain sprouted first a rural village, then, from tillage land, a booming township, and now a fully urbanised neighbourhood of the ever-expanding city…. There should be little wonder that the neighbourhood which we today call Rathmines is like a vast house, forever haunted by its former residents. Those among you with sensitive temperaments will understand what I mean. We notice the details that most do not. We see the stories that others are unable or unwilling to read… The buildings that line the street are themselves entities, unique in their moods and vitalities. Many contain certain rooms that are by nature unwelcoming, and we would do well not to enter them. To do so would cause our stomachs to flutter, and the shadowy corners that subsist within would prickle the hair on our necks with disquieting expectation. What are these shades that exist alongside us? All we can hope for is that we do not enter one of these places whose disposition is darker than our own.

We may not want to enter these places, but with Brian J. Showers as a guide, we should all seize the opportunity to walk past them.

* * *

The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories was originally published by Mercier Press in 2008; you can buy it from Amazon.com or The Book Depository, or from the author. Old Albert was originally published by Ex Occidente Press in an edition that is now out of print; it might be available from dealers, or you could buy the reprint from Swan River Press. I own the latter edition; it's lovely, and looks very nice on the shelf next to The Bleeding Horse, which has the same dimensions. "Quis Separabit" from The Bleeding Horse is also available as a chapbook (scroll down). You can read Jim Rockhill's "Note to the Reader" from Old Albert, a sort of preview of the novella, in The Swan River Press Reader, a free e-book with selections from the publisher's current titles.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January-February 2013

2013-02-25T16:37:00.000-05:00

I've been experimenting with Kindle magazine subscriptions lately, and read the most recent issue of F&SF. Here are some quick thoughts on the fiction:

*Alex Irvine, "Watching the Cow": this novelette got the cover and first position. I wish I knew why, or that I felt anything much about it. A VR experiment by the narrator's sister goes wrong and blinds two million children, including the narrator's son and daughter. You'd think something interesting would come of that, but it's all remarkably undramatic. It's nice that Irvine avoids the melodrama of exaggerating the conflict between the narrator and his sister, or the narrator and his wife, or the narrator and his kids, as they all cope with what's happened... but the result is a story that offers nothing to care about. Something intriguing is happening offscreen, and something happens at the end that might have even more intriguing consequences, but the story skims over all of that in favor of the narrator's bland psychological processes. It also offers the unlikely prospect of an average guy who can outsmart the FBI, which apparently doesn't know how to track the activities of the family of a wanted fugitive. I could forgive that, if I saw a point to the story. But I don't.

*David Gerrold, "Night Train to Paris": once this gets going, it's a decent traditional horror story. But first you have to get through an overlong introductory section, in which we learn that Gerrold was reading A Game of Thrones and doesn't like lolcats or beggars, or talking to people on public transportation. I recognize, of course, that the reality-derived frame story is a time-honored ghostly device, but it doesn't need to go on so long, or tell the reader so little. The ending, though well-executed, is nothing you haven't seen before, and the thematic matter that's been laid across it doesn't add much.

*Ken Liu, "A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel": easily the best thing in the issue. An alternate history about an unlikely solution to the Great Depression, and its horrifying price. The structure, alternating between the narrator's personal account and the history of the tunnel, is common to alternate history, but there's a lot packed into this 6,000-word story, including a cross-cultural love affair, a technological marvel, and an unsettling confession. Even with all that, this isn't a breathtaking piece of fiction, but it comes close. I can see why Liu has received so many awards and nominations, and look forward to reading more of his work.

*Matthew Hughes, "Devil or Angel": this might be charming if it were a lot shorter, but at 16,000 words it does the opposite of growing on you. The characters are broadly drawn; the female antagonist is described as follows: "if Krissa Bolide were a car, she'd come with only forward gears and no rearview mirror." That's cute, but it's hardly deep characterization, and the plot depends on similarly cheap binaries of good and evil. It's an afterlife scenario that melds devils and angels with reincarnation, and never suggests that judging people in black-and-white terms might not be the best idea. The system is shown to be flawed, but only because the male protagonist, on his way to afterlife processing, touches the ethereal body of an acquaintance who is PURE EVIL, and thereby catches a case of evil cooties. Apparently this has never happened before in human history, so he is misjudged and separated from his true love. The structure makes the ending obvious pretty far in advance, and the climactic action sequence, while fun in a goofy way, doesn't justify all the time spent getting there. Maybe I'm just a grouch, but I wanted this story to be more complicated than it was.

*Dale Bailey, "This is How You Disappear": middle-aged angst with a surrealist spin. A few passages capture the guilt and fear involved in recognizing a moment where you might make a connection and failing to act on it, but mostly this story is, despite the details of its protagonist's family life, too generic to bring home the emotional malaise it describes, and feels more like an exercise in pity than profound fiction. I admire the craft, but there's no spark.

*Albert E. Cowdrey, "A Haunting in Love City": a psychic detective story. The scare, when it comes, is good, as in the Gerrold, and there's some stereotype-driven but genial background, as in the Hughes. This is better than either of those, but despite some modern trappings it's fundamentally old-fashioned, and (do you sense a theme here?) I wanted something more. In a different frame of mind I might have been more satisfied. The interaction between the detective and his husband is sort of amusing, anyway.

*Desmond Warzel, "The Blue Celeb": two barbers discover a car with an astonishing power. Or it would be astonishing, if cars and other things didn't demonstrate this kind of power in a lot of modern horror fiction. Like all four of the issue's novelettes, this is undeservedly slow-paced, and it's another story that isn't executed quite well enough to sell its well-worn premise. The text acknowledges that wisecracking Harlem barbers are a cliche, but indulges in them anyway, and the wisecracks aren't especially good, at least not enough so to justify the sassy, saintly, overweight elderly woman who also appears. With stock characters like these, an attempt to comment on life and death in the world of urban violence doesn't have much impact, though the last couple pages work fairly well all the same.

*Robert Reed, "Among Us": I like the twist in this one, which plays on familiar motifs and narrative contrivances of contemporary SF in a fairly clever way. But it feels more like the prologue to something larger than like a complete story in itself. Its aliens don't do anything worth reading about, and while that may be the point, it leads to a story that's underwhelming rather than understated. I do like the subtlety of the ending, though, which a lot of people may not pick on up. Unless I'm the one who's reading it wrong...

*Judith Moffett, "Ten Lights and Darks": a reporter assigned to a psychic, expecting to uncover a fraud, but... You can probably write the rest of the summary yourself, and despite a couple tweaks, this story basically develops according to formula. The big difference is that it's a pet psychic, or "animal communicator," but the methods and results are basically the same. Characterization here is thin-- the dog is about as well-developed as any of the humans-- and while the plot development is not as heavy-handed as it might be, there's still nothing here that earns 10,000 words' worth of the reader's time.

If I were describing whether to subscribe based on this issue, the answer would be "No," but the digital subscription is cheap enough that I can give it more time, and I know F&SF has published writers (M. Rickert, Richard Bowes) and stories (Carolyn Ives Gilman's "The Ice Owl") I really admire. So I'll definitely read the next issue, and I may be back at some point with comments on it. I also have digital subscriptions to (so far) Apex, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, and I may write about those. So this blog could be coming out of its long hibernation. Or not.

Apparitions 2: an anthology that deserves your support

2013-01-14T15:39:00.001-05:00

A quick one here, for people (if any) who read this blog but don't follow any of the other venues where I've made similar posts. Michael Kelly is seeking funding for Apparitions 2, a follow-up to his original anthology of ghostly fiction. The new volume will feature fiction from major contemporary writers like Glen Hirshberg, Kathe Koja, John Langan, Sarah Langan, Mark Morris, Reggie Oliver, M. Rickert, and Simon Strantzas. In spite of that star-studded lineup, the IndieGogo funding campaign is hovering at about 50% with 36 hours to go, so I'm doing what I can to bring in money. For a $25 contribution, you get a copy of the anthology, so it's basically like placing a pre-order. Larger donations offer other perks, such as a galley copy of the original Apparitions, in addition to the copy of Apparitions 2. If you can spare the cash, it's certainly a worthy project: http://www.indiegogo.com/Apparitions2/.

The Epiphanist: Interview

2012-10-31T12:00:00.000-04:00

After enjoying The Epiphanist more than I ever expected, I asked author William Rosencrans to answer a few questions about himself and his book by e-mail, and he agreed.

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Your author biography on Amazon.com says "William Rosencrans was born and raised in New Orleans, the entropic center of the universe. Immediately after receiving a degree in medieval studies from Tulane University he fled for the wilderness. He spent years living in the Ozarks, then wandered the US before settling down in the mountains of western North Carolina, where he currently works as a stonemason and writer." An unusual career path-- could you tell us more about it, and about your life in general?

Sure. I was raised in a wonderful family by a mathematician, an artist, and a lawyer, who allowed me (mostly) to do whatever I wanted. I never had a curfew; I ate and read and dressed as I liked; and I made friends among the city’s criminal underbelly, its aristocracy, and various layers in between.

In college I declared a major in linguistics, then in astronomy, then in anthropology before deciding on English and medieval studies. Lovelife, employment, hairstyles: all very erratic. In the early 1990s, as New Orleans was becoming the most violent city in the industrialized world, I joined a commune in the Ozarks and learned how to weld, slaughter, garden, and weave a hammock. Four years later I abandoned the commune with my wife and baby daughter; moved the three of us, naively, into a van; traveled the country for two years...

Things are settling down now. For the last twelve years I’ve practiced stonemasonry in Asheville, North Carolina – the longest I’ve stuck with anything.

Tell us something about your development as a writer. Have you always wanted to be one? The Epiphanist is unusually polished and complex for a self-published first novel: is there earlier, unpublished fiction, or other writing? Who and/or what do you see as influences on your work?

Well, I’ve always told stories. But writing? You should take a look at the sample rough draft on my Amazon page. Two and even three lines of writing to every college-ruled line on the paper, heavily annotated, crossed out, arrowed, systems of colored ink violated impatiently... Even a simple three-word phrase can induce a fit of compulsive rewriting and re-rewriting: it might be a better use of my time to rock back and forth in a closet with my knees clutched to my chest.

The problem is that I love words so much. Now and then I open the dictionary at a random spot and read for a while. Boustrophedon, gowpen, sitzmark, slinkskin... Wow. I love them too much to be completely comfortable with the writing process; it should probably only be entrusted to a master.

At the top of my current list of masters are Graham Greene for how much meaning he can condense into a single sentence and Dickens for writing so beautifully and with such generosity. Science fiction favorites: Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Stanislaw Lem, Rudy Rucker... But lists are boring, aren’t they?

What are your hobbies and interests outside of literature?

Stonemasonry has been a major part of my life. I love it. I’ve practiced it for over a decade, building walls, paths, steps, columns, ponds, waterfalls, and so on. (There’s an online portfolio of some of my work at www.stonebyrosencrans.com.) A few months ago I herniated three discs in my back working on a small dam for a distillery in Tennessee, though, so I’m doing lighter masonry work at the moment.

I could also draw all day, and on walks in the summer I like to take a sketchbook with me. Doing pen-and-ink drawings and sketches are an indispensable solace. My mother was a tremendous artist and allowed me unfettered, uncritiqued drawing time whenever I wanted it. And I’ve recently done some woodcarvings, working on big dead treestumps with a chainsaw and chisels.

How did you come to self-publish The Epiphanist? What was the experience of preparing print and electronic editions of the novel like?

It was great. Many fantastic books get rejected a dozen or more times before their publication, which begs the question of how worthwhile it is to try and run the gauntlet of agents and other gatekeepers in the first place, especially since publishers more and more leave the burden of marketing to the author. I was already skeptical of the industry, and after just three rejections I opted to self-publish.

I was encouraged by editing another book, Jean Henri Chandler’s The Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic, a great work by a great scholar who had decided to self-publish. The draft copy he sent me was a perfect-bound book with a gorgeous cover, lavishly illustrated and beautifully formatted; I was floored to find out that this copy had cost him less to set up and purchase from Lulu, a self-publishing company, than the manuscript of The Epiphanist had cost me to print out at Kinko’s.

After doing some research I decided to do it through Amazon. Incredibly easy. Contractual obligations are negligible. I bought my own ISBN directly from Bowker for about $125, and have purchased copies of the book for potential reviewers. Beyond that I haven't spent a dime.

Editing, cover design, and promotion are all things one could hire out and which I opted to do myself; I think you could expect to spend several thousands of dollars otherwise (the bulk of it being for promotion). I’m a part-time copyeditor and edited a newspaper for a while, so that much was simple. Designing a cover was a painstaking process but I’m satisfied with the result. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service makes the e-book process very simple, and its Createspace branch does the same for printed matter.

Promotion is the tough part. I've been fairly lackadaisical about it, asking as many people as possible to review The Epiphanist or tell friends about it on Facebook or otherwise. Typically I've looked at reviews of books which were similar in style or content to mine, culled the best-written of those reviews, and emailed the authors if their contact info was available to see if they were interested. Out of 102 queries, 33 have responded; 19 of those have agreed to review it.

But those efforts are paltry. It takes real determination to do it right: setting up interviews on local radio stations and book signings at local bookstores; establishing a presence on forums related to your work, and, after you've built up some credibility, announcing the publication of your masterpiece; developing a website... I haven’t done any of this yet.

Where did the idea for The Epiphanist come from? How did you develop its unusual setting, which mixes contemporary and futuristic technology with historically-influenced social, economic, and political structures?

Well, the basic notion of a world in which high and low technologies exist side by side is hardly a new one, but I suppose the specifics here are more heavily researched than normal.

Of course my university studies provided some background. The Middle Ages were actually a time of incredible technological sophistication, every bit as revolutionary as current developments in nanotechnology are for us. A peasant lad travelling from his farmstead in, say, rural Prussia to a major city like Danzig would have been astonished no less than Vladimir is in The Epiphanist when he reaches the Holy City. It didn’t seem like too much of a stretch to superimpose current and future technologies on that same milieu.

The world is like that, though: it’s a temporal palimpsest whose earlier traces underlie everything. I have a certain fondness for the terminology used in medieval European social systems, and I used it extensively in the book, but those systems themselves aren’t too different from what one can find now in much of the world, even here in America in some ways.

The physical setting of The Epiphanist is crucial to this aspect of the story; all that simultaneity seemed to need a hot, overgrown environment to melt together in. The island is actually Borneo, whose jungles and swamps and mountains I spent several years researching – I amassed a huge pile of information about Borneo in the process of writing this book. I don’t like inventing things willy-nilly and I get a bit annoyed with science fiction and fantasy authors who pull implausible concepts out of thin air to move a story forward, or make up weird-sounding words to introduce a note of exoticism. Every strange plant and animal in the book, every peculiar geological feature, from the corpse lilies to the karst forests, is absolutely real. The same holds true for technologies (self-healing ceramics, biomimetics) and religion (early Gnosticism).

Religion is a major topic in The Epiphanist, with different characters offering a variety of views on its legitimacy, its ethics, the question of free will, the nature of visionary experience, and other issues. Would you be willing to discuss your own history with and perspective on religion?

Sure! I was raised in the Episcopalian church until about the age of eleven, at which time two things happened: I read the story of the Golden Calf, and my mother stopped attending. Both things extinguished my interest in religion for many years. The Golden Calf incident... Well, it seemed to me that only a psychopath would order his followers to kill their own sons, brothers, friends, and neighbors for praying to an idol.

For the next decade or so I thought of religion as a profoundly bad thing; there were just too many examples of devout people wreaking havoc in the name of their faith. I’ve since made a sort of peace with it, and a few people have taught me the extraordinary extent to which a religion can ennoble its followers.

Religion is a great framework in which to pose questions about ethics and free will. And it does give people a sense of community and hope. Beyond this, it fascinates me as a writer. The teachings of the Church in The Epiphanist are lifted straight from classical Gnosticism. The notion that there was once a God, that the female half impregnated Herself, that She cast the unborn child from Her womb into the void, that it survived and created a world for itself to be God of, and that we live in that world... Fantastic. Pure science fiction.

Politics is also key to The Epiphanist, which is set in a place in which it and religion are intertwined. Certain characters put forth what might, depending on one's perspective, be called a cynical or a realist view of the concerns and tactics of political leaders. What are your own feelings about the relationship between government and its citizens, and how do they relate to the content of The Epiphanist?

Generally the relationship looks like a pretty bad one, doesn’t it? Everyone seems to agree that it could be much better. Democracy, like Gandhi’s quip about Western civilization, “would be a good idea.”

In The Epiphanist, a nanorobotic fly introduces Vladimir to the concept of the state as an egregor – an entity with its own agenda, distinct from the individuals who nominally control it: a sort of demon. The initial idea came from the concept of demonic “powers and principalities” as expressed by William Stringfellow, a theologian who adapted the idea from the Book of Revelations to American politics.

Do I believe that the state is a demon, complete with horns and tail? Of course not. But it’s a useful metaphor for some states, at least, and the personae they seem to acquire as they grow. And, leaving the metaphor behind, it’s painfully obvious that most people in positions of political power have no concern for average citizens.

In the part of North Carolina where I live, until the late 19th century, we had a population of yeomen, which in the US meant non-slaveholding, small-landowning family farmers. I’m not one to romanticize hard physical labor, especially since my back went out (though white-collar workers throw their backs out, too), but these were independent people who got by perfectly well and had a supportive community. They got sick, like we do; they died, like we do. But they had a degree of autonomy unfathomable to us now. It was a far better situation, in my opinion.

What do you think you'll write next? Is more fiction in the world of The Epiphanist a possibility, or have you said all you want to say about that setting?

I’ve thought about writing a sequel, but Vladimir’s transformations make it pretty much impossible to write from his point of view ever again. It would be a shame to leave the jungles of Borneo forever, though; I really fell in love with them. I’d like to tackle a sequel from another character’s perspective.

I have a number of ideas for other novels. I’ll avoid mentioning specifics. The goal in writing any future novel, for me as much as any other novelist, is to use our beautiful English language as well as possible, pack in some interesting ideas, and do it all in the context of a ripping good yarn.

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I'm grateful to Mr. Rosencrans for taking the time to indulge my curiosity, and obviously I encourage you to read his novel. Now.

The Epiphanist: Excerpt

2012-10-29T11:16:00.000-04:00

From Chapter 1:

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He had come at last to the fields. The jungle stopped here abruptly, the trees leaning out past the jungle’s edge as though by the momentum of their growing. A dry, shallow moat, burned clean of vegetation, ran along the boundary to keep the wilderness at bay, and immediately past it, where the trail to the road began, three policemen sat rolling dice. They ignored him. Sir Wenceslas’s tobacco field was laid out neatly under the sun, and the tobacco hands were pulling off the little bouquets of unopened blossoms now that the day was cooling down.

Past the tall tobacco barn the road opened, and now the entire manor was spread out before him: its contoured hills and sloped fields, rice silos, the banana and lime orchards, the water buffalo in their pasture, the reed-thatched huts of the crofters cobbled together from mud and tufa blocks, and then the battery of coke-ovens hazing the air with sulfur gas. Beyond them the river cut a long lazy curve to the south, and an armored police boat motored across it from the big station house on the opposite bank.

