Showing posts with label Grant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grant. Show all posts

Sunday, November 9, 2025

DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories IV: A Davidson, H Clement, R Campbell, C L Grant and R A Lafferty

The first DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories, from which we read four stories in our last installment, was a reprint of a British anthology edited by Richard Davis.  The next two volumes in the DAW series consist of stories drawn from other Davis publications.  But The Year's Best Horror Stories IV, printed in 1976, is a US original edited by Gerald W. Page.  It looks like we have already assimilated four stories Page selected for the book, "Something Had to Be Done" by David Drake, "Cottage Tenant" by Frank Belknap Long, "No Way Home" by Brian Lumley and "The Glove" by Fritz Leiber, but its pages contain five as yet unread stories by people we are interested in: Avram Davidson, last seen flummoxing me with a story about a famous American crime I rarely think about; Hal Clement, whose science-heavy story "Proof" I recently enjoyed; Ramsey Campbell, author of "The Scar," among the many facets of which are incest, jewel thieves and doppelgangers; Charles L. Grant, famous as the writer of "quiet" horror (shhh!), and R. A. Lafferty, one of those wild and crazy sui generis SF authors like A. E. van Vogt and Barry Malzberg.  Let's investigate these five tales and take a stab at figuring out why Page included them in the first of his four outings as editor of The Year's Best Horror Stories.  (From VIII to XXII, the series was helmed by Karl Edward Wagner, author of the Kane stories and "The Picture of Johnathan Collins," which I in 2016 called "explicit" and tarbandu at PorPorBooks just recently called "unabashed gay porn.")

Oh, yeah, the great tarbandu back in 2020 reviewed The Year's Best Horror Stories IV, so after I have drafted my own assessments of today's tales I will reacquaint myself with what he had to say about the book and see if we are on the same page when it comes to the nine stories from the volume I will have read.

"And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" by Avram Davidson (1975)

"And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" debuted in Playboy alongside a Flashman piece by George MacDonald Fraser, an interview with Erica Jong ("I frequently go without any underwear at all"), and a goofy pictorial in which comic book heroines are depicted in compromising positions.  If you ever imagined Little Orphan Annie receiving oral sex from her dog or Lois Lane masturbating in a phone booth, well, you could have gotten a job at Playboy in the Seventies, I guess.  I'm reading "And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" in a scan of 1978's Getting Even: Gripping Tales of Revenge, where Davidson's story is accompanied by Robert Bloch's quite good "Animal Fair," and Robert E. Howard's "The Man on the Ground," among other stories by SF luminaries.  "And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" would also be reprinted in The Avram Davidson Treasury.

This is a joke story, but it is a sort of sophisticated joke story and is actually amusing.  I can't really convey the effectiveness of the jokes, which are mostly based on hyperbolic and absurd language, without actually telling them to you, which I won't do, but I will tell you I am giving this story a thumbs up and provide you the outlines of the brief plot (the story takes up just seven pages of Getting Even.)

Charley is an uneducated working-class dope who works alone in a shop reconditioning old gas stoves for resale.  Actual sales are handled by the shop owner, a fat jerk who has another business somewhere else in the area and only comes by on occasion to insult Charley and invade his space.  One day Charley makes the acquaintance of a mysterious Asian man, and is invited into the immigrant's home and place of business.  This refugee from the mysterious and perilous East sells elaborate ancient books and scrolls, one-of-a-kind masterpieces printed on the finest paper with the most exotic inks, full of esoteric knowledge and striking illustrations that Westerners would probably consider pornographic.  The prices of these books are not mere money; each can only be exchanged for a very specific collection of artifacts as rare and bizarre as the books themselves.  One of the books strikes Charley's fancy, and by a strange coincidence, if you look at things in just the right way, it seems Charley may be able to acquire the items for which he can trade the book, and, in so doing, pay back his boss for all the abuse the man has heaped upon him.


"A Question of Guilt" by Hal Clement (1976)

According to Page's intro to the story, "A Question of Guilt" was written for a vampire anthology that never saw print, and so its appearance in The Year's Best Horror Stories IV was its debut.  I am reading the story in The Best of Hal Clement, edited by Lester del Rey.

This longish story (like 40 pages here in The Best of Hal Clement) is not really a horror or a science fiction story, but a bit of historical fiction that celebrates science and the scientific method and criticizes religion and superstition.  Clement also tries to produce a human drama that will pull the old heart strings.

It is the 2nd century AD (I think.)  An intelligent slave from the provinces by chance escaped bondage and became a prosperous citizen of the Roman Empire.  He visited Rome multiple times, and there found himself a wife, but decided he'd rather live in a cave in the wilderness with his family: wife, kids, his wife's female slave.  

Tragedy struck!  All four of the sons the couple produced have had hemophilia, and three have died.  The father has dedicated his life to figuring out how to cure or treat the disease, and as the story begins he is returning to the cave after a long visit to healers in cities, including Galen of Pergamon.

Clement serves us up lots of dialogue scenes in which the man argues with his wife, who fears the disease represents a curse or a punishment from the gods or some such thing and that trying to treat the disease is pointless or even sacrilegious.  Similarly, there are scenes in which the wife's slave worries his scientific investigations are black magic.  But Clement also tries to win some points from the feminists, having the wife demonstrate intelligence and help her husband in his efforts to invent transfusion techniques.  Another of Clement's recurring themes is the pointlessness of people blaming themselves for misfortunes and being hard on themselves when they make mistakes--guilt is a waste of time, gets in the way of solving problems.  

The horror aspects of the story take up very little of the text.  Offscreen, the father kidnaps a stranger's kid and experiments on him.  When the fourth son dies (Clement has spent a lot of time describing this kid playing and expressing and receiving affection and so forth, in hopes we readers will be emotionally affected by his death) the mother disappears.  The father and the slave girl search the labyrinthine caves for weeks looking for mom; dad is sort of insane with grief and continues searching even when it is clear there is no hope of finding her alive.  Eventually the slave girl convinces dad that mom committed suicide by jumping down a deep pit.  Clement seems to be hinting that the slave girl is lying, trying to snap the man out of his funk.  Also of note, Clement earlier raised the possibility of the man having sex with the slave girl to see if their kids were also hemophiliacs; maybe we are meant to expect that the slave girl will end up as the man's second wife.  

