SFFWorld Countdown to Hallowe'en 2013

A STIR OF ECHOES by Richard Matheson (Tor, 1999; J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1958)

I felt like some sort of fantastic actor who could play two scenes simultaneously using not only the same setting but the same dialogue. That was the frightening thing about it. Anyone could have stood there and watched us and thought it innocuous; a pleasant summer's day flirtation which
lasted a few moments, then ended. They wouldn't have seen the part of it that went on underneath.
-- From A Stir of Echoes​

A Stir of Echoes occurs in a typical 1950s fictional suburb, the houses painted and neat, the lawns green, the residents chipper and prosperous and happy on the outside while underneath a seething mass of repressed and frustrated needs coil and churn. This was what Matheson brought to the horror novel: Mundane, late 20th century life shot through with unspoken desires overlaying a world of paranormal experience that reveals itself to one or a few of the characters. This novel, then, is a precursor to works like Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and Stephen King’s Pet Semetary.

After coming out of hypnosis Tom Wallace experiences an awaking of psychic powers allowing him to see what might be a ghost. He comes to realize that the ghost wants something, and that he doesn’t just see ghosts, he sees jumbled and muddy images that might be the future. Wallace’s wife, Anne, is as patient as possible, but the effects on Wallace echo through his relationships – Anne, pregnant, fears for his sanity and their children’s well-being, and their friends realize something is different. Meanwhile, Wallace becomes too aware of his neighbors, one wife desperate for children and her husband who does not want to be tied down, and another neighbor dominated by his wife, a sexual barracuda whose appetite amused Wallace before, but seems threatening to him now. And through all this, the ghost appears again, wanting something, but what?

The role of female sexuality in A Stir of Echoes makes the novel feel like a precursor to Matheson’s later, more explicit horror novel, Hell House, but also dates it. Written near the beginning of the so-called sexual revolution, and drawing on the 1950s preoccupation with post-WWII suburban housing developments as petri dishes for frustration – economic, class and/or sexual – the women are well-portrayed within their types, but are still types: wife/mother, sexual predator, frustrated mother. The portrayal seems to imply that the women are locked into these roles, and while Anne stretches the type through intelligence and compassion, still it’s not far.

That criticism aside, this is an entertaining ghost/horror story.

I bought a paperback of A Stir of Echoes back in the 1980s with the plan to read it immediately; didn't happen. I planned on digging it out from the bottom of the TBR mountain before seeing the movie; didn't happen. Somehow I don't recall, I ended up with a movie edition of the novel and now I've pulled the book out for the worst of reasons, to refresh my memory of a writer I enjoyed who has passed away, a little concerned the book might not live up to my expectations. I shouldn't have worried.

If this novel doesn't attain the level of I am Legend or Hell House, Matheson still does a fine job of gradually depicting the neighborhood the Wallaces live in, unveiling the extent of Wallace's awakening, of the effect on the man and his wife, of the gradual solving of the mystery. A Stir of Echoes has the feel of an extended episode of the original Twilight Zone, not surprising since Matheson was a regular writer for the series, and he packs all this into 211 paperback pages.

If literarily (and, in this case, literally) Joe Hill comes to us by way of Stephen King, then King comes to us by way of Richard Matheson (but only literarily). Matheson has his own literary ancestors -- maybe Fritz Leiber, maybe Robert Bloch, maybe Henry Kuttner -- but like the best writers he took what he learned and turned it to his own uses, and in A Stir of Echoes we can see the seeds not just of King’s brand of horror, but also of current urban fantasy.


About the 1999 movie version of A Stir of Echoes: It's been several years since I saw it, and as I recall the plot diverges from the novel somewhat. (IMDB seems to confirm that) Still, it’s a good movie, respectful of the source though not married to it, and anchored by the usual fine performance of Kevin Bacon.


Hobbit’s review of A Stir of Echoes



RELATED SUBURBAN READING:
“The Hungry House” by Robert Bloch
“Bird of Prey” by John Collier



Next: HELL HOUSE by Richard Matheson
 
malaksilver said:
i myself have been reading Bolo Brigade by Keith Laumer
Click to expand...

Hi, Malaksilver.

Welcome to SFFWorld. It's been years since I read Laumer but I recall enjoying the Retief stories I read.

Any plans for October/Halloween reading?


