Strange Stories #15. Mal De Mer by Robert Dunbar

 

Strange Story #15: Mal De Mer
Author: Robert Dunbar
Collected In: Martyrs & Monsters



She who had gone to such lengths to deny her own 

capacity for emotion believed the beast to be experiencing one...

The story Mal De Mer was for me the stand-out from Robert Dunbar's great collection Martyrs & Monsters. It's a tale that certainly features some monsters, but exactly how many and who they are, is another question. As is that of whether it features any martyrs, too.

It is told from the point of view of a nameless young (?) woman who is looking after an older, sick woman in a house by the sea. Neither of them seem to have any friends or connections with any neighbours. At the start of the tale the narrator doesn't like the sea, and this fact is used both to show her distance from normal people and her somewhat morbid frame of mind:

Did other people truly find this noise agreeable? Waves slid with an oily crunch; each grating hiss marked the extinguishment of time she could never regain.


The narrator is also differentiated from 'normal' people by her lack of emotion; on encountering some odd children playing alone on the beach she can only think about the situation intellectually, not emotionally: children often did foolish things, did they not? She believed this to be the case. And despite her job as a carer she appears to feel no real empathy for her charge, and to be just waiting for the old lady to die (the lady is stubbornly refusing to do so).

As I said, there are multiple monsters in this story: the odd children for starters, and maybe a man who, before the day the story is set, appears to have provided the one source of genuine, physical feeling for the narrator. He is someone she met and had sex with on the beach. Yes despite this he is described almost like a scarred walrus thrown up on the beach. Her encounters with him are pleasurable but lustful only, and described in terms like drowning...

...and the source of his scars is never fully explained.

And yet more monsters: the odd children, the scarred lover, and something vast and hideous that comes from the depths of the sea. (It shows Dunbar's skill, incidentally, that he manages to make the story unified and of a piece despite all these differing elements to it.) And towards all of them, in a way, the narrator feels more emotional connection than with the dying old lady she is looking after... (This emotional, wordless connection between the central character and the so-called monsters is a recurrent theme in the stories in this collection.)

But maybe, the story seems to suggest, she still doesn't feel enough.

Next Time: Strange Stories #16. The Little Dirty Girl by Joanna Russ.

Trifecta: City Of Hell Chronicles

Howdy. I'm delighted to say that a new story of mine called No Insects At Sea is available in the second City Of Hell release from Anachron Press.

Earlier this year I set myself the goal of writing some stories for specific markets, rather than what I have been doing all these years, which is write something and only then try and find a home for it. And also to force myself to write stories slightly outside my comfort zone.

The City Of Hell stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by giant, sentiment insects - the stories in the first volume were grim and dark, and focused on what people had to do to survive. I thought it would be an interesting idea to see if I could make my type of more psychological horror work in such a setting, and No Insects At Sea was the result. I hope you like it and that it gives you bad dreams.

Trifecta - City of Hell Chronicles also contains the stories The Harlot and the Bad Man by Phil Ambler and Brethren by Nina D’Arcangela. It is available as an ebook now (UK | US) and a physical version will be forthcoming soon.

A Dream about Robert Aickman

A Dream about Robert Aickman

Last night, I dreamt I was in a bookshop. All the books were on rotating carousels; they were square and very thin with covers seemingly made of canvas or some sort of woven fabric. They only displayed the author’s name on the front, not any titles, and to tell who the book was by you had to run your fingers over the embossed writing like Braille.

I was turning the carousel looking through the books and I wondered why there weren't any by Robert Aickman. As soon as I thought this, the carousel (which turned of its own accord) presented a book to me; I traced Aickman's name on the cover and then opened it.

All the pages were folded into each like the leaves of a map, but a thousand times more complicated and intricately layered. As I unfolded more and more pages I held them up to the light, and the paper was tough but almost see through, like an insect's wing. Each page spawned more and more pages. The next might have writing in all the alphabets of the world, or diagrams that drew themselves, or colourful illustrations like the Book Of Kells, or brand new periodic tables, or anatomical drawings of imaginary creatures.

I looked around the bookshop, and all the other people there had similar books open, their open pages unfolding and connecting like paper streamers between us. Everyone was smiling and everyone was reading, and I knew I’d never be able to shut the book that was opening and opening in my hands.

Book Reviews

Some highlights from my holiday reading... (links in the titles to Amazon UK)

Off The Record - Ed. Luca Veste


A charity anthology with a twist, this one - all the stories are named after classic song titles. Most of the authors contribute crime themed stories, which isn't always my favourite genre, but many of the stories here are very good. There are thirty-eight stories, so I haven't space to talk about them all individually unfortunately. However, if I were making a C60 cassette anthology of my favourite tracks from this book, it would feature:

Iain Rowan - Purple Haze
Paul D. Brazill - Life On Mars?
Nigel Bird - Super Trouper
Eric Beetner - California Dreamin'
Helen FitzGerald - Two Little Boys

And I'd end the tape with Steve Mosby's marvellous 'God Moving Over The Face Of Waters' a truly creepy and individual tale, which is one of the best short stories I've read for awhile.

