Recommendation: Asian Monsters (ed. Margret Helgadottir)

Asian Monsters is the third anthology in the 'Monsters' series from Fox Spirit Press, following on from European Monsters and African Monsters. It's a beautifully designed book, with evokative, sepia-tinted cover art from Daniele Serra and interior art from a range of artists. Two of the stories are in the form of comic-strips too.

The fourteen stories here (edited by Margret Helgadottir) take creatures from various strands of Asian folklore and give them new twists. If, like me, you're as boringly British as they come, you'll be sure to find beasts and creatures new to you in these pages. As such, it's an anthology that feels more original than many. I assume that most of these tales are based on old myths and folktales, but the the stories in Asian Monsters all feel like fresh retellings, the authors using their stories to investigate contemporary and human concerns.

Every story here is worth reading; here are a few words on my personal favourites:

'Good Hunting' by Ken Liu exemplifies the combination of the traditional and the modern I mentioned above; indeed it's about the journey from one to another. This story starts with a familiar setup–a demon-hunter seeking out his quarry–but ends up somewhere completely different, as the magic of spells and tradition is replaced by that of industry and modernity. It's a spectacularly well written story about how both the demon and the hunter adapt and thrive; in its scope its the equivalent of that jump-cut from 2001.

One of the most disturbing monsters in the anthology is to be found in 'Datsue-Ba' by Eliza Chan. Here, the traditional and the modern appear to be in conflict. The central characters are as modern as they come: two unmarried lovers enjoying a break at a Tokyo onsen; but they are unaware of the spirit-like creature there with them, one who sits in judgement over their actions and characters. But while it is a story about judgement, it's unclear whether justice has been delivered, or whether just the stale diktats of dead tradition enacted.

Aliette de Boddard's 'Golden Lillies' also sees the values of the traditional past being forced upon latter generations, although in this case the monster (a deceased ancestor) is actively sought out, by a young woman about to marry. The story is based around the horrific practice of foot-binding, and the reader might wonder if the 'help' the spirit offers is really aid at all, or merely pointless pain and torment.

EeLeen Lee's 'Let Her In' tells of the relationship between mother and daughter, the latter returning from the dead after being forced into an absuive marriage. A wonderfully poignant piece about revenge, cross-generational relationships, loss and love.

Perhaps the best story of all, and certainly the scariest, is 'Blood Women' by Usman T. Malik. Set in a contemporary Pakistan, young children already facing the horrors of bombs and drone-strikes realise that something even more monstrous is out there. It's a vividly conveyed setting, and it's testament to Malik's skills as a writer that the monstrous element still has the ability to shock and scare against this all too human backdrop.

All in all, Asian Monsters is thoroughly recommended (UK | US)

The Ritual & Wilderness Horror

I recently finished The Ritual by Adam Nevill, a horror novel set, to quote the blurb, in "the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle". It's a fine novel, albeit one that I felt lost a bit of steam in its second half. It's also a very pure horror novel too: it's essentially about a group of friends lost in the woods, with 'something' stalking them. Even more essentially, it's a book about the fear of death.

That might sound a trite, even pointless description - aren't all horror novels about the fear of death? After all, what else is there actually to be afraid of, underneath? Maybe that's true, but it's surprising how many horror books and films pussyfoot around the issue. Very few put us inside the head of someone facing death for any length of time. The gory kills, the entrails and innards spilt in the worst horror films and fictions actually seem a distraction, a sensationalist focusing on the external side of death. The real horror is inside.

The Ritual dares to show us the thoughts of someone who believes they are going to die for a very long time. The sense of dread, of hopelessness, is almost palpable and is as scary as anything I've read for a long time.

Maybe the starkness of the wilderness setting increases this feeling. After all, the central characters are in a hell of a mess before the supernatural element really makes itself known. They are lost, wet, alone, running out of food and a couple of them are injured, slowing the group down. They're suffering that modern dislocation that comes when suddenly, somehow in the middle of our routine lives we can be mortally in danger: they were on holiday for Christ's sake, and now this... But theirs is also an ageless fear, too: the fear of being lost in the woods.

