2015 weird madness from A D Foster, W F Nolan, N Kilpatrick and S R Tem

Let's crack open my copy of 2015's The Madness of Cthulhu: Volume Two and read four more 21st-century stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft that bear the S. T. Joshi seal of approval.

"The Door Beneath" by Alan Dean Foster

Foster's name feels very familiar even though I have read very little of his work during the period of this blog's life; Foster penned the first two Star Wars novels and the Black Hole novelization and I think a lot of his books were at the public library when I was a kid (I was born in 1971 so books like For Love of Mother-Not and Spellsinger would have been in hardcover at the library when I was in my early teens.)  A few years ago I read his story "With Friends Like These..." and thought it OK.  And I think "The Door Beneath" is similarly OK, maybe a little worse than OK, a standard issue science fiction action story with a little Yog-Sothery sprinkled on it.

Our protagonist is the head of safety at an important Soviet installation, the nature of which is kept from us readers.  A big wig accompanied by KGB brutes gives our guy a tour of a secret installation under the main installation.  Down there we find a huge subterranean chamber where toil an army of scientists and technicians on two unusual objects of tremendous size, a towering hunk of what looks like organic matter bigger than a whale and a bizarre contraption like an abstract sculpture above which shimmers a sort of black sphere.  These things were discovered in Antarctica, we learn.  As our main characters watch, the white lab coat crew pumps a bazillion gigajoules of electricity into the organic mass and it quivers to life, scores of eyes and pseudopods ending in toothy mouths emerging.  And then they see something scary in the black sphere--the sphere, they realize, is a portal to some other world and genocidal monsters are going to come out of it.  Our hero hurries upstairs as the monster (eventually Foster just tells us it is a shoggoth) devours his comrades behind him.  Upstairs he somehow convinces his colleagues to blow up the public installation they are standing in, which we learn is the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, killing the shoggoth and closing the portal, and thus saving the world.

A simplistic and plodding story in which the characters don't act in ways that are very convincing and which lacks anything like a Lovecraftian tone or spirit and also fails to supply anything engaging on its own terms, "The Door Beneath" is a barely acceptable filler story, with its focus on nuclear power more like a mediocre story from Astounding than something from Weird Tales.  (Compare "The Door Beneath" to two stories we read last time from Volume 1 of Madness of Cthulhu--Robert Silverberg's "Diana of the Hundred Breasts," which added good human drama to stereotypical Lovecraftian commonplaces and Darrel Schweitzer's "Warm" which embraced Lovecraftianism wholeheartedly and achieved a real Lovecraftian tone and atmosphere.)  Either go all the way with the weird horror goop or give us something new--and good--which integrates some Lovecraftian themes or images; don't give us lowest common denominator science fiction with the most obvious and banal and superficial Lovecraft dressing spritzed on it.

"The Door Beneath" would be reprinted in 2019 in the Foster collection The Taste of Different Dimensions.

"Dead Man Walking" by William F. Nolan

Oy.  I compared Foster's story to a below-average specimen from Astounding, but Nolan's is even less Lovecraftian and even less entertaining--"Dead Man Walking" is like a 1970s TV movie written by somebody influenced by somebody who was influenced by what he heard about Dashiell Hammett.  I think "Dead Man Walking" may be an unfunny spoof of such TV fare, or perhaps was even based on some script Nolan sketched out that he was unable to sell.  Thumbs down!

A writer guy lives in L.A.  (I couldn't care less about L.A. and I am sick of always seeing it on screen or reading about it or hearing people talk about it.  Who the hell still cares about In and Out Burger and Rodeo Drive and Sepulvedra or whatever the hell it is?  Enough already.)  Writer guy is working on a nonfiction book about how the supernatural is a load of crap.  But then a hot chick whose husband, a sculptor, died, calls him up to ask for his help--she thinks her husband is alive and trying to kill her!

We spend like seventeen pages with the writer, the widow, and a gallery owner who is also some kind of medium or witch or something, Madame Jechiel.  Jechiel gave the sculptor a magic ring that allowed him to live forever if he cut a deal with monsters from another dimension--he had to make statues of the monsters and anoint them with human blood and then the aliens would inhabit and animate the statues and take over the Earth.  The writer and the woman outfight the sculptor and the aliens in a way that is not scary or exciting and is not convincing in the least.

This story is bad.  The characters lack personality and act in ways that are not believable, and Nolan writes in a lifeless barebones style that fails to make anything that happens compelling logically or emotionally--plot developments don't follow each other in a way that makes sense, but seem to exist to set up scenes that have the potential to be visually arresting while not requiring much trouble or expense to film.  "Dead Man Walking" is also stuffed with poorly delivered bargain basement jokes, like the writer not liking the nickname his editor has given him and trying to quit smoking and that sort of thing.  I kept flipping through pages to see how many were left, the way I used to look at the clock every thirty seconds at school, at my job in a machine shop, at my job in a department store, at my job at a book store, at my job in a government office, at my job in a warehouse....

So bad I am angry.  Joshi should have deep-sixed this rough draft. 

Looking at the records, it seems I have now read 10 stories by Nolan.  That's right, it is links time.

Title                                                    TLDR quote from my blog post on the story  

"And Miles to Go Before I Sleep"     "OK...a little sappy"
"He Kilt It With a Stick"                    "competent, but pedestrian" 

"Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!"                            "Fourteen pages of feeble jokes."

"Starblood"                                         "lacks any sort of character, feeling or plot"

"Papa's Planet"                                    "Acceptable, I guess."

"Lap of the Primitive"                         "Weak....Lame!"

"Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe,                       "A total waste of time."

         Pip-Pop As You Go"

"Dead Call"                                         "Acceptable."

"One of Those Days"                          "Total junk."

"Dead Man Walking"                          "So bad I am angry."

Never again, Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award and International Horror Guild Living Legend Award winner William F. Nolan, never again.

(UPDATE SEPTEMBER 29, 2024:  I didn't do a good job looking through the records because today I find I've also read a story by Nolan called "Jenny Among the Zeebs" and declared it "unfunny and nonsensical" and "Bad.")

"A Crazy Mistake" by Nancy Kilpatrick

I've never read anything by Kilpatrick before, though I've read stories in anthologies she has edited.  Kilpatrick has written a lot of fiction we might describe as niche, like novels about Jason Vorhees of Friday the 13th fame and pornographic novels about having sex with Dracula, Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll, or the Frankenstein monster.  I'm not going to judge; I'm as horny as the next guy and I have done things I might not brag about for money--I've worked in a government office, after all.

The narrator of "A Crazy Mistake" is a self-sacrificing woman who left her boyfriend, a student at Miskatonic U, so she wouldn't distract him from his studies and moved to L.A. (ugh) to work as a researcher for B-movies.  She helps schlock filmmakers by doing research on mythology and the supernatural, looking for ideas about mummies or vampires or whatever they can integrate into their bad movies.  She is hired to do research on Amazons and talks on the phone with her ex-boyfriend about them and that gets her interested in purported prehistoric matriarchal societies and those famous Paleolithic sculptures of obese women with beehive hair.  The narrator takes a trip back East to use the Miskatonic U. library to do deeper research, including reading a handwritten first-hand account of the expedition described in At The Mountains of Madness, and she comes to believe that space aliens, the Great Old Ones, created human life on Earth, starting with fat women with beehive heads and then breeding them with Neanderthals, more or less as a joke.  She compares this frivolous entertainment to the B-movies she has had a small part in creating--life is meaningless so intelligent beings, be they the Great Old Ones or their creations--us!--try to fill their empty lives with pointless entertainment.  She ends up insane, believing her body is changing, getting fat, like one of those prehistoric sculptures, because she stole and ate a piece of that manuscript upon which was a sketch of just such a sculpture seen by the explorer in the Antarctic.

