Category: [Books, magazines, etc]

The Hunger and Other Stories

Book #8 for the year and the sixth and last for “Horror May-hem”. Charles Beaumont is a somewhat tragic figure in his field, having produced a string of well-received stories and books and an array of film and TV scripts including several episodes of The Twilight Zone… and then he was dead at 38 from an illness that’s still not really understood, like a form of early onset Alzheimer’s but one that also aged him terribly; apparently by the time he died he looked like he was in his 90s. This was his first book, published in 1957, a mix of hitherto unpublished stories and several that had seen magazine publication. By and large I think it’s this latter group that are the best things in the book, which I have to confess to being quite disappointed by; I was expecting a lot more, you know, horror from something that’s considered something of a horror classic (Stephen King lists it in Danse Macabre, his survey of the genre from 1950-80, as one of his “particularly important” titles*) and originally advertised itself this way:

Personally I actually found most of it fairly mild; obviously I don’t expect a Romero-scale gorefest from a 1950s book, but I’d have thought it might be stronger than it is. I am willing to concede that most of what’s here is not actually bad or anything, and that I may have another Wicker Man situation on my hands… I really didn’t like that film when I first saw but was much more receptive on later viewings, cos I’d gone in at first expecting a “normal” horror film whereas later I went in knowing not to do that and now I think it’s great. Maybe I’ll like The Hunger etc more on a re-read when I know what to expect from it, but on this first encounter I was a lot less blown away than I wanted to be.

*But he also lists Thomas Pynchon’s V. as one of his “particularly important” titles; I’ve never read it but I did once attempt Gravity’s Rainbow which, in conjunction with the plot summary I’ve seen of V., makes me suspect that’s a horror of a different sort…

Cruise of Shadows

Book #7 for 2023, continuing “Horror May-hem” with a book that leans more to the modern weird fiction side than the “regular” horror of its day (the stories within all appeared between 1929 and 1931, with the book coming out in 1932), Cruise of Shadows by Jean Ray… or should that be “John Flanders”? Cos that was the name attached to the book on its first appearance, and to the first translations of the stories that appeared in Weird Tales, and it was as much of a pseudonym as “Jean Ray” was… for whatever reason, that seems to be the name by which Raymundus Joannes de Kepler is best known in the Anglophone world, to the extent that he is; for a long time all you could get (if even that) was his novel Malpertuis and a small collection published in the mid-60s. Scott Nicolay and Wakefield Press have happily taken it upon themselves to try and rectify that AND IT WOULD HELP IF THE LATTER MADE THEIR EBOOKS AVAILABLE OUTSIDE THE US SO I COULD ACTUALLY BUY THEM, I MEAN I CAN’T IMAGINE COPYRIGHT BEING AN ISSUE ANY MORE WITH THE LIKES OF LEON BLOY OR MARCEL SCHWOB FOR FUCK’S SAKE um… sorry about that.

Anyway, the book is subtitled “Haunted Stories of Land and Sea”, and its contents stick to that rather less egregiously than those of Whiskey Tales (Ray’s first collection); happily they also lack the somewhat yikes-inducing anti-Semitism of the earlier book too. Land and sea prove, however, to be somewhat complicated issues in some of these tales, most notably the last two, “The Gloomy Alley” and “The Mainz Psalter”. This is a book I suspect may benefit from a re-reading, cos I am, frankly, uncertain of the import of some aspects of it (I found something especially nebulous about “The End of the Street”); whether or not it constitutes Ray’s masterwork as Nicolay’s afterword argues it does is something I’m not yet sure of cos I haven’t read the other available books THAT I HAD TO GET *cough* DUBIOUSLY OBTAINED COPIES OF GODDAMN IT WAKEFIELD PRESS er… yeah. I like this but I don’t know that I love it, and I do think I need to read more Ray to form a judgement.

The Third Grave

I opted for the cover art for the original Arkham House printing; the Valancourt reprint is good but slightly on the cheesy side.

Anyway, book #6 for 2023, Horror May-hem continues with The Third Grave by David Case… I gather the latter’s normal forte was werewolves, and this book does have a perhaps slightly pointless red herring in that line, but otherwise it’s actually a sort of mad science-ish tale with an Egyptological twist. In classic “Return of the Sorcerer” style, our narrator, Thomas Ashley, is hired by a most peculiar man, Lucian Mallory, to translate some hieroglyphics for him; Mallory’s real interest, though, is immortality, and he thinks he’s found part of the secret and wants Ashley to work out the rest of it. Neither, however, realises just what the immortality of the ancient Egyptians actually involves…

This is an awfully slow-burning book; it’s only about 200 pages long but the build-up feels paced for a much longer book, and the real business only really happens in the last third or so… mind you, when it does, damn. Mallory’s work, based on incomplete and misunderstood knowledge, has already had awful results; the murder-mystery stuff in the first two thirds of the book is resolved in a not exactly surprising manner, but conceptually speaking the nature of the killer turns out to be… yikes. The book has a weird sense of… well, time, I don’t know how to describe it really; I got this from Mallory’s ruminations about his own sense of the passage of time and the book kind of embodied something like that… the Egyptological setting of the book’s opening already felt decades old for a book published in 1981 and, evidently, set around that time as well, and the setting of the rest of the book—the crusty old rural village and the even crustier old house where Ashley and Mallory do their stuff—gave a similar sense of not quite the modern world. I don’t know, maybe I just felt that because it’s 2023 now and the book itself is as removed from my own time as the story feels. Wonder what its original readers thought.