On a little terraced hill was a green park used for feast days where a work party was now setting up tables and ribbons for tomorrow’s holiday, the Feast of the Transfiguration. The cartouchiers would fire a fusillade of star shells and firedrakes. And when the police weren’t looking he could trade them a little nitrous oxide for a paper bag of squibs...

An acre of green rice stippled the mirror of the floodplain. Four people were standing in the water, sickling the earliest of the ripening heads into their baskets. And well past the river and the paddies stood the castle itself, grey granite walls pitted and scarred, surrounded by shockfences and a great self-healing ceramic rampart.

The hut was empty when he arrived. Nana was in the kitchen at the castle cooking the Baron’s dinner but had made a stack of rice balls with yam, eggplant, and chili pepper from their little plot for dinner, and he took two, though she would yell at him for it. If there were any treats she had hidden them well.

In the shade of a banana tree he ate the rice balls and thought about his teacher and the New Believers. He had seen Revival Moon once, in Chowtown, while Nana was at the bazaar trading cigarettes for cutlery. The man wore only a loincloth, so that his almost fleshless flanks and ribs – wracked by cancer, torn by the flagellants’ lash, branded with charms – would inspire believers and rebuke the wicked. His shaved head was knobby like a fist. He was squatting next to a watering trough for oxen with a copy of the Evangels open on his lap, talking and smiling ecstatically to a small crowd of followers.

Nana had found him sitting there and pulled him away, bowing her apologies to the catechist, who ignored her. She was devout, but the fanaticism of the New Believers’ flock seemed to make her uneasy, as did Vladimir’s piety.

Vladimir, who walked to the manor’s small church every evening with Nana to light candles before going to bed, had felt the Holy Spirit enter him many times, starting at a river service when he was eight. First his body had come strangely apart from him; it had slumped over, while he watched from behind his own eyes as Nana reached down to pull him up from the grass. Then it had started to shake and he had stood as if yanked to his feet by two great hands and began shouting strange words in a voice not his own, a man’s voice which bullied, cajoled, and wept, and the pastor had put his rough hands on him for good luck, and then everyone had.

Afterwards, flushed with compassion for the sinners of Abaddon, he had decided to save Mr. Singh from his atheism, but the next morning the teacher had mocked his efforts with such energy and pleasure that he gave up and spent the next several weeks inventing terrible torments for the old man in Hell: spiked wheels, flensing hooks, iron crowns glowing with heat, beds of black nails, tubs filled with pit vipers and kraits, and other punishments derived from the Inferno Book of the Evangels.

Long known as a libertine who drank, gambled, fornicated with prostitutes, and scorned the Church, Mr. Singh had said that if Moon and the others were right, then he would be punished for his sins after he died. Therefore the New Believers, in calling for his arrest, were claiming divine justice for themselves and were thus guilty of a very terrible sin. He had read passages from scripture which seemed to back him up. Vladimir had, in the end, agreed, and if the fly had spoken the truth and Moon wanted to crucify him, then the Church had a responsibility to rein the catechist in and so prevent an offense against God, and he knew that it would not.

Was the Church, as Mr. Singh said, just another suzerain, and Moon its vassal knight?

The world seemed to draw away from him suddenly as he sat in the garden, finishing the second rice ball. His teacher believed that the world was surrounded by a void. No heavens, no hells, no God. What, then, had taken hold of him at the river, and made him stand up? Whose voice had come from his mouth?

He felt deeply alone, and spat out the mouthful of rice, a thing of the world he didn’t belong to. A tiny pink snail was crawling up the damp fibrous trunk of the banana tree. He flicked it off and crushed it sadly under the ball of his thumb.

The sun was lower, its light failing on the shadowed ground, and he got up, fed the rabbits in their hutch, and went to tend the coke-ovens. It seemed to take a very long time to get there. Few people were out, and he stared at them as they passed: they looked almost hollow to him, husks animated by something else inside, like snails. A star appeared in the east, or an untwinkling white dot rather like a star.

Farther and farther away the edges of the world were peeling from him, like an old photograph. He cupped his hands around his eyes the better to see it, a frail, pretty thing of painted fields and sky, full of murderers and fornicators, and wept, and began praying for their redemption, their release from the flesh.

He was still weeping, deep in prayer, when he reached the ovens. The smell of rotten eggs was overpowering, and the respirator he put on filled his ears with the sound of his fervent supplications to God. A coal car was scraping along the rails above the battery, dumping charges of fine crushed coal into the glowing trunnels as it went. Below, a figure in an asbestos hood and gown raked the charges flat, the heat from the open doors making his outline flutter. Vladimir was supposed to turn on the pump, and brick the oven doors shut, and the foreman raised her own respirator, exposing a face like cured ham, and yelled at him to get to work, but he couldn’t stop praying.

She swore and pushed him, and he got to his feet, making the sign of the chiasma over her as she shoved him toward the pumphouse. At last she gave up.

“Vladimir! You’re sick again. God damn it, get the fuck up. Get out of here.”

He stared at the animated shell of her face, its rough glossy surface not like skin, and said a prayer for the burned. When he reached out to bless it she reared back.

“Go home,” the woman shouted, and she unbuckled his respirator and tore it away. “Go to your Nana. Go to your Nana, you little shit. She’ll give you your medicine.”

The sun was setting now. More stars had come out, and he strode away from the glowing ovens and onto the road, waving his arms, shouting benedictions. A patrol car screeched to a stop in front of him and he blessed the driver, who laughed and waved him on. His prayer turned into a carol and he ran singing over the earth with its little huts, all of it like a picture from a book. He could see words written across it now, and he slowed down, amazed, staring at the richly inscribed vision, dwarfed by the great wheel of the constellations. It was a picture from the illuminated version of the Evangels, but one he had never seen before, a secret page. The wind blew down to help. You’re sick again, little sinner, it whispered. Sick under the dome of the heavens.

A figure was walking along the road up to him. It was the Savior, radiant on the darkening road between the lime orchard and the open fields of cassava. As in the illustrations, His face was round and white in death, and He was clad in a white winding cloth. The figure walked or drifted over the road until He was in front of Vladimir and the world folded completely away. There was nothing but the road, and the two of them.

Do you know the Word, the Savior asked. Do you remember how the aeon in Heaven turned away from her consort, and got herself with child; and how she came to know her error before the child was born, that it was deformed, and to spare her shame she cast it from her womb into the void; and how the demigod fell, and did not die but lived as it fell through the void, and created a world for itself. Do you remember the Word.

Savior, he said, I do remember the Word. It’s from the First Book of the Evangels.

Then continue it for Me.

The false, aborted god created the world of flesh, Vladimir said, and bodies of flesh to be cages, and he trapped sparks from heaven in the cages, and the sparks were of life and we call them souls. And You came to teach us how to open the cages, and were killed by agents of the aborted god, and have come back to help me.

It is so, said the Savior. Now you should go home, and let your Nana give you your medicine, for you are very, very sick.

Then the Savior’s face changed, and Vladimir screamed, and the thing loped after him on all fours, chasing him in the gathering dark back to the croft. Nana was sitting on the bench taking off her sandals when he burst in. Sobbing with terror he told her what had happened, and she sucked in her breath in shock and shushed him, and said his raving was very blasphemous and would bring bad luck. The Savior didn’t look like that in any pictures she had seen, she declared. She made him sit down, filled a hypodermic syringe with his medicine and dosed him, and he fixed his eyes on her old, capable-looking face and stubbled chin as the familiar icy numbness flowed up his arm.

Then she had him lie down facing the wall. After a while his breathing steadied, and he passed out, and when he woke up he was back in the world. He lay still in bed while Nana bustled in the kitchen finishing dinner and grouching to herself. The episode was losing clarity already, like a dream; he couldn’t remember the strange way things had looked, and a wave of melancholy swept over him. His mouth was parched, and he sat up and drank from a clay pitcher of water, crying a little.

The Epiphanist: Review

2012-10-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

When discussing self-published writing there is the unavoidable impulse to grade on a curve. There are good reasons for it. Most self-published material is below the not-exact-lofty standards of professional fiction, in ways that become obvious on page one. But even when better books come along, I sometimes find myself diminishing their achievement, thinking of them as "good (for something self-published)," even when they're no worse than what you'd find on a bookstore shelf from a major publisher. And then I read William Rosencrans' The Epiphanist, a novel that made such condescension impossible, a story so polished, thoughtful, and rich in sense of place that it demands to be thought of as a fine science fiction novel full stop. In fact, I liked it so much that I'm breaking new ground for this blog and posting an excerpt and an author interview as well as a review. The excerpt will appear later today, while the interview will follow on Wednesday. I'll update this post once both are available. (If I haven't, leave a comment reminding me.)

Because it is on the simple level of sentence construction that the typical self-published novel most visibly falls down, I should begin with the question of style. Since a long excerpt from The Epiphanist will appear separately, I'll forego my usual practice of quoting a couple passages. It would be hard to find appropriate ones, anyway, though this Amazon review does a good job; what makes Rosencrans so unusual among self-published writers, and, alas, among the traditionally-published as well, is the simple clarity of his sentences. There are no verbal pyrotechnics here, even when there are literal ones, but the language is never cluttered, banal, or obvious. I am embarrassed to admit that a lot of books bring out the clucking English teacher I never became, making me want to go over them with a red pen: "this word isn't used in this sense," "that modifier ought to be somewhere else." Not so with The Epiphanist, which is carefully wrought and occasionally finds a gentle beauty in the flow of images through the mind of its quietly observant protagonist.

It may seem odd to praise a book's style almost entirely by saying that it isn't flawed, but there are stories that almost demand this sort of subdued, difficult-to-describe prose, and The Epiphanist is one, precisely because its world is so lively, both physically and intellectually. The setting is the future (vaguely post-apocalyptic, though the details of how we got from here to there are not a major focus) and the war-torn island of Abaddon. The inhabitants of Abaddon are exiles, those deemed unsuitable for the wider world due to behavior or to perceived flaws in the templates from which they've been genetically engineered. But there is hope: if they can prove their moral worth by passing the examen, a rigorous study of their past actions (as recorded by the ever-present but invisible monitors) and present beliefs, they can enter the Holy City and live a life of peace and luxury. Of course, almost no one is ever deemed worthy. But Vladimir, the novel's young hero, may have some hope-- if he lives long enough to get there.

As this outline may suggest, the distinctive thing about The Epiphanist is its blend of old and new, strange and familiar, futuristic ideas used to explore ancient questions about right action, social order, and the possibility of goodness. The novel takes a nuanced and balanced approach to these questions, allowing different characters to put forth a range of opinions on religion, politics, and the underlying morality of each, always credibly, without force-feeding the reader a required perspective on anything (though that's not to say the book lacks an attitude of its own). The protagonist and title character does, as the title suggests, have his share of sudden revelations, but the reader isn't expected to agree with them, and can enjoy the flow of ideas and plot developments in a number of different ways, right down to the hauntingly ambiguous ending, which manages at once to reveal a good deal and to leave itself open. That Rosencrans can engage such heavy topics in the course of a long story without once becoming dogmatic is another sign of his depth as a writer.

But even before noticing that, the first-time reader of The Epiphanist is likely to be struck by the eccentric richness of its setting. Abaddon is a tropical island, and its flora and fauna have the intensity of the jungle, but the politics, society, and technology of the isle are a fascinating mix of varying places and times, past, present, and future. Gunships, swordsmen, feline-human hybrids, coke ovens, feudalism, limousines, gnosticism: it ought to feel like a meaningless hodgepodge or a showy collection of notions, but instead, unfurled gradually and without ugly exposition in Rosencrans' direct prose, it becomes a credible community, recognizably human for all its wildness, the best kind of science fiction milieu.

I haven't said much about the plot, nor will I. It isn't the point, nor is it especially "action-packed," though there are a few harrowing sequences of different sorts. The joy of The Epiphanist is the surprising world it unfolds (and if you think my laundry list of elements above has given everything away, don't worry: there's more where that came from), the old philosophical issues which are given new relevance in that setting, and the character of Vladimir, who wants to know what is true and right but is torn in a dozen different directions and is, like any of us, capable of terrible things. Like much thoughtful fiction, this novel is more about laying out dilemmas and showing possible responses to them than about providing easy answers, but the narrative arc, which ultimately reminds us that certain historic processes work regardless of how we interpret them, provides a sense of closure greater than that offered by explicit thematic summing-up.

Does this book have limitations? Of course. Gripped as I was by it, I never wanted it to move faster, but some may feel that Vladimir's peregrinations in the middle section go on too long. Readers led by my praise to expect great novelty will probably be disappointed; the blend of ideas here is unlike anything else you've read, but the individual components are readily recognizable from other science fiction. But these are the debatable flaws of a good novel, not the indisputable errors of an obvious failure. The Epiphanist is one of my favorite novels of 2012, and while you may not like it as much as I did, it's definitely worthy of your attention. The Kindle edition is a mere 99 cents (in the US; I assume it's roughly similar in the UK), a remarkable bargain for a novel of this caliber; even a print copy is more than worth its present price. William Rosencrans is a writer of prodigious gifts, and I'm eager to see what he'll do next.

The author supplied me with a review copy of this book.

Five Degrees of Latitude

2012-10-12T14:42:00.000-04:00

I recently read Five Degrees of Latitude, Michael Reynier's debut collection and part of the Tartarus Press Contemporary Fiction line. I recommend it highly to all admirers of the classical supernatural tale. Reynier's prose is uncommonly polished for a debut author, and his style is perfectly suited to the mode in which these five novellas work. The tales are reminiscent at one time or another of Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James, Edith Wharton, Le Fanu, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and others, not because Reynier's work is fundamentally derivative but because he is a new and distinctive writer working in that distinguished tradition. United though they are by their elegantly suggestive approach to the supernatural, these tales are each slightly different in tone.

"Le Loup-Garou" may, as its title suggests, be a werewolf story, but it's also a story about the power of the natural landscape to dominate a human community, and about the psychological struggles that occasionally erupt from beneath that community's surface. A disordered chronological structure creates an impression of eerie timelessness parallel to the mental dislocation of those who live in the forest-shadowed village of La-Chapelle-aux-Trois-Vallons, and also allows the plot to come together at an appropriate pace. That plot is made up of some traditional Gothic elements, but they are used well to create a story of old-fashioned psychological weight; it is here that the comparison to Hawthorne is strongest. And the very final scenes add that frisson of the numinous that distinguishes great supernaturalism.

"No. 3 Hobbes Lane," though as elegantly written as the others, is perhaps the weakest of these novellas. There is a disconnect between its ambitious themes, too bluntly stated in a key final scene, and the narrative devices to which that scene is tied, those of the charming but philosophically flimsy ghostly story. Unlike "Le Loup-Garou," which manages to be supernatural and psychological at once, "No. 3 Hobbes Lane" would be better without its shadowy creatures, relying on on the almost Dickensian drama of Ezekiel Hobbes. But there is a great pleasure to be had in unraveling along with the protagonist the mystery of a house that is turned entirely aware from the grand view toward which all its neighbors face. I do wish, though, that the local dialect had not disappeared from that character's speech just when it became necessary for him to narrate events in a more formal style...

"The Rumour Mill" is perhaps the most unusual of these novellas, and has no supernatural element, though it relies on and uses effectively the familiar device of discovered papers, in this case those belonging to a professor who has since disappeared in the course of experiments that grew out of a children's party game. It isn't terribly difficult to guess the direction in which the story is tending, and once a particular character appears the subsequent course of events is obvious. But there is a note of light comedy to the story that at first entertains and then, given subsequent events, disturbs, and as is often the case in such stories, the arrival at the expected ending still manages to satisfy.

"Sika Tarn" is, to my mind, the most chilling tale in Five Degrees of Latitude, and all the more so because in some sense it ought not to work. At first one seems to be reading a tale of alien presences in a remote landscape; there is an echo, intended I think, of "The Willows." But what haunts this isolated lake turns out to be something entirely different, on a smaller scale, and yet every bit as terrifying and sad as if it had had cosmic implications. What might otherwise have been commonplace devices are deployed in just the right way to make a massive impression, as in Edith Wharton's "Afterward," and the themes at work, similar to those of "No. 3 Hobbes Lane," feel much more natural than in that story, and contribute to the mood. "Sika Tarn," like Quentin S. Crisp's "Ynys-Y-Plag," is one of the finest contemporary novellas in the weird tradition.

"The Visions of Lazaro" demonstrates that it isn't only the tropes of fantasy and horror that make for atmospheric supernatural fiction. The trappings here are those of science fiction, but the effect of this "found manuscript" story is as dislocating and ominous as those of the other four. The inclusion of a fictional "Editor's Note" that clarifies certain plot points is, I feel, a miscalculation; not since The Ring has a genre work explained and explained and explained in a way that sucks out the atmosphere. Some subtle connections that I had missed were revealed, but it's better for such things to be discovered gradually on re-reading and contemplation than to have them handed to you. Still, "The Visions of Lazaro" is a fine piece of weird science fiction, with an almost bittersweet air of pessimism running throughout.

Tartarus Press' primary output is handsome hardcover limited editions, but many of its titles are also available in ebook, either from Amazon sites or direct from the publisher, and it was in that format that I read Five Degrees of Latitude. Although the experience of a Tartarus hardcover is not to be missed for aesthetes of the physical book, quality fiction transcends format: these novellas are every bit as evocative on a screen as they are on the page, and the ebook is more readily affordable for readers on a budget. However it happens, Five Degrees of Latitude deserves to be read by any fan of authors like those mentioned in the first paragraph of this review. Michael Reynier has enormous gifts, and I'm very much looking forward to his next work.

The First Book of Classical Horror Stories

2012-09-19T12:14:00.000-04:00

Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.
-William Congreve, The Mourning Bride

And so it does. But it also has less pleasant capacities, darker magic to unsettle, to depress, to terrify. It is that sort of music that's performed in DF Lewis' latest anthology, The First Book of Classical Horror Stories. As with The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies from the same editor, this is an intriguing, often remarkably effective set of stories, let down only by unpolished prose and imperfect structural decisions from a few of the contributors. However, this new volume is heavier than its predecessor on truly well-crafted work, and lighter on grating failures. The highs are also higher, and the lows aren't lower, making The First Book of Classical Horror Stories an easy anthology to recommend to admirers of subtle and surreal horror.

Things begin a little awkwardly with Rachel Kendall's "Chamber Music" and Andrew Hook's "The Universe at Gun Point," both of which are solid concepts imperfectly executed. Kendall's style lacks the command of diction necessary to allow her disturbingly evocative vision of a comatose giant on a hillside to achieve its fullest power. Hook, on the other hand, finds the right voice for his account of a musician's unusual source of inspiration, but the imagery and narrative arc are too insubstantial for the whole to have much impact; one is aware and appreciative of the story's intentions, but almost clinically so. Neither of these opening tales is bad, but there's a definite sense of reach exceeding grasp.

