I wouldn't say this is really a vampire story in a literal sense, though it is in a metaphorical sense and plays with the forms and themes of a vampire story. On the surface at least it is a tricky sort of mainstream story. Malzberg tells the story out of order, breaking it into five parts and starting with the part that is fourth, chronologically. Then we get the third part, then the second, then the first, and finally the ending.
"Folly for Three" is told in the third person, but there is one lead character whose thoughts to which we are privy, who is in every scene. She is a married woman, and she enjoys sex, but her sex life with her husband has gotten stale--he is gaining weight, is stressed from overwork, she doesn't love him any more, and she has trouble getting wet. Because of the unchronological order in which the story is told in, readers may think she, and perhaps her husband, are cheating, but we learn late in the piece that they are scared of catching AIDS if they are unfaithful, so what appears to be an extramarital affair is in fact the married couple playacting at cheating; they meet in a bar, pretending to be strangers, and then go to a hotel to have sex--this pantomime of adultery excites her. At the bar a guy described as "priestly" sees them going off together, calls them "fornicators," and then follows them to the hotel, getting into their room (he has a key, somehow), where they are just about to have sex, toting a gun, apparently intent on killing them.
The literary flourishes Malzberg adds to the story include making the husband a salesman--he "sells" his wife on the idea of playacting to make their marriage more sexually arousing, and Malzberg implies that being a salesman consists of putting on an act, and the husband is going to use the same skills he uses to make money--putting on masks and playing roles--to save his marriage.
This story is alright. Maybe it is interesting as an historical document, depicting the fear of AIDS in the early 1990s among heterosexuals.
In an afterword (the stories in A Whisper of Blood all have afterwords), Malzberg praises Datlow highly, crediting her for helping him with the story and even implying she turned it into a vampire story. He also talks about Cornell Woolrich (an earlier draft of this story was a tribute to Woolrich) and George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle. With his trademark pessimism, our boy Barry suggests that marriage is psychic vampirism, like all our relationships, which are fundamentally asymmetrical, one partner always taking more from the other than he gives.
"Folly for Three" has only ever appeared in the many printings of A Whisper of Blood, but that includes a translation into Finnish! It is nice to see that the people of Finland have had an opportunity to experience Barry Malzberg in their native tongue.
"The Slug" by Karl Edward Wagner
A writer, Keenan, comes to Martine for a visit while she is trying to work. Most of "The Slug" is a first-person narrative related by Keenan as he describes at great length how a mutual acquaintance, Casper Crowley, who claimed to be related to Alistair Crowley, kept coming to visit him, interrupting him day after day while he was trying to work. Crowley was fat and a messy eater, and would devour all of Keenan's food and drink all his beer. These distractions made Keenan miss deadlines and wrecked his relationships with his publishers and his editors. At the same time, Crowley kept saying his own writing--books about the occult on such goofy subjects as the connections between druids and Nazis or between witches and UFOs--was going gangbusters, editors snapping up his work. Keenan, low on funds, has to sell some of his books and Crowley actually buys them at a used bookstore to aid his research for his own next book.
Keenan thinks of the obese Crowley as a slug, and tells Martine he killed Crowley by burying him in rock salt. Keenan is drunk on Martine's gin, and she doesn't believe him. But after he leaves, Martine has trouble chiseling away at the bust that is her current project, and we readers know that Keenan is now going to try to suck out her creative energy the way Crowley stole his.
This story is OK, a little too long and wordy. And a slug isn't really parasitic; Wagner sort of admits that calling Crowley a leech would make more sense. One aspect of the story that I haven't mentioned but which might be noteworthy is that Crowley tells lots of obscene jokes about women's privates and animals having sex, and Wagner includes many of these.
In his afterword to "The Slug," Wagner complains with some fervor and some sarcasm that people sometimes come to visit him while he is writing and make his work more difficult. Maybe Martine is a female version of Wagner, which is why Wagner spent all that time describing her tastes--maybe they are his own.
"The Slug" was selected by Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones for Best New Horror 3 (1992) and can also be found in several Karl Edward Wagner collections.
 |
| The rock music Martine is listening to when Keenan comes by to confess the murder of Crowley is performed by Lou Reed |
"Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" by Thomas Ligotti
The central idea of "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" is that dreams are parasites, "maggots of the mind and soul," creatures or beings who lived in the black chaos before life arose, monsters that have no world and so, as we sleep, suck at and steal the essence of our world! Dreams are the reason we grow old and die--if not for their nightly depredations we would be immortal!
