Tales of sex and horror by T M Disch, R Aickman & H B Cave

As I recently reported on my twitter feed (hard-hitting journalism!), on the back wall of the 2nd & Charles in Hagerstown, MD, is a sort of art installation consisting of hundreds of hardcover books glued (I guess) together in such a way as to recreate the 2nd & Charles company logo.  A brief look at this hecatomb of literary artifacts revealed one book I own and have read from--Nova 2, edited by Harry Harrison--and another I have considered buying--I Shudder at Your Touch, edited by Michele Slung, a 1991 anthology of "Tales of Sex and Horror."  In honor of the sacrifice of this hardcover SF anthology, let's read three stories from I Shudder at Your Touch by authors of interest to us here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Thomas M. Disch, one of SF's most able writers and critics, Robert Aickman, who has some level of mainstream literary cred, and Hugh B. Cave, veteran of the 1930s pulps who kept on writing new material into the 1990s.  I'm reading them at the scan of the book at the internet archive, where we can hope it will live forever.

"Death and the Single Girl" by Thomas M. Disch (1976)

"Death and the Single Girl" is a sort of satire of upper-middle class young women who live in Manhattan, the kind of girls who own copies of books with titles like Gestalt Therapy, attend functions like "a World Fellowship event in the Catskills" and make half-hearted, performative suicide attempts in order to get attention.  Jill Holzman has decided to end it all, and she calls up Death on the phone, makes a date with him.  Disch analogizes committing suicide to a blind date; when he comes by it becomes clear that, for her to die, Jill must bring to orgasm Death, who appears as a quite ordinary middle-aged man whose office job keeps him too busy to enjoy life.  Despite Jill's best efforts, Death can't get it up.  After multiple dates, because he is tired or she is incompetent or whatever, he is unable to achieve a sufficient level of arousal, and Jill gives up her hope of killing herself and instead takes a clerical job at Death's office--working such a job is almost like being dead, after all.

"Death and the Single Girl" paints such a bleak picture of casual sex and of career life, portrays such experiences as so unfulfilling, that it sort of feels like a sneaky subtle attack on the sexual revolution and feminism, that it is hinting, without actually using words like "marriage" and "children," that lots of women who in the 1970s were having promiscuous sex and pursuing careers might actually have been happier doing the traditional thing of getting married--to a man!--and raising his kids.  I guess if you are a leftie, though, you might see it as an attack on the bourgeois work ethic and American decadence or the way women are treated as sex objects by men, who don't even bring women any sexual satisfaction.  One of the great things about Disch's work is that it is hard to put much of it into convenient boxes; Disch doesn't follow anybody's program.

Suicide, New York (I've done plenty of depressing pointless clerical work in Manhattan offices myself!), and disastrous sexual relationships are some of my favorite topics, and Disch crafts good sentences and good paragraphs and this story is just the right pace and length, so of course it's getting a thumbs up.  

"Death and the Single Girl" first appeared in the Disch collection Getting into Death and Other Stories, which includes another Manhattan life story I have blogged about, "Slaves."  (If you want another Disch story about a sad young woman's horrible relationships with sex and death, check out "Linda and Daniel and Spike.")  Our Italian friends included "Death and the Single Girl" in two different Disch anthologies, both with covers by the great Dutch illustrator Karel Thole.

"The Swords" by Robert Aickman (1969)

"The Swords" first appeared in The Fifth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, which Aickman himself edited.  

Aickman writes the story in a smooth engaging style, understated and  very real, offering lots of detail about ordinary local color stuff that feels "authentic," like stereotypes about black people and the people and weather of England's Midlands, as well as about the story's weird elements that make them believable.  These descriptions are vivid and compelling, never feel too long or superfluous, each sentence holding your attention and adding something to the tale.

The main theme of the story, as with "Ravissante," the last Aickman story we read, is the fact that your life is full of mysteries you will never solve, its main topic our narrator's first sexual experience.

Early on in his working life, our narrator has a job for which he has no ability or passion, travelling around England trying to sell grocers lines of cheap products; a relative has lined this job up for him.  In various little towns he stays in crummy little boarding houses recommended by this relative.  In one such town he stumbles upon a sad little poorly-attended fair with shooting galleries and a merry-go-round ("roundabout") upon which nobody rides.  In a tent is a surreal show that the narrator attends.  On a stage are a man who runs the show, a pale inert woman sort of slumped in a chair who wears green powder and is clad in provocative attire, and a pile of cheap-looking swords.  Men in the audience are called up one by one and each drives a sword through the woman and then kisses her, lengthy passionate kisses.  The tent is dark, and the men's bodies obscure what exactly is going on, but it seems that the men really are stabbing the woman, but that she does not bleed--in fact, with each stabbing she seems more healthy and alert.

The narrator falls in love with the woman, but lacks the nerve to go through with the strange stabbing and kissing ritual, and leaves the tent before he is called up to the stage.

He runs into the man and woman in a restaurant the next day, and ends up hiring the taciturn but friendly woman, through the offices of the man (a much better salesman than is the narrator), to spend the night with him.  Their tryst does not go well, a disturbingly bizarre development cutting it short, and then a disturbingly sordid and mundane denouement capping it off.

Besides the main mystery about the man and the woman--I guess they are robots or more likely the living dead--there are plenty of little mysteries that add powerfully to the main themes and atmosphere.  Besides the pervasive mystery aspect, the story may also be "about" the shabby disreputable desires men have regarding women, and the way sex, love, work, family, and just about everything in life disappoints.

Quite good.  "The Swords" would be included in the Aickman collection Cold Hand in Mine as well as David Hartwell's anthology Dark Descent.

"Ladies in Waiting" by Hugh B. Cave (1975)  

A young couple is house hunting, and goes to look at an old remote house they looked at a few months ago.  The wife is eager to see it again, the husband reluctant.  As they look it over we learn all about their last visit, when they got stuck there overnight during a snowstorm.  The house, for like 150 years, was occupied by a family reputed to be demon-worshiping witches, and we readers get all the clues we need to suspect that, while the husband was outside trying to dig the car out of the snow during that first visit, the wife was having a sexual experience with a ghost or demon, and the reason she wants to visit the house again, to buy it and live in it, is that she has the hots for her supernatural lover!  Amazingly enough, on this second trip car trouble again gets them stuck in the house.  But this time, it isn't only the wife who has sex with a demon--the husband is seduced by a whole squad of semi-corporeal demonic women with scales and tentacles! 

We kind of know where this story is going from the start, but it is not too long and it is competently told, so it is not bad; slight, but not bad.  The forms and appearances of the demons feels a little incongruous and silly, poorly integrated with the rest of the story; the real authentic horror of the story is based on our fear of and guilt over infidelity, betrayal, and sexual inadequacy, and switching gears at the last second to disgust over contact with scaly tentacled creatures undermines all that. 

Acceptable.

After first appearing in Whispers, "Ladies in Waiting" has been reprinted numerous times, including in three different anthologies with which Martin H. Greenberg was involved.

"Ladies in Waiting" works, but "Greatest" is really overselling it

**********

Three stories that leverage our anxieties and misgivings about sex: our fears of being unable to perform and to satisfy a partner, and our recognition that sex, like so many things in life, is never going to live up to our hopeful expectations.  Perhaps ironically, there three stories succeeded in meeting my hopeful expectations of Disch, Aickman and even the sometimes quite poor Cave.