In his introduction to Red Dreams, Karl Edward Wagner of Kane and "Sticks" fame says that most horror fans are too unsophisticated to get Etchison and that even serious horror readers often find him "too subtle" or "too downbeat." Let's read three stories from the collection and see if we pass the KEW test or should be consigned to the ranks of what Wagner calls "the average shock fan" or "the reader of supermarket-pop horror;" I really liked an early version of Etchison's "Wet Season," a revision of which appears here in Red Dreams, and his "It Only Comes Out at Night," so I think there is a chance of passing this test!
(I find it annoying when authors attack other authors in an oblique "I'm preserving plausible deniability to protect my career" fashion. Who is Wagner slurring when he talks about "supermarket-pop horror?" What horror novels would be sold in a supermarket in 1985? Christine and Pet Semetary and The Talisman? Is Wagner hinting that he thinks Stephen King sucks? This seems unlikely, as Wagner included King stories in the volumes of DAW's Year's Best Horror he edited in '81, '84 and '85. It's a mystery!)
"Talking in the Dark" was in Charles L. Grant's Shadows 7, was chosen by Wagner for DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series XIII, and would serve as the title story for a 2001 Etchison collection. Maybe reading this story is a good way to figure out what Etchison is all about.
The ironically named Victor Ripon is a man in his early thirties who has lots of problems. He dropped out of pre-med to become some kind of computer tech, and that didn't work out, either. His wife left him and he never sees his kids--she travels around the country, apparently a deliberate strategy to make it difficult for him to find her. He now lives in his dead parents' decrepit old house, eking out an existence repairing appliances in a little shop he rents behind the local diner. Victor's poor decisions and his incapacities hurt him and they hurt those around him, like the waitress at the diner who would like to be his steady girlfriend or wife and make a life with him--Victor lacks the energy or interest to meet her halfway, to care for her like she wants to care for him.
His life just one miserable day after another, Victor is on the brink--only one thing really matters to him: the horror novels of Rex Christian! In a long letter that is amusing because of its solecisms and pathetic because of its desperate need, Victor says he likes Christian's work because "in your books people always get what they deserve" and invites Christian to come visit him, suggesting that the two have much in common and can help each other.
I guess I've already addressed this issue at the blog here, but I will again present my theory that a true horror story doesn't suggest that "people always get what they deserve." There are tons of stories that are nominally horror stories in which a guy kills a spider and then gets eaten by a giant spider or steals a pile of money and then gets drowned in a pile of money or runs a Nazi death camp or a German submarine and then in Hell is a prisoner in a death camp or a civilian passenger on a doomed Allied freighter as it gets torpedoed by a U-boat. These are stories in which bad people suffer poetic justice, stories which present the universe as an orderly place in which bad people are punished for their misdeeds. Such a universe is not horrible or horrifying--such a universe would be an improvement over our real universe, in which innocent people suffer through no fault of their own all the time and bad people prosper from their misdeeds, and people can't even agree on what constitutes a misdeed. To my mind, a real horror story is a reminder that the universe is inexplicable chaos and morality is an opinion and life is meaningless. This is why H. P. Lovecraft is the greatest of horror writers--his stories overturn the assumptions of religious people that human beings are important and God is there to guide and protect us, and the assumptions of scientific people that human beings can figure out the universe and use what we learn to make our lives better.
(A story in which justice is served or good triumphs over evil can be a good story, and I like plenty of stories which have such a bent, but I don't think they are really horror stories. Also, you don't have to buy Lovecraft's ideas about religion and science to find his work effective.)
(We also have to consider the possibility that Rex Christian is just named after Richard Matheson's son, Richard Christian Matheson.)
Sure enough, Rex Christian responds to Victor's invitation! Victor even breaks the waitress's heart by breaking a date with her to meet secretly with Christian--Christian demands absolute privacy and secrecy! Unexpectedly, Christian the famous author is a dwarf! Christian explains that he likes to meet his readers because they provide inspiration for his writing--he meets unhappy losers like Victor as an aid to writing about people who are unhappy and have been defeated by life. And it is worse than that! After putting his tiny hand on Victor's head (Etchison describes it as "a grotesque benediction") Rex Christian whips out a short sword and stabs Victor to death.
If you've got yourself a horror bookclub, here's a question for you kids to discuss after reading "Talking in the Dark:" to what extent is Rex Christian's murder of Victor ironic (because Victor doesn't deserve to be stabbed to death) and to what extent is it his just desserts (because his treatment of the waitress, and maybe his wife, and his general foolishness mean he deserves the death penalty)?
On one level "Talking in the Dark" is an attack on religion, and maybe a more general suggestion that it is a mistake to look to others for salvation, that you have to run your own life--it seems like Victor could build a decent life with the waitress if he made an effort to do so and wasn't distracted by his worship of Christian.
On another level "Talking in the Dark" is a sort of joke story about being a writer. Victor's clumsy fan letter, full of worship and then nitpicky criticisms of his hero's books, is funny. And the punchline of the story is that Victor wants to ask Christian where he gets his ideas, because Victor himself wants to be a writer but has trouble coming up with ideas. (Also, the idea of a horror novelist killing people as research is pretty jokey--an almost identical idea is the basis of Robert Bloch's 1957 joke story "Crime in Rhyme.")
