Cold Hand in Mine

by Robert Aickman

as far as my love for genre fiction goes, college did a number on me and for many years i scorned my old high school loves of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. silly me; i'm glad i came back to my senses. during college, only a couple authors escaped my new-found scorn - one of them being the amazing Robert Aickman. pre-college, i enjoyed his sinister tales of uncertain, indescribable menace. in college, i found to my surprise that Aickman was a literary horror writer, and both my snobby new self and my buried-deep genre-lover rejoiced. i could appreciate him with a complete absence of guilt; if my postmodern buddies happened to notice his books on my shelf, i could defend him with ease. his stories were multi-leveled: they existed as menacing tales of horror - but they were also ambiguous, psychologically adept metaphors and analogies for life in all of its strange, unsettling complexity. nowadays, snob years long behind me, i enjoy him for both his literariness and his ability to weave a scary tale filled with dread.

but it is that literariness that really sets him apart. if you are a reader who wants your horrors to be straight-up and visceral, look elsewhere. Aickman crafted stories that are elegantly written, slow-moving, rich in nuance and detail, short on blood and shocks. he crafts - simultaneously - old-fashioned, shivery ghost stories and subtle, cerebral tales that muse on our fears and uncertainties. he is the obvious antecedent of Thomas Ligotti.

The Swords could be about a sadly inhuman and monstrous marionette who plies her abilities in tawdry sideshows and in the sex trade. it could also be about the fear of sex, the literal commodification of flesh, the dehumanization of women.

The Real Road to Church could be about a lonely woman who purchases a home that lives on the path of the dead. it could also be about a life lived without living - and a second chance, a chance to reinvent that life, and live.

Niemandswasser could be about a haunted lake. it could also be about the decadence and emptiness of aristocratic life, a shallowness so complete that it almost assumes its own kind of sad, meaningful depth.

The Hospice could be about a comforting retreat - comforting as the womb, comforting as the grave - in which our predictability-loving hero finds himself terrifyingly ensconced. it could also be about the logical end result of such predictability, a hell that pretends to be heaven.

The Same Dog could be about a vicious animal, perhaps even a kind of were-beast, one that takes captive our protoganist's first love. it could also be a literalization of how paths part, about how life moves us apart, how time changes everything, always.

Meeting Mr. Millar could be about a residence haunted by a living ghost and by a company of beings whose terrible motives remain tantalizingly beyond reach. it could also be about, well, growing up - learning that life is full of terrible things that we will never truly understand.

The Clock Watcher could be about a strange bride, a loving cipher whose existence seems to rely on her enslavement to the many ticking little cuckoo clocks that are brought into her home. or it could be a mordantly comic parody of the supposedly uber-efficient German character. it could also be about the deep gaps that exist between us all, in marriage, in our own understanding of the people around us.

so if you are new to Aickman, don't come to him expecting easy answers. expect to have to think about the purpose and meaning of why you are being supplied certain details, why stories are being framed in a certain way. Aickman does follow the traditional format of horror short fiction. a few pages are devoted to developing the story's protagonist, perhaps more pages than is typical. then the disturbing ambiguity begins, the horror unfolds... and then the tale ends. Aickman endings usually have little resolution and are almost always without an explicit explanation of what the reader has just experienced. that lack of explication is a hallmark of Aickman's style. but just as important are all of the details, important or seemingly incidental, the offbeat bits of dialogue, the disconcerting moments when the reader learns something that seems to come out of nowhere but yet somehow fits into the theme of the story being told.

i'll use "The Swords" as an example. the narrator, an impressionable traveling salesman, starts his narrative with an off-putting but perhaps often true generalization on the nature of sex, the first time, and all subsequent times. but then there is much odd detailing of the mysterious flophouses that the narrator must stay at, places he's led to by an ambiguous uncle, places teeming with squalid sexuality. these flophouses actually have nothing to do with the horror itself. later, there is a creepy conversation with a shop owner, who practically drools at the prospect of the young man before him having sex - he wants details, he wants it described to him. again, this conversation has nothing to do with the thrust of the narrative. and yet both the flophouses and the conversation have everything to do with what i think the story is about; they are there to further illustrate the story's implicit meaning. although they have little narrative purpose, they are still all of a piece. mysterious events are continuously detailed that have little internal logic but which make perfect thematic sense.

