74: [1977] HUGH B. CAVE - Murgunstrumm and Others
Published by the North Carolina imprint, Carcosa, Murgunstrumm and Others is almost 500 pages long and collects together 26 tales of horror — the best of Hugh B. Cave’s hundreds of published stories, covering forty years of writing. Rarely reprinted since their original appearances in the pulp magazines Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Argosy, etc., this line-up of lurid chillers includes “The Isle of Dark Magic” and “The Death Watch”, Cave’s only two contributions to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos; “Horror in Wax”, a grisly tale of vengeance from the single issue of Thrilling Mysteries; “The Affair of the Clutching Hand” and “The Strange Case of No. 7”, two early tales of Cave’s occult investigator, Dr. Ronald Hale; “The Whisperers”, “The Strange Death of Ivan Gromleigh”, “Prey of the Nightborn”, “Purr of a Cat” and “The Caverns of Time”, all written under Cave’s jokey pseudonym, “Justin Case” for Spicy Mystery Stories; and “Murgunstrumm” itself — a 30,000 word short novel about the cursed Gray Toad Inn and its vampiric inhabitants. The book is gruesomely illustrated with more than thirty-five original drawings by Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye. Winner of the 1978 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.
***
I started reading the really weird stuff in my early teens. By then I’d already explored all I could of Haggard, Wells, and some Poe — Poe was a little more difficult. Mainly I loved adventure stories, and the stranger the adventures the better. Then I got lucky: I gained access to a secondhand book market littered with piles of old American pulps. Weird Tales may well have been the “unique” magazine, but it was only one of many, many pulps. Back in 1950-511 could buy 15-to 20-year-old copies of Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective, Argosy, and many other titles for as little as sixpence (2p to you —or maybe four cents to you) per copy! Certain names would recur in the contents pages: names like Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Robert E. Howard, until I got to remember them and started to look for them, just as in a few more years I’d be hunting for Lovecraft, C. L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith. The reason I looked for them was because I’d learned they wouldn’t let me down — or rarely. Oh, these were only “pulp” stories, no doubt about it, but their authors had something; and someone who had an awful lot of it was one Hugh B. Cave. I’d had some bad old times with that bloke! The years intervened. Times changed. Titles I remembered had been extinct even before I had read them! Long before! All of those magazines were collectors’ items by the time I became a soldier. And I stayed a soldier until December 1980. But in 1977 Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa Press had published this book called Murgunstrumm and Others — by one Hugh B. Cave — and I had sworn to buy a copy. Actually meeting Cave at Worldcon in Providence, October 1986, galvanized me into action — at long last. We spoke only briefly but … Hugh was so nice and easy to talk to! You had to like him. He had what his stories had. And that was why I bought the book: to see if it was still there, that certain something which had kept me turning over those piles of old pulps which (God help me for a cretin!) I really should have bought up and kept, each and every copy, by means of which I’d now be halfway to rich. That certain something was still there in Lovecraft, I knew, and in Bloch and Moore. But was it there in Cave? I needn’t have worried. Yes it was still there: treasure. A treasure “Cave”. A veritable Aladdin’s “Cave”! I didn’t remember all of the titles but I certainly remembered some of the stories. “The Watcher in the Green Room” and “The Crawling Curse” were both from Weird Tales, and “Boomerang” from Argosy. But … talk about a book! Pushing five hundred pages of book! And 43 wide lines to the page. And illustrated (profusely simply does not do it justice) by the entirely alien and yet superbly earthy Lee Brown Coye. He was from Weird Tales too. With a book like this … I mean, which story do you read first? And what wonderfully grotesque illo do you study? “Murgunstrumm”, the title story, is itself a short novel — and after that there are twenty-five more stories! But describe them? Hint at their contents? Not here, friend! No way — no room — and anyway, how to start? The best I can do is steal a line from a Karl Wagner letter to Cave, which goes: “For sheer unrestricted horror, I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it”. And about Coye’s artwork: “Turning Coye loose on something like this is like giving a straight razor to a psychopath.” And about the pair of them together: “You (Cave) and Coye ought to flood the