A run of more successful stories follows. D. P. Watt's "Vertep" is arguably more puppet horror than classical music horror, but either way it's a good one. Initially its narrator's flat affect is a mixed blessing, making the prose seem crude rather than simple, but as this tale of obsession builds toward its unexpectedly blatant climax, that bluntness becomes appropriately disturbing, a mark of insanity that strikes an appropriate balance between terror and a terrible humor. Admirers of Thomas Ligotti's later work are particularly advised to check out this story.

Given the theme of his collection A Pallid Wave on Shores of Night, it comes as little surprise that Adam S. Cantwell contributes a story to this anthology, and given the excellence of that collection, it comes as little surprise that "Beyond Two Rivers: A Symphonic Poem" is one of the anthology's triumphs. A great conductor has traveled to a Middle Eastern nation to lead its Philharmonic, but why, in the aftermath of a botched performance, is he waking up in a pitch-black rehearsal hall where the only sound he can hear is music? The Maestro's desperate search for answers in that darkened space is a fine exercise in gradual horror, but the real meat of the story is its flashbacks, in which the opulence and the despair of this dictatorship, and the Maestro's own psychological and moral weakness, are deftly sketched, creating a weighty counterpoint to the immediate terror. Cantwell has a gift, quite valuable in subtle horror, for crafting language that communicates its elegance without verbal pyrotechnics, simply by never striking (forgive the over-apt metaphor) a false note.

In "Anamnesis in Extremis" Dominy Clements uses the historical fact of the suicide of Gustav Mahler's brother Otto as the basis for a tale of fatal music. The prose is, given the narrator's formality and the seriousness with which he approaches the philosophy of music, competent, but it's only in the final two paragraphs that it becomes truly, er, musical. Lawrence Conquest's "Reverie" is a short, sharp, grim story about grief and the power of music to set a mood, with lean, poetic prose that is as powerful a mood-setter as the music it describes. Nicole Cushing's "The Fourteenth" takes its inspiration from Shostakovich's symphony on death, and considers grief in a manner entirely different from but as effective as that of the Conquest story, with a series of odd, almost comical encounters that nonetheless capture the deranged pathos of loss.

Like "Chamber Music," Stephen Bacon's "The Ivory Teat" isn't written with quite the skill necessary to make its images of urban isolation, awkwardness, and despair resonate, though the story nonetheless has a lurid charm. There's no charm at all in "Human Resources," easily the anthology's worst entry. The element of classical music is awkwardly joined to a framework of corporate horror, which could itself be interesting were it not for Karim Ghahwagi's torturously flabby prose, which makes becoming involved in the story so difficult that its underdeveloped narrative is especially unsatisfying.

Things take a turn toward the positive again with "Winter's Traces" by John Howard. It's not really a horror story, though there is one creepy notion at work, but a melancholy reflection on a frustrated artist and his peculiar life, and on the disappearance of cultural forms. Holly Day's "Excerpted" is more traditionally horrific, and works well on that level, although there's nothing especially surprising about what happens when the protagonist goes too far in performing the strangely dissonant alterations to classical compositions that he discovered in a convent library. Colin Insole's "The Appassionata Variations," like his story for The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, conjures up a world of Gothic cruelty, but the prose here is much stronger, creating an atmosphere of decadent corruption that is, in and of itself, sufficient reason to recommend the story to audiences who value such things.

To this point the stories have aided the construction of a review by falling into runs of better and worse. In the last third of the collection, though, the patterns fall apart. Tony Lovell's "The Holes" is another surreal piece that doesn't quite make its strangeness meaningful, while Daniel Mills' "De Profundis" is a brilliant cosmic horror story of deepening obsession that returns to the motif of music's power to alter the world in upsetting ways. "Boris' Aria" by M. Sullivan could be a great little piece of comic horror, but in its present form it doesn't take full advantage of its potential, whether because it wasn't conceived as horror or because its author doesn't have the requisite stylistic chops. S. D. Tullis' "Strings" suffers from a couple unfortunate comparisons, one of which I'll get into below, and one of which comes from the use of quotes from finer stylists at the beginning and end of the style, which can only serve as reminders that Tullis' own prose lacks their natural rhythms. Carmen Tudor's "Grace Notes" is another traditional horror notion, somewhat hampered by imperfect prose. Mark Valentine's "Without Instruments" is a delightful example of his aesthetic, esoteric fiction, which whether supernatural or not has a marvelous transporting effect not unlike that described in this story, which can be seen as a sort of companion or contrast to his "The Atelier at Iasi." In "Songs for Dead Children," Aliya Whiteley takes on the bleakness of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, and says something powerful about the price of truly understanding tragic art. And the collection ends with Rhys Hughes offering his usual dark brand of whimsy in the one-page, one-joke, fairly satisfying "The Trilling Seasons."

Readers familiar with the table of contents for The First Book of Classical Horror Stories will have noticed that I've left one story out of this perhaps overly exhaustive rundown. I was about to type a one-sentence review of Sarah O'Scalaidhe's "He Had Lived for Music," but it would have been essentially the same as several other one-sentence reviews: "prose doesn't quite do justice to" etc. The deeper problem, for O'Scalaidhe's story and several others, is that, despite differences in setting and style, many of the contributing writers are trading on similar basic notions, often to do with the power, either emotional or literal, of music. "Strings," for example, isn't really a bad story, but both "De Profundis" and "Anamnesis in Extremis" have done basically the same thing at a higher skill level. Sameness is often an issue in theme anthologies; here, given the mediocrity of some of the contributions, it means that they slip rapidly from the mind. (Badness is often more memorable than adequacy; I'm certainly not going to forget "Human Resources," but I had already lost track of "The Ivory Teat" in the week between finishing the book and writing this review.) To an extent, this works in the anthology's favor, since only the good stories contribute to the reader's impression of it. And there are a lot of good stories, and only the one real clunker, which means that as anthologies go, The First Book of Classical Horror Stories is quite strong. Will there be a Second Book of....? I don't know, and I don't know whether the concept of classical horror is strong enough to support a series. But for one volume, it works out reasonably well.

The publisher supplied a review copy of this book.

On the World Fantasy Award Nominees for Best Novel

2012-09-04T14:29:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, when the World Fantasy award nominations were announced, I looked at the list of Best Novel contenders and thought, "Hey, I've read three of those, and I just downloaded a fourth from the Kindle Library. Why not read the fifth too, and have an informed opinion on one category of one major award?" So here we are.

The nominees are:

•  Those Across the River, Christopher Buehlman (Ace)
•  11/22/63, Stephen King (Scribner; Hodder & Stoughton as 11.22.63)
•  A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Bantam; Harper Voyager UK)
•  Osama, Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
•  Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Three of those were selected by this year's award judges (John Berlyne, James P. Blaylock, Stephen Gallagher, Mary Kay Kare, and Jacques Post), while two were the top vote-getters among the convention members. I think it's pretty obvious that the Buehlman and the Tidhar are judge selections. It's tempting to suggest that the Walton is the third and that the two bestselling doorstoppers are the member selections, but I'm not sure of that. The Walton just won the Hugo, so it has plenty of support among convention-goers, for reasons that we'll (unfortunately) be getting to. I don't know that the judges would have added the Martin, especially since they're also giving him a Life Achievement Award this year, but I suppose they might have picked the King. It hardly matters, anyway.

So which one of these would I vote for, if I were on the jury? The Tidhar, I suppose. My main reaction is that it's a pretty weak slate of nominees. I can think of quite a few novels from last year that are more deserving, and not because they're masterpieces; they just lack the glaring flaws of four of these five nominees, and are more ambitious and innovative than a different four of the five. Yes, these nominees include a novel whose craft is consistently elegant and a novel whose content is appropriately contemporary, but they aren't the same novel. So which are which? Let's go down the list in order.

I reviewed Those Across the River exactly a year ago, and my opinion hasn't changed much in hindsight. It's a well-written novel in the sense that its prose isn't awkward or workmanlike, a standard not all of the nominees can equal, but it's not a masterpiece of style either, and the plot covers familiar territory for rural horror. I'm not sure its treatment of race is ideal; like John Farris' All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, it invokes black revenge on white cruelty in ways that can be troubling. Suggestive and explicit horror are carefully balanced, and the ambiguous ending is powerful, but these aren't enough for the novel to transcend its ultimately conventional nature. This is Buehlman's debut fiction, and as such it's impressive; I wish the World Fantasy Award had a first novel category, so his accomplishment could be acknowledged without suggesting that it's one of the best novels of the year, which it isn't.

I didn't review 11/22/63. I think Stephen King could have written a good changing-the-past story. And I think he could have written a good historical novel about Lee Harvey Oswald. And I think he could have written a good sentimental novel about a late 1950s smalltown romance... no, scratch that. I think he could written a competent sentimental novel about a late 1950s smalltown romance, because books like that tend not to be good. You see where I'm going with this, anyway. The trouble with changing-the-past stories is that there are only two types: the one where you can't change the past, and the one where you can but you shouldn't. There's still some pleasure to be had in a clever execution of each, and King uses his particular narrative mechanics to construct a great suspense sequence at the climax, but let's not confuse that with great writing.

The bigger problem with 11/22/63 is that by the time King actually gets around to playing out his time-travel premise, you've already read 900 pages of two other books, the endessly good-natured, achingly derivative smalltown romance, and that Lee Harvey Oswald novel, in which his mother is one of King's usual shrieking-harpy moms, much like Eddie Kaspbrak's. And speaking of It, there's also a long interlude in which the narrator tests the time-travel mechanism via a trip to 1950s Derry, and if you think characters from It won't have a charming-but-gratuitous cameo, you haven't read enough King. The Derry interlude isn't terrible in and of itself-- King, whose prose over the years has become, if not more graceful than at least less graceless, writes about the shadow over the city rather well given the flatness of his style-- but it, and all the other sidelines, make the novel so long that the resolution of the central narrative feel like an afterthought. It's simply not interesting or inventive enough to be worth all that wait. I liked the book-- to one degree or another I liked all five nominees-- but none of the four or five better books trapped inside it pokes far enough out for it to be award-worthy.

I reviewed A Dance with Dragons, but you shouldn't read what I wrote about it. Really, don't click there. It's an utterly fannish response that barely mentions, and severely understates the depth of, the novel's flaws. I'm not as down on A Song of Ice and Fire as some in fandom. I still think it's virtually the only doorstopper fantasy series that can be taken seriously in terms of complex characterization and remotely credible storytelling, and that its attempt to offer the pleasures of a certain kind of fantasy in a story that also reflects on what real life in such a milieu would be like is laudable. The enthusiasm that radiates from that review (seriously, don't read it) is still there.

But the thing is, A Song of Ice and Fire just won't stop growing. If Martin had delivered the story he envisioned when he sold the series, the last book would have been released twelve years ago. Instead, as we all know, three books became ~~four six~~ seven and counting, and the gaps between them keep getting longer. A Dance with Dragons is 420,00 words long, and it's still only 50% of a proper novel. This is an improvement over A Feast for Crows, which was 40% of same, but still. In the half of the overall story it focuses on, A Dance with Dragons builds toward two major events, and then stops right before either one happens. That's just bad structure, and I don't care that putting the actual ending in would have made the book too long to bind. I love the trivial world-building with which the series is loaded, but not when it prevents a book from reaching an actual conclusion.

The more pertinent issue is that the endless ballooning of the plot has dragged Martin's themes out so long that they lose what originality they had. One of the series' major concerns is with the difficult nature of leadership, the possibility that good, well-intentioned men-- heroes-- may not be good leaders. Over the first four books of the series we've seen, oh, three or four leaderships styles of major characters prove ineffective or disastrous. So when A Dance with Dragons offers two more, the response is not, "What a thoughtful commentary on issues fantasy typically ignores," but "Yes, yes, it's tough, we get it already!" If you dig deeper into the text there are more complex topics to be debated-- I read niggling debates on Westeros.org as much as anyone-- but still, the depth of thematic content is out of proportion to the breadth of pagecount.

And the other consequence of the series' physical and chronological explosion is that it's now been 16 years since A Game of Thrones was published. Its grim, gritty approach to fantasy was fresh then. It isn't now. Newer fantasy series, from authors who tend to lack Martin's skill, have made that sort of thing common as paint. I'd rather see award nominations go to writers who are doing new and unexpected things now than to those who did them in 1996. The fact that Martin is receiving a lifetime achievement award the same year A Dance with Dragons is a best novel nominee is unfortunately telling.

Speaking of "new and unexpected things," we've come to the novel I guess I would want to win. I'm hesitant because Osama isn't actually a very good novel. It's a promising idea, and it could have made a brilliant novella, but at novel length it's a frequently tedious slog through dreamlike interludes that add nothing to plot, theme, or character, and aren't stylish enough to be interesting simply as exercises in language. Anyone who would ever read a book like Osama is going to work out the ending well before the halfway point, and while I suspect Tidhar realizes that, he doesn't offer anything else to hold the reader's attention. There are some neat passages-- one in an abandoned subway, another at a convention-- but many others, evidently striving for a surreal variation on the modes of the detective novel, fall flat.

This isn't really a novel about terrorism in a deep thematic sense, which is just as well, since its observations on the phenomenon aren't much beyond what reasonably intelligent readers will already be familiar with. But writing about terrorism and the power of the idea of Osama bin Laden is at least something modern fantasy writers ought to be doing, rather than rehearsing the cliches of epic fantasy, rural horror, and time travel. I really do wish Tidhar had shaped this material into a novella, because that version would have been bursting with powerful images, and its ideas would have seemed more than sufficient given its wordcount. The novel is something I'm glad I read, and it's the only one of the five nominees that I think actually deserves a nomination, but in a better year it certainly wouldn't be the book I hoped to see win.

Among Others won the Hugo the other night. It's already won the Nebula, so if it gets the World Fantasy Award (which I think is a real possibility, especially if it was one of the three judge selections) it will, I believe, be the first work of fiction ever to win all three awards. I find this mildly distressing, not so much because Among Others is a bad book as because the things that are good about it-- its forbidding, ominous take on magic, some promising secondary characters, an eye for the atmosphere of its Welsh landscape-- are shoved aside by the author in favor of what people like about it: a long, plotless meditation on how awesome it is to be an SFF fan and how awesome everybody else in fandom is. Walton does this with just enough subtlety that I was able, while reading the book and deluding myself that plot and character development were going to arrive eventually, to imagine that there was some distance between the teenage narration and the adult writer shaping it. But I'm no longer certain that's the case, and I certainly don't believe that the people who have been supporting the book are focused on anything like that.

No, I'm afraid they're more likely to enjoy the embarrassing moments, like when the narrator congratulates herself on being superior to her classmates, who only care about sports and the house cup while she cares about deep things, like the fiction of Robert Heinlein. Or when she thinks, "The handsome boy I met at the local SF book club could never like me, because I'm not pretty," only to find out that he does and she is. Considering what it is, Among Others is well-executed, and it captures the charming and less-charming aspects of a teenaged fan's voice whether or not it realizes that the latter exist. But there's so much that exists to no evident purpose-- that scene with her father, the stuff about her paternal aunts, the thing with Wim and his ex-girlfriend-- unless it's to distract from the thinness of the central love letter to fandom. There may also be a hint at unreliable narration, but this, like everything else, is more gesture than serious attempt. In the final analysis the book is what it looks like: a list of books read and precocious but shallow reflections on them. It might be fun to live, and if you're in the right mood it's fun to read, but it's not a great novel.

I'm not surprised when some Hugo and Nebula winners turn out to be unexceptional; whether the people voting on them are fans or writers (to the extent that those are distinct groups), various group dynamics are bound to come into play that will influence what wins. I was the opposite of shocked that the combination of Neil Gaiman and Doctor Who won the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) Hugo this year, even though a few funny lines, a bunch of fanservice, and another one-dimensional sexy chick for the Doctor to banter with and then cry over are hardly the stuff of great drama, even by the standards of contemporary genre television. But I had hoped an award where nominee selection is split between fans and a jury would produce a better slate. The Tidhar, in addition to being the best of the lot, is also something ordinary members might not have heard of, but otherwise the jury selections are hard to distinguish from the fan picks, aesthetically speaking, and that's a shame. But that's the nice thing about juried or part-juried awards: the makeup of the jury changes every year, so you can hope for better things in the future, rather than the usual fan favorites racking up further hard-to-justify nominations. If you're looking for an optimistic conclusion to this post, that's the best I can do.

Quick Thoughts on Three Ash-Tree Press E-Books (and a Related Title)

2012-08-17T17:37:00.001-04:00

I knew it had been a long time since I'd updated, but three months? Ouch. It's not that I haven't been reading stuff I'd like to review. I wish I'd had time to write about several books: George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois' cross-genre anthology Songs of Love and Death (remarkably consistent in its mediocrity, with perhaps two stories actually worth reading), Kim Newman's The Bloody Red Baron (entertaining at first but runs out of energy, and undermines its own theme; the new novella in the Titan Books edition is lightweight but amusing), William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (a few masterpieces, but over-reliant on certain structures and devices), Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl (a further evolution of her extraordinary talent, with a powerful climax), Terry Dowling's Clowns at Midnight (a baffling novel made up of elements from bad horror films, saved from utter ridiculousness only by Dowling's inherent skill), and R. B. Russell's Bloody Baudelaire (a fascinating exercise in eerie ambiguity, though I'm not sure the ending works). Yes, I wish I could write more than a parenthetical sentence about each.

But I lack free time lately, what I do get I'd rather spend reading than reviewing, and what I do spend reviewing is usually on books I've committed to by accepting a review copy. I still have a few of those pending, including a ridiculously late review of Ellen Datlow's latest annual best-of, and a rather late review of Ennis Drake's 28 Teeth of Rage. But this isn't either of those reviews. I've already written one full review today, for an Amazon Vine title (remember that you can read all my Amazon reviews here), and that will suffice. Instead, here are capsule reviews of some e-books I've read lately.

A big part of the reason I bought a Kindle is the recent commitment of small supernatural fiction publishers like Tartarus Press and Ash-Tree Press to releasing some of their titles in electronic form. Ash-Tree in particular is to be commended for the substantial range of titles it has made available in less than a year, including much highly-regarded work that was out of print and only available at high prices. Buying all six volumes of Ash-Tree's collected H. R. Wakefield in hardcover might cost close to $1,000; the six e-books are available for a mere $41.94. Even for an in-print title, the e-book is still about 1/10 of the total cost of the hardcover. For readers on a budget, or uncertain they like a given author enough to want a classy hardcover, e-books are an invaluable option. I've only bought a few Ash-Tree titles so far, but as soon as I clear my backlog of unread horror fiction, I'll be picking up more. Here, in the meantime, are those reviews.

Steve Duffy, The Night Comes On: A collection of M. R. James pastiches. Generally James pastiche is as miserable an experience as Lovecraft pastiche-- if it isn't quite as groan-inducing, that's only because James' reserved style is less inherently risky than Lovecraft's febrile histrionics. What makes Duffy's work enjoyable is that he has a natural command of the Jamesian narrative voice, so that the sentences flow naturally rather than clunking along. He's especially good at the sort of light social comedy with which James leavened his terrors. The language here is, despite the storytelling mode, slightly more formal and long-winded than in James himself, which can become somewhat tiresome, and only occasionally do the key horrific images match James' best, but fans of the antiquarian ghost story will find themselves better-served by this collection than by almost any they might select. Notable stories include "Off the Tracks," a railway horror story that's one of four newly added to the collection for this electronic edition, and "Running Dogs," which is, despite the lack of traditional antiquarian elements, the collection's finest; Ellen Datlow included it in the horror half of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. With story notes by the author.

