96. Sub-editions } & other mysterious appearances.

From the cult of Ex Occidente, Transactions of the Flesh, an anthology after the writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans edited by D.P. Watt and Peter Holman: the book is made, in two incarnations, a “lettered deluxe subedition” and the “numbered regular edition.” The cost is irrelevant. Copies can be obtained from Zagava Books.

I’ll write a word more about the book once my copy arrives. My story, “Smoke (Ash Sun, Raspberry Sky)” is another episode in the life of Theophile, who I first wrote about in the story “Her Magnetic Field,” published in Cinnabar’s Gnosis. “Smoke” is set ahead of Theophile’s confrontation with the “Stone That Thinks,” features an alternate Milla Jovovich, and Siduri, the barkeep who urges Gilgamesh to enjoy life, rather than punish himself with grief for Enkidu.

Dan Ghetu, publisher of Ex Occidente books, recently announced that he’s liquidating his (small) remaining stock; it is possible to purchase one of two remaining copies of Cinnabar’s Gnosis for $80. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait till I complete and then find a publisher for the complete Theophile tales, an event I anticipate occurring never.

# # #

My mixed feelings swell for 1913 Press and their efforts to raise funds for a print run of 1913: A Journal of Forms 6. A while back, they half-heartedly ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds—unsurprisingly, they failed to meet their goal. A similar fundraising campaign is now running through Indiegogo; as of today, they’ve raised $2,171 of the $25,000 they asked for. At least with Indiegogo they get whatever they raise.

When “editrice” Sandra Doller asked me for a poem for the journal I was delighted, and I am delighted—look at the t.o.c. for issue 6 (published, at last, as a PDF): there’s Rae Armantrout, Rachel May, Deborah Poe, Thalia Field, etc. But I’m disappointed too, that the press couldn’t fund a print incarnation: 1913’s great charm is in print, their books and their journal loves the page. I’d be less disappointed if there seemed to be more enthusiasm from the press themselves—infrequent email notices notwithstanding, there’s not enough brouhaha to hope that a financial goal as big as $25,000 will ever be met.

Do visit the issue. The PDF is satisfying—and suggests that if the funds are raised, issue 6 would be every bit as pleasing as its predecessors. My poem—one part of a triptych (I hope one day will be published whole)—is on page 52.

# # #

This Sunday, at 3pm, at Ada Books in Providence, R.I., the chapbook Compound Eye will be released. It’s a selection of poems written during the R.I.S.D. Museum “Locally Made” show in September. A number of area poets were invited to sit behind typewriters and write poems on demand. To explain: folks would approach a poet, supply the poet with inspiration—a word, a theme, a picture—and the poet would write a poem.

With carbons, copies were made, then collected by Kate Shapria, who, with the help of Maria Anderson, Janaya Kizzie, and Kat Murphy, assembled them into Compound Eye. I know little about the end-result, and only vaguely recall the poems I wrote. Fellow poets are Mary-Kim Arnold, Lindsday Beebe, Indigo Bethea, Cherry Pickman, and Amish Trivedi.

Some of us will read our poems. I read at 3:20. Kate says, “it'll be pretty easy-breezy—some milling around, some exclaiming over the books, punctuated by reading out loud.” Chapbooks cost $5, except for “everyone who participated, or who managed to hang onto their event program”—then it’s free.

# # #

[Photo: a Valentine Portable Typewriter by Olivetti, in the R.I.S.D. Museum collection]

95. Elisa Gabbert writes } “What I miss about childhood is…”

Friday, my eldest and I will visit Boston to look at colored glass and ice and to listen to Elisa Gabbert read from The Self Unstable. Prose poems; of them, Black Ocean sez, “combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism.” Which doesn’t make them sound at all different from billions of poems. The difference is Elisa—from what I’ve read, the pieces in The Self Unstable are like lines of her poems and thoughts from her blog, with some interesting deviations in-between. (An in-between, for instance: “I saw a figure from a distance and thought it was me. I drink from the opposite side of a glass.” Make that the opening line of your horror story.)

