86: [1982] DENNIS ETCHISON - The Dark Country
A collection of short material written between 1972 and 1981, The Dark Country demonstrates the quiet, modern American Gothic strain of which Etchison is a master. Typically, he writes of the horrors that stalk motel car parks (“It Only Comes Out at Night”), laundromats (“Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly”), or all-night drug stores (“The Late Shift”). This volume also contains a loosely connected series of science fiction horror stories (“The Machine Demands a Sacrifice”, “Calling All Monsters”, “The Dead Line”) about organ transplants. Etchison is among the most exquisitely depressing voices in modern horror and the title story of this collection won both the 1981 British Fantasy Award and the 1982 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.
***
In a world brutalized by televised overkill from Beirut and Northern Ireland, it takes a Master of the Horror Genre to set his stories in the late 20th century and come up with anything more gut-churning than what passes for everyday life. Dennis Etchison is such a Master and The Dark Country is such a collection. Eschewing the gore of the Texas Chainsaw set he gives us instead the understated atrocity — the inference rather than the actuality, the razor-blade as opposed to the hatchet. Just beneath the surface of his stultifyingly ordinary world something unspeakable is going on. Victim and reader alike are lulled into a sense of false security, only to be caught on the hop by the unexpected outrage. For Etchison works on two levels. In reading him we become his victim and he plays us like the expert angler plays the fish. One moment we are swimming, womb-warm in well-known waters, the next we are hoist on the impaling hook, torn into the killing air and left to thrash out an agonized death in an alien world where even the elements conspire against us. There are echoes of Poe in these first-person narratives and yet the subjects are uncomfortably contemporary. The preoccupation with premature burial is replaced by an equally chilling but updated terror, felt at some time by all of us, that when our time comes to go, gently or otherwise, into that dark night, we might instead be prevented and preserved, quail’s eggs in aspic, brain-dead yet breathing, so that our vital organs may be torn from our shuddering flesh and sewn into other bodies, other lives. Read “The Dead Line” before you sign that Donor Card. Or, on second thoughts … don’t. Each of these stories has been crafted with the delicacy of a miniaturist so that what we end up with is a series of small, disturbing masterpieces. From “The Pitch”, in which a super salesman slices off his own particular corner of the food processing market to “We Have Been Here Before” which reminds us that not all psychics are saintly souls, each is a tiny gem. Most of the tales begin innocuously enough, the settings mundane in their normality — the supermarket, the launderette, the motel bedroom. The characters are ordinary too. Rather like us. They leave us with the distinctly unpleasant feeling that anytime now … or at least one of these days … maybe … The Dark Country is the kind of book which, days after laying it aside, causes one to look more closely than usual at the parking attendant with the secret smile or draw back a hand from the waitress as she presents us with the cheque, for fear that her blood-red nails might be tipped with just that. Etchison cradles us in the palm of his hand, almost persuading us that we are travelling well-trod ground, secure in the knowledge that we have read it all before. Only when our defences are down do his fingers tighten around our vulnerable flesh and begin to squeeze … Like the hungry lips of the “Daughter of the Golden West”. I defy any red-blooded male, having read that one, to ever again submit to a fellatious tongue without at least a frisson of apprehension. — SAMANTHA LEE
87: [1983] KARL EDWARD WAGNER - In a Lonely Place
Although best known for his violent and sophisticated series of heroic fantasy tales featuring Kane, the immortal Mystic Swordsman, Karl Edward Wagner has been contributing a number of highly original horror stories to small press magazines and anthologies since the 1970s. His first collection, In a Lonely Place, was published as a paperback original in 1983 with an introduction by Peter Straub, and contains “In the Pines”, “Where the Summer Ends”, “Sticks”, “The Fourth Seal”, “.220 Swift”, “The River of Night’s Dreaming” and “Beyond Any Measure”. It was reprinted the following year in hardcover by Scream/Press with an extra story, “More Sinned Against”, and a new afterword by the author. His untimely death in 1994 robbed the field of one of its major talents, and his final fiction was collected in Exorcisms and Ecstasies.
