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| 1989 and 2004 editions |
Hot Blood is full of stories by people of whom I have never heard, but there are also some familiar names, so let's read stories by those worthies Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Dennis Etchison, and Robert Bloch, men about whose work I have already written here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
"The Likeness of Julie" was first published in the Ballantine anthology Alone By Night under the pen name Logan Swanson. Its subtitle is "Tales of Unlimited Horror," but Alone By Night also includes Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "A Gnome There Was," which, when I read it in 2014, I interpreted as a satire of left-wing activists that was full of goofy jokes.
Eddy is a horny college student who never paid skinny plain Julie much attention, but one day he notices she has an angelic face and some nice curves under those loose clothes after all, and becomes obsessed with her. Her innocent look doesn't just inspire a desire to have sex with her--he wants to defile her, to rape her and blackmail her into keeping her mouth shut! Eddy resists his own dark urges as long as he can, knowing the risk he runs if caught, but he can't help himself--he asks Julie out, drugs her, photographs her naked and has sex with her in such a brutal fashion that the next day he finds traces of her skin and blood under his fingernails and can't stop seeing in his mind's eye the bruises and bite marks he left on Julie's beautiful body!
The twist ending is that Julie craves being taken roughly by men, and uses her psychic powers to hypnotize men into abusing her, striking her, and raping her. All of Eddy's crimes were her ideas, implanted in his mind. When Eddy commits suicide she begins her search for another man to hypnotize into dominating her the way she aches to be dominated.
This is an acceptable sex and horror story. The twist ending in which a woman is not only shown to be an evil manipulator but revealed to have rape fantasies and enjoy being abused is perhaps the kind of thing that would get a lot of pushback today.
"Vengeance Is." by Theodore Sturgeon (1980)
"Vengeance Is." was first printed in Dark Forces, an anthology of new tales of horror and suspense by many important SF and horror writers.
A guy from the city goes to a bar in the country to ask about two brothers with a reputation for taking advantage of women and bragging about it, Grimme and Dave. Through dialogue we learn the crazy story of Grimme and Dave's demise. G & D attacked two city folks passing through, a gorgeous babe and her husband, an academic type. Bizarrely, the professor egged the brutes on to rape his wife; for her part, the wife ferociously resisted their sexual assault--at first. Then, when G & D found some priceless paintings in the trunk of the city folks' car and deliberately ruined them, the woman submitted to their efforts to rape her. G & D died from a mysterious disease not long after.
The twist ending: the woman had some extremely rare disease (Sturgeon goes into it--I won't here) that is certain death to those who have sex with her, except for her husband, who is an extremely rare case of somebody who is immune to the disease. The true horror of the story is not that a woman was raped, or that some priceless paintings were destroyed, or that two rapists died in agony from a weird disease, but what the two city folks learned about themselves. You see, these educated people thought they were above a desire for revenge, but, when put to the test, the man quickly succumbed to that very desire, urging G & D to rape his wife so they would get the killer disease. Initially, the wife fought G & D so vigorously because she didn't want them to get the killer germs, but when she saw G & D destroy the priceless canvases she was enraged and sought vengeance herself, letting the malefactors rape her as a means of killing them.
The two urban liberals repented of their lust for revenge and sent the guy in the bar out to look for G & D in hopes of providing information to those medical professionals caring for them that might ease the pain of their final days, but the guy is too late, G & D perished in terrible agony.
Acceptable; less sexy than the Matheson story, and kind of contrived, but more philosophical and science fictiony--Ted is at least pretending to give us something to think about instead of just trying to titillate and/or disgust us.
"Footsteps" by Harlan Ellison (1980)
"Footsteps" first appeared in the men's magazine Gallery, where it was advertised as "Harlan Ellison's Strangest Story."
Claire is a werewolf! She travels the world, visiting the world's finest cities, murdering people and eating them. One of the story's recurring jokes is that Claire thinks of herself as sampling world cuisine, and she compares the taste of different people from different cities--people in London are stringy, for example, in Berlin, starchy. The tastiest people are in Los Angeles and Paris. In this story, set in Paris, we follow Claire as she seduces a well-fed middle-class Frenchman at a sidewalk cafe, guides him under a bridge, sexually arouses him, transforms into a hairy monster, rips off his clothes and slits his throat, and then rides his erection as he dies. Then she eats him.