Randy
 
hey Randy

my plans consist of contuning to read the Bolo Series.
Once thats done I may move on to a light novel series a freind bought me from Japan.



malaksilver
 
Hi, all.

I'm running a little behind with finishing some writing, but hope to catch up over the weekend. I'm not sure I'll be on-line again until Wednesday, so expect the next installment then.

In the meantime, feel free to jump in with some scary tidbits of your own.


Randy M.
 
I have some good Halloween recommendations. From the fiction side of things two good ones that I have read recently are The Narrows by Ronald Malfi and The Evolutionist by Rena Mason. On the movie side, The Conjuring is one of the best horror movies I have seen in years.
Carl
 
I keep hearing good things about The Conjuring, Carl; it's not out on DVD/Bluray here in the UK yet, but it's one I'm going to look out for when it does.

To add to Randy's miscellany of Hallowe'en Horrors, I've added a review of a Lovecraft themed collection, being re-released here in the UK: Shadows Over Innsmouth. A big tome, but one I enjoyed very much. (LINK.)

M.
 
The Conjuring is excellent!
Has anyone read 'Those Who Hunt the Night' by Barbara Hambly? It has been sitting on my shelf for about 20 years and I just ran across it today. Thinking of giving it a try.

Best,
WPS
 
Working on Hallowe'en movies. Recently watched the US version of The Shining on Blu Ray, which is longer that the UK version. Unusually, the shorter version is allegedly Kubrick's preferred version (which is probably why the US copy is so darned hard to get here in the UK).

Then followed it with Room 237, which has to be seen to be believed. It's a documentary about the many so-called hidden meanings in The Shining, which tells us more about the conspiracy theorists than the conspiracies of the film. It is jaw dropping to watch and hear some of the quite bizarre ideas proposed. It did make me wonder how a film director could create such devotion to his films.

I have a copy of the latest cut of The Wicker Man(aka The Final Cut) on the way to me, on Blu Ray. Should be here in the next couple of days. One of the most bizarre horror movies of the genre, whose tales on its production are almost as legendary as the film itself. The more I've seen it over the decades, the more I like it. Although this is not the definitive (ie: original) cut, it sounds like it is about as close as we're going to get. Looking forward to it.

M.
 
I've managed to get on-line today, so here's another entry.

HELL HOUSE by Richard Matheson (Viking, 1971; Tor, 1999)

”Isn’t it just another so-called haunted house?” [Edith] asked, using his phrase.
“I’m afraid it isn’t,” [Dr. Barrett] admitted. “It’s the Mount Everest of haunted houses, you might say. There were two attempts to investigate it, one in 1931, the other in 1940. Both were disasters. Eight people involved in those attempts were killed, committed suicide, or went insane. Only one survived, and I have no idea how sound he is – Benjamin Fischer, one of the two who will be with me.”
-- from the first chapter​


Hill House? The Overlook Hotel?

Pfhhht! Mere goose bumps compared to the Emeric Belasco mansion, otherwise known in parapsychological circles as Hell House, where your fears and insecurities are diagnosed, your differences with your companions assessed, and all are wielded as weapons to destroy you.

An ailing head of a publishing empire hires Dr. Barrett to prove survival after death by looking for facts in the one place on Earth in which haunting has never been disproven, Hell House. Along with Barrett, the publisher insists upon Fischer, a gifted physical medium (that is, capable of such physical acts as creating ectoplasm) before his first contact with Hell House but afterward tracing a downward spiral in his career and his life, and Florence Tanner, a mental medium (able to commune with the dead), also a pastor in a Spiritualist church. Neither would have been Barrett’s choice of companion, but the take-it-or-leave-it offer of $100,000, and the chance both to prove his theory that “haunting” is merely residual energy that can be depleted and eliminated and to finally build the machine to do so, is too attractive to refuse. The fourth, Edith, Dr. Barrett’s wife and his frequent partner in his researches, is the least invested member, but also the most vulnerable.

