At a mall bookstore where they play hideous music and apparently make all their money selling Hogwarts paraphernalia and tricking people into joining their 10% discount club (annual membership fee, $25), among the thirty-five telephone-directory-sized copies of It on the horror shelves, I spotted a newish anthology by Stephen Jones, The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories. Seeing quite a few familiar names on the contents page, I resolved to read those tales from the anthology by those writers who interest me that I could find at the indispensable internet archive. By chance, all three of the suitable stories are by Britons; sadly the Denis Etchison and Poppy Z. Brite stories from the volume are not available at the internet archive, while I have already read the included story by Harlan Ellison, "In the Fourth Year of the War," which I blogged about when we read DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner.)
I have mixed feelings about Lumley, and over the years this blog has seen me praise some of his work and slag other specimens of his writing. Here I am rolling the dice again; call it research into the legacy of Lovecraft and Arkham House if any explanation is necessary. "The Viaduct" first appeared in Ramsey Campbell's anthology Superhorror, which is kind of a funny name, and was later included in the 1993 Lumley collection Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi; I am reading it in a scan of the Tor hardcover edition of that collection. (Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi also includes the long story "Born of the Winds," which I declared "an acceptable Lovecraft pastiche" when I read it back in 2016.) "The Viaduct" was chosen by David Drake and Martin H. Greenberg for the 1996 volume A Century of Horror: 1970-79: The Greatest Stories of the Decade, so how bad can it be?
Two boys are messing around at the beach near a massive viaduct, a bridge that carries trains one hundred and fifty feet above a river. The boys have been practicing at the playground at their school, carrying themselves hand over hand on the overhead bars of a "climbing-frame," what we in America call "monkey bars" or a "jungle gym"--their object is to swing hand over hand across the viaduct via the one hundred and sixty rungs under the viaduct's walkway. (These are brave kids!)
The boys spot the "village idiot," Wiley Smiley, a mentally retarded nineteen-year-old, fishing on the other side of the river. They throw stones in the water next to him, the splashes getting him wet and enraging him. Their victim being on the other side of the river, the boys think they are safe.
These boys may be brave, but they are also stupid, because they decide that today is the day to swing Tarzan-style across the river on those metal rungs far above the river. Most of Lumley's story (like 21 pages total here) is a tense adventure/chase sequence, as the boys hang under the railway and Wiley Smiley takes advantage of this period of vulnerability to exact his revenge.
isfdb categorizes "The Viaduct" as "non-genre," and there are no speculative elements to it; it is a mainstream story about the psychologies of three not very likable characters who are under terrible stress and do things that no decent or sensible person would do--"The Viaduct" is also a quite effective tale of terror and gore. Thumbs up!
"These Beasts" made its debut in F&SF, in an issue in which Charles de Lint uses his book review column to promote an anthology of stories about child abuse that includes a story of his own (he explains that he is donating any money he makes from the book to charity and that the book is really really important to the cause of dealing with the problem of child abuse.) In the intro to the story in F&SF editor Kristine Kathyrn Rusch quotes Lee's explanation that the idea for the piece came from her husband John Kaiine. "These Beasts" would reappear, ten years before the publication of The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, in the 2009 Lee collection Tempting the Gods.
"These Beasts" is a clever entertainment, a jewel-like exercise in mood and style that reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith. Carem, the son of a whore in a sort of Arabic setting, has made his fortune robbing tombs. He learns the location of a desert tomb more closely guarded and more richly appointed than any other, and leaves his two wives behind to undertake the perilous operation of looting it. Lee fills her story with intriguing sorceries and magic devices as well as sharp images, but as in Lumley's story, there are also some pretty foul crimes and some pretty gruesome bloodshed. While Lumley's "The Viaduct" is disturbing thanks to its realism, Lee's story, set in a kind of never never land and written in the style of a dark fairy tale or "Oriental" fable, is more lighthearted and fun, but equally absorbing. A sober assessment might consider it a trifle, but "These Beasts" is a well-crafted and satisfying story I really enjoyed. Thumbs up!
I was a little dismayed when I realized how long this story was--"Needing Ghosts" first appeared as an 80-page chap book in 1990, and it is like 90 pages in the scan of the 1993 Campbell collection Strange Things and Stranger Places in which I was to read it. This volume has a dumb cover illustration, an off center image of a kitchen knife penetrating the spine of a book. (This image is based on an image from "Needing Ghosts," but in the story the book is pinned open by a knife, face up so it can be read.) I'm skeptical of Campbell's work, and 90 god-damned pages would be a slog if "Needing Ghosts" was tedious, as I have found several of Campbell's stories to be. I was rolling the dice again...and this time they came up snake eyes!