It's the same fear Stephen King plays on in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - one of his best books I think, because it's so simple: the titular girl is also lost in the woods and scared she's not alone. It's a very different book, both in terms of plot and tone, to The Ritual but there's a similarity there. As there is with The Terror by Dan Simmons, another book where the horrors of the Arctic wilderness the characters can't escape (stranded this time, rather than lost) almost seem to dwarf the supernatural element of the plot.

So why, we might ask, do these books even need a monster - is it a mere sop to the horror audience? A set of stabilisers that these writers can't write without?

Well no, I don't think so. I think it's important to the effect of these stories, and The Ritual in particular, that the 'thing' is barely described, a shadowy but constant presence at the characters' backs. No matter how far they walk, it keeps pace with them; no matter where they hide it seeks them out. It's like Death itself, in fact. Not so much a symbol, but an externalisation of the character's plight.

But, these being stories, the monster can also be evaded, fought off- temporarily and at great cost it can be defeated. Sometimes we can make it out of the wilderness, of the woods we have got lost in. Despite a sense of hopelessness as great as any I've encountered in a novel, there are brief moments of respite in The Ritual, of light and hope. But I won't give the game away about whether they are ultimately groundless or how the novel ends - this really is one you need to read yourself.

The Ritual (UK |US)

Vortex by Robert Dunbar

On the day I was born, the headline in The Daily Mail was "WEREWOLF KILLER CAUGHT."

This is just one of many things I have learnt from Robert Dunbar's new book, Vortex.(UK | US)

Vortex is a non-fiction book, and it is Dunbar's personal exploration of the roots of many of contemporary horror's best known beasts, plus a few lesser known ones as well. From the Jersey Devil to vampires, from sirens and mermaids to were-creatures of all kinds, Dunbar examines the roots behind these legends - how the stories have changed over time, and how they have remained the same. There are also some chapters on film, the most interesting being the one about the theme of 'the other' in horror movies - which groups society marks out as its 'monsters'.

Regular readers will know that Dunbar is one of the favourite horror authors I've discovered in recent years, so I wasn't surprised to discover how well written Vortex is. However, the tone is very different to his dense, thoughtful fiction, being a witty and frequently self-mocking read. It's certainly no dry-as-dust academic piece; in fact given that half the time he's talking about real life cannibals or witch-burnings or mass-murders, it's a very gleeful book. My favourite section was that about The Jersey Devil, a monster Dunbar has made very much his own in an early novel, in a deliberate attempt to move away from the over-used, over-European monsters that still rear their heads in such a great deal of horror fiction. Being a boring old European myself, this was all new to me. Like many other parts of this book, I learnt a lot, and had a blast doing so.

So, a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable ride through some of the most horrific myths and real-life events imaginable. Very much recommended for anyone with an interest in Dunbar's work, or in horror fiction in general. There were some sections I wish were longer and went into more detail, but maybe I'm just wishing for a sequel.

Here's a little trailer to watch, for those who wish to do so:

Scary Women Mixtape

Apparently, it's Women In Horror Month. As part of this you'll find many great female horror writers talking about their work, which can only be a good thing - I don't know if there's any residual sexism meaning woman have a harder time getting accepted as a horror author than their male counterparts, but given that dickheads like Vox Day exist, the answer is probably yes.

(Don't google "Vox Day" if you are unaware of the man or his views. Seriously, don't. You'll end up feeling worse about people in general, which is never good.)

Anyway, for Women In Horror Month I thought I'd post 20 of my favourite horror short stories by female authors. For no other reason than I like compiling imaginary anthologies; it's like making mix-tapes all over again...

This list is off the top of my head, so it's pretty biased towards stories I've read recently, but I've tried to include both classic and contemporary stories. I've only picked one story per author and as ever my definition of what makes a story 'horror' is pretty loose.

