Readers who are unfamiliar with the anthology may prefer to read these notes only after reading the stories.
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Introduction: They're Here--and They Won't Go Away by Karl Edward Wagner
Wagner sums up 1987 as a year of growth for short fiction markets at zine level.
....The hyperactivity in the small press field is particularly impressive. Amateur magazines—call them fanzines or semiprozines, as you will—have been a fixture in the field for as long as there have been fantasy/horror fans. Fifteen years ago there were relatively few small press publications devoted primarily to horror fiction. Weirdbook and Whispers were in the fore and in the minority. More often, fan publications centered upon one particular author—usually Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, or Robert E. Howard—and such fiction as they published was devotedly derivative.
Heroic fantasy was quiet in vogue, and the major thrust of fan publishing—and fan writing—was directed toward imaginary realms of sorcery, swords and derring-do. Horror fiction, unless derivative, was decidedly not where the action was.
Not so in 1987, if the four-foot shelf crammed with the year's small press publications—as many as I could lay hands on—is any indication. Surging strongly in recent years, horror fiction now rules the small press world. Most of the older magazines stand firm, the young ones from a few years back have settled in, and new titles are lurking in every dark alley. People are interested in horror fiction; they want to read it, and many want to write it. This is where the future of horror fiction really can be seen, and I wonder what awaits us in The Year's Best Horror Stories fifteen years from now.
"Fifteen years from now" would be 2003. By 2003 Wagner was gone. But the amateur and semi-pro zines he celebrated in 1988 had evolved into small and specialty presses, for good and ill. In his Year's Best Horror collections Wagner showed readers there was good horror writing all around us, from collections and anthologies by major publishers to the motorcycle magazines you buy at the gas station carryout.
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Popsy by Stephen King
Briggs Sheridan is one mouth of the supply pipeline we would today call human trafficking. "Popsy" tells the one damn thing after another story of his final hour alive. Sheridan did not start out cruising in a van for little kids to kidnap at the mall. He's the real victim here, in fact.
....as soon as he started to bawl out loud, someone would notice him. He didn't like moving in with a cop less than sixty feet away, but if he didn't cover his markers at Mr. Reggie's within the next twenty-four hours or so, he thought a couple of very large men would pay him a visit and perform impromptu surgery on his arms, adding several elbow-bends to each.
"Popsy" may be a one-joke story, but King is one of the few writers who can toss-off a story of any length or quality where the reader learns the socio-economic forces that create a human monster. Because Sheridan is the only monster here.
Popsy yanked him out of the car, talons sinking through Sheridan's jacket and shirt and deep into the meat of his shoulders. Popsy's green eyes suddenly turned as red as blood-roses.
"We only came to the mall because my grandson wanted some Transformer figures," Popsy whispered, and his breath was like flyblown meat. "The ones they show on TV. All the children want them. You should have left him alone. You should have left us alone."
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Neighbourhood Watch by Greg Egan
A small town has found the solution to the rising crime rates imperiling local businesses. They have dreamed up a tulpa. Or have they hired a demon, or vampire? Whatever he is, his contract with the town restricts him to vigilante action against blue collar thieves and pushers.
....A list of statutes is provided, to be precise. Parking offences, breaking the speed limit and cheating on income tax are not included; decent people are only human, after all. Breaking and entering is there, though, and stealing, well, that dates right back to the old stone tablets.
The vigilante drifts over town at night, psychically sampling the thought-worlds and activities of the citizenry:
I love this suburb. I honestly do. How could I not, born as I was from its sleeping soul? These are my people. As I rise up through the heavy night heat, and more and more of my domain flows into sight, I am moved almost to tears by the beauty of all that I see and sense. Part of me says: sentimental fool! But the choking feeling will not subside. Some of my creators have lived here all their lives, and a fraction of their pride and contentment flows in my veins.
A lone car roars on home. A blue police van is parked outside a brothel; inside, handcuffs and guns are supplied by the management: they look real, they feel real, but no one gets hurt. One cop's been here twice a week for three years, the other's been dragged along to have his problem cured: squeezing the trigger makes him wince, even at target practice. From tonight he'll never flinch again. The woman thinks: I'd like to take a trip. Very soon. To somewhere cold. My life smells of men's sweat.
I hear a husband and wife screaming at each other. It echoes for blocks, with dogs and babies joining in. I steer away, it's not my kind of brawl.
