Dark Love: K Koja, B Copper, R Campbell and K E Wagner

We just read three stories by the great Tanith Lee about disastrous sexual relationships.  This is a theme close to my heart, so let's see what other material of the same bent we can find.  At an antique store recently, I spotted a hardcover copy of 1995's Dark Love, edited by Nancy A. Collins, Edward E. Kramer and the ubiquitous Martin H. Greenberg-- tag line: "twenty two all-original tales of lust and obsession"-- and took a gander at the table of contents.  No Lee, no Malzberg or Wolfe, but still some authors we read.  In the MPorcius tradition of absolute cheapness I decided to save four bucks and read my four selections from Dark Love via the internet archive.  

Dark Love seems to have been a success, winning the 1996 Deathrealm award, which I had never head of until today, and seeing print in Britain and France as well as in America.  Our European friends seem to have gotten the short end of the stick, however, as the US editions of the book have a quite fine Mel Odom cover illustration (check out the even more beautiful original Odom work from which this cover was adapted here) while the French cover is pedestrian and the British cover is embarrassingly lame.  U-S-A!

I guess Stuart Kaminsky is a big deal, but I don't know that I have ever heard of him before

"Pas de Deux" by Kathe Koja

This is a pretty sophisticated piece of work.  The pace of "Pas de Deux" is quick and there is a lot of titillating sex stuff and some violence but Koja also weaves together plenty of compelling scenes that explore multiple engaging themes about life and human relationships, including the relationship of a person to his or her own body--does your body determine your fate?  Does your body, even more than your mind, represent the real you?  

Our main character is a woman who is living in poverty in a crappy apartment in a big city, trying to make it as a ballet dancer.  But she has a troubled relationship with dance--as a kid she wanted to play soccer, but her fat mother forced her to take up ballet, and the woman at the strip mall ballet studio told her "No sports for you, you've got a dancer's body."  Our protagonist left the world of dance for a while and now that she is back in it she is probably too old to really make it.  Many an evening she goes to night clubs where people dance to thrash metal and "steelcore," which I have to admit I've never heard of.  (I'm always learning!)  Her dancing of course is better than anybody else's, and many men hit on her and she brings them back to her apartment for one-night stands; she explains her philosophy to them after having sex with them.  

The dancer's relationship with men is a major component of the story and Koja includes flashback scenes of her with her chain-smoking father in her teenaged years and with her former long term boyfriend, Edward, who himself had a strange relationship with his first wife and his mother-in-law, Adele, a successful dancer who knew Balanchine well, or at least wrote a book purporting such.  Our main character reads Adele's memoir of her relationship with Balanchine, and it has a powerful effect on the dancer's mind, as do her memories of Edward's critiques of her face and fashion choices.  Perhaps the main theme of "Pas de Deux" is to what extent we make decisions and to what extent other people and other external factors (along with the body we got stuck with) determine our choices.  The main character again and again does things she tells herself she doesn't want to do, but asks herself, "what else is there to do?" 

In need of money, she contacts Edward but he wants sex in return for a "loan" she probably will never be able to repay.  She refuses to grant him any sexual favors, in fact strikes him.  So she gets a job at a used bookstore; she steals from the place and gets herself fired.  She then gets a job as a stripper.

At the same time she pursues her doomed quest to become a professional ballet dancer, our heroine is on a quest to find a man, a partner in life--Adele in her book advises women to "find your prince."  This quest is also doomed--the men the dancer meets at thrash clubs won't do (her body, she feels, will tell her which of the men is her prince, but her body rejects man after man, night after night) and she never even considers the repulsive men for whom she strips.

The dancer's sanity slips, and she stops eating, becoming skeletally thin, which does not endear her to her clients or her boss.  The story ends somewhat inconclusively, like a literary story--there is a climax, in which the dancer encounters Edward again and she beats him up and wrecks his house, but we have to assume this is not going to improve her life and career prospects and that if she doesn't take Edward's unwanted advice ("You're very sick, you ought to see a doctor") she is going to die soon.

