54: [1954] RICHARD MATHESON - I am Legend
1976. Robert Neville, formerly a scientist, lives alone, besieged in his ordinary home by nocturnal creatures who used to be his neighbours. By day, he tries to find the lair in which the bulk of the vampires hide from the sunlight and destroys by staking those he can find. In flashback, we learn that he is the only immune human in a world blighted by an epidemic of vampirism. A rational, bacteriological explanation is presented for the ancient myth, and Neville is able to use some of the legendary trappings of the vampire hunter — garlic, the cross — against his enemy for medical or psychological reasons. Finally, he is hunted down not by the vampires he is seeking to destroy but by a new society of infected humans who have learned to live with the disease. In a world of vampires, the last human being becomes a monster. I am Legend, one of the first attempts to treat a traditional horror theme in a science-fictional manner, was an instant classic. It has been unsuccessfully filmed twice, as The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price and The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston, but more importantly served as the inspiration for George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels.
***
Blood. Endless, red avenues of it, roaring in blackness. The body’s ancient aqueducts splash its sleepless current; spreading life. Sometimes death. Like the famished death which the infected in I am Legend chaperone each night. Like the death which their sunset predation and thirst bring to Robert Neville. As the novel’s crucified hero, his life hemorrhages before us. Rampant pain and loss pool around his existence; dark, inescapable. He is bleeding, somewhere deep; unseen. And the undead envoys who vulture and loiter septically outside his house each night want not only the red liquid inside him. They want the aching psyche which floats like a failing raft. Blood. Protected in our body vaults; royalty behind a walled city. Like Neville, barricaded within his battered house. He is blood; the wet voltage which runs within the book. Safe in his house, as blood in a body. His unrelenting flow is the kinetic stream which makes each chapter continue on, despite pestilent, viral assault from without. Yet Neville, too, knows anemia. It shifts within a wounded soul; an isolated dune, blown by empty routine. The liquor he is addicted to is only so much sweetened, civilized blood. The vampires who shriek obscene rage outside his house, as he drinks, simply crave a more horrid vintage and in Neville discover a warm, living vineyard. Blood. It drifts like thought and in I am Legend becomes the presence of evil itself; an unmerciful irrigation of postwar toxicity and dementia. The novel’s layers are not unlike blood itself. Dense; intricate. Textured by a rich compositional weave. And in an era of AIDS, the global contagion which roves like some hideous vagabond, the ideas expressed in I am Legend are especially disturbing and prophetic. The AIDS virus, too, hides amorally in human waterways. Waiting. Polluting the body’s helpless Amazon torrents with death. It is impossible to stop; like the vampires Neville tries uselessly to slaughter. Did my father have a vision which extended beyond merely a brilliant novel? Did he see what was coming? I believe psychics exist. I believe we are all possessed of such ability. I therefore must, at least partially, support those visions which strike the psychically sensitive most powerfully; strike with most precise imagery and articulation. And I find myself asking, what could be more specifically articulate than a detailed novel, the crux of which is a central image so exact, it’s virtually the duplicate of AIDS; a blood holocaust. I am Legend was set during a period between 1976 and 1979. The first, vague, unresponded-to reports about AIDS began to appear around 1980. It is, if nothing more, an evocative coincidence. Still, if Orwell’s fictive predictions in the novel 1984 unsettle the nerves, what then should we make of what might be equally predictive, albeit equally fictive, visions contained within I am Legend? Blood. It is passed from father to son; a divine transfusion. All life comes from it. Worships it. Forfeits it in death. It is essence. And as we are all now grimly aware, it is the perfect messenger for horror. Perhaps I am Legend, without my father’s conscious awareness, might have been written not only to frighten us. It might have been written to prepare us. — RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON
55: [1955] RAY BRADBURY - The October Country
The October Country is substantially a reprint of Dark Carnival (1947), an Arkham House collection of stories Bradbury originally published in Weird Tales and other magazine markets in the ’40s. Dark Carnival was never widely available, and The October Country, which includes several tales original to the collection, stands as the definitive assembly of Bradbury’s early horror fiction. As the title suggests, the mood is usually autumnal and sombre, as in “The Scythe”, where the protagonist becomes the Grim Reaper, chopping down wheatfields in the knowledge that every stalk represents a human life. However, there are also horrific tales along the lines of “Skeleton”, in which a hypochondriac becomes obsessed with the idea that his own bones have turned against him, and several stories (“Uncle Einar”, “The Homecoming ) about a Charles Addamsish family of non-humans living in the Midwest. All these themes recur in the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).