coronary care units all across the country!” Now I know Karl personally and he’s said a few true words in his time, but none truer than these. So here’s me stuck for space, just a few more words, and not having said anything very much about my subject. Some things are like that: too big to allow room for trivial observation. So big that even detailed observation might appear trivial. But if I had to choose my favourite book again next year, it would still be this one. That is, unless someone had been damn busy between times! Hugh B. Cave is still alive — is he ever alive! His latest weird story (or one of them), “No Flowers for Henry”, can be found in Whispers for October ‘87. It’s polished — an example of Cave’s art perfected. On the other hand many of the stories in Murgunstrumm have rough edges too. These are the ones that tore my imagination and put splinters in it back when I was a kid. And reading them anew … why, the scars start itching all over again! — BRIAN LUMLEY
75: [1977] BERNARD TAYLOR - Sweetheart, Sweetheart
David Warwick returns to England from New York because he instinctively feels that his twin brother, Colin, has died. In Hillingham, the village where Colin lived, David begins to gather the full extent of a series of tragedies which have recently claimed the lives of Colin and his wife, Helen. Moving into Garrard’s Hill Cottage — which has a history of unhappy owners meeting violent ends — David begins to suspect that murder has been done. When David’s American girlfriend, Shelagh, joins him, the girl becomes the focus of a series of attacks David at first thinks are the work of Jean Timpson, a local woman who helps out at the cottage. Gradually, he learns that the place is home to a malevolent, jealous female spirit who has notched up many victims over the years. Taylor’s second novel, which follows his The Godsend (1976), has been called by Douglas Winter “one of the finest ghost stories ever written”. Subsequently, Taylor has written the novels The Reaping, The Moorstone Sickness, The Kindness of Strangers, Madeleine, Mother’s Boys and Wild Card, along with such nonfiction studies as Cruelly Murdered, Perfect Murder (with Stephen Knight) and Murder at the Priory (with Kate Clarke).
***
Ghosts were a reliable staple of dark fantasy long before they were ever shrouded in fiction and put to paper. And because of their longevity, and their evident tenacity, there is by now little new about them. We know what they are, what they represent, what they portend — usually before the author gets around to his own explanation. Yet, whether these ghosts are pranksters or tragic figures or something in between, they persist in our literature. Perhaps as reminders of our own mortality, or as promises of life after death, or as warnings that life after death isn’t what we hope or pray it will be. The viewpoint depends on the writer, and the reader, and just as often does not really matter. Just as often, a ghost is a ghost is a ghost, no further explanation necessary. The author who attempts such a story must be aware that he’s walking on well-trod ground, and his tread has no recourse but to be different if the story is to be notable, and lasting. That difference does not have to be drastic, nor need it be even visible at first glance. But to add substance to the canon requires something that has not been done, or done well, before. Sweetheart, Sweetheart, by Bernard Taylor, is then the best ghost story (in novel form) I have ever read, and am ever likely to read. Nothing on either side of the Atlantic has thus far even come close. Any number of elements make this novel special: that it is a true novel, and not some spawn of a television generation noted primarily for its minuscule attention span, marks it out as distinctive; that its elegant use of language demonstrates no condescension, signals a respect for the reader
’s intelligence far too often lacking in contemporary fiction of any stripe; and that it achieves its effects without artifice speaks volumes about the care and caring that went into its writing. A ghost story ought to have a certain unease, an anxiety, an air near palpable tension that is played upon by the writer to summon and engage as much of his reader’s imagination as possible, in what amounts to active collaboration. Through this, the fact that we already know this is a ghost story means nothing. What are important are the lives of the characters, the people, who are involved, and how they deal with the real and preternatural forces which oppose them. Or lure them. And rather than opt to pile explicit horror upon gruesome horror, throw one body atop another, toss one cliche after another into the pot to satisfy what such a story is “supposed to be”, Taylor has successfully created both a world and a population we can reach and understand with all our senses, and all their attendant, honest, emotions. In dark fantasy, to give one an honest chill through a story that holds and entertains us is a mark of success; to multiply those chills without dissipating them, to entertain without pretense, and at the same time conclude an already emotionally draining story with a wrench that is at once heartbreaking and horrifying, is the mark of a potential classic. Sweetheart, Sweetheart is precisely that. — CHARLES L. GRANT
