The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

The Book of the Damned (1919) by Charles Fort: Charles Fort is an important figure in both paranormal circles and in the science-fiction and horror genres. Financially able to not work, Fort decided to work at compiling strange stories from journals and newspapers and historical accounts during lengthy days spent in New York's public libraries. The result was what sometimes reads like The Book of Lists: Early 20th-Century Paranormal Edition.

Buried under a mountain of metaphysical gobbledygook is a fairly simple thesis: things are not what the experts tell us! The 'Damned' of the title are any 'facts' either excluded from theories of the way things work or explained away as being explicable.

Unfortunately, Fort's writing is often tedious at its best and almost incomprehensible at its worse. The book falls into a fairly consistent tripartite pattern:

1) Metaphysical and philosophical theories that slide rapidly into endlessly repeated Fortean platitudes.

2) Lists of hundreds of items, most of which could profitably be moved to an appendix because once you've read about ten things that were reported as falling from the sky, the list of another 700 things that fell from the sky gets pretty boring.

3) Rinse. Repeat.

What saves the material is Fort's almost throwaway gift for specific science-fictional speculation. These speculations are the stuff that many stories can and have been made of. Do alien spaceships jettison spent fuel into Earth's atmosphere? Is Earth's atmosphere partially covered by a gelatinous dome? Does Earth occasionally pass through the debris fields left by ancient space freighters? See, that's great stuff!

Fort tries to pass himself off as a bold iconoclast. However, while he has oodles of derision reserved for scientists, he seems to accept that stories from newspapers and journals of the 19th century and earlier are for the most part reliable. 

Another problem is that Fort perplexingly begins this, his first of four forays into the paranormal, with perhaps the most boring of topics -- weird stuff that purportedly fell from the sky. About 200 pages of it. This rapidly loses its interest long before the 200 or so pages Fort devotes to it is over. Frogs, fish, red rain, black rain, slag, cannonballs, thunderstones, rocks... on and on and on. You can almost taste the boredom -- and Fort's desire to get all that research he did into the book.

This is an important book when it comes to various genres. But if you read it, you will skim long sections. There's only so many strange rains of the 19th century one can find interesting. Recommended.

The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (1909)

The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (1909): William Hope Hodgson's brilliant short novel of the sea and its terrors is a fine, tightly plotted work of horror and disquieting weirdness. A careful, fairly slow build of suspense climaxes in a rapid-fire and horrifying climax. 

Hodgson's early days as a merchant sailor come into full play in this tale of the cargo ship Mortzestus, plying the seas some time early in the 20th century or late in the 19th. The Mortzestus is a sailing ship on an Atlantic run. But she's also a ship whose crews have felt her to be more and more strange as the years have passed. And strange she is, and becoming moreso.

The joys of The Ghost Pirates lie in a lot of areas, from the unusual but intelligibly delivered dialects of the sailors (and of this particular sailing milieu itself, really) to the gradual but accelerating accumulation of details and events that give the novel its name. 

From the beginning, we know something has happened -- the narrative is framed as being the written testimony of Jessop, last survivor of the Mortzestus. Jessop has been rescued by another ship. Rescued from what? Well, that's why there's a novel.

The Ghost Pirates is one of two Hodgson weird novels of the sea (The Boats of the Glen Carrig is the other). Hodgson also wrote dozens of other stories set at sea, from comic pieces to thrillers to horror and the supernatural. He also wrote in a sub-genre I'd probably call 'Fictional Sea Cryptids,' tales of unusual animals and other... things... which come into conflict with human beings on or near the sea. 

The Ghost Pirates is part ghost story, part cryptid fiction, part pseudo-scientific horror story. Perhaps. Jessop offers an explanation for the events of the novel that's not a tale of actual ghosts, but he doesn't necessarily know what really caused the events of the novel. 

Nonetheless, Jessop's quasi-scientific explanation of the horrors he and the rest of the crew of the Mortzestus are beset by is in line with many of Hodgson's other stories and novels in which supernatural events are given disturbing, visionary explanations. A model of narrative economy, The Ghost Pirates is one of the treasures of weird fiction. Highly recommended.

Bears

Crooked Tree by Robert C. Wilson (1980): I'll buy almost any horror paperback with a lurid cover if the price is right. At 50 cents, and with the luridness hidden inside the cut-out cover (and a cutout cover with a full-page illustration inside just screams 1970's and 1980's), Crooked Tree fit that bill. I also thought it was an early novel by Canadian SF writer Robert Charles Wilson, but it wasn't. This Robert C. Wilson is a Michigan lawyer with three published novels over the last 35 years.

Well, would that he published more. This is really a terrific little horror novel. Set in and around the Crooked Tree State Park in the northwestern part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, Crooked Tree sees ancient evil resurrected and set loose. Yes, this actually is the 'Indian burial ground' trope in action. It works here -- as does any tired trope -- because Wilson invests time and sensitivity in exploring the Native-American culture of the Ottawas whose burial ground it was, and in making Native Americans non-stereotypical characters in the drama.

For the most part, the novel's descriptions of the natural landscape work, with only a few slips into the purple. A real sense of menace builds, and the supernatural menace, once revealed, is fully worked out and logically combated within the rules Wilson has created for this particular manifestation of the supernatural. The tiredness of the Indian burial ground trope also loses its exhaustion by making the unburied menace something that once threatened the Ottawas as well. This puts the whole thing more in line with the mainstream of supernatural literature, in which danger comes from Something Awful that was buried, and not from the vengeful spirits of once peaceful beings.