At TOR.com, Michael Bradley confirms something I remember reading a number of years ago (wish I could recall where) that Hell House was written in part because Matheson was dissatisfied with Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which I willingly believed because the premise is so similar: Four people, one an academic with an interest in the supernormal (as Barrett would have it) another a damaged but gifted medium, all with the intent of proving a house is truly haunted, each with an emotional or intellectual frailty and some private guilt, and each with an assumption on the nature of the haunting, enter in spite of the reputation of the house for destroying its tenants. Over the course of a few days they are picked apart by ... well, that's where the novels diverge. Jackson doesn't commit to ghosts, leaving the reader to interpret what is ghostly, what is psychological. But Matheson commits to a true haunting, and with a vengeance. Hell House is wickedly perverse, sexually explicit and mesmerizing in the logical step-by-step dismantlement of the defenses and strength, physical and moral, of the four investigators, building dread less through creation of atmosphere and mood than through solidly mortaring together event after event in escalating, focused, ruthless attacks, both physical and psychological.

What follows I have made a spoiler because a couple of plot elements, though probably not crucial, are mentioned while responding to criticism (not entirely unearned criticism) of Hell House:

There are comments on-line regarding how obviously this is a product of the 1970s, and that’s true, but it’s equally true of any story that it bears the mark of its times, for good or bad. One point of criticism I’ve seen is that Florence calls on a spirit guide whom she names Red Cloud. Red Cloud is an Indian and by that I do not mean a Native American, but rather the stereotypical, “How! Me, Red Cloud” Indian from the bad old days of B-movie Westerns. Matheson wrote Westerns and I expect knew the stereotypes well and the novel’s anonymous narrator comments on how unrealistic the spirit guide is, offering the perspective that this is Florence’s way of coping with and interpreting the energies she is channeling. I believe Matheson was not being racist, but making an oblique comment on Florence and her perspective.

Another criticism brought up on-line is, I think, more complex and probably more justifiable, and I alluded to it in my comments on A Stir of Echoes. While Hell House attacks one of the men through his intellectual hubris and the other through his caution, with the women, though more explicitly, Matheson focuses on their sexuality. The history of the Barrett marriage indicates that he suffered an accident that left him incapable of sex, something his younger wife Edith has not been openly bothered by since an incident in her past undermined her enjoyment of sex. Still, once in Hell House the suppression of her sex drive makes sex an obsession. Meanwhile, Florence was a former film actress famous for avoiding the social life of Hollywood. In both cases, the house looks to undermine them in part by insinuating lesbian tendencies into their thoughts, or perhaps emphasizing tendencies already there, and each woman, especially Edith, is disturbed and unsettled by it.

Edith’s repugnance at lesbianism is not inconsistent with the general reaction of the time nor, considering recent developments in the U.S., all that unusual even now. So while I understand why this attitude may seem dated to some readers, unfortunately the novel may be less dated by these attitudes than by its technology, the gas-guzzling Caddy, the lack of cell phones and the Internet, etc. I do think that Matheson does a better job in this novel than in A Stir of Echoes in portraying the women. Florence’s reaction to the house’s assault on her sexuality is somewhat more nuanced than Edith’s: She tries to understand the forces at work and in particular one spirit she has identified and dedicated herself to save. And both women act and are not just acted on, both hold thoughts and base their actions on them, and Matheson does a nice job of balancing the views of Florence against the views of Professor Barrett; neither fully understand the true nature of Hill House’s haunting.

Until the Will Smith movie version of I am Legend, and maybe even after, I would have nominated Matheson as the best-known unknown American writer of sf/fantasy/horror. For anyone 40 years of age or older, even though we may not have known his name, his imagination was on constant display throughout our cultural lives: I am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Twilight Zone (notably, “The Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”), various Roger Corman produced movies based (loosely) on Poe stories, The Night Stalker, The Night Strangler, Trilogy of Terror, “Duel”, Somewhere in Time, and many other novels, short stories and films bear his mark. Except for Stephen King, he may well be the most influential writer of horror, and particularly of an s.f./horror hybrid of the second half of the 20th century.

While reductive to characterize Richard Matheson as Stephen King 1.0, he appears to be the one older writer King has the most affinity to in terms of imagination and approach, and King has acknowledged this. But Matheson presents what I consider a harder surface, his writing more directly influenced by the journalistic and hard-boiled writers of his time period, the 1940s into the 1950s. Sentence by sentence, there isn't as much to pare away (although I would definitely tweak some of his adverbs), but while you can understand and empathize with his characters, there's less charm in the telling than in King's better books; where Matheson writes a story to read, King chats over the kitchen table, confiding in you a homey tale about family and community, just before he removes the floor from under your chair.