One thing about the book that, unfortunately, was of another time but still is of ours is the racism of the village characters, who have thoughts and feelings about immigrants even though they’ve almost certainly never met any (the local “vagabonds” are bad enough for them. Cf. also the vicar who laments how much of the Bible was written by Jews). It’s probably more of a general small old village distrust of outsiders and newcomers than anything, but still… and I don’t suppose David Case actually shared in that sort of thinking, having been an import to the UK himself, but Ashley as narrator never exactly does much if anything to contradict these people’s Middle Englandness… That aside, though, I wound up liking this a lot; should read more Case.

How should I swear, then?

Daniel Lord was an American Jesuit whose lasting legacy was probably (at least jointly) the Production Code aka the Hays Code which (arguably) hobbled the American film industry for decades; swearing was just one of the things it prohibited (indeed, it was the very first thing outlawed in Will Hays’ original 1927 list of “Don’ts”), and evidently it vexed Lord enough that in 1943 he wrote a whole pamphlet about it. Notice that this is clearly a British edition of it, so I wonder if he had to adapt it to local tastes in profanity…

Anyway, I’m kind of amused to have found this after also recently discovering this delightful document on a related note from 1898; for all that people complain about sledging in cricket in modern times, particularly by Australian cricketers, clearly American baseball players were way ahead of them, to the point where one of the sport’s top executives wrote this letter with examples of the bad words currently in use… but what makes it hilarious is the “UNMAILABLE” notice at the end, because the thing contained enough profanity that if they’d mailed it and it had been intercepted for some reason they could’ve been up on an obscenity charge…

Dagon

Book number five for 2023, continuing the “Horror May-hem” theme, with Fred Chappell’s Dagon from 1968 (although the cover shown here, ganked from Will Errickson’s Too Much Horror Fiction blog, is clearly of rather later vintage). Did not particularly like. Chappell is a “proper” author of “Southern literature”, and I was kind of intrigued as to why he chose to dive into the Cthulhu Mythos for this one. Our not really shining “hero”, Peter, inherits a farm from his grandparents and he decides to use it to work on a book he has planned about the survival of ancient religions in America. So far, so conventionally “horror”, but the place starts getting to Peter who goes off the deep end…

And then the book suddenly goes into what looks like a somewhat tenuously-connected different direction in its second half, getting more and more tedious as frankly bugger all happens until we get what I presume was meant to be a big horror climax, by which time I no longer cared. I can’t even say brevity was the book’s main virtue, cos even at 177 pages (that’s what ISFDB tells me was the page count for the first edition) it was longer than it needed to be… Having finished the book, I am no more enlightened by why Chappell bothered with the Mythos business (which just amounts to kind of meaningless name-dropping), nor indeed why he bothered with the book at all, damned if I could see much point to any of it.

John Silence, Physician Extraordinary

Continuing “Horror May-hem” with book #4 for the year, Algernon Blackwood’s 1908 collection of stories about the titular “occult detective”, not the first of his kind (Le Fanu and Machen had beaten him to it in the 1800s) but more influential on later ones than his predecessors were. A curious set of five stories (plus one more Blackwood wrote for a later collection), in that Silence’s part in them is highly variable… the actual “I” narrating the stories is actually his assistant Hubbard, whose own part in the stories is similarly up and down. As for Silence, he’s only really a leading actor in two and a half of the stories, he’s essentially a deus ex machina in the fourth, and does practically nothing in the remaining one; he’s the link that connects all these stories but he’s only really partly the star of his own book. I wonder if that’s because there’s only so much you could probably do with the character, who is the sort of all-knowing unfailingly good guy who’s hard to make terribly interesting (even Sherlock Holmes made mistakes).

But, all that considered, I still enjoyed this a lot (though the idea in the last story that the young Canadian man becomes a werewolf partly because of his Native ancestry is a bit… ergh). Lovecraft hails him as the master of atmosphere in Supernatural Horror in Literature, and I think atmosphere is what the book does best; you get a really solid sense of place (and you do get a good variety of settings across these tales) and overall enigmatic vibe of things in each story. This also at least begins to plug a major gap in my knowledge of the supernatural classics; of Lovecraft’s “big four” (Blackwood, Dunsany, James and Machen, with Hodgson kind of bringing up the rear as a later discovery), Blackwood was until now the only one I hadn’t at least one full book by (I’d only read one story, that being “The Wendigo”; no, I haven’t even read the celebrated “Willows” before). I have now done that and intend to continue doing so.

