Tales of Forbidden Acts from 1995 by Koja & Malzberg, Tem and Wagner

I'm still working the 1990s perversion desk!  In our last episode we confronted three tales of rape and death from Poppy Z. Brite's Love in Vein.  Today we subject ourselves to three visions from the 1995 anthology Forbidden Acts, edited by Nancy A. Collins and Edward E. Cramer.  I got my copy of Forbidden Acts on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books.  The cover is very lame, with lots of negative space, a boring picture, no blurbs and no famous names.  Was this a rush job or something?

Forbidden Acts has an introduction by Joe Bob Briggs, the B-movie review guy!  When I was still living with my parents in New Jersey my brother and I would watch all those B-movie TV shows with hosts like Gilbert Gottfried, Morgus the Magnificent, Commander U.S.A, Grandpa Al Lewis, and Briggs.  Those were the good old days!  Anyway, Briggs warns us that we will not "enjoy" the stories in Forbidden Acts, that they are "rude"and "brutal" and will "shock" and even "hurt" us.  Well, let's see if this anthology's offerings by four writers we've already talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log will rudely brutalize us.

"Mysterious Elisions, Riotous Thrusts" by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg

A professional woman is in the middle of a bitter divorce from her second husband, Gerald.  She left her first husband for Gerald because Gerald was a good lay and was as sexually ravenous as she is, but Gerald started cheating on her before the first anniversary of their wedding.  Currently our main character lives alone, sexually frustrated and spending her free time getting drunk on scotch Gerald left behind.

While drunk she hears a sound at the door, and opens it to find an odd little monster has come to visit.  This thing, which I guess is like a volley-ball-sized blob or slug (it has "stalks" and "ganglia" and green blood) but with human-like hands and face, climbs up her legs and has sex with her, using its "claws" and "smile" to give her some of the best sex of her life!  Then it crawls away.

The second time the monster visits her, after it has exhausted her with its attentions, she realizes it has the face of Gerald!  The last sentences of the story invoke the names of Paolo and Francesca, the famous adulterous lovers from Dante, and hint that, like Paolo and Francesca, Gerald and our protagonist are in Hell, being punished because they let their passionate lust carry them away from their duty.  O lasso!

Rossetti's classic 1855 watercolor illustrating Canto V from Inferno

This one is pretty good, a crazy pornographic monster story grounded in believable human emotion; Koja and Malzberg handle both the insane monster stuff and the realistic relationship material well.  Koja and Malzberg completists may be forced to get a copy of Forbidden Acts; I don't think this story has been published in any other place.

"Blood Knot" by Steve Rasnic Tem

This is a story about how claustrophobic families can be, narrated by a guy with psychological problems who isn't good at detecting relationship boundaries; he was sexually attracted to his step-mother, for example, and to his own daughters.  Tem doesn't come out and say much about where these people live or their jobs or anything (besides that our narrator spent time in the Army), but I got a "redneck" or "hillbilly" vibe from the story, I guess because of the contractions and nonstandard grammar used in the dialogue.  "Rednecks" are a demographic that everybody feels comfortable looking down on, an "other" for people who champion diversity and are always criticizing other people for "othering" people.

The narrator's father had four wives, and may have killed one of them (she just disappeared after a loud night of drinking); he serves as a role model for the narrator. An example of his wisdom:  "It don't matter if you like your family or not.  You're tied to 'em; might as well accept that.  It's in the blood."  Tem takes advantage of the multiple meanings of "blood" in English, and there is a lot of talk about family ties ("blood knots") as well as about menstrual blood.

The narrator longed to have a family of his own, but had trouble attracting women. When he did marry it was to a woman much younger than he is (just as his father's fourth wife, the one our narrator lusted after, was much younger than his father.)  The narrator doesn't know how to be a good husband or father, and found living with his wife and three daughters difficult.  The smell of them during their periods was particularly upsetting.  When the daughters started dating he went off the deep end, and, as far as I can tell, murdered them with a sharp implement ("cutting" those blood knots the way Alexander cut the Gordian knot.)  It is possible he cannibalized them, or just drank their blood (he compares his daughters' breasts to apples, onions and tomatoes, and has drinking blood on his mind, comparing his wife and daughters at one point to vampires.)  This is one of those stories in which everything is hinted at rather than baldly stated, so maybe I am misinterpreting something.

I'm going to have to give "Blood Knot" a thumbs down; I didn't feel like the energy spent trying to figure it out was a worthwhile investment, because the plot and characters didn't interest me or inspire any feeling in me.  Some guy I can't identify with in some place I don't know about murdered his family because he was insane and/or came from a broken home--"Blood Knot" is like the news stories I ignore every day when they pop up on the computer screen or the radio.  Maybe people who are into serial killer stories and child abuse stories will like "Blood Knot."  I know Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling included it in the ninth Year's Best Fantasy and Horror so I have to assume I'm voicing the minority opinion here.   

Back cover of Forbidden Acts

"The Picture of Johnathan Collins" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner of course is famous for those grim sword and sorcery tales of Kane and for writing and editing horror stories.  I've mentioned before how much I like his story "Sticks."  I also like "The Picture of Jonathan Collins," though not as much. This story appears in two later anthologies of Wagner's horror stories, so you don't have to track down a copy of Forbidden Acts to read it.

Collins is a Londoner.  During the Second World War his house suffered a direct hit from a German bomb.  He was in a coma for a week and awoke with no memory of his past--he even had to learn to walk and talk again!  Any records that may have been in the house were destroyed by the bombing. Forty years later he still looks thirty years old, and still lacks any memory of his pre-war life.

Collins is a bit of a lady's man, and also a collector of turn of the century pornogrpahy.  At an auction he purchases some late Victorian photos, and finds among them pictures of two men dressed in women's clothes having anal sex.  Close examination suggests the active member of the pair is Oscar Wilde, while the passive participant is none other than himself!  Collins starts having flashbacks to homosexual experiences with Wilde, and begins to suspect he is the model for the title character of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Collins seeks help from fringe elements of English society in figuring out the truth and finding the painting or photograph or whatever it is that has kept him young and alive all these decades, so that he can safeguard it and ensure his immortality.  There's a fraudulent psychic cat lady, a transvestite dominatrix, and a gay collector of old pornography.  Even though he has been straight since the war Collins has gay sex with the transvestite (at eighty pounds a session!) as a means of jogging his memory. After being "buggered," as our cousins across the pond say, Collins faints and has vivid memories of the photo sessions that produced the pictures he purchased at auction, at which Wilde "used him like a girl" and then abandoned him.

Collins' quest is ultimately disastrous; he unwittingly puts the image that renders him immortal at risk and suffers a horrible, and long overdue, death.

This story has a strong central idea and is well plotted and structured.  It is also explicit (in every sense of the word) and easy to understand, unlike some of the oblique and obscure stories I have been reading in these 1990s porno anthologies.  I do think "The Picture of Jonathan Collins" is a little too long.  In an apparent effort to shock or offend "square" readers and amuse or even arouse "hip" and gay readers, the story is full of explicit scenes of homosexual sex and detailed descriptions of S&M clothing. Maybe other people will enjoy these scenes, but I thought they were too long and repetitive and dragged the story down a bit.

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I wouldn't say these stories "hurt" or "shocked" me, though the Koja & Malzberg story and the Wagner tale are both outside the norm with their explicit depictions of sex with a monster and exhibitionsitic gay sex.  Both of those stories are worthwhile reads with engaging plots and characters and references to canonical literary works.  The Tem story about broken families and murder feels like an episode of one of those TV shows "ripped from today's headlines" about cops chasing perverts, but without the cops.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.  