a last word on the story Pages from a Young Girl's Journal. this is in many ways an atypical Aickman tale - a journal account of a young lady's travels abroad, encountering a mysterious stranger, embracing his vampiric nature, becoming something new and terrible. the story's horrors are clearly delineated; the reader is made to understand exactly what is happening. it definitely shows that if Aickman had been of a mind to write straightforward horror, he could accomplish that in spades. it also illustrates a key strength: Aickman's skill at establishing a character. throughout all of his stories, i was continually impressed by how each protagonist was uniquely differentiated and by the depth of their characterization. they lived and breathed. but back to "Pages". although this was my favorite story of Cold Hand in Mine, i'm glad that this was not the direction that Aickman chose to go in most of his tales. i like the uncertain resolution, the creeping ambiguity. it is a pleasure not having things explained, to have to figure things out on my own. i love being able to approach his stories on whichever level i choose.

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musical accompaniment

Sigur Ros: ()
Andrea Parker: Kiss My Arp

The Books of Blood, Vols. 1-3

by Clive Barker

based upon the evidence of Books of Blood 1-3, Clive Barker sprung into the literary horror world fully-formed, a writer all grown up, already past the awkward growing pains of an adolescent period that other writers of his stature and widespread appeal suffered through before reaching their full powers. his ability to construct and sustain an intriguing narrative, his resonant themes, his stylistic flourishes, his use of irony and dread and gore and comedy, his strength at detailing truly real and deeply developed characters' lives, his expertise at creating an entire world within the space of a story... these are all the traits of an author writing at his peak, and so early in his career.

the stories within these collections are truly sensational: their power comes from his consistent strength at conveying sensual, physical sensation. this is not to mean that he writes sexy horror stories; rather, he is a writer who knows how to write "body-based horror". in many ways, these stories parallel the themes and goals of the films of David Cronenberg - the body as something alien, the body as a sacred space, the body as a target or vehicle or ideal, the body turning against itself.

Peter Straub - an intellectual writer - locates his horrors within the mind: a place of murky motivation and potential evil, a site of invasion and transformation; his horrors are often as ambiguous and as ambivalent as mindspace itself. Stephen King - an emotional writer - places his horrors in scenarios that are wellsprings of sentiment and feeling, often squarely within the family unit or painful adolescence or the various dreams and ambitions of the heart itself; his horrors are often explicitly tangible things that exist to tear apart humanity's most beloved institutions. unlike those two, Barker's horrors are centered in the body as a battleground, a place where the mind and the heart are often at war. his horrors blur the boundaries of right and wrong; the various transfigurations that occur throughout his stories are often so dreadful because they are both unnervingly ambiguous and disturbingly familiar, intimate on a physical level - and in the end, almost infinitely unknowable. his bodies are places of both terror and wonder.

Barker illustrates how the body can be a site of fearsome splendor and violence in the collection's first story: The Book of Blood, in which a fraud's appealing body exists first as a landscape encouraging erotic contemplation and then as a horrific diary of the dead. in the masterful Dread, a psychopathic guru lives to sadistically push his trainees past their base physical fears, and eventually meets his match in a student who has learned his lessons all too well. the horror of Jacqueline Ess comes from the terrifying protagonist's ability to wield utter control of the body itself. New Murders in the Rue Morgue revisits the classic story with a new (and rather sympathetic) focus on the idea of what truly, physically, makes a man? and in Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud, the story serves as both an ironic commentary on pornography's rigorous mono-focus on body parts and as a clever rejoinder to the idea that a meat-based body is even necessary to create horror - let alone to enact bloody vengeance.

the author's themes remain intact and even more visceral in those stories that are straight-up, traditionally structured servings of familiar, monster-based horror. The Midnight Meat Train features ancient, physically mortified beings who must be paid their due in flesh and has a classic "ambiguous" protagonist who finds his goals in life may soon be adjusted in favor of a more transformative purpose. Pig Blood Blues is wonderfully bizarre (its malevolent foil... a demonic sow!) and explicitly depicts potential physical change and transformation as an undeniable terminus for its victims, villains, and hero alike. and the now-classic Rawhead Rex has a monster whose mind dreams of domination and whose physical body yearns for both freedom and the flesh of children; his achilles' heel, his personal horror... the fertile woman, the menstrual cycle.

