2011 Horror: D Etchison, T Lee, and G Wolfe

I don't read a lot of 21st-century material, but I was poking around the internet archive looking for stories by Gene Wolfe written late in his career and came upon Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition, and saw it had stories not only by Wolfe but also Dennis Etchison and Tanith Lee, writers I generally life.  So let's check out these horror stories penned and published in the internet age, only a few years before I started up this blog of mine.

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" by Dennis Etchison

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" debuted in Stephen Jones' A Book of Horrors.  Over ten years ago we read the Ramsey Campbell story in A Book of Horrors, "Getting it Wrong," a story about torture that has particular appeal for film buffs.  Let's hope I like Etchison's contribution to A Book of Horrors more than I did Campbell's.

(Hopes are dashed.)

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" is about survivor's guilt, a topic that is coded as mature, a fit subject for serious contemporary literature or a special episode of a TV drama, and thus kind of pretentious and boring.  This story itself feels pretentious and boring, a sort of fragment of suburban working-class life with scenes in a grocery store and talk about going to Home Depot.  Zzzz.

The fantasy or horror element of "Tell Me I'll See You Again" is a young boy's odd affliction: he will periodically collapse and appear dead--his heartbeat and breathing are actually undetectable during these events.  But then he gets back up just fine.  These episodes are likened to "playing possum"--in the same scene in which the kid has one of these episodes his friends actually find nearby a possum feigning death and the girl of the bunch uses the same technique on both boy and marsupial to arouse them.  We learn that the kid started having these episodes after his mother and brother died in a car accident--the kid himself was scheduled to ride with Mom, but he was busy so his brother went.  The aforementioned girl is a budding scientist or aspiring doctor or something, and is trying to figure out what is going on with her friend, experimenting on bugs, reading books, interrogating him.  He tells her he hopes he dies for real.

Then the story ends abruptly, telling us the boy with the odd malady and the smart girl drift apart and the boy's father dies when he is a senior in high school and the boy develops a sad philosophy about life and death.

This story feels like a load of nothing, lacking a conventional plot structure with characters who make decisions and some kind of resolution, and offering themes and images that are jejune but respectable mainstream fodder.  Thumbs down.  In 2019 I read the Karl Edward Wagner intro to the 1984 Dennis Etchison collection Red Dreams in which Wagner suggests ordinary people are too dim to understand Etchison, so maybe this is on me, even though I have enjoyed quite a few Etchison stories.

"Why Light?" by Tanith Lee

Here we have a tale of a teenaged girl's angst--her father is dead, she doesn't get along with her mother, and she is being thrust unwillingly into the world of adult relationships.  But it all turns out well for her in the end.  I don't think we can even call this a horror story--luckily Guran's book has "dark fantasy" as well as "horror" on the cover.  (I'm not adding "dark fantasy" to my blog post title, though--just remember I'm not engaging in false advertising, but "subverting reader expectations.")   

Daisha is a seventeen-year-old in an alternate universe where they have email and automobiles and skyscrapers, just like your world, reader, but in this world many of the wealthy are vampires and they live on estates catered to by human servants.  These vampires are genetically diverse; sure most of them have to drink blood and are harmed by sunlight, but some, like Daisha, can eat regular people food and endure some time in the sunlight.  Daisha can tolerate more sun than most, and this is one of the reasons her aristocratic family is cementing an alliance with another family of aristocratic vampires by having her marry a guy named "the Wolf," a 27-year-old vampire who is very vulnerable to the sun.  The Wolf's family's bloodline will benefit from gaining some resistance to solar radiation.  These bloodsuckers are into selective breeding!  (Daisha's rough relationship with Mom is also, it seems, because Mom is disgusted by or envious of Daisha's ability to tolerate, even relish, the sunlight she herself hates and fears.)

"Why Light?"'s 17 pages are split into three parts.  Part One is an imagistic scene in which Daisha dramatically describes her mother carrying her outside as a child to witness a sunrise and see how much sun her little vampire kiddo can take.  In Part Two seventeen-year-old Daisha says good-bye to home and rides across the country is a chauffeured limousine to her new home, that of the Wolf, where she finds the vampires of this family live quite differently from her own family back home.  Daisha is cold towards these odd disturbing people, and the Wolf himself is cold--could he be as unexcited about this arranged marriage as Daisha is?  

In Part Three, after three weeks with her new family, Daisha learns of the Wolf's secret sorrow.  He loves sunlight, dreams of it, but the slightest touch of sunlight makes him deathly ill!  He was bedridden for ten months when his parents took him outside as a child to test his resilience to the dawn.

