"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 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.
I was born a couple decades before you were, but we share the same fondness for SF and Fantasy in the second half of the 20th Century. Like you, I've found a lot of the contemporary fiction published today to be mediocre and disappointing.
ReplyDeleteThough I may not be in tune with 21st century culture, I am still grateful to be alive now in the internet age, when so much information, literature and art that I never would have been able to access is right at my fingertips thanks to Wikipedia, the internet archive, isfdb, youtube, ebay, etc.
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