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76: [1977] JOHN FARRIS - All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By
In 1942, Clipper Bradwin, a promising young army officer from a wealthy family, plans to marry a socially prominent heiress. The lavish ceremony, which takes place at an exclusive Southern Military Academy, is disrupted by the mysterious ringing of a silent bell, an apparent earthquake, and the bridegroom’s sudden attack of sabre-wielding homicidal mania. Although Clipper, his bride, and his demagogue father are killed, his brother Champ and young mother-in-law Nhora survive. Two years later, Champ returns shattered from the War in the Pacific to Dasharoons, the huge family plantation, accompanied by Jackson Holley, a mysterious English doctor. The tragic events that follow are traced back to unpleasant experiences Jackson and Nhora had while younger at the hands of an obscure African tribe, and a race riot-cum-massacre in which Champ’s father was dishonourably involved. Farris weaves a powerful and complicated story, and delivers the best modern treatment of the lamia and voodoo themes in horror literature. The novel reflects the author’s interests in Africa, the military, social history and America’s power elite, as also examined in his Catacombs (1982), Son of the Endless Night (1985) and Wildwood (1987).
***
No frills: All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By is a unique horror novel; the strongest single work yet produced by the field’s most powerful individual voice. The title countermands the phony melodramatics of drippy gerunds or the exhausted syllabary of horror’s titular cliches: dark or blood or night this or that. [It was published in Britain as Bad Blood (ed.)] “This house was built on the bodies and blood of Africans,” notes the half-breed prophet of the resurgent goddess Ai-da Wedo — “a ravishing serpent woman who waxed and grew powerful as a consequence of — sexual desire.” This house is Dasharoons, wellspring of three generations of Bradwins, a sprawling Southern estate still going strong at the close of America’s age of slavery. Farris’ strongest theme is cultural collision, represented in the collaboration of pedigree that is Little Judge — half Bradwin, half high priest of ancient African sorcery. Farris’ juxtaposition of a partially sunken Mississippi riverboat with a voodoo temple (secreted in the swamplands that are slowly swallowing the vessel) is the fulcrum image of this complex saga of deadly erotic obsession and racial karma debt repaid. Far from “feel good” horror that restores order to the world by the final chapter, Farris prefers to concentrate on the evils people wreak upon themselves. The restoration of balance is not always a good or pretty thing, and the ultimately poisonous mingling of disparate cultures in All Heads Turn offers not even temporary respite — regardless of allegiance, all the characters are doomed. Apart from being a rare racial horror novel, the fatal magnetism of the Ai-da Wedo and of Nhora Bradwin for Jackson Holley and the cursed Bradwin clan make All Heads Turn the finest modern sexual horror novel yet written. Most fiction employing Haitian or African magic boils down to elementary vengeance-via-voodoo, or a procedural “how to” story about little more than its own occult research. The novel’s plot is a finely tangled viper’s nest of incident into which Farris has not only deftly braided the voodoo, but dovetailed two fascinating bloodlines united by a common past. The horror elements and character narrative are inextricably interdependent (a similar structure, minus the supernatural, is seen in Shatter [1981]). The succinct prose artfully forms instantaneous brain pictures for the reader. Clipper’s aborted wedding turns hallucinogenic as the stuffy formalities skew into a surgically dispassionate slaughter. Farris never wallows in artificially inflated detail or masturbatory excess, yet his writing is always unflinching, specific, precise. He is not terrified of good sex between adults, or confused by it, as most of his contemporaries seem to be. The veracity of his erotic passages serves well this book’s unusual story, which redefines love and shows us a compelling aberrancy as pure as a genetic mutation. The closing scenes, symmetrically recapitulating the wedding which opens the book, are surreal and hypnotic. The web pulls taut and knots tight. The end is unforgettable, the blackest of fade-outs, a conclusion whose potency does not pale with repeated reading. Farris claims that he “hated every page” of All Heads Turn while it was in-work, and that “up until the last night [of writing], I had no idea how it was going to end”. That night, ironically, preceded his marriage to his second wife, and today he notes the book as his personal favorite among his own novels. “There’s nothing that I’ve seen or heard about that’s remotely like it,” he says. Likewise, when John Farris is on high-burn, no one can match the skill with which he puts words together. All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By is conclusive proof. Period. — DAVID J. SCHOW