Three erotic vampire stories from 1994: Koja & Malzberg, Holder, and Tem & Tem

"

I'm back on the pornographic nosferatu beat!  You like vampires, don't you?  Who doesn't?  And you like sex, yeah?  Of course!  So how can we miss with three stories from Poppy Z. Brite's 1994 anthology Love in Vein?  What's that?  The last time I read a story from Love in Vein I thought it was goofy and juvenile and wasn't even sure whether it was a genuine attempt to sexually arouse the reader or just some kind of joke?  Well, that happens to everybody sometimes!  Let's give Love in Vein another chance!  You don't really think that blue-eyed red-headed sex freak on the cover would steer us wrong, do you?

"In the Greenhouse" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg

I've enjoyed horror work by Koja and by Malzberg in the past, and a story they did together, so I was looking forward to this one.

"In the Greenhouse" is consciously "literary," with long sentences in the present tense, many of which are poetic and consist of lists and metaphors: "Flowers surround her: plant, foliage, bonsai and bouquets, staggered floor to ceiling, wall to wall, heaped like coverlets upon and beside the refuge bed; their exhalation is gigantic in the room, their scent the smell of anguish and desire."

Lucia is a woman whom many men pursue, but while she is loved and desired, she has no feelings for any of her suitors.  A flashback suggests she enjoys teasing men both emotionally and physically, leading them on and then rejecting them, only to start leading them on again.  She absent-mindedly marries one man who courted her by sending her lots of flowers, but she finds their relationship a bore and so demands a divorce.  He sends multitudes of flowers and plants to her apartment, making it seem like a greenhouse.  The "exhalations" of the many plants, it seems, somehow kill Lucia as she sleeps, or, maybe, just put her in a coma during which she decides to change her ways--there is talk of redemption and forgiveness as well as death in the brief (six page) story's final paragraph.  Koja and Malzberg seem to be setting up an allegory--in the same way beautiful flowers arise from manure and compost and other dreadful things, perhaps a more sympathetic and kind Lucia will arise from the stink of an apartment choked with dying, rotten plants.

This story is only marginally erotic or vampiric, and it is not particularly fun or interesting.  It is a challenging puzzle, but I didn't feel much urge to figure it out, and it is so cold and distant that I didn't care about Lucia or her frustrated suitors.  Guess I gotta give this one a thumbs down.  

"Cafe Endless: Spring Rain" by Nancy Holder

I don't think I've read any of Holder's fiction before, but I was impressed by the anthology she edited with Nancy Kilpatrick, Outsiders, so I thought her fiction worth a shot.

"Cafe Endless: Spring Rain" is one of those stories about an ugly American abroad.  Americans who think themselves sophisticated, writers and academics and so forth, are always eager to express their contempt for their countrymen and tell you how much they prefer some other country.  When I was in grad school in New York the only people who ever said anything positive about the United States were the foreign students.  The American students always made sure to tell you how they only watched British TV shows and only got their news from the BBC (though some of them eventually transitioned into telling you they got all their news from that Comedy Central comedian) and how they had been to Italy or France and how those people really knew how to live and so on.  

The people in the country where this edition
of Love in Vein was published
really know how to live! 

Anyway, "Cafe Endless: Spring Rain" is about a 40-something American businesswoman, Buchner, and the 30-something Japanese businessman, Satoshi, who is showing her around Tokyo.  He has a crush on her, liking her childish, arrogant, naive American ways.  ("Americans to him were like puppies, eager, alert, bounding and fun.")  Holder talks a lot about how beautiful Tokyo is and how great Japanese culture and attitudes are, and even integrates haiku-like structures (about herons) into her text.  Satoshi and Buchner are drawn to a cafe...the very cafe where resides the lady vampire who recently seduced Satoshi at the kabuki theater and with whom he regularly has gory sado-masochistic sex sessions!

"Cafe Endless:Spring Rain" fulfills our expectations of explicit vampirism and explicit weird sex (wooden stake as sex toy!)  Mostly it is a mood piece, a love letter to Japan.  "The joy of being Japanese was that each action existed for itself, and fulfillment was possible in infinite, discrete moments."  Does it make sense to include Western folklore (all that vampire and stake and sunlight jazz) in a story about how admirable Japanese culture is?  Whatevs!

Satoshi, after drinking absinthe and coffee with Buchner, sends her back to her hotel and has sex with the vampire.  As he has been hoping for some time, the vampire woman turns him into a vampire.  Together the Japanese lovers fly to Buchner's hotel room and have sex with her and drink her blood while she sleeps.  Nowadays we call that rape, but perhaps it is just a dream that the lady vampire is providing Satoshi.  The last page of the story is very poetical and a little opaque, but I think Satoshi and his lover allow the sunlight to burn them to death, and they become beautiful ghosts that fly like herons.  (I've seen plenty of herons here in the good ol' USA, and I agree, they are beautiful.)  The reader remembers that ten pages ago Satoshi told Buchner to go to such and such a place to see ghosts, and we know she will soon see his ghost there and perhaps both Sathoshi and Buchner, across the barriers of culture and of death, will enjoy an "infinite, discrete and fulfilling moment" together.

Holder worked hard to throw a lot of Japanese stuff in there (the rising sun that kills the vampires, for example, and starting the story with a reference to the season, which an American who married a Japanese once told me is how Japanese traditionally begin correspondence) and I guess I'll judge this one acceptable to mildly recommended.

 
"The Marriage" by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem

Whoa, just the title of this one is scary, right, guys?  Oh, we're just joking, ladies, you know that!  Please don't rat me out to the twitter ruling council!

I thought Melanie Tem's story "The Country of the Blind" was powerful, and awarded it five out of five empty eye sockets, and so had high hopes for this one.

The immortal vampire in this story feeds on people's feelings--negative feelings, like fear, anger, grief, etc.  He also feeds on people's bodily fluids, including those fluids we generally deposit in the toilet.  (Yuck!)  As you might expect of an evil parasitic monster with the power to become invisible and otherwise change its appearance, the vampire spends most of his time raping and murdering strangers.  This vampire embraces diversity, and doesn't discriminate based on age or sex, unlike movie vampires who are always victimizing pretty young women.

After putting in a long day raping teenage girls, their fathers, and anybody else who happens along, the vampire always returns home to his loving wife to devour her emotions, secretions and excretions.  These two have been together since she was fifteen; she is now in her nineties and near death.  The vampire's wife is a very emotional woman, prone to rages and fits of tears, and they have had a symbiotic relationship for the last eight decades--he relieves her of all that excess emotion, which provides him with sustenance.  She truly loves him, but he, as an immortal cold-blooded monster for whom a decade is like a blink of an eye, feels no love in return.

I suppose the main goal of this story is to point out how miserable our lives are: the loneliness, the fear, the way we deteriorate and die, and the inequality and exploitation that characterize our relationships.  On the last  page, when the vampire's wife has died and he is leaving their home to continue preying on the populace, the vampire, for a brief moment, suspects himself of feeling some affection for his dead wife, even of having loved her.  Do the Tems mean to suggest that, however terrible our lives may be, that generous human relationships offer some glimmer of hope?              

This is more of a character study and mood piece than a plot-driven story, but I think it works.  Mild to moderate recommendation.