Maybe like the Lee stories we read in our last episode, "Pas de Deux" is about women who seek love and when men aren't willing to give it to them they lash out at the man who let them down and/or society at large.  But this is no wish fulfillment fantasy that celebrates a woman empowered--it is all about how women are at the mercy of others, men and women both, and factors over which they have no control.

A good mainstream story about a creative person crushed by the world that has enough sex, violence and creepiness that it also provides the thrills we look for in genre fiction--thumbs up!  "Pas de Deux" has been reprinted in Koja collections in English and in French, the language of (noir?) love.

(An odd little note: the artist Patrick Nagel is mentioned twice in "Pas de Deux," but both times here in Dark Love his name is misspelled "Nagle."  I found an electronic version of Velo/cities, and in there the name is spelled correctly.)

"Bright Blades Gleaming" by Basil Copper

We've reads three stories by Copper during this blog's chevauchee across the interwebs.  I liked "The Knocker at the Portico," and "Voices in the Water" but gave "Beyond the Reef" the old black ball.  making sure to keep in mind the law of small numbers, we must acknowledge that "Bright Blades Gleaming" will determine if Mr. Copper has a 75% or 50% hit rating here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Fingers crossed!

"Bright Blades Gleaming" is well-written on a page by page and sentence by sentence basis, with Copper constructing an interesting character and offering strong images.  Of course I am a sucker for stories in which a sensitive young man lives in a big city in a tiny apartment and spends a lot of time on the crowded streets wistfully looking at young women--there was a time when I was such a young man!  But the plot of "Bright Blades Gleaming" amounts to little and the twist ending is pretty disappointing.  It is frustrating when a guy like A. E. van Vogt comes up with a plot full of crazy ideas and astounding events but his poor writing style limits how much you can really enjoy the wild ride, and it is also frustrating when a guy has a good style but only applies it to a plot that lacks any sort of emotional or conceptual punch or any thrills.  We'll call "Bright Blades Gleaming" acceptable.

The text of "Bright Blades Gleaming" is the diary of a late 19th-century young man who has just moved to Berlin.  He describes in detail his new room and his fellow tenants and hints that he is some kind of weirdo with "inflammatory views" who is often in trouble with the police.   As the story proceeds we learn he is an atheist who loves animals and refuses to step on beetles he finds under his seat at the restaurant but hates human beings, a failed medical student who finances his slacker's lifestyle of sitting in restaurants and parks staring at the girls who go by through clever thievery. 

The diarist studies the slaughter of cattle at an abattoir, buys surgical instruments and practices the art of dissection on some dolls.  He starts having horrible bloody dreams and wakes up one morning to discover indications that last night, presumably while out of his mind, he killed somebody.  He flees Germany for England, where Copper provides the in-your-face clues that confirm readers' suspicions that the diarist is Jack the Ripper.

We follow this dude for page after page as he tidies his room, follows a girl on the street, has tense conversations with his land lady, and denounces aged veterans, slowly learning how truly odd and sinister he is, but instead of some kind of climax in which he achieves some dastardly perverse goal or he is foiled by the authorities or some brave civilian, our supposed pay off is being told he is Jack the Ripper?  Copper's attempt to appeal to the audience's supposed fascination with Jack the Ripper is cheap and unsatisfying, a cop out--it is like he wrote only half a story, just the setting and the character, leaving the reader to supply his own climax and resolution.    

(Defenders of "Bright Blades Gleaming" might call it a mood piece or a character study.  Let's also note that Dark Love is dedicated to Robert Bloch, so maybe this story is an homage to the Jack-obsessed Bloch.)  

Besides in Dark Love, you can catch this rump of a story in the Copper collections Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume Two and Cold Hand on My Shoulder.    

"Going Under" by Ramsey Campbell 

This story feels long and glacially slow, with long meandering sentences that fail to engage the reader's interest or inspire any emotion and a tedious pace that leaves the story seeming to move in slow motion.