Linda has a spray can. Hi, Linda, like your hair-cut. Do you know how much that poster cost? What do you mean, sexist pornography? The people who designed it are creative geniuses, haven't you heard them say so? Besides, what do you call those posters of torn-shirted actors and tight-trousered rock stars all over your bedroom walls? And how would you like it if the agency sent thugs around to spray your walls with nasty slogans? You don't force your images on the public? They'll have to read your words, won't they? Answering? Debating? Redressing the imbalance? Cut it out, Linda, come down to earth. No, lower. Lower still.
Hair gel gives me heartburn. I must remember that.
Bruno, Pete and Colin have a way with locked cars....
"Neighbourhood Watch" is a brilliantly organized and executed story. Its protagonist finds an unlikely mortal enemy among the populace, and plans for a showdown as soon as his employment contract expires.
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Wolf/Child by Jane Yolen
Yolen does an expert job making-new a trite literary shibboleth: that colonialists are monsters who make the subaltern monsters that will in turn devour them. She explores this through multiple viewpoints , alternating toward a bloody climax.
The colonel laughed. "I'll stay here and guard this bunch. They won't be going anywhere. You run back to the village and get our carters. And that Ramanrithan fellow."
"They won't come here after dark," Geoffrey protested. "And which of us shall have the lantern?"
"Don't talk nonsense," the colonel said. "You take the lantern and tell them I've captured not one but two of their manushies and I'm not afraid to stay here in the dark with them. Tell those silly villagers they have nothing to fear. The British Sahib is on the job." He laughed out loud again.
"Are you sure ..." Geoffrey began.
"One of England's finest scared silly of three wolf cubs and a pair of feral children?" the colonel asked.
"Then you knew ..." Geoffrey began, wondering just when it was the colonel had realized they were not apes, and not wanting to ask.
"All along, Geoffrey," the colonel said. "All along." He patted the subaltern on the shoulder, a fatherly gesture that would have been out of place had they not been alone and in the dark clearing. "Now don't you get the willies, my boy, like those silly brown men. Color is the difference, Geoffrey. They've no stamina, no guts, and lots of bloody superstitions. Run along, and fetch them back."
Geoffrey picked up the lantern, shouldered his smoothbore, and started back down the path.
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Everything to Live For by Charles L. Grant
"Everything to Live For" is one of Grant's meticulously calibrated suburban nightmares. A teenage boy wants to drop out of the world of parental expectations but just can't find the exit. Other classmates suddenly begin killing themselves.
....there's no justice for a kid my age, no justice at all. You have to stand there, that's all, and take it like a man, and hope that tomorrow they'll forget all about it and leave you alone.
Grant is very good at being stingy with the reader about explanations: this isn't a whodunit, this is a howcouldtheydothat?
So what can you do about it if you're a parent? You give birth to the kid and you watch it grow up and into a person, and then you decide if you like it or not. Someone you meet that you don't like you don't have to see again, or you can be polite to, or you can ignore. A kid is there all the time—all day, all week, all year, all your life.
It's cold out here.
So what can you do about it if you're a parent and you don't like your kid? What can you do if you don't want him anymore?
It's very cold, and it's dark.
I think ... I think some parents go from hate to not caring, and that's the worst of all. And if they look right, they can find someone who can see that, see the dark of it, and make it almost alive. Like a cloud, a black cloud that hangs over you in November, telling you it's going to rain but not telling you when. Those kinds of days are the most rotten, and they make you feel rotten, on the outside where it's raw, and on the inside where you wish you could just go away and find a place that has the sun.
If the cloud stays long enough, you don't wait for the next day, or the rain, or the snow—you go on your own, and you never come back.
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Repossession by David Campton
On walks, errands, or drives to and from work, our narrator cannot stop haunting the old shuttered Marlow factory . He knows its reputation, and can vividly imagine scenes of its heyday manufacturing goods for the "Africa trade." Compelled ultimately to enter, the narrator confronts more than he anticipated.
How could I be so certain? The man in the black coat turned to face me. It was like looking into the mirror again. His face was mine. There had been bastards, and after three generations who can be sure of his family tree?
I was certain. After all, an accountant ought to be aware of elementary mathematics. The Marlow factory was the lowest common denominator—for me, for him, for the girl. My grandfather had been conceived in that place where the spirit of old vice lingered
David Campton produced few stories in a career clearly spent elsewhere. His prose is careful, but he makes the most exacting demands upon the reader as he focuses on a small number of characters chasing and doing little as they prepare for collapse.
The story is free of energizing rhetorical pyrotechnics.
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Merry May by Ramsey Campbell
Ready to be scared stiff?
