Yesterday I finished reading Ramsey Campbell’s debut
novel, The Doll
Who Ate His Mother. In doing
so, I realized that I’ve now read all ten novels that Stephen King examined
in-depth in the horror fiction chapter of his genre overview Danse Macabre, originally published in
1981. These ten novels were chosen because they represented everything King
considered fine in horror fiction from 1950-1980 (the time period Danse Macabre covers.) The chapter is
essential reading for anyone interested in this period of horror fiction; I’d
argue that it is the definitive statement. But 1981 is some distance in the
rearview mirror; do these novels still have anything to say today? I’m going to
tackle this question by looking at each book and what it looks like now—how it does
or doesn’t interact with the genre today now that we have nearly 40 additional
years of horror fiction history to consider. Do these novels (ok, nine novels
and one short story collection) still represent what is fine in the genre? How
influential are they today?
A couple of disclaimers are necessary first. One, I’m not
an essayist by nature and this will not be an academic exercise. Such treatises
hold little interest to me—it’s all a matter of taste—and would not be in the
spirit of King’s original work. Secondly, I want to try to examine these works
less as to whether they work as stories (though I’ll touch on that some) but
whether they still speak to the genre today. A story can be enjoyed regardless
of context; once more, it’s a matter of taste. My reading of these books spans
my teenage years through the present, a period of over 30 years. Some of them I
read once, some I’ve read multiple times. It would be impossible to divorce my
own experience and impressions from this exercise; we’d be back in academic
territory. I want this to be like we are chatting over beers. It should be fun.
That’s all.
Ok, so enough with the excuses. Let’s roll.
The Doll Who
Ate His Mother
Might as well start with my most recent read. Before I
can even talk about this book, it’s necessary to come clean: I think Ramsey
Campbell is one of the finest writers the genre has ever produced…and yet I
think he is still somehow underrated. He wears the mantle of horror writer
proudly, and he’s certainly received much recognition and respect by folks who
follow horror fiction closely over the years…and yet, perhaps because he’s
always been so prolific, we take him for granted. He’s always there, always
writing. Like Stephen King without the popular crossover success, the fame, or
the money. No student of 20th century horror fiction can understand the
genre without coming to terms with Campbell.
And he should be wider read—there has been a massive
rebirth of the weird tale in this millennium, and you can’t avoid Lovecraft,
whose influence and the debates about feel ubiquitous (and frankly, draining—I
love Lovecraft but I wish more modern writers were *not* taking cues from him,
even the good ones. The bad ones…I’m not even going to go there.) Campbell’s
early shorts were drenched in Lovecraft mythos before he found his own voice; by
the time he wrote Doll, his debut
novel, he sounded like no one else. And through the ups and downs of his
career, that has never changed.
The Doll Who Ate
His Mother evokes a very specific time period: 1970s Liverpool, which in
this book feels very drab and grimy, all slums and pollution and decay. In this
way the book reads a bit dated today, but the story itself holds up remarkably
well. King himself said reading Campbell is like being on a low-grade dose of
LSD, and I can’t think of a more apt description. This
almost-but-not-quite-surrealism often feels both queasy and disquieting, and is
probably a large part of why Campbell has never crossed over to mainstream
success. The book’s much touted climax is not as horrific as other things
Campbell has since written, but it is one of his most tense passages, and the overall
terse style of the novel is something I wish he would return to on occasion. A
review of the plot here isn’t necessary (I’m not going to waste lots of words
on something you can queue up online with a couple of keystrokes) but if you
like Campbell, you’ll like this book. If you haven’t read Campbell, I’d start
elsewhere. The 80s novels Midnight Sun
and The Hungry Moon are his best, and
I prefer the latter-day novels The
Overnight and The Grin of the Dark
to Doll. But Doll is a well-executed novel and is one of the more approachable
of his works.
So was it a good choice? Does it still resonate? Well,
Campbell’s influence may not loom as large as I believe it should, but he has
still had a big impact on the genre. What I really don’t know is if people
discovering the genre today read him. I suspect by and large they don’t; he’s
too much of an acquired taste. He might also be too prolific; I’ve certainly
not read all of his work and I consider myself a big fan. Despite the voluminous
output, it can be hard to track his stuff down. It took me so long to read Doll because I never saw it anywhere,
and I finally bought a used stained and torn copy online. I’m glad King
included Campbell and exposed many to his work (including me); were one to
write an overview of horror fiction today he would be in there, but we’d be
talking about Midnight Sun or The Hungry Moon. I don’t think Doll turned out to be influential, even
if Campbell did. But dammit, it’s a crime more don’t read him…
Ghost Story
From the most recently read to the oldest: I first read Ghost Story in junior high. It was the
first non-King horror novel I read, rescued from a moldy cardboard box of
paperbacks at a junk store along with a copy
of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His
Gun. Total cost: 50 cents. Never has so much been gained from such a minute
cash outlay. I was completely, utterly enthralled with Ghost Story from the first words of chapter 1 right up through the
end. If any book is going to be hard for me to take an objective look at, it is
this one. Good thing I didn’t promise objectivity!
