Hell Train by Christopher Fowler (2012; Solaris)
”When the Devil was summoned to Earth, he built a train to take the Damned to Hell.”
– blurb on the box of the game, Hell Train
Writer Shane Carter, fired by American International Pictures and Roger Corman, tries his luck with Hammer Studios. But even Michael Carrera, head of Hammer, acknowledges that success has brought imitators and the old magic is fading, critics and audiences no longer frightened by the same old Gothics. Still, Carter has arrived at an opportune time and Carrera decides to take a chance: No new projects scheduled means the studio could stand unused until after the first of the year, can Carter provide a script within five days?
The story begins: A young Polish girl, alone and listless, retrieves a board game from the attic.
Hell Train seems a bit naughty and so, naturally, she begins to play it. The rush of wind and the surge of an oncoming train seem so real.
Scene ends, new scene.
The battlefields of World War I have shifted toward Chelmsk. A married British couple and two run-away lovers, one a British adventurer the other a young Chelmsk woman, find themselves with no chance to survive except by a midnight boarding. Once on the train, no one has ever found a way to escape, but Nicholas and Isabella each have history that makes them different from previous passengers and once they understand the nature of the train the game is on.
Hell Train is simultaneously a story about a deal-with-the-devil, a travel adventure, a young woman coming of age, and of striving for redemption and to find home and love. It is also homage to the movies from Hammer Studios. Between the middle 1950s and the early 1970s, Hammer was the major British movie studio creating horror movies, reviving the monsters America’s Universal Studios had abandoned, most profitably Dracula and Frankenstein with some excursions into werewolfery and mummies, the occasional non-series horror movie and filmed versions of Nigel Kneale’s TV serials featuring Professor Bernard Quatermass.
Fowler captures the style and feel of Hammer in its prime. For movies shot on small budgets by a studio devoted to cutting costs, there is a surprising sumptuousness in texture and color to the settings and costumes in Hammer productions which Fowler emulates in his descriptions of the interior of the train and the clothing of its passengers. He also creates characters suitable for Hammer’s biggest stars, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, both of whom attend a discussion of the script with Shane and Carrera.
The bulk of the novel dramatizes Carter’s script and throughout Fowler comments on the Hammer product, either indirectly through scenes that emulate scenes from Hammer productions (or slightly mock them as with one unnecessary rending of the heroine’s attire) or more directly during the interludes in which Carter interacts with the staff of Hammer. Fowler is not uncritical even while displaying his fondness for Hammer’s movies, but his allusions to Hammer movies as fables seems about right; the movies take us to a somewhat indefinite 19th or early 20th century in an English or vaguely European locale while presenting stories of good battling evil. Here Fowler grounds his novel in references to the war, the events outside the train having an impact on behavior and events in the train and serving to add weight to the characters’ stories.
Hell Train is fast reading, a creative, respectful but clear-eyed rearranging of the furniture of Hammer Studios movies fused with the myth of Pandora’s Box. Fowler supplies action, meaty roles for the stars, parts for a variety of English types with suitable bits of business for all, and satisfying conclusions both for the story in the script and the story around the script. Fun reading for the days around Halloween.
Also recommended from Christopher Fowler:
Nyctophobia
A Handful of Fine Hammer Movies:
+ Horror of Dracula, 1958; dir. Terence Fisher; starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough
+ The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1959; dir. Terence Fisher; starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Andre Morell
+ Curse of the Werewolf, 1961; dir. Terence Fisher; starring Clifford Evans, Oliver Reed, Yvonne Romain [Based loosely on Guy Endore’s
The Werewolf of Paris]
+ The Phantom of the Opera, 1962; dir. Terence Fisher; starring Herbert Lom, Heather Sears, Edward de Souza
+ A Plague of Zombies, 1966; dir. Not Terence Fisher – John Gilling; starring Andre Morell, Diane Clare, Brook Williams
+ Five Million Years to Earth, 1967; dir. Roy Ward Baker; starring James Donald, Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley, Julian Glover [based on television play by Nigel Kneale. One of my favorite Hammer films, it deals with a kind of cosmic horror better than most movies based on, say, Lovecraft’s work.]
+ The Devil Rides Out, 1968; dir. Terence Fisher; starring Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Nike Arrighi [based on a novel by Dennis Wheatley, script by Richard Matheson. Saw this for the first time in a long time last year. Still fun if you can get past the very ‘70s feel of it.]
Scripts:
Quatermass,
Quatermass 2 &
Quatermass and the Pit by Nigel Kneale
Literary film horror:
Ancient Images &
Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell
Other Trains:
“The Little Black Train,” from
Who Fears the Devil? by Manly Wade Wellman
“That Hell-Bound Train,” from
The Early Fears by Robert Bloch (also in
Sympathy for the Devil, ed. Tim Pratt)
