SFFWorld Countdown to Hallowe'en 2014
- Thread starter Hobbit
- Start date
That's one of the reasons I mention dark fiction/weird fiction/etc. fairly often. As a description of a genre, the word "horror" has been devalued by using it to describe a lot of ineffective works.
As for Orphan Black I give it a brief sidebar because it is dark. Also dark comedy.
American horror movies go through cycles. Something interesting comes along and a bunch of movie-makers copy it to death. For instance, I'm hesitant to see Annabelle because it could easily be more of the same. As a side issue in The Conjuring the doll was effective. (Speaking of The Conjuring, it was good. The last 15-20 minutes trail off, but the acting and the story-line were solid to that point.) And you'll have a year where nothing much comes along that shows a spark of imagination, and then another year where 3,4,5 movies show up that range from good to excellent.
I think the ratio is much better in written fiction.
Been years since I saw it. Thought it was good, but wasn't as won over as some fans. I can see how it might remind you of Laird Barron. I still haven't read the novel it's based on -- Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg. It's held by many as one of the best horror novels (that word again) of that period.
Randy M.
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Terror in Print
GENERATION LOSS by Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press, 2007)
Cassandra Neary, Cass, was a promising photographer. She arrived in New York City in time for the punk scene and CBGB, and her taste for the weird and her recognition of beauty in the grotesque, coincided with the time and place. Her book of photos, Dead Girls, which captured some celebrities of the time, even sold out its run. But then some of those celebrities o.ded and some went off to more lucrative scenes, and the time was past and Cass was past. Unable to sell a second collection, doubtful of her ability, she turned to alcohol and drugs and one night, stoned and drunk, a man took advantage, raped her, nearly killed her, leaving a cut across her abdomen. Scarred but not truly healed, she’s less haunted by the memory of rape than by the memory of running, of not fighting back.
Settled into life alone after her lover died on 9/11, an old friend, Phil Cohen comes to her prefacing an offer with, “Remember how they used to say if you tipped the country on its side, everything loose would roll into California? Well, it’s like they tipped it up again, only now everything that was still loose rolled back up into Maine. … [T]his is, like, the new weird America.” Maine is where Aphrodite Kamestos finally landed, staying on the island of Paswegas even after the commune she helped found there failed. Now, Phil says, Kamestos is ready to emerge from her voluntary exile and to do that she wants to be interviewed by Cass, the same Kamestos whose late 1950s books had inspired Neary’s interest in photography. How can she refuse?
When Cass reaches Paswegas, she finds dilapidated buildings, backwoods loners, faded resonances of the old commune in the person of former hippies, the death decades before of a young woman, and the recent disappearance of a young man. She also finds Kamestos, who says she doesn’t know who Cass is and never authorized an interview. Kamestos’ son suspects a family friend, Danny, of setting it up, the same Danny who Kamestos mentored in photography and who left Kamestos for another, younger woman. Did Danny set up the interview? If so, why? And why is Kamestos argumentative and resentful, even antagonistic?
Drawn into the mysteries inhabiting Paswegas, this time Cass won’t run.
Cass is superficially reminiscent of Lisbeth Salander and Generation Loss of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – a disconnected loner as main protagonist, a remote location, a mystery, characters some of whom are distant and even hostile – but while Steig Larsson's protagonist and novel are convincing while reading, I think Hand's book remains believable once the spell of reading ends, at least in part because the plotting is less intricate and involved. Written in first-person, we experience Cass directly, her sharp edges smoothed by her humor and wryness (on Phil Cohen’s shaved head: “He’d immediately realized this was a bad move and tried growing it back, with the result that he now looked like what you’d get if Edvard Munch had painted Chia pets”). Additionally, her use of analogies from photographic processes affords us a view of both her skill set and her thought processes, deepening our appreciation of how thoroughly her obsession with photography affects her sensibility and outlook.
Generation Loss is a well-written crime thriller with a touch of mystery set in a gloomy, threatening landscape, and developed gradually to reveal moments of terror near the end. Early on Cass notes that Maine is Stephen King country, and Hand’s novel fits nicely in and contributes to that library of suspense and dread. There is some violence, Cass’ morality is murky at best, but her skills as an observer and her knowledge of photographic history and process gives an insight into what has happened on the island that connects the strands of events past and present, even if not before someone disappears and someone dies.
Of similar interest:
In the Cut by Susanna Moore (not a book I care for, but championed by enough readers whose taste I trust to wonder if it’s a blind spot on my part)
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
More broadly:
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Man on the Balcony by Per Wahloo & Maj Sjowall
The Face that Must Die by Ramsey Campbell
The Cormorant by Stephen Gregory
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
Koko, Mystery & The Throat by Peter Straub
The Cutting Room by Louise Welch (Not as well-known as some of the other titles here, it is a fine debut thriller)
And still more broadly:
13 Bullets by David Wellington
The Ritual by Adam Nevill
The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff
Friday: Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
GENERATION LOSS by Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press, 2007)
… I hate looking at bad reproductions of great photographs, and these on-line images were uniformly lousy. Generation loss – that’s what happens when you endlessly reproduce a photographic image. You lose authenticity, the quality deteriorates in each subsequent generation that’s copied from the original negative, and the original itself decays with time, so that every new image is a more degraded version of what you started with. Same thing with analog recordings. After endless reproduction, you end up with nothing but static and hiss.
”Our gaze changes all that it falls upon.” – from the introduction by Aphrodite Kamestos to her book of photography Deceptio Visus (translation, “deceiving sight”)
”Our gaze changes all that it falls upon.” – from the introduction by Aphrodite Kamestos to her book of photography Deceptio Visus (translation, “deceiving sight”)
– both quotes from Generation Loss
Cassandra Neary, Cass, was a promising photographer. She arrived in New York City in time for the punk scene and CBGB, and her taste for the weird and her recognition of beauty in the grotesque, coincided with the time and place. Her book of photos, Dead Girls, which captured some celebrities of the time, even sold out its run. But then some of those celebrities o.ded and some went off to more lucrative scenes, and the time was past and Cass was past. Unable to sell a second collection, doubtful of her ability, she turned to alcohol and drugs and one night, stoned and drunk, a man took advantage, raped her, nearly killed her, leaving a cut across her abdomen. Scarred but not truly healed, she’s less haunted by the memory of rape than by the memory of running, of not fighting back.
Settled into life alone after her lover died on 9/11, an old friend, Phil Cohen comes to her prefacing an offer with, “Remember how they used to say if you tipped the country on its side, everything loose would roll into California? Well, it’s like they tipped it up again, only now everything that was still loose rolled back up into Maine. … [T]his is, like, the new weird America.” Maine is where Aphrodite Kamestos finally landed, staying on the island of Paswegas even after the commune she helped found there failed. Now, Phil says, Kamestos is ready to emerge from her voluntary exile and to do that she wants to be interviewed by Cass, the same Kamestos whose late 1950s books had inspired Neary’s interest in photography. How can she refuse?
When Cass reaches Paswegas, she finds dilapidated buildings, backwoods loners, faded resonances of the old commune in the person of former hippies, the death decades before of a young woman, and the recent disappearance of a young man. She also finds Kamestos, who says she doesn’t know who Cass is and never authorized an interview. Kamestos’ son suspects a family friend, Danny, of setting it up, the same Danny who Kamestos mentored in photography and who left Kamestos for another, younger woman. Did Danny set up the interview? If so, why? And why is Kamestos argumentative and resentful, even antagonistic?
Drawn into the mysteries inhabiting Paswegas, this time Cass won’t run.
Cass is superficially reminiscent of Lisbeth Salander and Generation Loss of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – a disconnected loner as main protagonist, a remote location, a mystery, characters some of whom are distant and even hostile – but while Steig Larsson's protagonist and novel are convincing while reading, I think Hand's book remains believable once the spell of reading ends, at least in part because the plotting is less intricate and involved. Written in first-person, we experience Cass directly, her sharp edges smoothed by her humor and wryness (on Phil Cohen’s shaved head: “He’d immediately realized this was a bad move and tried growing it back, with the result that he now looked like what you’d get if Edvard Munch had painted Chia pets”). Additionally, her use of analogies from photographic processes affords us a view of both her skill set and her thought processes, deepening our appreciation of how thoroughly her obsession with photography affects her sensibility and outlook.
Generation Loss is a well-written crime thriller with a touch of mystery set in a gloomy, threatening landscape, and developed gradually to reveal moments of terror near the end. Early on Cass notes that Maine is Stephen King country, and Hand’s novel fits nicely in and contributes to that library of suspense and dread. There is some violence, Cass’ morality is murky at best, but her skills as an observer and her knowledge of photographic history and process gives an insight into what has happened on the island that connects the strands of events past and present, even if not before someone disappears and someone dies.
Of similar interest:
In the Cut by Susanna Moore (not a book I care for, but championed by enough readers whose taste I trust to wonder if it’s a blind spot on my part)
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
More broadly:
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Man on the Balcony by Per Wahloo & Maj Sjowall
The Face that Must Die by Ramsey Campbell
The Cormorant by Stephen Gregory
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
Koko, Mystery & The Throat by Peter Straub
The Cutting Room by Louise Welch (Not as well-known as some of the other titles here, it is a fine debut thriller)
And still more broadly:
13 Bullets by David Wellington
The Ritual by Adam Nevill
The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff
Friday: Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Terror in Print
SHARP OBJECTS by Gillian Flynn (Shaye Areheart Books [Random House], 2006)
Camille Preaker is a reporter at a small newspaper in Chicago, a favorite of her editor, Curry, even if she hasn’t blossomed into the reporter he thinks she should be. But Camille has issues, issues which include a recent stay at a psychiatric hospital; Camille is a cutter, she etches words into her skin and sometimes she can feel the word appropriate to her situation wriggle or rise or flare under her clothing.
Now Camille is back to work. She comes from Wind Gap, Missouri and Curry sends her there to cover the disappearance of Natalie Jane Keene, 10-years-old. Curry, in spite of age and alcohol hasn’t lost his instincts and he’s certain this disappearance ties into the murder the previous August of another young girl, Ann Nash, 9-years-old. Camille knows the area and still has family there so she’s Curry’s best choice; and, too, Camille believes Curry wants her to face the family troubles that led to her stay in the hospital.
While in town, Camille revisits the past, seeing old friends who don’t understand why she would leave Wind Gap, not be married and settled, tries to contend with her memories of her dead sister, Marian, gets to know her 13-year-old half-sister Amma, tries to reach a truce of sorts with her mother, Adora, all while interviewing family members, neighbors and others tied to the death of one little girl and the disappearance of another. And then Camille is among those who find Natalie’s body; like Ann, her teeth have been pulled.
The more Camille learns, the more apparent it is that her dysfunctional family is intimately woven into the mystery of the murdered girls: Adora had tutored both, Amma had been friends for a while with each of them.
Flynn is the real deal, a writer who understands the pacing and plotting needs of a thriller while also able to weave in the complications of family, of struggling with truths that might destroy you, of knowing and accepting the people around you even those who do care for you, of the weight of expectations, your own for others and others for you, and she does all this with exemplary prose. This is a strong first novel, stronger in my view than some other first novels I’ve read in the past few years that received similar levels of acclaim.
Of similar interest:
The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich
The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown
In the Cut by Susanna Moore
[Not a book I care for, but a lot of readers whose taste I trust like it.]
Girls by Frederick Busch
The Snowman’s Children by Glen Hirshberg
Of broader interest:
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
Roseanna by Per Wahloo & Maj Sjowall
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg
More of Gillian Flynn:
Given precedents set in previous years, I hesitate to give Flynn’s most recent novel, Gone Girl, a separate entry because I can’t quite convince myself it fits in as October reading. So here’s a post-script with a simple message:
Read Gone Girl. I’ve enjoyed my other reading over the last year, but this is simply the one book that made me say, Wow. Good as I found Sharp Objects, Gone Girl exceeds its scope, its ambitions and its achievement, and does so with the apparent effortlessness of an Astaire dance. (Nick and Amy, the novel’s main characters and movie buffs, would like that analogy.)