***
The October Country is a special place of dark magic where so many discriminating readers have ventured time and time again. It is a terrain where numerous writers and would-be-writers have also gone in search of a touch of Ray Bradbury’s cool shadows, and sometimes those writers have enjoyed their visits so much, they have come back with souvenirs of his style and tone. But that is understandable. This October Country is such a marvelous place, for all its fears, one hates to leave it. The October Country is, to my mind, Bradbury’s finest work. Certainly, it is his most magical. Something Wicked This Way Comes touches that dark magic now and again, but fails to sustain it. But here, in this volume of nineteen, perfectly honed stories, it is the status quo. It is a shame and a surprise to me that his later science fiction tales, fine as they are (and it should be noted that Bradbury’s so-called science fiction bears about as much relationship to that genre as a live pig does to pork) have overshadowed his ventures into the realm of horror, for it was in this realm that he was at his best. The stories have a feel of youthful enthusiasm, yet they are also the work of a mature artist coming into his own. Fifteen of these tales originally made up his first collection, Dark Carnival, published by the justly famous Arkham House. These fifteen stories were reworked by Bradbury, sharpened, and grouped with four others to form The October Country, and from that point on, his poetry of shadows has defined the field of short story writing in the weird fiction category, and has had no minor influence on the literary world at large, though his influence here is probably less admitted due to his pulp origins. His direct influence can be seen in the works of such writers as Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William F. Nolan, and Chad Oliver, as well as more recent wordsmiths like Charles Grant, Dennis Etchison, Thomas Monteleone, Al Sarrantonio and Richard Christian Matheson. Bradbury, like any writer of real literature, was writing about more in these stories than things that go bump in the night. More goes on in the scenes than just the scenes. After reading this collection and laying the book aside, attending to more mundane chores like polishing the woodwork, tying your kid’s shoes or feeding the gerbil, the echo of these stories, of that peculiar October Country, continues to bounce inside your head, and its echo does not diminish with time. Bradbury has the knack of making the commonplace mystical. It is as if everything in his stories is alive. The animate and the inanimate. After reading “The Wind”, who has not listened to the howling of the wind about the eaves and corners of the house and failed to think that it might not be a random force of nature, but might in fact have intent — dark intent? And who cannot, when snug in their bed, half-drifting-off, with an infant down the hall, fail to think of “The Small Assassin”, and find themselves listening for the murderous slide of scooting baby knees on the carpet. And what about the other things The October Country has forever redefined? Hot Mexican nights and cisterns and the insides of strange men
as viewed through a pane of stained-glass window; a man with a scythe; a man driving through the Tropic of Cancer, patting the empty car seat beside him; a dog bringing an unusual friend to see his sick master; and a dwarf in love with a funhouse mirror. Bradbury is not without his faults as a writer. Sometimes his style is poetic for poetry’s sake. Sometimes his dialogue is too precious. Sometimes his view of childhood too brightly nostalgic. Sometimes the point of his stories too trite. But these faults do not raise their heads in The October Country. When Bradbury wrote of shadows and dread, the disappointments and emptiness that all of us experience, his poetry was sharp, his dialogue lean, his visions of childhood bittersweet, his points as simple and effective as the sight of fresh blood on an infant’s face. We have many books by Ray Bradbury. Most of them collections of short stories. Novels like Fahrenheit 451, his best long work, and the flawed, but still marvelous, Something Wicked This Way Comes. But The October Country was, and is, his finest hour. Had he written only this one volume of stories, his place in the archives library of the darkly fantastic would have been assured. And his disciples no less numerous. — JOE R. LANSDALE
56: [1958] JOSEPH PAYNE BRENNAN - Nine Horrors and a Dream
First published by Arkham House under the direction of August Derleth, this collection consists chiefly of pieces written for Weird Tales in the early ’50s. Indeed, the book is dedicated to the memory of the magazine, and the best of Brennan’s stories typify the pulp imagination at its most concentrated. Included here are the classic blob-of-hungry-ooze story “Slime” and the highly regarded tale of a cursed stretch of scrubland, “Canavan’s Back Yard” together with such lesser but evocative tales as “Death in Peru”, “On the Elevator” and “The Hunt”. One story, “Levitation”, has been adapted for the TV series Tales from the Darkside. Despite the narrator’s last words, “I have never gone back since. And I never will”, Brennan produced a sequel to “Canavan’s Back Yard” — “Canavan Calling” — twenty-five years later for inclusion in Night Visions 2: Dead Image (1985). Brennan, who died in 1990, was also the author of much poetry, the most macabre of which is collected in Nightmare Need (1964) and produced series of stories concerning Lucius Leffing, a Holmesian psychic investigator, and Kerza, a lady barbarian.