Parenthetically: though I used that Dover cover art I actually read John Silence in one of those giant Delphi “complete works” collections. The latter actually includes a picture of the first edition, but I chose against using that cos, frankly, there’s a swastika on the cover. I mean, it’s a 1908 book, it’s a pre-Hitler swastika, so it’s not a bad one. But even so… I’ve actually seen with my own eyes in an antiquarian bookshop books from a hundred years earlier with swastikas in the cover design, and though I knew they weren’t bad ones (I think the books were from 1912 or something) it was still immensely jarring at first. So I decided to go with the more recent cover art. Fucking Nazis.

Mapping the Interior

FINALLY, book #3 for 2023, Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones… the goal of reading 50 books this year seems as far away as ever. Anyway, one of the things currently happening in BookTube circles is a thing called “Horror May-hem”, which is a month devoted primarily to shorter horror (books 250pp and under approximately), so this fit the bill brilliantly (weighs in at 112pp in print form, according to Amazon, though obviously I got it for Kindle). I discovered it via Dave at Book Blather, who has it as one of his titles for the event; it sounded intriguing in his description so I picked it up, and yeah, I think I was duly rewarded.

Basically it’s about a young boy of Native American ancestry who sees his father come home late one night, which is obviously not unusual apart from the fact that Dad has been dead for some years by this point. This will prove to be a somewhat less happy reunion than Junior initially thinks. Mapping is well-proportioned as a novella, doesn’t waste time or words unduly, and I managed to read it in only about an hour and a half. The real horror of the story, though, is perhaps less the ghost (or whatever the manifestation is) than it is the way the past doesn’t just linger on without ever really leaving us, it carries on and repeats (as the slightly obscure conclusion perhaps indicates).

And one thing I found very striking is how the Native narrator refers to himself and his people as “Indians”, which… well, Jones himself is Native, so the term is obviously less questionable than a white author doing it, but it was just kind of striking to see a Native character use the word. Cos I was under the impression that “Indians” was kind of verba non grata now in the way that “Eskimo” is, although having done a quick squiz at Wikipedia that appears to be a more vexed issue than I realised before now… Anyway, splendid little book, and I’ve now acquired a couple more of Jones’ books as recommended by Alessandro Manzetti, whose 150 Exquisite Horror Books I’ve been using as a bit of a guide to the more recent stuff…

Art brutal

I’ve seen a bunch of these things lately via some of the Tumblr accounts I follow that post vintage horror content, “these things” being the covers of various comics published by Eerie Publications from the late 60s through the start of the 80s… Eerie Publications is not to be confused with Eerie, the actual comic of that name which they didn’t actually publish; that came instead from Warren Publishing, who discovered Eerie P. were about to use that title and hastily trademarked it themselves. What Eerie did publish appears to have mostly been reworkings of older horror comic stories from before the advent of the Comics Code in 1954, and from what I can see Eerie’s stuff seems to have been poorly regarded in its day. Mind you, I do see one online vendor asking $150 for this particular issue, so something’s changed in more recent times…

What fascinates me is that several of these Eerie covers follow the sort of scenario this one depicts (I only picked this as a somewhat random example), i.e. monsters attacking other monsters… in this instance, what appears to be a gang of vampires being wiped out by whatever the fuck that thing’s supposed to be. Here’s another Eerie publication of the same date, for comparison…

…in which an apparently not entirely human corpse throws his own head at a vampire woman. It’s a novel choice of weapon, if nothing else (and I suppose when you’re already dead there’s no point worrying about inflicting brain damage on yourself). And the vampire woman, or ghoul woman or whatever the hell she is, is wielding an axe, so did she cut the head off in the first place? I just wonder what the reasoning was for the monsters-vs-monsters theme… I know Universal had done their “monster rally” films in the 40s where they put their classic monsters (wolf man, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster) in the same film but they weren’t at war with each other, and there was another 40s horror film called Return of the Vampire with Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire and it also has a werewolf in it, but the werewolf is the vampire’s assistant. So I don’t think they were exactly ripping off the movies, so I’m just left wondering where the idea did come from, cos like I said, this was something they apparently did at least often-ish…

…another example from 1968 (wonder what the werewolf’s part in this situation was supposed to be)…

…and from November 1974, a bunch of ghouls challenging a vampire for the attractive brunette in the coffin…

…and from 1980, so this was something Eerie did with their cover art across their range and their lifetime. I wonder if this was more because of the artist, though? From what I can gather, the artist for these Tales of Voodoo and Weird Vampire Tales covers was one Bill Alexander, who I’m guessing (though can’t currently find confirmation) also did the rest of these, and a stack of other Eerie covers. Maybe this was his particular thing? I don’t know. I just find it kind of odd and fascinating in any case…