Gone Girl takes a relatively simple plot, one we’ve seen in TV movies (which Flynn playfully acknowledges), filtering it through a film noir lens (which Flynn also acknowledges, using it to help develop her characters and themes) and deploys it through a believably self-centered, self-obsessed married couple, delivering a self-aware, pitch black satire, a grinning skull of a book cackling over the state of 21st century partnership, devotion, trust and loyalty and the ulterior motives behind them, and skewering contemporary marriage, parenthood and child rearing, police work and media celebrity, with special attention devoted to the creation and modification of self through the bits and bites we receive, digest and regurgitate as we prepare the stories we adopt and adapt, the shifting details which we choose to present or not, to emphasize or disguise.
I won’t say more because you need to read it to appreciate Flynn’s gleeful craftsmanship and gamesmanship in merging the elements of a fine thriller with sharp, caustic commentary on our media-driven, camera-ready society and its ideals.
The movie version, directed by David Fincher (Seven; Zodiac) and starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, was also scripted by Flynn. While it jettisons most of the satire I enjoyed in the novel, it maintains a sharp thriller edge because of strong direction and editing, and because of spot-on casting: It’s possible that Affleck has never been better cast for a role, Neal Patrick Harris has a nice turn as Amy’s former lover and Rosamund Pike inhabits Amy’s intensity and intelligence as though born with it. There are also sharp, if short, supporting performances, notable Missi Pyle as a Nancy-Grace-style TV journalist. (If you’re from the U.S., you probably know who Nancy Grace is; if you’re not from the U.S., trust me, you don’t want to know.)
Monday: True Detective
SHARP OBJECTS by Gillian Flynn (Shaye Areheart Books [Random House], 2006)
”Some loony, some crazy man musta done it. …”
“Why do you say that?” …
“Why else would you pull out a dead little girl’s teeth?”
“He took her teeth?”
“All but the back part of a baby molar.”
It’s impossible to compete with the dead. I wish I could stop trying.
“Why do you say that?” …
“Why else would you pull out a dead little girl’s teeth?”
“He took her teeth?”
“All but the back part of a baby molar.”
It’s impossible to compete with the dead. I wish I could stop trying.
– both quotes from Sharp Objects
Camille Preaker is a reporter at a small newspaper in Chicago, a favorite of her editor, Curry, even if she hasn’t blossomed into the reporter he thinks she should be. But Camille has issues, issues which include a recent stay at a psychiatric hospital; Camille is a cutter, she etches words into her skin and sometimes she can feel the word appropriate to her situation wriggle or rise or flare under her clothing.
Now Camille is back to work. She comes from Wind Gap, Missouri and Curry sends her there to cover the disappearance of Natalie Jane Keene, 10-years-old. Curry, in spite of age and alcohol hasn’t lost his instincts and he’s certain this disappearance ties into the murder the previous August of another young girl, Ann Nash, 9-years-old. Camille knows the area and still has family there so she’s Curry’s best choice; and, too, Camille believes Curry wants her to face the family troubles that led to her stay in the hospital.
While in town, Camille revisits the past, seeing old friends who don’t understand why she would leave Wind Gap, not be married and settled, tries to contend with her memories of her dead sister, Marian, gets to know her 13-year-old half-sister Amma, tries to reach a truce of sorts with her mother, Adora, all while interviewing family members, neighbors and others tied to the death of one little girl and the disappearance of another. And then Camille is among those who find Natalie’s body; like Ann, her teeth have been pulled.
The more Camille learns, the more apparent it is that her dysfunctional family is intimately woven into the mystery of the murdered girls: Adora had tutored both, Amma had been friends for a while with each of them.
Flynn is the real deal, a writer who understands the pacing and plotting needs of a thriller while also able to weave in the complications of family, of struggling with truths that might destroy you, of knowing and accepting the people around you even those who do care for you, of the weight of expectations, your own for others and others for you, and she does all this with exemplary prose. This is a strong first novel, stronger in my view than some other first novels I’ve read in the past few years that received similar levels of acclaim.
Of similar interest:
The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich
The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown
In the Cut by Susanna Moore
[Not a book I care for, but a lot of readers whose taste I trust like it.]
Girls by Frederick Busch
The Snowman’s Children by Glen Hirshberg
Of broader interest:
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
Roseanna by Per Wahloo & Maj Sjowall
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg
More of Gillian Flynn:
Given precedents set in previous years, I hesitate to give Flynn’s most recent novel, Gone Girl, a separate entry because I can’t quite convince myself it fits in as October reading. So here’s a post-script with a simple message:
Read Gone Girl. I’ve enjoyed my other reading over the last year, but this is simply the one book that made me say, Wow. Good as I found Sharp Objects, Gone Girl exceeds its scope, its ambitions and its achievement, and does so with the apparent effortlessness of an Astaire dance. (Nick and Amy, the novel’s main characters and movie buffs, would like that analogy.)
Gone Girl takes a relatively simple plot, one we’ve seen in TV movies (which Flynn playfully acknowledges), filtering it through a film noir lens (which Flynn also acknowledges, using it to help develop her characters and themes) and deploys it through a believably self-centered, self-obsessed married couple, delivering a self-aware, pitch black satire, a grinning skull of a book cackling over the state of 21st century partnership, devotion, trust and loyalty and the ulterior motives behind them, and skewering contemporary marriage, parenthood and child rearing, police work and media celebrity, with special attention devoted to the creation and modification of self through the bits and bites we receive, digest and regurgitate as we prepare the stories we adopt and adapt, the shifting details which we choose to present or not, to emphasize or disguise.
I won’t say more because you need to read it to appreciate Flynn’s gleeful craftsmanship and gamesmanship in merging the elements of a fine thriller with sharp, caustic commentary on our media-driven, camera-ready society and its ideals.
The movie version, directed by David Fincher (Seven; Zodiac) and starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, was also scripted by Flynn. While it jettisons most of the satire I enjoyed in the novel, it maintains a sharp thriller edge because of strong direction and editing, and because of spot-on casting: It’s possible that Affleck has never been better cast for a role, Neal Patrick Harris has a nice turn as Amy’s former lover and Rosamund Pike inhabits Amy’s intensity and intelligence as though born with it. There are also sharp, if short, supporting performances, notable Missi Pyle as a Nancy-Grace-style TV journalist. (If you’re from the U.S., you probably know who Nancy Grace is; if you’re not from the U.S., trust me, you don’t want to know.)
Monday: True Detective
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algernoninc
Now I'm an axolotl
- Joined
- May 3, 2004
- Messages
- 2,169
I've read Gone Girl earlier this year. I liked, but I had some reservations the game thehusband and wife play with each other. It stretches credibility sometimes. It made remember also a film with Kathelin Turner and Michael Douglas (I think is The War of the Roses). Anyway, good writing. I bomarked a lot of quotes like this one:
Isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He ‘gets’ me. She ‘gets’ me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?
For this month, I finished The Bottoms by Joe R Lansdale. I picked up a winner for my first book by this author (easy task, as this is his most celebrated novel). I now plan to check out his other work. The Bottoms for me has echoes of Robert McCammon (Boy's Life) and To Kill a Mockinbird in its descriptions of racism during the Great Depression in a small place in East Texas. It is also a very scary book with a series of horrible murders and what appears to be a supernatural creature haunting the wetlands.
My next Halloween pick is Fata Morgana by William Kotzwinkle, another choice I made based on the reviews of Randy in previous years. About a third of the way in, and I believe it's another great scary story.
Isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He ‘gets’ me. She ‘gets’ me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?
For this month, I finished The Bottoms by Joe R Lansdale. I picked up a winner for my first book by this author (easy task, as this is his most celebrated novel). I now plan to check out his other work. The Bottoms for me has echoes of Robert McCammon (Boy's Life) and To Kill a Mockinbird in its descriptions of racism during the Great Depression in a small place in East Texas. It is also a very scary book with a series of horrible murders and what appears to be a supernatural creature haunting the wetlands.
My next Halloween pick is Fata Morgana by William Kotzwinkle, another choice I made based on the reviews of Randy in previous years. About a third of the way in, and I believe it's another great scary story.
Terror and the Weird on Screen
TRUE DETECTIVE (originally aired on HBO, January-March 2014; director Cory Joji Fukunaga; writer/creator, Nic Pizzolatto)
This eight-part mini-series opens with two former Louisiana State Police homicide detectives being interviewed separately by two current State Police detectives concerning the investigation of the murder of a young woman in 1995. Rust Cohle and Marty Hart (symbolism, much?) had been lionized for catching the murderer, but their interviewers have evidence that the real murderer was not caught, evidence in the form of another dead body and a similar M.O.
In 1995 Cohle transferred from a Texas vice division, and so was new to the state, to the homicide division and to partnership with Hart. There were rumors about his departure from vice, but they remained unsubstantiated. Though Hart was the veteran homicide cop, when called to view the body of Dora Lange, Cohle assessed the scene and told Hart it was a serial killing, and not the killer’s first. From that point on, he took the lead.
Though this noir series is frequently drenched in the glaring Louisiana sun shimmering off the bayous, the bright light never diminishes the viewer’s sense of the characters’ desperation. Rust Cohle is a philosophizing loner, likely the smartest person in any room, and Hart is a satisfactory but unmotivated and unimaginative cop, and a father and husband who does not or cannot live up to his platitudes about parenthood and marriage. As they track the case they gain a sense of each other, neither particularly liking what he learns, but develop a grudging, sometimes argumentative and combative alliance. Infidelity, betrayal, partnerships gained and lost, animosity and jealousy, anger and despair, laws followed and laws broken strew the wake of their investigation and its aftermath, as Hart’s marriage dies and Cohle sometimes accepts and sometimes struggles with his disconnection from everyone.
Still, from the beginning of the interview, Hart praises Cohle’s methods and tenacity in pursuing the investigation, but his interviewers keep asking questions that push the conversation in directions which raise Hart’s suspicions. Hart learns that over the years since Cohle quit the force he has drifted, drinking heavily and not holding down a job, and he is apparently still looking for something: Cohle even appears in crowd shots taken near a recent murder reminiscent of Dora Lange’s.
So far, so noir. But there’s more.
The body of Dora Lange had been posed naked, kneeling before a huge wreath of dead branches and twigs that hung at the bottom of a tree, her hands and feet bound. Over the course of the investigation, Hart and Cohle found artifacts of twigs and branches most of them woven into pyramidal shapes, and in an abandoned church appropriated by a cult they found a mural depicting a huge, looming man with antlers, similar to drawings in Dora Lange’s diary of a scarred, strangely deformed, large man beside which are allusions to lost Carcossa and the King in Yellow.
Cohle told Hart he was prone to visions since the death of his daughter and that this case triggers them – we see one, a flock of birds forming a spiral like the tattoo on Dora Lange’s back – and so he pushed Hart to keep investigating and they found evidence of kidnappings and ritual sacrifice. And then they discovered two missing children too late to save the life of one or the sanity of the other.
In the early episodes Pizzolatto hints at cults and the supernatural – the layout of Lange’s body, the twig and twine artifacts, rumors of a large scarred man, indications that more than one man is involved – but the presentation remains consistent with the noir mystery, particularly in not flinching at the ugliness of victimizing children or exploring the possibility of corruption on the force and among those in higher seats of authority and power; at times the noir fatalism nearly swamps the goal of finding Dora Lange’s murderer as Cohle and Hart exert themselves to survive the miasma of corruption and despair surrounding the investigation. In later episodes that fatalism darkens until Rust has another vision we share, a moment both awesome and awful, when he and Hart finally stumble into Carcossa and comprehend the identity of the King in Yellow.
Woody Harrelson is fine as Marty Hart, showing Marty’s (sometimes self-)wounded pride and character in-between his moments of righteous posturing, perhaps not entirely conscious that his womanizing undermines his authority when criticizing his wife’s and his daughter’s behavior. For a good portion of True Detective Harrelson plays a character several years younger than he is and does so convincingly. In the last episodes, coerced into resuming the investigation, his Hart shucks the down-home homilies, touches his sadness gingerly – two scenes with his ex-wife are restrained in expressing genuine emotion, and all the stronger for that restraint – and prepares to face something that dismays and sickens him, to finish what he and Cohle started twenty years earlier, regardless of how painful the truth may be.