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Their authors put a great deal of effort into these stories, trying to make them "literary," but while the Tems' tale is pretty disgusting and a little depressing, none of them is as scary, sexy, or entertaining as I had hoped they would be.  There is something academic, flat, cold or distant about them that kept me from having the emotional reaction one expects to get from effective horror or erotica.  Maybe this material just didn't push my buttons.

I don't know if I will be reading any more stories from Love in Vein, but in our next episode we'll be exploring more 1990s horror fiction that seeks to cross boundaries and push the envelope.        

21st Century stories FROM THE EDGE by Tanith Lee, Kathe Koja & Poppy Z. Brite

Even though I buy used paperbacks at a rate that exceeds my ability to read them, I still check in at various university and public libraries to see what is going on.  On a recent trip to the Franklin Avenue branch of the Des Moines Public Library I spotted the 2005 softcover anthology Outsiders, edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, which is said to contain "All-New Stories from the Edge."  The book seems to be targeted at the "teenage-girls-who-cut-themselves" demographic, but when I saw it contained a story by MPorcius fave Tanith Lee, as well as contributions from Kathe Koja and Poppy Z. Brite, in whom I have recently taken an interest, I decided to borrow it.  This weekend I read these three pieces.

In the tradition of my blog posts about stories from Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, in which I judged to what extent the stories truly were"extreme," I won't simply assess whether Lee's, Koja's and Brite's tales are good, but will also assess how edgy they are.  Whose story will be the edgiest of the batch?  Place your bets!

Back cover text

"Scarabesque: The Girl Who Broke Dracula" by Tanith Lee

This story is apparently a chapter of an unfinished novel, the fourth Blood Opera novel, which isfdb suggests was never published.  I have not read any of the Blood Opera books, but I assume in the world they depict vampires are real.  If "Scarabesque: The Girl Who Broke Dracula" is considered alone, however, I think everything that happens in it is explicable without recourse to the supernatural.

Sue Wyatt is a plain and skinny 24-year-old woman who works in retail and has middle-class parents.  Every Friday night she puts on lots of cosmetics, black clothes and a long black wig and rides the train to London, where she calls herself "Ruby Sin" and hangs around in goth bars and clubs.  We follow the course of one of these Friday nights during which she is rescued from lesbian bullies who want to jab her with a syringe by a mysterious foreign man who then takes her to his elaborately decorated rooms in an abandoned part of town.

Interspersed with this tale are flashbacks to when Sue was fourteen, lonely and friendless, and became obsessed with the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker and the film version by Francis Ford Coppola.  (She watched the videotape of the movie so much she broke it.)  The same week she rented the movie she was raped for the first time by her father, when he found her dressed up in her mother's cosmetics and lingerie.

The mysterious foreign man makes Sue's dreams come true--he bites her neck, shedding blood, while caressing "her center," bringing her to her first orgasm.  The next day she can't find the man or even his decrepit neighborhood; she searches for him for years, to no avail.

This story is not bad.  I think the history of Sue's Friday night is supposed to remind you of Jonathan Harker's visit to Dracula--the dangerous lesbians are like Dracula's brides, for example.  Like Harker Sue rides in a cab driven by a mysterious taciturn figure.  Lee describes London's neon lights, which are perhaps meant to evoke our memories of the eldritch lights Harker sees as he travels through Transylvania.

Sue is definitely an outsider, with no friends or lovers, and no real family to speak of. She alienates herself from mainstream society with her goth outfit, but without joining the goth subculture--she goes to the bars and clubs but never talks to anybody there, ignoring women who address her and rejecting men who try to pick her up (Sue's experience with her father has soured her on the idea of sexual intercourse; her dream is to be bitten by a vampire like Lucy and Mina are in Dracula.)  I'd say this story is pretty edgy, despite its pun title.  

I should note that this story reminded me of Richard Matheson's famous and brilliant 1951 story "Drink My Red Blood" (AKA "Blood Son,") in which a young boy becomes obsessed with Dracula and, in the story's closing lines, meets the Count, who embraces him.

"Ruby Tuesday" by Kathe Koja

Good song, crummy restaurant.

This is a decent tear-jerking mainstream story.  I didn't detect any speculative fiction elements.

Our narrator is Rikki, a high school student.  I think Koja deliberately leaves Rikki's sex unspecified.  Rikki's mother is in the hospital dying of cancer, and the stress of this tragedy has severed Rikki's ties with his or her friends, ruined Rikki's grades at school, and strained Rikki's relationship with his or her father.

Rikki wants to be a filmmaker, and every week goes to see a film called Ruby Tuesday.  This is a goofy musical, clearly based by Koja on Rocky Horror Picture Show--the same people are in the audience every week, wearing costumes and singing along, throwing confetti during a wedding scene, etc.  Rikki studies the film, taking notes, hoping to someday create a film which, like Ruby Tuesday, will serve as an alternate world to which people can escape their problems.

Rikki is an outsider--like Sue in the Lee story he/she leaves mainstream society by taking up the rituals of a fringe community (the people who see and interact with the crazy movie every week) but without actually joining that fringe group--Rikki doesn't dress up or make friends with the other Ruby Tuesday fans.  Compared to the Lee story, with its gross sex, violence and crime, however, "Ruby Tuesday" is not particularly edgy.

"The Working Slob's Prayer" by Poppy Z. Brite

This isn't a real story with a plot and all that, more like a bunch of character sketches of people who work at a New Orleans restaurant.  According to the intro to this story, the characters described in "The Working Slob's Prayer" appear in a series of Brite's novels.  The story has no speculative fiction elements.

Leslie, a waitress, is from Brooklyn, and has to yell at the cooks to get them to put out the food as fast as she would like: "Fuck you in the ass, you pig motherfuckers!...If I want any more shit from you, I'll scrape it off the end of my dick, OK?"  Paco is the head chef, a culinary genius and misogynist who has contempt for his customers and employers, most of whom can't appreciate his abilities.  Rickey (another Rick in this anthology?) and G-man are a gay couple, Rickey somewhat violent and low-class, G-man more sensitive and conventional.  The tensions in their relationship are the most interesting part of this story: G-man is offended and worried by how much Rickey idolizes the thuggish Paco (Paco, for example, uses the term "fag" derisively to describe men who are ineffectual or whiny.)  Shake is a Croatian-American whose parents wish he would get out of the restaurant business.

This is a somewhat forgettable mainstream story.  Maybe people fascinated by the seamy side of the culinary world (people who love Anthony Bourdain, perhaps) would get excited by it.  Is it edgy?  Are the characters outsiders? Well, everybody uses cocaine and gets drunk all the time and swears all the time.  I guess that is kind of edgy.  But in 2015 aren't the drug culture and homosexuality practically mainstream? And since they are all working together on a team, making money in a pretty prestigious industry, can we really consider them outsiders?

This is the least interesting and least edgy of the three stories I read in Outsiders this weekend.

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I have to admit I was a little disappointed in these stories, even though none is actually bad.  For one thing, I expected them to have more SF elements.  For another, I expected them to represent efforts to really push the envelope, full of shocking behavior or ideas.  The Lee is the only one that seems to be really dedicated to presenting edgy behavior, and the only one I would really recommend to the typical SF fan.

Maybe I'll read three more stories from Outsiders later this month, in search of serious edginess.  

1980s & '90s horror stories by Edward Bryant, Poppy Z. Brite and Gene Wolfe

The Halloween celebration at MPorcius Fiction Log continues with three more late-Twentieth Century horror stories selected by Ellen Datlow for her 2010 anthology Darkness, these by Edward Bryant, Poppy Z. Brite, and Gene Wolfe.