Kilbride is a middle aged music teacher yearning to compose a work of genius. But mostly he tries to indulge his lech for young women, the very thought of which gives his penis fits, a useful distraction from moping around his apartment.
He thought of playing some Ravel to revive his pianistic technique, or listening to a favorite record, Monteverdi or Tallis, whose remoteness he found moving and inspiring. But now early music seemed out of date, later music seemed overblown or arid. He'd felt that way at Heather's age, but then his impatience had made him creative: he'd completed several movements for piano. Couldn't he feel that way again? He stared at the final page of his symphony, Kilbride's Unfinished, The Indistinguishable, Symphony No. -1, Symphony of a Thousand Cuts, not so much a chamber symphony as a pisspot symphony ... Twilight gathered in the room, and the notes on the staves began to wriggle like sperm. When it was too dark to see he played through the entire score from memory. The notes seemed to pile up around him like the dust of decades. He reached out blindly for the score and tore the pages one by one into tiny pieces.
He sat for hours in the dark, experiencing no emotion at all. He seemed to be seeing himself clearly at last, a middle-aged nonentity with a yen for women half his age or even younger, a musical pundit with no ability to compose music, no right to talk about those who had. No wonder Heather's parents had forbidden him to visit her or call her. He'd needed her admiration to help him fend off the moment when he confronted himself, he realized. The longer he sat in the dark, the more afraid he was to turn on the light and see how alone he was. He flung himself at the lightswitch, grabbed handfuls of the torn pages and stuffed them into the kitchen bin. "Pathetic," he snarled, at them or at himself.
To further distract himself from everyday life as an academic in Manchester, Kilbride begins phoning a classified ad for Renewal of Life. The women who answer the phone convince him to attend their rural retreat, where he assumes the totty will be rampant and plentiful.
What he finds there is a village whose inhabitants have been poisoned by the local factory; there are no children.
Kilbride is given plenty to distract him from some very menacing clues in the talk and behaviour of those around him. He gets to select the May Queen from among a bevy of teenage schoolgirls, and later helps prepare the May Pole.
The moon was almost full. At first it seemed to show him only slopes coated with moonlight. Nothing moved except a few slow cows in a field. Not only the cows but the field were exactly the color of the moon. The woods looked carved out of ivory, so still that the shifting of branches sent a shiver through him. Then he saw that the trees which were stirring were too far apart for a wind to be moving them.
He raised the window and craned out to see. He stared at the edge of the woods until the trunks began to flicker with his staring. The voices were in the woods, he was sure. Soon he glimpsed movement in the midst of the trees, on a hillock that rose above the canopy of branches. Two figures, a man and a woman, appeared there hand in hand. They embraced and kissed, and at last their heads separated, peering about at the voices. The next moment they disappeared back into the woods.
They were early, Kilbride thought dreamily. They ought to wait until the eleventh, May Day of the old calendar, the first day of the Celtic summer. In those days they would be blowing horns as well as calling to one another, to ensure that nobody got lost as they broke branches and decorated them with hawthorn flowers. Couples would fall silent if they wanted to be left alone. He wondered suddenly whether he was meant to be out there—whether they would be calling him if they knew his name.
"Merry May" is the Ramsey Campbell version of stories like "Randall's Round."
Except Kilbride doesn't poke around in things he isn't meant to see. Instead, ritual participants lead him easily by the libido into acts no man is meant to experience.
At the end of "Merry May," Kilbride must run for his life, chased through moonlit woods by village Morris men as the story builds toward Campbell's final shattering punchline.
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The Touch by Wayne Allen Sallee
"The Touch" is not a horror story in the generic sense. In the affect/ existential Celine down-and-out sense, a case might be argued, but I'm skeptical.
Sallee has constructed a tightly organized story about a couple of hours in the life of protagonist Downs. In the wee small hours he sits in a Chicago strip club called The Touch, not enjoying the show. An annoying fellow patron looks like Rifkin the lawyer from "Barney Miller." Strippers dance to "West End Girls" and "Rosanna."
Commercial jingles and name brand beers also get name-checked. It's all acutely drawn and well-organized.
The existential horror - if it can be dignified thus - consists of:
....He was sick of killing time with his life. He was sick of hiding behind the lame excuse that his cerebral palsy was keeping him from being more successful. What was he doing sitting here in this dive? He couldn't even justify things by being mildly buzzed.
