Aickman's Introduction to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964)

Balking at the prospect of paying the price for a copy of Night Voices, through dumb luck I found all eight volumes of the Aickman-introduced Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories at archive.org last night.

Volume 1 (1964):

Jay

22 March 2023

Six stories from Screams from the Dark, Edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Nightfire, 2022)

Readers who are unfamiliar with the anthology Screams from the Dark may prefer to read these notes only after reading the stories.

*   *   *

         "The British saw the Hudson as key to their strategy. If they could control it, they could split the colonies, divide and conquer them. As plans go, it wasn't a bad one. It failed because their army was defeated at Saratoga, which initiated a series of events leading to them losing all of the state down to the City, where they remained until the end of the war. Before news of the loss at Saratoga spread, the British had sent thirty ships sailing up the Hudson. There were a few thousand soldiers on them. The idea was for these men to meet up with the British forces marching south along the river from their presumed victory at Saratoga. On their way, the British ships would create a diversion and perhaps more. They got off to a promising start, destroying a couple of colonial forts on the lower Hudson, capturing one right across from West Point. A little bit below Wiltwyck, the fleet received word of the defeat at Saratoga. With this message, their mission became pointless. To say the least, they were not pleased. Since Wiltwyck was the closest settlement, they visited their displeasure on the city. First, they subjected what was then the state capital to bombardment by their ships' cannons. Last I heard, one of the older buildings uptown still has a cannonball lodged in its basement wall. Fortunately, the city's residents had gotten wind of the ships' approach and had largely abandoned it. Once the cannons were done, the fleet sent several landing boats full of soldiers to shore. Reports vary as to how many redcoats set foot on Wiltwyck Point, with some claiming six hundred, others a thousand, and others still more. For the purposes of this story, the exact number doesn't matter. What does is there were at minimum hundreds of them marching on the city, which was lightly defended, most of the able-bodied men off fighting. The British shot at the handful who showed up to confront them, then set fire to the city. Over three hundred buildings, houses, barns, businesses, and places of worship burned down. The soldiers retreated to their boats, returned to their ships, and sailed for Manhattan, thus concluding their final, spiteful military success in this part of the Hudson Valley.

     "Among the soldiers who came ashore that day was a captain, Amos Black. He brought with him a pair of diminutive figures, whom the other troops referred to as Captain Black's little gray fellows. They were part of a group of five such fellows under the captain's command. As soon as it had become clear to the British that the battle against the colonists was not going to be over soon, they had sent across the Atlantic for Black, who was housed with his gray fellows separately from the rest of his regiment. Upon their arrival in New York, the six of them were billeted in a repurposed barn not far from Harlem Heights. From there, they were deployed on select missions, most of which were secret. None of the regular soldiers cared for the captain and his associates.

     "As the British troops fired on Wiltwyck's defenders and set torch to its buildings, Black and his two companions kept to the rear. He was a striking figure, a small, narrow man dressed not in the scarlet and white of a regular soldier, but entirely in black, with the exception of an emerald neckerchief. It was as if he was wearing his name, the troops joked. Only when the British were climbing back into their boats did Black take action. Before joining the rest of the landing party, he turned to his undersized companions, uttered words no one could make out, and pointed at the burning city. The little gray fellows turned and sprinted toward it. According to one observer, they ran more like dogs, or wolves, than men.

     "In the following days, there were a series of terrible murders in and around Wiltwyck's smoldering remains. Men, women, children, old, young, all were victims. They were killed sorting through the charred wreckage of their homes and businesses. They died attempting to recover what vegetables were left in their fields. They met their end on the road out of Wiltwyck to Hurley, where the majority of the city's residents had relocated. These were savage acts, bodies torn open, entrails strewn around them. Popular suspicion fell on wild animals, a pack of wolves, drawn to the devastated city and made bold by its ruin. There were organs missing from some of the victims, but what was remarkable was the lack of any substantial amount of blood at the sites of the crimes, which pointed to creatures other than wolves. A couple of young men who had spied on Captain Black ordering his undersized companions to remain behind made the connection between those strange figures and the outbreak of murders. The young men—they were boys, really—assembled a group to locate the little gray fellows and put a halt to their attacks. Its numbers consisted of men too old, too young, and too unwell to fight in the Continental Army, as well as a pair of ministers and a widow who had assumed the running of her farm after her husband had been struck down by a British musket ball at the Battle of Long Island.

