Vampires Overhead

by Alan Hyder

  VAMPIRES OVERHEAD

  Alan Hyder

  VAMPIRES OVERHEAD

  ISBN: 9781553101680 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553101697 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  For Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  First electronic edition 2012

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 2002

  First published 1935

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2002, 2012

  Introduction © Jack Adrian

  Original cover design © Jason Van Hollander

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Jack Adrian

  VAMPIRES OVERHEAD

  I. The Coming of Bingen

  II. The Tunnel Beneath the Brewery

  III. The First of the Vampires

  IV. The River Through the Dead City

  V. The Finding of the Screamer

  VI. The Flight Across the Marshes

  VII. The Valley of Security

  VIII. The Killing of the Stranger

  IX. The Opal Ring

  X. The Death of Bingen

  XI. The Future!

  VAMPIRES OVERHEAD

  Introduction

  ALAN HYDER, in VAMPIRES OVERHEAD, created one of the great pieces of twentieth century horror pulp fiction. There is nothing clever about the story, nothing cerebral; certainly nothing sophisticated (sophistication is not a crime you could ever have laid at Hyder-the-writer’s door, probably never at Hyder-the-human-being’s). Vampires Overhead is crude, flawed, simplistic, and at times downright sordid. But it also has a scorching narrative drive; from the start Hyder grabs you by the scruff of the imagination and hurls you into the action, so that you’re forced to read on and on, blind to its author’s (actually very obvious) imperfections, blind to all the things that don’t add up, that don’t make sense—blind to everything, in fact, but the hurtling momentum of the terrifying here-and-now.

  It’s a thrilling (in the best sense of the word) piece of pulp, and absolutely nothing Hyder wrote before its publication prepares you for its impact. Come to that, nothing he wrote after it comes anywhere near.

  So who was Alan Hyder? Not someone who ever made it into the reference books, that’s for sure; not even that invaluable guide to Grub Street between the wars, The Author’s and Writer’s Who’s Who & Reference Guide. Nobody (so far as I’m aware) mentions him in books of memoirs set in the immediate pre- or post-war period, and the editors and publishers who (presumably) knew him a little and took him out to lunch once in a while must all by now be long since dead and buried.

  Judging from his books it seems more likely he was either an ethnic West Indian, or a white Briton who was born or had been brought up in the West Indies (almost certainly Jamaica). On balance, my vote would go down on the latter. Workwise, he wrote just four novels, all pre-war, and a handful of normal-length short stories for the magazines of the day, as well as a host of short-shorts, most of which were later collected into two slim volumes.

  Hyder’s first novel, Lofty (1932), is a grim affair (though told in an authorial voice of almost unrelieved facetiousness) describing a short and by no means merry life that leads to the gallows. Hyder’s themes are socio-realistic—the kinds of themes explored by American ‘naturalistic’ writers such as John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, and the young John Steinbeck, although I doubt very much that Hyder himself was aware of this. His primary influence, though certainly not in the actual writing, is manifestly Hardy, in that he seems deliberately to set his characters up as mere pawns of fate: struggle as they may, they cannot escape their doom. Lofty himself has a wretched but hectic childhood, joins up in the Great War, shoots an officer, deserts, befriends a prostitute, gives himself up, is hanged.

  Although Black-Girl, White-Lady (1934) is altogether more adventurous in theme, plot, and setting, it is sabotaged by Hyder’s lack of general literary skills. His model here is the American chronicler of Deep South poor white trash Erskine Caldwell, whose early bestsellers Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933) had already attained near-classic status. Hyder turned his attention to poor black and half-caste trash. Set in Jamaica, the novel tells, in sprawling fashion, the tale of the beautiful Rina (short for Ocarina), the slum-child bastard daughter of a ‘fat Mammy’ and a ‘Spanish gentilmans’ from Kingston. Rina is more ofay than black and has a desperate desire for a white child, preferably (weirdly) from the dire Cyril, a lazy, selfish English boy from the upper middle class who eventually seduces her—‘pain seared thanksgiving through her arched body until her soul flowered’. She works as a prostitute in the local bordello, the ‘Scarlet Grasshopper’, presided over by the gross Madam Titicaca, and at the end of the book gets herself to a nunnery—possibly with child: Hyder’s prose in the ‘big moments’ (see above) is by no means a model of transparency, his actual meaning (i.e. what he wants to get across to the reader) frequently difficult to grasp.

