Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  The point of all this is, of course, that—as their nicknames suggest—Danny and the monster have a great deal in common. In essence, they are embarked upon precisely the same quest, which is summed up by the title of a book which the monster goes to some trouble to obtain: On Being a Real Person by Harry Emerson Fosdick. The monster is a prolific consumer of self-help books—and, for that matter, of books of many other kinds, all of which he seems to approach in much the same earnestly inquisitive fashion.

  Since deciding not to end his life in the Arctic wilderness after taking his creator’s body from Walton’s ship, the monster’s sole project has been to fit himself for life in human society, in the hope of one day being accepted therein. By the time that Danny meets him he has contrived to ameliorate the unprepossessing color of his skin and to modify his altogether unnatural height (by surgically excising sections from his own leg-bones without the benefit of anaesthetic). He has become a vegetarian and a pacifist, and is now well-educated and well-spoken. Most important of all, he has found in the baseball diamond the one arena of human affairs where his capabilities will more than compensate for his unfortunate appearance. Through baseball, the monster has a chance of becoming an object of admiration among his potential fellows, if only he can make it into the major league. In essence, all of this is simply Danny’s problems and Danny’s dreams writ large. He too yearns to become a fully-fledged member of the human race, and he too must overcome a whole series of hurdles carelessly erected for him by his father/creator—whose one and only positive contribution to his life chances was to teach him how to play baseball.

  The particular significance of baseball in American life—and hence, of course, in the story—is that it provides a kind of Utopian model of how society is supposed to work in an age of individualism. The performance of the individual, arising out of his own talent, skill, determination, and conformity with the rules, is everything—but everything the individual accomplishes contributes to the performance of the team, seamlessly uniting his personal interests with those of a greater whole (which extends, of course, to all the team’s supporters). Like getting married and having children, only much more so, being a baseball player offers a ready-made certificate of belonging to human society, and playing in the major leagues is the ultimate badge of honor.

  Unfortunately, the model which looks so wonderful and so perfect in the abstract can only be as good in practice as the society which contains it, and the actual baseball team of which Danny and the monster are parts is riven with all the conflicts of the world without. For instance, the black pitcher who is better by far than any of the players—and is the bastard son of its aristocratic owner—is excluded from the all-white league and forced into a menial role, his superiority in the field of play generating envy and bitter resentment instead of admiration. This is merely the most glaringly obvious of the monstrous injustices, hatreds, and ironies which are scrupulously mirrored in the make-up and behavior of the Hellbenders. It is the marvellous detailing and deft extrapolation of this analogy which provides the measure of Michael Bishop’s accomplishment in producing this novel.

  The power of Brittle Innings to move the reader derives from the fact that although Danny and the monster—like everyone else who ever travelled the reversed trail of tears which leads from childhood to adulthood—are desperate to become “real persons” it does not seem that the people around them are making much use of their own opportunities to do likewise. Nor is it obvious that the society they so earnestly desire to join has much use for members of the worthy sort which they are so ambitious to become. In the end, as we know from the very beginning by courtesy of the frame narrative, Danny’s chance to go up to the majors is ruined by Buck Hoey’s malice; he must settle for a very different role in the world of baseball—and, perforce, in the world per se. Were he alone in the story this would inevitably seem like his own failure, but he is not alone; if the role which the monster plays were not enough to make it abundantly clear that the failure is, in fact, the world’s, the journalist is there to pop up when everything is said and done, still so preoccupied with his own project that he cannot see anything more than a tall tale in the allegory he has been asked to pass on.

  Brittle Innings appears to have begun life as a novella (the author’s notes include an acknowledgment to a screen-writer who produced a movie script based on some such early version) but its five hundred pages are not in the least excessive. There is not a wasted image or phrase in the text, which is extraordinarily rich and eminently readable from beginning to end. It is a very fine book indeed, and I cannot emphasize too heavily the insistence that no potential reader should allow himself or herself to be put off by the seeming freakishness of its premise. It is not the first good sequel to Frankenstein to be produced by an American SF writer—it is at least arguable that the whole “steampunk” craze was kick-started by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop’s stirring “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole” (1977)—but Brittle Innings seems to me to be the best sequel imaginable, at least for the present. If the story were ever to reach the big screen the resultant movie would surely be a travesty, but if the making of such a movie were to persuade more people to read the book that would be ample justification for the endeavor.

  THE MAGIC OF THE MOVIES

  It has long been recognized that the world of the movies is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Some sixty years has passed since Elmer Rice produced his mock-Utopian romance A Voyage to Purilia (1930), in which visitors from our world enter the movie-world and have an absurdly comical time learning to cope with the eccentric metaphysics of cuts, close-ups, and fade-outs, and with the silly paradoxes of cliché and censorship. A similar interval separates us from Vicente Huidobro’s proud boast that his Mirror of a Mage (1931) was a pioneering “visual novel” which would daringly take aboard the methods of “the cinematograph” in order to exploit the particular education of experience which had been visited upon audiences by the silver screen. Since then, history has carried us inexorably into an age when the movies are one of the most significant aspects of our common cultural heritage. We have all become expert in decoding their modes of presentation, and can no longer be surprised to find them mirrored in prose.