***
Karl Edward Wagner is among the most important and accomplished contemporary writers to have emerged from the tradition of the horror story, and In a Lonely Place (graced with delicately menacing illustrations by Ron and Val Lakey Lindahn) is one of the most impressive horror collections to have appeared for quite some time. Where many recent horror writers appear to have learned too much of their craft from their own generation, Wagner draws strength from his considerable knowledge of the history of the field. Indeed, In a Lonely Place demonstrates the development of the genre from the landscapes of the Gothic novel through the ghost story and pulp fiction to the modern selfconsciously psychological horror story, and does so with a good deal of individuality and unexpectedness. Wagner isn’t a writer who seeks to conceal his influences, as the title of the book — with its clustering references to Bogart, Nicholas Ray, Dorothy B. Hughes and Walter de la Mare — makes clear. (The assumption that the reader will note the references also implies that Wagner is a writer to be read attentively.) Thus the earliest tale, “In the Pines”, a ghost story which perhaps isn’t only that, acknowledges its echo of The Beckoning Fair One”, though the reader may be more struck by the ways in which it prefigures The Shining, published three years later. “In the Pines” is the first statement of one of Wagner’s recurring themes, the swallowing up of characters and their psychological conflicts by a vividly imagined, almost hallucinatory landscape. If “In the Pines” incorporates Wagner’s tributes to several aspects of British supernatural fiction, not least a piny whiff of Algernon Blackwood, “The Fourth Seal” both reaches further back, to Faust, and deserves to be hailed as a progenitor of the modern tale of medical horror where the mad doctors are not so much visionaries, misguided or otherwise, as professionals who have sold their souls to the job. That the tale derives from Wagner’s observations of medical school makes it even more dismaying. The reader may turn with some relief to “Sticks”, one of the few original Lovecraftian stories of the seventies, a witty and touching tribute to Weird Tales and in particular to the artist Lee Brown Coye. With its enigmatic landscape strewn with lattices that seem on the point of turning into symbols, the story also reinvents the Gothic in terms of the psychedelic decade. “.220 Swift” was written partly with a Lovecraftian anthology in mind, but found a home in an anthology of newer terrors. Though both Lovecraft and Machen loom in its shadows, it reaches back to an earlier myth, and its scenes of underground terror are all Wagner’s own. “Where the Summer Ends” is the most sustained tale of terror in the book, but “The River of Night’s Dreaming” may be the finest story; it is certainly the most variously disturbing, and a masterpiece. In this story Wagner uses Robert W. Chambers’ mysterious symbol The King in Yellow as personally as Lovecraft did in reconceiving it as “The Necronomicon”. “The River of Night’s Dreaming” repays especially attentive reading, and offers Wagner’s finest nightmare landscape to put the reader in the mood. “Beyond Any Measure” is both an unusually powerful treatment of the confrontation with the Other and an enviably original variation on the theme of vampirism, firmly rooted in the conventions of such stories. With their erotic explicitness, these last two tales might have had difficulty being published until recently, and the story that followed, “More Sinned Against”, was rejected by a horror anthologist who lacked the courage of his genre on the grounds that the drugs used by the characters were insufficiently disapproved of, a doubly absurd objection to the story. “More Sinned Against” is the first example of a bleaker phase of Wagner�
��s work, where the landscape is mostly psychological. Other examples may be found in his later collection, Why Not You And I?, alongside such stories as “Sign of the Salamander” and its oblique sequel, “Blue Lady, Come Back”, remarkable rediscoveries of the merits of pulp writing. Lately Wagner’s short fiction has seemed limited by a bitterness akin to that apparent in Cronenberg’s The Brood and Amis’s Stanley and the Women, and it is to be hoped this is a darkness he needs to live through in order to emerge refreshed. The contemporary horror story would be much poorer without the full range of his intelligence and imagination and often audacious originality. — RAMSEY CAMPBELL
88: [1983] TIM POWERS - The Anubis Gates
Brendan Doyle, an academic and expert on the poet William Ashbless — a contemporary of Coleridge’s — is hired by millionaire J. Cochran Darrow to act as an expert guide on a time travel field trip to 1810 in order to attend one of Coleridge’s lectures. Once in the past, things go awry and Doyle finds himself lost and caught up in a complex series of plots involving ancient Egyptian gods, sinister travelling showmen, a body-hopping spirit whose victims turn into hairy apes, various literary notables, mad scientists, and a community of artificially created mutants living under the streets of 19th-century London. Among other things, Doyle is tricked into another body and forced to live out the life of the little-known Ashbless, a fictional but convincing character who also figures briefly in James Blaylock’s Homunculus (1985). The Anubis Gates is the ideal post-modernist genre novel, at once science fiction, horror, literary fantasy, historical recreation, swashbuckling thriller and comic apocalypse: it was awarded the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award in 1984.