  An additional barrier to understanding is his tin ear for dialogue. It would be simple to quote generously—or, in fact, un-generously—from his prose, but this would be too much the sledgehammer/nut approach. A good deal of his dialogue (exclamation marks aside) has a certain crude force that is, at times, almost attractive. Too often, however, he descends to the ethnic, or at any rate his version of the ethnic: ‘Lawsy, suh! Wan’t too, Ise abettin’, a trip along to Noo Yark lak dem rich niggers has to meet dat person dere in dat place what takes de kinks outta black people’s hairs’, or ‘Married! Lawsy, suh. Ise suah bin too busy keepin’ dem men offern me to think ’bout gettin’ married!’ Long stretches like this—and there are many—make the book hard labour, certainly for the reader seventy years on who is used to a more naturally written black demotic as expressed by writers (both black and white) such as Walter Mosley, Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and Chester Himes.

  Hyder’s fourth novel, Prelude to Blue Mountains (1936), is in many ways the most exasperating of the lot. It starts off as another Hardyesque slice of doomed lives battling hopelessly against the inevitable, and its plot may be epitomised in a single chapter heading: ‘Fate moves a pawn’. Its premise, however, though banal, is by no means slackly presented: Start Rasny Hansone, a generally mild and inoffensive man (and though owning a patently West Indian name, he seems to be a straight-down-the-middle white Britisher) strangles his nagging wife in a drunken rage. Leila Lavalette, sable-tressed gypsy beauty with dreams above her station, yearns for adventure and romance, not a dreary life on the road. They meet, are attracted, take it on the lam. But while on the run Hansone is betrayed by Leila’s father, who tells the cops where to find him. Up to this point the novel can be judged to be a reasonable additon to the 1930s’ socio-realistic ‘escape’ novels in which characters uncomfortable within the rules and mores of ‘polite society’ break out (usually violently) and are pursued by the guardians of society (usually, though not necessarily
, the police, who are usually, though not necessarily, far more corrupt and brutal than those they are pursuing). James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity are exemplars of this particular sub-genre. In Hyder’s rendering Hansone is captured, tried, and sentenced to death.

  But Hyder then sabotages what is by no means a good book, but isn’t on the whole a terribly bad book either, by changing the social realism of the plot into sheer pulp fantasy. Leila employs a ‘crook’ (Hyder’s description, and we’re not talking criminal mastermind here) to break into the prison and free Hansone from the condemned cell. This is duly done with not much inconvenience to anyone; indeed with extraordinary ease—virtually ‘with one bound Jack was free’. Leila and Hansone flee across the ocean to Jamaica, but Hansone jumps off the ship near to land and battles a shark, losing a hand in the process (possibly Hyder’s attempt to mitigate the murder). Leila and her father make land, where they meet a good-time girl at a hotel. Leila’s father marries her. Hansone reappears, minus his hand, having miraculously made it to shore, and hitches up with Leila. Fin.

  This claptrap, only marginally less silly than the average Jeffrey Archer plot, has to be read to be believed, and frankly one is at a loss to explain why it was ever published. A glance at Hyder’s pre-war publishers may perhaps explain the seemingly inexplicable.

  Lofty was issued by Cranley & Day, one of a surprising number of publishers who seemed to spring up in the very worst moments of the Depression, and as swiftly, like mushrooms at high noon, died. Pawling & Ness is another; Denis Archer yet another. Perhaps Cranley & Day’s chief claim to fame (and it’s a legitimate one) is that, in 1933, they issued two cruelly funny satires, by one Robert Leicester (probably a pseudonym), on D. H. Lawrence and Radclyffe Hall: Sadie Catterley’s Cover and The Hell of Comeliness.