Click to read a census of Ellen Datlow's pets and library.

"Dancing Chickens" by Edward Bryant (1984)

I've devoted two posts to Edward Bryant in the past, liking some stories and disliking others.  Let's see what Bryant has in store for us this time.  I have to admit that "Dancing Chickens" is not an inspiring title--I don't want to read any dumb jokes! "Dancing Chickens" first appeared in the anthology Light Years and Dark.

Like Koja's "Teratisms," which I talked about in my last blog post and also appears in Darkness, this story realistically describes a lifestyle which is disturbing and disgusting.  Our narrator, Rick or "Ricky," is the product of a broken home, a street kid who loves dancing.  He was lifted out of the gutter by a man he calls "Hawk." Hawk and Rick have a pederastic relationship:

He had taken me home, cleaned, fed, and warmed me.  He used me, sometimes well.  Sometimes he only used me.

We are even informed that Rick has suffered anal damage which he tries to pass off to doctors as hemorrhoids.  Yuck!

Alien spaceships have been hovering over the Earth for months; they have yet to communicate with the human race, and everybody is constantly wondering why the aliens are here and what they will do.

At a party where cocaine is available and all of the attendees appear to be gay men, one partier uses a raw chicken, dressed in doll clothes, as a puppet, making it dance to a recording of  "Tea For Two"and "If You Knew Susie."  (Not "Sledgehammer," however, which would not be released until early 1986.)   This performance sickens Rick, who flees the apartment and runs in front of a bus.  As he lays dying, the space aliens use a tractor beam to make him dance around, their first interaction with the human race.  The point of the story is, no doubt, that the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.

This story is well-written, and certainly horrible, but it is hard not to see the resolution of the plot as sort of ridiculous.  It is like those EC comics in which a guy who enjoys pulling off flies' wings is captured by giant alien flies who delight in tearing people's arms off--a little too obvious.  "Dancing Chickens" is a borderline case that I hesitate to say is bad, but don't feel I can endorse.

"Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" by Poppy Z. Brite (1992)

Poppy Z. Brite is one of those names that I see in anthologies all the time, but I had never read any of her work.  I decided to give her a shot this week.  When I read editor Datlow's intro and learned "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves," which first appeared in the anthology Still Dead, was a zombie apocalypse story I was discouraged, as I am sick of that kind of thing, but having committed myself I went through with reading it. Luckily its main focus is not the kind of zombie stuff we've read and seen a billion times already.  (Maybe I shouldn't read these introductions until after I've read the stories they are affixed to.)

You might call this story transgressive.  How often do you read a story in which the smell of the vagina(!) takes a starring role in a metaphor:

The world squats and spreads its legs, and Calcutta is the dank sex you see revealed there, wet and fragrant with a thousand odors both delicious and foul.  A source of lushest pleasure, a breeding ground for every conceivable disease. 

This story is also a real gorefest--among other things, we hear how zombies will claw the breasts of a new mother so the milk spurts out of the wounds!  Yuck again!

The plot: Our narrator was born in Calcutta to a local woman and an American man. Mom died in childbirth, and Dad took him back to the US.  Dad was a drunk, and died when our hero was 18; soon after the narrator moved to Calcutta.  While he was living there the zombie apocalypse broke out.

Because the zombies move slowly, they can only catch cripples and children, so life in Calcutta goes on more or less as usual: the buses run, shops open and do business, etc. The story consists primarily of our narrator, who apparently has no need to work, spending a day strolling around the town. The picture he paints of Calcutta would not be appreciated by the Department of Tourism of the West Bengal government (whose official English website is full of adorable typos.)  We are told that the people smell bad, and shit and piss wherever they feel like.  Five million of the inhabitants "look as if they are already dead--might as well be dead--and another five million wish they were...."  I'm not feeling encouraged to book a flight to this center of art and culture!    
In the morning our Indian-born, American-educated hero visits the temple of Kali, the four-armed and three-eyed Mother and eater of souls, where he offers her statue a handful of flowers and spices.  In the evening he returns to the temple, and finds a gaggle of zombies there, also making an offering.  The living dead offer Kali severed heads, hunks of human flesh, and piles of bones!  Our hero hallucinates that the statue of Kali begins to move, exposing her gaping sex and gesturing him to come inside. Our narrator flees.

This is a pretty crazy story.  Like the Koja and Bryant stories in Darkness it relies for much of its power on realistic descriptions of the desperate lives of poor people.  I'm even considering the possibility that the "point" of "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" is that life is a horror story already for many people, that a zombie holocaust would be superfluous.

I would recommend the story as an experience: Brite's writing style is good, I learned a little about Calcutta (Brite does a good job of creating a sense of place), and the bizarre sexual elements (as in "Dancing Chickens") are striking and memorable.  Plot and character are lackluster, however.  In a conventional story a character faces a challenge or pursues a goal, and/or changes in some way.  I didn't get that from "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves;" the story is more like a "slice of life" or "tour of the city" kind of thing, meant to say something about Calcutta, that happens to be set during a zombie apocalypse.  There was also no real tension or emotional attachment, just the simple shock moments caused by the gore and cringe-and-laughter inducing sexual references; I didn't care what happened to the narrator, who in turn seemed detached and aloof himself (maybe that is part of Brite's point, that people from First World countries don't care about Third Worlders, or that the middle and upper classes don't care about the lower orders.)

I'll read more Brite in the future.

"The Tree is My Hat" by Gene Wolfe (1999)

I read this years ago, and didn't remember the details all that well, so decided to give it another read.  "The Tree is My Hat" first appeared in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, and is also in the 2009 collection The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction.

Like Brite's "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves," "The Tree is My Hat" is a first-person narrative by an American in the Third World, and has at its center an ancient non-Western religion and the narrator's relationship with one of its dangerous deities.  Wolfe's story is more complicated, though, told in the form of a diary and not quite in chronological order, and our main character is not at all aloof--the story is about his intimate human (and inhuman!) relationships.  It also has a conventional man versus nature, man versus society, and man versus himself plot.

It is sad to see a cover that is so lazy

Our narrator's name is Baden, and, appropriately enough, because like numerous other Wolfe first-person narrators, he is an immoral person and an unreliable narrator, everybody calls him "Bad" for short.  Bad, for example, admits to being a vicious liar.

Bad works for a US government agency whose (ostensible?) mission is to provide assistance to other countries. After a trip to Africa, where he caught a chronic disease (like malaria, I suppose) he has been sent to some little Polynesian island.  Bad wants to get back with his estranged wife Mary, and even while he is in the process of doing so via e-mail he has a sexual relationship with a local woman.

Besides the native woman, Bad becomes friendly with the native king of the island, a Christian missionary named Rob, and an ancient shark god named Hanga.  (And exchanges e-mails with a psychic, who gives him warnings of danger--Wolfe crams lots of characters into this 24-page story!)  The missionary, who has been on the island for years, gives us the lowdown on the shark god and the island's history.  In ancient times, Rob claims, a great civilization in an unspecified location was ruled by a tyrannical and bloodthirsty aristocracy, who waged war and sacrificed peasants in order to appease a bloodthirsty god.  Finally, the commoners rose up and threw the aristocrats out--the aristocrats resettled on the island in which this story takes place, bringing their god with them.

Hanga appears in human form to Bad, and sees in Bad a kindred spirit--in an unsettling ritual they become blood brothers!  In a line that will thrill libertarian and conservative readers, Bad equates the U.S. government with the murderous Polynesian aristocrats:

...I had to wonder about people like me, who work for the federal government.  Would we be driven out someday, like the people Rob talked about?  A lot of us do not care any more about ordinary people than they did.