A. F. Kidd, Summoning Knells and Other Inventions: more Jamesian stories, though these are less direct stylistic homages, and a great many of them have to do with bell-ringing. There are 47 stories here (a third non-Jamesian), and as you might expect they tend not to be very substantial, in the literal or the aesthetic sense of the word. The gradually-constructed sense of terror of which James was a master is not much present here-- the structures are simple-- and the bell-ringing stories in particular, with their specialized vocabulary, tend to blur together in the mind. But as subtle, ghostly horror goes, Kidd is very good: her Jamesian imagery is even better than Duffy's. And there are surprises like "Great Emmanuel," whose terror is surprisingly mythic and awe-inspiring for so short a story. The non-Jamesian pieces add a pleasing variety to the collection (possibly they ought to have been mixed in among the rest) but are not enormously accomplished in and of themselves.

Chet Williamson, Figures in Rain: Not Jamesian. Well, there are one or two stories that owe some debt to James, including "Ex-Library," in which the key image from "Oh, Whistle..." plays an important role. But there are also debts to Lovecraft, to Poe, to Rod Serling... variety is the watchword here, as Joe Lansdale's introduction notes. The stories are arranged chronologically, so things begin a little roughly with competent but uninspired stories like "Offices" and "A Lover's Alibi." Soon, though, come weightier stories like "Prometheus's Ghost," which has a thoroughly creepy spirit, an unexpectedly clever solution to the problem it represents, and a bleak yet moving conclusion. Or "The Music of the Dark Time," in which Williamson manages the difficult task of writing a supernatural story about the Holocaust that doesn't feel manipulative or inappropriate. He's good at varying his style according to the demands of the story, whether it's the refined/uptight Poe-style narrator of the amusing "His Two Wives," the surreal recollections of "The House of Fear," or the journalistic parody of "A Collector of Magic." A few stories don't have much going on or their twists fall flat, but all are well-crafted, and as a whole the collection is a fine overview of a significant talent in contemporary horror. Story notes by the author.

John Whitbourn, Binscombe Tales: The Complete Series: This isn't an Ash-Tree e-book, but the stories included were first collected in two Ash-Tree volumes (which also featured one story and an extensive afterword not available in the e-book) and I just read it, so I'm mentioning it here. These weird stories about a village in southeastern England are appealing, to the extent that they are, not so much for the concepts, which are pretty basic-- a few different parallel words, a few haunted objects, a general Twilight Zone air-- as for the charm of the linking elements, a new resident named Mr. Oakley, a pub called the Argyll, and the enigmatic Mr. Disvan, who is often forced to explain to the confused Oakley the peculiar features of Binscombe life. A few good jokes are mixed in, but as with a traditional sitcom it's not so much a matter of sheer skill as of the pleasures of formula. Not all readers will find these stories worth the effort, but if read slowly, so that the overall sameness becomes a virtue rather than a flaw, they can be fun.

And that's that. I hope it won't be another three months before the next post, but no promises.

The Croning

2012-05-14T15:46:00.000-04:00

When a writer known and acclaimed for his short fiction releases a first novel, there's a temptation to frame one's response in terms of the writer's command of the "new" form: is she as good at the novel as she is at the short story? The different lengths place different demands on a writer's skill, and devices that work in short fiction may fall flat in long. Some writers are undeniably good at one and not at the other. The trouble with applying this framework to a debut is that there's only the one novel to go by. A single awkward story would not demonstrate a loss of command, and a single awkward novel doesn't demonstrate its absence. You may gather from this lead-in that I didn't find The Croning, the first novel by Laird Barron, fully successful. It takes a while to get going, and doesn't take full advantage of the various types of added complexity that its length allows. But Barron's stylistic virtues-- charged, ironic dialogue, imagery that is cosmically remote yet viscerally disturbing, and an atmospheric world that mixes noir, espionage, and horror-- are intact, and the last quarter of the novel is a tour de force of Lovecraftian cosmicism.

After an opening chapter that blends fantasy and horror in an unusual retelling of a well-known fairy tale, The Croning is the story of Don Miller, a generally mild-mannered geologist, and the rather rowdier and more dangerous existence to which he is intermittently exposed by virtue of his marriage to Michelle Mock, an anthropologist whose interest in hollow earth theories and in the eccentricities of her very old family hasn't prevented her from becoming well-respected and an associate of certain movers and shakers. Different chapters show us Don in youth (a trip to Mexico during which his wife disappears and his efforts to find her lead to one of a few odd lacunae in his memory) and middle age (an unconventional wake and a dangerous excursion in the Pacific Northwest), but the major narrative takes place in the present day, when he's an elderly man, forgetful but, despite his wife's secretive behavior and other quirks, generally content. Until strange things begin to happen...

Which takes a while. The non-linear structure allows for some striking early scenes, but the novel is about half over before any real urgency develops, and some of that material (particularly in the present day chapters) could easily be removed without any loss to plot, character, or atmospheric effect. Because of the way the relationship between Don and Michelle becomes important to the resolution, these chapters might have been used to develop their characterization, making it clear what holds them together as a couple despite certain evident differences in temperament. But there isn't anything like that, and the connection between the two remains thinly drawn, a variation on the femme fatale and the poor schlub who gets caught up in her wake. There's nothing wrong with that-- it's a valid horror trope-- but in a novel a bit more depth in the dynamic would be welcome.

The flip side of the inessential material earlier in the novel is a sense that later events don't provide the tying-together of threads that makes for a fully-satisfying resolution. Barron puts a lot of characters and settings in play, blending different varieties of dark fiction to suggest a dark world of elite decadence, government and scientific intrigue, and malevolent or coldly indifferent alien forces. (The dark sarcasm and depraved indifference with which characters allude to these powers, part of Barron's debt to the cynicism of noir, gives his dialogue its distinctive appeal.) Part of the point of a milieu like this is that it remains allusive only (and alert readers will catch references to other Barron fiction), but the degree to which the climax of The Croning incorporates what has come before is underwhelming, more appropriate perhaps to a novella than a novel. On the other hand, the element that had seemed least relevant comes back with a vengeance, adding a human dimension to the epic terror of the ending.

And that terror is substantial. From time to time I find aspects of Barron's prose awkward, but on the whole he is a master of language that combines the cold awareness of universal vastness and human insignificance that characterizes cosmic horror with cruder details calculated to create visceral discomfort.

Then he was asleep again and dreaming of Michelle. She stood naked and smiling before the entrance of a cave. Strange, bony hands emerged from the shadows and caressed her, drew her into the cave. The moon flared.

The Man in the Moon turned his misshapen head, beamed green cheese eyes upon Don's cocooned form. The Man in the Moon said, It feels good, my boy. A black swarm of insects poured from his chasm mouth, took wing and scattered into the icy void of limitless space.

Or:

--the capsule revolved and the Earth slewed below the rim of infinite night and someone's water bottle floated toward the nose of the shuttle, someone's belt, an alabaster string of lower intestine, a wristwatch, the crucifix and rosary end over end. The Lieutenant vomited inside his helmet; window plates turned black as empty sockets and bloody light seeped from somewhere deep within the ticking heart of melted circuitry. One of the others babbled through the headset and beneath that a discordant tone, an animal growling, wires sputtering, a train wreck, an avalanche and who was shrieking, who--

As fine as those passages are for those of us who like this sort of thing, there are some in the final chapter that are even better. And the chapters leading up to that, in which two expeditions in different time periods come to sinister ends, create powerful narrative momentum that make the book difficult to put down. If the beginning and middle were as tightly constructed and disturbing as the end, The Croning would be a modern masterpiece of horror. As it is, it's still a fine novel, easily recommended to admirers of Barron's short fiction, and certainly worth consideration by any reader of hard-edged contemporary horror.

The publisher supplied an electronic review copy of this book.

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Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

2012-04-25T19:21:00.000-04:00

The latest release under the Contemporary Fiction banner at Tartarus Press is Black Horse and Other Strange Stories, the debut collection by American writer Jason A. Wyckoff. Not only is this Wyckoff's first collection, it's also his first-ever appearance in print. Reading the early work of a new writer is typically an exciting yet anxious experience for a reviewer, because there's no existing baseline for comparison: one is offering a judgment, however tentative, on an entire career. There are, generally speaking, three possible responses to debut fiction. It might be so underwhelming that one doubts the writer will ever produce great work; at the other extreme, it might be so powerful that one heralds it as great work in and of itself. Or more commonly it might occupy the middle ground often labeled "promising," in which the author isn't doing great things yet but demonstrates the potential to do so. It is in that thoroughly respectable territory that Black Horse lands. Wyckoff's prose has its drawbacks and not of all of the ideas he explores have found their ideal forms, but the range of his imagination and his particular command of eerie, psychologically-fraught supernaturalism make him decidedly a writer to watch.

Although Wyckoff's style is admirably developed and natural considering his lack of previous publication history, there is nonetheless a slightly stiff quality to much of his language, an echo perhaps of the formal feel of the classical supernatural fiction on which his work often represents a modern spin. Precisely because his characters are modern, the description of their thoughts and actions in this manner sometimes creates a distancing effect, and in any case the language doesn't flow as naturally, or with quite the desired distinctiveness of voice, as when used by the best adherents of such style. An extended quotation may demonstrate what I'm getting at:

Either because of the chasm of their years, or because he had less shared history with Martin than his father and grandfather, Jesse was less affected by the degradation of the old man, and was, ironically, able to suffer his presence more easily. Because of this, Jesse was assailed more frequently with the strange, taunting fragments about the treasure that everyone else dismissed as the fantasies of dementia. But, though there was nothing in the specifics of the telling that could be considered convincing, there was a perspicacious earnestness pervasive in Martin's comments that led Jesse to believe some truth was trying to claw out from behind the incipient madness. Jesse thought that if there were a treasure, then Martin's dismay at his weakened memory may have prompted him to reveal its existence, just as the meanness corroding his personality caused him to hold back its location--the result being exactly as witnessed: a series of indistinct teases dropped among knowing or suspicious looks.

That's from "Hair and Nails," for which the formal tone is a particularly odd fit, as it's a direct, faintly ironic supernatural revenge story with a (by traditional standards) gruesome climax. In other tales it feels more logical, but there are still places where a loosening of the vocabulary and sentence structure ("perspicacious earnestness pervasive") would enhance Wyckoff's stories. (On a more trivial note, it would also help to use character names less often: once a paragraph is about sufficient, and reading "Joe... Joe... Joe... Joe..." and similar disrupts the reading experience. A small concern, yes, but in fiction as dependent on mood as this, small concerns can have large effects.)

When the stories of Black Horse are themselves less than satisfying, it's generally not because the concepts involved are inherently flawed, but because they haven't been used to their fullest effect. The opening story, "The Highwall Horror" (available as a PDF preview here), is a case in point. The elements are more traditional than is usually the case with Wyckoff: an unexpected disruption in something mundane (in this case, a cubicle wall) reveals a world inhabited by monstrous creatures (insects) with which the protagonist is in danger of becoming obsessed. All promising in the abstract, but the story draws to too abrupt a conclusion before any of these features have been used to their fullest effect. There's something to the idea of leaving things unsaid, but in this case the result feels jagged rather than subtle. In the title story, on the other hand, there is rather too much (wonderfully suggestive) build-up toward a resolution that turns out to be more mechanical and (as the supernatural goes) straightforward than the story deserves. It has both a good beginning and a good ending, but they don't quite mesh.

"The Trucker's Story," which comes come to being a brilliant story of inexplicable dislocation, stumbles when the ending makes a certain thematic point too explicit. The reasons for this artistic decision seem clear (and this reviewer admittedly wouldn't have grasped what was being gotten at otherwise), but it's still something of a letdown. The only story that seems in need of thorough reconsideration rather than reshaping is "The Bells, Then the Birds," in which a folk music enthusiast pursues a song about a spurned woman's ghostly legacy. Again, traditional stuff, but there's a pleasure in the form, and the story starts strongly with the logical development of the protagonist's research. Once he reaches the town behind the story, however, there's only one way for events to develop, and there are no unexpectedly powerful images or turns of phrase to elevate the expected denouement.

From the descriptions of stories like "The Highwall Horror" and "The Bells, Then the Birds," one might imagine Black Horse to be a collection narrow and familiar in its scope. In fact one of the best things about the volume is its variety. From the satiric fantasy of "A Civil Complaint" to the short, sharp, melancholy ghostliness of "The Walk Home," from the surreal urban horror of "An Uneven Hand" to the unexpected conclusion of the wonderfully odd "A Willow Cat in Meadowlark" and the postmodern vampire of "A Matter of Mirrors," there are enough different forms of the supernatural to make for a rich collection, and to demonstrate the versatility of Wyckoff's mind. The settings and characters are equally diverse-- architects, archaeologists, farmers, undertakers-- but always described with well-chosen details that have the feel of reality. One gets the sense that these sixteen stories are only the beginning of the long revelation of Jason Wyckoff's talent.

The finest stories in Black Horse are often laden with a disturbing ambiguity, as though they might almost fit together if one just knew a little more; there is something of Robert Aickman about the overall effect. Such is the case with "The Night of His Sister's Engagement," in which a late-night boat trip leads to a pair of strange encounters that could, barely, be explained away, perhaps, but which also have mythic resonance; and with "The Mauve Blot," in which escape from a stressful marriage brings its own dangers to a harried wife and mother whose inherited house contains an unusual blur of light. "Knott's Letter," on the other hand, is reminiscent of Lovecraft, not because of any alien entities with unpronounceable names, but because its account of a search for Sasquatch cemeteries has the formality, the meticulous detail, and the febrile awareness of impending doom that characterizes some of his finest work. In this case the unusual manner of the prose works in the story's favor, adding an odd pathos to the narrator's awkward attempt to write an apologetic explanation to the family of a lost friend. Then there's "Panorama," in which the masterpiece of a missing painter is dense with loosely-connected, evocative images, almost impossibly so. This story, in which the description of the panorama's elements becomes hypnotically compelling both for the character and the reader, is perhaps the finest and most distinctive in Black Horse. It's not the sort of thing to be read at night as one prepares for sleep, when certain mental barriers fall and notions of reality become malleable.

The description of a debut collection as "promising" might seem to be damning with faint praise, a tacit suggestion that readers wait for a later, better book before laying their money down. With regard to Black Horse and Other Strange Stories, this is certainly not the case. Jason Wyckoff may not yet be a great writer of supernatural fiction, but he is already a good one, and sometimes very good. Readers in search of further indirect yet intense horror are especially encouraged to give this collection due consideration, but any reader who collects limited editions in the field will likely find at least one intriguing tale to reward their purchase.

The publisher supplied a review copy of this book.

The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners

2012-03-12T17:31:00.000-04:00

This is one of two long-delayed anthologies finally released by Cemetery Dance Publications in early 2012. The other, The Century's Best Horror Fiction, had been in the works for upwards of a decade, but The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners has it beat by a few years. The introduction by Joe R. Lansdale is copyright 1998, and although it actually seems to have been updated or entirely rewritten since then, that's probably a decent ballpark figure for the anthology's beginnings. In any case the included stories span only 1987-1996, the first ten years during which the awards were given. Fifteen years' worth of more recent winners are unrepresented. This gives the anthology something of the feel of a time capsule, as Lansdale acknowledges in his introduction. "These stories have been on the shelf for a long time, and as they still seem fresh and progressive, it speaks to the nature of their continued prominence. They age well, and they will continue to do so." But that only invites questions: do they seem fresh and progressive? have they aged well? My answer, anyway, is a mixed one.

The tone of Lansdale's introduction reflects a confidence in, if not awards processes in general, then the process of the Stoker in particular as producing winners that are in fact good stories. Based on what's included here, I can't disagree; all of these stories are good. But how many are especially good, so good that even with hindsight they stand as clear contenders for such distinction? Maybe I'm just picky or out of touch with contemporary opinion on quality horror, but by a generous count I would label only half the stories here notably ambitious, intelligent, or skillful. Some of them seem to reflect not great or even moderate artistic success, but other processes by which work wins awards.

Before looking at the stories themselves, it might help to note that the thirteen tales included here are not all the winners for shorter fiction between 1987 and 1996. Because there were two (and in one year three) short fiction categories, and because of occasional ties, there are in fact 25 stories that fit the criteria for this anthology. The volume is silent on what the selection process was, but one aspect seems obvious: the exclusion of additional stories by multiple winners. Within the ten year span, David Morrell and Harlan Ellison won twice each, and Nancy Holder and Joe R. Lansdale three times apiece; each is represented by only one story. (Morrell, Ellison, and Lansdale also had two additional nominations apiece; Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon, not included in the anthology, also won twice each, and Simmons had two further nominations.) Without casting doubt on the talent of any of these writers, none of whose work I'm very familiar with, I might argue that a rather narrow range of nominator reading explains this as least as well as consistent brilliance on their part.

But this is a review of a particular anthology, not of the Stoker process, except insofar as that process might explain why certain stories fall short of what one might hope for in an award winner. Take Robert Bloch's "The Scent of Vinegar," the first entry in the table of contents. A bad story? Not really. It uses a Malaysian variation on the vampire myth so weirdly effective that (questions of cultural appropriation aside) I'm surprised it isn't more popular. An abandoned house of prostitution from 1940s Hollywood provides both a spooky setting and a touch of the glamorous past. The pace and the prose and all that sort of thing are fine. But: a gaping plot hole is ignored to produce the desired ending. The treatment of Asian characters is, ah, not optimal-- there's a reference to one's "slant-eyed stare." And the story suffers a serious lack of originality: its only striking idea is lifted wholesale from existing myth, and there's nothing much in it that couldn't have appeared in a pulp horror story written at the beginning of the author's career sixty years earlier. There's something to be said for really good work in a vintage style, but "The Scent of Vinegar" just isn't that good.

So why did it win an award? Well, questions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity aside, it's probably not insignificant that in the 1990s Bloch, correspondent of Lovecraft and author of Psycho and much other well-regarded work, was a grand old man of the horror genre, or that his death in September 1994 made "The Scent of Vinegar" his first posthumous story. I don't mean any criticism of the Stoker voters when I suggest that this win has something of a gold watch feel. In 1995 that was no bad thing; in 2012, for an anthology whose stories are supposed to seem fresh and progressive, it's a bit of a letdown.

On the other hand, David B. Silva's "The Calling" is as relevant and genuinely, honestly upsetting now as it was in 1990. At first it seems only (only?) to be a grim portrait of the powerlessness, despair, and anger of a mother and son facing her terminal cancer, and on that level it succeeds by insight into the specific humiliations of such illness and by a flatness of prose that avoids any hint of sentimentality or other emotional manipulation. Then the ending, a final powerful image that's gruesome but not crude, transforms the story into the best kind of supernatural metaphor: the type that's both forceful as metaphor and disturbing as horror.

