"To See the Sun" (1980) by Kingsley Amis

 In his essay “Horror Fiction and the Mainstream,” Ramsey Campbell tosses this off parenthetically: 

Kingsley Amis…. describes the process which led to his writing…. Ghost stories: essentially, becoming interested in a genre to the extent of of feeling able to contribute. In his case this produced several fine shorter pieces—I continue to regret not including “To See the Sun” in Uncanny Banquet, with nothing to blame but my own laziness…. [1]

To open my Complete Stories (2011) was the work of a moment.

Fourth paragraph:

     The first shades of dusk are here and I must pause to light my candle. With the passing of the day, what I see from this window has changed a little and goes on changing as I write. Beyond the dark-red roofs of the peasant cottages, sharply sloped against the heavy winter snows, there’s a level grassy stretch something like a mile across (though it’s hard to be precise) and bounded by an irregular line of low hills that give place to higher hills, these being in turn topped by summits of what must be pretty considerable elevation, seeing that Nuvakastra itself can’t be much less than two thousand feet up. Until a few minutes back, the expanse of the plateau, broken here and there by a farmhouse with its outbuildings, a mill, a church, at one point a tiny village of tiny houses, had a warm and inviting look, and the distant mountains, though indeed wild, seemed to offer a noble mystery, a kind of primeval innocence. But now, how remote, how lonely everything seems! Imagine what it must feel like to be a wayfarer on that exposed plain with night closing in, even more to be lost among those desolate ravines and crags, beset by strange sounds and half-fancied movements in the dark! What makes us think that hidden forces are likely to be benevolent?

"To See the Sun" (1980) is a remarkable short story and a hidden gem of the horror genre. Set in 1925, it relates in epistolary style the encounter of an English folklore researcher with the chatelaine of a castle in Dacia. As with all Amis fiction, its structure, style, and point of view are handled flawlessly.

I first heard about the story four days ago in an essay in the collection Ramsey Campbell, Probably (2020), wherein Campbell regretted not getting the story into his anthology Uncanny Banquet.

"To See the Sun" is available in both the collected and complete Amis short story collections.

Don’t miss it.

Jay

29 April 2023

__________

1.  Ramsey Campbell, Probably: Revised and Expanded (2020) p.31.

A vampire novel canon from 1989

Near the back of the January 1989 issue of  The New York Review of Science Fiction, the reader will find Greg Cox's "The Transylvanian Reading List: The 13 Most Important Vampire Novels."

It's especially great to see Doctors Wear Scarlet acknowledged. [I wrote about Simon Raven's masterpiece here several years ago.]

Are there any post-1989 titles worthy of addition? I would nominate Ramsey Campbell's 2015 novel Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach (reviewed here).

Jay

10 January 2023

"Midnight Mass" (1990) by F. Paul Wilson

Readers unfamiliar with the novella "Midnight Mass" (1990) and the novel Midnight Mass (2004) may prefer to read these notes only after reading the stories.

A priest and a rabbi walk into a church together.

     For a moment he was disoriented, like someone peering out the window of a city apartment and seeing the rolling hills of a Kansas farm. This could not be the interior of St Anthony's.

     In the flickering light of hundreds of sacramental candles he saw that the walls were bare, stripped of all their ornaments, of the plaques for the stations of the cross; the dark wood along the wall was scarred and gouged wherever there had been anything remotely resembling a cross. The floor too was mostly bare, the pews ripped from their neat rows and hacked to pieces, their splintered remains piled high at the rear under the choir balcony.

     And the giant crucifix that had dominated the space behind the altar – only a portion of it remained. The cross-pieces on each side had been sawed off and so now an armless, life-size Christ hung upside down against the rear wall of the sanctuary.

     Joe took in all that in a flash, then his attention was drawn to the unholy congregation that peopled St Anthony's this night. The collaborators – the Vichy humans, as Zev called them – made up the periphery of the group. They looked like normal, everyday people but each was wearing a crescent moon earring.

     But the others, the group gathered in the sanctuary – Joe felt his hackles rise at the sight of them. They surrounded the altar in a tight knot. Their pale, bestial faces, bereft of the slightest trace of human warmth, compassion, or decency, were turned upward. His gorge rose when he saw the object of their rapt attention.

     A naked teenage boy – his hands tied behind his back, was suspended over the altar by his ankles. He was sobbing and choking, his eyes wide and vacant with shock, his mind all but gone. The skin had been flayed from his forehead – apparently the Vichy had found an expedient solution to the cross tattoo – and blood ran in a slow stream down his abdomen and chest from his freshly truncated genitals. And beside him, standing atop the altar, a bloody-mouthed creature dressed in a long cassock. Joe recognized the thin shoulders, the graying hair trailing from the balding crown, but was shocked at the crimson vulpine grin he flashed to the things clustered below him.

     "Now," said the creature in a lightly accented voice Joe had heard hundreds of times from St Anthony's pulpit.

     Father Alberto Palmeri.

