21st century horror stories by Tanith Lee, Steve Rasnic Tem and Ramsey Campbell

Judging by the contents of my blog you might suspect I am boycotting the 21st century, or perhaps am actually at war with the 21st century.  Well, today we call a truce and read three stories first published in the last ten years!  Today we expose ourselves to three tales of terror from the 2018 anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, The Best of the Best Horror of the Year, a copy of which I borrowed from the Baltimore County Library.  The two dozen or so stories in The Best of the Best Horror of the Year appeared in volumes of Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year, which was published between 2009 and 2018, and I have selected the included stories by MPorcius fave Tanith Lee, Steve Rasnic Tem, a few of whose stories I have read in the past, and Ramsey Campbell, in whose work I am sporadically interested.

"Black and White Sky" by Tanith Lee (2010)

"Black and White Sky" first appeared in the souvenir book of the 2010 World Horror Convention, Brighton Shock!; besides in this anthology and the third volume of The Best Horror of the Year, Datlow has included it in an issue of Nightmare Magazine she guest edited.

"Black and White Sky" incorporates a lot of magpie folklore with which I was totally unfamiliar (I don't think we get magpies in the Eastern USA.)  I didn't even know what a magpie looked like until I looked the creature up on wikipedia.  Anyway, in the story, all over Great Britain, an unusual volume of magpies start appearing, individual birds seemingly popping into existence near the ground or in trees and immediately shooting straight up into the sky, disappearing from view.  These sudden appearances interrupt the flights of aircraft and the operation of railways, and then electric power as the birds start knocking lines off of poles.

We observe this weird crisis alongside a writer, an ex-Londoner who lives in a cottage in the countryside.  There are lots of scenes of him talking to people in the village, watching TV, reading newspapers, etc., discussing and learning about the magpie phenomenon.  We sort of get to know this guy, his writing career, his history with women, that kind of stuff.  Interspersed with the sections about the writer are sections in present tense describing the sky and wildlife and the avian crisis from an omniscient point of view.  Eventually the larger of the British Isles (Eire is spared) lies under a shadow cast by a bazillion magpies just hanging around in the stratosphere--the English, Welsh and Scottish people must endure an endless rain of bird feathers and bird poo, and, lacking any electricity, have no means to communicate with the larger world.

The sexy woman who cleans the writer's cottage twice a month comes over after her husband hits her and she has sex with the writer.  Then the magpies all fall, burying Great Britain in a carpet of dead birds several feet deep, knocking down trees and buildings and presumably killing many people.

I don't know what to make of this thing, frankly.  Is it about the environment, comparing the way humanity treats the natural world to the callous way men treat women and the way women betray men?  Is it somehow a reflection of the stereotype that English people love animals?  Could it be some kind of religious allegory (a longish paragraph describes folklore about how the magpie's distinctive coloration either does or does not symbolize reverence for Jesus Christ), with the magpies a sort of British version of the plagues of Egypt?  Or is it just Lee toying with a wacky and disgusting idea (a postscript suggests the basic idea of the story came from Lee's husband John Kaiine.)  "Black and White Sky" is well written enough, so it gets a passing grade, but it is kind of leaving me shrugging my shoulders.   

"The Monster Makers" by Steve Rasnic Tem (2013)

The narrator of In Search Of Lost Time, as a child, would look at train schedules and imagine what towns he had never seen were like based on their names.  I have the bad habit of guessing what a story is like based solely on its title, and I guessed that "The Monster Makers" would be about how bullies turn kids into school shooters or microagressions turn those microaggressed into terrorists.  The story is not like that at all, of course.

Tem's story, at least in part, is about the horror of getting old: losing your memory and ability to focus, getting clumsy and weak, losing your eyesight and hearing, knowing that after you die you will be forgotten.  The actual plot, which is largely submerged beneath bizarre images and sad musings, is about an old man, our narrator, who, somehow, apparently, by telling his grandchildren fairy stories of monsters, gives these little tykes the ability to distort innocent people's bodies, turning them into deformed freaks (these transformations are fatal.)  Grandpa and his senile and/or demented wife live with their adult son and his wife and kids.  It is hinted that the family in this story is a family of witches or demons, like a less cute and more scary version of the Addams family or Bradbury's Elliott family, but that the son, by luck or design, has grown up to be an essentially normal guy.  The long-suffering son tries to manage the horrible hand fate has dealt him, siting the family domicile on a secluded farm, away from people.  Despite his efforts, the family does sometimes come into contact with people, and these people suffer horrendous and life-ending physical transformations.  His entreaties that his father stop telling those stories proving futile ("Telling stories, that's what grandfathers do," insists Grandpa), the son takes up an axe and pursues desperate measures, with disastrous results.