Michelle Monaghan gives a performance equal to Harrelson’s as Marty’s wife, displaying Maggie’s frayed, loving hope and pain, her indignation earned by Marty’s lack of loyalty. And Maggie is the only character who seems drawn to Cohle, intrigued but also aware that his aloofness masks pain, the only person who pries enough to learn some of his past, the only person he shows any sign of connecting with.
But the show belongs to Matthew McConaughey. Rust Cohle is damaged, isolated, the effects of his years as an undercover cop and the death of his daughter merging with a constitutional bent for dark philosophy and intolerance for commonplaces and received wisdom. For the viewer, his obsession with finding the killer to some degree mitigates his curt and caustic remarks, but the motives for his obsession are not entirely clear. Is it a desire for justice? Yet much of what he says indicates he doesn’t believe justice exists. Is it a need to protect the innocent? His comments to Maggie about children indicate this might be closer, with guilt at the core of his intensity and tenacity. And yet Cohle has little hope for or love of mankind, telling Marty that there is nothing natural about us, that our self-consciousness takes us out of the realm of nature and that our greatest gift would be to stop procreating. Is it possible that Cohle, who seems to know so much about the killer, is behind the killing?
In the last two episodes Cohle and Hart, aged and humbled, perhaps lesser men than they were but more cohesive in their need to unburden themselves of the case, face the evil that surfaced in their lives over a decade before, and the true question by the end of True Detective is whether they can survive their discoveries, especially their self-discoveries.
There is at least one on-line review/commentary that addresses the show’s possible literary influences, including some texts of philosophy. Since my experience with philosophy ends at “cure-for-insomnia,” I’ll only summarize the literary.
Foremost, is Ambrose Bierce’s story, ”An Inhabitant of Carcossa” which is less of a story than it is a prose poem meant to induce a certain emotional charge. From this story Robert W. Chambers extracted Carcossa and Hastur, part of the foundation of his story collection, The King in Yellow. These are seminal works in horror, dark fantasy and weird fiction.
Other writers suggested are Raymond Chandler, Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron and William Gay. Chandler was foremost a writer of mysteries, author of The Big Sleep, The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye among others featuring the private detective, Phillip Marlowe. He was also apparently aware of Chambers’ work since one of his early pulp stories (from Black Mask) was titled, “The King in Yellow.” If you’re interested in hard-boiled/noir fiction, I’d suggest all three of Chandler’s novels and note that there is a moment near the end of The Little Sister that is as dark as horror fiction.
Less apparent as an influence is Thomas Ligotti. In style, Ligotti harks back to Lovecraft and to 19th century writers whose prose was more fulsome, but his work offers a pitch black view and twisting of reality and also dramatizes philosophical theories, recent stories examining the work-place and the people who inhabit it. A little more obvious is Laird Barron, since his approach to writing appropriates the pared, direct style of hard-boiled fiction and couples it with a Lovecraftian sensibility along with a Ligottian twisting of reality. As for William Gay, he was a Southern writer whose work shares some of the Gothic sensibility of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. His story collection, I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down is very good, and I strongly recommend seeking out his novel Twilight if you enjoy Southern Gothic.
I’ve been surprised given the trajectory of the late episodes into the bayous and particularly the final scenes in the wooded and nearly inaccessible backwaters, that I haven’t found a mention of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The social conscience of True Detective overtly examines class and economic difference rather than race. Still by the time the Dora Lange case is reopened the all white squad room of Hart and Cohle no longer exists and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two detectives investigating Hart and Cohle are African-American. Here, instead of African natives who symbolize the primitive in man, these apparently steady, balanced family men act both as witnesses to the decadence of a white populace, particularly the wealthy, long accustomed to doing as they pleased, and as avatars of law and civilization trying to assert themselves.
I cannot recommend this dark, twisty, psychologically complex and extremely well-written, acted and directed mini-series highly enough as one of the better products I’ve come across in what increasingly appears to me a new Golden Age of television drama. Better news is that this is only the first entry in a True Detective anthology series, the next installment to appear in 2015. Still, I can’t imagine how they can top this one.
Reading of interest:
Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti
Viewing with points of similarity:
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948; dir. John Farrow; starring Edward G. Robinson, Gail Russell, John Lund)
Night of the Hunter (1955; dir. Charles Laughton; starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish)
Cape Fear (1962; dir. J Lee Thompson; starring Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, Polly Bergen)
Cape Fear (1991; dir. Martin Scorsese; starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange)
Other dark TV:
Helter Skelter (dir. Tom Gries; starring Steve Railsback; mini-series based on non-fiction book by Vincent Bugliosi. Later remade, that version not as strong.)
The X-Files (created by Chris Carter)
Millennium (created by Chris Carter)
Orphan Black (created by John Fawcett & Graeme Manson)
Wednesday: The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
TRUE DETECTIVE (originally aired on HBO, January-March 2014; director Cory Joji Fukunaga; writer/creator, Nic Pizzolatto)
[Cohle] “I don’t like this place. Nothing grows in the right direction.”
[Ex-cops discussing Hart’s discovery in a private investigation]
[Cohle] Good job. Look at you.
[Hart] High praise from a bartender.
[Ex-cops discussing Hart’s discovery in a private investigation]
[Cohle] Good job. Look at you.
[Hart] High praise from a bartender.
– snatches of dialog
This eight-part mini-series opens with two former Louisiana State Police homicide detectives being interviewed separately by two current State Police detectives concerning the investigation of the murder of a young woman in 1995. Rust Cohle and Marty Hart (symbolism, much?) had been lionized for catching the murderer, but their interviewers have evidence that the real murderer was not caught, evidence in the form of another dead body and a similar M.O.
In 1995 Cohle transferred from a Texas vice division, and so was new to the state, to the homicide division and to partnership with Hart. There were rumors about his departure from vice, but they remained unsubstantiated. Though Hart was the veteran homicide cop, when called to view the body of Dora Lange, Cohle assessed the scene and told Hart it was a serial killing, and not the killer’s first. From that point on, he took the lead.
Though this noir series is frequently drenched in the glaring Louisiana sun shimmering off the bayous, the bright light never diminishes the viewer’s sense of the characters’ desperation. Rust Cohle is a philosophizing loner, likely the smartest person in any room, and Hart is a satisfactory but unmotivated and unimaginative cop, and a father and husband who does not or cannot live up to his platitudes about parenthood and marriage. As they track the case they gain a sense of each other, neither particularly liking what he learns, but develop a grudging, sometimes argumentative and combative alliance. Infidelity, betrayal, partnerships gained and lost, animosity and jealousy, anger and despair, laws followed and laws broken strew the wake of their investigation and its aftermath, as Hart’s marriage dies and Cohle sometimes accepts and sometimes struggles with his disconnection from everyone.
Still, from the beginning of the interview, Hart praises Cohle’s methods and tenacity in pursuing the investigation, but his interviewers keep asking questions that push the conversation in directions which raise Hart’s suspicions. Hart learns that over the years since Cohle quit the force he has drifted, drinking heavily and not holding down a job, and he is apparently still looking for something: Cohle even appears in crowd shots taken near a recent murder reminiscent of Dora Lange’s.
So far, so noir. But there’s more.
The body of Dora Lange had been posed naked, kneeling before a huge wreath of dead branches and twigs that hung at the bottom of a tree, her hands and feet bound. Over the course of the investigation, Hart and Cohle found artifacts of twigs and branches most of them woven into pyramidal shapes, and in an abandoned church appropriated by a cult they found a mural depicting a huge, looming man with antlers, similar to drawings in Dora Lange’s diary of a scarred, strangely deformed, large man beside which are allusions to lost Carcossa and the King in Yellow.
Cohle told Hart he was prone to visions since the death of his daughter and that this case triggers them – we see one, a flock of birds forming a spiral like the tattoo on Dora Lange’s back – and so he pushed Hart to keep investigating and they found evidence of kidnappings and ritual sacrifice. And then they discovered two missing children too late to save the life of one or the sanity of the other.
In the early episodes Pizzolatto hints at cults and the supernatural – the layout of Lange’s body, the twig and twine artifacts, rumors of a large scarred man, indications that more than one man is involved – but the presentation remains consistent with the noir mystery, particularly in not flinching at the ugliness of victimizing children or exploring the possibility of corruption on the force and among those in higher seats of authority and power; at times the noir fatalism nearly swamps the goal of finding Dora Lange’s murderer as Cohle and Hart exert themselves to survive the miasma of corruption and despair surrounding the investigation. In later episodes that fatalism darkens until Rust has another vision we share, a moment both awesome and awful, when he and Hart finally stumble into Carcossa and comprehend the identity of the King in Yellow.
Woody Harrelson is fine as Marty Hart, showing Marty’s (sometimes self-)wounded pride and character in-between his moments of righteous posturing, perhaps not entirely conscious that his womanizing undermines his authority when criticizing his wife’s and his daughter’s behavior. For a good portion of True Detective Harrelson plays a character several years younger than he is and does so convincingly. In the last episodes, coerced into resuming the investigation, his Hart shucks the down-home homilies, touches his sadness gingerly – two scenes with his ex-wife are restrained in expressing genuine emotion, and all the stronger for that restraint – and prepares to face something that dismays and sickens him, to finish what he and Cohle started twenty years earlier, regardless of how painful the truth may be.
Michelle Monaghan gives a performance equal to Harrelson’s as Marty’s wife, displaying Maggie’s frayed, loving hope and pain, her indignation earned by Marty’s lack of loyalty. And Maggie is the only character who seems drawn to Cohle, intrigued but also aware that his aloofness masks pain, the only person who pries enough to learn some of his past, the only person he shows any sign of connecting with.
But the show belongs to Matthew McConaughey. Rust Cohle is damaged, isolated, the effects of his years as an undercover cop and the death of his daughter merging with a constitutional bent for dark philosophy and intolerance for commonplaces and received wisdom. For the viewer, his obsession with finding the killer to some degree mitigates his curt and caustic remarks, but the motives for his obsession are not entirely clear. Is it a desire for justice? Yet much of what he says indicates he doesn’t believe justice exists. Is it a need to protect the innocent? His comments to Maggie about children indicate this might be closer, with guilt at the core of his intensity and tenacity. And yet Cohle has little hope for or love of mankind, telling Marty that there is nothing natural about us, that our self-consciousness takes us out of the realm of nature and that our greatest gift would be to stop procreating. Is it possible that Cohle, who seems to know so much about the killer, is behind the killing?
In the last two episodes Cohle and Hart, aged and humbled, perhaps lesser men than they were but more cohesive in their need to unburden themselves of the case, face the evil that surfaced in their lives over a decade before, and the true question by the end of True Detective is whether they can survive their discoveries, especially their self-discoveries.
There is at least one on-line review/commentary that addresses the show’s possible literary influences, including some texts of philosophy. Since my experience with philosophy ends at “cure-for-insomnia,” I’ll only summarize the literary.
Foremost, is Ambrose Bierce’s story, ”An Inhabitant of Carcossa” which is less of a story than it is a prose poem meant to induce a certain emotional charge. From this story Robert W. Chambers extracted Carcossa and Hastur, part of the foundation of his story collection, The King in Yellow. These are seminal works in horror, dark fantasy and weird fiction.
Other writers suggested are Raymond Chandler, Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron and William Gay. Chandler was foremost a writer of mysteries, author of The Big Sleep, The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye among others featuring the private detective, Phillip Marlowe. He was also apparently aware of Chambers’ work since one of his early pulp stories (from Black Mask) was titled, “The King in Yellow.” If you’re interested in hard-boiled/noir fiction, I’d suggest all three of Chandler’s novels and note that there is a moment near the end of The Little Sister that is as dark as horror fiction.
Less apparent as an influence is Thomas Ligotti. In style, Ligotti harks back to Lovecraft and to 19th century writers whose prose was more fulsome, but his work offers a pitch black view and twisting of reality and also dramatizes philosophical theories, recent stories examining the work-place and the people who inhabit it. A little more obvious is Laird Barron, since his approach to writing appropriates the pared, direct style of hard-boiled fiction and couples it with a Lovecraftian sensibility along with a Ligottian twisting of reality. As for William Gay, he was a Southern writer whose work shares some of the Gothic sensibility of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. His story collection, I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down is very good, and I strongly recommend seeking out his novel Twilight if you enjoy Southern Gothic.