"A Crazy Mistake" feels kind of long even though quite little happens; Kilpatrick devotes long passages to describing theories of prehistoric matriarchy and to summarizing At The Mountains of Madness.  But it is not terrible, and maybe will appeal to feminists (the characters use the word "patriarchal" totally unironically like a dozen times) and to goth kids who recognize that life is meaningless and everybody is psychologically damaged but don't keep this knowledge to themselves like the rest of us do.  (Kilpatrick is also author of 2004's The Goth Bible.)  We'll call "A Crazy Mistake" acceptable if forgettable.

I'm never going to read William F. Nolan again, but if I ever feel like reading about women having sex with animated corpses or demons, Kilpatrick is going to be my go-to, so you can look forward to that.

"Deep Fracture" by Steve Rasnic Tem

This is a pretty literary story, with descriptions of the sky, themes of the sadness of working class life and conventional sexual relationships (ignoring phone calls from your nagging wife while you are out running errands, getting the supplies you need to do the cosmetic home repairs she expects you to do after spending a tiring week at work), themes of decay and a recurring motif of lines--cracks, hair, wires, worms.  I think I can mildly recommend this one--it is certainly the best one we are reading today, Tem taking the task seriously (unlike Foster and Nolan who are phoning it in or making a joke of it) and pacing and structuring the story ably (unlike Kilpatrick.)  There are lots of Lovecraftian things going on, and the literary stuff doesn't get in the way of the weird horror elements--Tem's metaphors and descriptions are not too long or too opaque and they all work.

Tom and Walt live in an Appalachian coal town that recently has been afflicted with earthquakes, such that the roads and buildings--ugly stores, houses and strip malls--are crumbling.  Walt is the older man, a geologist, and he is tagging along as Tom drives all over town buying stuff so he can refurbish his and his wife's house--his wife keeps calling him on his cell phone.  Snow is threatening, and Tom is sort of looking forward to snow covering up the ugliness of his decaying town.

All through the story we get hints that suggest a Lovecraftian cataclysm is about to strike, an alien city and its monstrous inhabitants about to rise up under the town and, I guess, kill everybody.  The cold feels strange; Walt admits that his father retired from coal mining because he kept having dreams of an alien city beneath the mines, then Walt shows Tom a spire or some such architectural fragment his father found in the mines which has indecipherable writing inscribed on it; wife calls up to say the contractors hired to clear their sewer line have found it is clogged with "lines" like hair and worms.

Nolan, Kilpatrick and Tem completists are going to have to buy a copy of The Madness of Cthulhu: Volume Two because "Dead Man Walking," "A Crazy Mistake," and "Deep Fracture" have not been reprinted elsewhere, though Tem's story deserves to be.

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One good story, two acceptable, and one bad?  A big step down from our last episode.  Well, sometimes you get the shoggoth, and sometimes the shoggoth gets you.

It's back to the World War II era next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log; see you there, fellow investigators of the astounding and the unknown.

Yog-Sothery madness from R Silverberg, M Tem and D Schweitzer

If you are interested in vintage SF and by some black twist of fate find yourself in the region of Hagerstown, MD, you should take the time to visit the antique stores on Route 40, because at Memory Lane Antiques, Antiques Crossroads and Beaver Creek Antique Market a wealth of old genre paperbacks, magazines and comic books as well as all manner of related material is on offer, much of it at bargain prices.  Recently at Antiques Crossroads I purchased for five dollars each paperback copies of The Madness of Cthulhu Volumes I (2014) and II (2015), anthologies of new stories edited by S. T. Joshi that (according to the back cover, at least) were inspired by At the Mountains of Madness, one of H. P. Lovecraft's most famous productions.  These books, once in the library of a John Johnson of Darrington, Washington, are in quite good shape--they look unread, though tick marks next to the titles of the stories on the contents page of the first volume suggest he did read them--so thanks to Mr. Johnson for taking good care of them.  Produced by Titan Books, the books look great, with nice fonts and cool cover images by John Jude Palencar, details from his Terror in A.D. 1000.

In a departure from normal MPorcius practice, let's take a look at Volume I and read some stories written in the last ten or twelve years.

"Diana of the Hundred Breasts" by Robert Silverberg (1996)

Contrary to what I just said, here is a reprinted story from 1996.  Consider this a plot twist.  (Madness of Cthulhu reprints two stories by Grand Masters of Science Fiction, this one and Arthur C. Clarke's "At the Mountains of Murkiness," which I am skipping because I assume it is a joke story.)  "Diana of the Hundred Breasts" debuted in Realms of Fantasy alongside a story by Tanith Lee and articles about Czech fantastic art and literature and about the illustrations on game cards.  The back cover of The Madness of Cthulhu suggests "Diana of the Hundred Breasts" is "rare" and "lost," but it was in fact reprinted in a Silverberg collection and two anthologies before Madness of Cthulhu was released: Volume Nine of The Collected Robert Silverberg, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's tenth Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas S. Roche's 2000 anthology Graven Images.  

"Diana of the Hundred Breasts" is a good story, with effective fantastic elements and engaging human elements.  Our narrator is a wealthy slacker who just travels around for fun, spending a lot of time on the Mediterranean visiting ancient sites.  He has a somewhat difficult relationship with his brother, a leading archaeologist; big bro is a genius with exceptional good looks who can also be a cruel and arrogant jerk.  For the first time in a few years these brothers hook up at an archeological site in Turkey.  They meet a fellow American, a Protestant minister from the Midwest who is a widower, and the archaeologist, an atheist who has contempt for religion and, as we expect of a college professor, is confident religion is just a scam used by elites to control the masses, sort of needles this guy, poking fun at Christianity, suggesting it is no better or different than paganism.  But the narrator suspects the cleric may have his brother's number--the minister believes the archaeologist, though gifted and privileged in so many ways, is unhappy because he is empty inside due to a lack of belief in anything.

At the site, the two brothers accidentally set free a space monster which is, perhaps, the source material of the famous image of Diana of Epheseus, and the experience has a profound effect on the archaeologist, shaking his cynical rationalist view of the universe--maybe there is more to the universe than the eye can see.

The people feel real and the images of the ruins and of the monster that may well have been a goddess to the ancient Greeks are vivid--thumbs up for "Diana of the Hundred Breasts!"  

"Cantata" by Melanie Tem (2014)

I think I've read four stories by Melanie Tem, "The Country of the Blind," "The Marriage" (with Steve Rasnic Tem), "Iced In," and "Lunch at Charon's," and liked them all, so it makes sense to read this one.  "Cantata" would be reprinted in the Tem collection Singularity and Other Stories.

"Cantata" is OK; I'm not thrilled by it.