And then Daisha learns what a goody the Wolf is--he cures any humans on his estate who get hurt or fall ill by letting them drink his blood!  Daisha falls in love with the Wolf.  And she has a brainwave--after they are married tomorrow, she will offer him her blood to drink!  Maybe he will gain some tolerance to the sun after drinking her blood, and they can share the light!

"Why Light?" is like a romance novel, or maybe I should say what I suppose a romance novel to be, not being very familiar with them.  Maybe it is Lee's version of Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights or something like that, the novels I am led to believe are the foundational texts of the women's romance genre.  "Why Light?" is also what we might call a switcheroo story.  Aristocrats in stories often oppress the commoners while vampires in stories traditionally murder and exploit humans, but in this story an aristo is generous and giving, and the lead vampire donates blood to give life to mere mortals rather than killing or enslaving them to steal their blood.

Lee is a good writer and her descriptions and metaphors are all good, and Daisha really does talk like a teenaged girl who is all depressed and angry and acting out one day (she declares she will wear black to her wedding) and then falls in love with a super guy and is all gushing over how awesome he is (she picks out a green dress for the wedding) the next.  So the story isn't bad; it may be a superior specimen of what it is trying to be, the characters and setting being totally convincing as they are.  But do I really want to read a story about good vampires or a story in which a teenaged girl meets her Heathcliff or Mr. Darcy or whatever?  Not really.  We'll call this one acceptable, though it may well be catnip for the people who like sympathetic vampire stories or all those paranormal romance books which I know even less about than I do Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, or Georgette Heyer.        

Vampire fans can find "Why Light?" in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Teeth: Vampire Tales and the 2019 Lee collection A Wolf at the Door.

"Josh" by Gene Wolfe

Here we have a six-and-a-half-page story that is genuinely creepy at some points and disgusting at others, so a horror success, thumbs up.  Do I really know 100% what is going on in this story?  Maybe not--as the little intro before "Josh" reminds us, in a Gene Wolfe story the narrator is often an unreliable one.

"Josh" is a portion of the journal of a young man who lives with his parents, a sort of depressed anti-social type, a guy who sees himself as an outsider or loner.  I guess he is high school age.  The family moves into a new house far away, a house in a sort of remote spot by a forest.  Before the furniture has arrived, before the electricity is switched on, Josh's parents disappear, leaving Josh alone for days in a house almost empty, and the journal excerpt ends before Mom and Dad reappear.  Josh has several eerie supernatural experiences in and around the house, and a sex and violence adventure with some hitchhikers which winds up with him trying to hide a dead body and then fearing attack from vampires.  Or so he suggests.  Is Josh including wish-fulfillment fiction in his journal?  Is Josh insane?  Are ghosts making him see things?  The vampires using their hypnotic powers on him?  Who knows?  There definitely seems to be some thing or things haunting the house, but the vampires seem to be coming to the house from outside.  (We had two distinct, perhaps competing, supernatural groups in Wolfe's "Sob in the Silence" a few days ago, didn't we?)

"Josh" debuted in Portents, an anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio, and has been reprinted in the 2023 Subterranean Press Wolfe collection The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories.

**********

 

Lee's story is written in a rich style, lavish in detail and easy to understand, but, as with the Etchison, the main themes are not to my taste.  Etchison's and Wolfe's stories are on the spare side stylistically, and a little challenging to get, but while Etchison's story is not engaging at all, Wolfe, as he does so often, does that thing where the story is very entertaining on the surface, delivering the thrills and chills we hope to find when we open up a book with the words "horror" and "fantasy" and a picture of a haunted house on the cover, even if you don't quite comprehend what it all means or what is really going on. 

I'll be mining the internet archive, world's greatest website, for more relatively recent Wolfe stories for our next episode.

Orbit 13: Lafferty, Bryant, Sallis, Grant, Etchison and Dozois

At the Dupont Circle location of Second Story Books, on the clearance carts, I recently spotted a volume entitled Speaking of Science Fiction, a collection of interviews of SF writers and editors conducted during the 1970s via the mail  mail by Paul Walker.  I was interested in the book, but I am incredibly cheap and so instead of buying it I found the scan of it at the internet archive and flipped through it while riding the subway (which in D.C. they call the Metro--oh la la!)