Ghost Story
follows five elderly gentlemen (joined later by a younger gentleman) charmingly
named the Chowder Society as they confront ghosts both past and present. That
does not even remotely begin to describe this beautiful book, which I think
remains perhaps the finest ghost story written, at least in novel form, save
for Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill
House—a quite different book. There are more than ghosts here, too—a
peculiar form of werewolf makes an appearance, and there are other tropes
pulled out, but this book clearly and resoundingly belongs to the ghosts. It is
an exploration of just what a ghost is and what motivations they take on. Straub
floats the idea that some or all of these ghosts are Manitou (shapeshifters),
and this is the one place the book stumbles, as this idea takes away from the
central conceit that perhaps ghosts simply take on our motivations and psyche.
The ghost is us. The latter is an infinitely more powerful and intriguing
concept than shapeshifters, and fortunately the book leaves the question
open-ended.
So yes, Ghost Story
is one of my favorite books ever, the combination of encountering it at such a
formative age with its pure reading pleasure (Straub writes beautifully clear
lines of prose that read literate without ever coming across as pretentious)
making it a novel I have returned to often over the years, never with diminishing
returns. I’ve probably read it 15-odd times. I love it dearly. But how does it
read today?
Man, I don’t know. Anyone who enjoys a well-written novel
with an involving cast of characters should still find plenty of enjoyment
here. Students of the genre will discover a well-plotted novel that plays with
many of the classic tropes. At the same time, there is no denying you simply
can’t write a book like this anymore. For starters, it is near impossible in
the age of smart phones and the internet to suspend disbelief enough to imagine
yourself in a town where all communication gets cut off (the only modern book
to convincingly do this that I’ve found is Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex, one of the great horror novels of
this millennium.) That alone gives this book the feel of another era.
I think it’s also an open question whether a tale of a
town cut off holds power in an era where so much horror fiction is concerned
with worldwide societal collapse. As big as Ghost
Story is, it’s a small story centered on less than a dozen characters in a
relatively low-population town. Next to the rampant biblical destruction and
slobbering zombies of 2017, it seems almost quaint. I’m also not sure how the
conservatism of the older gentlemen who make up the heart and soul of the story
reads today: this is a more complex, genteel conservatism than the toxicity and
rage the term invokes today. The book could even be said to suggest that such
conservatism is inherently a good thing, a loving thing, and that feels
completely out of step with 2017. Not to make sweeping generalizations of genre
fans; I just don’t know how easily one can work around those factors.
How about influence? Well, if you grew up in the 80s,
Straub almost surely influenced you. If you grew up later, I’m guessing not. He
left the genre for a while after burnout in the mid-80s, and did not return to
it until the late 90s. From what I’ve read, his work since returning has not
been particularly well-received. I’ve not read it myself. I love his entire
early run: Julia, If You Could See Me
Now, Ghost Story, and Shadowland.
Everything post-Shadowland I’ve read
or attempted to read, including his short work, I’ve just been unable to
connect with (though I did admire, if not exactly enjoy, The Throat.) Like many modern authors, he has a fascination with
unreliable narrators and meta commentary, and these things don’t particularly
appeal to me. It’s neither here nor there, it’s simply a taste thing.
If the criteria is whether or not Ghost Story represents everything fine in the genre, then in my
mind there is no question. It does and then some. If it’s whether it’s relevant
or influential today, I think that’s a more open-ended question. Still, were I
to make a required reading list for anyone interested in horror fiction—as a
writer or simply as a fan—Ghost Story
would be near the top. It remains a remarkable achievement.
The Body
Snatchers
Originally published in 1955, Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (or, as it is more
commonly known, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers—technically this was the film title only, but my copy features
this title and I rarely see it referred to otherwise) is the oldest of the
books King chose, beating out The
Shrinking Man by a year. The book has certainly been dwarfed by its
numerous film adaptations, but it’s also rarely if ever been out of print—an
impressive feat for a book now 62 years old. It’s an extremely short read that
can be pretty much summed up by its title.
An alien lifeform that King amusingly calls “ragweed from
outer space” is slowly taking over a perfect 1950s small town by replicating
its citizens. A young man and his sweetheart realize what is going on and try
to get others to believe them. There is paranoia, there is tension, there is
(exceedingly tasteful) romance as we race along with our heroes. It’s a slip of
a book, a small thing, that must have seemed dated in 1981 and seems positively
ancient now.
But its themes aren’t. Most of King’s overview is given
over to a discussion of those themes, which seemed to him eerily prescient then
and seem to me even more so now. This book could be said to be the birth of the
modern conspiracy theory, the spiritual godfather of the X-Files and JFK assassination
obsessives. I don’t think it’s important at this late date whether Finney was
intentional with these themes (he claims he was not, King seems less sure)—the
book picked them up, and its simple yet effective story has offered a
surprisingly flexible framework that the films have taken advantage of (the
1956 Red Scare and 1978 satire of the Me generation versions in particular.) In
that sense, the book is still influential and will continue to be, even if it’s
not widely read.
King asserts that Finney, along with Richard Matheson and
Robert Bloch, brought a realism to the genre, pushing it out of the moldy
haunted house and Lovecraft-dominated eras preceding. Let me offer a couple of quick
thoughts about this idea. First, the idealistic portrait of 1950s small-town
life in The Body Snatchers does not
strike me as particularly realistic; at best it’s an extremely naïve portrayal
wherein everyone is unfailingly nice. Nothing bad happens here, no sir! This
arguably makes the novel more effective—we are appalled that the nasty ragweed
from space could do such terrible things to these fine folks—but the setting
has no more realism to it than a fairytale. I know many reactionaries of a
conservative bent would like to tell you otherwise, but the world was never
like this, folks. Mayberry was not a real town. I’ll buy that the simple,
straightforward language, the complete opposite of Lovecraft’s (sometimes
purple) prose read refreshingly modern at the time of publication. Today,
though, it just reads kind of bland.