A woman who has a mental condition called "amusia" or "amusica" is part of a scientific team on an alien planet or maybe just a remote previously unexplored part of Earth.  This site is home to intelligent but primitive humanoid natives, the survivors of a more advanced civilization that was destroyed by legendary enemies; these survivors may perhaps share an ancestor with us normal humans.  (These elements of course remind us of Lovecraft, whose work is full of degenerate races and old ruins and vague memories of past apocalyptic wars and hints that the human race is the product of genetic engineering by aliens.)  People with amusia cannot understand or enjoy music, and our heroine actually hates music.  The lost tribe she is working among has no music, no knowledge of music, music having been lost in that cataclysmic war thousands of years past.  But while here on the expedition she has begun hearing music, music nobody else hears, and it is driving her insane--the sounds cause her to itch, and she scratches so vigorously that she penetrates her skin, inflicting upon herself bloody wounds.  Eventually the natives rediscover music and begin humming and our heroine scratches herself so ferociously that she cuts her own throat with her nails and even penetrates her own skull and damages her own brain.

"Cantata" is subtle and literary as well as disgusting in its depiction of injuries, so shares a lot with the other stories by Tem I have read, but I somehow am not enjoying it as much as those others.  If I had to guess I'd say it is because the main character doesn't show agency--in the other Tem stories I praised so much, characters demonstrated evil or self-destructiveness through their actions, which excites powerful emotions in the reader and raises issues of morality, while here in this story the protagonist is primarily a victim of unknowable forces who is defined by an unalterable innate characteristic.  Stories about those who act are inherently more engaging than stories about those who are acted upon, and narratives about people defined by what they do more compelling than those about people defined by inherited identities.      

"The Warm" by Darrell Schweitzer (2014)

I liked Schweitzer's novel The Shattered Goddess and his stories "Going to Ground," and "Malevendra's Pool," so let's give this story a try.  In 2015 "The Warm" would reappear in the Schweitzer collection Awaiting Strange Gods.

Once at a book store I saw that someone had written a novel in which the wife of Captain Ahab of Moby Dick fame was the main character, and I recently heard that someone wrote a novel in which Julia of 1984 was the main character.  Part of the excitement of such derivate productions is that they are works by and about women, whom we are told are "marginalized."  Well, who could be more marginalized than a monster who lives in an underground labyrinth that almost no surface dwellers even know exist?  "The Warm" is based on Lovecraft's famous tale "Pickman's Model" and its narrator is the ghoul whom Pickman induced to serve as an inspiration for his macabre art.

Schweitzer does a good job of depicting the alien world beneath our feet and the lives of the monsters down there, and the psychology of a man who joined the ghoul population but is the least of their horrible number, and, through his contact with Pickman, begins to regain his humanity at the same time Pickman is losing his!  The pacing and images of the story are quite good, and I liked the twist ending.  Thumbs up!  

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This was an enjoyable exercise, so let's keep it up--we'll read four stories from the second volume of The Madness of Cthulhu in our next episode.

Early '80s Terrors by Robert Bloch, Edward Bryant, Steve Rasnic Tem, & Thomas F. Monteleone

I recently put on my Yokoyama Bozaemon outfit and ventured into McKay Used Books in Manassas, Virginia, braving the dreaded coronavirus in my search for book bargains.  One of my finds was the 1982 anthology edited by New Jersey's own Charles L. Grant, Terrors, which includes stories by authors of interest to the MPorcius staff first published in a period ranging from 1967 to 1982.  Let's start exploring Terrors with four stories from the early '80s by contributors Robert Bloch, Edward Bryant, Steve Rasnic Tem and Thomas F. Monteleone.

"The Night Before Christmas" by Robert Bloch (1980)

This is a story about nouveau riches, about poor people of ambition who struggle their way up the ladder to wealth.  But does the money they acquire make them happy?  Do the compromises and sacrifices they make on their way up taint their successes?  Can the kind of people with the cunning and drive needed to climb their way to the top ever be happy?

Our narrator Arnold Brandon is a starving artist in Hollywood, a painter.  He gets a commission from a big barrel-chested Argentinean whom he calls "the incarnation of macho" and compares to the Minotaur, with his big mansion and his complicated business ventures as his labyrinth.  Carlos Santiago worked in the fields with a machete for years before a risky investment paid off; now he is a shipping magnate who travels around the world incessantly, managing his fleet of oil tankers and cargo ships.  Santiago hasn't forgotten his roots, however--his rusty machete is hanging right there on the wall above the fireplace in his Hollywood Hills mansion!  The narrator hates and fears macho men, but he needs the money, so he accepts Santiago's commission to paint the portrait of his trophy wife, Louise.

At the sittings, while Santiago is off in the Middle East, Brandon gets to know Louise, a girl from a poor family who failed in the modelling and acting worlds and settled for being Santiago's wife.  The painter thinks of her as Cinderella, and later sees her as a "vain and greedy child."  They have an affair, and much of the story is about Santiago's reaction to his suspicions about them and the terrible revenge he takes when his suspicions are confirmed.

Louise demands a divorce and Santiago moves out.  She and Brandon plan their wedding, though the painter has serious doubts about the propriety of acquiring Santiago's wife and Santiago's money, and about the possibility of these acquisitions making him happy.  It is December, and after years of missing Christmas in the USA while with Santiago on business trips to Muslim states, Louise insists on making a big deal of the holiday and getting a huge Christmas tree.  Brandon leaves Louise in the mansion to battle the Los Angeles traffic and crowds on a quest to buy her an engagement ring; when he gets back he finds Santiago has returned to chop his faithless wife up with his old machete and hang her body parts on the tree.  After speaking briefly with Brandon the businessman commits suicide with a handgun.

Acceptable.  The best part of the story is the considerable ambiguity over how we are expected to feel about each of the three principal characters, and how similar they all are, each pursuing wealth and sex and status but in a way that undermines their integrity and ability to enjoy the fruits of their labors.  Unfortunately, I don't feel that Bloch integrated the Christmas theme very well; it is sort of gimmicky and tacked on at the end, and doesn't really sit comfortably alongside all the minotaur/labyrinth stuff.  Students of Bloch, and people interested in identity politics, may be curious to see how the author of Psycho, a Jewish native-born American, portrays Christians and foreign-born Hispanics.  (I am going to assume there is a large scholarly literature on depictions of machismo among Latinos in Anglo popular culture.)

"The Night Before Christmas" first appeared in Kirby McAuley's anthology Dark Forces and would go on to be included in various Bloch collections and anthologies of Christmas horror stories.

"Dark Angel" by Edward Bryant (1980)

Another story from Dark Forces; "Dark Angel" has apparently only ever appeared in the various printings of that anthology and Terrors.  This one is also grist for the mill of the identity politics crowd, a story about abortion and relationship abuse written in the voice of a woman--a real witch!

In a little prologue we learn our narrator, Angie Black, is a vengeful sort who feels men always abandon her.  At age seven, some boys bothered little Angie, and her father shortsightedly suggested he would protect her the next day by throwing snowballs at the boys.  When he doesn't actually follow through on this unserious promise, Angie throws a rock at one of the boys, damaging his eye, perhaps permanently.