     And from the group a hand reached up with a straight razor and drew it across the boy's throat. As the blood flowed down over his face, those below squeezed and struggled forward like hatchling vultures to catch the falling drops and scarlet trickles in their open mouths.

     Joe fell away from the window and vomited. He felt Zev grab his arm and lead him away. He was vaguely aware of crossing the street and heading toward the ruined legal office.

• • •

Stories about humanity "under the fang" don't come much bloodier, more sanctimonious, and populated with more caricatues than F. Paul Wilson's 1990 novella "Midnight Mass."

Father Joseph Cahill, a handsome and winning young priest, has been framed-up as a pedophile and exiled from his parish before the action begins. He is found in the basement Morton's Liquors and recalled to life by an old theological sparring partner, Rabbi Zev Wolpin. Zev is a Jackie Mason Jew stereotype from central casting. For Wilson he only exists to maneuver Fadda Joe into inspiring a mass fightback against the vampire occupation.

Wilson later shaped this novella and other material into the 2004 paste-up novel Midnight Mass. That novel, with alternating situations for a variety of characters as they converge and unite to fight the vampires, is very good.

So, all proportions guarded, is "Midnight Mass." I have read enough Wilson to know his use of caricature for rabbis and whiskey priests and colorful parishioners is not aimed maliciously. It's mass market fiction, and of a very high order.

Jay

16 July 2022

_____

The Mammoth Book of Vampires ([1992] 2004 edition) edited by Stephen Jones

Remembering Under The Fang (1991)

Biological incident.

     That was the first of it. How the government tried to explain. A biological incident, at some kind of secret—up until then—testing center in North Dakota. That was six years ago. The biological incident was worse than they’d let on. They had created something from their stew of gene manipulation and bacteriological tampering that had sent their ten test subjects out into the world with a vengeance. The ten had multiplied into twenty, the twenty to forty, the forty to eighty, and on and on. They had the wrath of Hell in their blood, a contamination that made AIDS look like a common cold. The germ boys had learned how to create—by accident, yes—weapons that walked on two legs. What foreign power were we going to unleash that taint upon? No matter; it had come home to live.

     Biological incident.

     Kyle shifted the suitcase again. Call them what they are, he thought. They craved blood like addicts used to crave heroin and crack. They wrapped themselves up and hid in closets and basements and any hole they could winnow into. Their skin burst and oozed and they split apart at the seams like old suits in the sunlight. Call them what they are, damn it.

     They were everywhere now. They had everything. The television networks, the corporations, the advertising agencies, the publishing houses, the banks, the law. Everything. Once in a while a pirate station broke in on the cable, human beings pleading for others not to give up hope. Hope. There it was again, the cosmic joke. Those bastards were as bad as fundamentalist preachers; their role models were Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell, seen through a dark glass. They wanted to convert everybody on earth, make them see the “truth,” and if you didn’t choose to join the fold they battered you in like a weak door and chewed the faith into you.

     It wasn’t just America. It was everywhere: Canada, the Soviet Union, Japan, Germany, Norway, Africa, England, South America, and Spain. Everywhere. The contamination—the “faith”—knew no racial nor national boundaries. It was another cosmic joke, with a hideous twist: The world was moving toward a true brotherhood.

     Kyle watched his shadow loom before him, its darkness merging with Allie’s. If a man couldn’t take a vacation in the sun with his family, he thought, then what the hell good was living?

--"The Miracle Mile"

Under the Fang edited by Robert R. McCammon

(Pocket Books, 1991)

What happens when a thirty year old anthology you loved is out of print? When it has no ebook edition? When second-hand hardcovers are prohibitively expensive and paperbacks spread spores?

If you're me, you go hunting the stories in other anthologies and collections, triangulated with some clicking in the ISFDB. 

Most of the stories in Under the Fang never went further than that anthology. Most of the author names on the title page strike no chord. But I did find six of the seventeen stories here at home. 

*     *     *

My memory of Under the Fang was that its authors were better focused on the theme and mise en scène than those invited to publish in Skipp and Spector's 1991 Book of the Dead. 

[N.B. That both Under the Fang and Book of the Dead were published in 1991 (end of the cold war, "end of history" and all that) is worth noting.]

The Miracle Mile by Robert R. McCammon 

(Best New Horror, 1992)

McCammon edited Under The Fang, and his story, which leads the anthology, does not disappoint. He lays out the geography of the disaster, the scope of its human toll, and the dead-end of survivalist fantasies as a solution. All that's left for the family it depicts is remembrance and a stoical embrace of family suicide (or murder-suicide) as finale. McCammon handles this poignant material without surrendering to bathos or cynicism. It is a fine piece of work. 

....He took the thermos and went into the bathroom, where there was a sink and a shower stall and a tub with a sliding door of smoked plastic. He pulled the blind up and opened the small window in there too, and then he turned on the sink’s tap and waited for the rusty water to clear before he refilled the thermos.

     Something moved, there in the bathroom. Something moved with a long, slow, and agonized stretching sound.

     Kyle looked at the smoked plastic door for a moment, a pulse beating in his skull, and then he reached out and slid it open.