Claire spends some time in the City of Light, feeding on innocent people. Then she meets a man she cannot kill, a sort of plant man--sap runs from his wounds, which heal in moments. Luckily the plant man has normal male human genitals, and can have sex with Claire. The plant man uses his telepathy to convey to Claire some melodramatic goop about both of them being the last of their kind, and they live happily ever after! The footsteps of the title are a metaphorical reference to Claire's fear that mundane civilization is out to get her, that if she is discovered, she will be destroyed (because, you know, she is murdering people by the score, just the kind of behavior that raises the ire of us muggles.) Now that she has found her true love, plant man, Claire no longer hears the footsteps--I guess we are supposed to think plant man is going to teach her how to be a vegetarian...maybe he is going to feed her from his own flesh?
I thought it a little incongruous that a story about a famous type of gothic horror monster we have all heard about hundreds of times, the werewolf, a story in which, reminding us of Dracula, Ellison uses the phrase "children of the night" like five times, would achieve its climax and resolution not through the intervention of a vampire or an occult researcher armed with silver bullets or some other stock horror figure, but with something you'd expect to find in a story with rocket ships, robots and radiation, a telepathic plant man. Also a little jarring, after like ten pages of Ellison trying to write poetically, evocatively, like a "real" "literary" writer, he has a startled Claire yell at the plant man, "You're a carrot, a goddam carrot!" undermining the tone I thought Ellison was trying to achieve.
The narrative thrust of the story is how Claire changes, from a lonely person who feels hunted by society to somebody who finds true love and safety. That is all well and good, but a theme less in tune with our current zeitgeist is how the lone werewolf Claire was in total control of her life, and then chooses to give up control of her life to a (plant) man. "But now she was helpless, and she didn't mind giving over control to him." So far we have two stories, this one and Matheson's "The Likeness of Julie," about women murderers whose deepest need is to be dominated by a man. I don't think we'll be seeing a blurb from Gloria Steinem on the next edition of Hot Blood.
"Footsteps" is OK, no big deal. My attitude about Ellison is like my attitude about the Beatles--I am constantly being told that they are the best, to the point that it is annoying, but while I think they are good, they just don't move me or interest me the way a dozen or more artists working in the same genre do.
(After drafting the above assessment of "Footsteps," a little googling brought to my attention the story that "Footsteps" was the product of a stunt in which Ellison wrote the story in front of an audience who provided the raw material for the story, improv style--the story is about a lady werewolf rapist in Paris because people in the audience set those parameters. I believe it is still fair to judge the story like I would any other story, because it is presented to us in Hot Blood just like any other story, and during the years between the initial event that birthed the story and its appearance in the collection Angry Candy in 1988 and Hot Blood in 1989, Ellison had ample opportunity to revise and polish it--Ellison must have felt the version I read was satisfactory.)
"Daughter of the Golden West" by Dennis Etchison (1973)
"Daughter of the Golden West" was first printed in the men's magazine Cavalier under the title "A Feast for Cathy." (Cavalier in the 1970s, I now know, was full of early Stephen King stories and cartoons of nude women by Vaughn Bode. I learn a lot of exciting information working on this blog.)
"Daughter of the Golden West" is the best constructed and best written story I have yet read from Hot Blood. Etchison moves things forward at a good pace, starting us off with a mystery and giving us little nuggets of information that finally add up to the ultimate horror on the last page in a way which is satisfyingly striking. Along the way Etchison provides images that are sharper and human relationships that are more interesting than anything Matheson, Sturgeon or Ellison offered us. The reader gets the feeling that Etchison actually thought about the story and worked hard crafting it--it operates like a complex but smooth-running machine with a unified tone that leads logically to its erotic and gory conclusion, unlike the simple plots punctuated by a crazy surprise twist ending presented to us by Matheson, Sturgeon and Ellison. And while Ellison's writing is showy and flashy, an obtrusive and heavy-handed effort at appearing literary, Etchison's piece here actually feels literary, each of the sentences feels like it is pursuing some story goal, not a pointless piece of fancy embroidery that screams, "Hey, I'm a writer!" Even when you discover words like "gestalt" and "virgule" embedded in Etchsion's prose you try to figure out what Etchison is trying to accomplish with them, you don't just roll your eyes the way you do the fourth and fifth time Ellison waves "children of the night" in your face like a cheerleader's pom poms.