  Both Black-Girl, White-Lady and Prelude to Blue Mountains were published by the maverick Arthur Barker, a sometime refugee from the mad Walter Hutchinson. Barker, when establishing his own imprint, had an open-arms policy to the off-beat, the salacious, the scurrilous, the ‘difficult’. Some excellent writers passed through his doors: Robert Graves, the fine American regional novelist Phil Stong (author of State Fair, etc.), the comic writers Thorne Smith and Noel Langley, A. G. Macdonnell (as ‘Neil Gordon’), the apocalyptic fantasist Thomas Tweed—although in many cases their books were published by Barker because no one else would touch them (e.g. E. F. Benson’s bizarre saga of sex and Black Magic Raven’s Brood and Noel Langley’s bawdy Cage Me A Peacock). What almost certainly attracted Barker to Hyder’s two novels is the writer’s earthy vision and at times even earthier language and imagery—e.g. ‘Primordial Sex quivered with desire under the spell of crooned Negro music’. Unfortunately, what seemed exciting and avant-garde in 1935 appears merely risible a generation or so later.

  Hyder’s final two published works show his Jamaican roots even more clearly than his adult novels. These books were the visible results of the only fame—mild as it was—he gained during his writing career. During the 1940s he wrote a long series of well-received serio-comic children’s stories aimed at adults for the London Evening News, about a lively, mischievous, and irrepressible Jamaican ten-year old called Matthias Nehemiah Martingue: Matt for short. Seventy-six of these short-shorts were collected in Matt (1944) and The Magic of Matt (1950). The stories are mainly knockabout tales in which Matt either gets the better of fat constable Mermian, or gets whupped by his (equally fat) Mammy. The illustrations, by Hyder himself, are as crude and energetic as the stories.

  In Vampires Overhead, by sitting down at the typewriter and banging off a pulp thriller, Hyder neatly avoided most of the solecisms exhibited in the rest of his work (of style, plotting, grammar, dialogue, characterisation), even though he still had terrible problems with descriptive adverbs, both in their use and their meaning—e.g., ‘“I’m not sure that you really do understand,” I told her falteringly’ (seems calm enough to me); ‘stared down at her worryingly’ (what, like a dog shaking a rat?). Hyder’s non-weird books strike me as having been written by one trying to make a name for himself as a mainstream novelist whose principal task is to explicate the human condition. This was patently beyond his capabilities. Vampires Overhead, however, looks to have been written by one who needed the money. Ironically, this seems to have liberated his (for want of a better word) muse.

  After its storming start there are some genuinely horrible stretches throughout the narrative. Hyder’s vampires, for instance, are like few other vampires in fantastic and weird literature. I’m not at all sure quite where he got the central idea from: these are certainly predatory, blood-drinking creatures, but they are by no means the vampires of pre- and post-Stoker cliché. Hyder’s obsession with their eyes, and the fact that they hang in dreadful, silent clusters points, perhaps, to an experience of seeing some genus of large West Indian bat gathered together in jungle colonies. Often one’s own disgust fuels the creative juices enormously, and there are certainly indications throughout the story that Hyder is deliberately homing in on a personal fear or repugnance as a form of catharsis.

  The general post-cataclysmic background—quite cleverly dabbed in through the narrative—is easier to identify. The War of the Worlds (1898), by the founding father of modern speculative fiction, H. G. Wells, may be regarded as a template for most British domestic disaster novels and stories of the first sixty years of so of the twentieth century. I cannot believe that Hyder did not at some time experience that still (even a hundred years later) absorbing narrative. Perhaps, too, the polymathic Grant Allen’s extraorinary novella ‘The Thames Valley Catastrophe’ (1897), in which a volcanic eruption drowns the western Home Counties in a roaring sea of fire.

  Closer to Hyder’s own reality, the Great War had a profound effect on popular culture and the creators of both mainstream and imaginative fiction. The inter-war period, for all kinds of reasons, was a worrying time, and in worrying times writers, especially writers of popular fiction, write worrying books mirroring the general angst. So many threats seemed to loom over middle-class Britain, of which the Bolshevik menace (certainly in the 1920s) seemed the most blatant, and revolution and anarchy the most easily realisable—the bloody events recorded in Dennis Wheatley’s Black August (1934) summed up the prevailing mood of both writers and readers.