"Going Under" takes place in a tunnel that goes under a river.  The tunnel is part of the highway system, and to celebrate an anniversary of its opening it has been closed to automobile traffic to serve as the route of a charity walk--a crowd of people has come to buy a ticket, the money going to their favorite cause, AIDS or whatever, and then walk the length of the tunnel.  Blythe is doing this charity walk by himself, having had a fight with his wife.  Blythe is one of the first people to own a cell phone or mobile phone or whatever English people were calling them in 1995 and while doing the walk, crammed cheek by jowl with strangers in the dense crowd, he leaves wifey a voice mail and then takes an incoming call--these calls are critical, as Blythe has to get his alimony check to his first wife (I think it's alimony--the word "maintenance" is used) in the mail or he will be imprisoned, and he wants his current wife to put the check in the mail, which he stupidly didn't do himself.  The tension of the story is meant to come from the fact that he has trouble getting a signal and then the answering machine malfunctions and then he drops his phone and it breaks blah blah blah.  Campbell tries to make his story funny and/or disturbing by describing how fat everybody doing the charity walk is and how their bodies radiate heat and by having people make fun of Blythe for using a phone in public.  Blythe then goes insane and starts harming people in his feverish quest to retrieve his phone or borrow or steal some other person's phone.

Bad.  Maybe this crummy story serves as a historical document of a time when it was fashionable to envy people who had cell phones and used them in public.  Didn't Stephen King write an entire book about how cellphones are bad?  "Going Under"'s defenders might say that it seeks to evoke the claustrophobic stress of being in a dense crowd at a public event.     

People love Ramsey Campbell, and Stephen Jones included "Going Under" in a best-of-the-year anthology.  You can also find it in multiple Campbell collections.

"Locked Away" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner brings to our exploration of Dark Love the gross explicit sex we were perhaps sort of expecting, plus little jokes for genre fans, like a mention of David Drake (a romance novelist in this story's world) and to Bambi and Thumper from the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever.  

Pandora is an Englishwoman in her late twenties, a divorcee and owner of an antique store in North Carolina.  She wins a box of jewelry at an auction, and fancies for herself a heart-shaped Victorian locket she finds among the lot.  Pandora puts on the locket, the clasp of which she initially finds difficult to open.  When she does manage to open it, it triggers immersive dreams of rough sex in which she is the subordinate participant; Wagner graphic blow-by-blow descriptions of these episodes are like something out of a porn story.  Soon the locket clasp is opening freely, practically on its own.  Some of the dreams are essentially rape and torture fantasies.  When Pandora wakes up from the dreams she finds underwear or sex toys from the dreams in her possession, ejaculate on her face and blood leaking from her anus--was she having sex in another universe or with ghosts?  

It turns out the locket was owned by a spinster, a very religious woman, and, perhaps, the dreams are that old woman's sex fantasies, which she never expressed or experienced, but kept locked away in the locket.  (SF stories and porn stories often ridicule religious people, suggest religious people are hypocrites; I guess people who put science or sex at the center of their identities see traditional religion as a rival school of thought, a way of organizing the universe which they must supplant or perhaps just resent.)  But Wagner also suggests that Pandora is just a pervert, her sexual desires warped by abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, maybe even the result of brain damage from blows to the head.  As the story ends Pandora tosses away the locket, puts on revealing clothes, and arms herself with a knife--she is going to have rough sex with men she meets at a bar, or maybe her young employees, an attractive woman and a handsome gay man (there is a lot of lesbian sex and lots of gay vibes in this story), and unlike in her magical locket-triggered fantasies, she is going to be the aggressor, is going to leave the other participants bleeding.

A nasty exploitative thing, the supernatural elements an excuse to describe brutal homoerotic scenes of men abusing a woman, abuse the woman ultimately enjoys.  But competent, I suppose.  We'll call it acceptable.

"Locked Away" would go on to be reprinted in three different Wagner collections, all of which sport covers that leverage Wagner's biker image.

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Well, only one of these stories, Koja's, is actually good, though Wagner's seems to accomplish its (modest) goals.  Copper's shows ability but was disappointing, while Campbell's was emphatically not my cup of tea.  Of course, I'll probably read all there people again next time they pop up in some anthology that has caught my eye, maybe soon, maybe years from now.