The plot: Three California high school boys are best buddies, doing everything together. Then one of them disappears, and is found dead, the lower part of his body mutilated. Two other young men have suffered a similar fate in the last few months. The two surviving friends grieve, but also begin doing a little detective work, eventually going to talk to the high school girl, Cathy, who is probably the last person their dead buddy ever spoke to. At her house they face the same horrifying danger that destroyed their predecessors--Cathy and her sisters are descended from a member of the Donner party, and have taken up cannibalism! Their modus operandi is to seduce men and then incapacitate them by biting off their you-know-whats during fellatio!
A very good horror story; not only are the final scenes at Cathy's house, where the seduction, sex and murder take place, powerful, but the earlier scenes, in which the two boys and other members of the community deal with the shock and grief of the loss of one of their number, are also effective. I can recommend this one with some enthusiasm.
"The Model" by Robert Bloch (1975)
Like Ellison's "Footsteps," Bloch's "The Model" first appeared in Gallery, the author's name being given a spot on the cover. This cover, however, unabashedly features a woman's bare breasts, and, for fear of getting on the wrong side of the Google authorities, and making my protestations of being a libertarian and a free-speech absolutist look pretty hollow, I am censoring the image of the November 1975 issue of Gallery that is appearing here at MPorcius Fiction Log. To see the original cover image in all its glory, try here.
Remember how in "The Closer of the Way" Bloch used himself as the narrator and set the tale in an asylum? Well, he uses the same gag here. Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, talks to a mental patient, who tells him the story of his relationship with tall, thin Vilma, a fashion model he met while working at an ad agency. He was some kind of assistant who handled schedules, and with no creative work to do had time to hang out with Vilma when his agency was building a campaign around photos of her taken in the Caribbean. Vilma, the photog, the clothing and make up guy, and the assistant guy, traveled from port to port on a cruise ship, and between islands the assistant guy and Vilma spent their days on the ship sitting in the shade and shooting the breeze. He lusted after the beauty, even fell in love with her, but she was very cool, gently rebuffing all his advances.
After two weeks of getting nowhere with Vilma, as the ship was about to return to Miami, Vilma finally invited him to her room. She told him she wanted his genetic material, and revealed herself to be some kind of monster whose beautiful head was just an artificial appliance--her real eyes were on her nipples! Even more horrifying was her vagina, which had teeth which she used to take possession of the man's genitals after arousing him and binding him with her special powers. Vilma has not been seen since, and the assistant guy, who survived the removal of his genitals, is considered to have been driven insane by the mutilation he suffered--obviously nobody believes his story of Vilma being an inhuman monster.
The sense-of-wonder ending of this feeble story is Bloch suggesting that all those tall thin fashion models we see in magazines and ad campaigns, with their cool emotionless expressions, are inhuman creatures in disguise, monsters bred by some mysterious entity for some mysterious purpose.
Lame, the worst story we have discussed today. It is a good idea to explore men's fear of losing their maleness (independence and virility and so forth) to a woman who wants to make a child with them, but Bloch only does this in the most shallow way, and then he tacks on the gimmicky concept that fashion models aren't really human, a theory that he just throws out there and doesn't do anything with that might be interesting or emotionally engaging. "The Model" has no character development, no foreshadowing, no images besides the monstrous woman with eyes on her boobs and a toothy maw between her thighs, it's just six pages of filler and then the shock ending.
Thumbs down.
**********
Five stories that offer the perennially appropriate advice, "Guys, maybe you should just keep it in your pants." Four of the stories feature manipulative and murderous women, a reflection of the fact that men are scared of women and the desires they inspire in us, and the vulnerability we find ourselves in when we try to satisfy those desires.