***
There is no getting away from the man who invented steampunk. Charles Dickens (1812-70) may not be mentioned by name anywhere in The Anubis Gates, but his shaping presence can be felt everywhere in the populous chortling shadows of the London of 1810 to which the 20th-century hero of Tim Powers’ time-travel fantasy travels, never to return. It does not much matter that Powers sets his tale in a time Dickens could never have experienced, and of which he never wrote, because novels like Oliver Twist (1837-9), which depicts a London not dissimilar to that explored by Brendan Doyle, are a kind of apothesis of the supernatural melodramas popular at the beginning of the 19th century, so that Dickens’ Fagin and Powers’ Horrabin share a common source in Grand Guignol. Similarly, the Gothic fever-dreams of such writers as Monk Lewis or Charles Maturin can be seen to underpin the oneiric inscapes of the greatest achievements of Dickens — Bleak House (1852-3) or Little Dorrit (1855-7) or Our Mutual Friend (1865) — those novels in which the nightmare of London attains lasting and definitive and horrific form. For Dickens that nightmare of London may be a prophetic vision of humanity knotted into the subterranean entrails of the city machine, while for Powers the London of 1810 may be a form of nostalgia, a dream theatre for the elect to star in, buskined and immune; but at the heart of both writers’ work glow the lineaments of the last world city. Between Dickens and Powers, of course, much water has flowed down the filthy Thames. Between steampunk — a term which can be used to describe any SF novel set in any version of the previous century, from which entropy has been banned — and the desolate expressionism of its true founder lies what one might call Babylon-upon-Thames-punk. Fin de sie writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton attempted to domesticate Dickens’ London by transforming it into a kind of Arabian Nights theme park capable of encompassing (and taming) all the strangenesses that an Empire in pullulant decline could possibly import. Even H. G. Wells was sometimes capable of quasi-Dickensian sentiment (as in novels like Love and Mr. Lewisham, 1900) about the London he more normally destroyed utterly. That this enterprise of domestication was deeply suspect, most writers of Babylon-upon-Thames-punk knew full well, and as a result much of what they wrote gave off an air of bad-faith complacency, uneasy nostalgia, weird inanition. It is from their doomed enterprise (and from other sources as well) that contemporary steampunk authors like K. W. Jeter and Powers and James Blaylock and others have borrowed not only a vision of a talismanic city, but also (it must be said) some of the complacency and diseased nostalgia of the epigones who thought to tame Dickens. But there is no getting away from Dickens, and The Anubis Gates, despite the occasional chilling Chestertonian whimsy, is radiant with the ambience of his genius. The villains of the piece — like Horrabin, the beggar-king on stilts, half-immolated by the energy of his own self-depiction, or Dog-Faced Joe, or the Spoon-Sized Boys — strut through Powers’ pages with a grotesque theatricality that is proudly Dickensian. The geography of London —from the Avernal Thames to the underground cathedrals whose crepuscular Romantic arches evoke thoughts of Henry Fuseli in at least one character — has all the inspired animism of Dickens at his most convinced. And the inturning twists of plot — fumbled, as so often in Dickens, only in the final pages — seem to tell the tale of a country in which anything can happen, and not decay; in which entropy is reversed. This — it must be said — is not the message of Charles Dickens. An inextricable compact between world and self ordinates the whole of Dickens’ work, a rhetoric of entailment. If his London is glowing and corrupt, multitudinous and confining, star-shot and subaqueous, then it is so by reason of the human soul, which it expresses. In The Anubis Gates, on the other hand, world and self are carefully separated from one another. As they twist and dance through the long theatre of their tale, Powers’ protagonists — Brendan Doyle and Elizabeth Tichy — are like tourists in an enchanted wonderland; they are like readers of The Anubis Gates. We do not enter their interior lives, nor are we meant to, and the novel only fails when, by all rights, we should come to grips with some soul in extremis, as in the final pages when, after innumerable adventures and scrapes, Doyle is finally tortured to death — or so close to actual death as makes no difference. We hear his screams, but from off-stage. Before he can die of his terrible wounds, the barge of Ra surfaces into the world to encompass his fallen form, and to deliver him, like a newborn child, to the waters of old Father Thames, whole again and baptized. To understand the superflux of implications unleashed at this point, perhaps unwittingly, we must enter Doyle’s transfigured mind; but of the resurrection and epiphany of the hero we are tendered nothing but a brief passage of hearsay, offhandedly couched. Powers’ strategy has allowed him no choice in the matter. Terrible monsters do lurk in the cellars of The Anubis Gates, and fever-dream hints are dropped of circumstances in which it is possible for the hero truly to die. But after all, steampunk is a form of theodicy, and Powers displaces these intimations of the revolution-and-Frankenstein-haunted exterior world on to a harlequinade of magicians and other villains who know their place, genetically familiar templates whose attempts to spook England into decline and corruption and despair are constantly thwarted by the invulnerable Adamic Doyle. In externalizing the horrors of the world of change, Powers has invented a tale of paradise, where entropy lies down with the lamb and the steam yachts run on time. In The Anubis Gates he has written a book of almost preternatural geniality, a book which it is possible (rare praise) to love. Let us all, it suggests, co-inhabit the Christmas London of Brendan Doyle, and gape like children at the pageant of the world-stage of his triumphs. We do. He is having the time of his life. We join him. — JOHN CLUTE
Horror: The 100 Best Books Page 25