     "Together, these men and women tracked the gray fellows to a barn on the road to Hurley. They circled the barn and attacked. A ferocious fight ensued. Although bloated with blood, the gray fellows were fearsome contestants, terrifically strong, inflicting horrific damage on their assailants with the fangs filling their wide mouths, the claws on their long hands and feet. They killed a full third of the party, and of the rest, no one went uninjured. Finally, the widow—whose name was Emma Dearborn—struck the head from one of the creatures with an axe. For a short while thereafter, his companion continued the fight, then leapt through the ranks of the attackers and fled. The group bound up their injuries, burned the remains of their foe, and set off in pursuit of his fellow.

     "For six days, they chased him through the Catskills, occasionally drawing within sight of the gray fellow, though never close enough to do more than waste a musket ball on him. At last, his trail disappeared on the shore of a lake. Assuming he'd hidden beneath the water, the members of the party stationed themselves around the lake and waited for their quarry to emerge. Another four days passed, at the end of which, they decided the gray fellow had either drowned or escaped. A careful search of the surrounding woods failed to turn up any sign the creature had slipped out of the water and through their ranks, so they concluded he had chosen his end in the water rather than at the edges of their knives and axes. They warned the few people living near the lake of what they had pursued into it, advised them to keep an eye out for anything unusual, then returned to Wiltwyck and their separate homes."

     "How did your grandmother know this?" I said. "I'm familiar with the burning of Wiltwyck; they reenact it every other Fourth of July. But the rest of it…"

     "She'd read about it," Doris said, "at the Woodstock library. One of her responsibilities was the local history section, whose shelves contained all sorts of things, personal journals, albums of old newspapers, unpublished manuscripts. She read all of them, in part to figure out how to catalogue the holdings and in part to learn more about the place she and Morfa had chosen to call home. Among the papers she examined was a handwritten document titled Concerning the Terrible and Strange Events of October 18–November 2, 1777. Fifty-six pages long, it was the work of Emma Dearborn, the widow who'd beheaded one of the gray fellows. During the winter after the battle with the creatures, she set down her account of it. There was no record of the means by which the manuscript found its way to the library.

     "When she reached the description of Captain Black's little gray fellows, she recognized the pair as blodsuger. How was that possible, right?"

     I nodded.

     "Mormor's grandmother had come to Denmark from Finland, Lapland, where she had been what the Danes called a heks, the Finns a noita, a witch. She had taught Mormor about the nisse, how to distinguish among them, the proper ways for dealing with the more dangerous varieties. Of course, my grandmother didn't imagine the lake behind her and Morfa's house was the lake from Emma Dearborn's story. It would have been too great a coincidence. But she shared the details of the widow's narrative with my grandfather. His father, a blacksmith, had passed along the same and similar folklore to him. As the one who went off fishing, he was more likely to encounter the remaining blodsuger, assuming there was any truth to the tale she had read and the creature had remained in its watery hiding place. Telling him was a precaution of the same order as reminding him to keep an eye out for rattlesnakes when he went hiking on Overlook Mountain. She didn't expect he would meet any of the reptiles on the paths he followed, but better to be prepared for something that never came than surprised by it shaking its rattle at your feet. The only thing neither of them had anticipated was discovering the blodsuger in the middle of such a ferocious storm. It was the way of life: you made your plans, and God chuckled at them…."

"Blodsuger" by John Langan

*   *   *

Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous Edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Nightfire, 2022) is an ambitious attempt at a state-of-the-art horror fiction anthology. It includes over two dozen original short stories and novellas of high quality. 