Dennis Etchison's contribution is far and away the best, delivering successful sexual and horrific content in a story that works in every way. Richard Matheson comes in second with another story with decent erotic and terror elements. In third place we see Ted Sturgeon, who unloads some speculative medical science on us as well as raising issues about how we should treat with those who trespass against us. Then we have Harlan Ellison's mediocre offering, apparently the product of a stunt, followed by Robert Bloch's lackluster, anemic production, which fails to cross the finish line and is mired in "bad" territory.
I think my last dozen posts have been about short stories, but our next post will be about a science fiction novel by one of the SFWA Grand Masters, a novel I have wanted to reread for a while.
Eddy is a horny college student who never paid skinny plain Julie much attention, but one day he notices she has an angelic face and some nice curves under those loose clothes after all, and becomes obsessed with her. Her innocent look doesn't just inspire a desire to have sex with her--he wants to defile her, to rape her and blackmail her into keeping her mouth shut! Eddy resists his own dark urges as long as he can, knowing the risk he runs if caught, but he can't help himself--he asks Julie out, drugs her, photographs her naked and has sex with her in such a brutal fashion that the next day he finds traces of her skin and blood under his fingernails and can't stop seeing in his mind's eye the bruises and bite marks he left on Julie's beautiful body!
The twist ending is that Julie craves being taken roughly by men, and uses her psychic powers to hypnotize men into abusing her, striking her, and raping her. All of Eddy's crimes were her ideas, implanted in his mind. When Eddy commits suicide she begins her search for another man to hypnotize into dominating her the way she aches to be dominated.
This is an acceptable sex and horror story. The twist ending in which a woman is not only shown to be an evil manipulator but revealed to have rape fantasies and enjoy being abused is perhaps the kind of thing that would get a lot of pushback today.
"Vengeance Is." was first printed in Dark Forces, an anthology of new tales of horror and suspense by many important SF and horror writers.
A guy from the city goes to a bar in the country to ask about two brothers with a reputation for taking advantage of women and bragging about it, Grimme and Dave. Through dialogue we learn the crazy story of Grimme and Dave's demise. G & D attacked two city folks passing through, a gorgeous babe and her husband, an academic type. Bizarrely, the professor egged the brutes on to rape his wife; for her part, the wife ferociously resisted their sexual assault--at first. Then, when G & D found some priceless paintings in the trunk of the city folks' car and deliberately ruined them, the woman submitted to their efforts to rape her. G & D died from a mysterious disease not long after.
The twist ending: the woman had some extremely rare disease (Sturgeon goes into it--I won't here) that is certain death to those who have sex with her, except for her husband, who is an extremely rare case of somebody who is immune to the disease. The true horror of the story is not that a woman was raped, or that some priceless paintings were destroyed, or that two rapists died in agony from a weird disease, but what the two city folks learned about themselves. You see, these educated people thought they were above a desire for revenge, but, when put to the test, the man quickly succumbed to that very desire, urging G & D to rape his wife so they would get the killer disease. Initially, the wife fought G & D so vigorously because she didn't want them to get the killer germs, but when she saw G & D destroy the priceless canvases she was enraged and sought vengeance herself, letting the malefactors rape her as a means of killing them.
The two urban liberals repented of their lust for revenge and sent the guy in the bar out to look for G & D in hopes of providing information to those medical professionals caring for them that might ease the pain of their final days, but the guy is too late, G & D perished in terrible agony.
Acceptable; less sexy than the Matheson story, and kind of contrived, but more philosophical and science fictiony--Ted is at least pretending to give us something to think about instead of just trying to titillate and/or disgust us.
"Footsteps" first appeared in the men's magazine Gallery, where it was advertised as "Harlan Ellison's Strangest Story."
Claire is a werewolf! She travels the world, visiting the world's finest cities, murdering people and eating them. One of the story's recurring jokes is that Claire thinks of herself as sampling world cuisine, and she compares the taste of different people from different cities--people in London are stringy, for example, in Berlin, starchy. The tastiest people are in Los Angeles and Paris. In this story, set in Paris, we follow Claire as she seduces a well-fed middle-class Frenchman at a sidewalk cafe, guides him under a bridge, sexually arouses him, transforms into a hairy monster, rips off his clothes and slits his throat, and then rides his erection as he dies. Then she eats him.