When Mary gets to the island all hell breaks loose, and in some effectively creepy and then horrifying scenes, Bad, Mary, and their children are tormented and then attacked by the shark god--there are numerous horrendous casualties!

Perhaps my favorite scene comes a little before the catastrophic ending sections, and I think it exemplifies the feel of the story.  Late at night Bad sees what he calls in his diary a UFO, but we readers can tell from Bad's description that it must be his buddy Hanga, in flying shark form!

Like a lot of Wolfe stories, this one is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, in that you get all the pieces, but you don't pull them out of the box in the order in which they fit together.  It can take a second read to slot them all together and see the big picture. Also, as usual with Wolfe, it makes sense to pay close attention to every sentence; there is no fat or filler in this story.  Besides airing some of his political views, Wolfe also talks about God and His relationship with man, and about World War II, which, as with a lot of history buffs, apparently fascinates Wolfe.  There is also a surprising little joke which I didn't notice until looking through the story the fourth or fifth time--Mary's maiden name seems to be have been "Mary Christmas!"

Another gem from the master which gets better and yields more pleasure to the reader the harder he or she works at it.  Bravo!

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Worthwhile horror stories.  In our next episode it's back to the pre-war era for some horror stories by M. R. James, whom Otto Penzler suggests was "arguably the greatest writer of supernatural stories who ever lived!"

Late 20th-century Horror Stories by Thomas Ligotti, Kathe Koja & Dennis Etchison

I'm no Dinosaur Dracula, but, getting into the spirit of the season, I checked out 2010's Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, an anthology full of illustrations of snakes, edited by Ellen Datlow.  Early this week I read three widely-admired and widely-anthologized horror stories from its pages.  Maybe these "modern" horror stories will provide a contrast to the Victorian and Edwardian horror stories I have been reading?

"The Greater Festival of Masks" by Thomas Ligotti (1985)

Written in the present tense and full of rich descriptions, but with its plot and point not all that easily discerned, "The Greater Festival of Masks" has the qualities of a dream or nightmare.  I had to read it twice to feel that I had much of an idea of what was really going on.  It first appeared in the collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

Noss lives in a sort of neverland, an odd city with no connection to our own real world, in which a festival is taking place.  A prime component of the festival is the wearing of masks, and Noss walks through town, to a shop which sells masks.  He has been delaying participating in the festivities, but has resolved to now acquire masks for himself.

We come to realize Noss is not a native of the town but an immigrant, and along with him we learn the truth of the festival at the mask shop.  The people of this town, during the rare mask festivals, put on two masks, one after the other.  The first erases their features, leaving their faces egg smooth, and the second mask creates for them a new face--Ligotti compares the slow process of a new face forming to being like that of a garden growing.  After some initial reluctance, Noss joins in this practice.

Any fiction in which masks feature prominently is going to make you think about identity and about the difference between what we show of ourselves to the world and the true character of our souls.  ("Every day you've got to wake up/disappear behind your makeup.")  On the second page of the story we get a description of how deceptive and fake are the facades of many of the city's buildings, incorporating false doors which do not open, stairways which lead nowhere, and balconies that cannot be accessed, decorative features which mimic practical ones, but lack any utility themselves.  This is a city characterized by false faces.  Perhaps ironically, during the festival of masks people in the city are more open and aboveboard: "He also observes numerous indications of the festival season.....For instance, not a few doors have been kept ajar, even throughout the night, and dim lights are left burning in empty rooms."

This city is also one characterized by change; it is implied that buildings come and go, and change places, like the plants of a curated garden.  (The garden is a metaphor Ligotti uses more than once in the story.)  And I think the story is primarily about change, the way change can be scary, the way that moving to a new city can change you, and also social change--everybody in the city, after all, changes at the same time, not each citizen individually and of his own volition.  The device of the masks seems to suggest that changes in the character of individuals come from without, not within, and Ligotti hints that social change comes from the periphery, not from society's recognized rulers ("...the delirium of this rare celebration does not radiate out from the center of things, but seeps inward from remote margins.")  He also suggests that after a major change the past is buried, forgotten ("of the old time nothing will be said, because nothing will be known.")

This reminded me of the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire, and of recent changes in the conventional wisdom about homosexuality in the United States--such changes seem to bubble up from the the culture and the people, instead of being lead by politicians, who follow trends in an effort to appeal to the masses and seem to be lying half the time about how they really feel.  As Ligotti suggests, once the change has taken place everybody acts like the new fashion is the obvious norm, and claims to be shocked and disgusted by the way people thought and behaved in the past.

Well-written, full of good images and phrases, and thought-provoking--"The Greater Festival of Masks" is a quite good story.    

"Teratisms" by Kathe Koja (1991)

This story is sort of opaque, or at least difficult (editor Datlow appropriately uses the word "oblique" to describe Koja's style.)  As with the Ligotti story, I had to read this one twice to satisfy myself that I knew what the hell was going on plotwise.  The tone and feeling of the story is no mystery, however; Koja generates an atmosphere of disgust and despair, of helplessness in the face of challenges and guilt, partly by including realistic little details about the depressing lives of her degenerate lower class characters, partly with all the bizarre descriptions of blood.

Mitch and his sister, who changes her name periodically and is currently going by the name of Randle, are young adults.  Their mother, before dying, made them promise to look after their illiterate kid brother Alex, and so the three stick together even though Mitch and Randle openly detest and are sickened by Alex and by each other.  This soul-crushingly antagonistic family can't settle down anyplace, but instead moves across the country in a beat up old car because, unless I am totally misinterpreting Koja's clues, Alex is a cannibal, perhaps even a vampire or ghoul, who kills and eats children when he gets a chance.

("Teratisms" first was published in the anthology Whispers of Blood, which has the subtitle "18 Stories of Vampirism," but in the story Koja never uses the word "vampire" and Alex seems to walk around in the sunlight all the time.  The story works without any supernatural content, as far as I can see.)

Koja is a little cagey when describing the cannibal stuff, but open with other examples of this trio's insanity and abnormality.  Alex obsessively recites the list of towns they have been to, and obsessively plays with little scraps of paper.  Randle is always coming on to her older brother, exposing her breasts to him and so forth, and I thought Koja was hinting that the three of them form a love triangle or maybe sometimes have group sex:

They [Randle and Alex] were almost to the counter, holding hands. When Randle saw him [Mitch] enter, she looked away; he saw her fingers squeeze Alex's, twice and slow. What was it like for her? Middleman.   

In the final lines of the story (remember our spoiler policy here at MPorcius Fiction Log) Mitch, exhausted by this horrible life, intentionally runs over Alex as Randle sits beside him in the passenger seat, and then drives the car into some trees in hopes of exterminating his entire insane and predacious family.

"Teratisms" is a skilled performance, and is twisted, disgusting and disturbing.  Read at your own risk!

"The Dog Park" by Dennis Etchison (1993)

I read Etchison's story "The Dead Line" in the summer and thought it was pretty good. Dinosaur Dracula praised, and then illustrated, Etchison's novelization of Halloween III just recently.  (Illustration is the sincerest form of flattery.)  So I thought "The Dog Park" worth a look.  

"The Dog Park" is about Hollywood people.  I guess it is about the way Hollywood chews up and spits out so many ambitious people without the talent or luck to achieve their dreams ("success walks hand in hand with failure," you know), and maybe about how the people in Hollywood who have already made it feel contempt for and even prey upon those who have yet to make it.