Further suggestions very much welcome in the comments...

In The Waterworks (Birmingham, Alabama, 1883) - Caitlin R Kiernan
The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Idolised - Emma Newman

The Screwfly Solution - James Tiptree Jr.
The Little Dirty Girl - Joanna Russ
Don't Look Now - Daphne du Maurier
Cold Coffee Cups & Curious Things - Cate Gardner
A.G.A. - S.P. Miskowski

The Summer People - Shirley Jackson
The Dark - Karen Joy Fowler
Replacement - Lisa Tuttle
Under Fog - Tanith Lee
The Dog That Bit Her - Autumn Christian
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin
The Room Upstairs - Sarah Pinborough
The Devil of Delery Street - Poppy Z Brite
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? - Joyce Carol Oates
The Hortlak - Kelly Link

Afterward - Edith Wharton
White Roses, Bloody Silk - Thana Niveau

Review: Thin Men With Yellow Faces

Thin Men With Yellow Faces is part of the This Is Horror chapbook series, and is jointly written by Simon Bestwick and Gary McMahon. Sometimes when two authors I like collaborate I've found they muffle each other's voice, but other times it's more like amplification. I'm happy to say this story is very much in the latter camp.

Thin Men With Yellow Faces (and let's say right away what a great title that is) is a story perfect to read in a single setting, absorbing the grim atmosphere and allowing the tension to build. And build it most certainly does.

The set-up - child in trouble and menaced by human-like monsters - is like an episode of Doctor Who gone horribly awry, written with Northern verisimilitude and pessimism, and containing horrors that are very much adults-only. As you'd expect if you've read any of their previous work, these two authors don't stint on the chilling or grotesque.

The titular monsters are truly unforgettable, with a historical background that only makes them scarier. The story has a pleasing moral ambiguity to it, and could be read as a loose allegory about many of the horrors and injustices of the modern world (or our denial of them, at least). There's no easy get out for the characters here, and none for us either.

Overall this is a great collaboration, with the two-headed Bestwick/McMahon hybrid in fine form and breathing fire. You can (and bloody should) buy it directly from the This Is Horror site.

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say...

Most of the strange stories I've featured in this column to date have been short, controlled tales – paranoia and fear mounting to a single moment of horror. Whilst the best of these stories might imply a lot, they definitively state very little.

House Of Leaves is not that kind of story.

This is a huge novel (and one you must read in its physical version rather than as an ebook, as the photographs in this post will indicate) with multiple plots and sub-plots, typographical tricks, footnotes and diversions. It tells the story of ‘The Navidson Record’, a film by a renowned photographer about a very singular house.

The book takes the form of an academic treatment of the film, discussing its themes and veracity. This has apparently been written by Zampano, a blind man who dies in mysterious circumstances. His manuscript is recovered by a second character, Johnny Truant, who interprets the Zampano notes and The Navidson Record in his own way, as well as chronicling the breakdown he suffers whilst reading the material, despite the fact that he can find no evidence that the film even exists.

So the book is in effect one narrator annotating the notes of another narrator about a film neither can ever have seen (one doubting it is real, the other being blind) and that even if it does exist might just be a fake anyway. I think.

Added to this, the book is a labyrinth (and that word is chosen deliberately) of other stories, from Johnny’s tall-tales told to impress girls to historical accounts of people shipwrecked in the Arctic. The book also features seemingly never-ending lists (of architectural features, famous photographers, ghost stories etc.), mirror-writing, poems, and letters with a secret code. There are 'quotations' about the Navidson Record from people like Derrida, Camile Paglia, and Stephen King. There are a number of seemingly trivial mysteries that nevertheless prey on the mind: why is the word house (or any translation thereof) in a different colour & font to the rest of the text? Why is every reference to the Minotaur myth crossed through?

This book achieves ambiguity not through sparseness of detail but through a surfeit of it.