I have already blogged about two stories that demanded my undivided attention:

My notes on the sublime "The Ghost of a Flea" by Priya Sharma can be found here.

An initial response to the gruesome, non-supernatural "'The Father of Modern Gynecology': J. Marion Syms, M.D. (1813–1883)" by Joyce Carol Oates is here.

The reader will find my thoughts on six other stories below.

*   *   *

"Children of the Night" by Stephen Graham Jones is an amusing joke. Tol, the organizer of a Montana cryptid group searching for Bigfoot, gets his prayer answered.

In The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, John Clute reminds the horror reader that answered prayers are "wishes which are fulfilled in a fashion which punishes the wisher, the biter bit...."

While no sardonic genie or monkey's paw grants protagonist Tol's wish, there might as well have been.

The Bigfoot in question has been killed by a big rig on a lonely mountain highway. Tol  single handedly gets it into the back of the family minivan. (It never occurs to him to alert fellow team members.) Then he begins examining the body.

The author's droll conceit turns out to be that creatures of the night might wisely go in disguise on their errands. When Tol begins to "peel the onion," the reader knows it will all end in tears.

*   *   *

"Three Mothers Mountain" by Nathan Ballingrud also deals with the cost of answered prayers. Tom and his younger brother Scotty lose their father in a car accident. Maddened by grief, their mother mails his wedding ring to the three mountain witches who live above their North Carolina town, Toad Springs. There the ring is planted in a garden. The boys do not get their father back. They get a father-thing instead, a physically corrupt simulacra that wins their mother's single-minded devotion.

So one day Tom and Scotty set out for the witches' mountain cabin, determined to wreck everything.

     The path darkened as they walked. Tom no longer had a sense of what time it was, and he felt a flutter of fear in his gut. Common sense told him it couldn't be any later than two o'clock, two thirty at most. And yet the light filtering through the trees seemed diffuse and weak. This might have been due to the sun pursuing its course above them, and it might have had something to do with the heavy tangle of branches crowding them from either side, but he knew instinctively that the cause was something else: they were entering the Witch Wood. Darkness was an animal, and this is where it lived.

Ballingrud's craft is faultless in "Three Mothers Mountain." The emotional eloquence allowed to each character, the meticulous scene-building orchestrated at kitchen tables in two very different houses, the stoicism ultimately displayed by Tom when facing the consequences of his path, are testament to a writer able to convey every shade of horror. 

     The witches whispered, and then Mother Ingrid said, "Well, perhaps we can do something. Your mother paid. Will you?"

     Thank God, at last, a window. Yes, he would pay. Yes. "Yes."

     "You'll have to make friends with the dark," Mother Margaret said. "Do you have the heart for it?"

     He nodded.

     "We'll see."

     "Don't fret," said Mother Agnes, staring at his little brother. "The sweetest things grow in the dark."

*   *   *

As it begins, "Sweet Potato" sounds like another Joe R. Lansdale organ solo. 

....Though he had a good retirement plan, Tyler hadn't expected his job to end so abruptly, the boss having gone to prison for ass-fondling and grubbing money from the public trust. But there it was. She went and the business went, and now here he was, out in the wilds of unemployment, living off his considerable savings (thank goodness), and submerged way down deep in the cold-ass nothing.

     Dreaming for a while was so fine. No alarm clock, living in pajamas. What he liked best, at first, was that things that seemed silly in real life seemed fine in the dream world. He could be an old-fashioned hero in his dreams. Much younger, washboard abs, a baseball-bat dick, and balls like grapefruits. Carrying a sword, brave and relentless, six foot five and forever young. And then, one night, down in a dream, there was a soundless shift.

But after the early jokiness, a barbed and complicated tale unfolds. Tyler, unemployed and dangerously idle, figures out his increasingly strange waking and sleeping life is the product of something that finds him of use.

"Sweet Potato" carries a warning for men uninterested in the everyday world and its responsibilities.