One Paul Walker's interviewees is Damon Knight, and one of the main topics of the interview is Knight's famous series of anthologies of original stories, Orbit.  (Knight also does his husbandly duty, gushing praise for his second wife Kate Wilhelm, talks up the Clarion workshop, and admits that his famous attack on A. E. van Vogt in In Search of Wonder was one-sided and he wishes he had "included something about vV's strong points.")  Orbit, Knight writes, "represents an attempt to bring about a renaissance in science fiction by demanding high standards and giving a lot in return--high rates, prompt reports, courteous treatment, etc."  He says that improving the quality of SF requires "redefining the field" and "letting go of rigid conceptions of what science fiction is;" he argues that "booms for quality" in the past have been the product of editors who have done just that, citing "Tremaine in the mid-thirties, Campbell from '37 to '42," and "Gold and Boucher in the early 50's."  With Orbit, Knight claims, he is not "editing to strict ideas of subject and content," but is "keeping the boundaries fluid" and publishing lots of work on the "fringe of science fiction" or even beyond it that surprise him.  At the same time, and perhaps most interestingly, he asserts that "Orbit has never had anything to do with the stylistic experimentation of the New Worlds/New Wave scene."  I am often struck by how nobody can agree on what the New Wave is or what it was all about. 

The listing of "Gene Wolf" on the cover of the paperback edition is a mistake;
Gary K. Wolf appears in the anthology, not Gene Wolfe.  The promise of 
editorial notes and personal commentary also seems to be a mistake--
at least there is no such additional matter in the scan at isfdb, just two pages of
jokey biographies at the end of the book; in his interview with Walker,
Knight discusses why he stopped composing intros and "blurbs" for Orbit.

Reading this interview has made me want to read some Orbit stories, so I again turn to the internet archive, this time to take a look at Orbit 13 (lucky!) from 1974.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we recognize all too well that life is short, and so we won't be reading all 240 pages of Orbit 13, just cherry-picking stories by writers we already have a particular interest in.  I guess this goes against Knight's whole open-minded, innovation-privileging, no-set-ideas, aim-to-push-the-boundaries mindset, but that's how it is.

"And Name My Name" by R. A. Lafferty 

We start off with a story the superiority of which was endorsed by another important SF editor; after its debut here in Orbit 13, "And Name My Name" was selected by Lester del Rey for inclusion in the 1975 edition of his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year series.  The tale has since appeared in Lafferty collections.

"And Name my Name" posits a bizarre secret history of the world in which the Earth has been successively ruled by different classes or orders of animals: elephants, sharks, whales, crocodilians, etc.  In their time of primacy the ruling beasts have speech, art, even wear clothes, but when they are supplanted by the next rulers, lose these abilities and attributes and become dumb animals.  All except a small elite of seven or nine of their number, immortal representatives of their order at its height.  As the story (15 pages) begins, the seven elite apes, drawn from all across the world, are travelling to a conclave of all the sophisticated elites representing all the past rulers, because the times they are a-changing.  After we have been introduced to the ape delegation, we encounter the seven elite individuals who represent the current rulers of Earth, the human race.  At the big meeting in Mesopotamia a shining man appears; able to bend space and time he treats with each delegation separately but also simultaneously.  He assigns all the different species their roles in the new age, a process referred to as "telling them their names," and the members of the human delegation are pretty discomfited to learn they have no real name beyond "secondary ape" and to hear their culture of towering cities, nuclear reactors and space ships, dismissed out of hand by the shining man, judged less admirable than the hives of termites or the song of the mockingbird.  What will replace the human race that is about to be reduced to dumb animals as its civilization is swept away ,is left to the reader's imagination, but all the non-human characters seem sure it will be an improvement on humanity!

This is a good, fun story, and I think it fulfills Knight's ambitions for Orbit--it is innovative, throwing a new and crazy idea at you, and it is on the fringes of standard definitions of science fiction, seeing as it totally ignores all accepted science around biology and paleontology and all that and replaces it not with speculative science but what is a sort of religious view or just a fairy tale that casts the human race as inferior to the birds and the bees.  At the same time, the story is in direct dialogue with quintessential mainstream SF, as some of the human characters refer to Arthur C. Clarke stories by name. 

Good on Lafferty for producing a good story and good on Knight for publishing it.  Thumbs up!  

"Going West" by Edward Bryant

Looking at the records, it seems that 15 stories by Edward Bryant have been subjected to the sometimes pitiless, generally myopic and always erratic MPorcius microscope, plus the novel Bryant coauthored with bad boy Harlan Ellison, Phoenix Without Ashes, which you might call a piece of shrapnel or a submunition thrown off by one of Ellison's many explosive collisions with Hollywood.  While there are some clunkers among those fifteen, Bryant is a serious writer and his stories are generally thoughtful and ambitious (for one thing he seems to write a lot about various "marginalized communities," e. g., women, blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals, which is sort of risky and interesting), and they are often effective, so we have reason to hope "Going West" will be a good story.   