Barker can also do comedy with an expert touch. The Yattering and the Jack is laugh-out-loud funny, a wry tale of a lower-level demon vs. The Most Boring Man in the World, a man who apparently has no terrors or temptations based in the flesh or other physical things. the quaintly nostalgic and drily amusing Sex, Death and Starshine sees the decay of the flesh and a rotting life existing beyond the grave as, well, not so bad, really.

there are a few stories that are less successful, although they are by no means abortions. Hell's Event - Deadliest Marathon Ever! the entire world is at stake! - centers its horror within a runner's body. Son of Celluloid finds a lonely cancerous growth making its own body and invading a fading movie palace. Scape-Goats' horrors rise from the undisposed corpses of the long-dead and their reaction to a quartet of obnoxious tourists who obliviously pay their bodies no respect.

there are three stories that are now amongst the finest modern horror stories that i've ever had the pleasure of reading.

The Skins of the Fathers is an often amusing send-up of gun-toting hick americana. more importantly, in its unsettling tale of the male gender's First Fathers and their practice of holy/unholy procreation, it decribes not-so-alien physiognomies in detail - but makes the key decision to replace disgust with awe, to replace the Terrible Other with Ancient Adam (and his many brothers).

Human Remains is a mordant and moody story of the escalating relationship between a street hustler/ wannabe gigolo and a being that seeks to not just mimic (and protect) that hustler's body, but also endeavors to recreate that poor fool's history into a life that contains emotional depth - rather than a life of empty ambition, callowness, and apathy.

my favorite story of all 3 books is In the Hills, the Cities. this is a truly awesome tale, in all sense of the word "awesome"... a mind-boggling, bizarre, many-leveled account of two very different travelers and lovers, of two very similar rural villages, of an archaic tradition that replaces a many-bodied battle with two very unique bodies, of bodies coming together to create something greater, something terrible - something that the two travelers choose to either turn away from in horror or to embrace as a new form of physical being. the story is amazing.

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musical accompaniment

Coil: Gold Is the Metal, Hellraiser Themes
DJ Spooky: Songs of a Dead Dreamer

The King in Yellow and Other Stories

by Robert W. Chambers

5 Stars for the wonderful opening story "The Repairer of Reputations".

although i wonder if 'wonderful' is the correct word. after all, this is a story that opens with a bizarre, sometimes dire alterna-history leading up to a 1920s America that features public "Lethal Chambers" where the dispirited meet their final destination as on-lookers gather to contemplate this terminal disportment. and after this bit of surprising strangeness, the reader is plunged right into the mind of a classic Unreliable Narrator (the poor lad struck his head after a fall from a horse and was never quite the same again), complete with insanely grandiose ambitions and malicious thoughts of revenge and devious yet doltish plans for his enemies - who are everywhere, simply everywhere! with the added bonuses of the creepy title character, various books of ill repute, and some surreal shenanigans starring a peculiarly malevolent cat. all in all, it is a bracing and imaginative bit of darkness on the page. and, to me at least, quite wonderful. the style is so breezy, the pacing so brisk, the imagination so fertile and so oddly modern, the experience was pure pleasure. it is hard to believe that this story was written over a 100 years ago.

i also enjoyed the three tales of weird horror that followed. they did the job, and they did it right. interesting and off-kilter and pleasingly sinister - but perhaps nothing to write home about. the big take-away is the idea of a monstrous play ("The King in Yellow") that horribly impacts anyone who dares read it, and which is a key element in each of the first four stories.

here's an excerpt from said monstrous play (please don't kill yourself or anyone else after reading):

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

 if you are at all familiar with this author or classic Weird Fiction in general, then you know the drill. those first four stories (along with Ambrose Bierce's "An Inhabitant of Carcosa") set the template for much Weird Fiction to come, from H.P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith to Karl Edward Wagner and beyond. the names, the places, the idea of fell books of unhealthy influence, creeping dread, hysterical romanticism, humans viewed as repulsive insects... this story-cycle's place at the beginning of it all is well-known.