Second, while this breakthrough to a more realistic tone
was crucial at the time and dominated the genre into the 80s, the pendulum has since
swung fully opposite. Lovecraft today looms larger than any other writer in the
genre. It’s virtually required for a horror writer to offer his or her own take
on the mythos. Lovecraft-influenced writers such as Thomas Ligotti and Laird
Barron have been at the forefront of the genre for at least the last two
decades, maybe even longer. Add to that a 24-7 connected world where it’s
impossible to determine what the term “reality” even means, and Finney’s novel
seems even more quaint. As an aside, I would love to see more writers give the
Lovecraft pastiches a rest and play around a bit with characters that were more
recognizable as everyday people in extraordinary circumstances—more intimate
tales, you could say. But that’s simply a matter of taste, and one look at what
is published currently in the field shows that Finney’s book is a dusty relic
that has little to say to a modern audience. It may be continually in print,
but I suspect that has more to do with the endless movie adaptations than any
inherent value within the novel itself.
That all said, it is a speedy read, and Finney knew how
to put a story together. The Body
Snatcher’s time in the sun may have passed, but those looking for a break
from modern horror/weird fiction could do worse.
Something
Wicked This Way Comes
Ray Bradbury. Where do you begin? He is a legend, and
deservedly so. Something Wicked This Way
Comes is certainly part of that legend. It remains my favorite novel of
his, even above the more influential Fahrenheit
451. It’s not my absolute favorite work of his—that honor goes to the early
short story collections Dark Carnival
and The October Country, which share
many of the same tales. But it captures a nostalgic vibe about adolescence
that, while occasionally overwrought, avoids the syrup that drowns Dandelion Wine, a similar celebration of
the nostalgia of youth.
Wicked tells
the tale of Jim Nightshade and William Halloway and a carnival that comes to
town with the fantastic—I mean seriously, this might be my favorite thing about
the book—name Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show. This no ordinary
carnival. Run by the malevolent Mr. Dark, who can realize attendees’ secret
desires, the carnival enslaves those who fall under its spell so that Mr. Dark
can live off their life forces—a vampire minus the fangs and bloodsucking. The
carnival essentially functions as a dark (heh heh) metaphor for the temptations
and promises of adulthood, and while that might sound clumsy in description,
Bradbury pulls it off with aplomb in the book.
I first read Wicked
when I was just a year older than the protagonists (14 to their 13) and it was
the sweet spot, the literal perfect age to read the book. I was
enthralled and overjoyed throughout my reading but oddly, unlike other books I
loved at that age, I didn’t immediately re-read it. In fact, I didn’t read it
again until I was in my late twenties. I think I was worried that the magic
would be gone. Context matters when evaluating your reactions to a novel, and I
knew that there would never be a better set of circumstances than I’d already
experienced. I didn’t want to ruin the magic it held in my memory. Yet finally
I couldn’t resist.
And it was fine.
I mean, I’m not sure what else to say. The book was still
enjoyable, as many Bradbury tales are. Some of it read a little more purple to
my adult eyes, but that was inevitable. Like The Body Snatchers it portrays a version of small town America that
I doubt ever existed, but because Bradbury isn’t shooting for any kind of
realism—and because he’s a far better prose stylist than Finney—it doesn’t
bother me. Most importantly, it didn’t kill the magic that I’d carried with me
all those years. I’ve since read it a couple more times, and while I’ve not
gained any new insights to it as a work of art, it makes me feel 14 again in
the most innocent way—and I mean that as a high compliment.
I really don’t know how Wicked would read coming to it for the first time as an adult in
2017. Maybe even as an adolescent. As dark as the carnival is, it’s a broad, innocent kind of darkness and almost
certainly would seem quaint to a youth reading today. Yet I’ve met people
throughout the years who are younger than I who loved the book, so who is to
say? Most surprising to me is a couple of them are female, and I always thought
of Wicked as a book of boy’s concerns
that likely held little interest for the other half of humanity. So I’m likely
selling it short here—there is clearly something that calls out to many ages,
genders and walks of life. Bradbury’s gift will continue to give as long as
there are eyes to read.
And as to influence—well, this is a no-brainer.
Bradbury’s popularity has never waned, at least in my lifetime, and he is one
of the cornerstones of all fantastic fiction, no matter what the genre. Wicked is still widely read, still
influential, still has something to say. In relation to the horror genre, at
least as I view it, I think Dark
Carnival/The October Country, with their lineage from the Lovecraft pulps
through EC Comics through TV shows like Boris
Karloff’s Thriller and beyond make a more interesting discussion point, and
I find the best of these tales to still send shivers down my spine. After a
beer or two, I’ve been known to argue that “The Next in Line” is the third
scariest short story in the genre (topped only by Algernon Blackwood’s
masterful “The Willows” and King’s “Children of the Corn,” which can’t be
killed no matter how many lousy movies it spawned.) But Wicked has something that no other book discussed here has: a big,
open heart. It is less a horror novel than a book of loving kindness, and the
world needs that today more than ever. If it doesn’t bring tears to your eyes
then you, my friend, just might have ice in your soul.