"Going West" is indeed a good psychological horror/crime story, a character study and biography of a guy whose unhappy life drives him to trespass against the law and others; I guess you could call "Going West" an attack on our society, argue it suggests that American foreign policy and American racism created a monster out of the main character and that all the empty highways and congested interchanges in the story represent the loneliness and chaos of our individualistic culture of strivers and our complex capitalist economy.  (The title itself is a clue that the story is about America writ large, "going west" being a sort of quintessential theme of American history.) 

Lindsey was raised on the East coast by a single mother, his father having been killed in Cambodia.  Mom was cold and distant, and little Lindsey didn't make friends and was pretty maladjusted.  For example, he came to adore the school buses, to think of them as living animals, and was traumatized when activists angry about busing blew up one of the buses while it sat in a parking lot.

In college Lindsey's bicycle was repeatedly vandalized and eventually stolen.  After graduation, Mom got Lindsey a job at an accounting firm, owned by a Lindsay and his son.  The fourth man at Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsey and Veach was an aggressive homosexual who kept irritating shy and sad Lindsey, flirting with him and advising him to see a shrink he knew who was a "pussycat."  

Lindsey started having some kind of breakdown, which the senior Lindsay recognized, so he gave Lindsey some time off, and Lindsey is now driving to Los Angeles with no fixed reason to do so in mind, other than to get away from home, where he assaulted the doctor recommended by Veach.  As he drives he becomes progressively more insane, and we readers are privy to what appear to be hallucinations as well as memories, each of which may or may not be false, of people and of conversations--we cannot be sure that anything Lindsey sees or hears or remembers is real.  There are also allusions to Lewis Carroll's Alice.  In the story's climax it seems Lindsey dies after driving off a highway overpass, victim of his hallucinations or a death trap in a through-the-looking-glass universe of murderous highways.  

As I have told you a hundred times I miss living in New York City and one of the things I miss is never  having to drive--I hate driving and all the attendant risks and responsibilities, worrying about the car's tires and oil and fuel and all that.  Because I am from New Jersey and my wife is from the Middle West and has family who have fled the Northern winters for the balmy South I find myself on many long road trips, driving hundreds and hundreds of miles up and down the East coast and back and forth between Washington D.C. and the rural Heartland.  So, I found Bryant's descriptions of the experience of driving for hours and hours and then trying to navigate a complicated series of junctions quite compelling.  The horror stuff in "Going West" is suitably sad and disgusting, and while the story is something of a puzzle, told out of chronological order and full of surreal sections, it is not hard to figure out.      

So, thumbs up for "Going West."  As a psychological horror story it is certainly on the fringes of, or even outside, conventional definitions of science fiction, though maybe the magical realist ending qualifies it as "SF."  According to isfdb, "Going West" has never been reprinted; too bad.   

*"Sending the Very Best," "The Soft Blue Rabbit Story," "Shark," "Pinup," "Road to Cinnabar," "Audition: Soon to Be a Major Production," "Strata," "Dancing Chickens," "Cowboys, Indians," "Nova Morning," "Beside Still Waters," "In the Silent World," "Dark Angel," "Jody After the War," and "Black Onyx"

"My Friend Zarathustra" by James Sallis

I've read eight or nine stories* by James Sallis over the course of this blog's tempestuous life and I have not liked many of them; in fact, I think I have denounced half of them as a waste of the reader's time.  I am just reading this one because it is a mere three pages long and because I wanted to say that seeing the name "Zarathustra" in print always makes me think of Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl."

This is one of those stories by a writer that is about being a writer, how hard it is, how you hang around with other mentally unstable creative people who cry and vomit all the time and sometimes commit suicide.  It is vague.  Some of it is written in the first person, some in the third person; some is in past tense, some in present tense.  There are lots of images of stuff like the sunrise and neon signs.  The plot, such as it is, is about how the narrator's girlfriend left him for a friend.  The last paragraph seems to be evoking scenes of the torch-wielding villagers who come to the castle at the end of movies about Dr. Frankenstein, perhaps suggesting that writers, painters, musicians, etc., are like mad scientists who take risks, break the rules, and sacrifice others to bring about new life, new life that is sometimes twisted and destructive and arouses the enmity of the populace.  

Pretentious goop that goes nowhere and is eminently forgettable.  "My Friend Zarathustra" would reappear in Sallis's 1995 collection Limits of the Sensible World.

*"Field," "Tissue," "The First Few Kinds of Truth," "Delta Flight 481," "They Will Not Hush," "Faces and Hands," "Binaries" and "Only the Words are Different"

"Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" by Charles L. Grant

Charles L. Grant is the "quiet horror" guy.  If isfdb is to be believed, "Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" has never been reprinted, so if you are a Grant completist, it is time for you to hit up ebay and drop two or three sawbucks for a copy of Orbit 13.