it is also a well-known disappointment. only those first four could be classified as Weird Fiction. a fifth, "The Demoiselle d'Ys", is an elegant, wispy ghost story/romance - and is also quite traditional. following that is "The Prophet's Paradise" - a collection of bits of ambiguous prose poetry, or impenetrable fable, or snatches from a larger tapestry never completed, or something.

the remaining four tales (each fancifully titled after certain streets) have barely a whiff of horror about them and so have met a chilly reception over the years from Weird Fiction enthusiasts. they are all about living the lifestyle of a bohemian art student abroad in bohemian Paris' bohemian Latin Quarter. think Trilby minus Svengali. they are about romance, art, naive americans, lack of money, enticing but sometimes tragic whores, some bloodshed (at least in one story), a sad and lonely ending (in another story), some unbearable lightness of being... what it feels like to be young and artistic and ready to enjoy life in a bustling and sometimes violent big city. these stories were slim, rather quaint, rather witty, and quite vibrant. i particularly enjoyed "The Street of the First Shell", which plunges the reader into a you-are-there-now account of the milieu itself and then what it feels like to suddenly find yourself in the middle of a bloody, confusing battle full of chaos, terror, and death.

overall this is an unusual and surprisingly quirky collection of stories. none of them were failures, all of them were interesting, and a couple really sang.

 

The Wendigo

by Algernon Blackwood

a rainy, windy, chilly night with nothing to do but gaze lovingly at my overly full bookcases. so why not reread one of my favorite classic horror novellas? this one is about, wait for it, The Wendigo and its prey du jour (du nuit?) - some hunters and their guides. but is the story really about this so-called "wendigo" or whatever... or is it more concerned with the awful beauty of uncharted nature - its allure and its dangers? knowing the author, probably the latter.

third time down, the tale is still flavorful to the taste. Blackwood clearly loves the natural world. he knows how to write about the deep dark woods and lakes and the wind and the sounds you hear around a campfire. or better yet, the sounds you hear when no one is awake around you as you lay huddled in your tent with a sleeping buddy. or perhaps even all on your lonesome, your nervous and don't-want-to-admit-you're-scared lonesome. he can write about wonder and terror all at once. he paints a mighty attractive picture of the great outdoors. makes me want to go camping! all by myself!
the wendigo itself is marvelously obscure - an ambiguous monster that flies through the trees, creeps upon sleepers, that somehow knows them, takes them on a terrible journey, transforms itself and its victims, perhaps even releases them. this is no tacky bugaboo - it is a mythic, unexplainable creature. listen to the cry of its victim:

 

"Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!

Oh, oh! This height and fiery speed!"

although this is mainly a straightforward tale of horror, Blackwood's obsession with Transformation remains intact. he has a thing for it, the idea of moving beyond ourselves and this finite mortal coil, and the many variations of transformation have been at the heart of nearly everything i've read by him. often it is a source of a bizarre kind of epiphany. in The Wendigo, transformation equals terror. but an awe-inspiring kind of terror, unknowable and indescribable. a wilderness forever uncharted by prosaic humans. makes me not want to go camping.

The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig'

by William Hope Hodgson

A creepy travelogue set in 1757, following a diminishing group of men through alien waters after the foundering of the title ship. hey, do you want some giant sea squid, terrifying sounds in the night including some heavy breathing and light shrieking, trees that ooze blood and display tormented human faces, horrible slug-like 'weed men', squirmy flappy tentacled stinging biting things etc? you got it. you want a survival story that has a nuts-n-bolts approach to dealing with clean water, food, repairing a boat, making a fire, all those basic details of an adventure tale? you got that too. hey, do you want a brave & kind & loyal & stronger & smarter than anyone around him type supporting character as your blue collar The Real Hero? with this novella, you get a grade A specimen of the type, free of charge. (oh noble unnamed bo'sun, you rock the house!)