  As those sixty years have passed, our involvement with the movies has become far more complex and far more intimate. In the 1950s the TV set made the entirety of cinema history potentially available to a single generation of viewers, and freed the consumption of movies from the tyranny of cinema scheduling; in the 1980s the rapid proliferation of video-machines brought about a further liberation, exempting the TV set from the straitjacket of broadcasting schedules. We can now watch most of the films which we want to watch at times of our own choosing in the comfort of our own homes.

  These changes have brought about a fundamental change in the relationship between consumers and that great reservoir of visual imagery which is cinema history, allowing the mythological heritage of the cinema to be constantly available to everyone in a way which was never possible before. Broadcast TV preserved that heritage in an essentially disordered fashion, repeating old films endlessly but haphazardly, but the video-library has added the extra dimensions of order and choice to the relationship.

  The kind of access which the viewers of today have to films is comparable, for the first time, with the kind of access which readers have to books—with the important difference that there are far fewer films in the world than literary texts, and far more people are interested in them. The imagery of the movies refreshes parts of the population which literary imagery never reaches, and familiarity with particular filmic imagery is shared by far more people than ever shared familiarity with literary images. In fact, all the literary characters who have become household names in the twentieth century—Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Tarzan, James Bond—have acquired. or at least cemented, their celebrity via the movies.

  Part and parcel of this change in our relat
ionship with the movies has been a change in our relationship with the materials of fantasy. Because visual spectacle and violent action are the staples of the popular cinema, the repertoire of the film-director has always been heavily dependent on special effects. Even the making of realistic drama involves the clever and carefully-organized use of stunt men whose substitution for actors is expertly concealed by cutting, and it may also involve the use of elaborate models whose destruction will stand in for the destruction of buildings or whole cities. Techniques like these, supplemented by modern techniques of make-up and methods of splicing images together, make it possible for the cinema to present events impossible in the everyday world in an astonishingly convincing manner. The directors of movies have always used every trick at their disposal to present fictional worlds and events as strange as they could contrive; nowadays, they can offer realistic simulations of worlds and events that are very strange indeed.

  From the moment of their inception the movies found a vast heritage of literary images available for predation, and they went to the feast with a rapacious appetite. It was inevitable, as Vicente Huidobro recognized in his own quaint fashion, that there would be a counterflow of influence in the other direction, and we are now beginning to see that flow become a flood. The books from which popular films are made become best-sellers all over again, and novelizations of original film-scripts are safe cash-cows for the publishing industry. The entire genre of horror fiction, which had retired into comfortable esotericism in the early part of the century, has enjoyed a spectacular movie-led boom in the last twenty years.

  In view of all this, it is hardly surprising that we find among the literary fantasies produced in 1989 a number of works which deal artfully with the subject of our fascination with the movies, and various aspects of the evolving relationship between viewers and cinematic fantasies. Three in particular stand out: Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell; A Child Across the Sky by Jonathan Carroll; and The Night Mayor by Kim Newman.

  * * * *

  Of the three novels under consideration, Ancient Images is the most conventional. Its heroine is a film-editor whose colleague—an indefatigable researcher with a keen interest in locating and restoring “lost” films—has discovered a print of a 1930s film starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi which had been suppressed after completion, following the sudden violent death of its director. Tracking down a copy has not been easy because everyone involved in the making of the film felt uneasy about it at the time, and the survivors still feel uneasy—with good reason, given that some of them seem not to have been the same since.

  The heroine arrives at the private screening arranged by her friend just in time to see him leap off a roof, apparently fleeing a pursuer she cannot see; the film, of course, is gone. The story then follows the heroine’s quest to retrace the course of her dead colleague’s enquiries, searching for another copy of the elusive film and for an explanation of his curious death. Her own footsteps are dogged, in the meantime, by shadowy figures she can never quite make out—until the climax, when they and everything else become horribly clear.

  Ramsey Campbell is a past master of the suspenseful horror story, and he brings all his careful craftsmanship to the unravelling of this fairly predictable plot. His great strength as a writer is his ability to build sinister elements by slowly-amplified degrees into a narrative which is full of realistic detail, extrapolating the artistic method of M. R. James to novel length. He is almost alone in his ability to do this without relying on grand guignol violence, although he is able to do that too, when his themes require it. The greatest difficulty faced by the writer of suspenseful horror stories of the subtler kind is to maintain the reader’s patience and sympathy with a character who cannot know (as the reader inevitably does) that the pattern of events through which the plot moves really are significant of something unutterably nasty, and that it would be more sensible to stop rationalising away their foreboding hints of horror to come; Campbell can do this, and do it well, even in a 299-page novel like Ancient Images.