The style of the story, with its matter-of-fact first-person narration of surreally horrible events and its philosophy of resigned recognition of the futility and misery of our lives, reminded me a bit of Barry Malzberg.

Maybe "The Monster Makers" is arguing that parents' and grandparents' efforts to educate their descendants, to mold them and try to ensure they remember and honor their ancestors, just screw them up and cause trouble for them and society at large.  ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad....")  As I recall, Tem's story "Blood Knots" was also about a disastrous family in which a man's influence on his descendants caused mayhem among the populace.
     
Datlow included this one in her anthology Monstrous as well as the sixth Best Horror of the Year; it first appeared in the magazine Black Static.

"The Callers" by Ramsey Campbell (2012)

This is a story about how disturbing, disgusting, and dangerous women are!

Thirteen-year-old Mark and his parents are staying with Mark's grandparents in a dirty and depressing northern English town, a place where half the stores are boarded up and the old theater has had its seats removed and been turned into a bingo parlor.  Mom and Grandma have a stupid fight and Mark's parents leave early, leaving Mark behind with a train ticket so he can follow them on schedule.  In the evening Grandma goes to the bingo parlor and Grandpa goes to the pub, so Mark goes to the cinema to see what sounds like a pornographic horror movie: "Mark's schoolmates had shown him the scene from Facecream on their phones, where the girl gets cream squirted all over her face."

Though he claims to be fifteen, Mark is refused admittance to the show, as are four other kids--two couples--who blame Mark for keeping them from seeing Facecream and threaten to beat him up.  The girls are more cruel and aggressive than the boys--it is the female members of the couples who do most of the verbal threatening.  These four disgruntled movie fans chase Mark through the town, past sinister nightclubs and streetlamps covered in spiderwebs full of dead bugs.  Mark takes refuge in the bingo hall, where he sits at the same table with his withered old granny and a bunch of ugly ancient women--Campbell really pours on the descriptions of these women's jiggling fat and facial hair, and while they play bingo the old women make various disturbing gestures and jokes of a salacious nature.

That night, back at his grandparents' house, Mark is laying in bed when he hears the bingo women outside, calling out numbers as during the bingo game.  They call the number of the house Mark is in, and it is strongly implied that these women are witches or a serial killer cult or something like that who periodically choose a house in the town from which to seize a male upon whom they will inflict some unspeakably horrible fate!  The women demand either Mark or his grandfather, and I wouldn't trust Grandpa to sacrifice himself for Mark!

As with Tem's "The Monster Makers," in which people get transformed into monsters and killed in front of witnesses but the police never seem to catch on, you really have to suspend disbelief for this story.  Is the government of a First World city, even a city in severe decline, going to look the other way when a mob periodically drags a guy out of his house and he is never seen again?  (Weren't British people under 24-hour video surveillance by the time this story was printed?)  Are the local men going to let frail and obese old women overpower them and kill them?  Even a thirteen-year-old boy should be able to outfight these septuagenarians!  (Paradoxically, while Lee's story has an even more outlandish premise, it is more "believable" than Tem's and Campbell's because society at large in Lee's story responds to the impossible premise more realistically than it does in "The Monster Makers" and "The Callers.")

Of the three stories we're talking about today, "The Callers" is the most direct and conventional, and the least literary (I didn't mention it above, but Lee flings uncited T. S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold quotes at us in "Black and White Sky"), though Campbell writes it in the present tense, for some reason.  Fear of women on the part of young men, and the disgust felt by the young for the old, are good themes for a visceral horror story, though, and I think this story is a success--it may not be as ambitious as the Lee and Tem stories, but I think Campbell certainly achieves his goals here.