The remaining fifteen of the story's seventeen pages relate an episode when Black is age thirty-seven and a successful entrepreneur; her business is to provide magical services to the wealthy, and it seems like most of her clients are women who need help figuring out if their husbands are cheating and then getting revenge on them if they are.  On a business trip Black runs into Jerry Hanford, a womanizer who is now a travelling salesman who sells medical supplies, mostly gynecological equipment.  When she was 17, Black and Hanford had sex and she got pregnant; Hanford abandoned her.  The teen-aged Black tried to get an abortion, but the procedure was outlawed in her state, and her amateur efforts to terminate the pregnancy were ineffective.  She carried the baby to term but it was still born and Black was rendered unable to bear another child.

Black uses her knowledge of magic to achieve a horrifying revenge on Hanford.  She seduces him, and uses a potion on herself to ensure that a baby is conceived.  When she inevitably miscarries a few months later she retains "a piece of bloody tissue" and uses it to make a voodoo doll of Hanford.  Her sorcery conjures a growth inside Hanford that will, I guess we are supposed to believe, kill him when he goes into labor and the creature or whatever it is proves too large to pass through his urethra.  (She kills him by forcing him to do something--carry a baby--that he twenty years ago made impossible for her.)  Black has some second thoughts about murdering this dude, so she does detective work on him and finds out Hanford beat his wife and she committed suicide, I guess proving he deserves the punishment Black has already inflicted on him.

This is a pretty good horror story; Bryant is a good writer so all the technical stuff (pacing and structure and style and all that) is good, and the magic spell at the center of the story is sort of original and suitably disgusting, while the ambiguities about Black's own morality and the appropriateness of revenge in general and her acts of revenge in particular keep the story from becoming a heavy-handed feminist propaganda piece or misandrist wish-fulfillment fantasy--we cannot be certain that the sins inflicted on Black justify her acts of revenge, and that the accomplishment of revenge will make her happier or make the world a better place.  

"The Poor" by Steve Rasnic Tem (1982)

This brief piece, not even four full pages of text, made its debut here in Terrors and would go on to appear in a Tem collection and a few anthologies, including 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories.

This is a surreal, stream-of-consciousness piece that bears evidence of Tem's work as a poet, a series of images that offers little plot or character.  A middle-class guy who himself worries about making ends meet works in an office that offers handouts to the poor.  The poor line up outside his office, and as his home life disintegrates the number of the poor increases radically until they are like windswept leaves or an infestation of insects, the accumulating poor fill his car trunk, his house, hang from his lamp, are found under his furniture, etc.  I guess this is a satire of middle-class views of the poor, its themes such ideas as that the problem of poverty is insoluble, the poor are inexplicable, those who are not poor suffer anxieties about becoming poor and the possibility that the poor will be the foot soldiers in a revolution, fears that render the middle classes unable to enjoy their wealth, etc.

This story is a waste of time that flatters you if you already agree with its premises but does nothing to convince you or interest you or entertain you if you don't accept those premises.  Childish.

"Identity Crisis" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1982)

Another story that made its first appearance in Terrors, "Identity Crisis" would go on to be included in the magazine New Blood, the anthology 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories and a Monteleone collection.  Monteleone's contribution to Terrors is five pages long.

Elliot Binder worked at a hardware store for twenty years, getting along well with the owner, Leo Benford.  Unfortunately, the owner's son, Leo Jr., is a real jerk and the two did not get along at all.  When Leo, Sr. was killed in a car wreck, Leo, Jr. fired Elliot, and kept Elliot from getting a decent job by spreading lies about him all over town.  Facing financial ruin, and his wife lacking any empathy for his plight, Elliot goes a little crazy and vows revenge on Leo Jr.  When he learns Leo Jr.'s wife has just given birth, Elliot sneaks into the hospital to murder the infant!  Holy shit!  When he gets to the maternity ward he finds there are twenty tiny babies in there, and the tags on them have no names, just code numbers.  Which one is Leo III?  The only way to make sure his mission is accomplished is for Elliot to kill all twenty newborns!  WTF?!

The strength of this story is the shock value of learning a guy is going to murder a baby, and then that he is willing to engage in wholesale baby massacre.  I'm calling "Identity Crisis" just acceptable, as while his story is competently put together, Monteleone doesn't really do a good job showing how an ordinary reliable family man reaches the point where he is going to slaughter the babies of 19 innocent strangers.  It is easy to accept that Elliot might kill Leo Jr., but he goes way beyond that, and Monteleone doesn't foreshadow such extreme measures or lay any groundwork that makes them really credible, I guess instead just going for the shock surprise ending.

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These stories all feature failed marriages and three of them depict sexual relationships that result in tragedy.  Maybe I should have saved up this blog post for Valentine's Day! 

More stories from Terrors in our next exciting episode.           

Late 20th century stories about vampiric creatures by Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee and Melanie Tem

Vampires!  You love vampires.  I love vampires.  Everybody loves vampires.  So let's read about vampires!  Whatever it is you are doing--sheltering in place, living under quarantine, living under lockdown, working from home, searching for toilet paper, embroidering a snappy motto on your homemade face mask, attending a wedding via Zoom, breaking up with your not-as-significant-as-you-initially-thought-other via Skype--can probably be improved by simultaneously reading about vampires.

No doubt you recall our foray into The Mammoth Book of Erotica.  There is a Mammoth Book of most everything at this point; we can probably look forward to The Mammoth Book of Coronavirus Tales someday.  So let's seek our vampires in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones and first published in 2001, picking out tales by three people we have talked about before here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee, and Melanie Tem.   You won't be surprised to hear I am reading from a scan of the book available at the internet archive.  If that check for $1,200 that just mysteriously appeared in your bank account is burning a hole in your pocket you can pick up a trade paperback copy on ebay for less than $6.00.

"Homewrecker" by Poppy Z. Brite (1998) 

This one first appeared at the website Gettingiton.com, which I believe is currently defunct.  Enjoy your favorite website while you can, oh my brothers, it could be gone in an instant.  "Homewrecker" would first appear in a physical book in 2000 in Paula Guran's Embraces: Dark Erotica.  In the intro to "Homewrecker" here in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, Brite suggests that to write a decent vampire story "requires the ability to plumb one's own darkness."

This story is like two and a half pages long, but it is chock full of stuff that is gross, like hints of incest, explicit nonconsensual sex, vomit, and animal blood.  Brite also  skillfully packs an entire traditional horror story plot into this tiny space while piling on the memorable (albeit gross) images.

Our narrator is a young boy who lives with his "Uncle Edna" (birth name Ed Slopes,) a crossdressing homosexual who works at a slaughterhouse killing pigs by day and wears lipstick and women's dresses at night.  The narrator has to make sure Uncle Edna's perfumed bath is ready when he gets home or he gets beat--when Uncle Edna beats the narrator he (Edna) gets an erection.