Strange Wine
Ok, let’s use the halfway point to discuss the most
difficult book in this list. Difficult because its inclusion is questionable,
difficult because the author is most certainly questionable. Separating the
artist from their work is near impossible in Ellison’s case (something King
points out), and discussing Ellison is not something I am exactly looking forward
to. His unpleasant reputation looms, in 2017, far larger than any of his works
and is unavoidable even when assessing one of his books on its own merits.
So I’m going to sidestep the question of Ellison for the
moment—don’t worry, we’ll get back to it—and first discuss the other question Strange Wine’s inclusion has always
brought up for me: why is it the only collection of short fiction on the list?
I think it’s fair to say at the time of Danse Macabre’s writing, horror fiction
was a largely novel-driven format. The market for short fiction was drying up with
the pulps long gone and the men’s magazine market shifting largely to hardcore
pictorials. Novels, especially mainstream/”airport reads”, on the other hand,
were quite healthy. In the wake of The
Exorcist, Carrie, et al., a horror book could break on through to a wider
audience, especially if driven by a film adaptation. Short stories and
anthologies rarely broke through. This would start to change with King’s
success, though the genre would remain largely novel-driven through the 80s. I
think the real sea change came with the publication of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, which coincided with the
first death throes of the mainstream horror market. From the 90s on, much of
the best work in the genre was done in the short story format. This remains
true today.
But there were still collections that I think could have
been on this list, at the expense of one or two of the novels. Robert Aickman’s
Cold Hand in Mine comes to mind.
Charles Beaumont’s The Hunger and Other
Stories is another. Ramsey Campbell would have been better represented by
either Demons by Daylight or The Height of the Scream than The Doll Who Ate His Mother, and there’s
an argument to be made for Bradbury’s The
October Country, though many of those stories predate the era covered by
this list. There are others I could list. In the end, more than anything, the
question is…if just one collection, why one by Ellison?
Well, in defense of the choice, Ellison was still very
much an active writer at the time of publication. He didn’t fit into any box
easily, and if you were glancing familiar with sci-fi, you knew his name.
Within the fantasy community, he already had a difficult reputation, but it was
nothing like the caricature he’s eventually become. He wrote to shock, and was
often effective at doing so. The best of his tales, including several in Strange Wine, burn with an anger and a
caustic wit that can be downright corrosive, leaping off the page and yelling
in your face. As King points out, he is a moral writer—in the Old Testament
sense—and his best stories are closer to fables than a traditional horror short
story. Whatever my opinion of the man, I’ve been haunted by “Croatan,” Strange Wine’s opening tale, for years.
It is a brilliant story. It still holds power when read today.
But it—or any of Ellison’s tales—also bring a sadness
when read now, like seeing old footage of a once supreme athlete who we now to
be feeble and shuffling unnoticed down the street with a cane, yelling at
clouds. Danse Macabre was published
as Ellison’s time as a working author was coming to a close, though there was
no way of knowing it at the time. He published sporadically in the 80s, and by
the 90s onward has been all but silent. In those same years, his unpleasant
reputation, fueled by moronic public behavior and the ridiculous saga of the
never-realized anthology The Last
Dangerous Visions, grew into a larger-than-life myth, though largely
contained to the sci-fi fandom world. The rest of the world has forgotten about
him, if they were ever that aware of him in the first place. When you stake
your artistic identity on pushing the envelope, you run the risk of becoming
dated quickly as culture changes, particularly if you’re fueled by topical
concerns. Perhaps this is why his well dried up, or perhaps there are any
number of reasons, but it is certainly appears to be dry.
I don’t think anyone much reads Ellison anymore. Go into
any bookstore with a sci-fi section, and you maybe see one novel by him, or
more likely none. Certainly when he comes up in conversation it’s all about his
public persona and Ellison as a person, never about his work. Strange Wine was a weird, if somewhat
justifiable, choice in 1981. Though still in print, it’s largely forgotten
today and I don’t think Ellison as a whole had much of an impact on writers
that came after, at least as far as horror goes (I’m not as well-versed in
sci-fi, so perhaps his influence is more stated there.) Anyone coming across Strange Wine or any Ellison collection
today will still find some great stories but are likely carrying the burden of
his public persona and pathetic behavior in with them. I’m not sure the stories
still justify it, to be honest, but that’s a judgment call each reader will
have to make for themselves. As far as horror literature goes, they needn’t
worry they are missing a crucial part of its history.
The Haunting of
Hill House
I think I deserve a treat after dealing with Strange Wine, so let’s discuss one of
the greatest books ever written. Not one of the greatest horror novels, one of
the greatest novels period. Though very much a haunted house story and
completely deserving of its spot on this list, Hill House transcends any and all genre limitations through the
sheer perfection of its prose and storytelling. Does that sound hyperbolic?
It’s not, trust me—Shirley Jackson is one of the flat-out best writers I’ve
ever read and appeals to even those who would not normally care to visit the
genre. It is the greatest haunted house story ever written, and it’s more than
that.