The slave girl stops the grieving father from jumping down the pit himself after his wife.  She convinces him to continue his research into a treatment for hemophilia--it will be a boon to humanity, spare future women the loss of their children.  She suggests they travel the world, kidnapping kids and experimenting on them and then moving on to a new neighborhood before anybody catches on.  I guess the idea is that this behavior is how the legend of the vampire began, and Clement is trying to get us to think about the moral propriety of trespassing against social mores and the rights of others in the pursuit of the greater good, like all those Peter Cushing movies in which Dr. Frankenstein is committing all kinds of crimes in the name of advancing medical science.  "Sure, I'm torturing and murdering this person today, but I'm only doing it to lay the groundwork for saving countless lives in the future!"

"A Question of Guilt" feels long and slow and a little flat.  Clement spends a lot of time describing boring activities like making a bowl out of clay and a tube out of gold and so forth, while exciting activities like kidnapping a child and experimenting on him--to death!--are covered in a few lines of dialogue.  Still, the story is not actually bad.  Grade: Acceptable.     

"The Christmas Present" by Ramsey Campbell (1975 with an asterisk)

It looks like "The Christmas Present" debuted in an anthology of new stories published by Arkham House and edited by Page himself, Nameless Places.  "The Christmas Present" slightly stretches the concept of "new," as a version of it was performed on the BBC in 1969, but the story did not appear in print until this '75 book.  I am reading the story in a scan of Nameless Places, which I may return to because it has stories by David Drake, Brian Lumley, Lin Carter, Stephen Goldin, Carl Jacobi and Robert Aickman that I don't think I have read.

In this story Campbell tries to conjure up a mood and throw images at you, but keeps the actual matter of what is going sort of vague and mysterious.  At times it seems there may be an intellectual, I guess sociological, theory behind the story, but I'm not sure if we readers are to take the theory seriously or consider it pretentious and silly.

Our narrator is, I guess, a grad student or college professor, and it is late on Christmas Eve and the pubs and streets are crowded with revelers, mostly students who talk about cinema and Marx.  Our narrator has a party of like eight or nine people at his table at the pub.  A student they don't really know joins the group, and offers a present--it seems he has been looking for someone to give the present to, and settles on the narrator, who is the de facto leader of his crowd.

The party moves to the narrator's apartment on the upper floor of a house near an Anglican church and a graveyard that has recently been cleared, I guess the bodies taken away so the land can be put to other uses.  There are clues suggesting the mystery man with the mystery gift may be a ghost.  On the walk to the apartment he points out that the shadows on the front of the church make it look like a scary face.  As the group walks past street lights they go out, and there are no cars on the road, rendering the street very dark and spooking the partiers.

At the apartment, the mystery man refuses to dance and says quasi-Hegelian stuff like "A war is a clash between a myth and its antithesis" and then argues that "...there's nothing more frightening than people gathering round a belief....if a belief exists it must have an opposite.  That exists too but they try to ignore it.  That's why people in a group are dangerous."  This argument seems pretty incoherent--is Campbell intentionally putting semi-educated gobbledygook in this guy's mouth as a way of goofing on academics or at least faddish and pretentious college kids?  Or is this a set of beliefs Campbell takes seriously and is illustrating with his story here?

Anyway, the church bell rings at midnight, but it sounds odd, and then carolers singing a song nobody can recognize approach the house, enter, start up the steps.  The street is so dark the carolers cannot be seen.  I guess they are the souls of the dead who were evicted from their graves.  These weird carolers instill fear in the partygoers, who somehow make a connection between the carolers and the unopened mystery gift.  The narrator's girlfriend throws the gift in the fire, and the carolers vanish.  The mystery man won't say what was in the now destroyed box save that it was "Just something to give form to a belief....a sort of anti-Christmas present....The antithesis of a Christmas present.... An experiment, mate, you know."  I guess the box contained a bone or something else the dead souls would have wanted.

The narrator punches out the mystery man and efforts to arouse him are useless; as the story ends we have no idea if he will ever be revived.

I guess this story is OK...these stories in which you can't tell what the hell is going on can be frustrating; is the mystery man an actual ghost, or just a kid who, like an overconfident scientist who builds a super weapon or sacrifices people to advance medical knowledge, is foolishly putting the community at risk by meddling with phenomena he knows only a little about?  Difficult stories like this are easier to take from writers like Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty because their stories are generally full of virtues--shocking surprises or ancient wisdom or beautiful sentences or deep human feelings or funny jokes--you can appreciate without really grokking what is going on under the surface.  Probably there are people who love Campbell's style and can appreciate a difficult story by him because they enjoy how he describes the light or the fog or a room's decor or whatever, but I find much of Campbell's verbose descriptions to be a little much, a thicket that obstructs my appreciation of the story rather than an adornment.

"The Christmas Present" reappeared in a short-lived Italian magazine, Psyco, that had characteristically awesome covers by Dutch master Karel Thole, a few Campbell collections, and Richard Dalby's Ghosts for Christmas. 

Whoa, that ghost has a good body.  Come right in and celebrate the Yuletide with me,
Miss Ghost, I'll even open the French doors for you, though I see you walking right through
 my fence, you know, just to be friendly like.

"White Wolf Calling" by Charles L. Grant (1975)

This one debuted in an issue of F&SF with a cool volcanic cover and the first installment of the serialized version of Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man.  I read The Stochastic Man in 2007 and thought it boring because too much of it was just horserace politics; I also felt the characters' behavior a little unbelievable.  A below average Silverberg.  This ish also has a letter from our hero Barry Malzberg in which he jousts not only with Alexei Panshin over Panshin's whole attitude about the history of SF and his assessment of the influence of John W. Campbell, Jr. but also with Joanna Russ over Russ's hostile review of Silverberg's Born with the Dead, a Silverberg I have read twice and after the second read found to be quite above average.  And there are two letters from Kurt Vonnegut in the letters column that all you Vonnegut fanatics will want to read.  

OK, on to the fiction that brought me to look into the April 1975 F&SF.  Oy vey, Grant here in "White Wolf Calling"'s first sentence makes Campbell look succinct.
Snow: suspended white water humping over hidden rocks, slashed by a slick black road that edged around the stumped mountains and swept deserted between a pair of low, peaked houses that served as unassuming sentinels at the mouth of the valley; drifting, not diving to sheathe needled green arms that bent and held in multiples of thousands, spotting indifferently the tarmac walk that tongued from the half-moon porch of the house on the right.
I was tempted to give this story a thumbs down then and there and move on with my life, but "White Wolf Calling" is only 12 pages long so I continued plowing through.

Grant's writing here isn't just too long and full of superfluous goop; I also question his word choices:
...as he took a frustrated poke at the soiled snow the village plow had left to harass his cleaning.
"Harass" is no good--you harass a concrete entity, in particular one with a psychology, not an abstraction like a process.  This kind of thing is like a speed bump or a pothole when I am trying to read a story--it totally takes me out of the mood the author is trying to generate and the plot he is trying to communicate.