"The Callers" was first printed in Four for Fear, an anthology of stories commissioned for a literature festival in Hull, England; besides in The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Five it has been included in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24.

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These three stories are fine, but not great.  Certainly not good enough for me to renounce my allegiance to the century of my birth!  It's back to the 1970s (the decade of my birth!) in our next episode. 

2014 weird tales from Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tem & Darrell Schweitzer

If you undertake even the most cursory research on H. P. Lovecraft, the name of S. T. Joshi is bound to come up first, last and often.  Joshi is not only the towering figure in Lovecraftian scholarship--he has also edited numerous volumes of brand new weird stories.  When I looked up his name in the catalog of Central Ohio libraries, 2014's Searchers after Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic was among the numerous titles that came up (Joshi is prolific and indefatigable, and has published a lengthy and eclectic list of books on a variety of subjects.)  Last week, I borrowed Searchers after Horror, which has a fun wraparound cover by Richard Corben replete with human bones, from the Worthington Library, and this week I read stories included in the volume by authors whose work I have already sampled, Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Darrell Schweitzer.

"Iced In" by Melanie Tem

Longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may remember that I thought Melanie Tem's 2005 story "Country of the Blind" was a first-rate tale of shock and disgust, a well-crafted story that offered up an emotionally draining experience for sensitive souls like your humble blogger who used to get faint in health class when various diseases were discussed.  So, how did I handle this one?

"Iced In" is a depressing realistic story about a woman who has made a lot of poor decisions in her life (if you are the kind of person who judges, as the kids say) and suffers psychological problems.  She is a hoarder, has alienated all her friends and family, and blames others for her problems.  (While the story is in the third person, it is entirely told from the protagonists point of view and has aspects of an "unreliable narrator" situation.)  When an ice storm hits her Kansas home, because she has not paid her bills, has wasted her welfare money on ice cream and chips, and has not maintained her house or put aside supplies for an emergency, she freezes to death.

This story is well-written, and I liked it, but it is not shocking or disgusting, just sad, which is kindof a relief, and kind of a disappointment.  As far as I can tell, "Iced In" has little or no "weird" elements; this isn't supernatural horror or "cosmic horror," this is the horror of real life as lived by real people who suffer from mental deficiencies and/or bad luck.  The ice which is slowly invading the dilapidated house is sort of anthropomorphized, but I don't think we are expected to think it is really alive.

"Crawldaddies" by Steve Rasnic Tem

Like his wife Melanie, Steve Rasnic Tem has written a ton of horror stories and won a bunch of awards.  I was hoping the pun title of this one was not a warning that it was some kind of joke story.

I need not have worried; "Crawldaddies"is not a joke story; in fact it is a pretty traditional Lovecraftian tale.  At age thirty-five Josh feels a powerful urge to return to the remote mountain village in Virginia where he was born, which he and his mother left when he was five.  This place is so remote there isn't even a usable road to it; Josh has to hike there after saying goodbye to his wife and child.

Josh has always been a little odd, and in his place of birth it is quickly revealed why.  In Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" a remote seaside village is home to a bunch of people who have interbred with fish people; well, the town where Josh comes from is right next to a creek and everybody has some of the genetic material of giant crustaceans much like crayfish!  Josh himself is about to molt his human exterior and sprout additional limbs; presumably he is not going to return to the outside world and his wife and toddler.  The reader also has to speculate that Josh's own child, in thirty or so years, will likewise transform into a part-human, part-arthropod monster.

This story isn't bad.

"Going to Ground" by Darrell Schweitzer

I enjoyed Schweitzer's novel, The Shattered Goddess, a fantasy novel which had a healthy proportion of horror elements.  Schweitzer actually edited Weird Tales from 1988-2007 (the ups and downs of Weird Tales' long publishing history are actually pretty interesting--during Schweitzer's tenure, for example, they had to change the name of the magazine because they lost the rights to the name "Weird Tales"), and his stories appear in many of Joshi's anthologies of new weird fiction, so this is a guy who is committed to the weird.