Hill House tells
the story of four people gathered in a reputedly haunted house to explore what,
if any, paranormal activity is occurring. The viewpoint is almost exclusively
through the character of Eleanor, whom King labels “the finest character to
come out of the new American gothic tradition.” I wouldn’t argue that a bit, at
least at the time of Danse Macabre’s
publication and maybe not even now. Eleanor is an interior character,
narcissistic, and you don’t exactly sympathize with her. As the novel draws a
web ever tighter around her, you sense that the web is as much of her own
weaving as it is any force contained in the walls of the house. One of the many
things that makes Hill House such a
beautifully realized novel is that it leaves these questions open-ended; you
can read it as a story of outside evil or inner deterioration and both reads
make perfect sense. That is a near-impossible trick for any writer to pull off.
If there really were a school where novel writing was taught, Hill House would be the sacred textbook,
at least in my classroom.
I can find nothing to criticize in this book and even
though I’ve read it a dozen times or more, I always get something out of it.
The impact of the story has not lessened over the years, and is there anything
more enjoyable than watching a master practice their craft? As a writer,
Jackson either makes me want to give up (I will never write this well) or try
harder (if I can write even 1/100th this well I will have created
something special.) Hill House has
been required reading for the genre since day one, and while its influence may
have waxed and waned some over the years, I don’t think it has ever gone away.
Jackson is of course even more famous for her classic
short story “The Lottery,” which has been taught extensively since the day it
was published and remains one of the most famous stories of all time.
Curiously, her other short work, while not bad by any means, lacks even a
fraction of the power of “The Lottery” and is more for fans with a hardcore
interest in her work than the casual reader. Her reputation rests on “The
Lottery”, Hill House, and her final
novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle,
which I might honestly love even more than Hill
House. You could perhaps make an argument for The Sundial as well—an influence The Shining, among others—and it’s nice to see it back in print
after years of being unavailable. It’s a small collection of work to support
such a huge legacy, but there is not a wasted word to be found.
That said, I felt growing up in the 1980s that, “The
Lottery” aside, Jackson was close to being forgotten. Much of her work was out
of print, and a godawful 1999 film adaptation of Hill House did her no favors, even though the film retained
virtually nothing of the novel. (The 1963 adaptation, however, is excellent and
should be viewed by anyone with even a casual interest in horror cinema.) The
tide started to turn early in the new millennium, and now she has an award named after
her and last year saw the publication of an excellent,
thorough biography. All of her work is again in print. As a fan, it is
truly heartening to see. I wish we could have had her longer and I wonder what
additional tales she might have had to tell, but what she left behind is immortal.
It is the foundation from which we build.
So yes, Hill House
still resonates. It is an oddly timeless book; very little of the trappings of
the era in which is written come through and as such it still feels immediate. No
overview of the genre is complete without it. If my discussion of it feels a
bit thin for these claims, I apologize; there are only so many superlatives
available. Nothing I say can do justice, so if for some reason you’ve not read
it, correct this oversight immediately. You can thank me later.
Rosemary’s Baby
It seems appropriate to follow Hill House with Rosemary’s
Baby, as they both share a strong commitment to character and plot that
allow them to appeal to folks who otherwise might not care to visit the genre.
King famously called Ira Levin the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel and Rosemary’s Baby is a perfectly realized
book.
I’m going to guess that most are familiar with the story
via the 1968 film starring Mia Farrow, and for once it can be said that there
is no difference between the book and the film so far as plotting goes. It may
in fact be the most faithful adaptation of a book ever committed to celluloid,
and whereas due credit should be given to Roman Polanski, all he needed was
there in the book to begin with, right down to the dialogue. That said, I do
think the book is a richer experience. As faithful as the film is, it can’t
quite capture the dimensions of Rosemary Woodhouse present in the book. No film
can.
The story captures something of the “is God dead”
zeitgeist of the late sixties and could be seen as a sly sendup of the whole
thing. Levin is not a straight satirist, but as both this novel and The Stepford Wives show, he had a gift
for sending up cultural moments without betraying the intensity or paranoia in
his story. I’ve referred a few times to my distaste for the prevailing trend of
meta-commentary current in both horror literature and film, and Levin is a
large part why. A skilled writer can weave commentary into their tale without
shouting “HEY MA LOOK AT ME, AIN’T I CLEVER? I’M IN ON THE JOKE, MA! IT’S
IRONY! LOOKIT ME!” There is a thin line between horror and humor—and an even
thinner line between trusting in your audience’s intelligence and mooning them.
All of which is to say that even if you’ve seen the film,
Rosemary’s Baby remains a disturbing
read. For those of us who grew up Catholic, it carries an extra charge in its
sly inversion of the Catholic Mass and various other trappings of Catholicism.
Some of it is admittedly dated now—the dream sequence with JFK could only have
been written in the 1960s—but by and large this is still a story that will get
under your skin.
Here’s something that I have been wondering for years:
what on earth ever happened to Ira Levin? While never the most prolific author,
he published only two novels after 1976: Sliver
and Son of Rosemary. I’ve not read
either. Sliver was turned into a
lousy Sharon Stone movie but I’ve always meant to read the novel, whereas what
little I’ve heard of Son of Rosemary
is that it is completely awful. His playwriting also ceased in the early 80s,
with nothing new appearing after 1982. I’ve always been curious as to why he
essentially stopped writing, and I’ve never found anything that answers the
question. Writer’s block? Lack of interest? I wonder, because given not only
how good his work was but how easy it adapted to the screen, it seems there
should have been plenty of avenues for new work. Maybe he simply had no
motivation or further need to create. I’ve been unsuccessful in finding any
interviews or such that talk about this; if anyone has anything or recalls
hearing about it please send it my way.