The narrator tells us how, as a kid, he had horrible dreams and often awoke screaming and was left exhausted during the day. His mother had an interest in the occult, and took her boy to see a strange old woman reputed by others to be a witch, a Mrs. Rinaldi. Ligotti does a good job describing how she takes the narrator to dark room of her house that is full of cabinets and chests and there works a weird ritual or spell. As part of the procedure the old woman opens a box, and the narrator sees that within it lives a sort of glowing vapor.
After this mysterious treatment the narrator's bad dreams ease up. But he misses the dreams! Dreams not only draw away our life forces, but give us experiences and knowledge we cannot acquire awake by day, and the narrator realizes that he has "an appetite" for "the absurd and horrible, even the perfectly evil." The bad dreams return, but when his mother brings the narrator back to Mrs. Rinaldi they find the old woman is sick. She tells her visitors that she made a mistake trying to treat the narrator, that his voluntarily "consorting" with the dreams not only caused her treatment of him to lapse but exposed her "angel" and herself to the dreams, and she and the angel are now grievously poisoned. Not long after this meeting Mrs. Rinaldi dies, and neighborhood kids who spy through its windows tell the narrator that in the vacant house they have seen a thing creeping along the floor, a thing like a pile of dirty rags.
Thumbs up for this jewel of a creepy story!
In his afterword Ligotti talks about how the vampire (like the werewolf, incidentally) has lost his power because too many writers have leeched the mystery out of him, carefully cataloging his powers and weaknesses and so forth, and using him not to represent some kind of fantastic evil and a menace to the soul but as an allegory for boring psychological, sociological or political phenomena or simply as a physical threat.
"Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" would be reprinted in the Ligotti collections Noctuary and The Nightmare Factory.
MPORCIUS FICTION LOG BONUS CONTENT!!!!
A Whisper of Blood contains a story by Kathe Koja called "Teratisms" which I read in the anthology Darkness back in 2015 and blogged about then. I reread the story today in A Whisper of Blood and had drafted a discussion of it before remembering I had already blogged about it. So I copyedited my draft and present it to you below as a sort of superfluous bonus track or remix:
"Teratisms" by Kathe Koja
Koja tells her story somewhat obliquely and opaquely, but I think I can grok it. Mitch and Randle (not their real names) are a brother and sister who have to look after their retarded little brother Alex, having promised their mother on her deathbed that they would do so. They may all be vampires; at the very least Alex is a cannibal--whatever they are, they are not conventional Dracula-style vampires, as they eat ordinary food sometimes and the sun doesn't kill them. We do have incontrovertible evidence that Alex kills babies and eats them, however (speaking of Dracula.)
These sinister siblings travel across the USA by car. They try to settle down, but Alex, whom Randle (whose previous names include Francey and Marie-Claire) lacks the energy to keep an eye on 24/7 (Mitch has to go to work to make money), always ends up murdering and eating a baby, so they have to move to a different town and take different names. Randle always flirts outrageously with her older brother, showing him her breasts and laying her head on his thigh while he drives and so forth. The highlight scene of the story is when Mitch drives them to McDonald's. Mitch wants to get drive through, but the irrepressible Alex leaps out of the car, insisting they eat inside. While inside the restaurant Alex vomits, and blood and a baby's finger come out! Gross!
In the final scene of the story, Alex having committed yet another monstrous atrocity, Mitch decides the three of them would be better off dead and makes a snap decision to kill them all in a dramatic fashion.
A totally disgusting horror story that tries to leverage not only our horror at gore and monstrously evil crimes we wouldn't think of committing, but also the quotidian horror of our own lives: crummy jobs, crummy food, fights with your family members, sexual frustration, the weight of responsibilities you do not want, perhaps feel you don't deserve (at one point Randle screams "I'm not his mother!") Well done, but sickening and twisted and vulnerable to the charge that it is exploitative and soul-crushing. A possible defense against this charge, I guess, is that it is an allegory of the life of people from broken homes in our increasingly individualistic society in which (as conservatives lament) the church and the family are collapsing and (here's what commies would say) the government isn't spending enough money to help the poor and the mentally and physically ill.
Koja in her brief afterword says she doesn't like to write such ancillary material as forewords and afterwords, arguing a story should stand on its own. I wonder what Harlan Ellison and Barry Malzberg thought when they read this!
Ellen Datlow would go on to include "Teratisms" in three other anthologies, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, and Edited By. It also reappeared in Koja's collection Extremities.
No comments:
Post a Comment