Published in the same year as The Exorcist, Hell House still was – according to Bradley – one of Matheson’s best known works and one of his strongest sellers. I suspect both novels provided something of a template for the later "splatterpunk" movement, introducing the horror story to more detailed descriptions of violence and sexuality, and while I remain unconvinced that more explicit is more frightening, Hell House – and The Exorcist, for that matter – demonstrate it can be done effectively.


OTHER BAD HOUSES:
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
This link won't insert in text for me but works like this, so ...
http://www.sffworld.com/forums/show...!/page2&p=663265&highlight=shirley#post663265

The Shining by Stephen King
The House of Windows by John Langan
Naomi’s Room by Jonathan Aycliffe

NEXT: SOFT SPOKEN BY Lucius Shepard
 
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Softspoken by Lucius Shepard (Night Shade Books, 2007; winner International Horror Guild Award for Best Long Fiction, 2007)

Captivated, growing accustomed to the cold, Sanie watches them come and go. They intersect each other’s paths, yet they seem to apprehend her presence and avoid touching her as she moves along the hall toward the stairs. She has no doubt they’re real, not hallucinations, except in the sense that everything is hallucination. The Bullard stamp is on their features, that soft bewildered fleshiness that on occasion veers into a sharper beauty, as with Jackson. This is how he spent his childhood, then. Walking with ghosts, his soul shaped by their ineffable touches. No wonder, she thinks. No wonder.
-- from Softspoken​


Calling this a Southern Gothic, haunted house novel is probably reductive, but true. Shepard brings a contemporary sensibility and a fluid, efficient and often evocative prose style to Sanie Bullard’s voice, and an understanding of how small Southern communities work to this tale following a contemporary woman whose time in her husband’s ancestral home somewhat parallels the time spent by Eleanor Vance in Hill House in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

Sanie and her husband, Jackson, have temporarily moved from Wake Forest, North Carolina to the Bullard home in South Carolina while Jackson is studying to take the bar. Sanie has drifted since her marriage to Jackson, not completing her studies, not writing her stories, not sure where to turn and now, in his house, away from friends, alone; and she knows this and knows also that her marriage is failing, that her loyalties are in disarray as she tries to find an anchor in the midst of an ennui she cannot shake. Almost immediately on taking residence, she begins hearing a male voice that seems to plead for her to see him, a voice that her husband's brother confirms is a ghost. And then she sees ghosts and maybe not just ghosts. Maybe premonitions, rather like Tom Wallace in A Stir of Echoes, though these visions are rather more elaborate, a layering of ghosts from various ages of the house.

Over the course of the novel, Sanie watches Jackson become less and less the ambitious, energetic young man she married and more like his father, who having quit the state legislature became reclusive and increasingly eccentric before his death. Perhaps it’s the house: Louise, Jackson’s sister, is little more than a ghost herself, rarely coming out of her room when Sanie is abroad, and rather shy and quiet when she does see Sanie, only opening up one time and then saying she had once been like Sanie; and Jackson’s brother, Will, talks of ghosts and what he’s seen while under the influence of peyote, offering the idea that the house is at the center of a strange force – Shepard references Gnosticism and the plenum, though not as convincingly, I think, as M. John Harrison in The Course of the Heart – which Sanie herself perceives when under the influence of Will’s peyote.

Whatever it is, Sanie begins to understand it is threatening and she must get Jackson and herself out.


Softspoken lives up to its title, the narrative quietly guiding the reader through Sanie’s experiences and her understanding of them. When the end comes it felt, to me, rushed. But that may be because of the unhurried, methodical way that Shepard leads us into the brewing confrontation which, when it occurs, is brief but brutal. This is a good novel and a good read, and I see why it received good word of mouth when published.

Lucius Shepard established his reputation with s.f. stories, but even some of his s.f. – like “R&R” – can be read as horror. And as more of his stories appeared – for instance, “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket,” “The Night of White Bhaireb” (recently included in The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons edited by Paula Guran) and “Delta Sly Honey” (recently included in Hauntings edited by Ellen Datlow) – they came from a place central to the development of the horror story in the 1980s and 1990s.