Which leads to the curious case of how relevant Rosemary’s Baby still is. Certainly both
Rosemary and The Stepford Wives are well-cemented in pop culture; I’d say the
latter even more so, as everyone knows what a Stepford Wife is regardless of
whether they’ve seen the movie or read the book. Rosemary’s Baby is routinely cited as one of the finest horror
films ever made, keeping the story very much alive. I would think that some of
the audience, upon discovering the movie, reads the book. It hasn’t gone out of
print and is not hard to find. But I also don’t ever hear authors citing Levin
as an influence, and I would guess that most of any current influence from Rosemary’s Baby is due to the film.
Still, that’s Levin’s story, and it is still one damn fine read.
The Shrinking
Man
Welcome to the only book on this list I don’t like. I
thought it was terrible, actually. I’ve tried to understand why King was so taken
with it in the first place, and in this case context is particularly important.
I agree with King’s thesis that Richard Matheson was one of the first to bring
a realistic, “modern” if you will, voice to horror fiction in the fifties.
While the characterizations in The
Shrinking Man are exaggerated, you can argue that they are recognizably
1950s humans with 1950s human motivations. Sold as sci-fi book, The Shrinking Man is most assuredly not.
It springs from the same fear of science and its implications in a world where
technology was changing so rapidly no one could catch their breath that many of
the B movies of the era come from.
Before I get into my issues with this book, let’s look at
Matheson. He wrote a few stories that could rightly be considered classics in
the genre: I Am Legend, The Shrinking
Man, Hell House, Duel, the short story “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Notice
anything similar about these? Correct. Each one has been adapted at least once,
if not more, for the movies or television. And I think in every case we can
safely say that the celluloid version is far more known than the written
version. What is unusual about this situation: it’s not a crime. I think
Matheson was a great screenplay author. I think he was a mediocre writer. All
the stories above, and many of his others, have a great concept/setting/idea.
And each one reads incredibly dull on the page. He’s slightly more successful
in his short work than his novels—Duel,
which is roughly novella length, is the best read of the bunch—but reading
Matheson is like watching paint dry, without any good hallucinations from the
fumes.
Still and all, this is a matter of taste and not why I
have such a problem with The Shrinking
Man. The problem with The Shrinking
Man is simple: Scott Carey, our protagonist with whom we spend the entire
book, is whiny, misogynistic, grade-A asshole. I don’t mean that he’s some cool
anti-hero, I mean he’s just a piece of shit that I kept rooting for the spider
to catch. I get that in the 1950s casual sexism and fixed gender roles were the
rule, not the exception. And The
Shrinking Man is essentially an examination the loss of masculinity in this
era. (Dig the alternative application of the term “shrinking.”) But I’m sorry,
it doesn’t excuse the absolute shitty way Carey treats his wife, the way he
turns his back on his daughter, or the way he briefly rediscovers his sexual
potency with a dwarf only to insult her and run away. I get it, he’s scared.
He’s shrinking and the world has become alien. But it’s obvious this guy was no
prince before his accident.
And this sour tone dominates the book. There is a good
adventure story in here, as absurd as it may be. Books need not have a
sympathetic lead. A story structured like The
Shrinking Man needs at least some dimension (heh heh) to the character,
though. It asks us to identify with him and root for him. I found it impossible
to do either. And lord, does he complain! And whine. And whine. And whine. I
kept thinking if he put half of the energy he spends bellyaching about his
predicament into, you know, trying to solve the problem, he’d have been out of
danger in the early pages. Admittedly, that would not have made for much of a
book, but at least it would have limited the time I had to spend with this
loser.
So yeah, I didn’t care for The Shrinking Man.
Of course, this is just my opinion, and perhaps others
read the book differently. Regardless, is it still influential? Does it still
resonate? I think it’s safe to say no on both accounts. Matheson himself was
certainly influential through his film and television work, and I Am Legend seems like it is going to
live on through endless adaptations just like the one of the vampires in the
book, but The Shrinking Man is
rarely, if at all, read today and the movie made from it is not considered a
classic, even amongst the B-movies of the era. The misogyny and unpleasantness
of Scott Carey make it a difficult read, even if you find those things to be
less extreme than I did. It is beyond hopelessly dated. Richard Matheson is
important to the development of the genre in the latter half of the twentieth
century, but The Shrinking Man does
not demonstrate why and is a poor representation of his work. Watch the
original Twilight Zone adaptation of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” instead. You’ll
be much happier.
The Fog
James Herbert’s The
Fog (as must always be stated, no relation to the John Carpenter film) is a
great pulp read. According to King, at the time of Danse Macabre’s publication Herbert was held in low esteem within
the genre, due, so far as I can tell, to his penchant for explicit sex and even
more explicit (and tasteless) violence. Well, the culture has changed, and the
sex in Herbert’s early work now seems relatively tame, and the violence less
extreme, if a bit cartoonish. It’s all bit a tasteless, sure, but that’s the
fun of it! While I read a few Herbert works in my teen years, I didn’t read The Fog until a couple of years ago.
While unavoidably dated, it was still a great pulp read.