77: [1977] STEPHEN KING - The Shining
Jack Torrance, a would-be writer, takes a job as winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, a vast resort — snowbound from October till April — in Colorado. Alone with him in the place, which has a history of violence and evil, are his wife Wendy and his slightly psychic son, Danny. Jack tries to get to work, but falls increasingly under the malign influence of the Overlook, while Danny starts seeing the ghosts of the hotel’s previous victims. Finally, Jack becomes completely absorbed in the Overlook and attempts to repeat the crime of an early caretaker who murdered his wife and children in the place. Only Danny’s psychic link with Dick Hallorann, a black cook who works in the hotel in the summer, can help him and his mother escape from the transformed Jack. The Shining works many of King’s favourite themes — the child with paranormal powers, the pressures that turn a basically decent man bad, a horror that threatens to destroy an average American family, the extremely haunted house. The novel was controversially filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, and in 1997 it became an overlong mini-series, directed by Mick Garris (from a teleplay by King). It is Kubrick’s Jack, however, who reappears as a character in David Thomson’s mosaic novel Suspects (1985).
***
I’m not sure that The Shining has ever been properly understood or appreciated — it has been imitated (even its title has been imitated), filmed, and analyzed, all badly; by now it is an early element in a large and varied body of work, the merits of which tend to be taken for granted; its extraordinary special merits, not quite taken in at the time of its publication except perhaps by other writers, have become less visible as its author followed it with novel after novel and became not only a fixture on the bestseller list but also something like a personification of the bestseller list. The reasons why that should have happened to Stephen King are all present in full strength in The Shining, but at the time conventional wisdom declared that he was (only!) a phenomenal paperback success, read by young audiences — his subject matter inspired a certain degree of condescension among people who should have known
better. The fact is that The Shining is a masterwork, a bold product of an original vision, a novel of astonishing passion, urgency, tenderness, understanding, and invention. I think its most significant characteristic is its rich and generous inclusiveness, which is the inclusiveness of a powerful talent discovering its full capacities. The Shining’s themes encompass alcoholism, child abuse, imagination, madness, responsibility and loyalty, historical crime — a very Jamesian history — art, and giftedness, and the novel effortlessly locates all this material within a narrative frame that glides with great assurance towards its many, carefully nuanced, expertly judged and placed climaxes. The first time I read it I was moved by the beauty of its ornamentation which was as florid and precise as the pattern in a Persian carpet: Jack Torrance’s childhood is as fully ornamented as the Overlook Hotel: for it was that sort of instinctive detailing that made the terror ache throughout the book and in which the lyric terror accumulated. I remember also being stunned by the book’s style. This was not exactly literary, but much better than a conventional literary style, being a fresh freewheeling unrestrained representation of the way his characters’ minds actually moved. It was quick and lively, as responsive to mood as music. This way of writing became more familiar as Steve adapted it to the requirements of books that followed The Shining, but it was never done better than here. The first time I finished reading The Shining, I turned right back to the beginning of the book and started it again. I can’t think of another book in the field of horror that affected me as strongly, and of only very few outside it. In its uniting of an almost bruising literary power, a deep sensitivity to individual experience, and its operatic convictions, it is a very significant work of art. — PETER STRAUB
Horror: The 100 Best Books Page 22