The book’s design is as eye-catching as all Black Ocean titles are. You can read quite a lot from the book online—do a simple search Gabbert+The+Self+Unstable.

Will I seem to mock Elisa, by bringing my six year-old daughter to hear poems about ageing? My daughter, staring up at an end-result? Perhaps my own great age will dull the edge of my daughter's smile.

94. Horror fiction notes (7/7) } the unsatisfactory conclusion.

…however, the best story in the fifth annual edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror is Elizabeth Massie’s “Stephen.”

(I first read Jack Womack’s “Out of Sight, Out ofMind” before “hoarding” behavior was widely known, so the setting, a hoarder’s house, fascinated. That the hoarder’s obsession was triggered by Fibber McGee’s closet (the fact that no one seemed to remember Fibber’s closet) also interested me—I grew up listening to recordings of old radio broadcasts, including Fibber McGee & Molly, and had a sense of how bizarre it is for a culture to leave behind something that was once a great common ground. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” isn’t just about the fear of losing one’s own past; it’s also about preservation, and the point at which preservation becomes obsessive and destructive.

Rereading it now, I’m less bowled over, and the discovery at the end—what makes “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” horror—seems simply inevitable.)

Would someone send me a list of stories about (or that feature) decapitated heads kept alive (magic or science. Also, skulls)? Off the top of my capitated head is The Arabian Nights (Sage Duban’s head kept alive on a platter coated with a magic powder), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, F.Marion Crawford’s “The Screaming Skull,” Ramsey Campbell’s “Heading Home,” and (maybe) “The Skull of Charlotte Corday.” No films, T.V., or radio broadcasts, please. Donovan’s Brain? Sure, I’m willing to open the door to brains kept alive in jars.

“Stephen” is the only story by Elizabeth Massie I remember, though I’m sure I’ve read others—I had a story in Exotic Gothic 2 and so did she, with “Los Penitentes,” so I read that, “Pinkie” was reprinted in Best New Horror 17 so I probably read that, and maybe “What Happened When Mosby Paulson Had Her Painting Reproduced on the Cover of the Phone Book,” too. Anyway.

I don’t want to say much about  “Stephen.” It is a decapitated head story, but it treats that trope seriously, and uses it as an illustration of the other horror that truly runs the story. Though at sixteen I didn’t understand the sexual issues in Massie’s story—I understood enough to be troubled by them.

Coincidentally, I wrote a decapitated head story called “Stephen Plec.” Plec is a Polish word for sex; I associate the name Stephen with repression and guilt. Plec is a garbage collector who, out on his route, finds a head in a box, becomes intimate with it, gets rid of it in a frenzy of self-loathing, but ends up desperately searching for it in the municipal dump where he works.  I wondered if my Stephen was in any way inspired by Massie’s, but I  dug up the original drafts of “Stephen Plec,” and all were carefully dated “1989.”

93. Horror fiction notes (6/7) } a call & Mark Samuels.

Earlier this summer, before I reread David B. Silva’s “The Calling,” I dreamed I was at a roundtable with Silva and a group of other horror authors. In my waking life, I never met him, nor had any interest in his work. His The Horror Show ended its run before I was really aware of the horror small press—I never read an issue. We sat at the table—this dream Silva and me—and enjoyed a pleasant conversation.

Today, in preparation for writing this post, I learned that Silva died earlier this year, in March.

According to Locus magazine’s obituary for David B. Silva, he won a Bram Stoker Award in 1990 for “The Calling.” The Stoker is hardly a reliable measure of greatness, but “The Calling” is undeniably powerful. The horror is cancer and Silva’s portrayal of a son caring for his mother as she dies is harrowing. The end is silly—a risk Silva took—and obviously many readers felt otherwise.

In 1991, Ellen Datlow wrote, “Until a couple years ago, David B. Silva… was primarily known for his editorship of The Horror Show. This prestigious magazine’s last issue came out this past spring, giving Silva more time to write.” The Locus obituary begins, “Silva is best known for editing influential magazine The Horror Show, which ran from 1982-1991 .”