The Fog’s plot
is pure simplicity: a leakage of the stuff (thanks to the government;
nationality aside, Mulder and Scully would be right at home here) envelopes an
ever-growing area of England and causes people to do nasty things. A
misanthrope gets his eyes pecked out by his pigeons, the only creatures he loves.
A bus driver castrates a teacher with garden shears. A woman attempts to commit
suicide by drowning in the sea, only to decide she wants to live, upon which
she turns and sees hundreds of people marching lemming-like into the water and
she proceeds to get her suicide whether she wants it or not. In the most
disturbing scene to read today—for obvious reasons—a pilot flies a Boeing jet
into an office building. (Talk about the worst kind of prescience.) All of this
is done with a refreshing lack of surface humor—if someone wrote this today it
would probably be choked with wisecracks and clever (not) asides. Which isn’t
to say there isn’t humor inherent in these absurd, gross acts—simply that
Herbert respects his audiences’ intelligence enough to let them apply it
themselves. He’s simply concerned with putting together a (grossly) rollicking
yarn, and in this the book succeeds admirably.
This kind of tale, with its roots in the classic pulp
fiction era (but more closely related to noir/crime/tough guy pulp fiction than
the Lovecraftian “shudder” pulps) is today primarily the province of short
fiction, but it was very much part of the horror boom of the 1980s. It can be
argued that it is a forerunner of the splatterpunk movement; I’m not sure I buy
it because Herbert, graphicness aside, was still working in a very defined
tradition. The roots of splatterpunk lie primarily outside horror fiction
itself, owing more to graphic cinema than anything else. Herbert was a popular
author in the UK, but didn’t really break through in the U.S. so far as I can
tell (please correct me if I’m wrong on this.)
I can’t say that I’ve read Herbert extensively, and what
I did read, outside of The Fog, was a
long time ago. I have fond memories of checking out the copy my rural
small-town library carried of The Dark
and breathlessly reading and re-reading all the sexy passages; perhaps not the
best way to learn about alternative sexuality, but growing up where I did you
took what you could get. I’ve long meant to explore more of his bibliography,
but it’s rare to see any of his books around and he sadly has become one of
those “out of sight, out of mind” authors for me. I’m quite curious about his
later work and to see how he grew as a novelist; I intend to correct this
oversight in the near future.
Influence? Perhaps some, but I don’t think it’s
extensive, odd for such a successful author. Resonance? It depends on your love
of pure pulp tales, as far The Fog
goes. If you love ‘em, you’ll love this book. If you don’t, it’s not going to
convince you. I think this was an entirely defensible choice in the era, and
I’m glad King included someone who made the uptight squirm. One of the joys of
horror is the many different paths you can take; you can be literary and
subtle, you can be gross and loud. I appreciate both approaches (when done
well) as long as there is a good story attached. The Fog qualifies.
The House Next
Door
And so we have arrived at the last book. No particular
reason I saved this one until last. I didn’t want to pair it up, as King did,
with The Haunting of Hill House
because any book is going to be found wanting next to it; King arguably did
Anne Rivers Siddons a disservice by doing so. The House Next Door was, for the time, a modern spin on the classic
haunted house tale. Aspects of it inevitably read dated today, but Siddons
writes a nice crisp line of prose that makes it easy to slide into the story.
It goes down most pleasurably.
The story is told by a middle-aged upper-middle class
Southern lady. For most of the book, she and her husband are observers as a new
house is built next door and a succession of occupants move in and then out, in
the most socially awkward and unpleasant circumstances. Towards the end of the
book, the lady (Colquitt) and her husband get directly involved, risking their
lives and perhaps more importantly to Siddons, their social standing by doing
so.
The House Next Door
is many things, but one of the more interesting is that it is a comedy of
(grotesque) manners. The incidents that happen in the house and to the people
that live there very much violate the social norms at the time—this is where
the book draws much of its energy from. Many of those norms no longer exist or
have changed so much that it is harder for a modern reader to identify with the
character’s reactions; fortunately Siddons is for the most part very good with
characterization and the novel still packs a punch.
Unique to this list, Siddons never wrote in the genre
before or after this novel. She is a prolific author whose work is almost
exclusively set in the South. I’ve not read any of her other work but I think
her outside perspective to the genre makes The
House Next Door a refreshing read. Many authors in the genre are steeped so
heavily in its history (and often an active part of fandom) that they are too
familiar with all the tropes. This can lead to a freezing of the tale, a fear
to go down a road that is loaded with cliché. It’s completely understandable,
but Siddons benefits by not being beholden to sacred cows or choked with
tradition. This isn’t to say she isn’t aware of tradition, as least as far as
the classic ghost story goes—her letter to King makes clear she is—but simply
that she sees the ghost story as an interesting tool to use instead of a sacred
object to worship.
You don’t see this kind of dipping of toes in the water
by non-genre authors much anymore. I think this in part because the genre
itself has grown quite wide; we could argue endlessly about what constitutes a “horror
author” today. You do see a lot of genre writers cross-pollinating genres, but
they are usually quite clearly doing so in a pulp tradition. Siddons is an archetypical
bestseller author of her era. Today, with the decline of the novel as a
cultural force and the upending of the publication industry, this type of book
is archaic. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all—I love The House Next Door and Siddons is a very talented author. It’s
just the world this book was created and published in is long gone, and reading
it five years ago left me a little sad. It’s not a book that wants to change
the world, be edgy, or spark endless debate about its merits. It just wants to
entertain you. It entertained me.
