2011 Horror: D Etchison, T Lee, and G Wolfe

I don't read a lot of 21st-century material, but I was poking around the internet archive looking for stories by Gene Wolfe written late in his career and came upon Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition, and saw it had stories not only by Wolfe but also Dennis Etchison and Tanith Lee, writers I generally life.  So let's check out these horror stories penned and published in the internet age, only a few years before I started up this blog of mine.

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" by Dennis Etchison

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" debuted in Stephen Jones' A Book of Horrors.  Over ten years ago we read the Ramsey Campbell story in A Book of Horrors, "Getting it Wrong," a story about torture that has particular appeal for film buffs.  Let's hope I like Etchison's contribution to A Book of Horrors more than I did Campbell's.

(Hopes are dashed.)

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" is about survivor's guilt, a topic that is coded as mature, a fit subject for serious contemporary literature or a special episode of a TV drama, and thus kind of pretentious and boring.  This story itself feels pretentious and boring, a sort of fragment of suburban working-class life with scenes in a grocery store and talk about going to Home Depot.  Zzzz.

The fantasy or horror element of "Tell Me I'll See You Again" is a young boy's odd affliction: he will periodically collapse and appear dead--his heartbeat and breathing are actually undetectable during these events.  But then he gets back up just fine.  These episodes are likened to "playing possum"--in the same scene in which the kid has one of these episodes his friends actually find nearby a possum feigning death and the girl of the bunch uses the same technique on both boy and marsupial to arouse them.  We learn that the kid started having these episodes after his mother and brother died in a car accident--the kid himself was scheduled to ride with Mom, but he was busy so his brother went.  The aforementioned girl is a budding scientist or aspiring doctor or something, and is trying to figure out what is going on with her friend, experimenting on bugs, reading books, interrogating him.  He tells her he hopes he dies for real.

Then the story ends abruptly, telling us the boy with the odd malady and the smart girl drift apart and the boy's father dies when he is a senior in high school and the boy develops a sad philosophy about life and death.

This story feels like a load of nothing, lacking a conventional plot structure with characters who make decisions and some kind of resolution, and offering themes and images that are jejune but respectable mainstream fodder.  Thumbs down.  In 2019 I read the Karl Edward Wagner intro to the 1984 Dennis Etchison collection Red Dreams in which Wagner suggests ordinary people are too dim to understand Etchison, so maybe this is on me, even though I have enjoyed quite a few Etchison stories.

"Why Light?" by Tanith Lee

Here we have a tale of a teenaged girl's angst--her father is dead, she doesn't get along with her mother, and she is being thrust unwillingly into the world of adult relationships.  But it all turns out well for her in the end.  I don't think we can even call this a horror story--luckily Guran's book has "dark fantasy" as well as "horror" on the cover.  (I'm not adding "dark fantasy" to my blog post title, though--just remember I'm not engaging in false advertising, but "subverting reader expectations.")   

Daisha is a seventeen-year-old in an alternate universe where they have email and automobiles and skyscrapers, just like your world, reader, but in this world many of the wealthy are vampires and they live on estates catered to by human servants.  These vampires are genetically diverse; sure most of them have to drink blood and are harmed by sunlight, but some, like Daisha, can eat regular people food and endure some time in the sunlight.  Daisha can tolerate more sun than most, and this is one of the reasons her aristocratic family is cementing an alliance with another family of aristocratic vampires by having her marry a guy named "the Wolf," a 27-year-old vampire who is very vulnerable to the sun.  The Wolf's family's bloodline will benefit from gaining some resistance to solar radiation.  These bloodsuckers are into selective breeding!  (Daisha's rough relationship with Mom is also, it seems, because Mom is disgusted by or envious of Daisha's ability to tolerate, even relish, the sunlight she herself hates and fears.)

"Why Light?"'s 17 pages are split into three parts.  Part One is an imagistic scene in which Daisha dramatically describes her mother carrying her outside as a child to witness a sunrise and see how much sun her little vampire kiddo can take.  In Part Two seventeen-year-old Daisha says good-bye to home and rides across the country is a chauffeured limousine to her new home, that of the Wolf, where she finds the vampires of this family live quite differently from her own family back home.  Daisha is cold towards these odd disturbing people, and the Wolf himself is cold--could he be as unexcited about this arranged marriage as Daisha is?  