     It was lying in the tub. Like a fat cocoon, it was swaddled in bed sheets and tacky beach towels covered with busty cartoon bathing beauties and studs swigging beer. It was impossible to determine where the head and feet were, the arms bound to its sides and the hands hidden. The thing in its shroud of sheets and towels trembled, a hideous involuntary reaction of nerves and muscles, and Kyle thought, It smells me.

     “Kill it.”

     He looked back at Allie, who stood in the doorway behind him with the baby in her arms. Her face was emotionless, her eyes vacant as a dreamer’s. “Kill it, Kyle,” she said. “Please kill it.”

Dancing Nitely by Nancy A. Collins

(Hopedale Press, 2012)

"Dancing Nitely" is a small-compass slice-of-life evening of hip, on-the-town vampires. Mavrides, whose own "conversion" took place in the 1960s, disdains the bumptious nouveau types who swarm Club Vlad. "Today’s new breed of vampire didn’t have to worry about waking up with a stake piercing their thorax," he thinks. It's a clever story, one deeply embedded in the mores of a non-human social order where citizens take their right to rule as beyond question. 

Red Eve by Al Sarrantonio

(Toybox, 1999)

Sarrantonio gives us a far future holiday banquet populated by jaded vampire nobility. In a glass house in a glass city floating above a radioactive earth, these sybarites give Poe's Prospero and his guests a run for their money. Like most stories with a cast of feasting decadents, it is about tables being turned and history being avenged.  

     “Now!” LaFortina said, lifting himself unsteadily to his feet with the unsteady help of his neighbors. He spoke in a blur. “Give us your finest lesson—now!”

    “Hurrah!” came a slurred chorus behind him. Others tried to rise from their cushions, hampered by drunkenness and gluttony.

    “As you wish.”

    Eidolan's fingers fluttered, and the hologram moon overhead brightened to almost painful intensity. It was brown and white, artistically cratered; not the gray, pale, distant, bomb-blasted circle they knew, outshone by some of the stars, night-silent, dead. This moon tugged at them, at their eyes, their hearts—made rhythms in their blood.

    “This,” said Eidolan, “is my lesson.” Her voice was the voice of this moon, pulling at them, making them hers. For a moment the moon blinked out, leaving them with a gasping view of the red balloons still playing out through the clear-glass walls from the other palaces surrounding them—a black-night sky waltzing with rising balloons.

    The moon blinked back on; the ceiling, the night, disappeared. “This,” Eidolan said in a gentle hush, “is my story—”

    LaFortina pushed himself up, pointed a finger at Eidolan, at the moon. “Your finest,” he insisted. “You promised!” Swaying slightly, he turned his finger downward, pointed through the crystal table, the glass floor, to the roiling, dark, sickly yellow clouds that hid the Earth. “This year you promised your best—better than this moon! We're tired of the same old Red Eve lessons! We're sick of the Vampire Wars, of dead Earth below, poison gas, proton bombs, stakes through hearts, screaming men! We're tired of bogeymen with fangs, reflectionless images, children hung like beef for living blood, the battles for the moon—it doesn't entertain us! We're bored with the thousand-year-old histories, the slaughter in Asia, the Night of a Thousand Impalements, the building of the Crystal Sphere, the Deadly Climb to Life, the story of the Last Stake! It's old! And tired! Children's stories, for a children's holiday! We're tired of this tedium and we want better! We want—your finest lesson!”

We Are Dead Together by Charles de Lint

(The Very Best of Charles de Lint, 2014)

     Let it be recounted in the swato—the stories of my people that chronicle our history and keep it alive—that while Kata Petalo was first and foremost a fool, she meant well. I truly believed there was a road I could walk between the world of the Rom and the shilmullo.

     We have always been an adaptable people. We’d already lived side-by-side with the Gaje for ten times a hundred years, a part of their society, and yet apart from it. The undead were just another kind of non-Gypsy; why shouldn’t we be able to to coexist with them as well?

     I knew now. I had always known. We didn’t call them the shilmullo—the cold dead—simply for the touch of their pale flesh, cold as marble. Their hearts were cold, too—cold and black as the hoarfrost that rimmed the hedges by which my ancestors had camped in gentler times.

     I had always known, but I had chosen to forget. I had let the chance for survival seduce me.

A minor-key revenge tale, very brief.

Special by Richard Laymon

(Fiends, 1997)

Another patented Laymon misogynist survivalist daydream, complete with militia, hierarchy, treachery, and a double-entry bordello.  It's a love story.

Prodigal Sun by Thomas F. Monteleone

(Fearful Symmetries, 2004)

This is a clever, smoothly executed story about a vampire scientist who has discovered a cure for sunlight, and has successfully experimented on himself and survived. But there is a side-effect.

*     *     *

Free online material

"The Miracle Mile" story by Robert R. McCammon 

https://www.robertmccammon.com/fiction/miracle.html

McCammon's original Under the Fang prospectus: 

https://www.robertmccammon.com/fiction/fang.html

Jay

8 April 2020