This is a good story. It may be a little overwritten (there is a passage about how the vibrations from the waves hitting the shore a mile away are like the beating of a human heart under the town) but there isn't too much of that. Anthologists besides Wagner, including prominent editors Stephen Jones and Martin H. Greenberg, have also included "Talking in the Dark" in their publications, so I guess it is a story we can say has been embraced by the horror community.
The first publication isfdb lists for "I Can Hear the Dark" is in The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VI, edited by Gerald W. Page. Is this really where it first appeared? There is a 2017 edition of Red Dreams that is said to include extensive notes on each story, so maybe the answer is in that volume, but we are working on a low budget here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
This story is just OK; it is "about" Hollywood--its characters are all actors who make references to Roger Corman and Telly Savalas--which doesn't really interest me.
A little kid is hanging around the house, where his mother, an actress who was in Rome for years starring as a villain in horror movies now shown on late night TV, is entertaining her friends, a bunch of soap opera actors. Most of the story is the dialogue among these adults which the kid hears, some of it about how life is like a poorly written script, some of it about acting, methods and theories of how to put on a good performance when the script is poor or half-finished. This discussion is significant because soon the actors are all going to have to put on a performance for the cops for which there is no prepared script!
Etchison doesn't give us the plot in a straightforward way, we have to piece it together from the adults' dialogue, but I don't think it is a particularly challenging task. Basically, the mother is cheating on her husband, he found out, and she killed him just an hour or so ago here in the house, maybe when he came by to take away the little boy. The actors will all back her up in the story she will tell that will make it appear to be self defense--Etchison leaves it unclear to what extent it really was self defense, though there is no doubt they are all going to lie to the police. The supernatural element of the story is that the kid, who seems to have a better relationship with his father than with his mother and doesn't know about the killing (he was out with the nanny), has a nagging feeling that something important to him has been lost or stolen--he figures that it is a toy or something like that. To relieve this uneasy feeling, he heads upstairs to inventory his toys. The father's corpse is upstairs--Mom figured the kid wouldn't go up there alone, as he is afraid of the dark. The story ends just before the kid finds his father's dead body. Presumably this will drive the kid, who already has some psychological issues and whose mother is obviously neglectful, totally out of his gourd.
Etchison apparently wrote many Hollywood stories; we read one a few years ago, "Dog Park," and one of his collections, Fine Cuts, is entirely devoted to stories about Hollywood.
This one debuted in F&SF, in an issue which includes Barry Malzberg's "A Delightful Comedic Premise," which I read and recommended to the world at large three years ago.
I thought I might be failing the KEW test, because I was finding "The Graveyard Blues" to be a real poser the first time I read it, but I read it a second time and think I have figured it out.
Sixteen-year-old Marston is a member of a family of people who all write down their dreams in journals and notebooks. His maternal grandfather, who served in World War One, was the first to do this. Once a week the adult members of the family meet to discuss their dreams, and one of the current patriarchs judges what is to be done about the dreams; it is implied that the dreams are predictions and the family can prevent bad things from happening by taking advantage of this advance knowledge. Of course, all the stuff I just told you isn't really clear until the story is practically over. The earlier parts of the story are about how Marston spends time at the local cemetery and sees two black clad figures there, apparently blind people, gesticulating over a grave. At the end of the story we learn how these people are connected to Marston's family--Marston's mother, in the course of explaining to him this business about the family's dreams and his responsibility to record his dreams, says that the black clad people are her sister and a cousin who abandoned the family or something, and come to the cemetery to visit her father's grave.
The psychological core of the story is that Marston is not sure he wants the responsibility of telling his dreams to his family--he thinks it will be embarrassing--and so he may make up dreams that he thinks will satisfy them, or just run away. The two blind women he sees in the cemetery, it appears, ran away from their dream responsibilities--if he similarly shirks will he also go blind?
This is an admirable story, economical and full of vivid images and all that, but I'm not sure I enjoyed it. Is it fun, or funny, or moving, or interesting? Like "I Can Hear the Dark" it is a puzzle, and there is some satisfaction over having (I believe) figured it out, but was it a good time? I'm not sure. I guess we'll call it acceptable.
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These three stories are all well-written and well-structured and have layers and all that--they are sophisticated and run like clockwork and make the stories of, say, Robert Bloch's that I read recently, look childish and ham-fisted. But I'm afraid that I only really connected emotionally with "Talking in the Dark;" "I Can Hear the Dark" and "The Graveyard Blues" were a little cold and academic--I felt for Victor the loser and the sad waitress, and laughed at poor Victor's embarrassing letter, but the predicaments of the boys in "I Can Hear the Dark" and "The Graveyard Blues" left me cold. This may be a reflection of my own sympathies and prejudices more than any real difference in quality among the stories.
I'll read more from Red Dreams in the future, but our next episode will feature science fiction short stories from the second half of the 1950s.
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