# # #

My summer reading was not devoted exclusively to the 1991 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. I at last read the Chomu Press re-print of Mark Samuels’ The Man Who Collected Machen and, from Tartarus, The White Hands. I preferred The White Hands, which cohered a little better, but both are well-constructed collections.

The horror across all the stories is hopelessness. Story after story revealed any hope to be false. This is perhaps most obviously epitomized by “The Black Mould,” a story about a terrified life form that destroys what it encounters—and it encounters all.

A recurring “black mould” in these collections is infection. It sometimes acts as a doppelganger—ultimately replacing its victim with a sort-of copy—read “Vrolyk” but also “THYXXOLQU” and even “Glickman the Bibliophile,” in which a book lover is transformed into a reverse image of himself through the mechanisms of Nemesis Press. These stories are also about the decay of language and the power of that decay. Another black mould is the corporation—an easy target, but brilliantly portrayed in “The Impasse,” a story that perfectly describes the easy way a person can surrender themselves to something idiotic and monstrous: “Despite being utterly confused by the sheer waste of effort and time his work seemed to involve, he resolved that, as his employers were paying him so well, he should think to fulfill his obligations.” And for that pay, he is damned. 

The horror of hopelessness is the horror of Dante’s Hell. Everyone Dante meets in Hell thinks there’s a chance they can somehow improve their situation—even Satan keeps flapping his wings in order to fly away free, but all he accomplishes with his wings is to harden the ice that keeps him where he is. No one in Hell really understands the inscription on the gate: abandon all hope ye who enter here. So it is for the inhabitants of Samuels’ fictions.

In spite of the coda—which isn’t exactly disappointing, and, if I consider it in the right light, is a better end than the ellipsis that precedes it—“The Search for Kruptos” may be the best story of the lot. In it, all of Samuels’ fascinations are on display. A narrator who believes that books are important, but who is wrong, a text that infects, and hopelessness, with a European, World War II backdrop. Samuels seems to concur; in an interview conducted by Matt Cardin, he is asked where a new reader of his fiction might begin and replied:

I expect that “The White Hands” (in the restored version contained in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #15) or “The Search for Kruptos” would prove good starting points. If a reader enjoys those two tales I’d suggest that they try The Face of Twilight, which is my short novel published this year by PS Publishing. I think this is probably the most interesting work that I have thus far produced.

I did enjoy both, so I'll try The Face of Twilight, and let the infection progress.

92. Horror fiction notes (5/7) } the monster is the male gaze.

Talk of gender equality in horror fiction publishing, especially when conducted online, is too often reactionary rather than productive, anecdotal, and prone to inspire disgusting behavior. One author, male, whose work I thrice rejected from New Genre, threatened to expose me as a sexist editor in an email he sent me. Obviously unfamiliar with my editorial work as a whole, he said that if he pointed out to his online community how few women I publish, “I guarantee you there'd be an online reaction.” He then added, “Doesn't feel good to be accused of sexism, does it?”

What didn’t feel good was his use of a discussion about gender equality,  intended to improve circumstances for women, as a weapon. I have no idea if he did or didn’t attempt to blacklist me, but I did confront him about his email in person at a convention, and he simply withered. All the vitriolic rhetoric gone once face-to-face. He’s not looked me in the eye since.

# # #

Nikki Kiriki Hoffman’s “A Touch of the Old Lilith” is the second excellent Hoffman story to appear in the fourth Year’s Best—more on the story itself in a moment. Ellen Datlow selected it from Women of Darkness II, an anthology of new horror stories by women. Datlow wrote in her survey of horror fiction published in 1990 that Women of Darkness II is a “Pretty undistinguished reprise of #1….”

Of the first Women of Darkness, Datlow wrote,

The idea of an all-women horror anthology developed from the (correct) perception that the horror field in general and anthologies in particular were dominated by male writers. Kathryn Ptacek’s Women of Darkness (1988) was conceived to remedy this. Its publication in itself brought needed attention to the perceived “problem” [to be clear, the quotes are Datlow’s], and in that, the book was successful.

