The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron (Collected 2007) containing the following stories: Old Virginia (2003); Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001); Procession of the Black Sloth (2007); Bulldozer (2004); Proboscis (2005); Hallucigenia (2006); Parallax (2005); The Royal Zoo is Closed (2006); and The Imago Sequence (2005): Barron's fictional cosmos, in which most and possibly all of these early stories take place, exudes dread. Barron himself is a marvelous writer who seemed to arrive fully formed in 2000, as good or better than all of his contemporaries, and then proceeded to get better over the following decade.
As with H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Barron's fictional cosmos deploys many of the trappings of supernatural fiction in service to what is really science-fictional horror. What seems to be supernatural is really the result of beings and sciences too far beyond humanity to be fully fathomed by Barron's protagonists. None of the seemingly supernatural beings we encounter is remotely benign.
Humanity isn't so much cattle to many of these beings, per Charles Fort's classic construction, as it is game. Modern, 21st-century game animals, hopelessly doomed by the firepower of the modern hunter, still striving to escape while terrible things laugh at their impotency in the face of torture, death, dismemberment, or worst of all, transformation at the hands and tentacles and proboscises of their tormenters.
What helps set Barron apart from the majority of those who have followed in Lovecraft's squamous, gambrel, rugose footsteps is the nature of many of his protagonists. Most tend to be the hardest of hard-cases: professional killers, enforcers, former soldiers, Pinkerton men. When they come face to face with the ravenous, cloachal, aggressively sadistic god-monsters that populate the dark place of the Earth, they find themselves punching way, way above their weight class. But by God, many of them keep punching. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Barron's keen eye for both psychological and physical description is a joy to behold, regardless of the awfulness of what it is he's beholding. Even the worst protagonists seem benign compared to what they're facing.
There's a real sense of pathos in "Hallucigenia," to cite one example, in which a millionaire real-estate developer whose business practices are mostly loathsome but legal -- he specializes in displacing the poor in places such as Viet Nam so as to build factories -- comes up against...something. Something in an abandoned barn in the Pacific Northwest, where many of Barron's stories are set. Is he being punished? Well, no, I don't think so: Barron's universe, like Hemingway's, doesn't discriminate morally in terms of who it kills. Or eats. Or tortures. Or transforms.
There are awful wonders here, and marvelous images, and a measured approach to the accumulation of psychological detail. There are oddities I can't recall reading in any other horror writers. And there's a tremendous amount of re-readability, both to catch all the things you missed the first time, and to make the connections among the stories collected here and elsewhere. The stories can all stand alone, but the various intersections of characters, names, and locations often add extra levels of dread and delight. Highly recommended.
The Keeper by Sarah Langan (2006): This atmospheric and chilling horror novel features first-rate characterization and the development of a real sense of place. Langan sets her first novel in the small, depressed Maine town of Bedford -- and over the course of the novel, Bedford falls. Ghosts and monsters walk the streets.
Indeed, the sheeted dead really do squeak and gibber in the Bedford streets at points, along with other monsters. The monsters of Bedford, though, are the manifestations of all its buried secrets. They have not invaded from Outside.
Langan uses third-person narration to delve into the inner lives of several characters, and does so skillfully without neglecting the atmospheric description necessary to showing the physical and social disintegration of the town as a whole, as both place and imaginative gestalt. At points, she "cuts loose" with visceral, physical horrors, but these things never take over the narrative. This is not a gross-out.
As with so much horror, supernatural events arise from human failure. Child abuse and alcoholism are the chief sins explored here, along with the morally corrosive effects of keeping secrets on both the personal and civic level. Bedford has its own skeletons, literal and figurative, in its closet. The closing of its primary industry before the novel begins becomes, over the course of the novel, a judgment on the town's failings -- and then it becomes something more complex and affecting.
