Horror Express Volume Two

by Bentley Little

  He wanted to draw back, cringe in terror and revulsion, make them drag him up onto the gallows. Instead he found himself clumsily mounting a step at a time, swaying, trying to fall but his balance held. Now he was at the top step, the rope brushing against his face, a loop that seemed to take on leering features in the gloom; that hangman's face, gloating, savouring every second of this.

  Ballinger's hands were moving. He was conscious of an upwards stilted movement, his fingers flexing, groping; grasping the rope. This was even crazier. They should be pinioning his wrists, putting a bag over his face so that he couldn't see. That was when it would all end. But they weren't. He could feel the hangman's power commanding him again. Put the noose around your neck, Ballinger. Pull it tight until you are choking!

  Mentally Ballinger offered a meagre resistance, physically he obeyed. The knot slid easily, tightened against his adam's apple so that the bile came up again. He stared with bulging eyes. There was a clock on the wall, a Smiths like the one he had in his studio, a big while face and black hands, just coming up to nine o'clock. There was a roaring in his ears, he could hear his heart thumping, his pulses racing madly. His clothing was sticking damply to his sweating body. You can't go through with this. This is some kind of sick joke!

  It wasn't! The hangman was standing where he could see him, thin bloodless lips drawn back into a mirthless smile, but all the condemned man saw were those eyes behind the mask, glowing coals of malevolence that smouldered with a hatred that transcended the duties of a public executioner. Ballinger's terror escalated, reached its peak. He was trying to scream but no sound came.

  He felt his feet starting to move again, tried to hold back but there was no way he could check them. Stepping off into mid-air, a kind of floating feeling, then falling. A sudden jerk that seemed to stretch his neck yet it did not snap. Choking, the roaring and thumping inside him deafening, a red haze of pain and fear before his eyes but he could still see that hangman. Oh God, the fellow laughed openly, the warders sharing in this macabre fit of humour; all looking at Ballinger.

  Ballinger’s arms and legs flailed. He got his fingers up to the noose, tried to tear it away from the chafing skin but it had bitten too deep. Struggling in a red and black fog, still seeing those piercing eyes, jeering laughter ringing in his ears.

  You’ll hang by the neck until you are dead, Ballinger, and that won’t be long now!

  A crack like the report of a pistol. Ballinger felt the pain for just one brief moment and then it was all over.

  Boland regarded the gently swinging body, resisted the temptation to kick it in the guts. He never wasted energy, never showed futile emotion. As far as he was concerned it was all over. A life for a life.

  He drew a wad of banknotes from his pocket, began peeling some off, handed them to the tall man who was in the process of removing his long black cloak and face mask.

  ‘Here you are, Rowlands,’ he grunted, ‘or would you prefer me to call you Mister Hypto?’

  The other took the proffered money, stuffed it in an inside pocket.’"I hope we do not end up being charged with murder ourselves,’ he muttered.

  ‘No chance,’ Boland grinned. ‘It’s as clear a case of suicide as I’ve ever seen. Damn it, the fellow had hallucinations; you, me and Luke here witnessed them, didn’t we Luke?’

  ‘Sure,’ the third man nodded, ‘we did just that, boss. This guy got the idea into his head that he’d been tried and convicted of Milner’s murder and sentenced to death. Even rigged up his own gallows and hung himself. We didn’t do nothin’ ‘cept watch. As plain a case o’ suicide as I ever did see!’

  ‘All the same we’d better get the hell outta here,’ Boland grinned across at Rowlands. ‘Mr. Hypto is a busy man and maybe one day if I ever get the time of his so-called ‘unbelievable hypnotic performances’. On second thoughts maybe I won’t, just in case the audience gets the idea of hanging themselves!’

  NIGHTMARE ENGINEER:

  An interview with Rick Hudson

  by Catherine Patten

  Every once in a while horror is reinvigorated by a fresh talent that takes the genre into previously uncharted realms of the weird. In the 1920s H.P. Lovecraft took horror from the over-familiar confines of the gothic 18th and 19th centuries and placed it firmly in the 20th century with his visions of cosmic nihilism. Stephen King brought horror closer to home in the 1970s, embedding it in the minutia of everyday life and having horror intrude on the lives of very ordinary people. The 1980s saw Clive Barker explore dark and disturbed sexualities in his Books of Blood, whereas the ‘New Weird’ was heralded in the 1990s by Thomas Ligotti. Now the 21st century has its horror innovator: Rick Hudson.