Datlow then wrote more generally about anthologizing women horror writers:

I object to the single-gender anthology as a remedy. If more women edit horror anthologies, more women might be included. Of course, quality should always come first. I personally prefer to blur lines of gender and genre rather than bringing more attention to them and labeling them. There is an excellent essay by Jeanette M. Hopper in The Blood Review on women writing about stereotypically women’s subjects. The argument, with which I agree, is that if women want to be read by the other half of the population, they need to write male characters who aren’t stereotypical and two-dimensional, and they need to appeal to concerns of both men and women. These same truths hold for men and women; I’m dead sick of stories about battered women and children, just as I’m sick of stories by men that brutalize women for the eroticism of it.

A single-gender (or single-race, or single-sexual orientation, etc.) anthology isn’t only an argument; it is that, but it’s also an artistic opportunity, like any themed anthology, be it erotic horror, or Poe-inspired stories, or mummy stories, etc. The theme sets limits. Those limits exclude some authors and call to others.

Ideally, the authors invited to contribute to an all-women authored anthology would consider what it means that they are the theme, and work from there, rather than work from the premise that “woman” or “women’s subjects “ is somehow the theme.

# # #

“A Touch of the Old Lilith” falls soundly into the category of stories high-school Adam did not appreciate. That the antagonist is the polite young male photographer who has taken a fancy to Clea, and not Clea herself, or any of the Meander women whose fingers are snake-like, and whose boyfriends and husbands frequently end up dead under mysterious circumstances, was lost on me. The monsters in Clea’s life are men who carelessly or deliberately remake women to suit their desires. Toward the end of the story, Clea very nearly understands this:

I felt a flick of anger, like a little bruise inside. Did he think because he liked the way I looked that he had created me?
 Hadn’t he? Didn’t we choose this steel gray coat—“the color of your eyes”—together? Hadn’t he bought me this green velvet dress at a second-hand shop, and didn’t I drag these tights out of an old suitcase because he asked me to?

Too late for Clea—she loses herself. (Though, thanks to the efforts of her grandmother—the only honest woman in her life—there is hope she is not totally lost.)

That the monster—Jeffry is his name—is a photographer, suggests Hoffman is writing about the male gaze. How the male gaze deforms women. Hoffman’s tale is so subtle, it’s easy to miss that horror. Or perhaps I’m so inured to what makes Jeffry a monster it’s easy for me to miss. After all, how easy is it for the monster to recognize himself as such?

91. Horror fiction notes (4/7) } ”A work of art must breathe life.”

06.17.13

When Carl Taske, the narrator in David J. Schow’s “Not From Around Here,” finds a monster curled up in bed beside his young daughter Jilly, and is then unable to stop the monster from slowly eating her, I realized Jilly was a totally undeveloped character, so in spite of my own fatherhood, and the worry I daily experience for my own daughters, I wasn’t horrified at all.

To a lesser extent, a similar problem occurs when Taske’s wife Suzanne is eaten. Though Schow provides Suzanne a little backstory, she is mainly a middle-aged wet-dream:

After bearing Jilly and dropping the surplus weight of pregnancy, her ass and pelvis had resolved into a lascivious fullness that I could not keep my hands away from for long….

Furthermore, she “Recently shed all self-consciousness about sex…” and is nearly always naked or throwing on a robe as she rushes around her new house.

The inability to write realized characters is an oft-cited weakness of horror fiction authors. Schow, however, is able. Carl Taske is likeable in spite of a host of flaws because he is fully self-aware. He knows he’s a yuppy and he feels the attendant class guilt, he’s desperate to please his wife and child, his temper gets the best of him, he’s afraid but willing to do for his family, he accepts blame, he’s insecure, and he’s unsure what to do with his success—it’s this uncertainty, he determines, that imperiled his family. Taske’s neighbor, Dunwoody, who serves as a glimpse of what Taske might become, is another sympathetic character. Maybe Schow just doesn’t write women well.

When Dunwoody first meets Taske, Dunwoody asks a series of very specific questions. Dunwoody wants to tell Taske something, but is prevented—we understand later what prevents him. The second time they meet, however, Dunwoody is free to speak, but rather than clearly explain to Taske that he and his family is in danger, he’s cryptic and rude.