***
Fairytales apart, this was the first honest-to-God horror book that I ever got my hands on to. I was about nine years old, certainly not much more. It scared me stiff, gave me nightmares that actually shaded into major-league hallucinations, probably warped me for life, and certainly set me on target for what would eventually become a career. I loved it, and still do. How much more can you ask of a book? First let me tell you how I came to get hold of it. The collection had originally been published in an Arkham House edition with a number of the stories already having a Weird Tales pedigree, but the version that reached me was a luridly-covered Ballantine reprint … and when I say lurid I mean bright pinks, lime greens and purples, with the kind of lettering that they used in the opening credits of The Invaders on TV. A huge bulbous spider straddled the artwork from above, while down at the bottom of the cover a tiny naked woman stood amongst Easter Island statues watching the sun rise except that it wasn’t the sun, but an immense and inhuman head with wide-staring eyes. Crude, but effective, as the villains used to say of their buzz-saws in the chapterplays. I’m pretty sure it belonged to my uncle. He was an ex-Teddy Boy, ex-army conscript, ex-railway worker, then an employee on the Manchester docks. US paperback imports rarely made it into the shops in those days but a number of titles would make it over as ballast with other cargoes, as used to happen with comic books. Whether or not the Brennan was one of these, it’s hard to be sure. It’s only when I look back from here that I can appreciate how my uncle filled in some much-needed gaps in my early literary education; when they were making us read Black Beauty at school, he was the one who was telling me how the Frankenstein monster was put together. He provided my introduction to Edgar Rice Burroughs with a description of how the Leopard Men tenderized human flesh for consumption by breaking the limbs of their captives with clubs and then tethering them submerged up to their chins in a fast-flowing river. He told me who Doc Savage was. And he lent me Nine Horrors and a Dream. Ten stories don’t exactly make for a doorstopper of a book. I read it quickly and in a state of awe. The one that I think impressed me most was “The Calamander Chest”. It had many of the elements that I’ve come to think of as characteristic of the genre post-Lovecraft and pre-1970s, when tales of solitary young men and locked-up secrets gave way to a much broader sense of involvement that was more akin to soap opera. Each of the tales (with the possible exception of “Slime”, which at 32 pages was a more ambitious novella) was a similarly lean narrative built around a weird hook and calculated to leave the reader with that oddly satisfying sense of having taken a peek into forbidden territory from a place of safety. Did I mention that I was staying the night at my grandmother’s house when the book came into my hands? I’d better, because it has some bearing on what was to follow. My grandmother had a modest little place in a well-kept Salford backstreet (bulldozed, now, like everything of value in that city). It wasn’t a spooky house at all, by any rational standard … but to a child of my age, the gulf of time and taste was enough to make me feel ill-at-ease and a stranger in the home of any elderly relative. I read the last couple of stories in an unfamiliar bed with flannel sheets and heavy blankets — my own blanket at home had pictures of parachutes and jeeps on it — and when I finally switched off the bedside lamp, there was still a weak illumination in the room from a streetlight just outside the window. I could see the big, dark shapes of the furniture and, lit from the window like a little stage, I could see the top of the dressing-table. On this dressing-table stood — or rather, knelt — two figurines. They were carved out of smooth black stone and they represented an African man and woman, both unclothed but tastefully featureless. Black nakedness somehow seemed to be considered apart from the taboos of the age, which would explain why National Geographic was never kept under the counter with all the skin magazines. I must have been lying there for about half an hour before anything happened. So, what did happen? What happened was that the male figurine got to its feet, and walked to the edge of the dressing-table and looked down. He seemed to move at double speed, with a flicker like an overcranked film. As he turned away from the edge, the female was standing up with the obvious intention of repeating the action. I tried to close my eyes and look away, but I couldn’t. As the woman came forward the male was pacing back and forth behind her, as if trying to get the measure of this surface on which he found himself trapped. Neither of them made any sound. Every now and again they would dash back to their carved plinths for a few moments of rest and recharge. I don’t remember anything that ever scared me more. Not then, not since. I know exactly what was happening, of course. My body was on the brink of sleep and my mind was still racing, and the barriers between imagination and perception had dropped. I don’t know how long I lay there, watching this bizarre show that my imagination was conjuring out of the available materials, but what I do know is that I believed in it without question. I still do, in a way. You can add all of the later rationalizations that you want, but when you strip these away you’re left with one simple certainty: you know what you saw. I returned the book. Didn’t see it again for twenty-five years, when I moved some paperbacks while browsing at a convention bookstall and found myself face-to-face with that same Ballantine edition. There had been other landmark books for me in the intervening time — Wells, Bierce, Levin, Farris, King, Straub — but this had been the first. I hesitated — there are few things more elusive and disappointing than past magic — and then I bought it. How could I do anything else? I felt as if I was welcoming it home. The stories hold up. Styles and fashions have changed, but for me the line back in time stays unbroken. There’s only one difficulty that I find myself unable to resolve. I still can’t work out which nine stories are the horrors, and which one the dr
eam … — STEPHEN GALLAGHER
57: [1959] ROBERT BLOCH - Psycho
Fairvale, California. The obese Norman Bates lives with his domineering mother and runs the isolated Bates Motel. Mary Crane, a young woman fleeing from a robbery she has committed on impulse, is beheaded in the shower by the insane Mrs. Bates. Norman tries to cover up the crime, which is investigated by a private detective (who is also murdered by Norman’s mother), and by the dead girl’s sister and boyfriend. Finally, it develops that Mrs. Bates has been dead for years, poisoned by her son, and that Norman is a schizophrenic who becomes homicidal when he takes on his mother’s personality. Famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960 from a screenplay by Joseph Stefano, with a definitive performance by Anthony Perkins, Psycho has become the watchword for a certain kind of violent/suspense/psychological thriller. Bloch wrote a sequel, Psycho 2 (1982), which was not adapted into the 1983 film of the same name. Further sequels include the cinema’s Psycho III (1986), television’s Bates’ Motel (1987) and Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), and Bloch’s novel Psycho House (1990).
Horror: The 100 Best Books Page 16