In keeping with the title of Jones's anthology, "Needing Ghosts" is like one of those bad dreams in which every single thing you try to do, no matter how simple, is a complete disaster. You forget your name, you forget where your big meeting is, you have trouble opening a door, you lose a piece of paper with info you needed, you go into a store to buy something and the clerk ignores you, you have a bill for which a cabbie can't make change, your credit card breaks in half, etc. All these things, and more, happen to the protagonist of "Needing Ghosts," Simon Mottershead.
"Needing Ghosts" begins with middle-aged Mottershead, who suffers some pretty severe memory loss, waking up in the predawn, slowly becoming aware of his surroundings, and the story consists of Campbell describing in voluminous detail his every move over the course of a day. We learn more and more about this guy's character and life as the day proceeds, as Mottershead remembers things about himself. At the same time the story becomes increasingly surreal and absurd. I enjoyed the first 25 or so pages of "Needing Ghosts," all the detailed descriptions of this guy's looking around his house as if he'd never been there before, riding a ferry and then riding a bus full of disabled people, his confused memories and poor vision and all that, and Campbell's many weird metaphors and similes:
Shoving his copy of the voucher into his pocket together with the pointed blades which are the halves of the [broken credit] card, he pokes his arms through the straps of the rucksack and flounces out, his book bumping his s;pine as if it's trying to climb the bony ladder and reinsert its tale into his brain.But after the protagonist got off the bus the story became more and more dreamlike and surreal and ridiculous, with one striking but nonsensical image (an army of half-assembled mannequins on the street beckoning to him) after another (a table with a single chair set for a speaker, on the table a glass and a carafe--the carafe contains not water, but a film of dust), all of them piling up one on the other but adding up to nothing significant. The more we learn about the mysterious protagonist the less interesting he is--Mottershead is a novelist who has abandoned his writing career and wants to open his own used bookstore and is scheduled to speak at a library today, where, unable to remember the titles or plots of his own books, he offers banal anecdotes and self-indulgent observations about being a writer ("Writing's a compulsion. By the time you're any good at it you no longer have the choice of giving it up.") Campbell fails to inspire any emotion in the reader--Mottershead is totally boring and you don't care about his unbelievable interactions with the bizarre characters he meets. Much of the middle third of the story consists of the protagonist getting into arguments and fights and chases with the staff of the library and various bookstores as he tries, and fails, to find his own books on their shelves. This gets repetitive and irritating.
I guess "Needing Home" is about the burdens of being a writer, how your mind can be taken over by your fictional creations and how frustrating and sad it is to know how few people admire or even know about the work you have poured your heart into and all that. A realistic story on this theme could be effective, but a surreal dream-story about a disappointed writer just comes across as tedious--all the weird images of libraries as big as shopping malls and bookstore clerks dressed as frogs put distance between the reader and the character, making it harder rather than easier to identify with his feelings. Campbell absolutely fails to move the reader--who cares if this boring guy is nuts or a murderer or whatever?--and no part of this long story is sad or scary or exciting. The long passages and many scenes about being a writer frustrated that nobody knows his work have no connection to the plot element of being a murderer--Campbell gives only the barest hints that Mottershead might be a killer until the very end, and the protagonist's family receives almost no attention until like 60 pages in. Rather than being a natural conclusion to the rest of the story, a satisfying climax that grows organically out of the first 60 or 70 pages, the "this guy murdered his family" part of "Needing Ghosts" comes out of nowhere, like it was just tacked on to an unrelated story that was lacking an ending.
Thumbs down!
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After the Lumley and the Lee, which were well-paced and well-proportioned and written in styles suited to the material they presented and atmospheres they sought to generate, the Campbell felt like an unwieldy leviathan, blundering ponderously in no clear direction before finally beaching itself in an inappropriate place where it unceremoniously expired. Sad!
I myself have not been all that impressed by the few Campbell work's I've read. A critic did make an interesting point about him -- there is a big theme of failed and garbled communication running through his work. People can't communicate what they need to. It sounds like this story may have some of that element.
ReplyDeleteThat is an interesting point; I wish I liked Campbell's work enough to investigate a bunch of his stories with themes like that in mind. Campbell is obviously smart, knowledgeable, ambitious, and industrious, he obviously puts a lot of thought and effort into these stories, but they generally feel long and fail to elicit any emotion from me, which is too bad.
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