Reading notes: "The Sacred Grove" (2017) by John Clute

"Fantastika; or, The Sacred Grove" by John Clute in Fantastika Journal, April 2017

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ludic: showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness

eruv: an area within which observant Jews can carry or push objects on the Sabbath, (which lasts from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday), without violating a Jewish law that prohibits carrying anything except within the home.

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Part 1: A Problem

 

[....]  I proposed to use the term ​primarily to describe works written (very roughly) from the last decades of the eighteenth ​century onward: works that might be deemed therefore to have been written in a ​consciousness of their generic nature. I now use the term fantastika, in these two primary ​senses (plus a few others), in everything I write. I try to keep several loose conditions in ​mind.

Part Two: Practical/Poetical

1): Fantastika consists of that wide range of fictional works whose contents are understood ​to be fantastic.

​2): Fantastika is a child of Romanticism in Europe. It soon monstrously outgrew these ​swaddling clothes.

​​3) [....]  not until (roughly) the ​beginning of the nineteenth century that the subversive quasi-industrial creation by authors ​and publishers of oppositional genres began to create centripetal domains for various forms ​of the fantastic, forms inherently transgressive of standard understandings of how the West ​was won. For reasons beyond my scope here to anatomise concisely, these

incipient genres ​seemed from the first pragmatically prone to the breeding of interpellatory conversations, ​which is to say toolkits. A toolkit is a sharing of knowledge. 

     

[....]  The term fantastika designates a fictional work understood ​to be non-mimetic and which its creator understands is a toolkit (or megatext) to be shared.

​4) [....]  the nature of the sf gaze, which is a gaze driven ​by time.

[....]  the landscape painter Robert Hubert had already ​created a diptych, Project for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre (1796) and Imaginary View of ​the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins (1796), which, for the first time in his huge oeuvre ​(and perhaps for the first time ever), can be taken to visualise a doubled world joined one to ​the other through a yet-unspoken temporal gap that cried out to be narrated.

[....]  Similarly, John Martin's The Assuaging of ​the Waters (1840) or Solitude (1843) or The Plains of Heaven (1851-1853) may be the first ​works of art to hint at the curvature of the Earth.

The Assuaging of ​the Waters

Solitude

The Plains of Heaven

[....]  The term ​fantastika designates a fictional work through which the planet may be seen.

​5) [....]  the default understanding of a tale of fantastika is literal

not ​metaphorical; for metaphors in fantastika can mean what they say. Fantastika is a grammar ​of the literal; it is not a lesson imparted to the world from without. A story told literally is a ​story which believes what it sees, no matter how "marvelous" the vision may seem.

​6) [....]   if we take the Western World between 1800 and 2017 as its focus, then fantastika is ​transgressive against owners.

​7) [....]   the world is the fourth wall of fantastika. So when we say that a sf text can be ​defined as story set in an arguable world, we are saying that an sf text can be defined as a ​story that addresses the fourth wall. Any reading of any text of fantastika that dissevers text ​​from its worldly context throws out the bathwater and the baby. That to best understand any ​such text, we must recognise where it is. The author's engendering intentions, the context ​she wrote in and for whom, when he wrote and with what knowledge or premonition, the ​anthropocenic world that circumambiates each word: all should be taken into account. [My empasis - JR]

​8): Fantastika is ludic, which may be another way of saying it is literal....

[....]  inherent grammar – the ​engendering fire – of fantastika is not to be found in the thing done, or in strategic groupings ​of texts under various partial rubrics, but in the grammars of connection between texts

[....]  it ​lies in the beat that marks a tensing of the limbs of story, in the gap between the repose of ​the already told and the alarums of something new; it might be described as a manifestation ​of Pathosformel, a term Aby Warburg used to describe what he conceived of as the essence ​of any typology of an artistic form through time: which was the edge where it all changes. 

[....]  The heart of a matter is when it changes. ​Fantastika, which is time-bound, is the lord of the dance, which moves in time. The heart of ​fantastika is a changing of the guard between fixations.