There was a nuclear war recently, and almost everybody is dead.  A man and a woman meet at a seaside amusement park, both of these thin and haggard victims of radiation sickness who vomit all the time have independently come to the beach because they have happy memories of the place.  "Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" chronicles the first few hours they spend together, during which they fall in love.  As a college kid the man worked on the boardwalk, running a wheel of fortune, and says the line that serves as the story's title, and then remarks that the game is "fixed."  I suppose we are expected to see this as symbolism that our lives are similarly rigged by the existence of nuclear weapons.  The man is resourceful and has got generators running so the two can ride the decrepit ferris wheel.  (Feminists will groan at how the man saves the woman when she gets in trouble, picks her up when she falls, cooks the food, fixes broken machinery, and is a total gentleman who doesn't molest the woman, while the woman mostly cries and worries about her looks and obviously needs a boyfriend more than any fish ever needed a bicycle.)  Riding the ferris wheel offers these two ferris-wheel-lovers hallucinations of their happier days, and they decide to find a boat and sail to Coney Island to ride the much bigger ferris wheel there.  The end of the story is sort of ambiguous, with notes of hope as well as the pervasive idea that they are likely to die at any moment of their radiation sickness. 

Acceptable.  This is more mainstream science fiction than some of our other Orbit 13 reads, consisting of speculation of how people will react if there is a nuclear war, though the focus is on nostalgia and sadness and a human relationship than rebuilding civilization or something like that.    

"Black Sun" by Dennis Etchison

I've been impressed by many of the Etchison stories I have read, like "Daughters of the Golden West," "It Only Comes Out at Night." and "Wet Season"; at one point I even had the idea of reading the entire Etchison collection Red Dreams, though that ended up not happening (yet.)  So, I have hopes "Black Sun" will be good.

Well, the good news is that I am one step closer to reading all the stories in Red Dreams because "Black Sun" is included in that collection.  Maybe we'll really accomplish that goal some day.  The bad news is that this story is pretty opaque and boring.  As far as I can tell, the narrator is in a legal fight to avoid the draft, and his wife is pregnant, sick and suicidal.  There are lots of surreal scenes in which he deals with bureaucratic forms, his insane wife says crazy things, he looks at how skinny she has got, and wonders about the dots on her skin (it seems she is going to an acupuncturist instead of an obstetrician.)  Both these characters are getting pretty rundown, and in the end of the story it appears the narrator is so changed that people don't recognize him anymore.  He resolves to murder the acupuncturist and then take refuge in the wilderness, I guess an extreme reaction to losing his legal fight and/or the death of his wife.

An impressionistic mess; it takes some work to figure it out and what you end up with doesn't seem to justify the effort.  I didn't really see the connections among the story's themes of draft-dodging, acupuncture, pregnancy and darkness (Vietnam is in Asia and acupuncture is from Asia? burning your draft card is associated with hippies and lefties and so is acupuncture?)  The story is just a jumble of stuff and doesn't build to a climax or have any twists or turns, it is just a vague flat line from start to finish.  One problem with the story may be that Etchison is relying too much on readers' passionate connection to current events to give the story energy, expecting people in 1974 to get all worked up over the issue of the draft and so neglecting to include more universal themes; will readers in 2074 get the charge out of a story the main theme of which is the provision of puberty blockers to minors or AFVs to Ukraine that today's readers might get? 

I think I have to give "Black Sun" a marginal negative vote.  

"Flash Point" by Gardner Dozois

Looks like another horror story--"Flash Point" would go on to be included by Charles L. Grant in his 1983 anthology Fears and by Dennis Etchison in his 1986 anthology Masters of Darkness.  Were SF readers in 1975 disappointed by the high proportion of horror tales in Orbit 13?  Did Knight think that publishing horror stories in a science fiction anthology was somehow "innovative" or "redefining the field"?  Well, in Knight's defense, "Flash Point" does consist of speculation about the near future, so is more like traditional SF than Bryant's "Going West" or Etchison's "Black Sun."

You can also find "Flash Point" in Noreen Doyle's 2008 Otherworldly Maine, and it is a good choice for Doyle's anthology, as much of its text is devoted to creating a strong sense of place, offering lots of descriptions of the sights and sounds and the flora and fauna of its wooded setting and portraits of its small town people and the main character's relationships with them.  That main character is Jacobs, a guy who makes his living repairing appliances and doing handyman jobs; he is also a Vietnam veteran who was wounded in combat.  (Like "Going West" and "Black Sun," "Flash Point" reminds you that communism is nothing to worry about and that the world's problems stem from the sick society of the United States.  Maybe this is what Knight considered "innovative.")