Langan's characters are nicely developed, and their fates, for the most part, evade boiler-plate horror conventions. Startling moments in which the supernatural bursts into the "real" world abound. Through it all, Langan builds a convincing supernatural world populated by flawed human beings. There's evil here, but also hard-won goodness, very faint, very human, absolutely necessary. Recommended.
The Shrine: written by Jon Knautz, Brendan Moore, and Trevor Matthews; directed by Jon Knautz; starring Aaron Ashmore (Marcus), Cindy Sampson (Carmen), Meghan Heffern (Sara), and Trevor Matthews (Henryk) (2010): Surprisingly well-made Canadian straight-to-DVD cheapie ($1.5 million budget according to IMDB, less than the cost of one episode of an hour-long American drama TV series). It's another Bad Road Trip movie, though in this case the road trip has a point: an ambitious, up-and-coming journalist (Carmen) wants to discover what happened to a vanished, young American traveller somewhere in Poland.
Things are a bit rough for the first 20 minutes, but pick up once we leave America (well, America as played by Pickering, Ontario) for the rural wilds of Poland (well, the rural wilds of Poland as played by Pickering, Ontario). The people doing the accents and the Polish sound pretty convincing to this non-Polish speaker.
More importantly, there's real cleverness at work with the set design, make-up, and props. There's a dreadful mask-thing whose purpose only becomes completely clear at the end of the film. There's also some nice moments inside a fog bank, and a great scene involving a demonic statue. The film also plays with subjective POV in a relatively sophisticated way.
The ending, while undermined a bit by too much footage of prosthetics that look less and less real the longer the camera lingers, ultimately satisfies and makes sense of the proceedings. My only major caveat is that the prologue gives away things that would better be discovered as the narrative unfolds. The actors are convincing, and while their lines don't sparkle, they get the job done. There are echoes of Robert E. Howard's classic horror story "The Black Stone" here, among others. And the film-makers restrain themselves from offering too lengthy an explanation for the goings-on. As in, one spoken line! Recommended.
Night of the Demon (aka Curse of the Demon): written by Charles Bennett, Hal E. Chester, and Cy Endfield, based on the short story "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James; directed by Jacques Tourneur; starring Dana Andrews (Dr. John Holden), Peggy Cummins (Joanna Harrington) and Niall MacGinnis (Dr. Julian Karswell) (1957): It's too bad there's no way to see the pure Charles Bennett version of this movie: producer Hal E. Chester added some unfortunate bits (including the infamous demon close-up which doesn't frighten anyone) and probably subtracted others.
What's left is still a fine horror movie with outstanding performances throughout. It isn't patricularly faithful to the M.R. James short story it adapts, though most of the logic of the supernatural is kept intact. Niall MacGinnis is a stand-out as the mostly malevolent magician, who nonetheless dotes on his mother and seems to be mostly, charmingly harmless unless you disagree with him.
The long-shots of the demon are relatively effective, though its more sinister manifestations remain, in master horror-director Tourneur's hands, shadows and fog and noises off-screen. One of the oddities of Chester's decision-making with the demon lies in the fact that it's smaller than a man in James' story but a looming, King-Kong-sized giant here. Sometimes less is more, especially when it comes to horror. Recommended.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: written by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper; directed by Tobe Hooper; starring Marilyn Burns (Sally Hardesty), Allen Danziger (Jerry), Paul A. Partain (Franklin Hardesty), William Vail (Kirk), Teri McMinn (Pam), Edwin Neal (Hitchhiker), Jim Siedow (Old Man), Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface) and John Dugan (Grandfather) (1974): One of the remarkable things about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is how little graphic violence actually appears on screen. The makers pretty much manage what Alfred Hitchcock did in the shower scene in Psycho in terms of tricking the audience into believing it's seen terrible things that never actually appear on screen, but they do so for 90 minutes, not 17 seconds.
