"The Hungry House" by Robert Bloch

This is a pedestrian haunted house story from 1951.  A young couple moves into an old country house, they notice strange things, then learn the stories of how people died in the house decades ago.  The characters lack any definition or interest, and for some reason Bloch writes in a jocular tone which does not permit any tension to develop.  A limp effort.  

I read “The Hungry House” in the 2012 collection edited by the VanderMeers, The Weird.   

"Yellow and Red" by Tanith Lee

Yesterday, via a tweet from Joachim Boaz, I learned that Tanith Lee had recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention.  The very same day I first encountered the colossal (1100 pages!) collection The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.  The Weird includes a story by Lee I quite liked when I read it a year or two ago, “Yellow and Red,” and today I reread it.

“Yellow and Red” is a great little horror story, perfectly paced and a perfect length, with just enough detail to paint believable characters, settings, and images that have an emotional effect on the reader.  Lee uses the first person form (the story consists of diary entries and a letter) masterfully.  The plot is traditional (perhaps “classic” is a better word): in the 1950s, a wealthy middle-aged Londoner inherits a large old house in the country, full of an ancestor’s souvenirs of a successful career in the Orient.  The diarist gradually realizes that his adventurous ancestor brought back from the East something horrible that is in the process of destroying the family.  In Lee’s capable hands this straightforward plot runs smooth as silk and carries real impact.  Hints that Lee means this to perhaps be a feminist and anti-imperialist tale add depth.

Congrats to Lee on the recent award; “Yellow and Red” strongly suggests she deserves it.      

Michael Cisco’s “Machines of Concrete Light and Dark”

Two former friends meet as if by chance, and the dominant, taller, friend, Jeanie, convinces the subordinate friend, the narrator, to accompany her to her parent’s old house.  After a long train ride out of the city into the suburbs, they walk through a quiet, almost deserted town at night, to a house which is under construction, where Jeanie ritualistically murders the narrator.  Much of the story’s 16 pages are taken up by flashbacks, such as to when the narrator broke off her friendship with Jeanie some years ago, and by Jeanie’s philosophical musings about insanity – could it be that insane people have had parts of their minds co-opted by invisible predatory or parasitic machines, machines that consist of cobbled together fragments of the minds of their many victims?  I think there is the suggestion that Jeanie has shifted her consciousness to the narrator’s body while the narrator slept on the train, and imprisoned the narrator’s mind in her own body, and that she has been switching from one body to the next for a long time, but maybe I am mistaken. 

  

The story is readable and thought-provoking, and a few things resonated with me on a personal level – for example, I was reminded of how much I enjoyed riding trains when I lived in New York, how relaxing it was to lean my head on the window of the Metro North commuter train and drift off to sleep. The idea of unexpectedly renewing a relationship with an old friend is also compelling.  However, I don’t think the story is as well-crafted as “Violence, Child of Trust;” Cisco has included lots of poetical descriptions of things (trees, the sky, light and shadow, etc.) that don’t necessarily add to the story, and I am not sure the talk of predatory machines causing insanity is integrated with whatever it is that Jeanie does to the narrator.  Maybe we can read the narrator's first person tale, even though she is dead, because Jeanie is one of those machines and has preserved part of the narrator's mind?  

Still, while not a great story, “Machines of Concrete Light and Dark,” is a worthwhile read.  I read it in the 2009 anthology Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow.

“Violence, Child of Trust” by Michael Cisco

Some years ago, back in New York, I read Michael Cisco’s award-winning The Divinity Student.  I had mixed feelings about the book; I liked elements of it, but wished I liked it more.  The book’s partisans describe it as “hallucinatory,” and for me The Divinity Student was just too surreal, too difficult to figure out.  A Gene Wolfe story will often puzzle me, but I will enjoy working at the puzzle; The Divinity Student was a puzzle that was too hard, and frustrated me.  I finished it and grudgingly admired it, but felt like I had missed out, that it had defeated me.

In 2010 or 2011 I read “Violence, Child of Trust,” a 9 page story by Cisco, and had a much better experience.  Today I reread “Violence, Child of Trust,” which is available in editor S. T. Joshi’s volume Black Wings.  The Des Moines Public Library has copy of Black Wings, and that is where I read “Violence” the first time, but today I found that their copy has been checked out, so I had to talk to a librarian at Drake University Library and gain access to the copy in their Special Collections.  

(As a side note, Joshi, an expert on H. L. Mencken as well as H. P. Lovecraft and an atheist activist, seems to have a very interesting career.)

“Violence, Child of Trust” is a brilliant horror story, written in the voices of three freakish brothers living in the backwoods who are doomed to worship alien extradimensional monsters.  The story is as much about family relationships as it is about three creeps who kidnap and enslave girls and then sacrifice them to alien gods, and in return are granted visions of “palaces.”  The three brothers must work together to appease the monstrous alien gods (if the gods are not appeased the brothers will be destroyed, or worse) but the brothers all seem to hate each other and suffer severe cases of sibling rivalry.  

The plot of the story shows this rivalry coming to a head.  The brothers don’t sacrifice all the girls they kidnap and enslave, at least not immediately; some become servants and the objects of the brothers’ erotic attentions.  The alien gods are demanding a sacrifice immediately, giving the brothers no time to go capture a new girl; one of their favorites will have to be sacrificed, and each brother schemes to make sure it is not his favorite who is sacrificed.

The story is full of minor details which give the reader a glimpse into the horrific world Cisco has created to serve as background to the tale; for example, one of the brothers in his youth was mentally and perhaps physically warped by the alien gods, and one of the favorite slave girls is forced to memorize alien texts and conjugate in the alien language on command.  References to racism and that the brothers are doing what their father taught them perhaps indicate that the tale is also meant to be a bleak satire of our racist, sexist, patriarchal society and its religion.

“Violence” is short but dense - every sentence adds to the story, and rewards careful reading and rereading.  Even the title has thrilling multiple meanings.  Cisco is to be applauded for writing “Violence, Child of Trust,” and Joshi for putting together the volume in which it appears.  Highly recommended.    

Richard Matheson's "Prey"

"Prey" by Richard Matheson is also included in American Fantasy Tradition, edited by Brian Thomsen.  

First appearing in 1969, and the source material for a famous film adaptation, "Prey" is a great horror story.  Matheson doesn't just write the scenes of violence and blood very convincingly- the scenes about human relationships, that demonstrate the horror we face in our everyday lives, trying to get along with the people we say we love and who say they love us, are equally convincing and chilling.

Classic.