The story takes place in a dog park alongside an overgrown canyon.  People come to the dog park to network, giving their business cards to the other dog walkers and discussing scripts and that sort of jazz.  In the canyon, apparently, live coyotes and mountain lions who, it seems, kill any dogs who stray into the canyon.  On the other side of the canyon are the houses of rich people.

The plot follows a novelist who has produced only one novel and is leaving Los Angeles soon, defeated.  His dog vanished into the canyon a few weeks ago.  In the dog park one last time, in hopes of finding his lost dog, he meets a young woman who works for the Fox Network on a TV show about police dogs; she aspires to write a movie-of-the-week about Elvis Presley and his relationship with dogs.  Her dog is also stupid enough to end up in canyon.  As the story ends the rich people above the canyon are having a party, and seem to be applauding the wild beasts in the canyon as they devour the TV writer woman's canine.  Etchison directly compares the canyon to the Roman arena.

Maybe this story would do something for me if I had lived in Hollywood or ever owned a dog.  As it is, I am just sort of shrugging it off as OK.  Despite my lukewarm reaction it won a British Fantasy Award in 1994, and is apparently the favorite horror story of Richard Matheson's son!  "The Dog Park" first appeared in Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror.

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Datlow seems to have put together a collection of solid stories of importance to the horror fiction community; maybe I'll read more tales from Darkness later this week.

1991 stories by Kathe Koja, Robert Silverberg and Brian Aldiss

No Godzilla, Cthulhu or dragon on this Eggleton cover

I was pleasantly surprised to find a large selection of SF books at the Salvation Army in southern Des Moines, and made two purchases, parting with a total of $1.50.  One of the hardcovers I bought was The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois and published in 1992. This weekend I read three of the stories collected therein.  

"Angels in Love" by Kathe Koja

I have been curious about Kathe Koja ever since I read her collaboration with Barry Malzberg, "What We Did That Summer," and noticed Will Errickson singing her praises at his blog.  I bought The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection primarily because I saw her name on the cover, and I am happy to report my 75 cents was well spent.

Lurleen is a young single woman who works at a store where they sell classical recordings and sheet music.  Lurleen doesn't like classical music and her boss is a square who expects her to come to work on time and say "hello" and "good bye."  At night she hears the people in the next apartment having sex.  The sounds are unusual, mysterious, unlike those of any sex Lurleen has experienced or eavesdropped on before.  And so arousing that it becomes Lurleen's regular practice to masturbate while listening.  Lurleen becomes obsessed with the couple next door, and plots to break them up and take the woman's place.  But while she sees the woman next door in the corridors and laundry room, she never sees the boyfriend, until the final climactic reveal when Lurleen busts in on them and learns the startling truth!

The resolution of the story feels a little disappointing, but only because the build up is so effective.  "Angels in Love" is pervaded by a sense of dirtiness and sordidness.  Lurleen drinks from a can of beer as she drives home from work, buys cigarettes from a guy who stares at her "tits."  Apartments are described as "cramped," "dingy" and "ripe," a thin woman is "just chicken bones."  Lurleen, back home from a bar, drinks a glass of milk and can smell the sweat of a stranger she danced with on her arm.  Yuck!  Koja also skillfully exploits the whole weird mix of feelings inspired by hearing strangers in an adjacent apartment or hotel room have sex.

(Maybe I'm exaggerating how sordid the story is; I am a square myself, after all.)

Koja is good at generating an atmosphere, structures the story well (it is just the right length and has the exact density of description that it needs), and her writing is clever; she uses words like "tattoo," "pavane," "arpeggio" and "basso" to describe the sounds of sex Lurleen hears through the walls and the sound of Lurleen knocking on the neighbors' door, a sort of ironic reference to Lurleen's own lack of interest in classical music.

A quite successful horror story; Koja was able to evoke emotion and curiosity in me (without making me feel manipulated), like a good horror tale should.  I'll be keeping my eyes open for other stories by Koja.

"A Tip on a Turtle" by Robert Silverberg

New York art gallery employee Denise Carpenter has just been through a bitter divorce and needs to recover.  So she goes to Jamaica to lay in the sun and to get laid!  Down there at the resort hotel a Long Island car salesman tries to pick her up, but Denise shoots him down and instead shares the bed of a mysterious man, Nicholas Holt.  Holt has some kind of strange ability that allows him to pick the winner of the hotel's sea turtle races, and, more importantly, makes him a whiz on the dance floor and in the sack!  No man has ever danced with or made love to Denise like this, and after the initial thrill she finds it disturbing.  What is Holt's power?  Is he a mind reader?  Can he predict the future?  Is it the second sight?

In the end we learn Holt's ability to predict the future is more of a curse than a blessing, and the car salesman turns out to be a hero.

Silverberg is a pro, and this is an entertaining story.  As he often does, Silverberg unleashes on us some of the knowledge he has gathered in a lifetime of incessant reading and world travel; this time we learn all about the coral reef.  "A Tip on a Turtle" is definitely worth a read. 

"FOAM" by Brian Aldiss  

I never know how I will react to a piece of fiction by Aldiss.  I love The Malacia Tapestry to death, I thought the famous Helliconia books were a little boring, and I was incredulous at the popularity of "Who Can Replace a Man?"  I'm afraid today is one of those days when Aldiss and I are not on the same wavelength.

Dozois tells us this story is "complex and subtle;" I thought it disjointed, surrealistic and boring.  Plot and character take the back seat in "FOAM," which we learn stands for "Free Of All Memory."  Appearing originally (and appropriately) in an anthology titled New Worlds, this story feels like an homage to the New Wave, with an emphasis on what people who don't like the New Wave complain about.

In the near future, a British historian of architecture is in Eastern Europe, touring churches.  A war rages nearby, the result of the breakup of the Soviet Union.  American and British troops are involved in the war, which people call "The Soviet War" and "Operation Total Tartary."  The architecture expert is lured into the clutches of a sinister Hungarian doctor by a fellow Briton, an unscrupulous former literature professor.  The Hungarian sucks ten years' worth of his memories out of his brain and puts them on little tapes; he will sell copies of the protagonist's knowledge of architecture on the black market to academics, and his memories of having sex with his tall pretty wife to Saudis.  (In this world TV shows and other information, including other people's memories, can be installed directly in your brain.  I'm not sure why recording the memories erases them, or why the doctor tricks people into giving up their memories instead of just hiring them.)  The architecture dude wakes up, with no memory of the last ten years, in the English countryside, and eventually figures out what happened to him.  He returns to Budapest, gets copies of his memories, and has them reinstalled.

This is actually a decent plot, but because of the way the story is constructed and the style in which it is written it lacks any tension or human feeling; I didn't care what happened to architecture dude, he was like a prop.  Mostly Aldiss uses the story as a vehicle to issue his complaints about current events and the state of the world in 1991.  Europe is falling into decadence and corruption--nobody believes in Christianity or Communism any more, their god is not Jesus or Marx, but the almighty dollar!  And everybody is getting fat!  English people in the story are all jerks, and architecture guy's wife prefers life in California! Aldiss refers directly and indirectly to the Gulf War that followed the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait, and even has a US general named "'Gus' Stalinbrass" use chemical and bacteriological weapons in the Kutaisi area.  Besides trying to imply a moral equivalency between Christianity and Communism, and the US and USSR, Aldiss also attacks private gun ownership, including in "FOAM" a scene in England in which an unemployed dweller of public housing shoots a mother pushing a baby carriage, and the baby, with the Kalashnikov he goes to bed with every night.