An Uncle Jude used to live with Edna and the narrator, but a few years ago a woman, a Verna, somehow stole him away.  Edna is still bitter about it, often ranting about that "bitch who stole his man" and banging the table and so on.  One day the narrator hears that Verna is back in town (no sign of long lost Jude, though.)  Fearing that Edna might murder Verna, the narrator provides oral sex to another kid in exchange for some Xanax, and uses the drugs to knock out Edna before he finds out the homewrecker is back in town.  When the narrator goes to talk to Verna, in hopes of learning something about the whereabouts of Jude, we readers realize Verna is a vampire who gets her kicks from using her hypnotic powers to get gay men to have sex with her.  She uses these powers on the teen-age narrator, and not only fellates him against his will (which he finds so sickening he vomits) but poisons his mind, filling his head with thoughts of the look, the smell, the feel of a woman's breasts and genitals--as a homosexual, he finds these thoughts disgusting, but, despite his professed inclinations, these obsessive thoughts physically arouse him to the point where he has to masturbate in public to relieve the pressure.

Brite is a good writer, and on a technical level this is a well-written piece, with good sentences and economical pacing and striking images and all the stuff I hope to find in stories.  It is also a sort of switcheroo story; in the past it was common for heterosexual men to express disgust at gay men and their sexual practices, and it was common to express fear that gay men would seduce young boys into joining the gay subculture.  Well, in this story we have gay men expressing their nausea at the thought of a woman's body, and we have a woman who seduces a gay boy into joining the straight culture (which in the story feels like a subculture, because all the male characters are sexually active gay men.)

(I guess I should point out, in case you don't know, that, since The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women was published, Brite has come out as a gay man and taken hormone therapy and prefers to be called Billy Martin.)

I often complain that switcheroo stories are lame, but "Homewrecker" works because it is a well-crafted story and because the switcheroo feels fresh (at least to me) and because Brite doesn't stack the deck by portraying the gay men as angels and their lifestyle as ideal--the narrator is beaten by his father figure and trades sex for drugs as a matter of course, after all.

(For another switcheroo story about a straight minority in a gay milieu, check out Charles Beaumont's 1955 "The Crooked Man.")

Thumbs up, but I can't say this story is for everybody--it is disgusting and potentially offensive (for example, Brite does that thing where you compare the scent of a woman's vagina to a fish market, which I feel might piss some women off.)  But we read horror stories because we want to be shocked and speculative fiction in general because we want to be exposed to different ideas and learn about other points of view, don't we?

"Venus Rising on Water" by Tanith Lee  (1991)

I don't need to tell you I am a big fan of Lee's, as I told you that in our last episode when I read her gruesome story about family relationships that either smother you or let you down, "A Room with a Vie."  That story was set in an English seaside town; "Venus Rising on Water" takes place in a city much like Venice in a future alternate reality Earth.

The old city has been almost entirely abandoned, many of its buildings crumbling, its walls covered in vines and creepers, its streets and squares choked with trees and shrubbery.  Only a few nutcases live in the city, but the once beautiful metropolis, centuries ago home to aristocrats and artists in powdered wigs and elaborate masks, has been left to decay instead of torn down so it can serve as a kind of museum--every month a boat travels between the modern apartment buildings on the other side of the lagoon to the old ruin, and sometimes a scholar or journalist is on the boat.  Our heroine, 25-year-old Jonquil Hare, is one such writer who explores the city alone.  (Jonquil was Fritz Leiber's wife's name, which may or may not be significant.)

Jonquil, equipped with SF devices like an inflatable mattress and a machine that cooks fine meals for her, sets up camp in a glorious old pile called The Palace of the Planet which centuries ago was home to an astrologer named Johanus who claimed to have observed the surface of Venus.  She has an appointment with a caretaker who gives her a sort of remote control called a manual--by manipulating the buttons on the manual she can project holographic films in the palace which purport to show the now decayed edifice as it looked in its heyday, complete with costumed actors who act out masked balls.

Jonquil finds a chest, one that has not been opened in three centuries or more, one which the scholars who compiled the data in the manual believe is no chest at all, but a faux chest (a "jester chest,") an empty decoration.  Impelled by a dream about the chest, Jonquil figures out how to open it, and discovers a full-sized portrait of a boyish woman.  (A blurring of gender roles is one of the minor themes of the story.)  Jonquil, an expert on art and architecture, assesses the find and decides it must be a painting by Johanus the astrologer.  She begins having dreams of Johanus in which she learns that he believed that his long observations of the surface of Venus had opened up a path between the two planets which some Venerian creature used to travel to Earth, to this very palace.  This creature is like a cloth or large piece of paper or piece of skin that travels by inching along the floor or floating through the air.  Jonquil also has dreams, thrilling dreams, of the woman in the painting climbing atop her and bringing her to orgasm.

In the horror/action climax of the story it becomes clear that the canvas Jonquil discovered is the creature, that Johanus painted his idea (or the monster's memories transmitted into his mind!) of a Venerian woman upon this alien skin from Venus.  Dragging the picture frame along the floor like the shell of a clumsy turtle or snail, the monster pursues Jonquil (to eat of her flesh? to take control of her body? to slay her? to rape her?) through the palace, finally bursts free of the heavy frame and flies after her through the ruined streets of the town.  She takes refuge in an ancient mausoleum, but the monster from Venus is hot on her trail!  Among the long-interred coffins and mummies, a horde of the albino rats who infest the underworld of the abandoned city swarm over the alien, tearing it to pieces and devouring it.  Jonquil is saved, but we are left to consider the possibility that the alien still lives, that the rats will become a ravenous half-Terran half-alien plague which will threaten the entire human race! 

"Venus Rising on Water" is only about vampires if you are using the most liberal definition of what a vampire is, but it is a very good horror-SF piece; Lee's descriptions of the palace and city and the chase are quite fine.  It is kind of like one of Clark Ashton Smith's Mars stories, say "Vault of Yoh-Vombis" or "The Dweller in the Gulf" but with a rapey lesbian sex scene thrown in.  Who would gainsay that recipe?

Recommended.

"Venus Rising on Water" was first printed in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and would go on to be included in a 2019 collection of Lee tales published by Immanion Press, which has been printing collections of Lee's late work.

"Lunch at Charon's" by Melanie Tem (2001)

The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories
by Women includes several decorations
by Randy Broecker, this one among them 

I believe "Lunch at Charon's" was original to this anthology.

The narrator of "Lunch at Charon's" is a vain forty-something woman who is always working out and doing yoga and having plastic surgery and so on in order to maintain her looks and keep in shape--she talks a lot about whether or not her breasts are sagging, whether or not her finger nail polish is chipped, and about how her friends' fat bodies or unfashionable nail polish disgusts her.  This woman is a real jerk!  It soon becomes clear that one of her strategies for maintaining her looks is sucking the life force out of her friends!  Worse than a jerk, this woman is a god-damned vampire!

This story is apparently meant to be humorous--the narrator's obsession with her and her friends' appearances goes way overboard and Tem's learned references ("Charon's" as the name of a fancy restaurant, "Alighieri" as the name of one of the narrator's friends) are in-your-face obvious.  You know I often complain about joke stories, but this one is actually sort of funny, so good on Tem.

As for plot, the narrator chronicles how all her friends get old and die before their time because she is stealing their life force under the guise of giving them massages and hugging them and so forth.  One of her friends is a lonely lesbian college professor with an adopted Chinese baby--after the narrator sucks the life out of the horny prof through a kiss, she plots to make friends with the woman who is the newly orphaned baby's guardian, in hopes of feasting on the child's young and innocent life!