Oh yeah, plot.  "White Wolf Calling" consists largely of an old married couple with the nicknames Mars and Venus talking about the various gossip and tragedies in their rural community.  This guy and that guy are drunks, an unfaithful husband was murdered by his wife, this woman had a skiing accident, there are no job opportunities in the area, the couple's twin sons both lost their greedy wives in some kind of railway accident, etc.  Reading this story is depressing and annoying, like talking to your parents whose only news is the medical problems their friends and relatives and neighbors, people whose names you don't even remember, are suffering.  

The protagonists' sons are losers and Mars and Venus blame themselves for being poor parents.  (A reflection of the story's being produced in the Vietnam era is the fact that they consider one of their sons' being a captain in the Army an element of his failure.)  A few years ago a Slavic immigrant, perhaps Czech, and his crippled wife and their young blonde son moved in across the street, and Mars has been acting like a surrogate father to the kid, whose own father is often away, ostensibly working in "the city."  Mars loves this foreign kid more than his own sons.  

The kid tells stories about a huge white wolf with green eyes--people who see the wolf soon die.  Mars and the kid are in the woods collecting firewood when Mars sees the wolf.  He embraces the kid and shifts as the wolf walks by so that the kid won't see the wolf.  Sure enough, later that day the kid is nearly--but not quite--struck by the car of one of Mars' reckless sons.  Has the protagonist saved the kid he loves?  No, this is a depressing story, not one about self sacrifice or heroism.  Mars is killed in a stupid accident, and as he dies it becomes apparent that the three Eastern European immigrants are werewolves who "feed on failure."  I guess in some occult way they are causing all these accidents.

The plot is OK, though its depiction of family life and career life is pretty dismal, like that we might expect of a piece of despairing mainstream literary fiction.  It is the style I am not crazy about.  Low end of acceptable.

"White Wolf Calling" has been reprinted in three different Grant collections.  

Am I reading this right?  Stephen King thinks Charles L. Grant is the 
greatest horror writer of all time?  Good grief.

"The Man with the Aura" by R. A. Lafferty (1974)

"The Man with the Aura" debuted in the final issue of Gerald Page's small press magazine Witchcraft & Sorcery, the successor title to his Coven 13.  All told, ten issues of Coven 13/Witchcraft & Sorcery were printed between 1969 and 1974; Page got some good art for this magazine from people like William Stout and Stephen Fabian, and this tenth issue has a cover by Jeff Jones and an interior Jones picture of a cat all you Jones fans and feline fanciers will want to see.  Oh yeah, this magazine has so many typos I can barely believe it.  Meow!

In "The Man with the Aura" we have an absurd joke story that is pretty amusing.  Lafferty's story here actually has quite a bit in common with the Davidson story in tone and in the type of its humor; I bitch all the time about how I hate joke stories but here today we have two good ones--glory be.  

A man describes to a friend his rise from poverty to the position of the most trusted and admired person in the world.  He was born a vulpine-faced sneak whom all suspected, and with good reason, as he was an inveterate though incompetent fraudster and thief.  But then he invented a complex apparatus, a battery of complementary high-tech devices integrated into his own flesh, that changed his "aura."  Thanks to the invention, people now trusted him implicitly, made excuses for him when anything went wrong, literally refused to believe their own eyes and ears when they were confronted with stark evidence he had committed blunders or transgressions.  Now unassailable, he committed the most heinous crimes, crimes so blatant that a child could solve them, and profited hugely from them financially and socially.  Much of the humor of the story is the catalog of these atrocities and the public's response to them, Lafferty exaggerating outrageously for comic effect.

Plenty of fun, and an example of Lafferty's use of blood and gore for comedic purposes and perhaps of a jaded view of human nature that recognizes the way in which people judge by appearances, which can be so deceiving, and make allowances for the physically attractive and the charismatic they wouldn't make for plain janes and the awkward.  Thumbs up!

In 1991, small Canadian outfit United Mythologies Press included "The Man with the Aura" in a little 69-page collection titled Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange) and in 2015 Centipede Press reprinted it in the 316-page second volume of their Collected Short Fiction of R. A Lafferty series, for which "The Man with the Aura" served as title story.


**********

OK, now time to check in with tarbandu and see if there are major divergences between our opinions of the stories in The Year's Best Horror Stories IV that we have both read, all nine of them.

Hmm, no real fireworks, I'm afraid; we seem to basically agree about the stories.  I may be a little more generous; for one thing, tarbandu finds fault with Clement's entire career while I like much of Clement's work.  I also think I found Grant's "White Wolf Calling" less "oblique" than tarbandu did--I think Grant's story in the anthology is easier to understand than Campbell's.  For his part, tarbandu quotes a passage from Campbell's "The Christmas Present" that effectively illustrates the man's "purple prose."

If you are interested in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories volumes you should check out tarbandu's blog, as he has read and blogged about a dozen of them; here are links to his assessments:

The PorPor Books Blog on DAW The Year's Best Horror 

I     II     III     IV     V    IX    X    XII     XIII     XIV    XV     XX     

While I don't usually read entire anthologies the way tarbandu does, I did read every story in the second DAW The Year's Best Horror series over three blog posts:

ONE  TWO  THREE 

and the eighth over four posts:

Un  Duex  Trois   Quartre

Well, that's a long blog post, five stories and a million links.  Congrats for reaching the end.  Next time we'll be returning to the 1930s.  See you then!
     
   

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Saturday, April 26, 2025

Proprietors of Fate: B Copper, C L Grant and P Z Brite

A comment on this here blog from Will Errickson of the great Too Much Horror Fiction blog and Stoker Award-winning Paperbacks From Hell inspired me to look at the covers of some mid-Nineties publications from White Wolf, and I chanced upon 1996's Proprietors of Fate, an anthology with a cover and interior illos by Mike Mignola, one of my brother's favorite artists.  Why not read some stories from this book, stories by people in whom I have some interest?  The stories in Proprietors of Fate are apparently set in White Wolf's "Gothic-Punk" gaming milieu The World of Darkness in which the players take on the roles of vampires and werewolves who fight against the unfairness of modern capitalism.  In the 1990s I would have rolled my eyes at this ridiculous and childish concept and called it g** and r*******, but Basil Copper, Charles L. Grant and Poppy Z. Brite are probably up to the task of concocting good stories no matter how pandering and silly might be the angsty teen "I'm an oppressed minority and a superhero" theme in which they have to work, right?