It was not influential, and if it’s read today, it’s
probably by fans of her other work and not in the genre. Which is too bad,
because modern authors could learn a thing or two from it. As such, I would say
it still resonates for those who find it, but it cannot honestly be said to be
a work held in high regard in the field. Like whatever spirit lived in The House Next Door, it is largely
invisible. And that’s a shame.
Well.
Here we are, some eight thousand words later. Much
shorter than King’s original piece, of course, but still a lot of words. I
thank you for going along on this ride with me. I hope it was fun, I hope your
beer or three were as enjoyable as mine. I can see that there is still one last
question lingering on your mind, though. What about the ensuing 36 years? What
ten books should represent them?
I’m not that crazy. That would be an undertaking of epic
proportions, and I’m not sure I’m qualified to do so. You’d have to cover the
boom of the eighties, the subsequent bust of the nineties, and the rebirth of
the weird tale in the new millennium. Not to mention all the stories that don’t
fit those easy narratives. King was clearly justified in focusing on novels in
1981, but you could not do so today. There would be many questions to answer.
Many growlers would have to be filled and refilled. We might get hot under the
collar. We’d…
Ok, fine. I’ll just list ten. But look, I’ve not
thought long and hard about the list below. If I did it tomorrow, it would
change. I’m certainly not going to write another 8k+ words on the books below,
either. Tell you what—come on over and let’s discuss over drinks and a fine
meal. As it gets darker, with October just around the corner, I’ll light a fire
and we can listen to leaves rustle outside…
1.
IT, Stephen
King (1986). You have to have at least one King book. Starting from 1981 means
his early, arguably most seminal work can’t be included. I would have selected IT regardless of the recent box office
success of the latest film version. IT
continues to be read and loved and shows no sign of going away. Also under
consideration: Skeleton Crew (1985)
and Misery (1987.)
2.
Grimscribe:
His Life and Works, Thomas Ligotti (1991). My list would have much more
short fiction in it, and Ligotti is maybe the most important writer in the
genre from the 1990s on—certainly he kept the fire alive in the weird, rough
period of the 90s. Also under consideration: My Work is Not Yet Done (2002).
3.
Books of
Blood, Clive Barker (1984-85). All three volumes must be discussed. Not
only was Barker an exciting new voice, the three books (easily obtainable today
in one collection) were game changers that opened up brand new vistas in the genre
and influenced virtually everyone.
4.
The
Southern Reach Trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer (2014). Like Barker, VanderMeer’s
trilogy opened up brand new vistas for the weird tale. This is the freshest
weird tale I’ve read in the new millennium. If you feel it’s cheating to
include the whole trilogy, then we’ll limit it to the first book, Annihilation. But I think the whole
thing needs to be there.
5.
World War
Z, Max Brooks (2006). The best book to come out the zombie takeover of pop
culture.
6.
Hannibal, Thomas Harris (1999). Tough
call between this and Red Dragon, and
while I personally prefer the latter it was published in 1981 and so is
borderline for this list. A suspense writer par excellence whose subject matter
veers right into the horrific.
7.
20th
Century Ghosts, Joe Hill (2005). The best short story collection of the
millennium (unless it’s Kelly Link’s Magic
for Beginners, but Link is not really a horror author.)
8.
Hex, Thomas
Olde Heuvelt (2013.). Perhaps the
best pure horror novel of the millennium. Fully represents the genre’s rich
history while being thoroughly modern in its take. Successfully solves the isolation
issue in the age of smart phones.
9.
The
Croning, Laird Barron (2012). I feel Barron has to be in this discussion as
he is perhaps the most successful practitioner of the modern weird tale. I
prefer his short work, but The Croning
seems to be shaping up as his most influential work, and it is a damn fine
read.
10.
The Man on
the Ceiling, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem (2008). This would be my
underrated gem I would hope to push to wider exposure. A lovely, tragic, heartbreaking
and dark story of the bonds that hold a family together. I think I spent half
the book in tears.
There are things missing here: Anne Rice, for example.
But her best work is probably Interview
with the Vampire and it was published in 1976. I may also be biased because
I could never get into her work as an adult. It remains locked in my adolescence,
silent and forgotten. I’d really like to see Poppy Z. Brite here (god, I miss
her!) but I couldn’t decide which book and while her single best story is “Calcutta,
Lord of Nerves," I don’t think her short work in general accurately
represents her influence. I could make the case for Ramsey Campbell but he was
on King’s list so he fell by the wayside. And it seems dangerous to wade into
the ocean of mixed-author anthologies, but John Skipp and Craig Spector’s 1989 Book of the Dead is arguably the
starting point of splatterpunk as well as the horror fiction side of the zombie
phenomenon. It certainly exposed me to a great many new authors.
We could go on and on, but the hour has grown late and
the candlewax has dripped over the edge of the mantle and splattered on the
floor. If I could leave you with one final thought, it would be: the horror
genre holds more in it than you realize. Please support the authors by
purchasing their work in whatever format you prefer and as your budget will
allow. Writing these days is largely a labor of love and not a career, and
purchasing a work of art is a tangible way you can show support. Thank you.
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