It's a terrific movie, filled with dread and grotesque comedy, terrible images, and sudden action. Reviewers who compared it to a nightmare were quite right, I think -- the suddenness of occurences in nightmares, and certain things all people dream fearfully of, especially flight from something dreadful and perhaps inescapable. And then they woke up. Maybe.
Made for very little money, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre nonetheless doesn't seem low-budget. The acting is solid throughout; the grainy 16mm film stock perfect for the grunginess of the environment the five unlucky travellers find themselves in. Hooper and company also conjure up a nightmarish soundscape meant to suggest what cattle would hear in a slaughterhouse. That works too.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre made an astonishing multiple of its production budget in several theatrical releases in the 1970's and early 1980's. It kickstarted what I tend to think of as The Bad Road-trip sub-genre in horror movies, one which thrives to this day. It also pretends to be a re-creation of a "true story" (it isn't), and it gives us one of the first iconic monsters in post-classical horror movies, the human-mask-wearing Leatherface. Who keeps a pet chicken in a bird cage. Seriously. And it's a weirdly disturbing moment, the revelation of that chicken.
Another reason I think the film disturbed so many is its attention to suggestively occult set design. There's nothing supernatural about the monsters in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but their interior decorating (well, and exterior decorating in a nearby cemetery) gestures towards a baroque world of fetishized death and decay.
Nearly 40 years after its release, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains an influential classic in any film genre. It's a work of transformative brilliance that ends with what feels like one long scream climaxing in a chase sequence that's like a horrifying Keystone Kops routine. John Laroquette supplies the opening voiceover narration, for which he was paid one marijuana joint. Groovy. Highly recommended.
Northern Horror: Canadian Fiction Magazine: edited by Edo van Belkom, containing the following stories: The Transaction by Scott H. Urban; Wavelength by Terence M. Green and Andrew Weiner; The Spruce Tree by David Shtogryn; Heart by Edo van Belkom; Rideau by Kathryn Ptacek; Vermiculture by Nancy Kilpatrick; Writhe, Damn You by Ed Greenwood; Warmth by Scott H. Urban; Advertising Hell by Peter Sellers; Shadow of My Father by Michael Bracken; Sewage Treatment by Stephanie Bedwell-Grime; Skin by Scott Nicholson; The Party Over There by Nancy Baker; Sitters by Del Stone, Jr.; Comes a Cool Rain by Michael Kelly; Above It All by Robert J. Sawyer; and Mrs. Thurston's Instrument of Justice by David Nickle (2000):
Apparently, there always has to be a point at which Canadian literature announces it has 'arrived' in some area -- lyric poetry, comic writing, or in this case, horror fiction. By 'Canadian literature,' I simply mean those people running literary magazines or university literature departments or reviewing books in The Globe and Mail. They're not all the same people, but the canonizing end of the CanLit pool is shallow enough to be remarkably incestuous, even now.
This 13-year-old issue of Canadian Fiction magazine, as editor Edo van Belkom notes in the introduction, told the world that Canadian horror fiction had arrived. Arrived where? I'm not sure. This is an awfully mediocre selection of stories, representing the best work of none of the writers whose names I already know. There are some traditional CanLit tropes at work throughout, including somebody having sex with either an animal or a tree ("The Spruce Tree", which is I guess the Arabesque companion to Marian Engel's Bear), people trying to survive terrible weather ("Warmth"), and people being sexually assaulted by family members (OK, that's not a Canadian trope, but it sometimes feels like one).
The collection also gives us a comic horror story that would be twice as good at half the length ("Advertising Hell", by the improbably named Peter Sellers, is mildly funny until it overstays its welcome by about 2000 words).
We also get an entry I'll leave un-named in one of my two or three least favourite horror sub-genres, one I've dubbed The Damnation of Nobody because the stories always involve dreadful things happening to a person because the person isn't Excellent enough. It's a sub-genre whose patron saint is Harlan Ellison, and it's deeply unpleasant once one pieces together what an unpunishably excellent life would be (generally, that would involve being a writer, the most Excellent type of being on the planet, and not some stupid accountant or teacher or truck-driver, all of whom lead lives not worth living). Don't punish your characters for having ordinary lives, kids. You don't want to be an insufferable prick.