Not bad.

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I really thought these stories were going to be about more or less traditional vampires, but it turns out that the common thread running through them is homosexuality.  Fortunately these stories are all entertaining, so, no harm, no foul, right?

21st century horror stories by Tanith Lee, Steve Rasnic Tem and Ramsey Campbell

Judging by the contents of my blog you might suspect I am boycotting the 21st century, or perhaps am actually at war with the 21st century.  Well, today we call a truce and read three stories first published in the last ten years!  Today we expose ourselves to three tales of terror from the 2018 anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, The Best of the Best Horror of the Year, a copy of which I borrowed from the Baltimore County Library.  The two dozen or so stories in The Best of the Best Horror of the Year appeared in volumes of Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year, which was published between 2009 and 2018, and I have selected the included stories by MPorcius fave Tanith Lee, Steve Rasnic Tem, a few of whose stories I have read in the past, and Ramsey Campbell, in whose work I am sporadically interested.

"Black and White Sky" by Tanith Lee (2010)

"Black and White Sky" first appeared in the souvenir book of the 2010 World Horror Convention, Brighton Shock!; besides in this anthology and the third volume of The Best Horror of the Year, Datlow has included it in an issue of Nightmare Magazine she guest edited.

"Black and White Sky" incorporates a lot of magpie folklore with which I was totally unfamiliar (I don't think we get magpies in the Eastern USA.)  I didn't even know what a magpie looked like until I looked the creature up on wikipedia.  Anyway, in the story, all over Great Britain, an unusual volume of magpies start appearing, individual birds seemingly popping into existence near the ground or in trees and immediately shooting straight up into the sky, disappearing from view.  These sudden appearances interrupt the flights of aircraft and the operation of railways, and then electric power as the birds start knocking lines off of poles.

We observe this weird crisis alongside a writer, an ex-Londoner who lives in a cottage in the countryside.  There are lots of scenes of him talking to people in the village, watching TV, reading newspapers, etc., discussing and learning about the magpie phenomenon.  We sort of get to know this guy, his writing career, his history with women, that kind of stuff.  Interspersed with the sections about the writer are sections in present tense describing the sky and wildlife and the avian crisis from an omniscient point of view.  Eventually the larger of the British Isles (Eire is spared) lies under a shadow cast by a bazillion magpies just hanging around in the stratosphere--the English, Welsh and Scottish people must endure an endless rain of bird feathers and bird poo, and, lacking any electricity, have no means to communicate with the larger world.

The sexy woman who cleans the writer's cottage twice a month comes over after her husband hits her and she has sex with the writer.  Then the magpies all fall, burying Great Britain in a carpet of dead birds several feet deep, knocking down trees and buildings and presumably killing many people.

I don't know what to make of this thing, frankly.  Is it about the environment, comparing the way humanity treats the natural world to the callous way men treat women and the way women betray men?  Is it somehow a reflection of the stereotype that English people love animals?  Could it be some kind of religious allegory (a longish paragraph describes folklore about how the magpie's distinctive coloration either does or does not symbolize reverence for Jesus Christ), with the magpies a sort of British version of the plagues of Egypt?  Or is it just Lee toying with a wacky and disgusting idea (a postscript suggests the basic idea of the story came from Lee's husband John Kaiine.)  "Black and White Sky" is well written enough, so it gets a passing grade, but it is kind of leaving me shrugging my shoulders.   

"The Monster Makers" by Steve Rasnic Tem (2013)

The narrator of In Search Of Lost Time, as a child, would look at train schedules and imagine what towns he had never seen were like based on their names.  I have the bad habit of guessing what a story is like based solely on its title, and I guessed that "The Monster Makers" would be about how bullies turn kids into school shooters or microagressions turn those microaggressed into terrorists.  The story is not like that at all, of course.

Tem's story, at least in part, is about the horror of getting old: losing your memory and ability to focus, getting clumsy and weak, losing your eyesight and hearing, knowing that after you die you will be forgotten.  The actual plot, which is largely submerged beneath bizarre images and sad musings, is about an old man, our narrator, who, somehow, apparently, by telling his grandchildren fairy stories of monsters, gives these little tykes the ability to distort innocent people's bodies, turning them into deformed freaks (these transformations are fatal.)  Grandpa and his senile and/or demented wife live with their adult son and his wife and kids.  It is hinted that the family in this story is a family of witches or demons, like a less cute and more scary version of the Addams family or Bradbury's Elliott family, but that the son, by luck or design, has grown up to be an essentially normal guy.  The long-suffering son tries to manage the horrible hand fate has dealt him, siting the family domicile on a secluded farm, away from people.  Despite his efforts, the family does sometimes come into contact with people, and these people suffer horrendous and life-ending physical transformations.  His entreaties that his father stop telling those stories proving futile ("Telling stories, that's what grandfathers do," insists Grandpa), the son takes up an axe and pursues desperate measures, with disastrous results.

The style of the story, with its matter-of-fact first-person narration of surreally horrible events and its philosophy of resigned recognition of the futility and misery of our lives, reminded me a bit of Barry Malzberg.

Maybe "The Monster Makers" is arguing that parents' and grandparents' efforts to educate their descendants, to mold them and try to ensure they remember and honor their ancestors, just screw them up and cause trouble for them and society at large.  ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad....")  As I recall, Tem's story "Blood Knots" was also about a disastrous family in which a man's influence on his descendants caused mayhem among the populace.
     
Datlow included this one in her anthology Monstrous as well as the sixth Best Horror of the Year; it first appeared in the magazine Black Static.

"The Callers" by Ramsey Campbell (2012)

This is a story about how disturbing, disgusting, and dangerous women are!

Thirteen-year-old Mark and his parents are staying with Mark's grandparents in a dirty and depressing northern English town, a place where half the stores are boarded up and the old theater has had its seats removed and been turned into a bingo parlor.  Mom and Grandma have a stupid fight and Mark's parents leave early, leaving Mark behind with a train ticket so he can follow them on schedule.  In the evening Grandma goes to the bingo parlor and Grandpa goes to the pub, so Mark goes to the cinema to see what sounds like a pornographic horror movie: "Mark's schoolmates had shown him the scene from Facecream on their phones, where the girl gets cream squirted all over her face."

Though he claims to be fifteen, Mark is refused admittance to the show, as are four other kids--two couples--who blame Mark for keeping them from seeing Facecream and threaten to beat him up.  The girls are more cruel and aggressive than the boys--it is the female members of the couples who do most of the verbal threatening.  These four disgruntled movie fans chase Mark through the town, past sinister nightclubs and streetlamps covered in spiderwebs full of dead bugs.  Mark takes refuge in the bingo hall, where he sits at the same table with his withered old granny and a bunch of ugly ancient women--Campbell really pours on the descriptions of these women's jiggling fat and facial hair, and while they play bingo the old women make various disturbing gestures and jokes of a salacious nature.

That night, back at his grandparents' house, Mark is laying in bed when he hears the bingo women outside, calling out numbers as during the bingo game.  They call the number of the house Mark is in, and it is strongly implied that these women are witches or a serial killer cult or something like that who periodically choose a house in the town from which to seize a male upon whom they will inflict some unspeakably horrible fate!  The women demand either Mark or his grandfather, and I wouldn't trust Grandpa to sacrifice himself for Mark!