William Hope Hodgson is one of the senior members of the classic Weird Fiction crew, and yet he gets less love than melodramatic Lovecraft or the arch & ironic Clark Ashton Smith. unlike Lovecraft, he knows how to restrain himself. his style is wonderfully archaic but he rarely goes over the top and is able to capably conjure up an atmosphere of creeping dread without getting all hysterical about it. he's no Lovecraftian drama queen (don't get me wrong, i love Lovecraft). and unlike CAS, he doesn't seem interested in being witty or using sardonic drollness to create a kind of ironic distance from his horrorscapes (don't get me wrong, i love CAS the most of the Weird writers). Hodgson is rather dry, very sincere, practically humorless, and despite the palpable horrors of Boats, there is a kind of naturalist-slash-spiritual side to him that makes this tale particularly convincing. of all the Weird writers, i would say that his closest brother would be Algernon Blackwood.

4 stars for the first two-thirds, which is expertly written and wonderfully dark and atmospheric. unfortunately, 2 stars for the last third, where a very annoying second boat is found, full of annoying people, and worst of all, The Tender & Brave Romantic Interest. that last third brings out the worst in both Hodgson and the narrator. on the one hand, we have endless descriptions of ropes & kites & repairing ships & oh yawn i'm falling asleep again. on the other hand, we have a narrator who suddenly embodies the most cloying aspects of Victorian culture (although, to be precise, the narrative actually takes place in the Georgian era) and who plunges into a particularly labored and trite romantic affair. it's like being forced to sit in Great Aunt Hortensia's stuffy, musty, doily-shrouded parlour and listening to her endless and microscopic descriptions of the Victorian Mating Ritual. especially irritating when i came over to visit Grandfather Jedediah and listen to some of his eerie ghost stories. get away Aunt Hortensia, your stories make me a little nauseous. and your tea is too sickly sweet.

this was my first audiobook and i have to say that i didn't enjoy the experience. i have a couple more on my ipod so i will try again; hopefully this will turn out to be an anomaly. the narrator was as monotone as they come and the sinister, atonal sound effects & music - although suitably unnerving at first - eventually became wearying (although they did add a delightfully macabre quality to the saccharine romance). but worst of all was my inability to go back, reread, and so further enjoy all the glorious WORDS ON THE PAGE. it was frustrating and it made the experience so much less immersive.

Blood Crazy

by Simon Clark

it seems as if this quasi-young adult, sorta post-apocalyptic, kinda zombie-horror, new-fangled Lord of the Flies type novel published in 1995 is somewhat of a cult classic. i think it completely deserves that status and wish it were even more well-known. i have rarely seen it referenced, but given how it straddles different sorts of subgenres, i suppose that is understandable. still, it deserves more attention. at the very least, if you are a fan of any of those subgenres i mentioned, this should be considered as particularly interesting reading material.

one day in April, 17-year old Nick Aten ("yeah, it rhymes with Satan") learns to his extreme surprise and displeasure that everyone age 20 and over has had their mind switched over to something more sinister, more herd-like. in essence, adults have become bloodthirsty, zombie-like beings with minimal intelligence and whose main priority appears to be to capture and quickly, brutally, horribly kill their own children. lesser priorities for these transformed adults is the killing of any other children that may cross their path and the building of odd geometric patterns that they form out of their children's belongings, their children's bodies, and their own dying bodies as well. but above all, their main mission remains to kill their own kids - to the point of tracking them down and hunting them with some kind of uncanny homing instinct. 

Nick starts out in a kind of state of shock (rather understandable) but quickly learns to survive, picking up and protecting a few fellow kids on the way, including the obligatory love interest. he is an amiable and amusingly laddish protagonist: recently graduated, with some skills in the fixing of cars, but whose main priorities in life are hanging out, drinking lots of beer, contemplating girls, and planning further engagements with his ongoing rival Tug Slatter within their suburb of Doncaster. the first quarter of the book details Nick & company's sometimes panicky, sometimes steady-handed attempts to drive around and figure things out. the rest of the novel becomes a study in contrasting ways to build communities, as Nick finds himself an increasingly important part of several different kid communes, each of which has reacted to the global disaster in different ways.

the writing is plain, unadorned, at times crude. Clark's greatest skill may be in simply making this all seem real - i did not have to carefully suspend disbelief to enjoy it. despite the atrocities being committed and the horrible ways that kids die, this is not the kind of novel that goes into graphic detail about those kinds of things - visceral, splattery horror elements are rather slight; brief descriptions are the norm. sadistic and rape-y behavior from some particularly bad kids are noted and reacted against by the young heroes, but they are not dwelt upon by the author in a leering way. mainly Blood Crazy is a fast-paced page-turner, one of those books that you may find yourself skipping ahead a bit to see if any characters die or if anything especially terrible will happen next, if you are the sort of reader who worries about that kind of thing (i certainly am).