Next, more Southern story-telling: WHO FEARS THE DEVIL? by Manly Wade Wellman
 
WHO FEARS THE DEVIL? by Manly Wade Wellman (Dell, 1980; Arkham House, 1963)


Where I’ve been is places and what I’ve seen is things, and there’ve been times I’ve run off from seeing them, off to other places and things. I keep moving, me and this guitar with the silver strings to it, slung behind my shoulder. Sometimes I’ve got food with me and an extra shirt maybe, but most times just the guitar, and trust to God for what I need else. ​
—from “John’s My Name”​

In the 1950s Manly Wade Wellman made his home in North Carolina, going into the mountains to hear folk music and listen to tales. Mixing what he heard with what he imagined, he created John, who became known to readers as John the Balladeer or Silver John, a young man raised in the South, back from the war (given the copyright date of the earliest story, 1946, WWII rather than the Korean War though Wellman doesn’t specify) and wandering the woods and mountains of North Carolina with his silver-strung guitar to sing and to track down the sources of the old songs dear to his heart.

Like Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence and William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, John the Balladeer was featured in a series of short stories (and, late in Wellman’s career, a series of novels). The early stories first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and were revised for this collection so one story led into another (this according to Karl Edward Wagner, a close friend of Wellman’s), allowing the publisher to market the book as a novel. Between each story is a vignette, John telling us a little more about himself and his adventures. Some of the vignettes are effective (“The Stars Down There”; “Find the Place Yourself”) and some just mark time, but the stories are uniformly entertaining.

John gets plenty of chances to learn the origins of his songs, some of which seem to come to him appropriate to the situation in which he finds himself, and to help those mountain folk caught in the reality of the source of the song. All of the stories make for spritely reading, in no small part due to Wellman’s ability to suggest dialect and regional speech through word choice and syntax. Even so, some of the stories particularly appealed to me:

“O Ugly Bird”: The first story in the book and the first published. Mr. Onselm rules the little village. Anything he asks for is given to him. Now he wants Winnie and John is not inclined to let him have her. Thing is, Mr. Onselm has a bird, a very large bird with a sharp beak and claws. The bird even a little resembles Mr. Onselm …

“Shiver in the Pines”: Where “O Ugly Bird” and the second story, “One Other,” suggest a pattern of John coming to a place, first meeting the people involved and then the enemy for that story, this one alters the pattern a little, making a slight mystery of who is not to be trusted – or maybe not who so much as why. There is a treasure in the cave, and the four men who go there aim to get it. Except maybe the treasure isn’t what it seems.

“The Desrick on Yandro”: Mr. Yandro wants to visit the mountain known as Yandro, and as John accompanies him we learn of the Toller, the Flat, the Behinder and the Bammat, all the rare creatures on the mountain from which Polly Wiltse’s desrick keeps her safe, Polly who has been waiting for someone to visit for many a long year.

“Vandy, Vandy”: Similar to “O Ugly Bird” in concept and execution, enough so John acknowledges what he learned in dealing with Onselm could be useful with Mr. Loden, an old man in a not so old body who, like Onselm, is a witch man. And Mr. Loden wants Vandy.

“Walk Like a Mountain”: The statuesque beauty Page Jarrett, tall as John himself, has been scooped up by the giant, Rafe Enoch and hauled to his mountain top home. Rafe has not mixed well with the little people below, still there’s a flood coming and he aims to save Page. John does, too, though not from the flood. But Page proves a challenge to save for both of them.

“Nine Yards of Other Cloth”: The last and most personal of these stories for John in which the fiddler Shull Cobart pursues Evadare and Evadare pursues John. Cobart’s fiddle and John’s silver-strung guitar could make interesting music, except they are on opposite sides and in Hosea’s Hollow, where the Kalu lives, Cobart has the advantage.


In Horror: Another 100 Best Books (ed. Steven Jones and Kim Newman), a collection of short essays, each by a different writer discussing a book he or she loves, Glen Hirshberg (American Morons and The Snowman’s Children) says of Who Fears the Devil?, “…through it all strides Silver John, comfortably solitary, but capable of love, using music like campfire light to chase back loneliness. I love his sense of justice, which is site-specific, derived partially from Native American traditions and partially from Judeo-Christian theology but mostly from intuition. Told that witches can’t prevail against a pure heart, John says, ‘I can’t claim that,’ and he can’t. But he listens, and he learns, and he sorts for himself, and his judgments aren’t global, and his fights are his own even when they benefit others.”