As with Tem's "The Monster Makers," in which people get transformed into monsters and killed in front of witnesses but the police never seem to catch on, you really have to suspend disbelief for this story.  Is the government of a First World city, even a city in severe decline, going to look the other way when a mob periodically drags a guy out of his house and he is never seen again?  (Weren't British people under 24-hour video surveillance by the time this story was printed?)  Are the local men going to let frail and obese old women overpower them and kill them?  Even a thirteen-year-old boy should be able to outfight these septuagenarians!  (Paradoxically, while Lee's story has an even more outlandish premise, it is more "believable" than Tem's and Campbell's because society at large in Lee's story responds to the impossible premise more realistically than it does in "The Monster Makers" and "The Callers.")

Of the three stories we're talking about today, "The Callers" is the most direct and conventional, and the least literary (I didn't mention it above, but Lee flings uncited T. S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold quotes at us in "Black and White Sky"), though Campbell writes it in the present tense, for some reason.  Fear of women on the part of young men, and the disgust felt by the young for the old, are good themes for a visceral horror story, though, and I think this story is a success--it may not be as ambitious as the Lee and Tem stories, but I think Campbell certainly achieves his goals here.

"The Callers" was first printed in Four for Fear, an anthology of stories commissioned for a literature festival in Hull, England; besides in The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Five it has been included in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24.

**********

These three stories are fine, but not great.  Certainly not good enough for me to renounce my allegiance to the century of my birth!  It's back to the 1970s (the decade of my birth!) in our next episode. 

2014 weird tales from Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tem & Darrell Schweitzer

If you undertake even the most cursory research on H. P. Lovecraft, the name of S. T. Joshi is bound to come up first, last and often.  Joshi is not only the towering figure in Lovecraftian scholarship--he has also edited numerous volumes of brand new weird stories.  When I looked up his name in the catalog of Central Ohio libraries, 2014's Searchers after Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic was among the numerous titles that came up (Joshi is prolific and indefatigable, and has published a lengthy and eclectic list of books on a variety of subjects.)  Last week, I borrowed Searchers after Horror, which has a fun wraparound cover by Richard Corben replete with human bones, from the Worthington Library, and this week I read stories included in the volume by authors whose work I have already sampled, Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Darrell Schweitzer.

"Iced In" by Melanie Tem

Longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may remember that I thought Melanie Tem's 2005 story "Country of the Blind" was a first-rate tale of shock and disgust, a well-crafted story that offered up an emotionally draining experience for sensitive souls like your humble blogger who used to get faint in health class when various diseases were discussed.  So, how did I handle this one?

"Iced In" is a depressing realistic story about a woman who has made a lot of poor decisions in her life (if you are the kind of person who judges, as the kids say) and suffers psychological problems.  She is a hoarder, has alienated all her friends and family, and blames others for her problems.  (While the story is in the third person, it is entirely told from the protagonists point of view and has aspects of an "unreliable narrator" situation.)  When an ice storm hits her Kansas home, because she has not paid her bills, has wasted her welfare money on ice cream and chips, and has not maintained her house or put aside supplies for an emergency, she freezes to death.

This story is well-written, and I liked it, but it is not shocking or disgusting, just sad, which is kind of a relief, and kind of a disappointment.  As far as I can tell, "Iced In" has little or no "weird" elements; this isn't supernatural horror or "cosmic horror," this is the horror of real life as lived by real people who suffer from mental deficiencies and/or bad luck.  The ice which is slowly invading the dilapidated house is sort of anthropomorphized, but I don't think we are expected to think it is really alive.

"Crawldaddies" by Steve Rasnic Tem

Like his wife Melanie, Steve Rasnic Tem has written a ton of horror stories and won a bunch of awards.  I was hoping the pun title of this one was not a warning that it was some kind of joke story.

I need not have worried; "Crawldaddies"is not a joke story; in fact it is a pretty traditional Lovecraftian tale.  At age thirty-five Josh feels a powerful urge to return to the remote mountain village in Virginia where he was born, which he and his mother left when he was five.  This place is so remote there isn't even a usable road to it; Josh has to hike there after saying goodbye to his wife and child.

Josh has always been a little odd, and in his place of birth it is quickly revealed why.  In Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" a remote seaside village is home to a bunch of people who have interbred with fish people; well, the town where Josh comes from is right next to a creek and everybody has some of the genetic material of giant crustaceans much like crayfish!  Josh himself is about to molt his human exterior and sprout additional limbs; presumably he is not going to return to the outside world and his wife and toddler.  The reader also has to speculate that Josh's own child, in thirty or so years, will likewise transform into a part-human, part-arthropod monster.

This story isn't bad.

"Going to Ground" by Darrell Schweitzer

I enjoyed Schweitzer's novel, The Shattered Goddess, a fantasy novel which had a healthy proportion of horror elements.  Schweitzer actually edited Weird Tales from 1988-2007 (the ups and downs of Weird Tales' long publishing history are actually pretty interesting--during Schweitzer's tenure, for example, they had to change the name of the magazine because they lost the rights to the name "Weird Tales"), and his stories appear in many of Joshi's anthologies of new weird fiction, so this is a guy who is committed to the weird.

The protagonist of this quite short story is a college professor who is an expert on Edgar Allen Poe, and the story refers to Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" directly several times, so I dutifully read that 1845 tale immediately after finishing "Going to Ground."  Poe writes in the story about our irrepressible urges to do things which we know are immoral, counterproductive or even self-destructive, providing as examples the common desire of people looking over a cliff to jump, and the all-to-common practice of procrastinating in performing even the most urgent of obligations.  The narrator of "The Imp of the Perverse" is a murderer who has escaped detection for years who gives in to a sudden urge to confess, which leads him to the hangman's noose.

In "Going to Ground" the college prof wanders into the forested wilderness late at night, his memory a blank.  He finds he is marching among a column of corpses and ghosts, and then remembers that earlier today he murdered his wife and child.  Soon thereafter he is confronted by their own ambulatory corpses.  Schweitzer's character's experiences mirror many of those of Poe's character: both flee wildly, lose their sight (Schweitzer's prof drops his glasses) and are cornered by a crowd.  I'm not sure if the prof is already dead when he discovers he is marching with the dead, or if the dead are leading him to his own death...it seems possible that he died while falling into a ditch (where he lost his spectacles) or maybe when he stopped his car by the forest he was in reality crashing it.

Not bad, and, of course, it was a spur to reading an important story I would have already read if I had had a decent education.    

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These stories are all good, but not great.  Also, I've gotten so used to reading old books, that encountering references to the common currency of quotidian 21st-century conversation (e. g., hoarding, the Internet) was a little jarring.  We'll be going back some 37 years into the past in our next episode.

Tales of Forbidden Acts from 1995 by Koja & Malzberg, Tem and Wagner

I'm still working the 1990s perversion desk!  In our last episode we confronted three tales of rape and death from Poppy Z. Brite's Love in Vein.  Today we subject ourselves to three visions from the 1995 anthology Forbidden Acts, edited by Nancy A. Collins and Edward E. Kramer.  I got my copy of Forbidden Acts on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books.  The cover is very lame, with lots of negative space, a boring picture, no blurbs and no famous names.  Was this a rush job or something?