Some urban street horror comes at the end, though it's mostly simple manslaughter. Downs leaves The Touch but lingers in the shadows to observe two bouncers from the club hustling a jerk customer to his death in a fenced-off quarry across the street. Various agonies are carefully distanced so Downs can process them as spectatorial artifacts and not a barometer of his own obvious sociopathology.
(Dump a guy across the street from the club where you bounce drunks? I would ask Sallee if that is realistically motivated behavior for fictional characters.)
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Moving Day by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
Chetwynd-Hayes is always worth reading. He took obvious pleasure in writing unique and often hilariously macabre short stories. In particular, "Don't Go Up Them Stairs" (1971) and "Keep the Gaslight Burning" (1976) are superb.
"Moving Day" may lack the exacting focus and consummate style of those earlier tales. But in its story of David, an adult who moves in with his aunts, a literal trio of weird sisters, there is a lot of fun with cross-purposes before the screaming starts.
Mr Mondale [the vicar] pulled me into a room he called his den—tired old armchairs, a battered desk, plus for some reason the smell of stale urine and green water.
I sank into a chair which instantly groaned and tried to do something dreadful to me with a broken spring. We didn't say a great deal until his sister had served the weak tea, but I then managed to muster some indignant resolution and asked:
"What is all this about, Mr Mondale? You dragged me in off the street, without so much as by your leave."
The tea must have done something for his cold for his speech delivery improved.
"Distant member of the family myself, you know. Otherwise I'd have been moved long ago. You know the village is terrified of your aunts. Fear takes many forms. That scene by the churchyard the other day was one. But one day the aunts will really let rip—and then I'd hate to think what would happen. Particularly after a moving."
Curiosity got the better of irritation and I leaned forward to ask the all-important question:
"What the hell—beg pardon—is this moving? They won't tell me a thing. I thought they meant the actual moment of death, or even possibly the funeral. But apparently there's something more "
The vicar leaned back in his chair and yawned at the ceiling in an effort to emphasize there was indeed more. Much more.
"Good ... good Guard, yes. My word yes. It's the moving which upsets the village and will in time bring the newspaper people—especially that Sunday lot—beating a trail to our doors. Fortunately it takes place at night and most people close their curtains and try to ignore what's going on. Two years ago a foolhardy youth did come out and saw. He hasn't spoken since and has dreadful fits of the shakes to this day."
I dragged my chair forward. "But ... but ... what did he see?"
The Reverend Mr Mondale put out a hand. It was not particularly clean and the nails needed trimming.
"Does that member shake?"
"No."
"Would you say that is a steady hand with not a tremor about it?"
"I would indeed."
"Surely that is evidence enough that I have never been such a fool as to peer through parted curtains when your aunts and that which is with them pass the house."
"Then you don't know?"
He jerked his head forward twice, his bad cold losing out to the strong emotion that now held his entire body in a masterly grip.
"I can surmise, sir. I am not the only one who has had the merest glimpse of those who sometimes stray back from the grave and pay a social call on your aunts. Unfortunately churchyards have become associated with certain supernatural nastiness in the public mind. Can it be wondered at, that if at times, in some particular locality, the seeds of that nastiness come to full fruition? Eh?"
I felt a need to confess, share a fear that up to that moment I had not been aware existed.
"There's a nasty atmosphere in the house. Things lurking behind the left shoulder—something cold in the bed—cold fingers on the throat, whispers in the dark."
The vicar raised both hands, then let them fall back on to the desk with a kind of soggy thump. "Ah! Then it was not imagination! I have seen white faces with runny eyes looking down from the upper windows! There is only one answer. That house must be razed to the ground and the ground itself sewn with salt."
"Look here, I'm going to inherit that house!"
"Could you live there after the remaining aunts have moved?"
"No, I'd sell it. Good development land."
Now the vicar raised his eyes ceilingward. "There is no piercing the armor of the mercenary ungodly."
I rose. "Thank you for all you have not told me."
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La Nuit des Chiens by Leslie Halliwell
"La Nuit des Chiens" by Leslie Halliwell may ultimately have a supernatural source for its horrors, but the question becomes secondary in all the beautifully choreographed carnage.
Leonard, a Monte Carlo executive planning an evening out for business clients he and his wife are shepherding, finds his reservations have disappeared. Can a dinner be found anywhere along the coast?