Dozois thinks this is subtle?  I am entertaining the possibility that the over the top elements (e. g., the Battleship Potemkin baby-carriage bit, and the American general's name) are not "real," but are fake memories installed in the protagonist's brain, or maybe the brain of the reader.  This seems unlikely though.

If you were wondering what Brian Aldiss was thinking about in 1991, "FOAM" is the story for you.  Maybe if you are still bitter about the fall of the Berlin Wall or Operation Desert Storm you'll enjoy it.  Otherwise, I can't recommend it.

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A mixed bag; the Koja was quite good, the Silverberg moderately good, and the Aldiss disappointing.  Aldiss, like Silverberg, is important enough, and often good enough, that I am always curious about what he is up to, so no regrets about picking up this volume of Dozois' Year's Best SF.

Three more "Extreme Visions" from Redshift: Sarrantonio, Niven, Haldeman

Calibrate the Extremometer!  It's time to check out three more stories from Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, the 2001 anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio which seeks to (according to the jacket) "revolutionize and galvanize the field of speculative fiction."  I liked the three stories I read last time I cracked open Redshift, let's hope I have another positive experience.  

"Billy the Fetus" by Al Sarrantonio

I decided to read Sarrantonio's story to get a sense of what kind of work he was hoping to receive when he sent out his call for "extreme" stories which would "expand the science fiction field."  This is the first story by Sarrantonio I have ever read.

"Billy the Fetus" is a first person narrative written from the point of view of a fetus.  Reflecting the limited educational opportunities available to fetuses, our protagonist Billy has deplorable grammar.  ("Soon as I growed ears I heered things.")  Billy's mother is promiscuous, and Billy gets the idea that the penis of one of her sex partners is a weapon that is trying to kill him.  So, Billy grabs the umbilical cord in his hands (which, he tells us, still look like flippers) and tears it, then leaps out of the womb into the outside world to do battle with his supposed enemy.  He grabs up a convenient revolver and shoots his mother's inamorato.  When "Mammy" expresses unexpected indignation, Billy decides he's not ready for the world and returns to his mother's womb.  He brings the pistol with him; he plans to use it to defend himself should anybody "come in after" him.

What can you say about such a story?  It is "extreme," I'll give it that.  I didn't actually laugh, but I guess it is kind of funny.  Joe R. Landsdale in his introduction calls the story "brave" and its prose "magnificent."  Well... OK.  It's short (between 4 and 5 pages) and it is not bad, and it is definitely original, so I guess it is worth your time.  It isn't an obvious pro- or anti-abortion story, which is what I had expected; somehow the joke on "Billy the Kid" didn't occur to me until I was almost finished with the brief tale.

"Ssoroghod's People" by Larry Niven

I don't really think of Larry Niven as the kind of guy who pens "extreme" stories.  Niven's Ringworld, Integral Trees, Smoke Ring, and Mote In God's Eye, which he co-wrote with Jerry Pournelle, all of which I have reread as an adult over a decade after reading them in my teens, are full of interesting ideas, but I thought them average or mediocre in the style and character departments.

Niven is a prolific writer, so even though I have read lots of his work (besides the novels listed above, I read Oath of Fealty, Footfall, Legacy of Heorot, and Ptaavs in my youth) I had never heard of Draco's Tavern before. "Ssoroghod's People" is a Draco's Tavern story.

This story is about as short as "Billy the Fetus," but it is giving me a very low reading on the Extremometer.  An alien who is over a million years old comes in to the tavern and tells the story of how she watched a civilization rise over the course of millenia, then destroy itself with risky manipulation of its genes.  The story seems to be Niven warning humanity to not tinker with its DNA; or, if it must, to confine such experiments to isolated labs, like on the moon.

"Ssoroghod's People" is fine, but I have the feeling I will soon forget it.    

"Road Kill" by Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman is the kind of guy I would expect to write an "extreme" story.  Even if I'm not keen on their collectivist politics, I think Forever War is a great novel and I also really liked Mindbridge.  Haldeman's style, in those novels at least, is "literary," and reflects thinking about life, psychology, society, etc.  Those are also good adventure stories about going into space and dealing with aliens.  Haldeman seems like the kind of guy who, in response to Sarrantonio's call, could write a story which would use surprise or shock to get me to change my way of thinking about some big issue.

"Road Kill" is a description of a movie; maybe it counts as a "treatment."  (I don't really know what constitutes a treatment.)  The movie in the story really does sound like one of those serial killer movies like "Seven," which is the only serial killer movie I think I've watched in its entirety.  A huge fat guy murders joggers and cyclists in secluded woods, a rich guy hires a Desert Storm vet to look for the killer.  The killer is a sci-fi fan and claims to be an alien shipwrecked on the Earth.  We witness him torture and mutilate numerous people before he is finally brought to justice.

This story is like 6 or 7 pages, and I think the best of the three I have read today.  But is it "extreme?"  It doesn't seem to be expressing some point of view on some big issue.  I doubt we can consider the gore extreme in the post splatterpunk era.  ("Seven" and all that Hannibal Lector business was years before Redshift.)  Writing the story as a movie treatment seems like a novel idea, but I think Barry Malzberg did something like that years ago, though I can't recall in what book.  If the story is meant to be a criticism of gruesome Hollywood movies and/or SF fans or the view of SF held by people outside the dedicated SF community, maybe that is sort of extreme(?)

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Let's rank the six stories I've read from Redshift.  The stories have fallen into three groups in each of the two categories; differences within the groups are minor and perhaps illusory.  The Wolfe, Disch and Haldeman stories are all approximately equally good and equally "extreme."

             Is It Good?                                          Is It Extreme?
Best      What We Did.... (Koja & Malz.)        What We Did... (K & M)        Extreme!
                                                                         Billy the Fetus (Sarrantonio)
             Viewpoint (Wolfe)                                                
Good    Road Kill (Haldeman)                        Viewpoint (Wolfe)                             
             In Xanadu (Disch)                              In Xanadu (Disch)      Somewhat Extreme
                                                                         Road Kill (Haldeman)                                   
Avrge  Ssoroghod's People (Niven)
            Billy the Fetus (Sarrantonio)               Ssoroghod's People (N)  Not Extreme 

If this sample is representative, Sarrantonio has done a good job; none of the stories was poor, and 5 out of 6 have recognizably extreme elements.

Redshift includes 30 stories; it is possible I will read more of them. 

 

Three "Extreme" stories from Redshift: Wolfe, Disch, and Koja & Malzberg

Despite the fact that I own piles of books I have yet to read, I recently purchased seven SF books at the Des Moines Central Library book sale, where adult fiction books were 10 cents each.  Among these books was Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction edited by Al Sarrantonio, a big fat 2001 anthology of original stories.

In his introduction to the book, Sarrantonio praises Harlan Ellison and Dangerous Visions to the skies, even using the phrase "Ellison Revolution," which he shortens to ER.  (If only I had thought to shorten French Revolution and Russian Revolution to FR and RR back in my college days; it would have saved some wear and tear on my typing fingers.)  The stories in Redshift are meant to be as "dangerous" as those in Ellison's famous and influential 1967 anthology; Redshift is supposed to be the Dangerous Visions of the 21st century, pushing the envelope, influencing SF for the next 25 years, that sort of thing.

Today I read the three stories in the book by authors I already appreciate, Gene Wolfe, Thomas M. Disch, and Barry N. Malzberg, authors who are all deeply interested in the history and traditions of SF as well as "mainstream literature," and who have successfully (in my opinion, at least) brought high literary standards to their science fiction.  Let's see how "extreme" and "dangerous" these stories are.