  From one viewpoint, Ancient Images is simply one more performance of a kind which Campbell has perfected—and in that respect it is not quite up to the very high standard which he set with The Nameless (1981) and Incarnate (1983), and maintains with his more recent Midnight Sun (1990)—but its use of a film as the focal point of the unwinding curse forces it to touch on certain issues which, although not really relevant to the unfolding of the plot, are of interest in themselves.

  There is a scene in an early chapter of Ancient Images which seems, on the face of it, merely to be a satirical red herring. The heroine, having only just begun her search, visits a group of horror buffs associated with a fanzine, significantly entitled Gorehound, who had been in communication with her dead colleague. It turns out that they cannot help her, and the description of their sick and salivating fascination with the bloodiest scenes of a particularly crude video nasty which they happen to be watching is way over the top by comparison with Campbell’s customary deftness—and yet the heroine finds the encounter curiously terrifying. In the fullness of time—although Campbell does not labor the point by any explicit statement—it transpires that this scene does have a certain metaphorical relevance after all, because the ancient images which give the story its title are of a very similar nature to those which flit across the video screen in this brief interlude. The peculiar avidity of the three weird horrorschlock-addicts is exactly what is made incarnate in the supernatural pursuers whose image has been unwisely incorporated in the lost film.

  When they are not busy harrying those who have come into contact with their cinematic representation, the monsters in Ancient Images have a ritual function to perform, which is aided by the passive acceptance of the morally-anaesthetized inhabitants of the fertile land that they nourish with violently-spilled blood. This carries implications for our judgment of all unthinking “consumers” of horror, wherever they are to be found.

  It may seem odd that Campbell, who makes a living writing horror stories, should cast a jaundiced eye upon the motives and appetites of fans of gruesome excess, but one of the key roles of the horror story is, of course, to confront its users with awkward questions about their own impulses, appetites and secret fantasies. Like the heroine of Ancient Images, we find that cinematic imagery such as that contained in the film (which she ultimately manages to see) raises such questions much more provocatively than the written story which is its basis (which she reads, but finds unengaging). The relative unsubtlety of cinematic plotting and its lack of space for intricate philosophical discourse inevitably means, however, that careful and intricate consideration of the import of cinema imagery must be left to prose.

  * * * *

  A Child Across the Sky, whose plot is in some respects very similar to that of Ancient Images, is part of a looseknit series of novels by Jonathan Carroll. It borrows characters from both Bones of the Moon (1987) and Sleeping in Flame (1988), and although it has no actual internal references to the earlier novels The Land of Laughs (1980) and Voice of Our Shadow (1983), similarities of theme and method bind all of these works together into a common enterprise which, although one hesitates to describe it as “coherent,” is certainly a more-or-less unified whole.

  The protagonist of A Child Across the Sky is Weber Gregston, an earnest and honest but slightly flaky film director who once fell in love with Cullen James, the protagonist of Bones of the Moon, and briefly shared her bizarre dreams of the parallel world Rondua. Like the heroine of Ramsey Campbell’s novel he is impelled by the mysterious death of a close friend into a search for a missing bit of film—in this case a single scene unaccountably lost from the last of four horror films written by, directed by, and starring the friend in question, Philip Strayhorn. As in Ancient Images the search is complicated by the fact that some of the people involved in shooting the missing scene have died in freak accidents, while the sole remaining witness seems to have undergone a radi
cal personality-transplant. What is more, the hunters are themselves hunted—or at least observed—by baleful supernatural entities.

  Like Campbell, Carroll is a master of mundane detail, which he deploys very cleverly to give his narratives an effective gloss of realism and to make the reader sympathetic to his characters. His style is, however, markedly different from Campbell’s. He is much more sentimental, sometimes even schmaltzy, but a more striking difference is to be seen in the intrusions of the fantastic into his plots, which are by no means M. R. Jamesian. Carroll’s fantastic intrusions rarely lurk half-glimpsed in the background; they tend to be introduced rather flatly and their surreality is frequently quite blatant. They usually seem sinister at first only because they are so bizarre, although their innately menacing qualities tend to be exposed by slow degrees as his plots progress.

  Carroll has habitually drawn upon the apparatus of childhood, weirdly distorted and abnormally exaggerated, to populate the fantasies which slowly engulf his protagonists: the creations of a hypothetical writer of children’s books in The Land of Laughs; giant talking toys in Bones of the Moon; the Brothers Grimms’ fairy tales in Sleeping in Flame. Although the plot of A Child Across the Sky revolves around a group of horrific slasher movies about a fictitious incarnation of evil called Bloodstone the contents of the films themselves are described very obliquely; what we are mostly told about in connection with them concerns the various childhood experiences which the writer/director star plundered for inspiration. The supernatural character who provides the key to the plot is ostensibly an angel, but she is also the film-maker’s imaginary childhood playmate brought to life. She manifests herself in the mock-innocent guise of a nine-year-old girl, who claims to be paradoxically pregnant with the dead man’s cancer-stricken girl-friend.