"The Companion" by Ramsey Campbell
Well, hopefully my taste will be closer to King's when it comes to "The Companion."
Stone is a middle-aged man, some kind of accountant or something, who loves amusement parks and always goes to a bunch of them--by himself--on his yearly vacation. (Of course, he's British, so he says "fairgrounds" and "holiday.") He goes to a particularly old and decrepit sort of fairground, where he has hallucinations of his dead parents, and unhappy memories of his childhood and early adulthood come unbidden to his mind. He rides a carousel ("roundabout") and sees rambunctious kids trying to steal plays at a pinball machine by using a coin with a string attached to it.
The guy running the roundabout tells him that "the old fairground" is a few blocks away, so Stone walks to it, on the way getting scared by a bunch of kids. He enters the "old fairground" via a hole in a fence; the place seems to be deserted, but when he sits down in the sole car of the Ghost Train ride it moves, carrying him through the darkened building full of scary props, among them a stuffed animal faintly lit and a mirror that dimly shows his own face. The story abruptly ends when a sort of stuffed doll of a child appears in the car next to Stone and takes his hand.
With lots of descriptions of garbage on the streets and Stone's out-of-control thoughts, this story feels long and slow, and because Stone's character and what is happening to him are so vague and inexplicable, they don't arouse any feeling in the reader. Maybe I am supposed to piece together something about how Stone, who has a heart like a stone, is lonely and has no friends or women because his parents blah blah blah and he obsessively goes to fairgrounds to recreate for himself the childhood he never had and in the abandoned ride he finds the companion he has always needed but it is stuffed and fake just like he is stuffed and fake zzzzzzzzzzzzz... but what is my prize for doing all this work? Campbell's story is not fun or scary or interesting and there is little incentive to turn over all those stones in hopes something noteworthy will wriggle out.
Again I have to disagree with Stephen King and give "The Companion" a thumbs down. Mr. King and I are obviously not on the same wavelength.
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| Hans-Ake Lilja is like the world's biggest Stephen King fan, or something |
McClay is driving across the desert of the SouthWest, his exhausted wife asleep in the back seat, driving at night because it is cooler. While Campbell in "The Companion" shovels a lot of details at you that you chop through in search of some kind of feeling or meaning like an explorer, machete in hand, scouring a jungle for signs of a lost civilization, Etchison's details of what it is like for a tired man to drive for hour after hour across the desert at night all paint sharp images or convey some emotional import.
Plotwise, the story is simple: McClay, after all that driving, comes to a rest stop that he slowly realizes is a place where some kind of murderer ambushes weary travelers as they sit in their cars. He realizes this too late to save his wife. If I hadn't known the story appeared in The Mammoth Book of Vampires I would not have interpreted the clues as pointing to a vampire, but just to some bloodthirsty insaniac, or maybe a Native American shaman.
Quite good. I think I have read six stories by Etchison now, and three of them ("Wet Season," "The Dead Line," and here "It Only Comes Out at Night") have really impressed me, so one of these days I should probably get my hands on an Etchison collection.
"It Only Comes Out at Night" has actually appeared in several anthologies beyond The Mammoth Book of Vampires, including some purporting to present the "best" or "top" fiction in the horror field, and I suspect it belongs in them.
"Compulsory Games" by Robert Aickman
This is a literary story, written in a style that feels a little old-fashioned, like something Victorian or Edwardian, perhaps. The style is smooth and pleasant; the plot is alright; the ending is a little bewildering, I guess symbolic or surreal or whatever.
Colin Trenwith lives with his wife Grace in Kensington, which wikipedia is telling me is an affluent part of London. Colin likes books and is sort of a homebody, withdrawn from others. (This doesn't sound like anybody I know, really.)
The story is about the Trenwiths' relationship with a neighbor, middle-aged widow Eileen McGrath, a woman who works long hours in the civil service and lives in a huge house the rooms of which she tries, with limited success, to rent out. Eileen tries to be friends with Grace and Colin, but they find her boring.
Grace's mother is in India, studying or joining cults or something (I guess the way the Beatles got involved with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Pete Townshend became fascinated with Meher Baba) and she gets sick, so Grace travels to India to be with her mother in her last days. Eileen invites Colin to her house, perhaps to seduce him. Instead of trying to have sex with her, Colin, seeing how unhappy she is, suggests she take up a hobby.
After her return from India, Grace goes to see Eileen without Colin, and returns to tell Colin that Eileen has taken up a hobby--not books, as he suggested, but flying! And Grace is going to learn to fly with her! Even though, earlier, Grace didn't even like Eileen, the two women quickly become the best of friends, and Colin almost never sees his wife--she no longer makes his meals or goes on his annual holiday with him. When he does see her she talks about Eileen. Eventually Eileen and Grace buy a Moth together, and move out of Kensington without leaving Colin their address!
On his own, Colin goes (it appears) somewhat insane, and/or maybe dies and goes to hell. He often sees, and almost always hears, a Moth flying overhead--it seems to buzz him, and he has a terrible fear of its shadow falling upon him, leading him to run and dodge down the street, to the laughter of the local children. The story ends with Colin on holiday by himself, touring the unkempt garden of a decrepit country house--he sees three figures in the distance, and as he approaches them he realizes one is he himself, and then the Moth comes down and, I guess, kills some or all of them.
"Compulsory Games" is well-written enough and interesting enough that I am giving it a positive vote, but the ending feels limp--there is no climax or satisfying resolution, the story just seems to wither and expire. We readers are also moved to ask: What is the point of this story, what are its themes? Is it a feminist thing, about how women are better off without men stifling them, about how, liberated from men, women can soar if they work together? Are we to sympathize with the women or with Colin? Or none of them (the story is quite cool, emotionally detached)? There are some hints that the story is somehow about how machines are taking over human life ("Only machines are entirely real for children today....The machines cost enormous sums to maintain; and every day there are more of them, and huger, more intricate, more bossy") and how life is changing for the worse in general, what with the many references to old houses in poor repair and untended gardens and all that. Children seem to be mixed up in all this dissatisfaction with modern life business; on the first page of the story we read that "Children have come to symbolize such an unprecedented demand upon their parents (conflictual also), while being increasingly unpredictable almost from their first toddlings, as to be best eschewed...."
Its mysteries leave it a little unsatisfying, perhaps, but a worthwhile read, over all.
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I'll definitely be exploring more of Dennis Etchison's and Robert Aickman's work in the future; Ramsey Campbell's? Maybe not.
I think we'll put Frights aside now, but we'll have more speculative fiction short stories in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.
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