"The Night Before Christmas" by Robert Bloch (1980)
This is a story about nouveau riches, about poor people of ambition who struggle their way up the ladder to wealth. But does the money they acquire make them happy? Do the compromises and sacrifices they make on their way up taint their successes? Can the kind of people with the cunning and drive needed to climb their way to the top ever be happy?
Our narrator Arnold Brandon is a starving artist in Hollywood, a painter. He gets a commission from a big barrel-chested Argentinean whom he calls "the incarnation of macho" and compares to the Minotaur, with his big mansion and his complicated business ventures as his labyrinth. Carlos Santiago worked in the fields with a machete for years before a risky investment paid off; now he is a shipping magnate who travels around the world incessantly, managing his fleet of oil tankers and cargo ships. Santiago hasn't forgotten his roots, however--his rusty machete is hanging right there on the wall above the fireplace in his Hollywood Hills mansion! The narrator hates and fears macho men, but he needs the money, so he accepts Santiago's commission to paint the portrait of his trophy wife, Louise.
At the sittings, while Santiago is off in the Middle East, Brandon gets to know Louise, a girl from a poor family who failed in the modelling and acting worlds and settled for being Santiago's wife. The painter thinks of her as Cinderella, and later sees her as a "vain and greedy child." They have an affair, and much of the story is about Santiago's reaction to his suspicions about them and the terrible revenge he takes when his suspicions are confirmed.
Louise demands a divorce and Santiago moves out. She and Brandon plan their wedding, though the painter has serious doubts about the propriety of acquiring Santiago's wife and Santiago's money, and about the possibility of these acquisitions making him happy. It is December, and after years of missing Christmas in the USA while with Santiago on business trips to Muslim states, Louise insists on making a big deal of the holiday and getting a huge Christmas tree. Brandon leaves Louise in the mansion to battle the Los Angeles traffic and crowds on a quest to buy her an engagement ring; when he gets back he finds Santiago has returned to chop his faithless wife up with his old machete and hang her body parts on the tree. After speaking briefly with Brandon the businessman commits suicide with a handgun.
Louise demands a divorce and Santiago moves out. She and Brandon plan their wedding, though the painter has serious doubts about the propriety of acquiring Santiago's wife and Santiago's money, and about the possibility of these acquisitions making him happy. It is December, and after years of missing Christmas in the USA while with Santiago on business trips to Muslim states, Louise insists on making a big deal of the holiday and getting a huge Christmas tree. Brandon leaves Louise in the mansion to battle the Los Angeles traffic and crowds on a quest to buy her an engagement ring; when he gets back he finds Santiago has returned to chop his faithless wife up with his old machete and hang her body parts on the tree. After speaking briefly with Brandon the businessman commits suicide with a handgun.
Acceptable. The best part of the story is the considerable ambiguity over how we are expected to feel about each of the three principal characters, and how similar they all are, each pursuing wealth and sex and status but in a way that undermines their integrity and ability to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Unfortunately, I don't feel that Bloch integrated the Christmas theme very well; it is sort of gimmicky and tacked on at the end, and doesn't really sit comfortably alongside all the minotaur/labyrinth stuff. Students of Bloch, and people interested in identity politics, may be curious to see how the author of Psycho, a Jewish native-born American, portrays Christians and foreign-born Hispanics. (I am going to assume there is a large scholarly literature on depictions of machismo among Latinos in Anglo popular culture.)
"The Night Before Christmas" first appeared in Kirby McAuley's anthology Dark Forces and would go on to be included in various Bloch collections and anthologies of Christmas horror stories.
"The Night Before Christmas" first appeared in Kirby McAuley's anthology Dark Forces and would go on to be included in various Bloch collections and anthologies of Christmas horror stories.
"Dark Angel" by Edward Bryant (1980)
Another story from Dark Forces; "Dark Angel" has apparently only ever appeared in the various printings of that anthology and Terrors. This one is also grist for the mill of the identity politics crowd, a story about abortion and relationship abuse written in the voice of a woman--a real witch!
In a little prologue we learn our narrator, Angie Black, is a vengeful sort who feels men always abandon her. At age seven, some boys bothered little Angie, and her father shortsightedly suggested he would protect her the next day by throwing snowballs at the boys. When he doesn't actually follow through on this unserious promise, Angie throws a rock at one of the boys, damaging his eye, perhaps permanently.