  Working in the medium of the short story Hudson creates a distinctive fusion of comedy and horror to disturb and unsettle his readers. That is not to say that Hudson writes comic horror, or horror comedy in the vein of Scream or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, rather his perhaps Pythonesque grotesque alarms us even more as we are in uncertain liminal territory between two seemingly opposing genres. This is perhaps best illustrated in his story ‘Mr Gibb’s Tenants’ (which appeared in Horror Express issue 5) in which the pedantry and repressed prissiness of the narrator and the inanity of his observations are juxtaposed by the terrible fact that he is host to three sentient singing tapeworms who feed on young children.

  This somewhat bizarre and frankly unsettling world of Hudson’s is also evidenced in ‘Bedlam Lullabies’, ‘The Museum of Lost Toys’, ‘The Circus of Id’ and his only foray so far into science fiction ‘The Sandmen’. All these stories are also marked by the writer’s quite remarkable writing skill. Critics repeatedly comment on Hudson’s phenomenal ability to use language and the lyrical, striking and often beautiful style he employs. Punk Globe magazine recently described his writing as:

  ‘Nothing short of brilliant and inspiring. Horror and fantasy enthusiasts will be interested in Hudson’s work as he has constructed truly original fiction out of an over-mined genre, while writers of all genres will no doubt marvel at Hudson’s mastery of language and literary technique’.

  I caught up with Rick Hudson on one of his frequent visits to Southampton. He pulls a chair out from the table in the shadows at the back of the bar. I am charmed that he calls me Ma’am. And then he offers me a drink, too! Hudson is a gentleman in Adidas Gazelles with astonishingly blue eyes and sharp cheekbones. He has a pack of Marlboro Light in the pocket of his denim jacket. Hudson is incredibly erudite but there are so many ideas lurching around his brain at anyone time that his mouth can’t physically keep up: he stutters. Either that or he thinks I’m not really listening. I’m all ears, Mr. Hudson, sir:

  Catherine Patten: Are your stories gratuitously unpleasant or is there a deeper meaning in the grotesquery?

  Rick Hudson: I don’t think my stories are gratuitously anything; if by gratuitous we mean done in a free and uncaring manner. The unpleasantness in my stories is always there for a reason: even if that reason is simply to make the reader laugh. More often than not though, the unpleasantness is there for a literary purpose: to somehow represent reality or feelings in a bizarre allegorical way. For me horror fiction (or the gothic, the uncanny or whatever you choose to call it) at its best functions like comedy, it uses grotesque and absurd situations to represent reality. But, because both horror and comedy both deal with ideas and emotions that are often ambiguous or because we are at best uncertain about them these ‘unrealistic’ genres are perhaps paradoxically more effective at representing these feelings of ambiguity and uncertainty than supposed realist or naturalistic fiction. So, no – not gratuitous . . . but playful, YES most certainly.

  CP. Do you consciously construct them or just write them and see where they go?

  RH. It depends to be honest. Some are more carefully constructed than others. Some are planned and plotted in excruciating detail, while others just skip off my pen. And there’s no relation between how planned they are and how ‘literary’ they are. So
for example, I’m just finishing editing two stories at the moment: ‘The Oval Mirror’ and ‘The Harlequin’s Widow’. ‘The Harlequin’s Widow’ is probably the more ‘literary’ of the two…. In that it has poetic aspirations and attempts to say things of some value; and do so with a degree of elegance. This one has pretty much come out of my head quite intuitively without me planning it at all. On the other hand, ‘The Oval Mirror’- which is a much more straight forward horror story - has taken an awful lot of planning because it finishes with a pay-off or ‘punch-line’ so I’ve had to work hard to make sure that the ‘set-up’ and ‘punch-line’ both work together.

  CP. Horror continues to be a massively popular genre. What is the attraction of the horrific in fiction?