"Death of a Demi-God" by Basil Copper 

isfdb is telling me the version of "Death of a Demi-God" in Proprietors of Fate was altered by White Wolf, so I am reading the story in an e-book edition of the second volume of the Copper collection Darkness, Mist and Shadow in hopes of finding there a Copper-approved text.  I feel it my duty to warn you that this electronic version of the collection is chockfull of missing punctuation and annoying typos; e.g., "we must be folly alert," "feint applause," and "unproved" for "improved."  Oy.

(A version of "Death of a Demi-God" that isfdb specifically states is "definitive" can be found in the 2002 collection Cold Hand on My Shoulder, but I can't find a scan of that book.)

"Death of a Demi-God" is a police detective story set in an unnamed American city, the kind of American city where people suffer "anaemia," drink tea by the fire in the "sitting room" and go to a "late night chemist" to have their prescriptions filled.  These Americans say things like "Should not you see a doctor?" and "fortnight" and "old chap;" the "workmen" among them carry around "gimlets" while the police officers don't do paperwork and have meetings at the "station" but at the "Bureau."  What?

Ryan is our main character, a cop with a wife twenty years younger than he; he and cigar-smoking Grady are working on the case of a woman who was decapitated by her husband with an axe.  At night, Ryan starts having dreams of a hot naked blonde and a dark figure in a hat with glowing eyes--when he wakes up he has little wounds on his neck.  Copper describes three of these quite similar episodes to us in some detail--this story is long, over 50 pages.

The prime minister of France is coming to the city and Ryan and Grady are given the job of watching for trouble from the upper stories of a warehouse as the Frenchman's procession passes below them.  (Wait, aren't they detectives?  Do detectives get assigned this kind of grunt work when a murderer is on the loose?)  Ryan will be on the roof and Grady at a window two floors down, so Ryan gets a slate and and a piece of chalk so he can, if necessary, write a note on the slate and lower it down to Grady's window on a string.  (Wait, don't they have radios?)  So many people are out on the streets hoping to catch a glimpse of the French prime minister that Ryan and Grady can't find any "public conveyance" to the warehouse where they are to keep watch so they walk there from the police "Bureau."  (Wait, this town doesn't have police cars?)  They remark that the "Army" will also be acting to protect the Frenchman's procession.  (Wait, is the United States Army typically used in such a fashion on domestic soil?)  The "militia" is also on the scene.  

The man who murdered his wife shows up and tries to murder the French minister but is caught--not through any action of Ryan or Grady, but that of minor characters.  Our guys are there at the interrogation, though, where the murderer commits suicide by jumping out a window before divulging much of anything to the cops.

Ryan's vampiric dreams stop for a few months, then start up again.  A minor character is killed by a vampire, and we readers wonder if Ryan is now a vampire but doesn't know it.  Ryan begins to feel that he is being watched.  Then comes a big day, a major assignment, one on the scale of the French prime minister episode.  Ryan is given a spot at which to sit, apparently as a guard, but then feels compelled to leave the spot--he finds himself in the clutches of the evil people from his dream, the naked beauty--she turns out to be his wife--and the man with the hat and red eyes--he turns out to be a living corpse!

The twist ending of the story explains all the puzzling oddities about the city in the story and about people's vocabulary and behavior.  "The Death of a Demi-God" does not take place in the 1990s, as I stupidly assumed (the background on World of Darkness, linked above, talks all about skyscrapers and punk rock and film noir and other 20th-century stuff so set me up for a fall); it takes place in 1864-5.  The city in Copper's story is Washington, D.C.!  Ryan was given the job of guarding Abraham Lincoln's box at Ford's Theatre, and vampires used their diabolical powers to draw him away from his post so the President could be murdered!

This story is not enjoyable.  The murders don't feel connected, none of the detective work is interesting, the main character doesn't do much of anything, the supernatural elements are banal.  The characters don't have personalities or compelling relationships and don't win your sympathy, the story lacks tension and is poorly constructed, with a sort of climax when the murderer is found and then a dull segment followed by the real climax that comes from out of nowhere with no buildup.  As for the central gimmick, I found all the clues that this was the 19th century bewildering and distracting, assuming they were errors rather than part of a clever ruse, and the final revelation irritating.

Thumbs down!  

"Gray" by Charles L. Grant

Here we have a story by the famous practitioner of "quiet horror" which it seems may never have been printed in any other venue.  It is not only Mignola collectors who need a copy of Proprietors of Fate, but Grant fanatics!

The themes of "Gray" are more what I expected from a World of Darkness story--a depressed werewolf kills white people in his quest to defend nonwhites from capitalism--but like Copper's "Death of a Demi-God," Grant's story is about a famous 19th-century event and Grant tries to spring that fact on you as a surprise.

Our main character is a scout with the U S Army in the West, the racist white men think he is half-Native American because he is such a good tracker, but the reality is that he is a werewolf!  The werewolf is sympathetic to the Indians, and uses his position as a scout to lead the white imperialists into ambushes.  At the end of the story we learn he has lead Custer (who is never named, but identified by his blonde hair) to Little Big Horn.  There is also some business about the werewolf and the Indians he is helping not really getting along; even though by killing white people the protagonist is doing the right thing, he is also a tragic anti-hero, committing blunders himself and suffering the tragedy of having his favorite horse killed by natives.

This is a competent but slight story that maybe you'll enjoy if you like seeing white people laid low, in particular if you have some kind of resentment of blondes.  We'll call "Gray" barely acceptable.

Mike Mignola illustrations for "Gray" and 
"Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz"

"Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz" by Poppy Z. Brite

This story was a success, getting reprinted in Stephen Jones' The Best New Horror: Volume 8 and a stack of Brite collections.  Maybe this will be the one actually good story we read today?

Brite starts out by just telling you the following scenes are set in Sarajevo in 1914, which is a nice change of pace.  People my age will remember that in 1995, when Proprietors of Fate was published, Sarajevo was a focus of world attention because of fighting in the region which continued throughout much of the 1990s.

Anyway, Brite describes the murder of Arch Duke Francis Ferdinand and his wife Sophie capably over four pages.  While not bad, I have to wonder how useful this material is--if I wanted to read about this heinous crime, couldn't I just read about it in any one of scores of history books?  

The scene shifts to 1918 and New Orleans, a town Brite portrays as dirty and crime-ridden.  The ghost of the Duke accosts an Italian-American resident of NOLA, a former cop who has lived a tragic life.  Behind his murder, the Duke informs the ex-cop, was a centuries-old Sicilian wizard, Cagliostro.  Currently, Cagliostro is manipulating Mussolini!  Ferdinand the ghost wants the American to slay Cagliostro, who is currently in the Big Easy disguised as a grocer.  When the man refuses, the ghost takes over his body and starts killing grocers with an axe--the Duke knows the wizard Cagliostro is living as an Italian grocer, but he doesn't know which one.  This campaign of murder Brite, it turns out, based on a real life killing spree I never heard of before. 