The remaining fifteen of the story's seventeen pages relate an episode when Black is age thirty-seven and a successful entrepreneur; her business is to provide magical services to the wealthy, and it seems like most of her clients are women who need help figuring out if their husbands are cheating and then getting revenge on them if they are. On a business trip Black runs into Jerry Hanford, a womanizer who is now a travelling salesman who sells medical supplies, mostly gynecological equipment. When she was 17, Black and Hanford had sex and she got pregnant; Hanford abandoned her. The teen-aged Black tried to get an abortion, but the procedure was outlawed in her state, and her amateur efforts to terminate the pregnancy were ineffective. She carried the baby to term but it was still born and Black was rendered unable to bear another child.
Black uses her knowledge of magic to achieve a horrifying revenge on Hanford. She seduces him, and uses a potion on herself to ensure that a baby is conceived. When she inevitably miscarries a few months later she retains "a piece of bloody tissue" and uses it to make a voodoo doll of Hanford. Her sorcery conjures a growth inside Hanford that will, I guess we are supposed to believe, kill him when he goes into labor and the creature or whatever it is proves too large to pass through his urethra. (She kills him by forcing him to do something--carry a baby--that he twenty years ago made impossible for her.) Black has some second thoughts about murdering this dude, so she does detective work on him and finds out Hanford beat his wife and she committed suicide, I guess proving he deserves the punishment Black has already inflicted on him.
This is a pretty good horror story; Bryant is a good writer so all the technical stuff (pacing and structure and style and all that) is good, and the magic spell at the center of the story is sort of original and suitably disgusting, while the ambiguities about Black's own morality and the appropriateness of revenge in general and her acts of revenge in particular keep the story from becoming a heavy-handed feminist propaganda piece or misandrist wish-fulfillment fantasy--we cannot be certain that the sins inflicted on Black justify her acts of revenge, and that the accomplishment of revenge will make her happier or make the world a better place.
In a little prologue we learn our narrator, Angie Black, is a vengeful sort who feels men always abandon her. At age seven, some boys bothered little Angie, and her father shortsightedly suggested he would protect her the next day by throwing snowballs at the boys. When he doesn't actually follow through on this unserious promise, Angie throws a rock at one of the boys, damaging his eye, perhaps permanently.
The remaining fifteen of the story's seventeen pages relate an episode when Black is age thirty-seven and a successful entrepreneur; her business is to provide magical services to the wealthy, and it seems like most of her clients are women who need help figuring out if their husbands are cheating and then getting revenge on them if they are. On a business trip Black runs into Jerry Hanford, a womanizer who is now a travelling salesman who sells medical supplies, mostly gynecological equipment. When she was 17, Black and Hanford had sex and she got pregnant; Hanford abandoned her. The teen-aged Black tried to get an abortion, but the procedure was outlawed in her state, and her amateur efforts to terminate the pregnancy were ineffective. She carried the baby to term but it was still born and Black was rendered unable to bear another child.
Black uses her knowledge of magic to achieve a horrifying revenge on Hanford. She seduces him, and uses a potion on herself to ensure that a baby is conceived. When she inevitably miscarries a few months later she retains "a piece of bloody tissue" and uses it to make a voodoo doll of Hanford. Her sorcery conjures a growth inside Hanford that will, I guess we are supposed to believe, kill him when he goes into labor and the creature or whatever it is proves too large to pass through his urethra. (She kills him by forcing him to do something--carry a baby--that he twenty years ago made impossible for her.) Black has some second thoughts about murdering this dude, so she does detective work on him and finds out Hanford beat his wife and she committed suicide, I guess proving he deserves the punishment Black has already inflicted on him.
This is a pretty good horror story; Bryant is a good writer so all the technical stuff (pacing and structure and style and all that) is good, and the magic spell at the center of the story is sort of original and suitably disgusting, while the ambiguities about Black's own morality and the appropriateness of revenge in general and her acts of revenge in particular keep the story from becoming a heavy-handed feminist propaganda piece or misandrist wish-fulfillment fantasy--we cannot be certain that the sins inflicted on Black justify her acts of revenge, and that the accomplishment of revenge will make her happier or make the world a better place.