And there remains the fact that, despite the interruptions and longueurs, there is at the core of this book a truly frightening and original horror story. The Navidson Record starts with the Navidson family moving into a new house, and Navidson realising his house appears to be a fraction of an inch bigger on the inside than the outside: Lovecraft’s crazy geometry rewritten on a domestic scale. Soon after, a door appears in the house that wasn't there before, that appears to open onto a small, dusty corridor… which is clearly occupying the same physical space as the garden outside the house. Navidson, and later others, explore the corridor, and they soon realise the space behind the door is potentially huge (infinite?), and shifting and protean... and there might be something in that impossible space with them. The sheer impossibility of the house, initially represented by that small fraction of an inch, becomes something experienced on a far vaster scale. Added to this is the very human drama played out between Navidson and his wife Karen, who desperately wants her husband to stop exploring the house, and between Navidson and his estranged brother Tom. The book contains several moving moments of catharsis as well as it's brain-frying detail.

House Of Leaves seems to me a stunning achievement, a book that will become a true classic of the genre (despite the fact that no genre can really contain it). It meshes post-modernism with a strong knowledge of horror tropes, and comes up with something absolutely original. It contains enough intellectual stimulation to fuel a thousand post-graduate essays, but with enough twists and turns of the plot to turn it into an addictive page-turner too. Despite its size it’s compulsively readable, and re-readable – I've read it three times now and found new pleasures and confusions each time.

In fact, typing this, it occurs to me it's a love story, too.

Absolutely essential reading.

Five Reasons I Loved The Hoard by Alan Ryker

Five reasons I loved Alan Ryker's new novella from DarkFuse, The Hoard:

1. The story tells of Anna, a compulsive hoarder; in lesser hands such a character would merely be the subject of mistrust but Ryker deals with the theme subtly, showing her actions and their emotional consequences not just on herself but on her family too. The interior of Anna's house, full of junk and grime, is described with clarity and detail, and it is a vivid and original setting for a horror story. Similarly, the wider setting of a Kansas small town is made real to the reader, much like in the author's equally impressive Burden Kansas.
2. It's got a pun in the title. The title!
3. There's a low key start, where the main focus is on the revelation of Anna's hoarding to her family, but when the horror comes, it really comes. The story ends with a deluge of rain after a summer draught, and the change in the narrative feels much like that: foreshadowed by an increase in pressure, but still shockingly sudden and violent.
4. Despite the fact I normally hate any story with a chapter from the point of view of an animal, I didn't hate this one, even though really early on there is a part from the point of view of a rat. *
5. Whilst I'm not sure that any monster in horror fiction can be 100% original any more, the one in The Hoard is at least originally unoriginal - The Thing crossed with The Bodysnatchers crossed with the alien possession of The Autopsy (by Michael Shea), perhaps.

So there you have it. You can buy The Hoard in Paperback (UK | US) or Ebook (UK | US).

* I admit this dislike may be slightly irrational. I don't mind books told entirely from the point of view of animals like Watership Down. I just can't stand it when, in the middle of an ordinary narrative, suddenly there's a section where we see events from a Llama's point of view or whatever. Particularly when the animal seems to have human-esque feelings or be 'thinking' in English. **

** I reserve the right to use animal points of view in my future stories should the need arise.

Big Bulky Horror Novels for Halloween

Halloween is an odd time of year, when people who never normally watch horror movies or read ghost stories seem to find an excuse to do so. The webpage of a national newspaper might discuss a short story by Robert Aickman, and a respectable broadcaster might devote an hour to an informed discussion of European horror films.

 

I'm probably guilty on this blog of discussing the more obscure aspects of horror fiction, at the expense of commercial books that a wider audience will have heard of. So in tribute to Halloween and the temporary mass celebration of all things scary, I've decided to do a post on my favourite BIG horror best-sellers. These were the kind of books that introduced me to the genre when I was a teenager and it’s unlikely I’d be reading Aickman & Co. if I’d not read the likes of King and Simmons first.