So, anyway, not a very good collection. There are good Canadian horror writers, and have been for quite some time. But this collection doesn't really announce anything. Not recommended.
The Mailman by Bentley Little (1991): Like several Golden-Age science-fiction writers, Bentley Little's style is plain while his ideas and plots are baroque and sometimes nearly absurd. This makes him the most interesting of contemporary American 'plain-style' horror writers. I honestly never know what paths his novels will take to their conclusions. Or what those conclusions will be.
The Mailman is about as 'normal' a horror novel as Little is going to write. A stranger comes to town and Bad Things Happen. That's the set-up for a lot of horror over the years. Hell, that's the last two-thirds of Bram Stoker's Dracula!
In the course of the novel, however, Little does a couple of things differently: he evades any and all explanations for why a seemingly supernatural, malevolent mailman is threatening a small Arizona town, and he has the townspeople realize very early on that something is really, really amiss. The novel's about (increasingly inexplicable) apathy in the face of mounting evidence, not the more standard 'wait for the evidence' plot. Why don't people act in light of overwhelming evidence? Good question.
The characters, especially the father, mother, and 11-year-old son whom the Mailman seems especially obsessed with, are keenly and sympathetically drawn. Little's prose is about as basic as prose can be, and he's got the unfortunate tic of using actor-shorthand to describe people ("He looked like Broderick Crawford"). Nonetheless, a more-than-competent horror novel, and one with a fascinatingly odd choice of villain (even moreso now than in 1991 when The Mailman came out, obviously). Recommended.
Twelve Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural by Davis Grubb, containing the following stories: Busby's Rat; The Rabbit Prince; Radio; One Foot in the Grave; Moonshine; The Man Who Stole the Moon; Nobody's Watching!; The Horsehair Trunk; The Blue Glass Bottle; Wynken, Blynken and Nod; Return of Verge Likens; and Where the Woodbine Twineth (1964): Davis Grubb was a fine regional writer whose excellent novel The Night of the Hunter had the good fortune to be made into an excellent movie directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish. Grubb wasn't exclusively a genre writer, but he did write a lot of stories that could be classified as such, 12 of which are collected here.
The Night of the Hunter's dense, almost Faulknerian prose wasn't Grubb's normal style. The stories here are smooth and flavourful, touched with the rustic and the colloquial but never overpowered by metaphor or the twee the way Bradbury could be. Fantastic horror appears in several stories, though others ("Radio", for example) are psychological suspense that wouldn't have been out of place on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Stories chronicle rural life in the Midwest and the Southern United States, but are not limited to it. "Radio" is an urban horror; "Nobody's Watching" is a comic bit of science-fiction whimsy set in the broadcasting business; it's the sort of story that Kurt Vonnegut would make his career on. "The Man Who Stole the Moon" also reads like a lost Kurt Vonnegut piece of a gentler sort. Though I compare these stories to the work of others, however, they really are written in a distinctively Grubbian (!) voice, deftly switching among emotional states.
Grubb's flair for combining the horrifying and the absurd stands out in several stories. At times, he resembles the droll John Collier; at others, Ray Bradbury in full nostalgia mode: both contemporaries. "One Foot in the Grave" would have made a great EC Comics horror story. "The Rabbit Prince" is probably the most Bradburyian bit of whimsy here, featuring as it does a magical travelling carnival, a summer vacation, and a young boy as its protagonist. It's a funny story, tinged with a bit of sadness, and should probably be anthologized a lot more often.
So, too, should "Where the Woodbine Twineth" be better known. I've actually seen this story imitated almost verbatim a couple of times, but its own fresh horrors remain singular and oddly disturbing. It's a humdinger. Highly recommended.