"The Poor" by Steve Rasnic Tem (1982)
This brief piece, not even four full pages of text, made its debut here in Terrors and would go on to appear in a Tem collection and a few anthologies, including 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories.
This is a surreal, stream-of-consciousness piece that bears evidence of Tem's work as a poet, a series of images that offers little plot or character. A middle-class guy who himself worries about making ends meet works in an office that offers handouts to the poor. The poor line up outside his office, and as his home life disintegrates the number of the poor increases radically until they are like windswept leaves or an infestation of insects, the accumulating poor fill his car trunk, his house, hang from his lamp, are found under his furniture, etc. I guess this is a satire of middle-class views of the poor, its themes such ideas as that the problem of poverty is insoluble, the poor are inexplicable, those who are not poor suffer anxieties about becoming poor and the possibility that the poor will be the foot soldiers in a revolution, fears that render the middle classes unable to enjoy their wealth, etc.
This story is a waste of time that flatters you if you already agree with its premises but does nothing to convince you or interest you or entertain you if you don't accept those premises. Childish.
This is a surreal, stream-of-consciousness piece that bears evidence of Tem's work as a poet, a series of images that offers little plot or character. A middle-class guy who himself worries about making ends meet works in an office that offers handouts to the poor. The poor line up outside his office, and as his home life disintegrates the number of the poor increases radically until they are like windswept leaves or an infestation of insects, the accumulating poor fill his car trunk, his house, hang from his lamp, are found under his furniture, etc. I guess this is a satire of middle-class views of the poor, its themes such ideas as that the problem of poverty is insoluble, the poor are inexplicable, those who are not poor suffer anxieties about becoming poor and the possibility that the poor will be the foot soldiers in a revolution, fears that render the middle classes unable to enjoy their wealth, etc.
This story is a waste of time that flatters you if you already agree with its premises but does nothing to convince you or interest you or entertain you if you don't accept those premises. Childish.
"Identity Crisis" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1982)
Elliot Binder worked at a hardware store for twenty years, getting along well with the owner, Leo Benford. Unfortunately, the owner's son, Leo Jr., is a real jerk and the two did not get along at all. When Leo, Sr. was killed in a car wreck, Leo, Jr. fired Elliot, and kept Elliot from getting a decent job by spreading lies about him all over town. Facing financial ruin, and his wife lacking any empathy for his plight, Elliot goes a little crazy and vows revenge on Leo Jr. When he learns Leo Jr.'s wife has just given birth, Elliot sneaks into the hospital to murder the infant! Holy shit! When he gets to the maternity ward he finds there are twenty tiny babies in there, and the tags on them have no names, just code numbers. Which one is Leo III? The only way to make sure his mission is accomplished is for Elliot to kill all twenty newborns! WTF?!
The strength of this story is the shock value of learning a guy is going to murder a baby, and then that he is willing to engage in wholesale baby massacre. I'm calling "Identity Crisis" just acceptable, as while his story is competently put together, Monteleone doesn't really do a good job showing how an ordinary reliable family man reaches the point where he is going to slaughter the babies of 19 innocent strangers. It is easy to accept that Elliot might kill Leo Jr., but he goes way beyond that, and Monteleone doesn't foreshadow such extreme measures or lay any groundwork that makes them really credible, I guess instead just going for the shock surprise ending.
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These stories all feature failed marriages and three of them depict sexual relationships that result in tragedy. Maybe I should have saved up this blog post for Valentine's Day!
More stories from Terrors in our next exciting episode.
I recently just went to McKay's myself.....I have to say, it wasn't the most comfortable visit; I was wearing a mask, and the warm temps in the store meant that when I exited after about 50 minutes I was sweaty, with drops of sweat dripping around my mouth.........!
ReplyDeleteI did get some low-priced graphic novels, however, so it was worth it
I find most stores uncomfortably hot with the mask on, and then there is Second Story Books in Rockville, MD, where they insist you also wear gloves! Damn you, coronavirus!
DeleteMcKays and Second Story are both great stores that I recommend everybody check out, tons of bargains and lots of cool stuff you probably have never heard of before.