Jacobs finds a deserted car on the road; Dozois's detailed description of the vehicle and its contents makes it clear to readers that we are dealing with a case of spontaneous combustion!  Jacobs does not recognize this, however, apparently never having had a copy of that Reader's Digest volume Mysteries of the Unexplained that creeped me out as a kid.  He contacts the cops (the sheriff is a violent brute and his subordinates are idiots) and then has lunch at the local diner where we meet the various town  eccentrics and, from the town doctor, get a strong dose of one of the story's themes: abnormal psychology and psychosomatic illness, how the mind can powerfully affect the functioning of the body. 

Dozois gives us a lot of verbiage about Jacobs's feelings, his changing state of mind after finding the abandoned car.  He becomes subject to powerful, violent rages, savors the idea of harming the anti-communist at the diner, a stray dog, the raucous wealthy tourists ("gypsies") who recklessly pass his pickup on the road and harass him.  Late in the story, with a reference to hologram TVs, Dozois makes clear something that has not been evident earlier, that this story is set in the near future; the "gypsies" are a reflection of how violent and cruel and even suicidal American society has become, their extended visits to rural Maine symbolizing how even remote areas are subject to the degradation of American society that started, or at least was most evident initially, in big cities.  The climax of the story is the presentation of stark evidence that the sick culture of America at large has subsumed even this little Maine community, a rash of the spontaneous combustion events and even the discovery of a Satanic coven that practices human sacrifice!

"Flash Point" is well-written, but some will perhaps find disappointing the fact that it is a longish (22 pages) mood piece; the main character does very little, acting merely as a witness, and the plot consists not of the characters taking a journey or overcoming obstacles but instead of the author progressively revealing to us readers the extent to which American society is sick and is turning ordinary people into killers and suicides.  I've already compared it to Grant and Etchison's stories, and a similarity we might see to "Going West" and "Black Sun" is how over-the-top, through-the-looking-glass and surreal the ending of "Flash Point" might seem to some--witches sacrificing babies and a multitude of people spontaneously combusting is pretty "out there" for a story so much of which is so realistic.  

As I have said, Dozois's writing is quite good--he delivers sharp clear images of the character's environment and his mental state, and the pacing is good; I was always interested, the pretty extensive descriptions never becoming boring.  So, thumbs up for "Flash Point."

**********

Living up to our stereotyped view of the 1970s, these are some pessimistic, apocalyptic stories.  And I suppose living up to Knight's objectives with the Orbit series, none of them is straightforward and none offers rational scientific explanations for the events they depict--all of them present characters who are hallucinating or who have experiences that are inexplicable except as religious phenomena or suspension-of-disbelief defying symbolism.  I like horror stories and as I always do, I have judged these stories today on how interesting, entertaining and well-crafted they are, not on how closely they adhere to some kind of platonic definition of "science fiction," but I think it is fair to wonder if Knight, in expanding the definition of "science fiction" so far, is perhaps rendering the term meaningless, or making its essential meaninglessness more obvious.  It is easy to suspect terms like "New Wave" and "science fiction" lack any concrete definition and are mostly useful as marketing categories or shibboleths used by people to declare allegiance to (or express contempt for) an identity group or cultural phenomena.       

More terror awaits us in the next episode of MPoricus Fiction Log.  Stay tuned!

Terrors by B. Pronzini, M. Bishop, D. Etchison, and D. Drake

Let's check out four more stories from Playboy Paperbacks's 1982 anthology Terrors, edited by Charles L. Grant, who, at the time Terrors was published, was living in the very milieu in which a young MPorcius grew up, that stretch of Northern New Jersey that lies along Route 80.

"Night Freight" by Bill Pronzini (1967)

Here's a story by Barry Malzberg's friend and collaborator Bill Pronzini that appeared first in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and would go on to be the title story of a 2000 collection of Pronzini tales.

"Night Freight" is a competent little shocker story about riding the rails that clocks in at about seven pages.  A guy with a suitcase jumps aboard a box car in Southern California.  As the train rumbles northward, we learn all about his failed marriage--his wife didn't want to leave her hometown but our dude had a good job offer in Cali, so off they went.  The wife was miserable in the Golden State, they fought, she left him, got a divorce.  Our dude was brokenhearted--he really loved this chick--and went a little crazy, quitting his job and searching all over until he found his ex-wife.