And that’s a cliché. The old man, addled by the horrors he’s experienced, offers warnings no one would ever take seriously. What if the old man simply told Taske everything, the instant the two had a moment free? An interesting way to start a story—a real challenge to the protagonist. Sir, I know you just bought this house, but there is a monster here that mutilated my son and keeps me enslaved with its addictive venom. Here’s proof.

The addictive venom is the reason Dunwoody doesn’t warn Taske: Dunwoody is an addict. Addiction is the real horror in this story. It explains—justifies—everything. Even the cliché.

“Not From Around Here” starts strong, then drags to the end. Too much resolution for my taste.  Schow’s macho persona interferes, too—Taske’s page-long anecdote about losing it in middle school and beating up a bully is completely unnecessary.

06.19.13

While reading for my Video Lies series, I came across a 1993 review of X, Y that begins, “Michael Blumlein is best known in the horror community for The Brains of Rats, widely acclaimed as one of the most disturbing short story collections of the last few years “(Fangoria #130, Don Kaye). Who is Michael Blumlein?

“Bestseller,” ultimately collected in The Brains of Rats, is in the 1991 Year’s Best, and I admit I couldn’t finish it in one sitting because it disturbed me so. Specifically, the narrator is an author struggling to write in the face of his family’s growing economic desperation. His wife is losing confidence in his work and so is he. Then—and this is when I took my break—his son Nick is diagnosed with cancer and the doctors want to amputate his leg. This is not maudlin—Blumlein is better than that. The suffering of his characters is felt.

The weird of the tale is the arrangement the narrator makes with a private organ farm, a deal he enters into wide-eyed, and benefits from. The horror does not stem from forced harvesting, as it could, but rather from how the narrator responds to the progressively aggressive procedures. What the narrator becomes.

Briefly, “Bestseller” falls into a pattern that slows the tale down, but I’m not sure this should be considered a problem. A little lull is to be appreciated.

06.20.13

Susan Cooper’s essay “Fantasy in the Real World”—one of Terri Windling’s selections for the Year’s Best—proposes that the United States lacks the ritual that myth provides, and that this is the reason the United States “falls into destructive violence” (Cooper is paraphrasing Joseph Campbell, by way of Bill Moyers). Fantasy literature, she suggests, could provide the myth the States lack, presumably creating order in our society and putting an end to gun violence.

Cooper writes,

Great Britain is a fortunate country; there is a great deal to be said for constitutional monarchy. The actual governing is all done by a democratically elected Parliament; the monarch has no power at all, but leads a benevolent and very public life as a figurehead, a focus for ritual and emotion—a hero. Popularity is less important for a British prime minister than for an American president, since in Britain the public can focus all its adoration, all its hero-worship, upon the Queen—not to mention Prince Charles, Princess Di, and the rest.

She explains that, “We are short of such figures in the United States.” I don’t consider being without a preposterously entitled figurehead a lack, but a virtue. “Who are our heroes?” she asks, and then dismisses our heroes as either mere celebrities, or dead (she names John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.), or possessed only of great talent, intelligence, and great beauty—none of royalty.

The United States is not without myths—look to the wild west—nor without heroes—legendary and otherwise. The great benefit of heroes who are entrepreneurs, actors, athletes, musicians, politicians, etc., rather than royalty,  is that it is possible to not only emulate such heroes, but to become one yourself by achievement.

Cooper abandons her central claim (fantasy is really important) to conclude that “parents, teachers, librarians, authors, publishers” must bring together “the right child and the right book.” She explains: 

The biggest truism of our professional lives is that hugely important fact too many civilians still forget: every child should be encouraged to read books, words on a page, for his or her own pleasure, in his own time, dreaming his own—and the author’s—dream.

Originally a speech delivered at the New York Library, I’m sure she delighted her audience, as I’m sure the essay gave certain readers a sense of importance. It is, however, a mess. Condescending, too.

Too bad, because I like very much that a couple of non-fiction pieces made their way into The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror series (the other is Douglas Winter’s flawed essay “The Pathos of Genre” from the thirteenth volume, which I criticized in New Genre #4); it suggests that critical writing about fantasy and horror fiction, written by its practitioners, is of value.