With "Chatting with Anubis," we come to another story by a major name in the genre, Harlan Ellison. But I'm not as inclined to credit this story's success to voting for the author as I was with Bloch. Although it's not an especially substantial piece of work, and the great secret toward which it builds is not as shocking as it might once have been, the story is extremely well-crafted to achieve a mythic quality by the careful deployment of superficially-simple prose and almost random detail that nonetheless resonates. Here, since we're at one of those moments where I feel ill-qualified to describe the effect, have a quote:

When the core drilling was halted at a depth of exactly 804.5 meters, one half mile down, Amy Guiterman and I conspired to grab Immortality by the throat and shake it till it noticed us.

My name is Wang Zicai. Ordinarily, the family name Wang-- which is pronounced with the "a" in father, almost as if it were Wong-- means 'king." In my case, it means something else; it means "rushing headlong." How appropriate. Don't tell me clairvoyance doesn't run in my family... Zicai means "suicide." Half a mile down, beneath the blank Sahara, in a hidden valley that holds cupped in its eternal serenity the lake of the Oasis of Siwa, I and a young woman equally as young and reckless as myself, Amy Guiterman of New York City, conspired to do a thing that would certainly cause our disgrace, if not our separate deaths. (ellipsis in original)

Next we come to "The Pear-Shaped Man," by George R. R. Martin. As with most of Martin's fiction across all genres, the style is what one might politely call competent; the opening passage is actually rather atmospheric in its way. There's no sense of thematic ambition. The structure is eminently traditional: a woman moves into a new home, is menaced by a frightening stranger, becomes obsessed with the threat he poses, is ignored or dismissed when she tries to warn of the threat. What sets the story apart, and makes it at least defensible as superior work in the genre, is the nature of the stranger: not a suave gentleman who might turn out to be vampire or ghost or serial killer, but an overweight, solitary, socially awkward guy, the kind who lives alone in a small, dirty apartment and seems to subsist on junk food. Martin does an admirable job of making such a lifestyle menacing as well as pathetic, so that the classical structure becomes newly involving, and if you can accept a story in which the weird outsider really is as awful as the bright young go-getters find him, this is a solidly impressive piece of work.

Joe R. Lansdale's "The Night They Missed The Horror Show" is one of three stories from this anthology that also appears in The Century's Best Horror Fiction, so I've read it twice in the past few weeks. It also appears in the second volume of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, so I'll be reading it again when I get around to working through my unread volumes of that series. That's a lot of praise for a story to earn, and it's not difficult to see why. The rendering of an ordinary southern night that descends into a nightmare of racism and casual brutality is memorable and disturbing, and the portrayal of the hate-filled, frustrated mindset that drives such behavior is credible. In spite of all that, I wasn't greatly impressed by "The Night They Missed the Horror Show." The amount of grotesque behavior that piles up in a short span of time is so overwhelming that it becomes difficult to take seriously, verging on the ridiculous, and I don't see much deep insight into any aspect of the situation. Does a horror story have to be deeply insightful? Of course not, but if it isn't it runs the risk of becoming a simple exercise in the unpleasant, and for me that's all this one is.

I've been thinking lately that a major problem with contemporary psychological horror is that much of it lacks the detailed and convincing representation of its psychological aspects that's necessary to make it about psychological dysfunction in a real sense, rather than a portrayal of dysfunction for upsetting effect. What made "The Calling" work were specific moments that captured the anguish of the situation and communicated the reason for the narrator's profound despair; what makes a few other stories in the anthology fall flat is that they lack such authenticity. Nancy Holder's "Lady Madonna" is a case in point. It's clear that the combination of certain external forces and personal instability are meant to have driven the protagonist to the extreme form of protectiveness that the story describes, but she's more a collection of delusions than a credible human being, and the ultimate atmosphere of the story is of Gothic excess. Reasonably well-executed Gothic excess-- the first-person narration is clean and not in and of itself unrealistic, and the central idea is upsetting-- but still.

"The Box" by Jack Ketchum is another story also in The Century's Best Horror Fiction and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. And again, I'm afraid it didn't do very much for me. I appreciate its attempt at subtlety, but in this case I think the attempt backfires, producing a story so lacking in stylistic, atmospheric, or narrative excitement that it rests entirely on one's degree of engagement with the harrowing tragedy it inflicts on its protagonist after his son takes a peek inside a box containing a stranger's Christmas present. That tragedy is enough to generate some sympathy, but despite some suggestion of a deep sense of solitude the protagonist isn't developed enough to make his senseless plight feel more compelling than manipulative. I feel bad for him, in the way I'd feel bad if I heard about a similar event on the news, but nothing more.

Elizabeth Massie's "Stephen" is the third story that also appeared in The Century's Best Horror Fiction. And in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Oh, and this one was also in Stephen Jones' Best New Horror for that year. And it got a World Fantasy Award nomination. After all that, could I possibly give it a negative review? Maybe, but in this case I don't have to; after three readings (including that volume of Best New Horror) I'm conflicted enough not to be wholly positive or negative. The story certainly pushes buttons simply by its subject matter: a victim of extreme physical and sexual violence whose work as a therapist among seriously disabled patients at a rehab center brings her own issues to the forefront. This provocative situation is the basis for a reflection on how bodily and emotional damage affect the eternal need for and fear of human contact. What leaves me uneasy about the story despite this profound ambition is that same fear that the topic isn't being handled with an appropriate depth of insight. Obviously it's not my place as a man who was never a victim of physical or sexual violence to comment on the authenticity of such a story, but none of the characters are examined in enough detail to make me confident that their suffering is being explored rather than exploited. But it's a richer, more humane story than (say) "Lady Madonna," enough so that I can't reject it entirely. Maybe after yet another reading I'll have a better idea where I stand.

Thomas Ligotti is often praised, sometimes by me, for the philosophical content and dreamlike quality of his fiction, but what most struck me on rereading "The Red Tower" was its disturbing imagery and the paranoid tone of its narration. Ligotti is as adept at visceral discomfort ("a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs... many of them evidencing an advanced stage of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch") and disordered, unsettling narration ("I hear them talk of it every day of my life... Then the voices grow quiet until I can barely hear them as they attempt to communicate with me in choking scraps of post-nightmare trauma"), and on top of that this story functions as a pessimistic commentary on the horror and absurdity of conscious existence. That sort of layered achievement is what makes for a truly superior story, and it's why "The Red Tower," though not a particular favorite of mine, is a thoroughly deserving award winner.

Alan Rodgers' "The Boy Who Came Back From the Dead," the sort of story for which the phrase "does what it says on the tin" was made, is an odd one. It seems to be reaching for a reserved, resonant melancholy, but there's a plot element that jars pretty badly against that tone, and there isn't much to feel melancholy about, beyond the not-groundbreaking observation that coming back from the dead might not be the great pleasure you'd hope for. The prose has a direct, childlike quality that's appropriate to the young protagonist and makes his situation more involving, but overall this is another story for the good-but-not-great category.

Jack Cady's "The Night We Buried Road Dog" is the longest story in the anthology, and also the best. In addition to the Stoker, it won the Nebula and a couple lesser known genre awards, and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and a Hugo. That a ghost story should do so well in competitions more strongly associated with science fiction and fantasy is a sign of the power of this novella. Perhaps it tries a little too hard to evoke the pathos of the solitary lives of its protagonists, men of the great open spaces in the American West whose cars and dog are the most important thing in their lives, for whom lonely driving is a peculiar pleasure. But Cady is enough of a stylist, his prose authentically simple and lean yet wistfully evocative, that it works, even for a reader who's cynical about the type of person he's describing. The capturing of a way of life is so gradual that the ghostly quality is subdued, but when it emerges it makes a basic trope of ghost lore eerie and subtly moving. Another story that does enough things well to be an obvious award contender, and all by itself goes a long way toward making this anthology worth reading.

It is perhaps unfair to describe the plot of a stylized horror story in blunt language-- anything can be made to sound ridiculous that way-- but sometimes the temptation is irresistible, so here we are: P. D. Cacek's "Metalica" is about a woman who gets pelvic exams for kicks. There's a psychological aspect to her behavior, but the story is less about that than about explicit descriptions (it originally appeared in an erotic horror anthology) that certainly succeed in getting under one's skin. This is another case where emotional disturbance feels used for visceral effect, and while that's not always a bad thing, the erotic tone of the prose makes this story unsettling in all the wrong ways.

The anthology concludes with "Orange is for Anguish, Blue is for Insanity" by David Morrell, in which a young art student discovers the secret behind an avant-garde artist's unusual work. Will that secret claim him as it did previous enthusiasts? Well, obviously. This fits comfortably into the tradition of horror stories about over-curious scholars, and while the ultimate explanation has unusual qualities and the ending introduces a metaphorical/psychological element that isn't original either but is carried off with real intensity, following along as the story develops along expected lines wasn't a whole lot of fun for me.

Which doesn't mean that many readers won't enjoy it. From a certain perspective I've been too hard on this anthology. Taken as a set of stories, rather than as award winners about which high expectations are reasonable, it's above average. All the stories are at least solid on a technical level; none are out-and-out boring. Pick a horror anthology at random and the odds are pretty good that neither of those things will be true. The range of styles and subgenres here is also inviting. The book production is nice: no author biographies or story notes, but there's an illustration for each story by Glenn Chadbourne. Chadbourne's style isn't invariably appropriate for these stories, but his work is always accomplished and atmospheric, and adds to the polish and appeal of the volume. As a sampling of professional horror stories from the late 80s and early 90s, this anthology is easily recommended, and although not everything has aged well, most readers will find at least a couple stories they can thoroughly enjoy.

How to Be Better

2012-02-29T03:59:00.000-05:00

This post is a little outside the usual subject matter of the blog, but I think it's important.

A request for readers of this blog who are white, or male, or heterosexual, which I think includes most (but not necessarily all) who find their way here on a regular basis. Read this. Then read the posts it links to, both on that blog and elsewhere. Then read, or at least skim, other posts on Requires Only That You Hate. Try to find something that offends or upsets you. Unless you read only horror and no science fiction or fantasy, I doubt it will take very long.

So, my straight/white/male reader, what might you be thinking after all that reading? Here's one possibility. It's what I (a gay white man) have thought in the past when confronted with similar perspectives. "Well, I certainly support feminism/anti-racism/LGBT rights. And there are definitely some pieces of fantasy/science fiction/horror that show various biases or get into problematic territory. Bakker's defensiveness might be going a little too far. But this acrackedmoon is too extreme/too political/too blind to nuance/too angry. I can't take her seriously."

That sounds like a reasonable enough attitude, right? After all, we all decide every day whether particular opinions are worth our attention. We can't read every word of commentary from every perspective. And surely, just by the law of averages, there have to be anti-racists/feminists/GLBT activists somewhere who aren't worth taking seriously. Right?

Well.

Next, read this. What are you thinking now? Perhaps something similar? Maybe Sady Doyle goes on the list of feminists too die-hard to be taken seriously. Or are you beginning to see the problem?

Issues of representation and social justice tend to reach the mainstream of Internet genre fandom only when authors or other "important" bloggers respond negatively to being called out. Their responses get noticed, and much discussion and drama ensues. Now, let me be clear: although my opinion doesn't matter all that much, for reasons I'll get to, I think that's a good thing. These issues need to be discussed by any means necessary. But because such discussions only intermittently draw the attention of straight/white/male fans not already immersed in social justice debates, it's easy for those fans to see a sequence of individual critics, and reject them one by one without engaging the larger question of their own relationship to social justice commentary.

That question, simply put, is this: How can straight/white/men justify our claim to care about the concerns of oppressed groups while ignoring or dismissing any criticism coming from members of those groups that doesn't immediately strike us as valid? And the answer, simply put, is We can't.

* * *

One of the things acrackedmoon deals with in the post linked above is the white male fear of being labeled sexist or racist. As far as I can tell, that fear springs from an embarrassing inability to grasp the simple fact that saying, doing, or writing something sexist or racist is not an irremediable blot on one's soul. You don't become Theodore Bilbo by making a single mistake; that's a natural consequence of living in a world full of different kinds of privilege and bigotry. acrackedmoon was not suggesting that R. Scott Bakker is a monster in human form, that he secretly or subconsciously hates women, or that the only solution is for all decent-minded folk to gather pitchforks and torches and storm his castle. She was saying that she, as a woman and a feminist, found his response to criticisms regarding misogyny in his works severely lacking in several ways. Yes, she said it bluntly and mockingly. So what? Critics are not obligated to be nice. If you don't want your ideas and feelings abused, don't share them. Otherwise, accept that not everyone is going to like you and go from there.

Once straight/white/men have decided that the rhetoric or ideology of a particular blogger is over-the-top, we often perceive over-the-top demands as well, even when they plainly don't exist. For some reason discussions of racism and sexism in given books tend to generate unjustified fears of censorship, as though anyone is calling for authors to stop writing or for their works to be destroyed. This feeds the fear of admitting to, acknowledging the mere possibility of, racism or sexism; the white men in question seem to think that the only possible follow-up to such an admission would be to unplug their laptops and vow to write no more. Again, no.

Here's what we need to do, as white/straight/men confronting claims of bigotry against groups of which we're not members, in works we've written or works we like: acknowledge the validity of the interpretation. Even if you're not versed in the academic language on which it draws, accept that that language exists for very good reasons. The little voice that says "But it isn't, but it doesn't..."? Tell that voice to shut up. Part of being open-minded is accepting that you might not be right, even when it really, really feels like you are. You know how, when a friend expresses a firm dislike of some author you really admire, you don't spend the next six months trying to convince that friend he's wrong? Instead, you say "OK," and try to accept that his reading experiences have shaped different criteria by which your favorite author sucks. Maybe you secretly tell yourself that he's wrong and foolish and blind, but I really hope not, and in any case you only say that secretly. You don't throw it in his face. Well, when it comes to sexism, racism, and homophobia, the issues are more important but the principle is the same.

Women, people of color, and non-heterosexuals know more about bigotry than you, white/straight/men. They just do. They know it by bitter personal experience, and by the informed study that often follows such experience. They know more in the same way that Ph.D's in a given field know more than excitable amateurs with a little reading and some crazy theories. Yes, you can construct some wild hypothetical in which the Ph.D's are wrong and the crackpot is right, but if you're deciding that the crackpot is brilliant every single time, something is wrong with your intellectual system. It's ridiculous to regard oneself as open-minded if one constantly rejects the uncomfortable but well-informed radical argument over the safe, deeply ignorant status quo.

The thing about acknowledging the validity of such criticism is that it's not only, and even not primarily, about you. It's about respecting the right of women/POC/LGBT people to be uncomfortable with how they are portrayed (or not portrayed) in fiction, and to voice that discomfort. It's about not seeming (and even if this isn't what's intended, it's how such behavior comes across) more interested in shutting down criticism of something you like than in allowing all members of those groups to contribute to and shape the movements that act on their behalf. It's about not privileging your own progressive self-image above the concerns of those you profess to care about. Feminism belongs to women, anti-racism to POC, and so on. That doesn't mean that straight/white/male allies can't contribute to those movements; it does mean that we need to allow them to be what they are: spaces where, in contrast to the wider society and virtually every sub-culture, the beliefs, needs, and desires of oppressed groups come first. That includes all members of those groups, not just the ones who tell you what you want to hear. (Oh, and that perspective you have, the one you're worried won't be aired if your white/male/straight voice isn't heard? There's a woman, or a person of color, or a lesbian who shares it. Minority discourses are richer than the individual blogs you come across during the latest cycle of drama. They don't need you. Sometimes it's all right to say nothing at all.)

And here's the good news: not only does such an acknowledgement make you a better, more genuinely progressive person, it's also the only thing you have to do. (If you're the writer of the work in question, you might also want to apologize for any frustration or offense you caused, even if you didn't mean to cause any. That's just good manners.) Despite the grim daydreams some white men indulge, you won't be ordered to drop your books onto a pyre and watch them burn. You won't be asked to stop reading them or stop enjoying them, or pledge your absolute agreement with every word of every criticism. What you can do, when reading or writing such works in the future, is remember those criticisms and ask yourself how to avoid perpetuating hurtful ideas while still liking what you like. Or, as another blogger, whose comments are both briefer and sharper than mine, put it, "The best defence is to forget about defence. Just listen and think about it and try to be better."

Vine update, and some general notes

2012-02-22T01:43:00.000-05:00

I've gotten out of the habit, so here are a few of my recent Vine reviews that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

Steampunk!, a YA anthology of... well, guess: here.

The Demi-Monde: Winter, the first book in a series about a massive VR scenario that jumbles different historical periods: here.

When She Woke: a dystopian variation on The Scarlet Letter: here.

Ed King: a modern retelling of the Oedipus story, the final chapter of which makes for a decent SF novella: here.

The Thorn and The Blossom: an accordion-format curiosity by the great Theodora Goss: here.

The Flame Alphabet: a surreal dystopian novel in which language becomes poisonous: here.

The Games: technothriller with genetically-engineered animal gladiators: here.

The Uninvited Guests: drawing-room comedy with magical elements: here.

As a reminder, I sometimes post on Amazon non-genre reviews that don't appear here. There are also a few lightly-edited or updated versions of posts that originally appeared here and weren't immediately copied there. To see all my Amazon reviews, click here.

I apologize for the lack of content here lately; moving house and dealing with some other personal situations has cut down on my reading time, and various non-genre titles have taken up much of what remains. It'll be at least another three weeks before my schedule opens up much, but in the near future I hope to finish The Century's Best Horror Fiction (only 49 stories to go! Remember you can find my ridiculous brief story-by-story reviews on Twitter) and get back to The Sense of the Past: The Ghostly Stories of Henry James, not to mention the Tartarus Press collections of Arthur Machen I got for Christmas. Before all that, though, and hopefully in the next few days, will be a review of Mark Valentine and John Howard's new joint collection, Secret Europe.

On another topic entirely, I'm thinking that the white-on-black design of this blog is tough to read, and a bit dull to boot. Unfortunately I have absolutely no ideas on what would look better and still fit the tone of the blog. Reader suggestions are welcome.

The Century's Best Horror Fiction: Twitter Reviews

2012-02-06T21:38:00.000-05:00

Today I received The Century's Best Horror Fiction, a mammoth two-volume anthology edited by John Pelan and published by Cemetery Dance that does exactly what it says on the tin. One story per year, one story per author. 1550+ pages and 700,000+ words. Obviously with something this hefty I'm not going to mention each story in my formal review, but I have decided to do a quick review of each story on Twitter as I finish it. To see the review tweets, which will begin tonight, you can go to my Twitter feed or check out the tag #CBHF. Because space in a tweet is at a premium, I'm only listing the year of publication, not author or title. To find out which story goes with which year, you can check out the table of contents under the appropriately-labeled TOC tab on the Cemetery Dance website, where you can also pick up a copy if it strikes your fancy. (The first printing is almost gone and the already substantial price tag will increase for any second printing, so order soon if you're interested. The individual volumes are also available separately and substantially discounted from Amazon.com; here are Volume One and Volume Two.) As soon as I click "publish" on this post I'm closing the laptop screen and embarking on the 1901 story. Weirdly exciting!