According to the guide book entitled Villages Perches des Alpes-Maritimes:
It is said that in medieval times the [Malchateau] villagers kept savage dogs with whose help they waylaid and killed solitary travelers for their money and valuables. The dogs were bred for the purpose by a certain Madame Bejard who also kept a local restaurant, renamed La Maitresse des Chiens. Here, it was alleged, the remains of the victims often turned up in the ragout. The woman was executed in 1823, but to the villagers, whose fortunes seemed to turn for the better as a result of her activities (the notoriety attracting many tourists) she remained something of a heroine; and so for many years, no doubt with tongue in cheek, one winter night in each year has been reserved in her honor. Though a local by-law has long prevented dogs from being kept in the village (the chief intention being to prevent fouling of the narrow streets) and the restaurant itself was torn down a hundred years ago by incensed descendants of the victims, few who know the legend would venture alone on that night into the alleys of Malchateau.
Unfortunately for his guests, Leonard does not find the above-quoted passage until the morning after their night in Malchateau.
"La Nuit des Chiens" is a riveting thriller. Halliwell does an expert job establishing topography, leaving the reader in no doubt where each character is in relationship to the mountain-side castle/village and its canine population.
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Echoes from the Abbey by Sheila Hodgson
....we wrapped ourselves in outer clothing and trailed after him; he had succeeded by now in raising the entire household. We crossed the grass in ragged procession, clinging on to one another to avoid slipping on the frozen ground. I have never seen a more absurd undertaking. Arriving among the ruins it became apparent that Mr. Layton (who did not believe in ghosts) had come there with the intention of exorcising them. He placed the crucifix on a ledge and began to intone prayers of doubtful authenticity and quite horrid ferocity, calling on the Lord to strike his enemies dead; he insisted on our small group—Mrs. Layton, the boy, the maid Gladys, the cook—responding to his exhortations. And very strange we must have looked, gathered together in the shadow of the north transept, the lantern flickering in the wind. I listened: among Layton's outbursts I managed to identify lines from the terrible 109th Psalm. "Destroy mine enemy! Set thou a wicked man over him and let Satan stand at his right hand!" Something pressed against my side; I became conscious of Harley cowering up against me and realized that he was listening too.
But for something else.
"Can you hear them?" he whispered.
I feigned ignorance; one should not needlessly alarm the young, and besides I could hear nothing save Layton's voice raised in prayer, our own mumbled Amens, and a rustling ...
A whispering?
A dry murmur from beyond the arch.
At that moment Layton shouted to heaven for justice, Mrs. Layton squealed, the cook jumped sideways, knocked over the lantern and the light went out. There was a certain amount of confused scuffling in the dark; by some malign chance the moon took that moment to vanish behind a surge of billowing cloud.
I became conscious of a strong smell of burning.
And then beyond all hope of pretense or concealment I heard them—they came from the chapter house, they rushed upon us through the shattered pillars of the nave, and the chorus grew and swelled and became a monstrous roar.
Save-us-save-us-save-us-save-us-save-us!
Save-us-save-us-save-us-save-us-save-us!
SAVE-US-SAVE-US-SAVE-US!
On a sleepless night it can haunt me still. There arose from the ruins a kind of spiraling vapor, a mist that wavered and took form and swept along the north transept; the most appalling stench hit our nostrils, we scattered and fled in all directions and still the Thing swept on. My last impression was of a series of gaping mouths set in folds of dirty linen.
"Echoes from the Abbey" recreates the dry wit and probity of the Jamesian voice in an eloquent and often humorous "ghost story for Christmas."
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Visitors by Jack Dann
"Visitors" is a melancholy story. It takes place in a hospital terminal ward: a place pop culture has taught us is a very thin borderland. Charlie spends his last days there, learning the peculiarities of adults from previous ward occupants who have died. His days shift based on injections of Demerol and visits from his living mother and dead acquaintance, Mr. Benjamin.
End-of-life fiction has always struck me as too easy. It is hard not to feel manipulated when writers explore such a common emotional denominator as the death scene. No wonder Hemingway kept turning away from its insistence on melodrama and Bierce and Saki kept jesting about it. I prefer the jesting, but Jack Dann clearly wants to employ the full range of emotion available to writers of a death bed scene.
He does not abuse the privilege or the reader's patience.
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The Bellfounder's Wife by Chico Kidd
I have previously written about Kidd's tales here.
"The Bellfounder's Wife" is an ambitious story. Its depiction of vanished methods of work and life make it a story to treasure.
'Joshua was asked to cast a ring of bells for St Dunstan's in 1732. Now he didn't have a proper foundry then, because he dug a pit and set about doing the work in the churchyard. And there was a dreadful accident, and his wife was killed—some say burned to death in the furnace, some by molten bell-metal. It took the spirit out of him: he refused to go on with the job, and St Dunstan's stayed without bells for nigh on fifty years.