I’ve been surprised given the trajectory of the late episodes into the bayous and particularly the final scenes in the wooded and nearly inaccessible backwaters, that I haven’t found a mention of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The social conscience of True Detective overtly examines class and economic difference rather than race. Still by the time the Dora Lange case is reopened the all white squad room of Hart and Cohle no longer exists and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two detectives investigating Hart and Cohle are African-American. Here, instead of African natives who symbolize the primitive in man, these apparently steady, balanced family men act both as witnesses to the decadence of a white populace, particularly the wealthy, long accustomed to doing as they pleased, and as avatars of law and civilization trying to assert themselves.
I cannot recommend this dark, twisty, psychologically complex and extremely well-written, acted and directed mini-series highly enough as one of the better products I’ve come across in what increasingly appears to me a new Golden Age of television drama. Better news is that this is only the first entry in a True Detective anthology series, the next installment to appear in 2015. Still, I can’t imagine how they can top this one.
Reading of interest:
Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti
(horror stories infused with philosophical examinations; I don’t really know how to describe his fiction, but it is intense and often disturbing)
The Cormorant by Stephen Gregory (Poe-esque short novel of title character visited upon a young family)
Every Dead Thing by John Connelly (noir first novel in Charlie Parker series, contains hints of the supernatural)
I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down (story collection; see in particular, “The Paperhanger”) & Twilight by William Gay (Southern Gothic, not as bleak as Cormac McCarthy or Flannery O’Connor, but every bit as well written)
The Ritual by Adam Nevill Viewing with points of similarity:
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948; dir. John Farrow; starring Edward G. Robinson, Gail Russell, John Lund)
Night of the Hunter (1955; dir. Charles Laughton; starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish)
Cape Fear (1962; dir. J Lee Thompson; starring Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, Polly Bergen)
Cape Fear (1991; dir. Martin Scorsese; starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange)
[I prefer the first version for its realism.]
The Blair Witch Project (1999; dir. Daniel Myrick; starring Eduardo Sanchez, Heather Donahue)Other dark TV:
Helter Skelter (dir. Tom Gries; starring Steve Railsback; mini-series based on non-fiction book by Vincent Bugliosi. Later remade, that version not as strong.)
The X-Files (created by Chris Carter)
Millennium (created by Chris Carter)
Orphan Black (created by John Fawcett & Graeme Manson)
[Near-future noir s.f. premise with an X-Files-like paranoia factor centering around the lives of several young women pursued by a large corporation for genetic research. Imagine seeing a woman with your face kill herself, another woman with your face shot to death, another a manic suburban housewife, another a biologist, another a killer, ... Tatiana Maslany is terrific in multiple roles, creating different expressions and physical carriage and movements along with differing tones of voice and speech patterns to distinguish between characters. The supporting cast, mostly relative unknowns, is one and all fine.]
Penny Dreadful (created by John Logan)[Capital GOTHIC, Universal Studios-like monster mash-up but with more finesse, more thought, better acting and feature movie production values, in which the explorer Sir Malcolm Murray searches for his daughter, Mina, abducted by a being unnamed but obviously a vampire, enlisting the help of Mina’s duplicitous friend, Vanessa Ives, also Dr. Victor Frankenstein, and an American gunman who may be a bit more than he claims. Dorian Grey appears, as do some animals that might be werewolves.
The cast features Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett and Eva Green. Dalton is Murray, believable both as the dynamic, bigger-than-life explorer and the guilt-stricken father. Harnett as Ethan Chandler, the American gunman, displays a range and command of the screen I haven’t seen from him before, and needs to when going toe-to-toe with Dalton.
For me Eva Green is a revelation; I’d only seen her in Casino Royale and had no idea how fully she could commit to a character. Her Vanessa Ives is an amazing creation, perhaps a bit clairvoyant, certainly tied to the creature who has abducted Mina, weighted down with guilt but insistent upon standing ramrod straight under it and determined to set things right even if she cannot truly atone.
Tangentially, check the exterior set used for Murray’s home. I suspect it was also used in NBCs cancelled Dracula), which was a decent Gothic combined with elements of steampunk but somewhat hampered by network constraints and nowhere near as compelling as this show.]
The cast features Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett and Eva Green. Dalton is Murray, believable both as the dynamic, bigger-than-life explorer and the guilt-stricken father. Harnett as Ethan Chandler, the American gunman, displays a range and command of the screen I haven’t seen from him before, and needs to when going toe-to-toe with Dalton.
For me Eva Green is a revelation; I’d only seen her in Casino Royale and had no idea how fully she could commit to a character. Her Vanessa Ives is an amazing creation, perhaps a bit clairvoyant, certainly tied to the creature who has abducted Mina, weighted down with guilt but insistent upon standing ramrod straight under it and determined to set things right even if she cannot truly atone.
Tangentially, check the exterior set used for Murray’s home. I suspect it was also used in NBCs cancelled Dracula), which was a decent Gothic combined with elements of steampunk but somewhat hampered by network constraints and nowhere near as compelling as this show.]
Wednesday: The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
Yes to all that -- and I loved War of the Roses when I saw it years ago. Some of what stretched credibility for me were set pieces along the lines of what you see in Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. As with those novels, I find the pacing of the story will get me past them and frankly Flynn is, sentence by sentence, a stronger writer of prose than Harris. Other spots I thought were exaggerated for satiric effect. Unlike the movie, which is a thriller, the novel is satire wearing a thriller's clothing.
Hmmmmm ... another title for me to track down. I've heard of it but not bought it and it's long past due for me to read one of his novels.
Good to hear, Algernoninc. I hope you enjoy it as much throughout.
Randy M.
Nechtan
Registered User
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2014
- Messages
- 127
Brilliant review of True Detective, Randy. For me, Mathew McConaughey was a revelation. I'd dismissed him as a romcom type but I couldn't have been more wrong. Going a bit OT, in the unlikely event they ever make the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant into a film, I'd put him forward for the role of Covenant. He was so intense in the interview scenes. Exactly like the mad prophet that Covenant was likened to.
From what I've heard, the next season of True Detective will be set in California and be about the secret, occult history of the US transportation system. Unless Tor.com is pulling our legs.
Penny Dreadful was also great. I'm glad you liked Eva Green. She played Morgan in the Camelot tv show. Mostly, Camelot was pretty dull unless Eva was on screen. She also played Artemisia in the 300 sequel and again, was the only interesting thing about it. I'm glad she got a vehicle show to show off her talents. Overall, while Penny Dreadful could be a bit predictable, it was also done really well. The possession during the séance was brilliantly acted and, after a lifetime of watching horror films and possession scenes, genuinely freaky. Vanessa's flashback episode had the potential to be a bit dull but was well handled by Green. All the cast were really good. Looking forward to the next season.
From what I've heard, the next season of True Detective will be set in California and be about the secret, occult history of the US transportation system. Unless Tor.com is pulling our legs.
Penny Dreadful was also great. I'm glad you liked Eva Green. She played Morgan in the Camelot tv show. Mostly, Camelot was pretty dull unless Eva was on screen. She also played Artemisia in the 300 sequel and again, was the only interesting thing about it. I'm glad she got a vehicle show to show off her talents. Overall, while Penny Dreadful could be a bit predictable, it was also done really well. The possession during the séance was brilliantly acted and, after a lifetime of watching horror films and possession scenes, genuinely freaky. Vanessa's flashback episode had the potential to be a bit dull but was well handled by Green. All the cast were really good. Looking forward to the next season.
Great post on True Dective, Randy. It's an amazing series. The acting, the mood, the writing and the directing are all out of this world.
Nic P. has more or less adopted Ligottis world view as described in The Conspiracy Against The Human Race and Rushtons speech in the car in episode 2 (I think) is pure Ligotti.
I'd recommend starting out with Teattro Grotesco or Grimscribe.
Nic P. has more or less adopted Ligottis world view as described in The Conspiracy Against The Human Race and Rushtons speech in the car in episode 2 (I think) is pure Ligotti.
I'd recommend starting out with Teattro Grotesco or Grimscribe.
Hi, Whitleyrr.
I've read Grimscribe and My Work is Not Yet Done and nibbled on the rest of Ligotti's work. I agree with Surt that Grimscribe would be a good starting point. MWiNYD is later Ligotti and more openly violent than earlier Ligotti; I'd also call it determinedly weird as opposed to the more free flowing weirdness of earlier work of his that I've read. Which is not to knock My Work... but I'm not sure it's one you'd want to start with.
The title story of Teatro Grottesco is prime Ligotti, and I've never been more chilled by a story than I was by his "The Frolic."
Randy M.
Thanks for the good words, Nechtan (and you, too, Surt). McConaughey's romcoms were odd. I'm sure they set him up for life, but I've seen him act before and I couldn't quite figure why he'd abandoned it. Certainly his turn in Frailty was quite good, and it's a movie that fits this thread -- a suspenseful, intense thriller.
About the next True Detective the latest rumors have been it will star Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn. Farrell was decent in the Fright Night remake and terrific in In Bruges, and Vaughn can act if pushed into it. We'll see how it goes.
I agree about Penny Dreadful: The séance scene was freaky in part from the direction but mainly from Green's commitment to the role and the scene; and the episode you mention seems to me to have cemented the series. It could have been dull, it could have been a mistaken pause in the action, a misplaced caesura, instead it filled in background information, expanded what we knew of Vanessa Ives' character and the events triggering what we had seen so far, and gave a more human (and sadder) aspect to what could have devolved into a monster-mash. All that, and the handling of Dr. Frankenstein and his creation(s), and a nice turn by Billie Piper, and I think the series was successful. I certainly look forward to the next installments.
Randy M.
Whitleyrr
Named Man
- Joined
- Dec 30, 2009
- Messages
- 261
Great, thank you very much!
Weird
THE KING IN YELLOW by Robert W. Chambers (first published 1895; Buccaneer Books Inc., 1976; Project Guttenberg)
The King in Yellow is a collection of stories by Robert W. Chambers. In a perceptive and appreciative article Michael Dirda describes the book in current publisher parlance as a “mixed collection,” composed of stories not all of which are of a similar genre. Honestly to the casual reader an impression of “confused collection” might be an excusable given the vast difference between the decadent fantasy of the first half and the romanticism of the second half. Dirda does point out a connective theme running through most of the stories, though, which I’ll parrot presently.
For readers of fantasy, horror and weird fiction, the first five stories constitute a landmark in American fantasy fiction and any consideration of what we now call weird fiction needs to account for them. Haunting the collection is the (fictional) book The King in Yellow, written anonymously and floating free in the world, proclaimed the epitome of art by some critics and abhorred by others for its appalling addictiveness through the art of the written word; it is a kind of plague spreading desolation. To read the book is to be altered, fundamentally and irrevocably, one’s innocence and perhaps even hope dissipated in the knowledge of the King in Yellow, his realm, Carcossa, and the irresistible Yellow Sign, the King in Yellow’s summons. In “The Mask” a master artist devises a chemical formula that turns organic materials into something like marble. In “The Court of the Dragon” a churchgoer who has been reading The King in Yellow finds himself unable to abide the service or take it seriously and is distracted by a cloaked man who travels to and from the stairway to the organ. In “The Demoiselle D’Ys” a man lost hunting in a vast forest finds succor with a young, beautiful falconer and her entourage who lead him to a quaint village the inhabitants of which dress in a curiously ancient fashion and use a dialect of French long thought lost.
If these were the only fantasy in the collection, it is unlikely Chambers book would still be remembered, though in and of themselves they are enjoyable; “The Court of the Dragon” in particular seems to me a precursor to a fair amount of contemporary horror fiction, similar to something Ramsey Campbell or Thomas Ligotti might write. But “The Repairer of Reputations” and “The Yellow Sign,” both often reprinted, raise the collection’s importance immeasurably.
“The Repairer of Reputations” (first published in 1895) deposits us into 1920. Castaigne, the narrator quickly summarizes events over the years (some eerily close to actual events) revealing this as an alternate United States in which suicide has been legalized and lethal chambers erected for those who wish to exercise that freedom. As the story proceeds Castaigne introduces us to his cohort, Mr. Wilde, who makes his living through a network of agents, some not voluntary agents, who help him repair the lost or damaged reputations of his clients. Castaigne and Mr. Wilde are scholars of the The King in Yellow and the lines of heredity that make the narrator a potential ruler. They scheme to gain power through the aegis of the King, but all is not as it seems.