The Janus Tree and Other Stories

2012-02-05T19:17:00.000-05:00

Let's begin with the only disappointing thing about Glen Hirshberg's third collection: it includes nothing but the stories. No introduction, no afterword, no story notes, not even previous publication info or an author bio. The stories in Part Two are labeled "Tales from the Rolling Dark," but those not familiar with Hirshberg will have no way of knowing that's a reference to the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual ghost story tour founded by Hirshberg and Peter Atkins. This may seem a small thing to complain about, but front/back matter is a major element in making a collection feel like a book, a coherent entity unto itself, rather than a set of stories that happen to be appearing together. The division into three loosely-themed parts is a help, but the stories do seem a bit lonely on their own.

Perhaps that's appropriate, though. Hirshberg's great gift is to write about profound loneliness, grief, and regret without the resulting fiction ever becoming maudlin or grandiose. He communicates better than almost any writer I could name the pain, both in the moment and in hindsight, of realizing that you can't make the connection you want to make, that sometimes love and friendship and family bonds aren't enough. His characters are often damaged, hurting each other not out of malice but from deeper, inscrutable impulses that turn them into tragic figures. What prevents them also turning into tragic abstractions is Hirshberg's command of character: even in the shorter stories, his protagonists are never types, because they've been given details of personality that don't fit any cliche. Add in prose that creates a credible melancholy atmosphere in virtually any setting, and it's small wonder that Hirshberg is widely considered one of the best writers of horror fiction to emerge in the last decade.

His first collection, 2003's The Two Sams, was an extraordinary debut despite including only five stories; as Ramsey Campbell noted in his introduction, it was the sort of book to guarantee the author's reputation even if he never wrote another word. American Morons followed in 2006, and while there wasn't a single bad or even mediocre story among its seven, the overall effect was less dazzling than that of its predecessor. The Janus Tree is somewhere in between, which makes it very good indeed. Nearly half of these eleven stories have appeared or will appear in best-of-the-year anthologies, and the title story won the Shirley Jackson Award and was nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. I think it's about time to take a closer look at the work that's won all this praise.

"The Janus Tree" features one of Hirshberg's most evocative settings yet, a ruined, fading mining town whose people are as powerless to control their relationships and impulses as they are to restore industry and liveliness to their homes.

What I remember is walking with Robert one night during the summer after sixth grade, all the way across Aluminum Street past the hunched, dark taverns with their decades-old, hand-lettered signs proclaiming NO MINERS still posted in the windows. Just in case Company employees from some other town with enough miners left to matter decided to come by on a road trip, we guessed. We walked under a ridiculous, blazing moon, down rows of tightly packed, boxy Company houses, their yards full of rusting bikes and truck parts and swingless swingsets, into a wind that pummeled our faces or horse-kicked us in the back, depending on whether we were coming or going... We cleared the houses, and the wind half-lifted us off our feet, but we punched forward. To our right, the gouged mountains loomed black and treeless. The moonlight pooling in the biggest of the abandoned blast pits up there made it look more like an eye than a wound. To the east and below us, the plains stretched out, running free of the mountains.

So bleak a landscape casts into stark relief the dramas the young narrator faces: the loss of one friend, his growing affection for another, and his conflict with a third, a bully and drug dealer whose cruelty might, in their barren town, be mere desperation for some genuine feeling. That child antagonist, inexplicably nasty yet not entirely unsympathetic, makes "The Janus Tree" somewhat reminiscent of Hirshberg's earlier story "Struwwelpeter," but Matt Janus is thoroughly different from Peter Andersz; all they have in common is the insight they provide into the intensity of the lives of young adults, an intensity that, as Hirshberg's novel The Snowman's Children so keenly shows, can reverberate down the years into adult life.

The final element of "The Janus Tree," the one that explains why this book is being reviewed on a horror-driven blog, is the supernatural presence that lies beneath it all. Hirshberg's most powerful stories withhold the meaning of their mysterious phenomena until the end, when the connection between plot and theme flows over the reader in a wave of simultaneously chilling and moving comprehension. (You may be getting a sense that I like this stuff.) Here there isn't even an overt sign of the supernatural until the climax, but the barrenness of the town, in which the closest thing to an inspirational teacher is a man so emphysema-riddled and sedentary he barely seems human, creates an eerieness all its own. "The Janus Tree" stands alongside "Struwwelpeter" and "Dancing Men" as one of Hirshberg's most atmospheric and resonant stories.

The other three pieces in Part One ("Longer Stories") aren't as rich as "The Janus Tree," but they're every bit as well-observed and involving. In "I Am Coming to Live in Your Mouth," a wife facing the last days of her terminally-ill husband and a fraught relationship with his mother begins to see a threatening figure around the house. Hirshberg deftly walks the tightrope of writing about imminent death, avoiding both overblown sentimentality and unrevealing despair in favor of a simple, honest representation of the rhythms of the situation: despair, frustration, fleeting happiness, even more fleeting normality. Which may make it sound "heavy," but everything is woven together so carefully that the story never feels burdened with ambition or thematic program. "You Become the Neighborhood," which is (as far as I can tell) original to this collection, links the personal dramas of several residents, mental illness and loneliness and loss, into what is probably the most touching and humane story ever written about... but I shouldn't give away the ending. And then there's "The Pikesville Buffalo," an easy story to summarize but a difficult one to describe. In plot terms it might sound like a farce, but style and craft turn it into a delicately magical meditation on the question one character asks: "How do you survive the love you outlive?"

The "Tales from the Rolling Dark" in Part Two are somewhat shorter than what precedes and follows them, and since Hirshberg's best stories are usually his longest ones, these are a bit less impressive than the rest. The section is, however, book-ended by two excellent tales of the dangers of grief that were reprinted in successive volumes of Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year. In "Shomer," a young Jewish man is asked to guard his uncle's body overnight, and once he's alone in the funeral home he begins to suspect there really is something to guard it against. It's one of the more purely unsettling stories in The Janus Tree, and it's also another harrowing reflection on loss and memory:

Abruptly, another thought surfaced, dragging with it emotions Marty had forgotten were down there, or convinced himself he'd buried, and he sat hard on the depressed pillow and gripped his knees with his hands. The irony was not lost on him, was in fact unmistakeable. For twenty years-- more-- he'd longed for just one more night alone with Uncle El. Like when he was a kid, and El had taken the train down from college and spirited Marty away to the diner for blintzes, to some minor league baseball stadium he'd never been able to find since where fans hooted every time their Owls scored or threatened to score, to the Delaware shore in the dark in the middle of winter to swim for thirty seconds in their underwear and then drive straight back home, shivering, singing along to awful country songs on El's old car radio. So much of the code Marty used for processing the world-- the numbers and slashes for transcribing baseball games in scorecard boxes, the slanting or adjacent --ing and --ed and --er and --un combinations that signaled opportunity on a Boggle board, the squiggles and dots of trop in Torah portions in prayer books that indicates changes of pitch or chances to make the secret pretend-farting noise with your lips-- he'd learned from El, on those nights. And now his wish had been granted. They were going to spend one more night alone together.

At the other end of Part Two is "The Nimble Men," in which the pilot of a small commuter plane on a nighttime layover in rural Ontario sees lights in the surrounding woods that might be the aurora, or something else. The setting is suitably spooky, but what makes the story stand out is the bond between the narrator and his co-pilot, in which light-hearted (and amusing) banter conceals a deeper admiration that, set against the emotional and physical chill of the milieu, is genuinely affecting rather than soppy.

The remaining Rolling Dark stories are effective, but lack the spark carried by the rest of Hirshberg's work. (I imagine they work evwn better when performed aloud in their original context.) "Miss Ill-Kept Runt" has a child protagonist with realistic psychology, and hides its final revelation well, but isn't substantial enough to achieve the fullest possible impact. "Millwell" is creepy, with another inspired setting, but would likewise be better if it were more thoroughly explored. And "Like Lick Em Sticks, Like Tina Fey" (marvelous title) is flawlessly executed but has a premise that has become familiar over the past forty years' worth of horror fiction.

Part Three features "The Book Depository Stories," of which so far there are only two. The first, "Esmerelda," closed out the Ash-Tree Press anthology Shades of Darkness and appeared in the first volume of The Best Horror of the Year. The second was due to debut in issue 65 of Cemetery Dance, but that issue was delayed so long that it has only just appeared, simultaneously with The Janus Tree. The concept for the series, born of these photographs of a derelict warehouse of school supplies (more information here), is ingenious: as the physical book declines, depositories of dumped volumes appear all over the country, and people-- bibliophiles, urban explorers, the homeless and directionless-- take to visiting them, wandering rooms full of worn, moldy, and forgotten titles.

The Roosevelt, Michigan warehouse, where the books sprout mushrooms from their ruined pages and the hills of still-shrinkwrapped texts and composition notebooks rise shoulder high and higher, a mountain range of waste paper complete with alpine meadows of pink and green binders and waterfalls of paperclips and liquid paper bottles. Miles and miles of them. There's even weather; the rot and damp create a haze that rises from the ground on warmer nights and drifts about the giant, echoing space, as though the words themselves have lifted right off the pages like little Loraxes and floated toward the window sockets to dissipate over the abandoned thoroughfares of the Motor City.

But however appealing in their gothic way, the book depositories aren't safe. These are stories about the power of books and the imagination, and not in the stale, self-congratulatory way you might expect. These abandoned books are dangerous, and the characters who run afoul of them are among Hirshberg's most damaged and driven, living on the edge of insanity in a world that invites such excess, a world that these two stories can only begin to reveal. As impressive as Hirshberg's work to date has been, the book depository series could easily prove to be this author's magnum opus. And coming at the end of this extraordinary collection, an initial taste of it provides an ideal capstone to The Janus Tree's demonstration of the versatility of one of the first great talents in 21st century horror fiction.

The Janus Tree and Other Stories is available from Subterranean Press.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

2012-02-01T13:55:00.000-05:00

What sets Ransom Riggs' debut novel apart from other young adult fantasies is not the text but the illustrations. The bulk of them are, as an afterword notes, "authentic, vintage found photographs," from Riggs' collection and those of other vernacular photography enthusiasts. In fact, the novel began with the pictures, which Riggs used to guide the construction of the narrative. This unconventional source of ideas lends the invented milieu a strange, slightly disjointed quality that works for the book rather than against it, creating an appropriately quirky feel that separates the book from the bulk of "teenager discovers magical secret" titles. Factor in the creation of a fairly realistic teen protagonist, and you have a title engaging enough to recommend to YA genre readers of all ages.

Jacob Portman thought he was an ordinary boy destined to lead an ordinary life, but given the type of novel he's in that's obviously not going to last. The stories his grandfather told about a children's home in World War II era Wales and its residents with bizarre talents used to fascinate him, but now he thinks they're just a metaphor for a life lived in the shadow of the Nazi holocaust. That belief isn't destined to last either. When his grandfather dies in a horrifying way that makes Jacob wonder if it was all true, there seems to be no solution but a trip to Wales. What he finds there is even weirder than he imagined, and even more dangerous. The hidden world his grandfather alluded to is very real, and in great danger, and whether he wants to or not, Jacob has a role to play in its fate.

All of which may sound, to those widely-read in the genre, like standard fare. What elevates it is that the fantastic elements, and the way they fit together, are less traditional. Since the novel takes its time in revealing them, a reviewer shouldn't give anything away, but they blend fantasy, science fiction, and horror in a way that doesn't feel restrained or defined by the conventions of any of those genres. It helps that even the non-supernatural elements, from Jacob's unconventional best friend to the way of life of the remote Welsh island where he makes his discoveries, are equally striking, offbeat and amusing but not clumsily or cheesily so. And the wild invention is balanced by the realistic characterization of Jacob, whose relationship with his parents is edged with authentic personality flaws and failures of communication. The first-person narration is only partly successful-- at times Jacob sounds like an ordinary teenager, at others like a writer trying to achieve atmospheric effect-- but it hits often enough to work, and witty asides ("my mother was loath to pass up even the flimsiest excuse for a celebration-- she once invited friends over for our cockatiel's birthday") help keep the prose involving and the pace lively.

Another part of what makes the setting feel rich is that much of it remains unexplored. Only some of the peculiar children of the title have had their powers and personalities revealed, and there's a wider community of unusual types to be discovered. The ending is more of a new beginning that promises further adventures, so it's no surprise to learn that Riggs is currently gathering photos on which to base a sequel. If it puts the same distinctive spin on teen fantasy as its predecessor, it'll be a book to watch out for.

Digital Domains

2011-12-19T20:03:00.000-05:00

Between 1996 and 2005, leading speculative fiction editor Ellen Datlow selected original fiction for three different online-only publications: OMNI Online, Event Horizon, and SCIFICTION. In Digital Domains, Datlow reprints fifteen stories, many of them award winners or nominees, culled from those outlets. As the anthology's theme is place of publication rather than content, the stories are remarkably diverse, from near-future science fiction to mythic fantasy to a very modern ghost story. I could say that these stories, uniformly well-written and often excellent, prove that great fiction can be published online, but I think that in 2011 most people know that, even if they would prefer to read that fiction in paper formats. So I'll make a broader and equally accurate statement: these stories demonstrate the strength and range of turn-of-the-century speculative fiction, period. That's why the subtitle is "A Decade of Science Fiction & Fantasy," full stop.

With contributors like Kelly Link, Jeffrey Ford, and Kim Newman, Digital Domains doesn't lack for big names, but the stories by less familiar writers are just as good, from the inimitable Howard Waldrop's "Mr. Goober's Show," an eerie tale about the dangers of nostalgia and the history of very early television technology, to Simon Ings' "Russian Vine," a quietly poetic piece of science fiction that meditates on the mechanisms of imperialism. A fine companion piece to "Russian Vine" is M. K. Hobson's "Daughter of the Monkey God," in which an unusual form of outsourcing is the basis for a moving demonstration of the power of forgiveness and emotional catharsis. And then there's Severna Park's "Harbingers," where the instability and violence of contemporary Africa is the backdrop for a mind-bending story about two young women caught up in events beyond their comprehension, involving aliens, time travel, and more disturbing things. These are the elements of science fiction, but Park uses them in an eerie, suggestive manner that gives the story a welcome flavor of dark fantasy.

Some stories speak directly to the concerns of the modern world; others have timeless, unearthly settings. Almost a prose poem, Jeffrey Ford's "Pansolapia" echoes the Odyssey, providing a sense of the epic and the numinous in only three pages. Kelly Link's "The Girl Detective" is an unclassifiable, difficult to describe melding of elements from myth, fairy tale, and twentieth-century juvenile fiction into a surreal, strangely evocative story about the search for meaning and emotional connection. Plus it's pretty funny. Actually, there are a few funny stories in the mix here, like Paul Park's "Get a Grip," the concept of which has aged in the years since its publication, but which remains a pleasure because of the ironic sharpness with which Park imagines its details. Or Kim Newman's "Tomorrow Town," in which a utopian society based on the ideas of classic science fiction turns out not to be quite what was hoped for.

Although Datlow has edited and enjoys all types of speculative fiction, she's most strongly associated with horror, not least because of her long career identifying the genre's best stories, which will hit the quarter-century mark with the 2012 volume of The Best Horror of the Year. Unsurprisingly, several of the stories in Digital Domains are dark enough to be called horror. Most striking to me were Nathan Ballingrud's "You Go Where It Takes You," with its potent, upsetting metaphor for the flight from responsibility, and Richard Bowes' "There's a Hole in the City," a story about the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks that demonstrates the author's ability to write fondly but unsentimentally about New York City, and to evoke the tragic force of memory and regret.

Although there were a few stories that resonated less for me, like James P. Blaylock's "Thirteen Phantasms," a World Fantasy Award winner that I thought was well-crafted but driven by hollow, unconsidered nostalgia, there was nothing I thought was so outright bad it brought down the total grade for the anthology. I'll admit that I bought Digital Domains on a whim at a bookstore liquidation sale, and didn't expect to enjoy it all that much. But as is so often the case, a retrospective covering a longish span of time turned out to offer the cream of the crop. As Datlow's dedication mentions, there was a time when online publication was seen as a risky, vaguely unprofessional proposition. But a group of great writers took the risk, and the positive results, of which this book is just one, are all around us.

There's Nothing in Why: Robert Aickman's "The View"

2011-12-14T01:32:00.000-05:00

"The View," Robert Aickman's third contribution to We Are for the Dark, is the first of four of his "strange stories" that have very similar narrative outlines. A man goes on holiday, where he meets an attractive and mysterious woman with whom he forms a brief, blissful physical relationship before some disaster separates them, bringing his happiness to an end. This might be "The View," or "The Wine-Dark Sea" (where there are three essentially interchangeable women rather than one), or "Never Visit Venice," or "The Stains." To point out this similarity is not to suggest that the stories are repetitive; indeed they are not, for the specificities, of character and setting and supernatural phenomenon, render them quite distinct. One common feature, however, makes them difficult to write about within the framework of these essays: there is little about them to explain. Both in terms of broad narrative meaning and of wide-ranging theme, they seem to me fairly straightforward. (If I can be forgiven a digression, this may be why they have never struck me as among Aickman's finest tales; the air of unsettling ambiguity, though present in all of them, is not as strong or as all-pervading. In this, and in most other ways, I think "The View" is the best of the four.)

One could, of course, dig deeper, searching for a hidden level of meaning, a key to unlock the story and make every bewildering detail relevant. But I'm not sure that's a helpful approach. Both Aickman's theory of the ghost story as an artifact of the unconscious, "akin to poetry," and his philosophical stance that the modern over-reliance on reason and the scientific method represents a "wrong turning" for the human race, suggest that past a certain point the search for meaning is fruitless or even dangerous. "The View," though not the first Aickman story to hint at his criticism of the modern world-- there are intimations of that perspective in both "The Trains" and "The Insufficient Answer"-- is the first to move it into the foreground, contrasting the over-explained, dreary, unhappy world of contemporary England with the baffling, beautiful, fascinating Island and its lovely inhabitant, Ariel.

The critique of modernity begins with the description of the protagonist's temperament in the second paragraph. "Carfax always saw all good in terms of 'emancipation': all beauty, all duty. Others had seen the vision, but the slave selves of their past had intervened, making the gorgeous tawdry, the building in strange materials as rapidly failing in beauty, use, and esteem as the human body itself." (In the same vein is his later remark that "There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices." Note, by the way, that Carfax's own brief escape from his "slave self" is followed by the rapid aging of his own body.) Shortly afterward comes a glimpse of several such slave selves, in the array of overheard comments on the deck of the boat, which captures in a few brief paragraphs the depressing, faintly absurd quality of daily life and the various unsatisfactory bulwarks built against it.

"She has no idea how plain she is and of course you can't tell her," observed a conspicuously unattractive woman of about forty-five to a replica of herself.

"Communism gives the workers something to work for," vehemently asserted a man in a raincoat. His wispy colorless hair appeared on his prematurely obtruding scalp-line like the last vegetation in the dust bowl.

"So I said I'd give it to her if she promised to have it dyed green," remarked a round matron to her bored and miserable-looking husband.