90. Horror fiction notes (3/7) } "...his protective suit."

06.10.13

Ellen Datlow chose two stories by Jonathan Carroll for inclusion in the 1991 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror—“The Panic Hand” and “The Sadness of Detail” (the latter, also chosen by Terri Windling, the fantasy half of the series). (Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell took Carroll’s “The Dead Love You” for their Best New Horror 2.)

I see a parallel between Carroll’s “The Sadness of Detail” and T.E.D. Klein’s “Ladder”: both present an image of God, and while Klein’s God is childishly cruel, Carroll’s is heartbreaking. There’s a whisper of  W. W. Jacob’s “The Monkey’s Paw”—but it’s not anything like that story. I see a parallel between “The Sadness of Detail” and Jack Womack’s “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”: the horror of Alzheimer’s. Datlow and Windling placed “The Sadness of Detail” last in the book, absolutely the right choice.

A reviewer for Kirkus compared Carroll to John Collier and Saki. I’ll add Paul Bowels to that list. The same Kirkus review (of the 1996 collection The Panic Hand) states, “Carroll's weaker stories are slight and uninvolving, but his best are among the finest fantasies being written today.” I’m suspicious of this kind of comment—it may be accurate—I just made a similar remark about T.E.D. Klein—but it might also be a sign that the reviewer failed to appreciate the more subtle stories in the collection. I really don’t know—I haven’t read The Panic Hand.

I have, however, read “The Panic Hand.” Aside from loving the title, high school Adam didn’t think much of this story. Maybe I failed to understand that it’s about more than just a manipulative child (manipulative on the scale of The Twilight Zone), but is also about a pedophile. Or at least a pedophile in the making. Strip out that reading, and we’re left with a fairly satisfying fantasy story; but as Carroll has it, the story becomes horror. A fine illustration of the thin wall between genre.

06.11.13

Why collaborate to write a short story? This is not a rhetorical question. I can’t think of many fiction collaborations that generated work better than the work the authors write individually. Titus Andronicus is not better than Othello. Maybe it’s better than The Battle of Alcazar? I don’t know, though. Do chime in. I am currently collaborating with Anna Eyre on a series of cantos called On Land, so I know how a poetic collaboration of a certain type might work, that is, by treating the lines we each produce as found text we can rearrange, erase, add too, etc. When I work with Anna, authorship ceases to matter: it is we. And I love that.

I suppose with a fiction collaboration, as with a collaboration in verse, you set up a system. In the case of Lucius Shepard and Robert Frazier, I imagine Shepard was assigned to rough out the South American setting, the sex scenes with the barely legal prostitute, and the descriptions of psychotropic drug use. So what does that leave Frazier? The best scene in “The All-Consuming”: the main character rests in a clearing deep in a toxic future-jungle, surrounded by deadly flora and fauna, entranced by “a cloud pool” and his surroundings:

Through gaps in the foliage, Arce could see the slender trunks of other gargantuas rising above the canopy, vanishing into a bank of low clouds. And in the middle distance, its translucent flesh barely visible against the overcast, a rainbird flapped up from a stinger palm and beat its way south against the prevailing wind. Acre watched it out of sight, captivated by the almost impalpable vibration of its wings, by the entirety of the scene, with its gaudy array of colors and exotic vitality. At times like this, he was able to shrug off the bitter weight of his past for a few moments and delight in the mystery he inhabited.

Nothing else in the story interests as much as that description of replenishing solitude—a solitude so rich and satisfying as to make the main character’s escape from this jungle at the end of the story much less redemptive than it’s supposed to be. Oh and Arce? Arce is a terrible name for a main character—is it meant to be read as “arch” or “are-say”? I read it as “arse,” as in kiss my….

I’m a little surprised Datlow chose “The All-Consuming”; the elements of horror are awfully mild. However, I appreciate Datlow’s expansive take on horror—more than appreciate it: Datlow’s openness to work that skirts the genre is a part of what made The Year’s Bests so important to me in the early 1990s, when I was just beginning to read contemporary horror fiction.

Has anyone read The Talisman?