Who Fears The Devil? is a landmark work of quiet horror from the early 1960s, also a landmark work of fantasy and fine Americana. Wellman explores folklore even as he adds to it, and as Hirshberg points out, in Silver John Wellman created something that horror doesn’t often create, a character the reader wants to follow. If Silver John doesn’t change much from the beginning to the end of this book, he does shows signs of longing for something more than to know what’s beyond the next ridge, of wanting someone to share his experiences with. This basic human desire and his innate decency and empathy for those afflicted by the magics loose in the mountains make John an admirable travelling companion.


Next, more outdoors fun: “Longtooth” by Edgar Pangborn and “Near Zennor” by Elizabeth Hand
 
"LONGTOOTH" by Edgar Pangborn (From Good Neighbors and Other Strangers; included in Foundations of Fear edited by David Hartwell)

My word is good. How can I prove it? Born in Darkfield, wasn’t I? Stayed away more years after college, but when I returned I was still Ben Dane, one of the Darkfield Danes, Judge Marcus Dane’s eldest. And they knew my word was good. My wife died and I sickened of all cities; then my bachelor brother Sam died too, who’d lived all his life here in Darkfield, running his one-man law office over in Lohman – our nearest metropolis, population 6,437. A fast coronary at fifty; I had loved him. Helen gone, then Sam – I wound up my unimportances and came home, inheriting Sam’s housekeeper Adelaide Simmons, her grim stability and celestial cooking. Nostalgia for Maine is a serious matter, late in life: I had to yield. I expected a gradual drift into my childless old age playing correspondence chess, translating a few of the classics. I thought I could take for granted the continued respect of my neighbors. I say my word is good.​

– first paragraph​


It’s strange to pair Pangborn's name with the word "horror." Pangborn was a compassionate and empathetic writer, more inclined to gentle humor and a contemplation of good will and how sometimes good will isn't enough. And that’s all true of this novella, but "Longtooth" is also a horror story.

Harp is married to Leda. At 56 Harp is old -- the story was published in 1970 and estimates of the number of years constituting old were a bit more conservative before the first wave of Baby Boomers ripened enough to insist "old" extend outward -- and Leda is 28. Ben, our narrator, has renewed his friendship with Harp since returning to Darkfield. A year older and less healthy than Harp, Ben already notes the effects of a failing heart and lungs weakened by heavy smoking, and feeling the effects of age more acutely is inclined to ponder the discrepancy in age between his friend and his wife. Others in town have also wondered on a young woman’s reasons for marrying a man so much her elder, but not in front of Harp: Apparently Harp isn’t so old that they dare.

At the beginning of “Longtooth” Ben visits Harp to bring him a book. Snowed in, Ben and Harp talk and Harp confides in Ben that over the brutal Maine winter he has heard noises off in the woods around his house. The previous Fall one of his cows had been killed after a crossbeam of the fence had been pulled out – not pried, not broken, but pulled apart – and the cow led off into the woods before being slaughtered and eaten raw. Harp is an experienced woodsman but can't find the trail of the killer; he suspects it reaches the woods and travels tree to tree. Ben wonders about Harp and the pressure on an aging man of a young wife, even if his every move and glance at Leda is filled with adoration. But then Ben hears the sounds, too, and even sees the shadow of the thing, and while Harp and Ben are busy with the livestock, something crashes in Leda’s bedroom, and when they reach the bedroom they find the window broken inward and Leda gone.

The town officials are more than skeptical, and so Ben and Harp are on their own to find the truth, and the truth … well, truth can be devastating.

Pangborn was a stylist, not as showy as Ray Bradbury or Cordwainer Smith often were, but with a distinct, often wry way of expressing himself. On the beginning of the snow storm, “I saw the midget devils of white running crazy down a huge slope of wind …” On Harp and his home, “He produced a difficult granite smile, maybe using up his allowance for the week, and pulled out a bottle from a cabinet that had stood for many years below a parlor print – George Washington, I think, concluding a treaty with some offbeat sufferer from hepatitis who may have been General Cornwallis if the latter had two left feet.”