 

I've imposed some strict rules on my selections here: no tricksy post-modernism (sorry, House Of Leaves); no psychological ambiguity (bye bye Turn of The Screw and Hill House); nothing old (stop moaning,  Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde) and no short stories or novellas (adiós just about every weird, under-appreciated book I've ever featured here). Instead, these are the block-busters. The writers of cracking action scenes with unambiguously evil villains. At least three have been made into movies, and the other two should be.

 

I guess it’s obvious from the above that this list would include King, so I thought I might as well start with him. IT is probably my favourites of his horror novels, and it exemplifies the kind of book I'm talking about here: vast, with a sprawling cast of characters, and a ‘big bad’ who has been responsible for decades of fear in the Maine town (of course) of Derry. The story takes place across two timelines – the characters repeat scenes from their childhood as flawed and weaker adults… King’s handling of this, and the creepy effects associated with time repeating itself, are a highlight of the novel and really call into question those people who think he can’t write with any subtlety. (Just because the books I'm talking about here are big bulky blockbusters doesn't mean they’re big bulky dumb blockbusters.)

 

For me, Ghost Story is Straub’s best book by a country mile – forget the singular title, this book should really be called Ghost Stories, containing as it does multiple stories told by a group of old men know as the ‘Chowder Society’. Straub takes the Stephen King approach of using an American small town as a setting for his horrors, and as a microcosm of society as a whole, but this is distinctly his own style. As the story progresses it becomes clear that each of the individual ghosts and monsters are just facets of the real evil; that each of the separate stories being told, are in fact just elements of one story after all.

Probably the most ‘arty’ book in this list, and arguably not horror, being told as it is from the point of view of a monster. But there are bigger monsters in this tale than the vampire doing the talking, and the real horror may be the slow falling away of his humanity… I like this book for it’s lavish set pieces (the whole book is nothing more than a series of set pieces, really) and the darkly luxurious feel of the prose, particularly in its descriptions of night-time New Orleans and Paris. Maybe this was the start of the trend towards Twilight and everything bad associated with that, but here the vampires still have a decadent, almost nihilistic  edge. (Everything else I've read by Rice, including the sequels to this, I've not liked at all.)

 

An absolute whopper of a book, which has a premise that makes it sound like the worst tripe imaginable: ‘mind vampires’ have been controlling human affairs for decades. But this was back when Simmons was at the top of his game (by contrast his last book was one part plot to nine parts Tea Party ranting) and he plays the idea of mind vampires with a completely straight bat. They become almost the ultimate villain, responsible for humanity’s evils both big and small. And like all the best villains they are completely compelling. The odds seem ridiculously stacked against the human heroes and despite the simple good versus evil plot, the book has an air of desperation in places that makes it stand out.

 

The most recent book on the list and yet another one about vampires. I don’t know if Lindqvist has read Interview With The Vampire, but given it’s English-language ubiquity it at least seems likely he might have. One of the minor characters in that book might have been the inspiration for this one – a child vampire. A creature that has lived for centuries but still has the body of a kid. In some ways this is the darkest of the books in this list, with its setting of an 80s Swedish housing estate, and its background themes of addiction and child-abuse. In this setting the child-vampire is only partly horrific, and the tale of her relationship with a lonely schoolboy has a real emotional core, twisted and bleak, but there. The kind of book that gives best-sellers a good name.

Feel free to mention your own big bulky favourite horror novels in the comments...

Zombies: New Rules

I'm sure I'm not the only one dismayed by the rash of bad zombie fiction that's been released recently; stories that only seem to exist to rip-off Romero, The Walking Dead, or Twenty-Eight Days Later (yes I know they're not technically zombies, but they are zombie-esque). I'm sure there's some good books in amidst them all, but it's hard to tell them apart from their descriptions: each and every one seems to tell of the gradual spread of the zombies, whether by a virus or whatever, and of survivors banding together and... etc. etc. You know the rest I'm sure.