Cagliostro Brite portrays as a bleeding heart liberal who can see the future and only kills people to achieve a better future.  The wizard aims to manipulate Mussolini into undermining Hitler.  When the ghost-inhabited body of the ex-cop finally arrives at Cagliostro's place the wizard easily neutralizes it.  Then he pens a letter to a newspaper in the voice of the serial killer urging people to play jazz music on a particular night--the letter is a real artifact that Brite is just reproducing here.

The final scene of the story suggests the Axis powers lost World War II because of Mussolini's bungling, a product of Cagliostro's murders and manipulations.

Besides being, like Copper and Grant's stories, a fantasy explanation of various gory historical events, it is possible Brite means her story to be a satire of people who hope to improve the world by murdering people, or, maybe, a vindication of such people--Brite only has nice things to say about Cagliostro, though some of these nice things may be ironic or sarcastic.

We'll call this one mildly good.  The plot is OK and the style is pretty good, but the tone is a little too variable, with somewhat goofy joke scenes as well as very serious scenes and scenes in which horrible wounds are dwelt upon splatterpunk style.  

**********

If I had known these stories were going to be alternate history tales in which bargain basement Draculas, Wolfmans and Merlins were the secret manipulators behind famous battles and the world-shaking murders of statesmen I would not have read them because I don't find such stories entertaining.  But here we are, sadder but wiser.  

(Whatever I think of these stories, though, I am probably going to be reading Copper, Grant and Brite again.)

Proprietors of Fate is the second volume of a trilogy of anthologies edited by Edward E. Kramer, whom I just now am realizing is some kind of predatory homosexual who has been arrested time and again for violations involving minors.  (Again, I am sadder but wiser.)  The first Dark Destiny volume, Dark Destiny, includes a solid Robert Bloch story, "The Scent of Vinegar."  Kramer also had a hand in editing Forbidden Acts, which contains stories by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg, Steve Rasnic Tem and Karl Edward Wagner full of perverse sex, and Dark Love, from which we just recently read stories with uncomfortable sex themes by Koja, Wagner, Ramsey Campbell and Copper.

Next time on MPorcius Fiction Log: short SF from the Eisenhower era which (probably) will lack uncomfortable sex themes and gore in the splatterpunk style. 

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Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Nightmares from Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman and Charles L. Grant

The nightmare continues!  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have been reading stories from To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare, a 1993 anthology edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg.  To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare contains thirty stories, and we have read 14 of them over the years in various venues; interested parties can see what we thought about them by clicking the links below:  

"The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard     
"Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith
"Scarlet Dream" by C. L. Moore
"The Dreams in the Witch-House" by H. P. Lovecraft 
"The Isle of the Sleeper" by Edmond Hamilton
"The Unspeakable Betrothal" by Robert Bloch  
"Perchance to Dream" by Charles Beaumont
"A Dread of Red Hands" by Bram Stoker
"The Lady in Gray" by Donald Wandrei
"Prescience" by Nelson S. Bond
"The Dreams of Albert Moreland" by Fritz Leiber
"Lover When You're Near Me" by Richard Matheson
"The Depths" by Ramsey Campbell

Today we'll read three more stories from the collection, those tales plucked by Messrs. D, W and G from the oeuvres of Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman and Charles L. Grant.

"Dream of a Mannikin" by Thomas Ligotti (1983?)

This story has appeared in several books, sometimes as "Dream of a Manikin" and sometimes as "Dream of a Mannikin" and sometimes as "Dream of a Mannikin, or The Third Person."  There is some confusion at isfdb over whether the story debuted in 1982 or 1983, but it looks to me like its first appearance was in the 1983 issue of the magazine Eldritch Tales.  In 1989 Jessica Amanda Salmonson included the story in her anthology Tales by Moonlight II, which appears to be a collection of stories that first appeared in small press magazines; "Dream of a Manikin" was reprinted in the Ligotti collections Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Nightmare Factory.

I guess we sort of expect Ligotti stories to be a little challenging, to be the sort of story you have to figure out, and this is true of "Dream of a Mannikin," but it is not terribly difficult.  The story takes the form of a long letter written by a psychiatrist to a fellow shrink, a woman with whom he is in love, and we learn more and more about his feelings for her and the nature of their relationship as the story progresses.  The last paragraph of the letter is in italics and is apparently the female therapist's notes on or response to the man's letter.

The main topic of the letter is the visit of a young woman, Amy Locher, to the letter writer.  Locher has had a terrible dream and is seeking treatment, and it turns out she was directed to the narrator by the woman he is in love with.  Ligotti puts multiple layers between the story and the reader as he has the letter writer describe Locher's dream, which mostly consists of a second, inner dream, the dream of the patient's dream version of herself.  In real life (ostensibly) Locher is a clerk or secretary at an industrial firm, but in her dream she works in a clothing store and dresses the mannikins (the spelling is perhaps significant--I'd spell the term for those figures in a store "mannequin.")  The retail worker version of the patient has a dream herself in which she is attacked by the mannequins she dresses and turned into a mannequin herself--this dream within a dream includes classic dream elements, like being unable to move and unable to scream when in danger.

The woman shrink has some totally wacky theories about "otherworlds" and powerful beings who toy with lesser beings that may be subordinate "splinter" aspects of themselves, theories that the narrator feels are more metaphysical than scientific, and the male shrink in his letter accuses her of manipulating Locher, of hypnotically inducing her dream, in order to acquire evidence of her bizarre theories and to lay a trap for him.  And an elaborate trap it is--it seems the narrator's secretary is an agent of the woman shrink.

In the second part of the letter the narrator describes his investigations that lead him closer to the nature of the trap the woman psychiatrist has laid for him, which he nevertheless falls into.  It seems the female shrink has somehow gained the ability, through contact with other worlds or dimensions, to take control of people and turn them into mannikins (also described as dolls--allusively, the lady shrink apparently had a doll named Amy as a child, and the word "darling" is spelled "dolling" multiple times throughout the story in multiple contexts) and she has done this to Amy Lochner and it looks like the male shrink is in the process of becoming her next victim.  Or maybe the female psychiatrist can imbue dolls--and/or people--with alien souls she snares from outer space--one of the themes of the story is ambiguity and confusion about identity and transformation of identity.  Or perhaps the female shrink is a space monster and all the other characters--Locher, secretary and male psychiatrist--are aspects of her soul which she plays with to help pass the aeons.

This is a well-crafted story; the depiction of dreams feels totally believable, the images are strong, and every sentence feels significant, offering some clue to the plot or adding to the atmosphere.  "Dream of a Mannikin" does require some patience and it will give your noggin a workout, though, so maybe it's not what everybody is going to think of as fun entertainment.  