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Jay

12 November 2022

"The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932) by H. P. Lovecraft

Readers unfamiliar with "The Dreams in the Witch House" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

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[....] Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.

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"The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932) still has the power to shock. Lovecraft clearly wasn't interested in letting his protagonist off the hook. There is no fleeing in terror out of town or collapsing into easeful insanity. Walter Gilman is the man who, four years after "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), succeeded in the "piecing together of dissociated knowledge".  For his trouble he got the worst April of his life, and never saw May.

Before Walter Gilman arrived in Arkham, no renter in the rooming house reputed to be the former bolt-hole of 17th century witch and escaped fugitive Keziah Mason ever lived there by choice. But to Gilman the house looked like fertile ground for his research on points of interpenetration between witch's craft and Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics. 

"Possibly," comments the tale's omniscient narrative voice, "Gilman ought not to have studied so hard."

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Slingshot

"The Dreams in the Witch House" had me thinking about M. R. James' 1904 story "The Ash Tree." Though there is little correspondence in plot action, its outline about a witch's familiar carrying out her vicious errands is apposite.

And both tales end with a final narrative slingshot as the last buried secrets of their witches are brought to light. Too late, alas, for either story's protagonist.

James:

[....] The lantern must have broken at the bottom, and the light in it caught upon dry leaves and rubbish that lay there for in a few minutes a dense smoke began to come up, and then flame; and, to be short, the tree was in a blaze.

     The bystanders made a ring at some yards' distance, and Sir William and the Bishop sent men to get what weapons and tools they could; for, clearly, whatever might be using the tree as its lair would be forced out by the fire.

     So it was. First, at the fork, they saw a round body covered with fire--the size of a man's head--appear very suddenly, then seem to collapse and fall back. This, five or six times; then a similar ball leapt into the air and fell on the grass, where after a moment it lay still. The Bishop went as near as he dared to it, and saw--what but the remains of an enormous spider, veinous and seared! And, as the fire burned lower down, more terrible bodies like this began to break out from the trunk, and it was seen that these were covered with greyish hair.

     All that day the ash burned, and until it fell to pieces the men stood about it, and from time to time killed the brutes as they darted out. At last there was a long interval when none appeared, and they cautiously closed in and examined the roots of the tree.

     'They found,' says the Bishop of Kilmore, 'below it a rounded hollow place in the earth, wherein were two or three bodies of these creatures that had plainly been smothered by the smoke; and, what is to me more curious, at the side of this den, against the wall, was crouching the anatomy or skeleton of a human being, with the skin dried upon the bones, having some remains of black hair, which was pronounced by those that examined it to be undoubtedly the body of a woman, and clearly dead for a period of fifty years.'

Lovecraft:

     In March, 1931 a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles,and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman's old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.

     Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner's physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with the shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.     

    Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.     

    Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman's old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.     

    When the slanting wall of Gilman's room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house's north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to some period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.    

    In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic's department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated. 

    The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus' Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.

Both Sir Matthew Fell and Walter Gilman died without realizing how near they lived to the earthly remains of Mrs. Mothersole and Keziah Mason.

*   *   *

Vastation

"The Dreams in the Witch House '' suggests that every interior and exterior in Arkham, Massachusetts is of liminal character.

[....] Sometimes [Walter Gilman] would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.

[....] Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.

The Witch House itself was a true borderland: inside and outside, near and far, visible and occult. When each side of the border interpenetrated (what Arthur Machen termed a "perichoresis") it spelled death for Walter Gilman.

     It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out....

Lovecraft's tonal ostranenie regarding the fates of his protagonists is hard-boiled. But for all that, the reader feels the poignancy involved in the deaths of characters like the Nahum Gardner family, Charles Dexter Ward, and Walter Gilman. 

With the fates of his human characters, Lovecraft permits the reader to push beyond abstractions of "cosmic horror" and come to an "understanding of the malice of the world itself" in the words of John Clute. Clute terms this act of understanding vastation, the moment when protagonists  "find out too much about the world; more specifically, they find out, in a sense, that the world means its malice…." 

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Jay

12 October 2022

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.

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         "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

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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.

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"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.

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"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