And throughout Pangborn sets his scene neatly and concisely often, as when Ben and Harp track Longtooth, tying description to perspective, “It was a region of uniform old growth, mostly hemlock, no recent lumbering, few landmarks. The monotony wore down native patience to a numbness, and our snowshoes left no more impression than did our thoughts.”

"Longtooth" examines aging -- in this it might make an interesting companion read with Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes -- and the effects on a man of losing his wife, of losing the trust of his community and maybe of losing his self-confidence. If "Longtooth" doesn't reach the pitch of terror of other outdoor stories like Algernon Blackwood’s "The Willows," it postulates a sort of “call of the wild” (I suspect Pangborn chose the name Leda purposely) and applies the decency innate in all of Pangborn's work to a melancholy and sad effect, reminding us dread does not issue solely from the thing in the night.


Other horror by Pangborn: “A Better Mousehole” (same story collection)


RELATED READING:
”The Autopsy” by Michael Shea


And probably much easier to find …

“NEAR ZENNOR” by Elizabeth Hand (A Book of Horrors ed. Stephen Jones, St.Martin’s Griffin, 2012; Errantry, 2012; The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, ed. Paula Guran, 2011)

He found the letters inside a round metal candy tin, at the bottom of a plastic storage box in the garage, alongside strings of outdoor Christmas lights and various oddments his wife had saved for the yard sale she’d never managed to organize in almost thirty years of marriage. She’d died suddenly, shockingly, of a brain aneurysm, while planting daffodil bulbs the previous September. ​
—first paragraph​


Jeffrey, deep in mourning, is intrigued when he finds correspondence between his recently deceased wife, Anthea, and Robert Bennington, her favorite writer as a teenager, author of The Sun Battles, a series of YA novels Anthea and her friend, Evelyn, had loved as children, and which their other friend, Moira, had tolerated. Although Anthea had persuaded him to read them, Jeffrey did not take to the series the way she had, put off by the books’ darkness. The tenor of the correspondence, teenage adulation shading into anger and betrayal, lead Jeffrey to seek out Evelyn to learn more about the time the girls met with Bennington. The mystery only deepens when he finds that Bennington had later been accused, though never convicted, of sexual abuse of children, and Moira had disappeared shortly after the three girls met him.

In the afterward to this story Hand speaks of having visited Cornwall several times, and the fields, some of them merging with moor, all divided by stone walls and liable to be marshy, provide a distinctive setting. The burial mounds that dot the landscape intensify the weight of the past on the place and on the story, and the scene in which Jeffrey enters one opens up for him the possibilities of what Anthea and her friends experienced. In this, “Near Zennor” harks back to the work of Arthur Machen, Hand imbuing the prehistoric structures with a magic of their own which somehow cuts across time and connects our age with other times and a very different world.

For a reader looking to familiarize him or herself with weird fiction, this story would be a fine introduction since it is written in a fine contemporary prose and adroitly fuses the supernatural or paranormal to the human. The girls act like young girls, the older characters speak like people of their age group, and Jeffrey is a well-realized character whose grief comes across as real. Hand’s imagination is vivid and focused, her prose precise yet evocative, and she does not forget the human while exercising her inventiveness.



Other works of interest:
“Cleopatra Brimstone” by Elizabeth Hand (Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories; Poe’s Children edited by Peter Straub; The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror edited by Stephen Jones)
The Three Imposters by Arthur Machen (in particular “The Novel of the Black Seal”; more on this in a later entry)
The Complete Stories of M. R. James by M. R. James
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
Midnight Sun by Ramsey Campbell


Next Monday: The Ritual by Adam Nevill
 
Burn, Witch, Burn

Hi, all.

Just a note to anyone in the U.S. with access to the Turner Classic Movie channel, at 8:00 pm (EST) the TCM will show Burn, Witch, Burn. This was mentioned last year by both Raggedyman and Vinegar Tom as a filming of Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife.

I haven't seen it before, but have long wanted to, so tonight's the night!

Should note, TCM has been running older horror movies all month long on Friday nights and various times on Saturday. Tonight, besides Burn, Witch, Burn they feature The Tomb of Ligeia, The Seventh Victim, Curse of the Demon and I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man.