"Never Visit Venice" by Robert Aickman (1968)

Robert Aickman is another writer whose work I expect to strain the brain case.  The title of "Never Visit Venice" made me wonder if I was in for allusions to Thomas Mann's famous "Death In Venice," which I have read a few times, and to Proust--Venice (Marcel's desire to go there and his eventual visit) is a recurring theme in Remembrance of Lost Time, and strange dreams, in which little Marcel has become an inanimate object or an abstract concept, are a prominent topic of the very first page of that monumental novel.  And then came the epigraph that opens "Never Visit Venice," some lines from Celine, whose Death on the Installment Plan and Castle to Castle we read back in early 2022. 

Fern is an Englishman, an office worker who is shy, unambitious,  and not very social; he doesn't make as much money as he could because he doesn't see the point, and he doesn't make friends or achieve any success with women largely because other people interest him but little.  He has a recurring dream about embracing a woman in a gondola in Venice, and eventually actually goes to Venice, where the dream comes true in a macabre and surreal fashion.  As the story ends it seems that Fern, alone in the gondola with the skeleton of the woman who beckoned him into the little craft, will drift out to sea to be drowned; one of the last things he sees is a political slogan painted on a wall, I guess a quote or paraphrase from Mussolini, asserting it is better to live like a lion for an hour than to live a lifetime as an ass.    

Though the sudden revelation in the end, when the woman Fern has just had sex with becomes or is revealed to be a skeleton, is like something out of Weird Tales or EC comics, most of the story resembles literary fiction.  The first part is page after page of Fern in England that focus on his ambiguous and diffident attitude toward life and career and money, and most of the remainder is page after page of Fern in Venice, finding everything disappointing and sensing that Venice's glory days are long past, a fact none of the living people in Venice are to acknowledge--only the ghost woman in the gondola will voice this sad truth.  The pervasive atmosphere of the story is of ambiguity and irony--early in the story we learn Fern is both proud and embarrassed that he is different than other people and doesn't really get along with them, and we are told early in the Venice part of the story that Fern's expectations of what he would find in Venice, based on what he has read and been told, are not realized, that in fact he finds the opposite of what he was told to expect.  And there are many other instances of irony and ambiguity.  One of the more striking examples is the camouflaged suggestion on the last page that Mussolini, whom we always see portrayed as a monster or a buffoon, had a better idea about how to live than does the inoffensive Fern, a strange notion that I guess the quote from Celine, the notorious Jew-hater and Nazi-sympathizer, that begins the story foreshadows.  

But it could be that Aickman is not endorsing Mussolini and Celine.  Perhaps Aickman's point is that people who put themselves out there, who embrace life with vigor, are often evil people, and that being forward and ambitious is dangerous and ultimately pointless (Mussolini and Celine are, of course, in the final equation, losers who get humiliated.)  Consider that Fern tries to realize his dream of love in Venice only to have sex with a skeleton who tells him one should "Never visit Venice" (i.e., do not pursue your dreams) and then get killed, and that early in the story Aickman puts forward the idea that travel is pointless, suggesting, as would a skeptic of "globalism," that easy travel and communication have served to homogenize the world, turn a world of diverse cultures into one big monoculture, so that travel and communication are unprofitable, every place being now the same.         

Though not a lot actually happens in the story, Aickman's style, as in good literary fiction, is smooth and engaging and carries you along so the story doesn't feel long at all, even though there is little or no narrative drive.  Thought-provoking and worthwhile.

"Never Visit Venice" first appeared in the Aickman collection Sub Rosa, and was also included in the collection The Wine-Dark Sea.


"The Last and Dreadful Hour" by Charles L. Grant (1986)

"The Last and Dreadful Hour" is one of Grant's stories about the town of Oxrun, and debuted in the collection The Orchard.  The Orchard has appeared in numerous editions, and looking over their covers I was amused to see that in one edition the Stephen King blurb reads "One of the premier horror writers of his or any generation," but on another cover the quote has been misleadingly edited into "The premier horror writer of his or any generation."  Was King aware of this inexcusable chicanery?  

Ligotti's "Dream of a Mannikin" is like 12 pages long, and Aickman's "Never Visit Venice" is some ten pages longer.  Grant's "The Last and Dreadful Hour" is ten pages longer still, clocking in at 33 pages, a fact that made me groan after I had read the first of those thirty-three, which is wholly devoted to a description of the weather, complete with poetic repetition--while Ligotti and Aickman's stories felt like literary fiction, Grant's from square one felt like the work of a guy trying to be literary but succeeding only in wasting everybody's time.

The second page of "The Last and Dreadful Hour" is given over to describing in mind-numbing detail the movie theatre in Oxrun.  The aforementioned weather--a ferocious storm--causes a power outage, and the theatre manager goes on the sound system--which, unlike the electric lights, is somehow still working--to apologize.  We are then introduced to a passel of boring characters with boring backstories, and forced to read bland and verbose retailings of their every move--
...she straightened, rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, and waved him out to the aisle.  He grinned and did as he was told, thanked her as she joined him, took her arm and pulled her down a pace while Seth and Davidson moved to carry the old man...
--as they discover an unconscious man in the darkened theater.  It is bad enough that Grant wastes our time detailing these boring people's every gesture, but his sin is compounded by the fact that his descriptions don't even work.  Toni the medical student is holding Ellery the depressed bookstore clerk's hand, and then she lets go of his hand, but then two lines later she is "pull[ing] him slowly up the aisle," as if she never let go of his hand.  So not only are all these descriptions tedious and useless, they are confusing, and then angering when you realize you are looking back up the page to reread boring sentences in hopes of figuring out if some dope is holding another dope's hand, even though whether or not these dopes are holding hands is meaningless.  It is possible these apparent mistakes are intentional, an effort to make the story "dream-like," but I am betting Grant and his editor just screwed up.

Some supernatural force locks all the doors and renders all the windows indestructible so the characters are all stuck in the candle-lit (and believe me, we hear like one thousand times about wax dripping off these damned candles) cinema, in which all the women flirt with Ellery and the local rich guy acts like a jerk.  People start disappearing, and while Ellery and a woman (not Toni, who has disappeared) are away from the group looking for one of them, she strips naked and tries to seduce Ellery, and then turns into a medusa and then into a skeleton.  Ellery faints, wakes up, finds everybody is gone.  A third woman reappears and flirts with Ellery before joining him on another search.  Another woman reappears to flirt with Ellery, and they search some more.  (This story moves in sterile circles--phrases, images, and actions all get repeated while the plot goes absolutely nowhere.)  The same sort of stuff keeps happening until the story finally ends with the awakening of the old man and the hint that this mind-bogglingly lame story that makes no sense and achieves nothing is all just the dream of that old man whom they found unconscious--or maybe it is the dream of sad Ellery himself.  (Toni's out-of-left-field mention of the orchard way back at the start of the story that implies the orchard is a locus of black magic or demonic possession or something is forgotten--maybe "The Last and Dreadful Hour" is more like a chapter of an episodic novel than a short story that can really stand on its own.)