Wilson doesn't go as far as Martin Cruz Smith did in the excellent, nearly contemporaneous Nightwing: Crooked Tree's protagonist is still a white American and not a native. But the plethora of well-realized native characters makes the novel something special. So, too, the sensitive use of black bears as the main weapon in the menace's revenge: the novel explains many of a black bear's more dangerous attributes while also making it clear throughout that their danger to humanity in this novel has also been caused by humanity. Or the once-human, anyway. The bears, unlike the shark in Jaws, explicitly are described as acting against their nature in their attacks on humans. Naturally, they are shy and only dangerous in very specific interactions with human beings.

There are flaws. The climax could use a few more pages. As in many Stephen King novels, characters with viewpoints contrary to the author's -- in this case pro-leisure-hunting white men -- are drawn as gross, completely unlikable caricatures who meet their just rewards in being killed. They're as bad as the hillbillies in Deliverance, but the hillbillies in Deliverance were at least competent and sketched-in as being resentful of these rich(er) suburbanites vacationing in the place they called home. And Wilson's protagonist travels around so much in the concluding pages to assemble the necessary information to combat the evil that these pages start to feel like a Michigan travelogue.

However, despite its flaws, Crooked Tree is a surprisingly good horror novel from a little-known writer. It skilfully weaves together supernatural horror with natural horror (the menace must work through living beings to get its vengeance). Some segments suggest Jaws on land, but with animals that have become much more dangerous with a human will guiding and manipulating them. And a couple of the carnage-laden set-pieces are startlingly well-done and refreshingly unsentimental about who will die without being exploitative. Recommended.

Closet Case

Boogeyman, written by Eric Kripke, Juliet Snowden and Stiles White; directed by Stephen Kay; starring Barry Watson (Tim), Emily Deschanel (Kate), Skye McCole Bartusiak (Franny), Tory Mussett (Jessica), Lucy Lawless (Tim's Mother) and Charles Mesure (Tim's Father) (2005): Somewhat blah horror film with a screen story and partial screenplay credit for Supernatural TV series creator Eric Kripke. Childhood boogeyman kidnaps young Tim's father and, as it turns out, dozens of other people over the intervening years until Tim returns home upon the death of his mother to finally confront the creature that's made him afraid of closets for the last 15 years.

There are some solid scare moments here that don't simply rely on Old Reliable 'something jumps out at you!!!', but not enough of them. Barry Watson is curiously bland as the protagonist, while the decision to have two female leads (played by Tory Mussett and Bones's Emily Deschanel) means that neither of them has enough lines to make much of an impact, though it is nice to see Deschanel in a role that doesn't require her to speak like a human computer.

The ending, apparently much-hated by everyone on the Internet, actually goes somewhere interesting, though a greater fleshing out of how and why Tim finally turns the tables on the boogeyman might have helped things. Nonetheless, it's a use of logical magic, and may have signalled what was to come in Supernatural. Well, if Kripke actually wrote the ending. Somehow they followed this with two sequels. Not recommended.

My Bloody Hand!!!

My Bloody Valentine, written by Todd Farmer and Zane Smith, based on the screenplay for the 1981 film of the same name written by John Beaird and Stephen A. Miller, directed by Patrick Lussier, starring Jensen Ackles, Jaime King and Kevin Tighe (2009): 11 years ago, Tom Hanniger (Ackles) accidentally caused an explosion at the mine his father owned. One man survived by killing all the other trapped miners so as to conserve oxygen, though when he was found, he was in a coma. Ten years ago, that man awoke from his coma and went on a crazy killing spree, nearly killing Hanniger before being forced to flee into a collapsing mine tunnel.

Now, Tom Hanniger is back to sell the mine. Selling the mine will put everyone in town out of work because I guess in the universe of this movie, mines can be packed up and moved elsewhere, just like factories. This last is not the dumbest thing in this slasher-movie remake.

According to some wag on the Internet, the original My Bloody Valentine (1981) is one of the neglected high-points of the 'Golden Age of Slasher Movies', by which I assume he means the late 1970's and early 1980's, and not the age of 17, which is really the age at which these things seem interesting. Never has a Golden Age of any cinematic sub-genre produced fewer truly good films, though. That said, this is a pretty inept entry in the recent slasher-film boomlet.

Tonal shifts from horror-comedy to apparently serious melodrama jar the viewer right out of any ability to enjoy the movie on either level. Some of the CGI comes across so laughably that the gold old days of on-set special effects look awfully good by comparison -- a shot of a woman's head bisected by a shovel looks like something a talented 12-year-old whipped up in between Pizza Pops, for instance, while the nods to the 3-D this film was screened in are the same old throwing-stuff-at-the-camera crap we've been seeing from 3-D movies since the 1950's. ZZZZZZZZ.

Jensen Ackles, best known for TV's Supernatural, looks embarrassed and out-of-place here -- indeed, he looks like he's stuck in the Supernatural episode "Hollywood Babylon", in which his character hangs out on the set of a slasher movie that looks way more interesting than My Bloody Valentine. Some of the surprising slasher-film tropes expounded upon the the terrific film-criticism text Men, Women and Chainsaws play out here -- ultimately, the true protagonist (and only competent 'good' person in the entire movie) turns out to be a woman; Ackles, though he headlines the picture, is only in about half the movie, and his character is something of an incompetent boob. So it goes. Not recommended.