  But this attitude gradually changed after the Wall Street crash brought terrible instability to the western world, and, even before the sinister events of 1933, the mood in Germany particularly began to turn muscularly against reparations and the botched Treaty of Versailles. Touched by paranoia, the visions of the fiction-writers became even bleaker and more apocalyptic. Already in 1926 the Irish novelist Shaw Desmond’s gloomy Ragnarok had foretold a war that hurled mankind back to the Stone Age, but now the actual horrors of the Great War, in the hands of seasoned thriller-writers, were magnified a thousandfold.

  Gas that contaminated a mere hundred yards or so of trench networks became, a decade and a half later, a vast rolling cloud of doom that blighted half a nation—Ladbroke Black’s The Poison War (1933). Lumbering and relatively easily potted Gotha bombers of 1917 were transformed by the imaginative writer’s art into swift, sleek, unvanquishable machines of infinite destruction and terror—Moray Dalton’s The Black Death (1934).

  At some point in all of these, and similar, narratives, England—more precisely the Home Counties—is reduced to a ravaged moonscape of tortured metal girders and stinking rubble: the kind of scene, in fact, that greeted the aghast travellers in Francis Sibson’s Unthinkable (1933) on their return from the southern Polar regions, unaware that while they have been incommunicado for months, war has virtually destroyed civilisation. All contain memorable scenes of destruction, devastation, and horror that find echoes in Hyder’s fantastic and at times gruesome yarn.

  Even so, there are one or two explicatory gaps. That has to be admitted.

  There is an old story of the lowly pulp-writer who, after a lifetime of poundin
g out low-grade tosh, is lauded by mainstream reviewers and littérateurs when one of his books becomes a roaring critical success.

  This guy—let’s for the sake of argument call him John Schwarzenbrunner—is British and writes terrible private-eye novels set in California, to where he’s never been, filching all his backgrounds from out-of-date travel books. His thrillers (a misnomer if ever there was one) are formulaic to a degree: eight murders per book; the hero gets beaten up by the cops three times per book; every female in sight succumbs to his brutish charms except his rich, and stunningly beautiful, female client; he gets rich, and stunningly beautiful female client, in the last few lines of the final chapter; out of twenty chapters, Chapter Twenty is filled with mind-numbingly tedious explanations, Chapter Nineteen is all action, and Chapter Eighteen invariably ends with the hero in the most desperate straits, a grisly death staring him in the face (usually of a sexual and castratory nature), no help within a league. Schwarzenbrunner’s publisher is equally low-grade, utterly ruthless, psychopathically stingy, and has an obsession with cost-cutting.

  So the situation is: the price of paper has suddenly rocketed, the publisher is now trying to cram full-length novels into less pages (by using smaller type and printing on fewer signatures), and Schwarzenbrunner himself has just delivered his latest and gone on holiday to the Galapagos Islands (this is the only note of sheer fantasy in the story: no writer of crap private-eye novels would get enough money to enable him to visit Lundy, let alone the Galapagos Islands). On the Galapagos Islands Schwarzenbrunner falls prey to an abominable disease gained from kissing giant tortoises and is out of action for a year. When he returns to the U.K. he discovers to his astonishment and delight that his latest has been published and, instead of getting two lines in the Doncaster Argus & Courant, is garnering reviews one would happily kill for in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and all the heavy broadsheets: ‘Schwarzenbrunner plumbs the heart of darkness that is contemporary noir’ . . . ‘There are no resolutions, happy or otherwise, in this mean-streets masterpiece’ . . . ‘The depths of nihilism: life’s a bitch, and then you die’, and so on. Uplifted by this deluge of praise, he gets invited to a book-signing. Idly riffling through the pages of his chef-d’oeuvre his face suddenly takes on a look of stupefaction which swiftly resolves itself into something akin to that seen on the phiz of the demon in the pantomime when baffled by buxom, be-tighted Jack. ‘My God!’ he croaks. ‘The bastard’s cut out the last two chapters!’