“The Repairer of Reputations” remains unsettling, the narrator engaging but also conniving and vindictive so that the reader needs to attend to detail to determine how much is true and how much fabrication. Ultimately the story may leave the reader off balance. At times Chambers draws from Poe – note the similarity of the first quote above to Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” – and Castaigne could easily be a Poe narrator.
“Have you seen the Yellow sign?” an artist is asked in “The Yellow Sign.” The artist and his model have a light, airy relationship as she disrobes and he begins his work. But a growing intimacy of thought and speech changes their relationship and leads to a proposal; she will no longer pose nude for him, and he, while regretting the loss of his muse, anticipates their life together. Their lightly sketched romance adds poignancy to later events as the artist begins to feel watched: Who is that odd man in the cemetery across the street? Why is he always there? What does he want? And then his fiancé finds and reads The King in Yellow.
With the exception of “The Court of the Dragon” all of these stories, the mainstream stories as well, circle around love, one artist for his model, another artist for his wife, Castaigne’s cousin for his fiancé and even for Castaigne himself, and so on. Chambers went on to a successful career as a writer, becoming called (dismissively) “the Shopgirl Scheherazade,” which is to say a romance novelist or maybe a young girls’ version of Horatio Alger. The majority of these works, though, are no longer read and are hard to find. What reputation he has comes from his relatively small production of fantasy and horror, and this collection above his other fantasies. While capable of some wild feats of the imagination, Chambers is not a Kafka or a Lovecraft. He apparently viewed himself as an entertainer, delivering to his readers at least one character per story who is likable and writing a straight-forward, fluid prose; his dialog may seemed tinged with quaintness to the contemporary ear, but it is nonetheless easily read and believable within the context of his stories.
This year’s revival of awareness of Chamber’s collection following the success of the HBO mini-series, True Detective has prompted at least three new editions: In the local Barnes & Noble I recently saw two editions of the original collection (one hardcover, one paperback) from publishers connected to the chain, and a paperback from Dover Publications minus the realistic stories but including a selection of other short fantasy/horror from Chambers. Thanks to Nic Pizzolatto this collection that few general readers knew about in December 2013 became a hot book by January 2014. One wonders what those viewers think as they read the stories.
[Disclaimer: I am not connected to Barnes & Noble and do not mean to shill for them. I just happen to live near one. I am, though, a fan of Michael Dirda, a mainstream critic whose commentary on genre fiction is thoughtful and often both insightful and enlightening.]
Other weird fiction:
Ambrose Bierce: Can Such Things Be? (story collection)
Algernon Blackwood: Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (story collection)
Arthur Machen: Tales of Horror and the Supernatural & The Three Imposters (story collections)
H.P. Lovecraft: H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction (story collection)
Clark Ashton Smith: Zothique & Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (story collections)
Thomas Ligotti: Grimscribe & My Work is Not Yet Done (story collections)
Mark Samuels: The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Stories (story collection)
John Langan: Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters ((story collection; in particular, the title story and “On Skua Island”)
Caitlin Kiernan: To Charles Fort, With Love (story collection)
Laird Barron: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (story collection)
Friday: “The River of Night’s Dreaming” & In a Lonely Place & Where the Summer Ends by Karl Edward Wagner
THE KING IN YELLOW by Robert W. Chambers (first published 1895; Buccaneer Books Inc., 1976; Project Guttenberg)
Camilla: You sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it‘s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
quote opening the story, “The Mask”
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it‘s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
-- The King in Yellow: Act I – Scene 2d.
quote opening the story, “The Mask”
”… As I turned, my listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I thought of a coffin-worm.
—from “The Yellow Sign”
The King in Yellow is a collection of stories by Robert W. Chambers. In a perceptive and appreciative article Michael Dirda describes the book in current publisher parlance as a “mixed collection,” composed of stories not all of which are of a similar genre. Honestly to the casual reader an impression of “confused collection” might be an excusable given the vast difference between the decadent fantasy of the first half and the romanticism of the second half. Dirda does point out a connective theme running through most of the stories, though, which I’ll parrot presently.
For readers of fantasy, horror and weird fiction, the first five stories constitute a landmark in American fantasy fiction and any consideration of what we now call weird fiction needs to account for them. Haunting the collection is the (fictional) book The King in Yellow, written anonymously and floating free in the world, proclaimed the epitome of art by some critics and abhorred by others for its appalling addictiveness through the art of the written word; it is a kind of plague spreading desolation. To read the book is to be altered, fundamentally and irrevocably, one’s innocence and perhaps even hope dissipated in the knowledge of the King in Yellow, his realm, Carcossa, and the irresistible Yellow Sign, the King in Yellow’s summons. In “The Mask” a master artist devises a chemical formula that turns organic materials into something like marble. In “The Court of the Dragon” a churchgoer who has been reading The King in Yellow finds himself unable to abide the service or take it seriously and is distracted by a cloaked man who travels to and from the stairway to the organ. In “The Demoiselle D’Ys” a man lost hunting in a vast forest finds succor with a young, beautiful falconer and her entourage who lead him to a quaint village the inhabitants of which dress in a curiously ancient fashion and use a dialect of French long thought lost.
If these were the only fantasy in the collection, it is unlikely Chambers book would still be remembered, though in and of themselves they are enjoyable; “The Court of the Dragon” in particular seems to me a precursor to a fair amount of contemporary horror fiction, similar to something Ramsey Campbell or Thomas Ligotti might write. But “The Repairer of Reputations” and “The Yellow Sign,” both often reprinted, raise the collection’s importance immeasurably.
“The Repairer of Reputations” (first published in 1895) deposits us into 1920. Castaigne, the narrator quickly summarizes events over the years (some eerily close to actual events) revealing this as an alternate United States in which suicide has been legalized and lethal chambers erected for those who wish to exercise that freedom. As the story proceeds Castaigne introduces us to his cohort, Mr. Wilde, who makes his living through a network of agents, some not voluntary agents, who help him repair the lost or damaged reputations of his clients. Castaigne and Mr. Wilde are scholars of the The King in Yellow and the lines of heredity that make the narrator a potential ruler. They scheme to gain power through the aegis of the King, but all is not as it seems.
“The Repairer of Reputations” remains unsettling, the narrator engaging but also conniving and vindictive so that the reader needs to attend to detail to determine how much is true and how much fabrication. Ultimately the story may leave the reader off balance. At times Chambers draws from Poe – note the similarity of the first quote above to Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” – and Castaigne could easily be a Poe narrator.
“Have you seen the Yellow sign?” an artist is asked in “The Yellow Sign.” The artist and his model have a light, airy relationship as she disrobes and he begins his work. But a growing intimacy of thought and speech changes their relationship and leads to a proposal; she will no longer pose nude for him, and he, while regretting the loss of his muse, anticipates their life together. Their lightly sketched romance adds poignancy to later events as the artist begins to feel watched: Who is that odd man in the cemetery across the street? Why is he always there? What does he want? And then his fiancé finds and reads The King in Yellow.
With the exception of “The Court of the Dragon” all of these stories, the mainstream stories as well, circle around love, one artist for his model, another artist for his wife, Castaigne’s cousin for his fiancé and even for Castaigne himself, and so on. Chambers went on to a successful career as a writer, becoming called (dismissively) “the Shopgirl Scheherazade,” which is to say a romance novelist or maybe a young girls’ version of Horatio Alger. The majority of these works, though, are no longer read and are hard to find. What reputation he has comes from his relatively small production of fantasy and horror, and this collection above his other fantasies. While capable of some wild feats of the imagination, Chambers is not a Kafka or a Lovecraft. He apparently viewed himself as an entertainer, delivering to his readers at least one character per story who is likable and writing a straight-forward, fluid prose; his dialog may seemed tinged with quaintness to the contemporary ear, but it is nonetheless easily read and believable within the context of his stories.
This year’s revival of awareness of Chamber’s collection following the success of the HBO mini-series, True Detective has prompted at least three new editions: In the local Barnes & Noble I recently saw two editions of the original collection (one hardcover, one paperback) from publishers connected to the chain, and a paperback from Dover Publications minus the realistic stories but including a selection of other short fantasy/horror from Chambers. Thanks to Nic Pizzolatto this collection that few general readers knew about in December 2013 became a hot book by January 2014. One wonders what those viewers think as they read the stories.
[Disclaimer: I am not connected to Barnes & Noble and do not mean to shill for them. I just happen to live near one. I am, though, a fan of Michael Dirda, a mainstream critic whose commentary on genre fiction is thoughtful and often both insightful and enlightening.]
Other weird fiction:
Ambrose Bierce: Can Such Things Be? (story collection)
Algernon Blackwood: Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (story collection)
Arthur Machen: Tales of Horror and the Supernatural & The Three Imposters (story collections)
H.P. Lovecraft: H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction (story collection)
Clark Ashton Smith: Zothique & Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (story collections)
Thomas Ligotti: Grimscribe & My Work is Not Yet Done (story collections)
Mark Samuels: The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Stories (story collection)
John Langan: Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters ((story collection; in particular, the title story and “On Skua Island”)
Caitlin Kiernan: To Charles Fort, With Love (story collection)
Laird Barron: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (story collection)
Friday: “The River of Night’s Dreaming” & In a Lonely Place & Where the Summer Ends by Karl Edward Wagner
More Weird
”The River of Night’s Dreaming”& IN A LONELY PLACE & WHERE THE SUMMER ENDS by Karl Edward Wagner (1981; 1983; 2011, respectively)
Night and a drenching rain cause an activities bus to careen off an embankment into the river below. Among the survivors, a young woman, thrown clear of the broken bus into deeper water. She could swim to the rocks beneath the cliff and once rescued return to her ward, back to the weekly injections, back to her mental haze and the daily sameness, but the lights of the city beckon across the bay. Wait, or try for the far shore?
The young woman begins a journey that leads through a long abandoned portion of the city – abandoned except for a figure that looked to be chained to a pillar and then disappeared. Frightened, sure she is followed, she finds a house with lights where Mrs. Castaigne and her maid Camilla welcome her, feed, bathe and shelter her, giving her the room of Mrs. Castaigne’s daughter, Constance, who has gone and of whom they do not speak. Without quite knowing why, the young woman adopts the name Cassilda and relinquishes her past, welcoming absorption into this tightly knit, safe household that no one leaves and no one visits, until one night she hears crying and investigates.
The King in Yellow came to us from the Gay ‘90s, the 1890s, when for a brief period the Victorians unbuckled a bit, their thoughts on and fears of sex coming closer to the surface and reflected in literary works from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey to Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” among others. Writing in the 1970s and 1980s towards the end of another cultural cycle of relative openness to (or at least acknowledgement of) experimentation with sex and drugs in reality as well as in literature, Wagner was free to describe his character’s actions more fully. But if that was all he did this story might be no more than yesterday’s concept of decadence, already fading toward quaintness in the Internet era. Wagner’s command of atmosphere and mood largely through his ability to change diction from contemporary to something older, his word choice and sentence structure shading into that of pre-World War I literature without mimicking Chambers or any other writer, charge this story and give it power. I believe this in part underlies Peter Straub’s comment in his introduction to Wagner’s collection, In a Lonely Place: “I am particularly fond of ‘The River of Night’s Dreaming,’ which manages to accomplish one of the hardest and best of all tricks, to come to a perfectly satisfying ending while preserving most of the mystery.” From first lines to last the story sustains its moodiness, enfolding the reader in an environment almost comfortable and almost suffocating, and always vaguely threatening, like the ministrations of Mrs. Castaigne and Camilla and the presence of the figure.