This story is very bad.  The plot stinks, with no resolution or development and lots of loose ends.  The style is horrible, a mixture of the pretentious and the just plain dumb.  The characters' actions and dialogue make little sense, are just a series of non sequiturs; characters in genre fiction often act stupidly so that the plot will work, but this story is even worse because it doesn't even have a plot in which anything happens.

Grant has won a pile of awards but this story is garbage and I don't know why Dziemianowicz, Weinberg and Greenberg put it in their anthology; maybe they had run out of dream stories?  I will now take Stephen King blurbs even less seriously, and shun stories by Grant assiduously.

Incomprehensibly, "The Last and Dreadful Hour" would be included in the "Best of" Grant collection Scream Quietly.


**********

So today we have three stories that remind you that pursuing women is hazardous, two quite literary stories that are well-written followed by a piece of junk that makes you question the wisdom and honesty of Stephen King and the entire horror fiction establishment.  What a ride!

It's been like six weird and horror blog posts in a row here at MPorcius Fiction Log; when next we meet we'll do something a little different.
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Saturday, May 20, 2023

Masterful Dark stories: M W Wellman, C L Grant, F B Long & T F Monteleone

Let's surf on over to the internet archive, world's finest website, and check out Dennis Etchison's 1988 anthology Masters of Darkness II  (in its appearance in the 1991 omnibus edition The Complete Masters of Darkness.)  This is one of those anthologies that consists of stories selected by the authors themselves, stories with which they are particularly pleased.  Etchison invited contributions from a bunch of authors in whom we are interested, and let's today read four of them, stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Charles L. Grant, Frank Belknap Long and Thomas F. Monteleone.

In his intro to Masters of Darkness II, Etchison tells us that some of the stories in his anthology have been revised since their original publication, so I'll make clear here that for all these stories I am reading the versions that appear in this 1991 book.

"Up Under the Roof" by Manly Wade Wellman (1938)

We start with a story printed in Weird Tales prior to World War II.  "Up Under the Roof," after its debut, was reprinted in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine in 1967 and then in multiple Wellman collections and horror anthologies.

A bookish young boy is growing up in an old house with a family who treats his shabbily, always criticizing him and not lifting a finger to aid him when a bully thrashes him within their sight.  His family are such jerks that he can't tell them about the scary sounds he hears in the attic above his bedroom every night.  One day he feels that his doom is approaching, that tonight the creature is going to descend and work its malignant will upon him, so before sunset he screws up his courage, arms himself, and explores the attic.

This is a very good story, full of vivid images, totally believable psychology, effective metaphors, heart-rending sadness and a cathartic ending.  The author's note (first published in 1973) that follows "Up Under the Roof" reveals that this is an autobiographical story, being closely based on Wellman's own experience.  

Recommended.


"A Garden of Blackred Roses" by Charles L. Grant (1980)

This one first saw print in the anthology Dark Forces, which was published in Dutch in multiple editions as Macaber Carnaval, and would later be included in Grant collections.

"A Garden of Blackred Roses" feels long and slow.  For one thing, it groans under the weight of long detailed descriptions of boring quotidian stuff, like snow and wind and the way a guy holds his cigarette or puts his gloves in his pockets.  I guess these passages are supposed to create a mood, but instead they made my eyes glaze over.  (Maybe that is a mood, but not a mood I am seeking when I read fiction.)  There are also extravagant and sometimes clumsy metaphors which, instead of increasing our understanding of what the author is trying to say, bring us out of the story as we wonder why the author would commit to paper something so goofy.  Grant also presents to us ungrammatical sentence fragments which I guess are supposed to mimic poetry.  And then there is the fact that "A Garden of Blackred Roses" is an homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I am not familiar enough with Hawthorne to really grok all the references.  (Maybe Hawthorne junkies would love this thing.)

"A Garden of Blackred Roses" comes to us in the form of four vignettes about life on Hawthorne Street.  In the first three, people acquire flowers from the garden of a Mr. Dimmesdale, and then supernatural events occur to them--it seems the flowers can make wishes come true.  The fourth, shorter, chapter, portrays Dimmesdale, who has a letter written on his chest, tending to his blood-drinking flowers.

The star of Chapter 1 has a wife and four daughters and a cat he is crazy about.  He sneaks into the yard of the creepy Mr. Dimmesdale to steal some flowers from the man's rosebush.  His cat dies and he lays one of the flowers on kitty's grave; at night he thinks he can hear the cat--presumably the flower made his wish that his beloved cat was still alive come true.

In Chapter 2 we meet the owner of the only luncheonette on Hawthorne Street, a guy who is always irritating people with his cynical comments and unwelcome criticisms.  His wife has stolen some flowers from the Dimmesdale yard.  Some kids who hang out at the luncheonette have a tape recorder and are laughing at what appears to be a surreptitiously made recording of young lovers in a long-abandoned house down by the river.  The luncheonette owner and his wife, when they were young, themselves had sex in that abandoned house; after their tryst he hurt her feelings by critiquing her lovemaking.  Luncheonette guy goes to the abandoned house, I guess to investigate the nature of the recording or something, and gets killed by a ghost or something, I guess because he has with him some of the flowers his wife, who hates him, stole.  This chapter is the hardest to understand, and seems to drag in supernatural and mysterious elements that have nothing to do with the flowers; did the wife wish her husband would get killed?  Is the house on the river haunted?  Who were the kids recording?  

Chapter 3 features a sad highschooler who is in love with a girl who is uninterested in him.  This chapter has the most outrageous of the metaphors I was complaining about above.
...Ginny seemed so cold not even the equator could warm her.
Another girl in class is attracted to the boy, but he isn't interested in her.  Her role in the story seems to be to add additional sadness, and also to offer more examples of wishes coming true--she claims that her father stole a flower and wished for a car and got one, while her brother's wish for a glove came true.  

(Maybe things that seem to come out of nowhere, like the reference to the equator and the glove, are allusions to Hawthorne?) 