Claire spends some time in the City of Light, feeding on innocent people. Then she meets a man she cannot kill, a sort of plant man--sap runs from his wounds, which heal in moments. Luckily the plant man has normal male human genitals, and can have sex with Claire. The plant man uses his telepathy to convey to Claire some melodramatic goop about both of them being the last of their kind, and they live happily ever after! The footsteps of the title are a metaphorical reference to Claire's fear that mundane civilization is out to get her, that if she is discovered, she will be destroyed (because, you know, she is murdering people by the score, just the kind of behavior that raises the ire of us muggles.) Now that she has found her true love, plant man, Claire no longer hears the footsteps--I guess we are supposed to think plant man is going to teach her how to be a vegetarian...maybe he is going to feed her from his own flesh?
I thought it a little incongruous that a story about a famous type of gothic horror monster we have all heard about hundreds of times, the werewolf, a story in which, reminding us of Dracula, Ellison uses the phrase "children of the night" like five times, would achieve its climax and resolution not through the intervention of a vampire or an occult researcher armed with silver bullets or some other stock horror figure, but with something you'd expect to find in a story with rocket ships, robots and radiation, a telepathic plant man. Also a little jarring, after like ten pages of Ellison trying to write poetically, evocatively, like a "real" "literary" writer, he has a startled Claire yell at the plant man, "You're a carrot, a goddam carrot!" undermining the tone I thought Ellison was trying to achieve.
The narrative thrust of the story is how Claire changes, from a lonely person who feels hunted by society to somebody who finds true love and safety. That is all well and good, but a theme less in tune with our current zeitgeist is how the lone werewolf Claire was in total control of her life, and then chooses to give up control of her life to a (plant) man. "But now she was helpless, and she didn't mind giving over control to him." So far we have two stories, this one and Matheson's "The Likeness of Julie," about women murderers whose deepest need is to be dominated by a man. I don't think we'll be seeing a blurb from Gloria Steinem on the next edition of Hot Blood.
"Footsteps" is OK, no big deal. My attitude about Ellison is like my attitude about the Beatles--I am constantly being told that they are the best, to the point that it is annoying, but while I think they are good, they just don't move me or interest me the way a dozen or more artists working in the same genre do.
(After drafting the above assessment of "Footsteps," a little googling brought to my attention the story that "Footsteps" was the product of a stunt in which Ellison wrote the story in front of an audience who provided the raw material for the story, improv style--the story is about a lady werewolf rapist in Paris because people in the audience set those parameters. I believe it is still fair to judge the story like I would any other story, because it is presented to us in Hot Blood just like any other story, and during the years between the initial event that birthed the story and its appearance in the collection Angry Candy in 1988 and Hot Blood in 1989, Ellison had ample opportunity to revise and polish it--Ellison must have felt the version I read was satisfactory.)
"Daughter of the Golden West" was first printed in the men's magazine Cavalier under the title "A Feast for Cathy." (Cavalier in the 1970s, I now know, was full of early Stephen King stories and cartoons of nude women by Vaughn Bode. I learn a lot of exciting information working on this blog.)
"Daughter of the Golden West" is the best constructed and best written story I have yet read from Hot Blood. Etchison moves things forward at a good pace, starting us off with a mystery and giving us little nuggets of information that finally add up to the ultimate horror on the last page in a way which is satisfyingly striking. Along the way Etchison provides images that are sharper and human relationships that are more interesting than anything Matheson, Sturgeon or Ellison offered us. The reader gets the feeling that Etchison actually thought about the story and worked hard crafting it--it operates like a complex but smooth-running machine with a unified tone that leads logically to its erotic and gory conclusion, unlike the simple plots punctuated by a crazy surprise twist ending presented to us by Matheson, Sturgeon and Ellison. And while Ellison's writing is showy and flashy, an obtrusive and heavy-handed effort at appearing literary, Etchison's piece here actually feels literary, each of the sentences feels like it is pursuing some story goal, not a pointless piece of fancy embroidery that screams, "Hey, I'm a writer!" Even when you discover words like "gestalt" and "virgule" embedded in Etchsion's prose you try to figure out what Etchison is trying to accomplish with them, you don't just roll your eyes the way you do the fourth and fifth time Ellison waves "children of the night" in your face like a cheerleader's pom poms.