Of the stories in In a Lonely Place, the first of two horror story collections published in Wagner’s lifetime, Straub says, “A few of these stories make it clear that Wagner is closer than any of the new generation of fantasy and horror writers to the pulp writers of the thirties and forties, who, in effect, created contemporary horror – closer than any of us, I mean, to people like Frank Belknap Long and Lovecraft and Manly Wade Wellman.” That new generation included Straub and Stephen King, Charles L. Grant and Dennis Etchison, among others and from my reading, I’d agree. I think a case can be made that most of the stories in this collection are in conversation with older works, some pulp, some not. Besides “The River of Night’s Dreaming” the collection includes,
“In the Pines”: Ohioans Gerry and Janet Randall rent a cabin in Tennessee, a bit nervous about being isolated in the backwoods, still hoping a vacation away from their troubled lives will help them mend their marriage. But there’s a painting of a woman at the cabin and something about it speaks to Gerry’s bitterness, but not about rest and recovery and especially not about reconciliation.
“Where the Summer Ends”: Grand Avenue is no longer grand, winos wandering all over and kudzu taking over the empty lots and even the lots that aren’t empty; what might hide under vine and leaf? What might kill and flay one of the winos?
“Sticks”: For discussion see, “Sticks”
“The Fourth Seal”: Dr. Metzger’s research proceeds with great success. But he is not the first to conduct such studies, not the first to find answers, and those who keep the answers have their own agenda.
“.220 Swift”: Brandon’s research into folklore and Indian legends seems to make him good company for Professor Kenlaw, an anthropologist. But Kenlaw is distant and only grudgingly accepts Brandon’s company into local caves. The Spanish conquistadors knew these North Carolina woods and hills, and they were not shy about forcing the small people who lived in the caves to do their digging in search of gold. And maybe there’s more gold to be found, and more than gold, too.
“Beyond Any Measure”: Lisette is an American art student, Danielle her flat-mate and lover whose sketch in charcoal of Lisette sells to the wealthy, mysterious Beth Garrington. The branch of study Dr. Magnus specializes in isn’t quite clear but his interest in the occult is obvious, and particularly his interest in past lives like that in the frightening dreams Lisette describes to him, in the memories she relates under hypnosis, memories someone unrelated to Elizabeth Beresford by blood should not have. Magnus begins to dig and finds that over decades Beresford’s estate has descended to several women, each with a striking resemblance to her. He beings to suspect a connection and to fear it.
In 2011, Centipede Press issued two volumes of Karl Edward Wagner’s horror fiction: Where the Summer Ends and Walk on the Wild Side. I haven’t finished the latter yet, but among those who have the consensus is that the former is stronger; it contains all the stories from In a Lonely Place and two others from Why Not You and I? (the second and last of his horror collections published in his lifetime). Where the Summer Ends contains Wagner’s longer stories, at which he seemed to excel but which took longer to write and could be harder to place. The two extra stories are,
“Neither Brute Nor Human”: Written for the 1983 World Fantasy Convention Program Booklet, this story follows the careers of Damon Harrington and Trevor Nordgren as they emerge as successful writers. Nordgren makes the big leap first, moving from s.f. to horror with a sharp trajectory into the ranks of best-sellers. Book after book, including reprints of his earliest work, become strong sellers. Harrington, who first met and became friends with Nordgren at an s.f. convention, mostly sees Nordgren at conventions and begins to notice the effects of success on his friend, to note the wear on him, to wonder at the hunger in the eyes of the fans who constantly surround Nordgren.
“Blue Lady, Come Back”: The story here with the most pulp content (“The Fourth Seal” comes close) probably because it features Curtiss Stryker, one time pulp writer who has been invited to a haunted house and brings along his friend Dr. Russ Mandarin, psychiatrist. Stryker, author of several books on the occult, has come across his share of deluded people and wants Mandarin to assess the owner’s state of mind. Stryker comes away excited by this house, certain it will figure in his next book. Not long afterward, his car crashes through a guard rail and lands in a lake, and his body is missing. Mandarin believes Stryker was murdered and goes about trying to prove it. And then one night he sees the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, floating in a blue mist.
Two less than laudatory comments: First, Wagner was a heavy drinker which probably contributed to his tailing off as a writer and to his premature death. Heavy drinking figures prominently (though maybe not as prominently as in Laird Barron’s stories) in about half of these stories, not always in a good light but the effects are still less well-observed than a fan of his would have wished.
Second, women don’t fare well in these stories. Some don’t have much impact (like the girlfriend in “Where the Summer Ends”) and those who have an impact are not likable. “Cassilda” is something of an exception (though an escapee from an asylum) and Lisette from “Beyond Any Measure.”
Regardless of those reservations, regardless that the last two stories in Where the Summer Ends add nothing to the original collection – neither do they detract – and regardless of what one thinks of Wagner’s later horror stories, In a Lonely Place was a cornerstone collection in the genre, a great demonstration of how the old pulp materials could again be updated and presented effectively. Having those stories back in print together was past due.
Of similar, weird interest:
H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (story coll.)
Poppy Z. Brite: Wormwood (story coll.)
Sarah Monette: The Bone Key (story coll.)
Laird Barron: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (story coll.)
Monday: We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory
”The River of Night’s Dreaming”& IN A LONELY PLACE & WHERE THE SUMMER ENDS by Karl Edward Wagner (1981; 1983; 2011, respectively)
Taking up the book, Cassilda again experienced a strange sense of unaccountable déjà vu, and she wondered where she might previously have read The King in Yellow, if indeed she ever had.
– from “The River of Night’s Dreaming”
Night and a drenching rain cause an activities bus to careen off an embankment into the river below. Among the survivors, a young woman, thrown clear of the broken bus into deeper water. She could swim to the rocks beneath the cliff and once rescued return to her ward, back to the weekly injections, back to her mental haze and the daily sameness, but the lights of the city beckon across the bay. Wait, or try for the far shore?
The young woman begins a journey that leads through a long abandoned portion of the city – abandoned except for a figure that looked to be chained to a pillar and then disappeared. Frightened, sure she is followed, she finds a house with lights where Mrs. Castaigne and her maid Camilla welcome her, feed, bathe and shelter her, giving her the room of Mrs. Castaigne’s daughter, Constance, who has gone and of whom they do not speak. Without quite knowing why, the young woman adopts the name Cassilda and relinquishes her past, welcoming absorption into this tightly knit, safe household that no one leaves and no one visits, until one night she hears crying and investigates.
The King in Yellow came to us from the Gay ‘90s, the 1890s, when for a brief period the Victorians unbuckled a bit, their thoughts on and fears of sex coming closer to the surface and reflected in literary works from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey to Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” among others. Writing in the 1970s and 1980s towards the end of another cultural cycle of relative openness to (or at least acknowledgement of) experimentation with sex and drugs in reality as well as in literature, Wagner was free to describe his character’s actions more fully. But if that was all he did this story might be no more than yesterday’s concept of decadence, already fading toward quaintness in the Internet era. Wagner’s command of atmosphere and mood largely through his ability to change diction from contemporary to something older, his word choice and sentence structure shading into that of pre-World War I literature without mimicking Chambers or any other writer, charge this story and give it power. I believe this in part underlies Peter Straub’s comment in his introduction to Wagner’s collection, In a Lonely Place: “I am particularly fond of ‘The River of Night’s Dreaming,’ which manages to accomplish one of the hardest and best of all tricks, to come to a perfectly satisfying ending while preserving most of the mystery.” From first lines to last the story sustains its moodiness, enfolding the reader in an environment almost comfortable and almost suffocating, and always vaguely threatening, like the ministrations of Mrs. Castaigne and Camilla and the presence of the figure.
Of the stories in In a Lonely Place, the first of two horror story collections published in Wagner’s lifetime, Straub says, “A few of these stories make it clear that Wagner is closer than any of the new generation of fantasy and horror writers to the pulp writers of the thirties and forties, who, in effect, created contemporary horror – closer than any of us, I mean, to people like Frank Belknap Long and Lovecraft and Manly Wade Wellman.” That new generation included Straub and Stephen King, Charles L. Grant and Dennis Etchison, among others and from my reading, I’d agree. I think a case can be made that most of the stories in this collection are in conversation with older works, some pulp, some not. Besides “The River of Night’s Dreaming” the collection includes,
“In the Pines”: Ohioans Gerry and Janet Randall rent a cabin in Tennessee, a bit nervous about being isolated in the backwoods, still hoping a vacation away from their troubled lives will help them mend their marriage. But there’s a painting of a woman at the cabin and something about it speaks to Gerry’s bitterness, but not about rest and recovery and especially not about reconciliation.
Some readers have remarked this is a reworking of Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One” and that’s a fair assessment, though I find the ending of Onions’ story more satisfying.
“Where the Summer Ends”: Grand Avenue is no longer grand, winos wandering all over and kudzu taking over the empty lots and even the lots that aren’t empty; what might hide under vine and leaf? What might kill and flay one of the winos?
Effective and well-imagined, to me, this echoes Joseph Payne Brennan’s “Canavan’s Backyard.”
“Sticks”: For discussion see, “Sticks”
“The Fourth Seal”: Dr. Metzger’s research proceeds with great success. But he is not the first to conduct such studies, not the first to find answers, and those who keep the answers have their own agenda.
Perhaps the least of the stories in this collection, it is still entertaining.
“.220 Swift”: Brandon’s research into folklore and Indian legends seems to make him good company for Professor Kenlaw, an anthropologist. But Kenlaw is distant and only grudgingly accepts Brandon’s company into local caves. The Spanish conquistadors knew these North Carolina woods and hills, and they were not shy about forcing the small people who lived in the caves to do their digging in search of gold. And maybe there’s more gold to be found, and more than gold, too.
“.220 Swift” resonates off stories like Arthur Machen’s “The White People” and “The Novel of the Black Seal” but also has some of the feel of Manly Wade Wellman’s work. Straub includes this story, “Beyond Any Measure” and “The River of Night’s Dreaming” as, “I am certain, among the ten finest horror stories written since the end of the Sixties.”
“Beyond Any Measure”: Lisette is an American art student, Danielle her flat-mate and lover whose sketch in charcoal of Lisette sells to the wealthy, mysterious Beth Garrington. The branch of study Dr. Magnus specializes in isn’t quite clear but his interest in the occult is obvious, and particularly his interest in past lives like that in the frightening dreams Lisette describes to him, in the memories she relates under hypnosis, memories someone unrelated to Elizabeth Beresford by blood should not have. Magnus begins to dig and finds that over decades Beresford’s estate has descended to several women, each with a striking resemblance to her. He beings to suspect a connection and to fear it.
Wagner may have lifted the name Magnus from an M.R. James story – I’m not really certain the stories otherwise explore similar themes beyond vampirism – and may allude to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella, “Carmilla,” with its more subdued implication of lesbianism. In my reading experience this is a wholly original take on the vampire story, and again Wagner maintains a mood throughout, his prose moving from the matter-of-fact to the lush, from contemporary diction to an older, somewhat more formal tone when needed. As opposed to “In the River of Night’s Dreaming” there is more plot here and it is enriched and elevated by a sustained mood.
In 2011, Centipede Press issued two volumes of Karl Edward Wagner’s horror fiction: Where the Summer Ends and Walk on the Wild Side. I haven’t finished the latter yet, but among those who have the consensus is that the former is stronger; it contains all the stories from In a Lonely Place and two others from Why Not You and I? (the second and last of his horror collections published in his lifetime). Where the Summer Ends contains Wagner’s longer stories, at which he seemed to excel but which took longer to write and could be harder to place. The two extra stories are,
“Neither Brute Nor Human”: Written for the 1983 World Fantasy Convention Program Booklet, this story follows the careers of Damon Harrington and Trevor Nordgren as they emerge as successful writers. Nordgren makes the big leap first, moving from s.f. to horror with a sharp trajectory into the ranks of best-sellers. Book after book, including reprints of his earliest work, become strong sellers. Harrington, who first met and became friends with Nordgren at an s.f. convention, mostly sees Nordgren at conventions and begins to notice the effects of success on his friend, to note the wear on him, to wonder at the hunger in the eyes of the fans who constantly surround Nordgren.
If I were to suggest stories to read in conjunction with this, I’d pair it with Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd” then add, for contrast, Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” and Wagner’s later, shorter “The Kind Men Like.” Unlike those, “Neither Brute Nor Human” is mostly humorous, a sometimes wry, sometimes caustic view of the life of a writer dealing with agents and publishers. Until near the end and then the price of fame becomes too clear for laughter.