In Part Three, after three weeks with her new family, Daisha learns of the Wolf's secret sorrow.  He loves sunlight, dreams of it, but the slightest touch of sunlight makes him deathly ill!  He was bedridden for ten months when his parents took him outside as a child to test his resilience to the dawn.

And then Daisha learns what a goody the Wolf is--he cures any humans on his estate who get hurt or fall ill by letting them drink his blood!  Daisha falls in love with the Wolf.  And she has a brainwave--after they are married tomorrow, she will offer him her blood to drink!  Maybe he will gain some tolerance to the sun after drinking her blood, and they can share the light!

"Why Light?" is like a romance novel, or maybe I should say what I suppose a romance novel to be, not being very familiar with them.  Maybe it is Lee's version of Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights or something like that, the novels I am led to believe are the foundational texts of the women's romance genre.  "Why Light?" is also what we might call a switcheroo story.  Aristocrats in stories often oppress the commoners while vampires in stories traditionally murder and exploit humans, but in this story an aristo is generous and giving, and the lead vampire donates blood to give life to mere mortals rather than killing or enslaving them to steal their blood.

Lee is a good writer and her descriptions and metaphors are all good, and Daisha really does talk like a teenaged girl who is all depressed and angry and acting out one day (she declares she will wear black to her wedding) and then falls in love with a super guy and is all gushing over how awesome he is (she picks out a green dress for the wedding) the next.  So the story isn't bad; it may be a superior specimen of what it is trying to be, the characters and setting being totally convincing as they are.  But do I really want to read a story about good vampires or a story in which a teenaged girl meets her Heathcliff or Mr. Darcy or whatever?  Not really.  We'll call this one acceptable, though it may well be catnip for the people who like sympathetic vampire stories or all those paranormal romance books which I know even less about than I do Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, or Georgette Heyer.        

Vampire fans can find "Why Light?" in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Teeth: Vampire Tales and the 2019 Lee collection A Wolf at the Door.

"Josh" by Gene Wolfe

Here we have a six-and-a-half-page story that is genuinely creepy at some points and disgusting at others, so a horror success, thumbs up.  Do I really know 100% what is going on in this story?  Maybe not--as the little intro before "Josh" reminds us, in a Gene Wolfe story the narrator is often an unreliable one.

"Josh" is a portion of the journal of a young man who lives with his parents, a sort of depressed anti-social type, a guy who sees himself as an outsider or loner.  I guess he is high school age.  The family moves into a new house far away, a house in a sort of remote spot by a forest.  Before the furniture has arrived, before the electricity is switched on, Josh's parents disappear, leaving Josh alone for days in a house almost empty, and the journal excerpt ends before Mom and Dad reappear.  Josh has several eerie supernatural experiences in and around the house, and a sex and violence adventure with some hitchhikers which winds up with him trying to hide a dead body and then fearing attack from vampires.  Or so he suggests.  Is Josh including wish-fulfillment fiction in his journal?  Is Josh insane?  Are ghosts making him see things?  The vampires using their hypnotic powers on him?  Who knows?  There definitely seems to be some thing or things haunting the house, but the vampires seem to be coming to the house from outside.  (We had two distinct, perhaps competing, supernatural groups in Wolfe's "Sob in the Silence" a few days ago, didn't we?)

"Josh" debuted in Portents, an anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio, and has been reprinted in the 2023 Subterranean Press Wolfe collection The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories.

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Lee's story is written in a rich style, lavish in detail and easy to understand, but, as with the Etchison, the main themes are not to my taste.  Etchison's and Wolfe's stories are on the spare side stylistically, and a little challenging to get, but while Etchison's story is not engaging at all, Wolfe, as he does so often, does that thing where the story is very entertaining on the surface, delivering the thrills and chills we hope to find when we open up a book with the words "horror" and "fantasy" and a picture of a haunted house on the cover, even if you don't quite comprehend what it all means or what is really going on. 

I'll be mining the internet archive, world's greatest website, for more relatively recent Wolfe stories for our next episode.