"If you'll bring in the orders, I'll look after production. You can leave that to me. I know how to handle the ruddy Government."

"In the end I had to drag the clothes off her, and she tried to turn quite nasty." The speaker looked away from the other man and laughed gloatingly before resuming his former confidential manner.

"There's no hope for the world but a big revival of real Christianity," said the serious-minded, rather important-looking man. He was apparently addressing a large popular audience. "Real Christianity," he said again with emphasis.

"Look, Roland! A porpoise!" said a woman of thirty to her offspring, in the tone of one anxious to guide rather than dominate the child's formative years.

The pessimistic tone set by this passage and by the disagreeable boat journey is disrupted by the arrival of the woman known as Ariel, Aickman's first real femme fatale and the voice in this story of the rejection of modern communal values. There is her dismissal of her real names as "hideous commonplaces names of schoolgirls and young brides, and elderly lonely pensioners, and pure women in books. Godparents' names. Goodly names. Useful names which people in shops can spell." There is her description of Carfax's usual existence:

You live surrounded by the claims of other people: to your labor when they call it peace, to your life when they call it war; to your celibacy when they call you a bachelor, your body when they call you a husband. They tell you where you shall live, what you shall do, and what thoughts are dangerous. Does not some modern Frenchman, exhausted by it all and very naturally, say 'Hell is other people'?

The complaints she invokes are at once sweeping-- describing life in England as lived "entirely among madmen"-- and exact-- references to the absence of British taxes on the Island and to eating a lot of butter with breakfast. And finally there is the couplet written in her hand, reiterating her rejection of the pursuit of explanation: "There's nothing in why/The question is How?/Whatever you learnt/From the golden bough."

Faced with a story that itself seems to abrogate exegesis, one might simply throw up one's hands and enjoy it as an encounter with the irrational and beautiful and disturbing world that exists, or might exist, or ought rightly to exist, under and around the common one. But the details of that world, while not fitting into a reductive schematic explanation, do contribute to its resonance in ways that may not be obvious. "The View" is one of Aickman's more profusely allusive stories, rich in reference to the worlds of myth and art, and the remainder of this essay will track down some of those allusions for the benefit of readers who don't wish to do so themselves, suggesting in places how they relate to the larger theme of the story. Such a process does, of course, leave one at risk of "fancying absurd resemblances" and "making quite false identifications," but when analyzing Aickman, such risk is never far away.

Carfax: the name of Dracula's home in England in the Stoker novel, but I doubt that matters much. Its origin is in the Latin word for a crossroads, which would certainly fit the character's status, but it may just be the sort of British name Aickman was drawn to: at once vaguely aristocratic and faintly ridiculous (cf. Wendley Roper, Laming Gatestead).

Ariel: Shakespeare's air spirit from The Tempest, obviously, perhaps with reference also to the Biblical angel of the same name. Considering the gender ambiguity surrounding the Shakespearean character, which is explicitly mentioned in the story, the Aickman character's habit of dressing as a man is striking, if only as a suggestion of a more than human quality or of a duality comparable to a simultaneously human and non-human nature.

Fleet: Time is fleeting, indeed.

the Island: wherever it is. That it is left unnamed is surely the point. The Isle of Man is located in the right general area, and is likewise something of a tax haven, but I don't detect specific reference to that or any other place.

The Last of England: a Ford Madox Brown painting, shown here along with an accompanying sonnet by the author. The poem is, in tone if not in details, suggestive of Carfax's ambivalence about his holiday.

the Pastoral Symphony: Beethoven's Sixth, intended to suggest the pleasures of travel in the countryside, with movements labeled "Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country," "Scene at the brook," "Happy gathering of country folk," "Thunderstorm, storm," and "Shepherds' song, cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm." The association with Carfax's pastoral recollections and reflections is obvious.

Voltaire: his freethinking tolerance is, of course, quite fitting for Ariel.

the carpet: Possibly with an echo of Henry James' "The Figure in the Carpet," where a writer's great and secret intention is compared to "a complex figure in a Persian carpet," though one hardly needs to have read James to use carpet patterns as a metaphor for pointless meaning-seeking.

a huge and burly man: "one of the Island gods" according to Ariel, and therefore perhaps with some reference to giants of Celtic myth. It's worth mentioning that, with its mysterious woman, its strange and magical landscape, and its unexpected time dilation, "The View" has an underlying similarity to very old stories about visits to faerie lands.

Ariel's verse: This is a translation of a Sappho fragment by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of a pair of fragments he combined into a poem variously known as "One Girl" and "Beauty." Aickman's ellipsis at the end covers his omission of the final words "till now." The second fragment as translated by Rossetti is "Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,/Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,/Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground." Sappho has already been mentioned as part of Carfax's train of thought that was interrupted by Ariel-- that drew her into being near him, if one wants to interpret the story in that way. Critics have observed that Rossetti's use of these fragments has mythic significance, reflecting on love and death with reference to underworld myths like those of Orpheus and Persephone. But that observation postdates the writing of this story, and the general resonance of these images of the desired, the unattainable, and the destroyed for "The View" is a simpler matter given Ariel's own fleeting quality.

Così è se vi pare: Literally means "You're right if you think you're right." The title of a Pirandello play dealing with the fragility of truth and the relentless search for meaning.

Beddoes: Thomas Lovell Beddoes' work demonstrates an ongoing obsession with death, which would seem to make it a poor, or perhaps a telling, choice for Carfax's musical endeavor.

Dahlmeier's collection of Judaeo-Arabic fables: I assume this is a real book, though I can find no information about it. I have no idea about the relevance, if any, of the first fable to Carfax's situation, unless to suggest he has made or will make a wrong choice, but both the second, with its tradeoff between lifespan and pleasure, and the third, with its "pleasurable but dangerous activities... of some visitor from another world" are certainly suggestive.

"Dover Beach": I imagine the relevance of the poem to Carfax's situation is obvious from the section quoted by Aickman, but for those who somehow got through school without reading it the whole thing is here.

the golden bough: As the text suggests, Sir James Frazer's book was The Golden Bough, a rationalist, non-theological study of myth and religion, and as such a logical target for Ariel's (and Aickman's) criticism of scientific analysis at the expense of metaphysical significance. The absence of capitals, if it means anything, may also be meant to bring to mind the specific "golden bough" out of which Frazer's book grew. This was a ritual associated with the goddess Diana Nemorensis in which a runaway slave could pull down a bough from a special tree and fight the priest-king to the death; if he was successful, he became the new priest-king, at least until someone successfully challenged him. Frazer linked this practice to a perceived worldwide myth about a sacred king, married to a goddess, who died and was reborn as part of a cycle associated with fertility.

Without forcing a tempting but imprudent one-to-one comparison (Carfax as runaway slave, the impossibly tall figure as dominant god), one can see this legend and others reflected in "The View," a story that, for all its distinctive Aickmanesque touches, has something classically mythological about it. Whether a conscious product of revision or a result of the unconscious workings to which Aickman attributed the success of all true ghost stories, this air of myth produces that juxtaposition of the quotidian and the uncanny on which Aickman and so many other great writers of the supernatural have drawn.

Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One)

2011-12-01T15:53:00.000-05:00

One of the pleasures of reading widely is that you can achieve enough distance from an author's work to make you forget how brilliant it is, so that when you return to that author, the rediscovery is almost as powerful as the initial encounter. Caitlín R. Kiernan is such a talent, and her latest collection, Two Worlds and In Between, is ideal both for discovery and rediscovery. It's a "best-of" volume spanning 1993-2004, and like all great retrospectives it demonstrates at once the range of which its author is capable and the recurring themes, images, and stylistic features that make her work distinctive. At about 200,000 words and nearly 600 pages, it's a generous selection, including 25 short stories and novelettes and a long novella, each followed by a brief author's note on its genesis or its place in Kiernan's oeuvre. But enough of facts and generalities: on to the stories.

Lucy has been at the window again, her sharp nails tap-tapping on the glass, scratching out there in the rain like an animal begging to be let in. Poor Lucy, alone in the storm. Mina reaches to ring for the nurse, stops halfway, forcing herself to believe that all she's hearing is the rasping limbs of the crape myrtle, whipped by the wind, winter-bare twigs scritching like fingernails on the rain-slick glass. She forces her hand back down onto the warm blanket. And she knows well enough that this simple action says so much. Retreat, pulling back from the cold risks; windows kept shut against night and chill and the thunder.

The tricky thing about retrospectives is that they're usually arranged chronologically, putting the weakest work in front. Kiernan herself observes of two of the first three stories in the collection that they seem to her more ambitious than successful. But the ambitions themselves are enough to make these stories basically satisfying, especially given Kiernan's style, which even in her earliest work lacks any hint of awkwardness and has the darkly propulsive intensity that has become one of her hallmarks. The prose has been touched up over the years, but a look back at the original versions shows that this was only a honing of already-polished language.

"Emptiness Spoke Eloquent," quoted above, follows the long decline of Mina Murray in the aftermath of Dracula, and by interweaving her personal tragedies into the sweep of the century (world war, influenza, interwar Paris, war again, psychoanalysis in 1950s Manhattan), impresses even as it fails to compel on an emotional level. "To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)" has a few extraordinary evocations of a storm, but likewise lacks the psychological force that would be necessary to guide the reader through its careful tangles of prose.

But with the very next story, "Tears Seven Times Salt," that force arrives, and is instantly overwhelming. This story was recently chosen for the mammoth Century's Best Horror Fiction, and its invocation of displacement, dissatisfaction with identity, despair easily earns the distinction. The great genius of Kiernan's early writing is its depiction of the lives of outsiders and isolates; as Neil Gaiman put it, she is "the poet and bard of the wasted and the lost." Addicts, prostitutes, blocked artists, those who can't or don't want to find a place in what is sometimes called the adult world: Kiernan's gift is to write about them so sympathetically that even those who dismiss them as lazy or twisted can be made to understand how their lives feel, how the "unnatural" becomes the only natural thing.

Three very small rooms and each of them filled with his books and newspapers, his files and clippings and folders. The things he has written directly on the walls with Magic Marker because there wasn't time to find a sheet of paper before he forgot. Mountains of magazines slumped like glossy landslides to bury silverfish and roaches, Fate and Fortean Times, journals for modern alchemists and cryptozoological societies and ufology cults. Exactly 1,348 index cards thumbtacked or stapled to plaster the fragile, drained color of dirty eggshells and coffee-ground stains. Testaments uncorrelated, data uncollated, and someday the concordance and cross-reference alone will be a hundred thousand pages long.

That's from "Rats Live on No Evil Star," a portrait of something like schizophrenia, of pattern-making and the desperate search for truth, and the portrait of eccentricity, the evocation of a decayed yet strangely attractive place, are found throughout these early pieces. The settings, from the heat of a New Orleans summer to the chill solitude of a millionaire's estate on the Hudson, are as vividly captured as the flawed, obsessive, volative characters who populate them. But there's more at work than human yearning and despair; these are, after all, fantasy stories, dark and disturbing ones. Kiernan's supernaturalism, enhanced by her knowledge of geology and paleontology, of things so ancient or unrecognizable that to the common imagination they might as well be monsters, is, in its very different way, as reserved and elusive as that of the classic ghost story; it's unsurprising that the producer who wanted to turn the marvelous "Onion" into a screenplay should have mistaken it for only the first half of a story. Her work may not offer the expected answers, but as Kiernan writes, "one good mystery is worth a thousand solutions," and it is the awe brought on by the inscrutability of the phenomena she writes about that gives them their staying power. Without answers, there are only the images, which tap into the terror that comes when our fragile sense of order is disrupted.

But Frank didn't run away, and when he pressed his face to the crack in the wall, he could see that the fields stretched away for miles and miles, crimson meadows beneath a sky the yellow-green of an old bruise. The white trees that writhed and rustled in the choking, spicy breeze, and far, far away, the black enormous thing striding slowly through the grass on bandy, stilt-long legs.

As Kiernan's style develops over the course of the collection, another gift becomes evident, a mastery of narrative structure comparable to H. P. Lovecraft's. Stories told out of chronological order, further flashbacks within those disordered sections, dreams that echo the unrevealed past or foreshadow the future, excerpts from books whose banality is belied by the reader's knowledge of their true significance: Kiernan has mastered every device, gradually pulling back the curtain to reveal as much as she's ever going to. Small masterpieces like "Andromeda Among the Stones" and "La Peau Verte" use this non-linearity to great effect, building up to their defining moments so that those moments have the grandeur, the terrible and long-lasting reverb, for readers that they do for the characters. Eventually Kiernan begins to experiment with the first-person point-of-view, which she had long resisted, and the narrator's struggle with ordering events, with describing the indescribable and focusing on the horrific, further increases the brilliant structural complexity out of which fleeting and sinister knowledge emerges. For readers expecting the straightforward, the double whammy of elaborate structure and elusive meaning will be frustrating, but for those who prefer carefully-orchestrated and suggestive cosmic dread, there are few greater pleasures.

I wish I could convey what makes each of the stories in this collection excellent, but I don't know how to do so without bogging down in plot summary, which is beside the point. So let me mention only a few favorites. "The Road of Pins," a werewolf story except that it isn't one at all, in which profound unease grows out of the work of a contemporary artist, a mysterious film, and the writer's block and fragile romance of the protagonist. "The Dead and the Moonstruck," which shows the unexpected ease with which Kiernan's decidedly adult vision can be adapted for a satisfying young-adult story. I especially admired the few science fiction stories mixed in with the fantasy. Science fiction allows the weirdness that exists in the shadows of Kiernan's fantasies to emerge into the light and define her universe, which makes the element of cosmic terror all the more potent. In "Riding the White Bull" and "The Dry Salvages," the aliens are truly alien, but they're only a part of the strangeness of space-- vast, dangerous, beautiful-- and human society itself has or might become a nightmare scenario.

I give up. That paragraph feels hopelessly false, exactly what I might say about half a dozen writers I admire, nothing specific to Kiernan's talent. All I can think to do is quote more, the stopgap of throwing out the author's words when my own prove insufficient. And in the end, it's perhaps the way an author uses words that matters most. Themes, motifs, structural devices: they're common coin, accessible to anyone, but the flow of sentences is nearly impossible to imitate.

And all the world goes white, a suffocating white where there is no sky and no earth, nothing to divide the one from the other, and the Arctic wind shrieks in her ears, and snow stings her bare skin. Not the top of the world, but somewhere very near it, a rocky scrap of land spanning a freezing sea, connecting continents in a far-off time of glaciers. Dancy wants to shut her eyes. Then, at least, there would only be black, not this appalling, endless white, and she thinks about going to sleep, drifting down to someplace farther inside herself, the final still point in this implosion, down beyond the cold. But she knows that would mean death, in this place, this when, some mute instinct to keep her moving, answering to her empty belly when she only wants to be still.

A simple paragraph in some ways, picked more or less at random, but what I respond to in Caitlín R. Kiernan's fiction is there as much as it is anywhere else. It's not representative of her style-- no one paragraph could be-- but it has a compelling rhythm, captures the sense of being tossed into the deep end, somewhere you can't catch your breath, can only hold it in as you navigate the marvelous, malevolent landscape while looking for the way out. An easy experience? No. Never crude, Kiernan's work is nonetheless raw, likely to upset certain readers in ways they aren't looking for. But anything worth reading is going to upset someone, and if you want fiction that juxtaposes emotional frailty with the magnitude of the universe, fantasy that leads you someplace else and makes that place as real as here and now, Kiernan should be at the very top of your reading list.

Fantasy, Lite

2011-12-01T01:38:00.000-05:00

At the risk of becoming one of those people who gets sniffy every time Tolkien is mentioned in the mainstream media, I'm going to take a minute to look at this New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik. Which isn't actually about Tolkien; as far as I can tell, it's an attempt to explain the popularity of Christopher Paolini, into which Tolkien is awkwardly interjected. Of course Paolini is influenced by Tolkien; he is, as you would expect from a writer who began his series as a teenager, influenced by virtually every piece of fantasy and science fiction he ever read. But, superficial points aside, is there an actual basis for comparison? Paolini has the same relationship to Tolkien that caffeine-free diet soda has to the caffeinated, sugared variety: everything that makes it what it is has been taken out. Considering Tolkien through the lens of his imitators is inevitably going to diminish what makes his work different. Focusing on Paolini, and to a lesser extent Stephenie Meyer, also means the article flirts with treating The Lord of the Rings as a similar young-adult saga, even though it manifestly isn't.

Considering which, the key thing about the article is that it isn't too bad. There are problems, of course, or we wouldn't be here. We're told that The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin are early works, which is of course an oversimplification: depending on which texts you're looking at, they're early, they're late, they're contemporaneous with The Lord of the Rings. The context in which they're called early is the interesting part; they're distinguished from The Lord of the Rings because they lack "Hobbits and humors and pipe-smoking wizards" and are "as dull as dishwater in consequence." The irony is that the earliest version of The Silmarillion has a frame story that, while hardly a counter-balancing social comedy like Hobbiton, is more immediate and human than the later approach that of necessity won out in constructing the published text. That both The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin are, despite the existence of editorially-managed continuous versions, incomplete is also something Gopnik doesn't mention or consider.

But none of that really matters, and one can hardly argue the general point that for a lot of readers The Silmarillion as it stands is less interesting than The Lord of the Rings because of the absence of "lovable local detail." (One might, however, demur from the notion that J. K. Rowling's invented world is anything like "Tolkien's sword-and-sorcery realm," or that Tolkien's realm has anything to do with what's usually called sword-and-sorcery. All fantasy is not pretty much the same thing.) More important is this:

Modernist ambiguity, or realist emotional ambivalence, is unknown to Tolkien—the good people are very good, the bad people very bad, and though occasionally a character may be tossed between good and evil, like Gollum, it is self-interest, rather than conscience, that makes him tip back and forth. Betrayal and temptation happen; inner doubts do not. Gandalf and Aragorn never say, as even the most patriotic real-world general might, “I don’t know which side I should be on, or, indeed, if any side is worth taking.” Nor does any Mordor general stop to reflect, as even many German officers did, on the tension between duty and morality: there are no Hectors, bad guys we come to admire, or Agamemnons, good guys we come to deplore. (Comic-book moralities, despite their reputation, are craftier; the “X-Men” series is powerful partly because it’s clear that, if you and I were mutants, we would quite possibly side with the evil Magneto.)

That's a little better than an absolute denial of moral depth, but not much so; in the fundamentals it's no different from the usual response you get when readers of psychologically realistic fiction bounce off Tolkien's epic morality. Several things might be said in response: that in a novel about the seductive nature of power, self-interest is not readily separable from conscience; that Frodo's failure, a vital part of the novel's moral structure and not reducible to "self-interest," hasn't even been mentioned; that talk about who "we" do or don't come to admire or deplore is an act of projection. The underlying problem is that some readers confuse the style by which moral complexity is conveyed in twentieth-century literary fiction with the substance of that complexity. That the tragedy of Boromir is not described in interior monologue doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it isn't part of the appeal of the novel. The absence of a debate about the morality of takings sides in a particular invented war is not the absence of morality.