The boy's father is often away on business and it is hinted that his lonely mother is sexually attracted to him.  For example, when sonny boy groans that he doesn't want pea soup for dinner, Mom says "You know you love it" and smacks him playfully on the ass.  Then she pours him a glass of soda and the ginger ale foams up and drips down the side of the glass.  When she is particularly sad, she embraces her son and pulls his face to her breasts.  (Some of these hints are pretty broad.)  Actual incestuous intercourse is averted by the magic of the flowers--the boy's wish that his father not have to travel so much is granted (Dad gets transferred to the nearby home office) and the girl he has a crush on surrenders to his desires. 

Every page of this story radiates the feeling that Grant is trying very hard to be poetic and deep, but his strenuous efforts give birth to a story that is difficult to read because so much of it is tedious or oblique; as for the parts that aren't challenging to decipher, well, those are just lame.  Thumbs down!


"Cottage Tenant" by Frank Belknap Long (1975)

I have developed an affection for Frank Belknap Long over the years I have been toiling in the forge that produces this blog, but it cannot be denied that he has written a large quantity of clunkers, and here is another one.  The plot of  "Cottage Tenant" is acceptable, but the story is poorly written, and I don't just mean the typos and grammatical errors, for which the publisher deserves a large share of the blame.  Long's text lacks clarity, so there are times one has to puzzle out what Long's narration means to convey, and what the characters are trying to convey in their dialogue (which does not in the least resemble the speech of real people.)  Long's pacing and development of tone and atmosphere are also faulty, as he spends an inordinate amount of time describing absolutely extraneous phenomena.  The most egregious example comes up when a guy walking on the beach hears screams from a moored boat, and hurries over to investigate.  Instead of quickening the pace to inspire some excitement in the reader, or express the fear and urgency felt by the character, Long spends numerous sentences describing the guy's calculations regarding his method of approaching and climbing aboard the boat.  First, he decides that running across the beach will present an unacceptable risk of slipping and falling, and so instead he will employ "a swift stride."  Long informs us that the man has considered this issue before:
Crewson had always believed that it was a mistake to break into a run unless someone in need of help was in immediate critical danger.
Similarly, we are privy to the man's thought processes as he decides how far to wade into the water before he begins swimming, and then what stroke he will use, and finally, having clambered aboard the boat, whether he will crawl across the deck or stand up and walk across it.

Anyway, the plot:  Crewson has a wife and two kids.  He disagrees with his wife on what books their nine-year-old boy should read--the kid wants to read Greek mythology, but Crewson fears this fuels the kid's psychological problems, and it is strongly hinted the kid is somehow (Jung is mentioned) in touch with the ancient past, that he knows things about the Trojan War (for example) that are not recorded in literature.  Crewson takes a walk on the beach, discovers two of his neighbors are in distress on their moored boat; the man has been clawed by some animal which he describes as a beaked monster, and the woman is in a state of shock after grappling with the creature.  Crewson takes them to the hospital, and then back home is confronted by evidence that his son, somehow, by reading about the Trojan War, had summoned the monster who assaulted his neighbors.  The next day Crewson goes to see his son's psychiatrist, who, as a Jungian, takes all this talk of summoning monsters seriously, and advises Crewson to send his son to summer camp.  Crewson gets home just in time to find the monster clutching his two kids; he tells his son to empty his mind, and this causes the monster to vanish.  Then it is off to summer camp for the dangerous son.

Thumbs down, I'm afraid.  

Etchison specifically names "Cottage Tenant" as a story that was revised for its appearance in Masters of Darkness II.  It first was printed in an issue of Ted White's Fantastic that also includes a Barry N. Malzberg story I have never read; Gerald Page inexplicably selected "Cottage Tenant" for DAW's Year's Best Horror Stories: Series IV, and Centipede Press included it in the thousand-plus page $450.00 Long collection they published in 2010 and the 800-page $60.00 Long collection they put out in 2022.  


"Taking the Night Train" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1981)

In 1981 "Taking the Night Train" was published in the magazine Night Voyages and the hardcover Monteleone collection Dark Stars and Other Illuminations.  More recently, Eugene Johnson included it in his 2021 anthology Attack From the '80s.  In his afterword in Masters of Darkness II, Monteleone tells us it was the basis for his 1984 novel Night Train; back in 2020, Will Errickson of Paperbacks from Hell fame wrote a little about Night Train at his great blog Too Much Horror Fiction. 

Errickson wasn't crazy about Night Train, but I think this short story is quite good.  I suppose I am biased in its favor, because it covers a bunch of my favorite themes--New York City, alienation, and loneliness--but beyond that all the descriptions of people and people's emotions ring true, and the images are also vivid; critically, unlike Grant and Long in today's selections, Monteleone achieves his effects economically.

Ralphie is a short cripple in his early thirties who loves books and identifies with characters from Gogol, Dostoevsky, Hawthorne and Poe.  On work nights he emerges from his one-bedroom basement apartment near Houston Street to hobble on his mismatched legs to the subway to get to his job standing in front of a strip club drumming up business with a shouted spiel.  On the train one evening, he is not only confronted by homeless people and black muggers, as per usual, but spots what appears to be a secret abandoned station which the train rolls past, but slowly, almost as if the platform with its single light bulb is trying to stop the train but hasn't quite got the strength to do so.

There are a bunch of effective scenes that illustrate how the world has rejected Ralphie and how his ability to face people and his drive to make something of his life are ebbing.  At the same time, his obsession with the secret train stop grows, until he takes the radical step of lowering himself down onto the tracks and searching for the mysterious station.  He finds it, and a corridor that leads from it to a hellish allegorical landscape, where a tremendous monster representing loneliness cries out thunderously from where it is chained as a hideous skeletal bird picks at its entrails.  Ralphie frees the monster, which, presumably, goes on to terrorize the city in some fashion, and then Ralphie finds himself a tortured prisoner in the monster's place.

I can see how some people might find the allegorical ending a little over the top, but its echoes of Prometheus (who in some interpretations created mankind and in others gave mankind technology and civilization) are appropriate for a story that highlights horrible things about New York and about how people treat each other, and the realistic scenes illustrating city life in a period of high crime and how lonely life in the city can be are very good.  I also like the scenes in which Ralphie first sees the mysterious subway platform--I used to ride the New York City subway all the time, and one of the little thrills of such rides was the fleeting impressions of vague things in the dark beyond the windows.

Thumbs up!


**********

Wellman and Monteleone's offerings are commendable and easy to recommend, and the afterwards that accompany them in Masters of Darkness II are actually pretty interesting.  Unfortunately, Grant's story is pretentious and boring, and while Long's story has the makings of an acceptable horror piece, it is rendered ridiculous and ponderous by some bewildering authorial choices.  

I've got my eye on some more stories in Masters of Darkness II, so stay tuned.
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