When the train stops for water or something, two veteran tramps hop in the box car.  These two knights of the road try to overpower our dude and steal his suitcase, which they figure is full of warm clothes--the train is approaching chilly country, after all, and these two bums could certainly use some cozy duds that some other guy paid for!  Then comes our shock ending.  In the struggle the suitcase gets opened and it is revealed that our dude is carrying around the disassembled corpse of his beloved ex-wife, whom he slew when she refused to get back together with him. 

Acceptable.

"Darktree, Darktide" by Michael Bishop (1971)

Here's a horror story by critically-acclaimed Michael Bishop.  "Darktree, Darktide" first appeared in F&SF in the year of my birth and has only ever appeared in book form here in Terrors, so I think we can call this a Michael Bishop "deep cut."

I like to be the rebel or reactionary who disagrees with the critics and bucks trends, but "Darktree, Darktide" is my favorite story so far from Terrors--it is well-written, offers good images and metaphors, addresses themes of particular interest to me and incorporates elements that resonant peculiarly with me.  I guess Bishop deserves the critics' encomiums.

Eight-year-old Jon Dahlquist is the son of a wealthy family.  A worn-out old woman, Chloe, moves in with the Dahlquists--she is not a blood relative, but in some vague way is connected to Jon's family, and in fact begins to eclipse Jon as the center of his parents' attention.  She sleeps in young Jon's room for six nights because the room that is to be hers is unfinished, telling him strange stories he has trouble recalling, but which have an effect on his psyche.  Chloe's presence works changes in his parents' characters as well; for example, Jon's father begins to revere old things, getting rid of their car to buy an older car, one that he says "has tradition behind it," and moving the family into an older house. 

Over seven pages Bishop lays out the clues and sustains a mood that lets us know that Chloe is some kind of witch or soul-sucking vampire who feeds on the energy of others.  After her initial stay in the Dahlquist house, Chloe, terminally ill, is sent to Darktree Sanatorium.  She resides there for nearly two years, during which time Jon and his parents regularly visit her--disgustingly, at these visits bedridden Chloe insists on embracing Jon in her hideous gnarled purple hands, kissing him passionately on the mouth.  Yuck!  In the final scene of the story Chloe the sorceress or whatever she is, through one of her sickeningly erotic kisses, switches bodies with ten-year-old Jon, so that he finds himself in her dying husk of a body, watching through her filmy eyes his own healthy young form walking away with his smiling parents, who have traded their son in for an older model with a long history behind it.

This story integrates classic supernatural/SF elements--parasitic longevity techniques and body switching--with our all-too-natural fears of death, worries our parents will betray or abandon us, and revulsion at the smell and touch of the aged.  Quite good, well worth seeking out (you can read it at the internet archive at the link above.)  I'm a little surprised it hasn't appeared in more of the many horror anthologies that are being published all the time.

"Today's Special" by Dennis Etchison (1972)

"Today's Special" first appeared in Cavalier, and would go on to be included in Etchison collections and some anthologies, including 100 Menacing Little Murder Stories.  I was dismayed to find it a joke story about the kind of comic stereotype European immigrants you might find in an old sitcom.  I guess this sort of irreverent material is appropriate for a skin rag, though.

Business is lousy at the neighborhood butcher shop owned by Lou Avratin and his wife Rachel.  We learn why when Mrs. Teola, a friend of thirteen years who demands to be called Mrs. Taylor because her husband Manny changed their name to Taylor because he thought it would be better for business, refuses to buy anything and, when pressed, exclaims, "You get Luttfisk back, then maybe we talk meat.  That Luttfisk, he knows meat!"  Rachel nags Lou to get his former partner, Luttfisk, back, even though the man tried to rob Lou.  Exasperated, Lou appears to agree...and then he wreaks a terrible revenge!

Lou hires the best butcher in the county, a master of the blade who is also a hitman!  Etchison gives us a comic scene of this well-dressed, well-coiffed gent, who is known as "The White Collar Butcher," meticulously preparing his razor sharp tools and his chopping block.  Then we cut to the final scene of the story, in which all the women in the neighborhood line up at the door of the Avartin shop early in the morning in eager response to the huge banner Lou has hung in the window that reads "LUTTFISK IS BACK!"  When Lou opens up the shop the women look in the refrigerated case to see the many pieces of the flawlessly butchered body of Luttfisk.

I consider this sort of thing a waste of time.

"Smokie Joe" by David Drake (1977)

"Smokie Joe" first saw print in the second of Michel Parry's two Devil's Kisses anthologies, which Parry edited under the pseudonym Linda Lovecraft, in keeping with their theme of "erotic horror." As you can see on the cover, the boys down in marketing at Corgi also came up with the idea of leveraging the fact that Corgi was the publisher of the British paperback edition of The Exorcist. More Devil's Kisses ran into considerable legal trouble in Great Britain; read all about this contemptible incident of government suppression of freedom of speech and of the press in this blogpost, which includes extensive quotes from Parry and Drake.  "Smokie Joe" would later be included in various Drake collections.