Forbidden Acts has an introduction by Joe Bob Briggs, the B-movie review guy!  When I was still living with my parents in New Jersey my brother and I would watch all those B-movie TV shows with hosts like Gilbert Gottfried, Morgus the Magnificent, Commander U.S.A, Grandpa Al Lewis, and Briggs.  Those were the good old days!  Anyway, Briggs warns us that we will not "enjoy" the stories in Forbidden Acts, that they are "rude"and "brutal" and will "shock" and even "hurt" us.  Well, let's see if this anthology's offerings by four writers we've already talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log will rudely brutalize us.

"Mysterious Elisions, Riotous Thrusts" by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg

A professional woman is in the middle of a bitter divorce from her second husband, Gerald.  She left her first husband for Gerald because Gerald was a good lay and was as sexually ravenous as she is, but Gerald started cheating on her before the first anniversary of their wedding.  Currently our main character lives alone, sexually frustrated and spending her free time getting drunk on scotch Gerald left behind.

While drunk she hears a sound at the door, and opens it to find an odd little monster has come to visit.  This thing, which I guess is like a volley-ball-sized blob or slug (it has "stalks" and "ganglia" and green blood) but with human-like hands and face, climbs up her legs and has sex with her, using its "claws" and "smile" to give her some of the best sex of her life!  Then it crawls away.

The second time the monster visits her, after it has exhausted her with its attentions, she realizes it has the face of Gerald!  The last sentences of the story invoke the names of Paolo and Francesca, the famous adulterous lovers from Dante, and hint that, like Paolo and Francesca, Gerald and our protagonist are in Hell, being punished because they let their passionate lust carry them away from their duty.  O lasso!

Rossetti's classic 1855 watercolor illustrating Canto V from Inferno

This one is pretty good, a crazy pornographic monster story grounded in believable human emotion; Koja and Malzberg handle both the insane monster stuff and the realistic relationship material well.  Koja and Malzberg completists may be forced to get a copy of Forbidden Acts; I don't think this story has been published in any other place.

"Blood Knot" by Steve Rasnic Tem

This is a story about how claustrophobic families can be, narrated by a guy with psychological problems who isn't good at detecting relationship boundaries; he was sexually attracted to his step-mother, for example, and to his own daughters.  Tem doesn't come out and say much about where these people live or their jobs or anything (besides that our narrator spent time in the Army), but I got a "redneck" or "hillbilly" vibe from the story, I guess because of the contractions and nonstandard grammar used in the dialogue.  "Rednecks" are a demographic that everybody feels comfortable looking down on, an "other" for people who champion diversity and are always criticizing other people for "othering" people.

The narrator's father had four wives, and may have killed one of them (she just disappeared after a loud night of drinking); he serves as a role model for the narrator. An example of his wisdom:  "It don't matter if you like your family or not.  You're tied to 'em; might as well accept that.  It's in the blood."  Tem takes advantage of the multiple meanings of "blood" in English, and there is a lot of talk about family ties ("blood knots") as well as about menstrual blood.

The narrator longed to have a family of his own, but had trouble attracting women. When he did marry it was to a woman much younger than he is (just as his father's fourth wife, the one our narrator lusted after, was much younger than his father.)  The narrator doesn't know how to be a good husband or father, and found living with his wife and three daughters difficult.  The smell of them during their periods was particularly upsetting.  When the daughters started dating he went off the deep end, and, as far as I can tell, murdered them with a sharp implement ("cutting" those blood knots the way Alexander cut the Gordian knot.)  It is possible he cannibalized them, or just drank their blood (he compares his daughters' breasts to apples, onions and tomatoes, and has drinking blood on his mind, comparing his wife and daughters at one point to vampires.)  This is one of those stories in which everything is hinted at rather than baldly stated, so maybe I am misinterpreting something.

I'm going to have to give "Blood Knot" a thumbs down; I didn't feel like the energy spent trying to figure it out was a worthwhile investment, because the plot and characters didn't interest me or inspire any feeling in me.  Some guy I can't identify with in some place I don't know about murdered his family because he was insane and/or came from a broken home--"Blood Knot" is like the news stories I ignore every day when they pop up on the computer screen or the radio.  Maybe people who are into serial killer stories and child abuse stories will like "Blood Knot."  I know Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling included it in the ninth Year's Best Fantasy and Horror so I have to assume I'm voicing the minority opinion here.   

Back cover of Forbidden Acts

"The Picture of Johnathan Collins" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner of course is famous for those grim sword and sorcery tales of Kane and for writing and editing horror stories.  I've mentioned before how much I like his story "Sticks."  I also like "The Picture of Jonathan Collins," though not as much. This story appears in two later anthologies of Wagner's horror stories, so you don't have to track down a copy of Forbidden Acts to read it.

Collins is a Londoner.  During the Second World War his house suffered a direct hit from a German bomb.  He was in a coma for a week and awoke with no memory of his past--he even had to learn to walk and talk again!  Any records that may have been in the house were destroyed by the bombing. Forty years later he still looks thirty years old, and still lacks any memory of his pre-war life.

Collins is a bit of a lady's man, and also a collector of turn of the century pornogrpahy.  At an auction he purchases some late Victorian photos, and finds among them pictures of two men dressed in women's clothes having anal sex.  Close examination suggests the active member of the pair is Oscar Wilde, while the passive participant is none other than himself!  Collins starts having flashbacks to homosexual experiences with Wilde, and begins to suspect he is the model for the title character of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Collins seeks help from fringe elements of English society in figuring out the truth and finding the painting or photograph or whatever it is that has kept him young and alive all these decades, so that he can safeguard it and ensure his immortality.  There's a fraudulent psychic cat lady, a transvestite dominatrix, and a gay collector of old pornography.  Even though he has been straight since the war Collins has gay sex with the transvestite (at eighty pounds a session!) as a means of jogging his memory. After being "buggered," as our cousins across the pond say, Collins faints and has vivid memories of the photo sessions that produced the pictures he purchased at auction, at which Wilde "used him like a girl" and then abandoned him.

Collins' quest is ultimately disastrous; he unwittingly puts the image that renders him immortal at risk and suffers a horrible, and long overdue, death.

This story has a strong central idea and is well plotted and structured.  It is also explicit (in every sense of the word) and easy to understand, unlike some of the oblique and obscure stories I have been reading in these 1990s porno anthologies.  I do think "The Picture of Jonathan Collins" is a little too long.  In an apparent effort to shock or offend "square" readers and amuse or even arouse "hip" and gay readers, the story is full of explicit scenes of homosexual sex and detailed descriptions of S&M clothing. Maybe other people will enjoy these scenes, but I thought they were too long and repetitive and dragged the story down a bit.

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I wouldn't say these stories "hurt" or "shocked" me, though the Koja & Malzberg story and the Wagner tale are both outside the norm with their explicit depictions of sex with a monster and exhibitionistic gay sex.  Both of those stories are worthwhile reads with engaging plots and characters and references to canonical literary works.  The Tem story about broken families and murder feels like an episode of one of those TV shows "ripped from today's headlines" about cops chasing perverts, but without the cops.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.