I haven't seen the first two in so long that I don't recall them well at all. But if you have not seen Curse of the Demon, I would strongly recommend it. Directed by Jacques Tournier and starring Dana Andrews, it is a surprisingly effective cinematic treatment of M. R. James' "Casting the Runes." I also heartily recommend I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man. The former is Jane Eyre shipped to the South Seas; the second is a faithful adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's Black Alibi, which for three-quarters of its length is one of the best thrillers I've had the pleasure of reading. Both book and movie have a sequence of a young girl going to get her father's dinner; you will be surprised that something so mundane can be so suspenseful.

On Saturday, TCM will feature The Mask of Fu Manchu (starring Boris Karloff, and doubtless not at all politically correct), The Devil's Own and A Plague of Zombies. I've never seen the first two, but the latter is a Hammer Horror production, and an interesting take on zombies that reached the screens a couple of years before Night of the Living Dead.


Addendum: I didn't look closely enough at the full schedule. On Saturday night, TCM will present some other oldies: Freaks (one of the more disturbing movies I've seen from the 1930s), Mark of the Vampire, The Devil Doll and London After Midnight, all directed by Tod Browning, director of the 1931 version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Except for Freaks, I haven't seen these.

Randy
 
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How lucky you are! Very envious.

Further info: The UK edition of Burn Witch Burn is called Night of the Eagle and is available on DVD here quite cheaply: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Night-Eagle-DVD-Peter-Wyngarde/dp/B000L42MTW/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1382128632&sr=1-1&keywords=night+of+the+eagle

London After Midnight, all directed by Tod Browning
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Really? I thought this was one of the Holy Grails, with nothing left of the film but a few pictures of Lon Chaney in his (very scary) makeup:

london01.jpg


Be very interested to see that...

M.
 
Hobbit said:
[...]
Really? I thought this was one of the Holy Grails, with nothing left of the film but a few pictures of Lon Chaney in his (very scary) makeup:

london01.jpg


Be very interested to see that...

M.
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I believe this is a reconstruction of London After Midnight from found stills. I'm not sure if any appreciable footage still exists. Of course, several 1930s movies were like that. Dr. X and the original House of Wax were lost for decades until someone turned them up. Possibly that could still happen for London After Midnight, but with every passing year the likelihood of that diminishes. Note, too, that after Dr. X and House of Wax were found I think their reputations slipped some -- great pulpy fun, but I'm not sure their reputations for being scary are quite as high as when they were lost.


Randy M.
 
Anyone have a recommendation on a good place to start with Ramsey Campbell?

Really enjoying this thread. A lot of good reading ideas.

Best,
WPS
 
wps said:
Anyone have a recommendation on a good place to start with Ramsey Campbell?

Really enjoying this thread. A lot of good reading ideas.

Best,
WPS
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Hi, WPS.

Mostly, just dive in.

Campbell has written a lot and I haven't read half of it. The feeling I get from those who have read more than I have is that he's especially strong in the short story. His first collection, Demons by Daylight, was a breakthrough for him. Prior to that he'd been largely imitating the style and structure of H. P. Lovecraft. With DbD he developed his own voice, approach and subject matter. I've read about half the stories in it, and particularly like "The Interloper." Still, it might be better to go with Alone with the Horrors, which is Campbell's selection of his best stories from when he started to the early 1990s. Again, I've read some of the stories but not all. What I've read, I've liked. I have read all of Cold Print, a collection of his Lovecraftian stories, and the best are exceptional; I particular recommend "The Tugging" and "The Voice of the Beach" (also in Alone with the Horrors.)

As for novels, I've read five -- The Face that Must Die (non-supernatural); The Doll that Ate its Mother (those are two of my favorite titles for horror novels; cheesy titles for novels that really are better than that); Ancient Lights; Midnight Sun; The Grin of the Dark -- and enjoyed them all. Ancient Lights was fun (a forgotten Lugosi/Karloff movie is unearthed), but the most satisfying for me were the last two. Midnight Sun is almost like a Stephen King novel -- a family and the community in which they live are threatened by an entity that brings with it extreme cold. Check the link for a write up of The Grin of the Dark.

Some readers I've talked to consider Nazareth Hill (a.k.a. The House on Nazareth Hill) his best novel and because of that, it's in my TBR mountain.


Randy M.
 
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Thanks Randy!

I have a lot of ground to cover. Most of my reading in the past has been SF. Just started to get really interested in horror and weird fiction. Also have started a small horror movie collection that I'm working my way through.

Best,
WPS
 
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