I've enjoyed some of Drake's horror short stories in the past, but "Smokie Joe" is just not very good, a boring organized crime story written in a clunky style and full of lame metaphors ("The trio scuttled down the steps, their eyes darting about the street like lizards' tongues.")  I guess Drake's primary aim with the story is to shock and disgust the reader--the most memorable parts of its twelve pages are descriptions of injuries inflicted by firearms and explosives and descriptions of severely diseased penises.

The plot:  An Irish-American crime boss, Tom Mullen, is in some kind of war with another boss, Tullio, and enlists three men of violence, Angelo, Nick, and their leader Smokie Joe, to help him.  Mullen's outfit is relatively tame, their income based on the numbers game, but under the influence of Smokie Joe and his crew extreme anti-social policies are undertaken--Tullio is defeated by detonating Claymore anti-personnel mines at his church that kill over a dozen people, Mullen's accountant is murdered so Joe can take over the gang's finances, and Joe shifts the gang's operations over to heroin-dealing and prostitution.  Mullen's new brothel caters to the most violent and depraved of clients, for example, those who want to watch a huge black man with a diseased penis whip and rape a drugged girl.  Smokie Joe has bribed and blackmailed all the local politicians, so these outrageous atrocities are not subject to prosecution.

As the story ends we learn that Smokie Joe has contrived for Mullen's son to contract the same penis affliction that that oversized African-American man is suffering, and when Tom in a rage tries to murder Smokie Joe it becomes even more obvious that Smokie Joe is no ordinary criminal mastermind, but the Devil himself.

I am predisposed to skepticism towards stories about organized crime and stories about the Devil, so "Smokie Joe" was already facing an uphill battle trying to win me over, and it fails spectacularly, not only because it is poorly written, but because it comes off as a parody of a story that is striving to be as offensive as possible.  Maybe "Smokie Joe" is a big goof that Drake deliberately wrote poorly as some kind of satire?  Maybe Michel Parry commissioned Drake to provide a story that would emphasize over-the-top exploitative elements?  Whatever Drake is doing here, I don't like it; gotta give "Smokie Joe" a spirited thumbs down.  This is far worse than Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Poor" or Dennis Etchison's "Today's Special," neither of which I liked but both of which are clearly sincere efforts to achieve an artistic vision--"Smokie Joe" in sad contrast just feels cynical and shoddy, and I'm surprised Grant saw fit to include it.

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The Bishop is obviously the stand out here.

That's enough late 20th-century horror for a while; it's mid-century science fiction in our next episode!  Stay tuned!

Tales of provocative horror by Matheson, Sturgeon, Ellison, Etchison and Bloch

1989 and 2004 editions

Regular readers of this blog know I love the internet archive, a convenient source of multitudes of things worth reading.  I spend a considerable amount of time there just typing in names and topics and seeing what comes up; last week, for example, I read a scan of The Stick and the Stars, William King's memoir of commanding Royal Navy submarines during the Second World War.  Another recent find was the 1989 anthology Hot Blood, which has a cover that I find pretty hilarious. On its inside title page Hot Blood bears the subtitle "Tales of Provocative Horror," but I guess the boys down in marketing got their way and on the cover the subtitle is "Tales of Erotic Horror." Anyway, seeing as this is the month in which we all pretend we think that mutilation, murder and evil are a big joke, and one of the twelve months in which we are all fascinated by sex, it seems appropriate to check out what Hot Blood has to offer.

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" by Richard Matheson (1962)

"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.

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German edition of Hot Blood

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.

"Talking in the Dark," "I Can Hear the Dark" and "The Graveyard Blues" by Dennis Etchison

At the internet archive you can find a scan of the 1987 Berkley paperback edition of Denis Etchison's 1984 collection Red Dreams, with a cover by J. K. Potter that is reminding me of Vampire Hunter D and is a rehash of Potter's cover for a magazine that illustrates a story by J. N. Williamson.  (My brother loves Vampire Hunter D, but I could never get into it.)

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" (1984)

"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.)

Anyway, we are told that in Rex Christian's fiction people get what they deserve.  This little factoid, and Rex Christian's name, and Victor's belief that Christian is the only person who can help him, suggest that Rex Christian represents God, or a conception of God, and there are a number of other clues in the story that suggest it is about religion.

(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.

"I Can Hear the Dark" (1978)

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.

"The Graveyard Blues" (1974)

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.

**********

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.