The plot: Three California high school boys are best buddies, doing everything together. Then one of them disappears, and is found dead, the lower part of his body mutilated. Two other young men have suffered a similar fate in the last few months. The two surviving friends grieve, but also begin doing a little detective work, eventually going to talk to the high school girl, Cathy, who is probably the last person their dead buddy ever spoke to. At her house they face the same horrifying danger that destroyed their predecessors--Cathy and her sisters are descended from a member of the Donner party, and have taken up cannibalism! Their modus operandi is to seduce men and then incapacitate them by biting off their you-know-whats during fellatio!
A very good horror story; not only are the final scenes at Cathy's house, where the seduction, sex and murder take place, powerful, but the earlier scenes, in which the two boys and other members of the community deal with the shock and grief of the loss of one of their number, are also effective. I can recommend this one with some enthusiasm.
"The Model" by Robert Bloch (1975)Like Ellison's "Footsteps," Bloch's "The Model" first appeared in Gallery, the author's name being given a spot on the cover. This cover, however, unabashedly features a woman's bare breasts, and, for fear of getting on the wrong side of the Google authorities, and making my protestations of being a libertarian and a free-speech absolutist look pretty hollow, I am censoring the image of the November 1975 issue of Gallery that is appearing here at MPorcius Fiction Log. To see the original cover image in all its glory, try here.
Remember how in "The Closer of the Way" Bloch used himself as the narrator and set the tale in an asylum? Well, he uses the same gag here. Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, talks to a mental patient, who tells him the story of his relationship with tall, thin Vilma, a fashion model he met while working at an ad agency. He was some kind of assistant who handled schedules, and with no creative work to do had time to hang out with Vilma when his agency was building a campaign around photos of her taken in the Caribbean. Vilma, the photog, the clothing and make up guy, and the assistant guy, traveled from port to port on a cruise ship, and between islands the assistant guy and Vilma spent their days on the ship sitting in the shade and shooting the breeze. He lusted after the beauty, even fell in love with her, but she was very cool, gently rebuffing all his advances.
After two weeks of getting nowhere with Vilma, as the ship was about to return to Miami, Vilma finally invited him to her room. She told him she wanted his genetic material, and revealed herself to be some kind of monster whose beautiful head was just an artificial appliance--her real eyes were on her nipples! Even more horrifying was her vagina, which had teeth which she used to take possession of the man's genitals after arousing him and binding him with her special powers. Vilma has not been seen since, and the assistant guy, who survived the removal of his genitals, is considered to have been driven insane by the mutilation he suffered--obviously nobody believes his story of Vilma being an inhuman monster.
The sense-of-wonder ending of this feeble story is Bloch suggesting that all those tall thin fashion models we see in magazines and ad campaigns, with their cool emotionless expressions, are inhuman creatures in disguise, monsters bred by some mysterious entity for some mysterious purpose.
Lame, the worst story we have discussed today. It is a good idea to explore men's fear of losing their maleness (independence and virility and so forth) to a woman who wants to make a child with them, but Bloch only does this in the most shallow way, and then he tacks on the gimmicky concept that fashion models aren't really human, a theory that he just throws out there and doesn't do anything with that might be interesting or emotionally engaging. "The Model" has no character development, no foreshadowing, no images besides the monstrous woman with eyes on her boobs and a toothy maw between her thighs, it's just six pages of filler and then the shock ending.
Thumbs down.
**********
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| German edition of Hot Blood |
Dennis Etchison's contribution is far and away the best, delivering successful sexual and horrific content in a story that works in every way. Richard Matheson comes in second with another story with decent erotic and terror elements. In third place we see Ted Sturgeon, who unloads some speculative medical science on us as well as raising issues about how we should treat with those who trespass against us. Then we have Harlan Ellison's mediocre offering, apparently the product of a stunt, followed by Robert Bloch's lackluster, anemic production, which fails to cross the finish line and is mired in "bad" territory.
I think my last dozen posts have been about short stories, but our next post will be about a science fiction novel by one of the SFWA Grand Masters, a novel I have wanted to reread for a while.
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