'After Joshua died they asked his son—Abraham, that was—to cast the bells for St Dunstan's. He did the work, but reluctantly, and that's the back five now. He later said that all the time he was doing the work he was aware of his mother's presence, and that she disapproved. Which I suppose is logical, if ghosts can be logical....
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The Scar by Dennis Etchison
She knelt and gripped the little girl's arms. "I don't know where to go," she said. "I can't figure it out by myself." She lifted her hair away from the side of her face. "Look at me! I was born this way. No one else would want to help us. But it's not too late for you."
The little girl's eyes overflowed.
"The Scar" is about as Etchison as Etchison can get.
Are the trio a family?
What's the source of the woman's scar?
Does the man have PTSD?
Is the little girl the woman's daughter?
Are the females kidnap victims?
Did so many have to die in the highway diner?
Etchison sets aside motivations and the bourgeois cliche of cohesive identity and social roles. As readers, we know their money is running out, they have no home. Are they war refugees? Is it a radiation burn scar?
Etchison gracefully executes his plot, triggering many more questions than these. He also lodges a ball of anxiety deep in the reader's guts.
The story ends. The author escapes without giving us more than an enigma. But the dread induced will linger.
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Martyr Without Canon by T. Winter-Damon
Aspirations to Yellow 90s style decadence create a wall between reader and text when it comes to the gauche but ambitious "Martyr Without Canon." Winter-Damon comes across as a reader inspired to commit a run-on first draft in verse and prose to paper.
First drafts are always the most authentic, right?
....like smoke rings of silken venom. & the coral snake like Ouroboros slithers through the tunnels of perception. Rimbaud & Jim of The Doors & Baudelaire. & the Seps shall share the tonguing of my ardor in French kisses of necrotic splendor. & below the violet blades of grass we writhe in visions of abandon. (do not hunger yet to drink my sins! grind not the gruel of bool keban! the maize shall rot before my steeping! even now i stride!). & i shall feast upon the dragon's flesh to know the fullness of the barrow. to savor the secrets of the mound. & i shall swill deep trenchers of his black & fiery liquor. & i shall bathe my flesh-that-is-no-longer-flesh in torrents of his steaming essence. (& i shall toast the blood elixir!)
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The Thin People by Brian Lumley
Barrows Hill. I didn't stay long, a few months. Too long, really. It gave you the feeling that if you delayed, if you stood still for just one extra moment, then that it would grow up over you and you'd become a part of it. There are some old, old places in London, and I reckoned Barrows Hill was of the oldest. I also reckoned it for its genius loci; like it was a focal point for secret things. Or perhaps not a focal point, for that might suggest a radiation—a spreading outward—and as I've said, Barrows Hill was ingrown. The last bastion of the strange old things of London. Things like the thin people. The very tall, very thin people....
"The Thin People" is vintage, loquacious, first-person drollery spiced with horror. No Titus Crow, no Lovecraftismo. This is the Lumley who wrote "The Picnickers," "The Viaduct," and "The Luststone."
"The Thin People" has such gusto, I might mistake it for the work of Chetwyn-Hayes. You can tell Lumley was enjoying himself when he wrote this.
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Fat Face by Michael Shea
I have blogged about my pleasure in reading Shea several times: here, here, here, and here.
"Fat Face" bakes in the heat of Los Angeles dawns and dusks, of urban neighborhoods, of coffee shops and old hotels, of superseded side streets of once pleasant residences left behind long ago. Its characters have fallen off the bottom rung of class society, and live an atomized lumpen existence, self-sedating and kidding themselves they have a future or any life plans worth thinking about. Bukowski has nothing on Shea with this milieu.
....She dreamed of a city like Hollywood, but the city's walls and pavements were half alive, and they could feel premonitions of something that was drawing near them. All the walls and streets of the city waited in a cold-sweat fear under a blackly overcast sky. She herself, Patti grasped, was the heart and mind of the city. She lay in its midst, and its vast, cold fear was hers. She lay, and somehow she knew the things that were drawing near her giant body. She knew their provenance in huge, blind voids where stood walls older than the present face of Earth; she knew their long cunning toll to reach her own cringing frontiers. Giant worms they were, or jellyfish, or merely huge clots of boiling substance. They entered her deserted streets, gliding convergingly. She lay like carrion that lives and knows the maggots' assault on it. She lay in her central citadel, herself the morsel they sped toward, piping their lust from foul, corrosive jaws.
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Jay
16 June 2022
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