the explanation of why this is all happened to the adults is, for me, what lifts this novel into 4-star material. there is a rather mind-blowing rationale for it all, one that includes the idea that God is simply a projection of our unconscious, in some ways a Jungian symbol that we are all genetically predisposed to believe in. i did not expect to read that in this book! the explanation/revelation occurs during an info-dump that is over 25 pages long. from reviews i've read, this sequence is intolerable to many readers. Clark does try to tart up the dryness of this passage by having it delivered during a sexy massage ("Now turn over, I'll do your front"..."You know I'm getting as much pleasure from this as you are") by a sweet young lady who had just spent the previous few days drugging up our hero and pretty much raping him night after night (upon learning this, Nick is at first irritated but then basically shrugs it off - he has bigger things to worry about). this sequence was completely absorbing. so was the entire book.

Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

this is a big, meaty slice of steaming cthulhu-horror goodness. somewhere near the sargasso sea, a sinister fog envelopes a ship, its crew, and an often ostentatiously manly group of contractors... and deposits them in some horrible other-dimension. this new world is just that: "new", in the sense of a world that is pretty much a primal soup of creeping crawling flapping flying swimming life, almost completely fog-shroud, land nowhere in sight.

"He likened that sea to a petri dish, warm and wet and clogged with organic profusion, a metabolic medium, a fluidic slush of life and death and potential."

potential, indeed! the survivors of the soon-to-be-sinking ship are confronted with a host of typical denizens of a fetid Cambrian (and i suppose pre-Cambrian) world. that equals danger. the survivors also have to deal with each other, which is basically no problem, except for one seriously demented, paranoid, knife-happy asshole who suffers from an increasingly grotesque infection. that equals more danger. then there are the assorted horrid and often soul-sucking supernatural and alien presences, perhaps likewise trapped in this dimension, often making their homes in the various stranded wrecks littering this evil-soup planet. that equals danger times 10. and then of course there is the cthulhic deity that also calls this place home, comfortable with manipulating minds from afar but also happy to breathe nuclear chaos on any unfortunates in its path. that equals danger times infinity!

the novel is all of a piece. it is all wall-to-wall horror, men stuck with each other on a foreign and hostile world, being picked off one by one, basically trapped in a dimension of terror that feels like the biggest, swampiest haunted house of them all. Dead Sea does not let up. although there are moments of more gentle emotions as various men briefly flash back to their normal lives, and occasionally bond with each other, there is a distinct lack of sentimentality and corniness. there are many lengthy sequences where the men are just sitting in their various boats and are basically shell-shocked by their situation... these frequent bits skirted monotony, but were also essential to the plot and atmosphere. when the horrors do arrive - which is fairly regularly - they come fast and furious, grisly and literally gut-wrenching. the creativity in differentiating the horrors from each other is impressive... Curran's imagination is as bizarre, monstrous, and full of disgustingly primal life as the "dead" sea itself.

also, i was scared. i'm not usually scared by too many horror novels. maybe i'm jaded or maybe i'm just unimaginative or maybe the horrors of real life are enough to scare me. who knows. but Dead Sea was unusual for me in that it was a genuinely scary experience. kudos!

the main flaw of the novel is a certain tendency towards overwriting. nowhere near enough for me to sneer at, and a lot of it is clearly in homage to Lovecraft's signature purple prose. the main offense, and boy does it happen often, is Curran's annoying tendency to try to create some kind of effect by isolating a trying-to-be-impactful sentence.

you know, like this.

see, i'm making a point here.

it gets a little obvious at times.

anyway, that caveat aside, this is great stuff if you love horror. it may lack the resonance of classier and/or more transcendent pieces of horror fiction... but it really delivers when it comes to setting up an atmosphere filled with dread and fear, and then following through with shuddery, visceral, no-brakes horror.

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musical accompaniment

PGR: The Chemical Bride
Chrome: Into the Eyes of the Zombie King
Thessalonians: Soulcraft