The protagonist of this quite short story is a college professor who is an expert on Edgar Allen Poe, and the story refers to Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" directly several times, so I dutifully read that 1845 tale immediately after finishing "Going to Ground."  Poe writes in the story about our irrepressible urges to do things which we know are immoral, counterproductive or even self-destructive, providing as examples the common desire of people looking over a cliff to jump, and the all-to-common practice of procrastinating in performing even the most urgent of obligations.  The narrator of "The Imp of the Perverse" is a murderer who has escaped detection for years who gives in to a sudden urge to confess, which leads him to the hangman's noose.

In "Going to Ground" the college prof wanders into the forested wilderness late at night, his memory a blank.  He finds he is marching among a column of corpses and ghosts, and then remembers that earlier today he murdered his wife and child.  Soon thereafter he is confronted by their own ambulatory corpses.  Schweitzer's character's experiences mirror many of those of Poe's character: both flee wildly, lose their sight (Schweitzer's prof drops his glasses) and are cornered by a crowd.  I'm not sure if the prof is already dead when he discovers he is marching with the dead, or if the dead are leading him to his own death...it seems possible that he died while falling into a ditch (where he lost his spectacles) or maybe when he stopped his car by the forest he was in reality crashing it.

Not bad, and, of course, it was a spur to reading an important story I would have already read if I had had a decent education.    

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These stories are all good, but not great.  Also, I've gotten so used to reading old books, that encountering references to the common currency of quotidian 21st-century conversation (e. g., hoarding, the Internet) was a little jarring.  We'll be going back some 37 years into the past in our next episode.

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.        

Three more 2005 stories FROM THE EDGE about Outsiders by Elizabeth Massie, Katherine Ramsland & Melanie Tem

Before I have to take it back to the library, let's read three more stories from Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick's 2005 anthology of "All-New Stories from the Edge": Outsiders.  I chose these tales based on their provocative titles, and all are by women whose work I have never read before.  Let's see how edgy they really are!

"Pit Boy" by Elizabeth Massie

The term "pit boy" appears in the first paragraph of the introduction to Outsiders by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, as part of a list that includes "goth" and "bag lady."  I know what a goth is, and what a bag lady is, but what is a pit boy?  I had no idea.  I resisted googling the term in hopes of being shocked and amazed by the story by Elizabeth Massie that bears that title.

This story is brief and effective, a first person narrative by a young man who apparently lives in a dark cellar with other young men.  The boys talk about how there is going to be party tonight, and our narrator describes briefly the arc of his life--born to a prostitute, work as a lookout for drug dealers, and now, apparently, some kind of slave to the guy who is holding the party.  I thought that our narrator and the other boys were catamites, but when the cellar door is opened by the narrator's owner and the lights are turned the truth is revealed--the boys are not sex slaves but 20th (21st?) century gladiators!  The boys are each locked in a separate cage, and Massie describes their battle scars-- missing ears and nipples, for example.  Yuck!

The pit boys are not Roman-style gladiators, but humans treated just like fighting cocks.  Their owner lashes Freddy Krueger gloves to their hands and spurs to their shoes, and they fight pit boys brought over by other owners for the pleasure of paying spectators.  The narrator wins multiple fights, and is rewarded with beer and the services of a prostitute.

Well-structured and paced, and certainly about outsiders and people on the fringes of our society, "Pit Boy" is more or less what I expected from this anthology, something creepy and disgusting about degraded criminals.  I am not sure if we should consider it a piece of speculative or merely crime fiction.  It seems to take place in modern America--spectators pay in dollars, people have names like Chuck, Erik and Ricky (yes, "Ricky" again), and consumer items like boom boxes, Coke, and Pepsi are mentioned.  But I have to hope there are not real to-the-death gladiatorial combats between slaves taking place in basements in the United States, that this is some kind of parallel universe, created by Massie in hopes of inspiring in the reader a loathing for such pastimes as cock-fighting, bull-fighting, dog-fighting, and the way, in my youth, I would throw live moths and flies to my pet anoles.

"Grim Peeper" by Katherine Ramsland    

I read this one because I thought it would be about voyeuristic sex.

Ramsland apparently makes her living catering to all those people who watch those criminal forensics shows; the intro notes that she wrote The Forensic Science of C.S.I. and The Science of Cold Case Files.  The first sentence of this story contains the word "perp," and the brief story takes place in a courtroom, where the narrator is observing a trial.