Eventually, after some mockery of the Inheritance Saga, we get the explanation of the appeal of fantasy:

And the truth is that most actual mythologies and epics and sacred books are dull. Nothing is more wearying, for readers whose tastes have been formed by the realist novel, than the Elder Edda. Yet the spell such works cast on their audience wasn’t diminished by what we find tedious. The incantation of names is, on its own, a powerful literary style. The enchantment the Eragon series projects is not that of a story well told but that of an alternative world fully entered. You sense that when you hear a twelve-year-old describe the books. The gratification comes from the kid’s ability to master the symbols and myths of the saga, as with those eighty-level video games, rather than from the simple absorption of narrative.

It's not so much that that's objectionable, although there are young adult fantasies that don't deserve to be treated as mere exercises in world-building, or that it's inaccurate, although I'm not inclined to take someone who writes with such anthropological distance as an expert on how kids read. It's that, as an explanation, it's utterly banal. Fantasy is unrealistic but people respond to the depth of the mythology-- this is an insight worthy of four pages in The New Yorker? It's like writing an article on Cubism whose big insight is that Picasso actually meant his paintings to look that way. The young-adult spin, that books like Eragon and Twilight provide typical adolescent struggles plus a light gloss of magical wish fulfillment, is equally unprofound. This, I suppose, is what gets on my nerves: that in 2011 the audience of a putatively intellectual magazine still needs to be told that fantasy isn't purely juvenile escapism, that it has some connection to the real world. An article like this should be an elaboration of the complicated appeal of fantasy, not a basic look at how the other half reads. The argument Gopnik makes ought to go without saying.

(By the way, is Huckleberry Finn really "a narrative whose purpose is to push the hero toward a moment of moral crisis?" I rather doubt it.)

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

2011-11-20T17:12:00.000-05:00

In 2003 there was The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, in which a group of roughly fifty authors described bizarre, humorous, or downright disturbing illness the mainstream medical community refused to acknowledge. That anthology built on the work of the brilliant, eccentric, and entirely fictional Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead. Now it transpires that the doctor, who died in 2003 at the age of 103, was also a great collector of artifacts, inventions, found objects, and miscellaneous junk, and an even larger group of authors and artists has undertaken to describe the highlights of his collection. The result is a quirky blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror that ranges from the comical to the creepy and back again.

After an introduction that elaborates the fiction of Dr. Lambshead, perhaps excessively so, the first of several themed sections is "Holy Devices and Infernal Duds: The Broadmore Exhibits," which features four unusual pieces of steampunk tech, from "The Electrical Neurheographiton," an unusual electroshock device invented by Nikola Tesla and described by Minister Faust, to "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny," the ultimate in high-tech child-reading as explained by Ted Chiang. An excerpt from the former will suggest the particular note of weirdness much of the book strikes:

On January 12, 1943, Mr. Tesla was claimed to have died, although reports were conflicting. Many in Hollywood conjectured immediately that assassins in the pay of Big Cinema had done in the Serbian genius for selling them "exclusive" rights to a device whose blueprints contained, in tiny print, the phrase "I have omitted an explanation only for the motive unit which makes the entire machine work, in fear that the alchemists of celluloid might enthrall their nation and the world with ludicrous tales of vacuous lives." Others believed that Mr. Tesla's madness finally claimed him, infecting him with a Jovian "brain burst" that produced not Minerva but rather a puddle of bloodied grey matter upon Tesla's hotel room floor. Among the modern-day Fraternal Society of Teslic Scientific Investigators, there remains the belief that Tesla's "corpse" was an electrophantasmic discharge that had merged with organic materials in the hotel room to produce a permanent simulacrum of Tesla, while the "real" man departed from this world to explore the Universe, unhindered by the constraints of mortals.

Next up is "Honoring Lambshead: Stories Inspired by the Cabinet," six fictions based on artifacts from the cabinet. From Garth Nix's "Ambrose and the Ancient Spirits of East and West," about a British government operative with a gift for magic, to Holly Black's "Lot 8: Shadow of My Nephew by Wells, Charlotte," about the fate of a bear raised as a human, all the stories are good, but several lack the peculiar charm of the rest of the cabinet. Only "Relic" by Jeffrey Ford, with its lonely church and surreal parishioners, is as disarmingly funny, strange, and sad as the catalog entries. Tad Williams' "A Short History of Dunkelblau's Meistergarten" is also great, but it's not really a story, and but for a superficial similarity to Chiang's piece, it would be more at home among "The Broadmore Exhibits."

The next two sections are built around artists: four pieces illustrated by Mike Mignola ("The Mignola Exhibits") and two by China Miéville ("The Miéville Anomalies"). As it happens, one of the Mignola illustrations is for Miéville's "Pulvadmonitor: The Dust's Warning," one of the eerier entries. Although it's found, whimsically enough, in the attic of British Dental Association Museum, the Pulvadmonitor is no joke, but an unsettling reflection of the human search for meaning. Lev Grossman's "Sir Ranulph Wykeham Rackham, GBE, a.k.a. Roboticus the All-Knowing" is funnier, but its account of a British nobleman whose fame in artistic circles is enhanced rather than diminished by his prosthetic lower body and head has an edge of pessimistic melancholy that runs throughout the Cabinet of Curiosities, making it more than an extended steampunk gag. Another example: the second Miéville Anomaly, "The Gallows-horse," is at once a satire on contemporary philosophy and academic theory and a series of unpleasantly pessimistic variations on a memorable image.

The final section of exhibits is simply titled "Further Oddities," and lives up to that title. There's "The Thing in the Jar," in which Michael Cisco recounts Dr. Lambshead's seven attempts to explain the origins of "an anthropic creature" that might be an aborted minotaur, an Olmec carving come to life, or the offspring of a man and a volcano. And Caitlín R. Kiernan's "A Key to the Castleblakeney Key," an epistolary horror story about an impossible bog artifact and the terrible dreams it brings, suffused with its author's gift for balancing historical and archaeological erudition and portrayals of the fraying human mind. And Alan Moore's "Objects Discovered in a Novel Under Construction," which uses elements from his unfinished novel Jerusalem, envisioned as an enormous but unfinished building:

Making a considerable contribution to the already unsettling ambiance is the anomalous (and even dangerous) approach to architecture that is evident in the unfinished work: the lowest floor, responsible for bearing the immense load of the weightier passages and chambers overhead, seems to be built entirely of distressed red brick and grey slate roofing tiles with much of it already derelict or in a state of imminent collapse. Resting on this, the massive second tier would seem to be constructed mostly out of wood and has been brightly decorated with painted motifs that would appear to be more suited to a nursery or school environment, contrasted with the bleak and even brutal social realism that's suggested by the weathered brickwork and decrepit terraces immediately below.

Following these oddities are personal accounts of visits to the collection, dating from 1929, when N. K. Jemisin studies Dr. Lambshead's supply of kitchen implements to acquire the awesome power of "The Singular Taffy Puller," to 2003, when, as recounted to Gio Clairval, Dr. Lambshead's housekeeper sealed the collection's fate by trying against orders to clean "The Pea." That might seem an ideal conclusion for the book, but there's one more thing for those who just can't get enough of Lambshead's collection: "A Brief Catalog of Other Items," paragraph-long descriptions of such curiosities as the Bear Gun (it fires bears), the box of Reversed Commas, and St. Blaise's Toad (a miraculous relic).

With a contributor list featuring some of the biggest names in several varieties of imaginative fiction and art (in addition to those mentioned above, there's Aeron Alfrey, J. K. Potter, Michael Moorcock, Holly Black, Brian Evenson... I could go on), The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities is a treasure trove of the weird. The playful metafictional conceit and some of the more tongue-in-cheek items may lead some readers to expect a wearyingly cutesy volume, but there's more than that going on here, and the total effect of the varied items is all the more powerful precisely because they don't adhere to one easily-described style. Beautifully designed and laid out, this is one curio that any reader of non-mimetic fiction should at least flip through, and many will want to own.

Three Creatures and a Castle: Robert Aickman's "The Insufficient Answer"

2011-11-20T03:39:00.000-05:00

After much consideration, it seems to me that the best approach to an explanatory analysis of "The Insufficient Answer" is three mini-essays on the story's central characters, each of whom appears to be a supernatural being of one sort or another.

Felicity: The Ghost

That Felicity is a ghost now seems so overwhelmingly obvious that I have no idea how I ever missed it. She has a tomb, for heaven's sake, even if housekeeping standards at the Schloss Marcantonio are so eccentric that it might just be an unusual bed. And Cust considers the possibility that she might be a ghost, which is, in an Aickman story, the equivalent of a large neon sign spelling out "SHE'S A GHOST!" in violent green letters. Her ability to move among the locked rooms of the schloss is another clue. But I didn't quite put it all together when I read the story a few months ago. That's the thing about Aickman; his stories are so rich in detail and implication that they become overwhelming, creating an impression of inscrutability so profound that even obvious connections can be overlooked. For that reason, I'll deal briefly with Felicity's two appearances in the narrative, highlighting the hints of her ghostly nature, some of which may not be noticed even by those who know a ghost when they see one.

Felicity died when, in her desperation to escape the schloss, she threw herself from its only large window, the one Cust finds and wonders about. As a ghost, she relives those moments over and over again. This is why, in her first conversation with Cust, she begins to fade as the sounds from the hall are overheard; the sounds are her, weeping as she runs down the corridor toward the window, and disappearing from the room altogether as she and the fallen iron shutter, which Cust sees at the end of the story, on the ground outside and covered with years' worth of vegetation, strike the ground below, setting up the enormous clattering that is either the source of Mrs Hastings' aversion to noise or an especially ironic mockery of it. That there is, despite the comparatively new glass Cust notices, no sound of its breaking when he sees the figure fall from the window, is another indication that the fall is spectral rather than physical.

A few aspects of Felicity's dialogue, which is, like Beech's at the end of "The Trains," a model of the suggestive yet opaque manner of certain Aickman characters, also allude to her status, of which she seems at least partially aware. (If that's so, there's a chilling pathos to her description of being imprisoned and looked in on and getting out.) The statement that Cust wouldn't believe how long she has been at the schloss implies her death was so long ago that, if she were aging normally, she'd be much older than she appears. The concern about whether women still say "bloody" in London also reflects the passage of time. Her reference to "the goose who lays the golden eggs" is presumably about herself as Mrs Hastings' model, killed like the goose by another's cruel greed. And finally there's the remark that Poppy is always ill "at these times," a sign that she knows there is some unnatural cycle involved in her escapes.

But how did that cycle begin? Why was Felicity imprisoned, and what need of Mrs Hastings' did she fulfill?

Mrs Hastings: The Vampire

Just as "The Trains" brought Aickman's distinctive devices to certain horror tropes, so too does "The Insufficient Answer" seem to be his variation on two great nineteenth-century tales of vampirism: Stoker's Dracula and Le Fanu's "Carmilla." As "Carmilla" was itself an influence on Dracula, the specific source of some of these similarities can't be pinned down. All three works have English characters in Central European castles, with an emphasis on secrecy, locked doors, and emergence late in the day. All three feature mysterious, powerful characters whose effusive and learned conversation is emphasized. Dracula and Mrs Hastings are both unexpectedly robust and both are shown sleeping in chapels deep inside their castles (though for very different reasons); both castles are without mirrors. Even Miss Franklin's delirious mutterings about Whitby may be an allusion to Stoker's novel, in which that city was the site of Dracula's first landing in England. There's also the mention at both the beginning and the end of the story of the Irving statue near which Benson's gallery is located. That would be Henry Irving, whose friend and biographer Bram Stoker used the actor-manager as an inspiration for Dracula. The most salient direct parallel between "The Insufficient Answer" and "Carmilla" is that in both stories the dominant figure and her victim are female.

Given the absence of explicitly monstrous behavior in the Aickman canon, the question these similarities raise is not so much whether Mrs Hastings is a blood-drinking vampire as it is what subtler form her victimization might take. One need not assume any supernatural manifestation at all; it might be that she is simply a cruel, controlling woman whose behavior drives people to despair. One certainly doesn't know what she might have done to cause her husband's plane crash, or exactly what (if anything) happened to Miss Franklin's sister Lilian, whose belongings are for some reason stored in the castle. But in the case of Felicity, we have a little more to go on.

In the first place, there is something off about Felicity's willingness to travel halfway across Europe to stay at a ruined castle with an older woman she's only just met. It's perhaps not insignificant that one of the subtexts of "Carmilla," and many other female vampire stories, is lesbianism. The reference to unspecified "talk" about Mrs Hastings could support such a reading (or any number of others, of course), and even the mention of "just a phase" could be so interpreted if one wished. Most interesting in this context is Miss Franklin's explanation of why Mrs Hastings came to Slovenia: "I should say it was simply to get away from the world of men." This, like several of her explanations, appears to be consciously disingenuous, trading on the difference between "men" as a species and "men" as a gender; it is at the very least suggestive. But in any case a sexual reading is hardly necessary, as the strongest intimations of strangeness around Mrs Hastings are not about love but about art.

If Felicity is to be believed, Mrs Hastings imprisons her simply to use her as a model. That could be motivation enough; she has great hopes for the work she does with Felicity's image, and it is, in Cust's judgment, "curious" and "astonishing;" he "had never seen anything like it." The tomb sculpture in her shape is "brilliantly suggestive" and a "masterpiece." More is involved than beauty, though; in one of the story's more bizarre moments, Mrs Hastings' statement that she is learning to paint in the dark "seemed perceptibly to shake the previously assured Miss Franklin." Is there something dangerous about her talent? A now-obscure allusion may be significant here.

When studying Mrs Hastings' library, Cust pulls out a book at random, Chris Massie's Corridor with Mirrors. This is a real novel, published in 1941 and therefore fairly recent at the 1951 publication of We Are for the Dark, but both it and its author are so poorly-known today as to have left little mark on the Internet. Any readers of this essay who are familiar with the book or the author are encouraged to leave a comment, but in the interim I must rely on this summary of a 1948 film version. If it's at all representative of the novel's plot, Aickman's allusion to the story of a woman shaped by an eccentric figure into the ideal female of his imagination may be a hint of how intense, ominous, and possibly supernatural is Mrs Hastings' interest in Felicity. Or it might just be that the title of that novel allows Aickman to bring up the absence of mirrors in the schloss.

Whatever her precise nature, Mrs Hastings is certainly a powerful personality. But by the end of the story one suspects she is not the most powerful woman in the castle. That dubious honor must go to the third member of the story's peculiar triad.

Miss Franklin: The Witch

I've suggested that Miss Franklin's answers to Cust's questions are sometimes dishonest. Three times she pauses before replying to him: when asked about the loud noise, when asked about Mrs Hastings' reason for leaving England, and when asked if she has any control over Felicity's appearances. In the first instance, her answer is a lie with a hint of the truth; in the second, it's so ambiguous as to be meaningless. I would argue that the third answer is also dishonest: that Miss Franklin is in fact the source of the apparition of Felicity, and since that apparition is (savor the irony of her name) the reason the older women "must absent ourselves from that felicity [of leaving the schloss] a while," she has therefore imprisoned Mrs Hastings as thoroughly as Mrs Hastings once imprisoned Felicity. Cust himself, remembering Felicity's "fear and hatred" and "constant references to her rather than the sculptress," is on the verge of a similar conclusion, and back aways from it only out of fear.

Before going over the evidence for this proposition, it's worth looking at the relationship between the two older women. Felicity says, "They hate each other, of course," and Mrs Hastings' indifference to Miss Franklin's potentially fatal illness ("It's very tiresome of her and quite unnecessary") backs up that contention on one side. On the other, Miss Franklin shows no sign of warmth toward or about anything or anyone. It's unlikely such enmity was there from the beginning; Miss Franklin would hardly have taken so solitary a job with a woman she despised. One might speculate, then, that the mutual hatred began when Miss Franklin saw what Mrs Hastings was capable of, what she did to Felicity, to her husband, or to Miss Franklin's sister Lilian. Possessed of that knowledge, Miss Franklin apparently armed herself against becoming the next victim. As she says to Cust, after inexplicably unlocking her door without a key, "I have no intention of being trapped."

There are a few signs that she is linked to Felicity's appearances. It's Felicity herself who observes that Miss Franklin is always ill at these times, and Miss Franklin is said to have woken suddenly in the middle of the night, presumably around the time Felicity appeared or disappeared. But the largest clue is her amusement when Cust suggests a mundane cause for her illness, and the exchange that follows.

"Pneumonia?" Cust might have said rabies.

"I recollected your cold when we last met."

"Oh yes. That." Miss Franklin laughed. "I followed my sister Lilian's remedy."

"Your sister Lilian?"

"Two heaping tablespoonsfull of salt in a tumbler of water piping hot and drink it down."

"I see. It certainly seems to work like a charm."

"Well, it works, Mr Cust. Charms often don't and when they do you oftener wish they hadn't." She still looked extraordinarily ill and her hair was a disorganized heap; but she was fully dressed in an ugly brick-coloured frock.

"You know about charms?" inquired Cust lightly but, all recent events considered, fearing for the answer.

"I've been asleep for goodness knows how long. That's something I'm not used to at all. I think there must have been magic in the air." The sentimental cliche sounded ludicrously sinister.

Magic indeed. In this light, Miss Franklin's unflappable calm (I think especially of her "neat ladylike figure" and amused laughter during Mrs Hastings' fitful response to Felicity's appearance), and the statement that she loves her job, make a grim sense, as does her fear of Mrs Hastings' ability to paint in the dark: if the two women are in some way dueling forces, an unexpected advance on the part of one might endanger the other. And their relationship is psychologically rich as well; one hardly need invoke the supernatural to imagine dangerous power games, driven by secrets, in the dynamic between a servant and her mistress. Possible sexual interpretations of Mrs Hastings' behavior become interesting again here: Miss Franklin as abandoned lover, Miss Franklin as willing or unwilling procuress.

But whether one prefers a reading that involves sex or one that emphasizes other deep, mysterious drives, the psychological element is a constant. It's often true of Aickman that even when the narrative details of a story remain obscure, the philosophical and psychological weight is clear. Whatever the specific connections and secrets that were involved, all three of the story's female characters are trapped in the Schloss Marcantonio by networks of mutual need and loathing, and each is, despite evident flaws, tragic or pathetic in her own way. There is, as Miss Franklin suggests, no end in sight to their suffering, and Cust, who only spends a week with them, loses his job as a result of the contact. Not all Robert Aickman's stories are bleak, but the world of this one does seem to be an inescapable and permanent hell.

Open Questions

1. As mentioned above: how similar is Massie's novel to that film version? What further connections might be made by one who had read the book?

2. Names are important in Aickman. "Cust" is probably related to constancy and perseverance, which is rather funny in the circumstances, and the irony of "Felicity" has already been mentioned, but what about Lola Hastings and Poppy Franklin? Is there anything there? And why is it called the Schloss Marcantonio? A reference to the engraver? The composer? Someone else? My guess would be the first, but what would be the reason? Is there a specific work of his that might be relevant?

3. Is something particular meant by that bit about painting in the dark?

As ever, comments on these or any other aspects of the story are welcome.