Martyrs & Monsters - Robert Dunbar

 This is the third book by this author I've read, and probably the best - but then I do have liking for a good, literate horror short story collection. Such stories are delivered in spades here. The author has a remarkable capacity to combine a variety of story styles & genres that still cohere into a consistent world view. Partly this is down to his taut & lyrical turns of phrase; Dunbar can use language to make you feel and see what he wants; in a book of chillers he even managed to make me laugh out loud in 'Explanations'.

Many of the stories take a basic horror story trope and run with it, twisting it into new directions - 'Getting Wet', 'Folly'. Others, such as the superlative 'Mal De Mer' are true one offs (the image of the wheelchair in the bottom of the swimming pool will haunt me for days).

As with all collections, there was the odd one that didn't hit quite as hard, but none weak enough to drag my rating down to anything less than a full-fat five-stars. Consistently impressive, and I hope the author does some more work in the short story form soon.

They're Waiting - Tony Rabig

This is a single short story, so it is hard to say too much without going spoiler-crazy. But suffice to say it is a taut, well-written story, which manages to do something new and different with the traditional ghost story. No mean feat. It's tone is almost lyrical and sad rather than scary. I look forward to reading a full collection of short fiction from this author - I think it could be something well worth reading.

Damn it - Ray Bradbury has passed away.

Of course, no one needs me to tell them about Bradbury's genius, or his many great novels and short stories.

I'll just mention that my favourite story of his has always been The Crowd - still creepy as hell after all these years.

It first appeared in Weird Tales in 1943 - see left the first page of the story and the accompanying illustration...

Also Colin Barnes wrote a great piece on Bradbury as part of the 'In Defence Of Short Stories' series - reread it here.

By the time you read this, I shall be dead - Pt 2.

Another post from beyond the grave northern Majorca, in which I repost a piece I originally wrote as a guest blog piece for another site. This piece originally appeared on the website of the excellent Greyhart Press, headed up by Tim C. Taylor and publisher of such authors as Mark West, who I've reviewed very positively on here in the past.

Anyway, this piece was originally called Ghostly Stories.

If you visit your local bookstore, or browse online, and look at the titles in the horror/paranormal section, what do you see?

Vampires.

Zombies.

Vampires.

Werewolves.

Vampires.

Cthulhu.

Zombies.

Vampires.

All well and good, but the current vogue for such fleshy, corporeal monsters leaves readers and writers in want of what is, for me, the mother-lode of supernatural fiction: the ghost story. The term was a virtual synonym for horror stories once, when MR James & Co. were scaring each other around coal fires of a Christmas. Never mind that not all James's stories actually featured ghosts - maybe ghostly stories would be a better description.

What I mean by 'ghostly' is a certain level of ambiguity about the proceedings, a doubt on the part of the reader about what is or isn't objectively true at the level of the story. There's an obvious example here, but obvious due in part to its greatness, so I'll just say it: The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James. (The name 'James' obviously being a sign of a great ghost story writer, heh heh). Hundreds of thousands of words have probably been written arguing that the ghosts in the book are a product of the governess's imagination, and hundreds of thousands probably written arguing for the opposite point that the ghosts are real.

All of them miss the point. A novel like The Turn Of The Screw (and most novels, to an extent) can be compared to one of those pictures that looks like an old woman or a young woman depending on how you look at it:

Arguing about whether this image is really a picture of an old or young woman is besides the point, despite the evidence that can be mustered either way. The whole point is that it as an image of both, and the whole point of The Turn Of The Screw is that the uncertainty about what is real is what creates the doubt, creates the unease. I think that, as a species, we instinctively want to determine whether something we hear or read is true or not, and we try and do this to fiction too. Even though we know it's all untrue we want to know what is real in the context of the story. And I believe the failure to do so disturbs us at some fundamental, subconscious level. Which is perhaps why some critics are so vehement that, no, the ghosts the governess sees are real, or aren't (it is a picture of an old woman, and I have a hundred thousand words of proof!)

I think this ambiguity about what is literally real in the context of the story runs through much great horror fiction, possibly without the authors always being aware of its presence. I'd bet that out of any genre horror fiction has the greatest percentage of unreliable narrators - the mad, the delusional, the dead. Lovecraft's twisted geometries and vagaries of description work in the same way, I think - the reader finds it hard to visualise what is actually being described, which creates its own ambiguity. Shirley Jackson, in stories like The Visit and The Summer People, was a genius and knowing what to miss out of a story to make it scary. Robert Aickman's self-called 'strange stories' work in a similar way - despite all the details that seem significant, they refuse to cohere into something easily understandable and digestible. Contemporary writers like Robert Shearman, Cate Gardner  and Dennis Etchison seem to me to be doing similar things, in their own differing ways.

And the ghost, of the all the traditional horror monsters, is ideally suited to this kind of ambiguous story. Of course it can be done with the more trendy, physical monsters that current bedevil our horror fiction, but it's harder - how many times have you wanted to shout at the characters in a vampire novel that of course the vampires are real, why else has half the town got holes in their necks? The characters might be unsure of the reality or otherwise of the vampire, but the reader rarely is - bloodsuckers are all too obvious for that, usually.

Like most horror authors, I've dabbled with zombies, I've dallied with vampires and werewolves. But for me, the truly scary monster is the one that I just saw out of the corner of my eye, and that I might have imagined anyway - the ghost.