I know of a number of 'literary horror' readers (a dreadful term, but it will do for now) who've vowed never to read another zombie book, and I know authors who'd turn their nose up at writing a zombie story nowadays... old-hat and déclassé, old boy.

But I'm a bit perverse sometimes, so I've decided to force myself to try and write some zombie stories, but with a few rules in place to make sure they're not just generic toss. I've got two ideas worked out (but not written) that meet my rules, although they aren't consistent with each other (i.e. the two stories can't be said to exist in the same fictional universe) and I'll probably have them finished at exactly the point the commercial zombie bubble bursts.

Anyway, here are the rules I've set myself:

New Zombie Story Rule#1: no using the basic narrative structure of modern, civilised society being gradually swept away by a zombie outbreak. The setting can be post-apocalyptic (and is, in one case) but the story can't be about how that situation came to be.

New Zombie Story Rule #2: the story cannot be centred around a disparate group of plucky survivors.

New Zombie Story Rule #3: it is not original to have the same old story but with a 'zombie with a twist' (like fast zombies - for fuck's sake) or a different setting (zombies at Buckingham Palace etc.)

New Zombie Story Rule #4: neither can originality be gained by having a pseudo-scientific explanation for the zombie outbreak.

New Zombie Story Rule #5: zombie's are the risen dead, but they don't have to want to eat us (in one story I have planned they do, in another, no)

New Zombie Story Rule #6: symbolism - zombies as a symbol for mindless consumerism was an original idea when Romero did it. It isn't now. Nor is the idea that zombies are symbols (used consciously or otherwise) for our fears of super-flu etc.

New Zombie Story Rule #7: zombies don't have to hang around in big groups.

What about you? Any good, original zombie books to recommend? Any further rules you think I should be following? Any of you think I'm talking rubbish?

Some Thoughts on Edge-Lit

Yesterday I went to Edge-Lit, a one-day convention of horror, science fiction and fantasy writing. I've never been to anything like this before, but this was just down the road (well, train tracks) in Derby, and I'd met the organiser Alex Davis at a writing course before, so I bought a ticket.

I went on my own and didn't know anyone there personally; I recognised a few name badges from Twitter and probably should have plucked up the courage to say hello. But I'm really not the type who can just walk up to strangers and introduce myself, despite the fact that I know from experience if I just forced myself people would probably have loved to say hello & shared a beer, just as I would have in their shoes. So there was a bit of drinking on my own in the bar. Nevertheless I did chat to some people during some of the events, and have got in touch with a few of them on Twitter since (internet socialising I'm fine with...)

As for the event itself it was tremendous and my brain was buzzing with ideas all day, and well into the night until my thoughts were blunted with a glass of wine or two. All the authors on the various panels were excellent, but naturally the words of some of them stuck with me more than others:

Obviously I went to the What Makes a Great Story? panel chaired by Marie O'Regan. The answer to the question seemed to be pretty much 'that indefinable something that we can recognise but not pin down' which I'm sure we all knew really, but the discussion around it was fun and interesting. Particularly where Simon Bestwick starting ranting about haunting "fucking copy editors" from beyond the grave if they started messing with his work after he died.

Emma Newan wasn't a writer I'd ever heard of before, but by chance I ended up seeing her on a number of panels, and a lot of what she said was really great, particularly talking about The Writer And The Internet. Her comments on drawing a line and social anxiety (see above!) struck a chord. Despite proclaiming she was afraid of "everything" she was also on the excellent Are We Still Afraid Of Monsters? panel, alongside    Simon Bestwick , Ian Culbard, and Paul Kane. Being a horror author this was the panel I was most looking forward and it didn't disappoint: lots of Lovecraft; The Birds; disdain for sparkly vampires; human monsters; whether right-wing governments cause a resurgence in the horror genre... - scattershot and marvellous.

The Ray Bradbury retrospective was also fun and a tad moving, although I most liked the part where Sarah Pinborough and Graham Joyce had a bit of a spat... But an good-natured and erudite spat, so it was all okay.