     Visiting a friend from work, who was also out of a job with time for the coffee shop, Tyler said, after their conversation began to falter, "Have you ever had a dream that seemed real?"

     The friend, gray and heavy with lips like two red earthworms, rocked back in the booth and sipped his coffee before answering.

     "Of course. Though mostly they don't make sense when I wake up. But now and again, they feel real, could be real. Some of the most outlandish dreams seem real at the time."

     "Just for curiosity's sake. Have you ever felt something in a dream come back with you, being there when you woke up?"

     "No. Though I've heard of it. Some people believe your soul lets go sometimes and comes right out of you when you breathe awake. One moment you're breathing asleep, the next, you're breathing awake."

     "Your soul?"

     "If you believe in that sort of thing. Maybe a piece of your soul. Or something worse. A demon. A succubus, which is a kind of sex demon that rides in and out on your essence while you dream, fucks the shit out of you and takes your energy, borrows your soul, and finally keeps it. They can be created by your subconscious, or they can be night riders."

     "What's that?"

     "Loose souls looking for a place to light. A place to suck the energy out of. Men can be incubuses, you know."

     "I don't know."

     "Male sex demons. The succubus in reverse. I think succubuses and incubuses can switch-hit when it comes to sexual matters. You might even have to put Scotch tape over your dog's asshole if one of them is around."

     "I don't have a dog."

     "That's one less worry, then."

     "How do you know all of this?"

     "I read a lot. I found golf too tiring."

     "Well, I could use a sex demon actually," Tyler said.

     "I wouldn't mind one either. But it might be like that old saying about how you have to be careful what you wish for."

*   *   *

"Knock, Knock" by Brian Evenson is a story about two moral monsters, uncle and nephew, pitted against each other over ownership of a house and its land. In their contest, murder does not resolve conflict, it simply raises the stakes and increases the horror.

....You killed the bastard once, he told himself. Now all you have to do is kill him again.

*   *   *

"Bitten by Himself" by Laird Barron is a perfunctory story. It begins in a 

promising mode: a North American frontier scout and mountain man named Chick Poe, prone to wallowing in his own crapulence as a way of life, stumbles upon his doppelganger in a forest clearing one night. They fight and he is bitten, infected with rabies.

From there the tale's missteps and wrong turns commenced. Rather than pursue the rich potential in the story's historical setting, Barron decided to pad the remainder with solipsistic winks, smirks, and reverses.

This is a disappointment for readers who appreciated the riveting if uneven 2013 story "The Beatification of Custer Poe."

But it is an even greater disappointment for readers who thrilled to the sheer storytelling skill seen in stories like "Mysterium Tremendum" (2010), "The Men from Porlock" (2011), and "In a Cavern, in a Canyon" (2015). (Speaking for myself, I found it hard to sleep the first night after I read "Porlock.")

Compared to those sublime stories, "Bitten by Himself" is dully soporific.

*   *   *

"Blodsuger" by John Langan is about the longest story in Screams from the Dark, and is probably the most satisfying. The story's formal elegance is admirable: two people meet at a community social event in the Catskill mountains of New York state. The older protagonist, Doris, tells the narrator the beautifully articulated story of a horror from her adolescence. Langan tells the entire story in dialogue between these two people at a picnic table in a barn. 

"Blodsuger" places horror outdoors, on the land and imbricated in the region's history. Doris is not the victim of answered prayers; she tells the story of her "attempted rescue" of herself, and the way the outcome taught her to know better in future.

The excellence and eloquence of "Blodsuger" is staggering. It reminded me of several earlier Langan stories that have rewarded rereading: "On Skua Island" (2001), "Mr. Gaunt" (2002), and "What Is Lost, What Is Given Away" (2016). 

Langan's stories allow the reader to luxuriate in a horror-filled region made strange by narrative distance.

Jay

4 July 2022

The Year's Best Horror Stories 16 (1988) Edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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.

❖

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.

❖

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.

❖

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.

❖

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