“Blue Lady, Come Back”: The story here with the most pulp content (“The Fourth Seal” comes close) probably because it features Curtiss Stryker, one time pulp writer who has been invited to a haunted house and brings along his friend Dr. Russ Mandarin, psychiatrist. Stryker, author of several books on the occult, has come across his share of deluded people and wants Mandarin to assess the owner’s state of mind. Stryker comes away excited by this house, certain it will figure in his next book. Not long afterward, his car crashes through a guard rail and lands in a lake, and his body is missing. Mandarin believes Stryker was murdered and goes about trying to prove it. And then one night he sees the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, floating in a blue mist.
The mystery of the blue lady – was she murdered? – two break-ins, another murder, Mandarin shot at, Stryker’s papers rummaged through, all the hugger mugger of pulp fiction, blended and served in a taut, fast adventure story.
Two less than laudatory comments: First, Wagner was a heavy drinker which probably contributed to his tailing off as a writer and to his premature death. Heavy drinking figures prominently (though maybe not as prominently as in Laird Barron’s stories) in about half of these stories, not always in a good light but the effects are still less well-observed than a fan of his would have wished.
Second, women don’t fare well in these stories. Some don’t have much impact (like the girlfriend in “Where the Summer Ends”) and those who have an impact are not likable. “Cassilda” is something of an exception (though an escapee from an asylum) and Lisette from “Beyond Any Measure.”
Regardless of those reservations, regardless that the last two stories in Where the Summer Ends add nothing to the original collection – neither do they detract – and regardless of what one thinks of Wagner’s later horror stories, In a Lonely Place was a cornerstone collection in the genre, a great demonstration of how the old pulp materials could again be updated and presented effectively. Having those stories back in print together was past due.
Of similar, weird interest:
H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (story coll.)
Poppy Z. Brite: Wormwood (story coll.)
Sarah Monette: The Bone Key (story coll.)
Laird Barron: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (story coll.)
Monday: We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory
Weird Reined In
We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory (Tachyon, 2014)
Dr. Jan Sayers has become well-known for helping victims of crimes. But not just any crimes: Each of these victims (with one exception) contends the crime committed was of supernatural origin.
Stan was imprisoned by the Weavers, a backwoods family of cannibals. He lost his legs and hands. Rather than withdrawing from life he has become aggressive, obnoxiously so, but in the course of the sessions he shares one memory of his capture and torture that seems oddly tender: Along with other captives he was bound and hung from a barn roof, and he is certain he would have died without the Pest, the youngest of the Weavers who climbed the ropes with surprising agility and fed them and petted them and consoled them as best he could.
As a teen, Barbara was kidnapped and anesthetized by the Scrimshander and aware of him cutting her open. Just before her rescue, when she last saw him, he said, “I left you a message.”
Harrison Harrison, basis for the children’s’ story hero Jamison Squared, at seventeen survived the Dunnsmouth disaster, his efforts minimizing casualties. Now in his thirties and after other adventures, he has trouble acknowledging this, instead acutely aware of how many died while he fumbled until he got lucky.
Martin wears glasses that are the latest technological interface with his favorite game, Deadtown. The interface presents passersby as zombies to avoid or kill. Except other things begin to appear, things not programmed into the game, things whispering in the ears of the passersby. On hearing Martin’s story, Harrison calls them Dwellers. They see Martin, too.
Lastly, Greta, nineteen, was raised by a cult of women who groomed her to become the next bride of their protector; she says little at the sessions but keeps attending. Confronted with her silence, she reveals the scars on her arms, placed there by the cult, a ritual scarification, but what Martin sees in her is fire.
As disturbing as their physical scars are, the emotional scars are deeper and less well-healed. And when one of them is attacked, they find a common enemy.
Gregory alludes to H. P. Lovecraft – Dunnsmouth is a melding of the town names of Innsmouth (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”) and Dunwich (“The Dunwich Horror”); the forces the members of this group have faced are consistent with the Lovecraftian imagination and a few shades less intense than but not too far away from the creations of Laird Barron. In a review of this book, Gary K. Wolfe observed that Gregory’s writing indicates he is less interested in the horror than in the consequences and aftermath of horror. I agree and what pulled me in had less to do with the weirdness or the Lovecraftian than with the characters and what they were still enduring in several cases long after the events that brought them to Dr. Sayers’ attention. Their interaction and the challenges they face together propelled me though this story. At 182 pages and large type, it’s a fast read and an adept homage to Lovecraft but different from either Lovecraft or Barron in effect. I would not be surprised if this became the lead title in a series of books and stories, and indeed the title of a new novel by Gregory to be published by Tor in March 2015, Harrison Squared, suggests a connection with this book.
Short version: We are All Completely Fine is suspenseful, exciting and so engaging I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Other Lovecraftian reading in longer forms:
H. P. Lovecraft: "At the Mountains of Madness" (H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction)
Stephen King: The Mist
Ramsey Campbell: The Grin of the Dark
Laird Barron: The Croning
Caitlin Kiernan: The Red Tree, The Drowning Girl
John Jacob Horner: Southern Gods
John Langan: House of Windows
Of broader interest:
Michael Shea: “The Autopsy” (in Polyphemus; The Dark Descent ed. David Hartwell; The Weird ed. Jeff & Ann Vandemeer)
Adam Nevill: The Ritual
Still broader, groups in danger:
Agatha Christie: And then There Were None
John W. Campbell, Jr.: “Who Goes There?” (Adventures in Time and Space, 1946, eds. Healy & McComas; The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, vol. IIa ed. Ben Bova; The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, 2012, eds. Kane & O'Regan)
Tim Lebbon: “White” (Fears Unnamed, 2004; The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror, 2010, ed. Stephen Jones)
Alexandra Sokoloff: The Harrowing
Tuesday: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron
We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory (Tachyon, 2014)
There were six of us in the beginning. Three men and two women, and Dr. Sayer, Jan, though some of us never learned to call her by her first name. She was the psychologist who found us, then persuaded us that a group experience could prove useful in ways that one-on-one counseling could not. After all, one of the issues we had in common was that we each thought we were unique. Not just survivors, but sole survivors. We wore our scars like badges.
— first paragraph, chapter 1
Dr. Jan Sayers has become well-known for helping victims of crimes. But not just any crimes: Each of these victims (with one exception) contends the crime committed was of supernatural origin.
Stan was imprisoned by the Weavers, a backwoods family of cannibals. He lost his legs and hands. Rather than withdrawing from life he has become aggressive, obnoxiously so, but in the course of the sessions he shares one memory of his capture and torture that seems oddly tender: Along with other captives he was bound and hung from a barn roof, and he is certain he would have died without the Pest, the youngest of the Weavers who climbed the ropes with surprising agility and fed them and petted them and consoled them as best he could.
As a teen, Barbara was kidnapped and anesthetized by the Scrimshander and aware of him cutting her open. Just before her rescue, when she last saw him, he said, “I left you a message.”
Harrison Harrison, basis for the children’s’ story hero Jamison Squared, at seventeen survived the Dunnsmouth disaster, his efforts minimizing casualties. Now in his thirties and after other adventures, he has trouble acknowledging this, instead acutely aware of how many died while he fumbled until he got lucky.
Martin wears glasses that are the latest technological interface with his favorite game, Deadtown. The interface presents passersby as zombies to avoid or kill. Except other things begin to appear, things not programmed into the game, things whispering in the ears of the passersby. On hearing Martin’s story, Harrison calls them Dwellers. They see Martin, too.
Lastly, Greta, nineteen, was raised by a cult of women who groomed her to become the next bride of their protector; she says little at the sessions but keeps attending. Confronted with her silence, she reveals the scars on her arms, placed there by the cult, a ritual scarification, but what Martin sees in her is fire.
As disturbing as their physical scars are, the emotional scars are deeper and less well-healed. And when one of them is attacked, they find a common enemy.
Gregory alludes to H. P. Lovecraft – Dunnsmouth is a melding of the town names of Innsmouth (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”) and Dunwich (“The Dunwich Horror”); the forces the members of this group have faced are consistent with the Lovecraftian imagination and a few shades less intense than but not too far away from the creations of Laird Barron. In a review of this book, Gary K. Wolfe observed that Gregory’s writing indicates he is less interested in the horror than in the consequences and aftermath of horror. I agree and what pulled me in had less to do with the weirdness or the Lovecraftian than with the characters and what they were still enduring in several cases long after the events that brought them to Dr. Sayers’ attention. Their interaction and the challenges they face together propelled me though this story. At 182 pages and large type, it’s a fast read and an adept homage to Lovecraft but different from either Lovecraft or Barron in effect. I would not be surprised if this became the lead title in a series of books and stories, and indeed the title of a new novel by Gregory to be published by Tor in March 2015, Harrison Squared, suggests a connection with this book.
Short version: We are All Completely Fine is suspenseful, exciting and so engaging I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Other Lovecraftian reading in longer forms:
H. P. Lovecraft: "At the Mountains of Madness" (H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction)
Stephen King: The Mist
Ramsey Campbell: The Grin of the Dark
Laird Barron: The Croning
Caitlin Kiernan: The Red Tree, The Drowning Girl
John Jacob Horner: Southern Gods
John Langan: House of Windows
Of broader interest:
Michael Shea: “The Autopsy” (in Polyphemus; The Dark Descent ed. David Hartwell; The Weird ed. Jeff & Ann Vandemeer)
Adam Nevill: The Ritual
Still broader, groups in danger:
Agatha Christie: And then There Were None
John W. Campbell, Jr.: “Who Goes There?” (Adventures in Time and Space, 1946, eds. Healy & McComas; The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, vol. IIa ed. Ben Bova; The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, 2012, eds. Kane & O'Regan)
Tim Lebbon: “White” (Fears Unnamed, 2004; The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror, 2010, ed. Stephen Jones)
Alexandra Sokoloff: The Harrowing
Tuesday: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron
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algernoninc
Now I'm an axolotl
- Joined
- May 3, 2004
- Messages
- 2,169
I finished Fata Morgana by Kotzwinkle, and I believe i know now what you meant with your earlier comment, Randy : it starts very good, but the ending is a bit of a letdown. Good writing though!
I have also wrote a review of a book I read last month, and realized it's another good Halloween choice, for those who like modern fairytales of haunted mansions, with some romnce and humour thrown in. It's by Patricia McKillip : The Bell at Sealey Head.
To finish the month, I went to a sure thing : The October Country by Ray Bradbury - a collection of short stories that deal mostly with High Anxiety - people confronting their greatest fears, and not always coming up on top.
I have also wrote a review of a book I read last month, and realized it's another good Halloween choice, for those who like modern fairytales of haunted mansions, with some romnce and humour thrown in. It's by Patricia McKillip : The Bell at Sealey Head.
To finish the month, I went to a sure thing : The October Country by Ray Bradbury - a collection of short stories that deal mostly with High Anxiety - people confronting their greatest fears, and not always coming up on top.
Weird, with a Side of Weird
THE IMAGO SEQUENCE AND OTHER STORIES by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books,2007)
Laird Barron’s short stories disturb me, even more than his novel, The Croning. There are three aspects to these stories that make me susceptible to his particular brand of weird horror:
1) Characters
Start with “Old Virgina,” which may become a weird horror classic if it hasn’t already. It’s the early 1960s and Garland, veteran of two world wars and an agent of the Company has been assigned with his crew to hide and protect an important asset. When their truck is disabled he begins to wonder if he’s been set up, if they’ve all been set up. He had bungled a mission not long before and maybe his bosses don’t need him anymore. He learns of a clairvoyant, Virginia, and then she appears and the asset’s behavior begins to make a kind of sense, suddenly his talking and chuckling behind closed doors understandable. There are things you’d rather not understand.
Which leads to “Shiva, Open Your Eye,” a first person monolog in which the owner of a farm kills a snooping FBI agent. The farmer has a secret in his barn, something he’s been constructing, and the agent becomes … well, let’s say the agent contributes to art.
“Procession of the Black Sloth” returns us to the world of espionage, but this time corporate espionage, a multi-national certain its Hong Kong department is leaking secrets, one of its best trouble-shooters sent to infiltrate the staff until he finds the culprit or culprits. There’s a lot of drinking in Hong Kong. One has to keep up appearances. But appearances keep changing; a normal room for one moment appears cluttered and disarranged the next moment and a moment later back to clean and tidy. And there are the old people who seem to cluster in the condo and perform naked rituals at night. And other people who shouldn’t be there but wander the halls. And the woman who is, frankly, too socially elevated for the agent, but still makes herself available. And the managers who are certain there have been no secrets leaked, but happy with the agent’s discoveries, even though he doesn’t quite recall what he found or how.