As well as the panels, I also went to a workshop run by Simon Bestwick  (yep him again) about Making Monsters. This was the best part for me, doing some actual writing, albeit rushed and in public. Obviously we had to create a monster and after staring at an empty page for what seemed like three quarters of the wriring time the idea I came up with seemed really solid, and I tinkered with it on the train on the way home. My monsters were The Men Who Value Everything In Money and I have a feeling in my gut that there's a good story of that name in me somewhere. I read out my piece to the group, which as you can imagine from the what I said above I found particularly nerve-racking, but people seemed to like it.

I asked Simon to sign a book after the workshop, and was really chuffed when he recognised my name from the interview I did with Cate Gardner recently (he being a big fan of hers) & signed my copy of The Faceless "from one Abominable Gentlemen to another".

Oh and I came home with a ton of books (many by the authors mentioned above who particularly impressed me). Huzzah!

So overall a great day, and hopefully I'll be back next year and be a bit bolder in the forcing myself on people in the bar department. Knowing me I'll probably wildly overcompensate and be the drunken twat everyone can't stand - the title of next year's shamefaced blog post no doubt.

Penny Dreadnought Omnibus Volume 1 Out Now

Very pleased to say that the Abominable Gentlemen's diabolical plan is coming to fruition, with the release of the first Penny Dreadnought Omnibus!

(For those who don't know, Penny Dreadnought is a series of themed weird fiction anthologies from myself, Alan Ryker, Iain Rowan, and Aaron Polson).

It contains all sixteen stories from the first four volumes of Penny Dreadnought as well as a bonus gallery of cover art. Side effects may vary from reader to reader, but are likely to include: trembling hands; creeping dread; visions of the end times; speaking in tongues; existential doubt, and an intolerance to sparkly vampires.

Experience it at Amazon UK | Amazon US

 

The stories are:

 

‘Lilies’ - Iain Rowan

‘Cargo’ - Aaron Polson

‘First Time Buyers’ - James Everington

‘Invasion of the Shark-Men’ - Alan Ryker

‘Falling Over’ by James Everington

‘All the Pretty Yellow Flowers’ by Aaron Polson

‘Ice Age’ by Iain Rowan

‘A Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet’ by Alan Ryker

‘Precious Metal’ by Aaron Polson

‘Only the Lonely’ by Iain Rowan

‘The New Words’ by Alan Ryker

‘He’ by James Everington

‘Occupational Hazard’ by Iain Rowan

‘The Aerialist’ by Alan Ryker

‘Packob's Reward’ by James Everington

‘Poe's Blender’ by Aaron Polson

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.

Strange Stories #11: The Hortlak by Kelly Link

Strange Story #11: The Hortlak
Author: Kelly Link
Collected In: Magic For Beginners
Also Available to Read or Download on the Author's Website


The zombies came in, and he was polite to them, and failed to understand what they wanted...

For this week's story, I though it would be interesting (for me at least) to read and comment on a story by an author completely new to me. No prior knowledge, no research on Google - just read it and then write this piece. And if you don't like it you only have yourselves to blame, because this story was chosen by the readers of this blog when (for reasons that doubtless made sense at the time) we composed a contents list for a non-existent Scattershot Writing Horror Anthology. Kelly Link was one of the writers who was new to me who got a lot of votes, so I've been meaning to read her for awhile now. Also you can get this story, plus many others, for free on her website, which is great.

Anyway -  The Hortlak. (Okay, I lied. That thing about not doing any research? I did Google the meaning of the title. It is Turkish for 'ghost' or 'phantom').  It's immediately obvious from the style of this story that this isn't a straight horror story - the writing and range of references is too knowing, stylised, and arch for that. Like Douglas Coupland if he'd seen more George A. Romero films. And it seems to me Romero's zombies, and the notion that they are a metaphor for mindless consumerism are a touchstone here, albeit one completely transformed and transfigured by Link's prose. The zombies in The Hortlak come out of a chasm in the ground, behind a twenty-four hour convenience store. They don't go on a flesh eating rampage though. They seem to go... shopping. Sort of. Anti-shopping.