"Viewpoint" by Gene Wolfe    

I first read "Viewpoint," a novelette of 40 pages, in my trade paper edition of the collection Starwater Strains, which appeared in 2006.  I was surprised by how forward, even blatant, it was in presenting its conservative/libertarian political arguments.  "This is like the lead story in an anthology curated by the NRA," I thought after I read it.  Everybody knows Wolfe is "on the right," as they used to say on "Crossfire," and I am basically sympathetic to what he has to say in the story, so I wasn't offended, just surprised at how "upfront" he was about portraying his political beliefs.  Now that I know Wolfe was commissioned to write an "extreme" or "dangerous" story, it makes a lot more sense.

The story starts in a big city, I suspect New York, I guess in the near future.  We find that the police (even the robot police!) are corrupt, the streets are crawling with drug dealers and violent beggars who threaten people with broom handles, and store clerks are angry jerks who act like they don't want to make a sale.  The government has seized all rifles, and frowns on the exercise of self defense.  Government agents insist that people don't really make or own money, all money is in fact the property of the government, and any you keep after taxes is just what the government has decided to let you have.  Everybody has a little screen on his forehead; the number of stars on the screen indicates your social class.

A country boy who lives off the grid in a log cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania, Jay, is in town.  He needs money, and in an office is handed a hundred thousand dollars in bills.  He is warned not to put the money in a bank, or the government will figure out a way to seize it.  What is Jay getting paid for?  To be on a reality TV show; the TV station will announce that he has the money, show a photo of him, and then the drama will be if he can survive the inevitable attacks he will suffer from desperate creeps and career criminals.  (They install something in his skull that allows them to film through his eyes.)  As it turns out, the government is a bigger threat to him than anybody else.  The story ends with Jay hiding in the woods, pursued by government soldiers.  Just as Jay is about to shoot a female soldier he sees a phantom of a Revolutionary War rifleman, and wonders if his hallucination will appear on the viewing public's TV screens.

This is a decent story, and Wolfe does all the violent parts and the espionage/crime stuff (trying to hide from surveillance and escape pursuers) well.  With its long list of complaints about the government and TV, the fact that the women in the story are sneaky and use their sex appeal to manipulate men, and that the black characters speak poor English, I think it is fair to say that the story is "extreme" or "dangerous" - it surprised me, and I can imagine it would offend or disappoint Democrats and left of center types.  On the other hand, it appeared in David G. Hartwell's Year's Best SF 7 and was voted 8th best 2002 novelette by Locus readers, so it seems like a substantial portion of the SF community embraced it.  And as far as technique is concerned, it is a traditional plot and character driven story.

"In Xanadu" by Thomas M. Disch

In this 14-page story, dead people's consciousnesses are uploaded into a virtual world constructed by the Disney company.  Unfortunately, the uploading process is not very efficient, and many memories are garbled or lost in the process.  And you are at Disney's mercy, or the mercy of computer hackers; a man is uploaded into the virtual body of a woman, for example.  In the end the main character hopes for death (as I have found Disch characters are apt to do.) 

The story isn't bad.  I laughed at some of the jokes.  But is it "dangerous" or "extreme?"  Disch dismissively criticizes religion, environmentalism, and feminism, and at greater length and perhaps more subtly, consumerism.  And, of course, Disch suggests that death is to be welcomed, even if religion is a scam.  He reminds you how cultured he is with his references to philosophers, French cinema, and high brow music.  "In Xandau" also has a sort of New Wave feel, with its many one page chapters, its barely-there plot, and the whole death and computers angle.  I guess it is about as "dangerous" and "extreme" as the Wolfe story; it is certainly more challenging when it comes to technique and literary pretension, but it is also diffuse and intangible compared to Wolfe's hard-hitting, in-your-face writing.

"What We Did That Summer" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg

I don't know anything about Kathe Koja, but Will Errickson at his cool horror blog raves about her.  (I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to admit that when I googled her name and all the photos came up I said, "Whoa, this chick is pretty good-looking.")  The premise of her novel The Cipher sounds like it could be great, and lots of people seem to think it is great.  Maybe I should keep an eye open for it when I hit the used bookstores and libraries.

I've read lots of Barry Malzberg's work, but most of it before I started this here blog.  I have several reviews of Malzberg books up at Amazon.  Malzberg's work is almost always "extreme" in one way or another, so I was curious about what he would come up with here.     

Well, "What We Did That Summer" is 10 pages long, and it scores very high on the Extremometer; in fact Koja and Malzberg may have left my buddies Tom Disch and Gene Wolfe in the dust.  For one thing, even though the story is full of dialogue, there are no quotation marks.  For another, I'm not sure what happened in the last paragraph.  But most important are all the other paragraphs, which are depressing, disgusting, and distrubing.

An impoverished prostitute who lives in a shack and lives on mac and cheese she can only afford when it is on sale is drinking cheap beer with one of her long term johns.  This guy has been her customer for ages, and they "hang out" regularly, but they barely even seem to like each other, bickering bitterly through the whole story.  You get the feeling they are stuck being friends with each other because they have totally screwed up their lives and nobody else will put up with them.     

The man had a strange adventure when he was 16 years old, thirty years ago, and he tells the woman the story, despite all her interruptions and complaints (about his poor sexual performance and the callous way he has treated her all these years, among other things.)  The man, along with a friend, those thirty years ago, came upon three girls in a field, naked girls who essentially dared them to have sex with them.  The girls are somewhat odd, with weird accents and strangely shaped bodies, and the boys later dub them "the aliens."  Several times over the course of a month they have sex with these three girls, long sessions in which the boys are permitted to do "whatever they want" with the girls. Of course, this is like a dream come true for the horny teenagers, but eventually the protagonist wonders if perhaps they are taking advantage of the girls, if they are maybe mentally ill, and what they are doing constitutes abuse or rape.

Tonight is the thirtieth anniversary of the climax of this strange adventure, when a fourth odd person or "alien," a man with a strange hat and a sort of necklace, confronted the two boys.  The alien man wore no clothes, and the boys see he has no genitalia.  The alien man explains that the boys must pay, without specifying what that payment should be, and then vanishes.  Thre boys never see him or the three girls again.

His story concluded, the man tells the woman he wants to show her something, and pulls down his pants and starts masturbating.  The woman hides her eyes, but he insists she look.  Then comes the confusing final paragraph.  It seems possible that the woman is suddenly experiencing the memories of the three alien girls.  Or, perhaps, she is just being reminded of her own life, how men have treated her so badly, like an alien, how in her life sex, instead of something joyous or life affirming or expressive of love, has been something desperate and horrible.

"What We Did That Summer" is not a fun read, but it is a strong story and I think Koja and Malzberg delivered what Sarrantonio was looking for when he was commissioning "extreme visions."  The story paints a pretty bleak picture of sexual relationships, includes what some might consider "obscene" images, and shows contempt for one of our finest literary institutions, the quotation mark. 

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So, three good stories, each of them containing elements that will likely surprise or even shock the reader: Wolfe's unapologetic condemnation of a corrupt government which infringes property rights and the right to self defense, Disch's dismissal of religious and liberal pieties and embrace of death, and Koja and Malzberg's disturbing depiction of sexual relations and men's treatment of women.

I will probably read some more stories from Redshift in the future, and also seek out some more short stories by Koja, or maybe one of her 1990s novels.