Our narrator is some kind of therapist, apparently studying people who are erotically stimulated by looking at dead bodies and watching such activities as autopsies.  The trial is of such a person.  The narrator, whose sex is not disclosed, over years of research has learned all their tricks and behaviors (like how to sneak into a morgue so you can hide in a closet and masturbate while covertly observing an autopsy through a peephole.)  The point of the story is that the narrator is similar to the perverts he or she studies, devoting his or her life and deriving sexual satisfaction from pursuing a difficult quarry the requires elaborate planning and risky maneuvers to catch up with.

This story is OK, no big deal.  It certainly qualifies as edgy and outsiderish, however.

"The Country of the Blind" by Melanie Tem

I read this one because the title refers to one of my favorite adages, and I thought it might be about a guy who gets one of his eyes gouged out.  Nothing says "horror" like an eye-gouging!  In addition, Tem, I saw from the intro, was a critically successful writer (she won Bram Stoker and World Fantasy awards), so presumably worth a try.

As it turns out, Tem hits the edgy outsider jackpot with this unsettling and realistic story of blind down-and-outers.  The story has conventional literary values: it is well-structured and full of human relationships and has a good surprise ending.  Tem also fills "The Country of the Blind" with disturbing and squirm-inducing details--examples include numerous references to empty eye sockets, and the description of how a character enjoys kisses from rough, chapped lips.  There is the pathetic image of a blind homeless man wearing a woman's sweater and using an aggressive chihuahua as a guide dog.  "Pit Boy" and "Grim Peeper" both included inappropriate and yucky erections, but Tem wins the gross-me-out arousal competition when the protagonist feels a "stirring in his balls" when another blind person grapples him and sticks her tongue in his empty eye socket.  Yuck!

The plot [WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND]: We follow Clement, the blind beggar and shoplifter, through a day in his life in the city.  Clement lives in a house with other blind people including Seph, their leader and Clement's lover.  Seph has been blind since birth and takes in people who are down on their luck, helping them learn to survive via beggary and thievery.  Clement loves Seph, and there are several flashbacks in which we learn how much she means to him, how she guided him and taught him to survive, even enjoy, his life after losing his sight.  Clement is also jealous, and worries that a young white girl, Victoria, who may be joining Seph's household, may displace him as Seph's lover.

There are plenty of good scenes, some tense and some repulsive, about Clement begging and getting lost in the city with his beloved chihuahua Loozy Anna, who is a poor guide.  Seph and Loozy Anna, we see, are the two things that make Clement's life worth living.

At the end of the tale come the shocking revelations.  Victoria has decided not to join the group, putting Seph in an ugly mood.  She seizes Loozy Anna and, because the dog is not "one of us," tries to cut the dog's eyes out!  To the reader's shock and amazement, we learn that the wretches Seph takes in are not blind when they arrive at her doorstep--Clement and the others were sighted when they met Seph, but Seph demanded they allow her to gouge out their eyes (!) as a sign of commitment to her! And they did it!  Perhaps even worse, Seph, on this day the young girl whose eyes she wanted to possess got away, demands that Clement himself cut out Loozy Anna's eyes!  Our whole view of Clement's relationships with his lover and benefactor and with his guide dog is upended as Clement takes up the blade and lays the dog "on his thigh as if it were a cutting board."  Even though Tem had cleverly foreshadowed these dreadful revelations, I was taken by surprise.

There are three kinds of surprise endings.  There's the surprise ending that is not a surprise, which is not very satisfying.  Then there's the surprise ending which is a surprise because it makes no sense, which is annoying.  Tem delivers in this story the best kind of surprise ending, the surprise ending which makes total sense but still comes as a shock.  Tem's story is like the work of a mastercrafstman, and it is a joy to behold in this world in which so many things are mediocre or shoddy.  

"The Country of the Blind" takes you on a disgusting and depressing nightmare rollercoaster ride.  Very effective--five out of five empty eye sockets!  I'll read more Tem in the future, after I have had time to recover from this draining experience.

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I've only read six of the 22 stories in Outsiders, but I feel comfortable recommending it to people interested in reading stories "from the edge"--the Nancies Holder and Kilpatrick seem to have done a good job putting the book together, collecting stories that are either edgy, or well-written, or, as in the case of Tem's "Country of the Blind," both.