In “Bulldozer” a Pinkerton operative tracks an escaped convict who doesn’t seem all that concerned about being found. The Op corners the escapee in a cave, enters and finds himself lost and disoriented outside the cave hours later. And now he’s not sure who is being hunted.
In “Proboscis” a group of drug-addled mercenaries drive back home through Washington state after a successful operation in which they had found, captured and turned over to Canadian authorities a rapist and kidnapper named Piers. One of them takes a notion to visit the Mima Mounds. Nothing will do but to see the Mounds. The narrator, not quite as high and drunk, doesn’t understand and his instincts warn him something is wrong. What do the Mounds have to do with anything? But sometimes you can’t run from what you know will be bad.
Wallace is aging and unwell, wanting to keep up with his younger wife, Helen, a photographer, but having to work hard to do so. When the Bentley dies on the road, she sees a picturesque barn and goes to photograph it. But the barn isn’t what it seems and by the time “Hallucigenia” is ended, Wallace is more than unwell, and aware of vistas beyond anything he’s prepared to accept.
“Parallax”: Jack Carson lost his wife. She didn’t die; at least no one knows if she died since no one has found her. Carson suspects he knows what happened to her but he’s wrong and so is the cop who investigated the murder.
“The Royal Zoo is Closed” and “Shiva, Open Your Eye” are the most unusual stories in the collection, the latter narrated from the point of view of someone already under the control of larger forces, the former a near stream-of-consciousness narrative of someone noticing more and more the inconsistency of and gaps in reality. Read this in conjunction with Mark Samuels’ “The Black Mould.”
Lastly, in the closing (title) story, photographer Maurice Ammon was at best a journeyman, but for three photographs that came to be known as “The Imago Sequence” he produced something disturbing, the manifestation of Nietzsche’s warning that when you look into the abyss it also looks into you. Marvin Cortez is hired by his friend Jacob to find what happened to Jacob’s Uncle Teddy, owner of one of the photographs. But looking at the photograph affects Cortez, gives him dreams and disturbs his sense of reality.
A quick summary does little justice to Barron’s tales. The plots vary in intricacy but are invariably not the most rewarding feature, instead it is in the telling where the fascination lies; these stories are marvels of gradual development of unease, of essentially announcing something bad will happen and still pulling you forward, toward the bad, watching the inevitable manifest. The hard man trying to maintain his courage; the sick man pushing on knowing the odds are against him; the smart man realizing that his intelligence may not be enough against a force capable of moving at will through time and space. These characters are introduced to something larger than them and once they know it, they are caught and incapable of breaking its hold, already moving along a line of inevitable events toward what each understands is his doom, whether he dies or not.
I find I can’t read more than a couple of Barron’s stories at a sitting in part because I find them so intensely, viscerally disturbing and in part because I think there’s more to them than a first reading ekes out. I need time to consider their implications before going to another. In my personal reading pantheon, that puts him in pretty good company, if with some very different writers, like Walter de la Mare, Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, none of whom write anything quite like him (well, maybe Ligotti, a little, and Campbell a little when he wants to) but all of whom write stories that feel substantial as they disturb.
On Lovecraft and Lovecraftian Tales
Wednesday: The Man Who Collected Machen by Mark Samuels
THE IMAGO SEQUENCE AND OTHER STORIES by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books,2007)
On the third morning I noticed that somebody had disabled the truck. All four tires were flattened and the engine was smashed. Nice work.
The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.
– Then He bites off my shooting hand.
Christ on a pony, here’s a new dimension of pain.
– from, “Old Virginia”
The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.
— from, “Shiva, Open Your Eye”
– Then He bites off my shooting hand.
Christ on a pony, here’s a new dimension of pain.
—from “Bulldozer”
Laird Barron’s short stories disturb me, even more than his novel, The Croning. There are three aspects to these stories that make me susceptible to his particular brand of weird horror:
1) Characters
Barron’s characters are men toughened by experience in places where life is not highly valued. At least, not the life of others. They should not be easily shaken but his modus operandi is to take these intelligent, tough, competent, if flawed, men and slowly feed them through an emotional and psychological meat grinder, undermining their confidence in what they know of the world. And in some stories the meat grinder isn’t just emotional and psychological. Drink helps dull the pain except whatever they’ve come up against encourages drinking, uses it to soften them, not just physically, and worm its way deeper into their consciousness.
2) Style Barron has been described as a cross between H. P. Lovecraft and Dashiell Hammett, which isn’t a bad comparison. He mostly writes in first person or third person with a tight focus on a single perspective, his prose pared down, mimicking clipped, direct, everyday male speech if men spoke the way they think they do or really, really wish they did.
3) PhysicalityHe lays out how things work in the protagonist’s world in a manner that would be familiar to writers from Robert Heinlein and Fred Brown to Lucius Shepard. For these men mechanisms behave according to laws of physics, time progresses one second followed by another followed by another, heat produces sweat, drinking produces momentary distance from troubles and a punch bruises or breaks and a bite leaves a mark. Then they meet something that alters all that, and objects show a new elasticity, stretches of time disappear or events occur not quite in order, a thing shot or hit is unfazed and vengeful, walls display moving stars in unfamiliar constellations, and a mouth grows wider and wider until it is a gaping abyss, and when the mouth closes a limb is gone or worse the mouth has latched on and does not let go.
Start with “Old Virgina,” which may become a weird horror classic if it hasn’t already. It’s the early 1960s and Garland, veteran of two world wars and an agent of the Company has been assigned with his crew to hide and protect an important asset. When their truck is disabled he begins to wonder if he’s been set up, if they’ve all been set up. He had bungled a mission not long before and maybe his bosses don’t need him anymore. He learns of a clairvoyant, Virginia, and then she appears and the asset’s behavior begins to make a kind of sense, suddenly his talking and chuckling behind closed doors understandable. There are things you’d rather not understand.
Which leads to “Shiva, Open Your Eye,” a first person monolog in which the owner of a farm kills a snooping FBI agent. The farmer has a secret in his barn, something he’s been constructing, and the agent becomes … well, let’s say the agent contributes to art.
“Procession of the Black Sloth” returns us to the world of espionage, but this time corporate espionage, a multi-national certain its Hong Kong department is leaking secrets, one of its best trouble-shooters sent to infiltrate the staff until he finds the culprit or culprits. There’s a lot of drinking in Hong Kong. One has to keep up appearances. But appearances keep changing; a normal room for one moment appears cluttered and disarranged the next moment and a moment later back to clean and tidy. And there are the old people who seem to cluster in the condo and perform naked rituals at night. And other people who shouldn’t be there but wander the halls. And the woman who is, frankly, too socially elevated for the agent, but still makes herself available. And the managers who are certain there have been no secrets leaked, but happy with the agent’s discoveries, even though he doesn’t quite recall what he found or how.
In “Bulldozer” a Pinkerton operative tracks an escaped convict who doesn’t seem all that concerned about being found. The Op corners the escapee in a cave, enters and finds himself lost and disoriented outside the cave hours later. And now he’s not sure who is being hunted.
In “Proboscis” a group of drug-addled mercenaries drive back home through Washington state after a successful operation in which they had found, captured and turned over to Canadian authorities a rapist and kidnapper named Piers. One of them takes a notion to visit the Mima Mounds. Nothing will do but to see the Mounds. The narrator, not quite as high and drunk, doesn’t understand and his instincts warn him something is wrong. What do the Mounds have to do with anything? But sometimes you can’t run from what you know will be bad.
Wallace is aging and unwell, wanting to keep up with his younger wife, Helen, a photographer, but having to work hard to do so. When the Bentley dies on the road, she sees a picturesque barn and goes to photograph it. But the barn isn’t what it seems and by the time “Hallucigenia” is ended, Wallace is more than unwell, and aware of vistas beyond anything he’s prepared to accept.
“Parallax”: Jack Carson lost his wife. She didn’t die; at least no one knows if she died since no one has found her. Carson suspects he knows what happened to her but he’s wrong and so is the cop who investigated the murder.
“The Royal Zoo is Closed” and “Shiva, Open Your Eye” are the most unusual stories in the collection, the latter narrated from the point of view of someone already under the control of larger forces, the former a near stream-of-consciousness narrative of someone noticing more and more the inconsistency of and gaps in reality. Read this in conjunction with Mark Samuels’ “The Black Mould.”
Lastly, in the closing (title) story, photographer Maurice Ammon was at best a journeyman, but for three photographs that came to be known as “The Imago Sequence” he produced something disturbing, the manifestation of Nietzsche’s warning that when you look into the abyss it also looks into you. Marvin Cortez is hired by his friend Jacob to find what happened to Jacob’s Uncle Teddy, owner of one of the photographs. But looking at the photograph affects Cortez, gives him dreams and disturbs his sense of reality.
A quick summary does little justice to Barron’s tales. The plots vary in intricacy but are invariably not the most rewarding feature, instead it is in the telling where the fascination lies; these stories are marvels of gradual development of unease, of essentially announcing something bad will happen and still pulling you forward, toward the bad, watching the inevitable manifest. The hard man trying to maintain his courage; the sick man pushing on knowing the odds are against him; the smart man realizing that his intelligence may not be enough against a force capable of moving at will through time and space. These characters are introduced to something larger than them and once they know it, they are caught and incapable of breaking its hold, already moving along a line of inevitable events toward what each understands is his doom, whether he dies or not.
I find I can’t read more than a couple of Barron’s stories at a sitting in part because I find them so intensely, viscerally disturbing and in part because I think there’s more to them than a first reading ekes out. I need time to consider their implications before going to another. In my personal reading pantheon, that puts him in pretty good company, if with some very different writers, like Walter de la Mare, Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, none of whom write anything quite like him (well, maybe Ligotti, a little, and Campbell a little when he wants to) but all of whom write stories that feel substantial as they disturb.
On Lovecraft and Lovecraftian Tales
Wednesday: The Man Who Collected Machen by Mark Samuels
Hi, Algernoninc.
I often refer to this as a meringue of a novel, light, airy, nearly insubstantial, to some degree an exercise in style over content, but a wonderful, even enthralling style if you're susceptible to it. If the ending doesn't live up to the build up, it has one quality to recommend it: Pragmatism. Possible spoiler, here, and for a Cormac McCarthy novel, as well:
Cool. The McKillip is on my shelves and I've been considering some lighter reading than what I've been dipping into. And the Bradbury is a favorite. When I started doing October threads a few years ago I began with Bradbury. Because Something Wicked This Way Comes and The October Country were among my early favorites of his work, I think of him as an autumn writer, and one whose works like "Homecoming" evoke a real nostalgia for Halloween and the Fall season. (My sense of him is out of sync with readers who came to him first through Dandelion Wine.) Great choice for rereading.
Randy M.
I often refer to this as a meringue of a novel, light, airy, nearly insubstantial, to some degree an exercise in style over content, but a wonderful, even enthralling style if you're susceptible to it. If the ending doesn't live up to the build up, it has one quality to recommend it: Pragmatism. Possible spoiler, here, and for a Cormac McCarthy novel, as well:
It reminds me in a way of the ending of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. How do you deal with a greater power?
Cool. The McKillip is on my shelves and I've been considering some lighter reading than what I've been dipping into. And the Bradbury is a favorite. When I started doing October threads a few years ago I began with Bradbury. Because Something Wicked This Way Comes and The October Country were among my early favorites of his work, I think of him as an autumn writer, and one whose works like "Homecoming" evoke a real nostalgia for Halloween and the Fall season. (My sense of him is out of sync with readers who came to him first through Dandelion Wine.) Great choice for rereading.
Randy M.
Great write-up on Barron, Randy. While The Croning did nothing for me, the three short story collections are all excellent. I completely agree regarding the physicality of Barrons work. Very intense. And the atmosphere is very oppressive and very humid, like an Alan Parker movie. While I love Image Sequence, I do find his other two collections better, but to each his own.
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