The zombies didn’t talk at all, or they said things that didn’t make sense. “Wooden hat,” one zombie said to Eric... They tried to pay Eric for things that the All-Night didn’t sell.

The story, despite its tone, seems preoccupied with death. As well as the zombies, there is Charley, who works at the vet putting down unwanted dogs, after giving them a final ride in her car. The dogs may or may not come back as ghosts, ghosts you can't see but can smell. The central character's mother appears to have left town to hunt and kill his father. The two central characters, Eric and Batu, spend a lot of time speculating about what life, so to speak, is like for the zombies down in the chasm:

“Yeah?” Batu said. “Zombie bars too? Where they serve zombies Zombies?”

It seems telling that they are unable to imagine the zombies as living a life that much different to their own - a life of consumerism. When all the evidence is that the zombies are not like this: they try and give things not buy them, they are attracted to objects because of their intrinsic value (they like shiny things) not their monetary worth.

The Hortlak seems to me in part a story about our inability to truly imagine death, despite it being all around us and inescapable. And about our inability to imagine an alternative to capitalism, perhaps, despite all its faults.

I may be doing the story a disservice here, because as I said I've only just read it, and I have a whole load of unanswered questions after that first reading. I hope some of you who are also new to Link are intrigued enough check it out (see the link above for free a downloads). And I haven't even mentioned the man with the bees, the pyjamas (what the hell is going on with the pyjamas?), the Startrek references, the Turkish translations, the Canadians, the...

If you have read the story before, have you any theories of your own? Have I missed the point or got anything wrong?

And if you were one of the people who recommended this story to me originally: thank you. This one looks like a keeper.

Next Week: Strange Stories #12. The Long Sheet by William Sansom. 

Supernatural Tales 21 - Review

Thought I'd give a quick shout out to an issue of a magazine that's really impressed me recently -  issue #21 of Supernatural Tales is stuffed to the rafters with excellent stories. Often when I read short story magazines there's a few I think good, a few average, and a few I can't stand. If I'm lucky they'll be one up there in the very good category. ST21's worst story was a good one, and some of these tales were really very good indeed.

I've mentioned both Iain Rowan and Adam Golaski on this blog before (Golaski as the first author in my 'strange stories' series and Iain Rowan so many times he could probably claim squatter's rights) so I was expecting to very much like their contributions, and neither disappointed. Rowan's The Edge Of The Map was a short and very effective story which, in it's final sentence manages to pull off a volte-face in terms of mood and meaning - something about it really got to me. Golaski's Translation by contrast is a longer and more ambiguous tale, and dense and hard to fully grasp on first reading

But what was also nice was to find other equally good stories by authors new to me. As I said, all of them were at least good:

Steve Rasnic Tem's story These Days When All Is Silver And Bright is as good as it's title, which about says it all.

Virpus is a more tongue in cheek tale, funny in that way that horror can be (and which seems to be missed by so many people). It still plays successfully on a very modern fear, thought. (This one was by Bill Reid.)

S.P. Miskowski's A.G.A. was told almost entirely in dialogue and all the more effective for it. I really liked this one.

Steve Duffy's The Purple Tinted Window was disturbing rather than frighting, in that the supernatural element was provides relief  from the horror of the protagonist's mundane life, rather than the other way round.

The Last Fight by Sam Dawson is about the sacrifice and responsibility of those who went to fight the Spanish Civil War, and perhaps our own lack of such virtues.

And Stephen J. Clark ends the mag with The Vigil - an almost Lovecraftian horror tale this, filtered through The Twilight Zone perhaps. A good one to end on.

You can buy the magazine from Lulu or take out a subscription from the Supernatural Tales site itself. And when I say "you can" I mean "you should", obviously.