  RH. People are generally attracted to fiction that represents their lives and emotional experience in one way or another…. even if it does so in an unrealistic manner. So, to give an example . . . I think Westerns appeal to men of a certain age not just because they are exciting adventure stories (although they are, and that’s great . . . don’t get me wrong), but because they are melodramatic and exaggerated stories about the kind of stuff blokes have to deal with: trying to do the right thing in the face of a world that seems to almost demand that you do the wrong thing; get / hang onto the girl; keep the family / farmstead / town / organisation together despite the people you’re trying to look after behaving like arseholes; standing up to the more powerful / successful guy who’s actually a bit of a cunt. Y’know bloke stuff. Uncanny / horror / gothic fiction does pretty much the same thing . . . but what it deals with is more ambivalent stuff and emotions we aren’t even sure of, or rather emotions we find it difficult to categorise. And it does all this by utilising odd, strange, weird and down-right unpleasant strategies. It allows us to explore the more liminal and contradictory states of our existence and psyches. It shows us a world we can’t identify but recognise.

  CP. You mention the terms uncanny/horror/gothic in tandem. Do they come under the same umbrella or are they one and the same?

  RH. It depends how pedantic you want to be. In general terms, these phrases are synonyms and can be used interchangeably. However in academic and literary critical circles they have very specific meanings. By horror we are referring to a generic term that is applied to a field of fiction which principally aims to achieve its emotional and poetic effects by eliciting what ostensibly seem negative and unpleasant emotional responses: whether this is through references to the supernatural; physical or psychological violence or other disturbing or disquieting images and ideas. Gothic is a stylistic term which refers to a form of heightened Romanticism which is rooted in traditional Germanic and Scandinavian rather than Greco-Roman aesthetics; and was in many ways a reaction against Classical art and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This style employs dark imagery and a melodramatic representation of emotional states. It prioritises the emotional over the cerebral and seeks to evoke the sublime: an awe inspiring beautiful dread. So, we can say that the Brontes are Gothic even though they weren’t writing horror, we could also claim that Beethoven’s music has Gothic qualities because whereas Mozart was Classical – in that he was creating beauty through elegance and finesse – Beethoven was aiming for a much more gut-driven clumsy raging beauty. The uncanny has two meanings. Literally it means ‘the unknown’ deriving from the German verb ‘kennen’: to know. However, in psychoanalytical literary criticism it refers to a principle explored by Sigmund Freud and Ernst Jensch in the early twentieth century; it is a rough translation of the German Das Unheimliche, which means ‘unhomely’ or ‘unfamiliar’. What Freud and Jensch meant by this was the feeling of something being simultaneous familiar and unfamiliar; and this feeling being both disturbing and appealing at the same time. There is a curious comforting reassurance in the disquiet Das Unheimliche excites. The being attracted and repelled at the same time feeling we sometimes get. But if we’re just talking in the pub, then we can use any of them freely to mean anything weird and creepy.

  CP. What does the term ‘horror’ mean to you?

  RH. What it means to me is a genre of fiction that enables you to trawl into the darker less certain areas of our consciousness and unconscious. Sometimes I’m confused myself about what I’m actually writing about. People have said to me “that story really affected me and spoke to me on some level . . . I knew it was communicating SOMETHING to me – something I didn’t understand but GOT on an intuitive level.” And my response has been “y’know that’s what I felt when I was writing it. I knew I was saying something . . . but had no idea what it was, at least not exactly. I couldn’t define it. Something intuitive that I couldn’t label myself’. So I guess it’s a genre that enables me to communicate to people on quite a deep emotional and intuitive level . . . but without me or the reader actually understanding what the fuck I am going on about.

  CP. What is your definition of horror fiction?

  RH. Walter Pater said that ‘all art aspires towards the condition of music’ and I think that horror is the closest literature comes towards music in that it communicates on an intuitive level and emotionally with the least call or dependency upon reason and exposition.

  CP. So taking the complete absence of reason into account, how can you make someone experience the uncanny in fiction given that people have different reactions to things based on their own experience?

  RH. By freaking them out by writing really weird shit. Ha Ha! No, seriously . . . that is a very valid point, but I think what illustrates the fact that you can do this is that I have found that people are quite often shocked, not so much by the ‘horrid bits’, as by the emotional familiarity. In a ‘How can you possibly know this is how I feel? How can you know I have such strange and odd thoughts and emotions? ’ kind of way. It’s the commonality of feeling that both disturbs and pleases them. I get that a lot as a response to ‘The Museum of Lost Toys’ – it does seem to strike a deep rooted emotional chord with people.

  CP. So is your fiction based on personal experience?

  RH. Well, so far I’ve had the good fortune not to be devoured from the inside by sentient tapeworms or have my head dissolved by acidic vomit; so ostensibly no. However, in some vague subterranean way I guess there’s usually some sort of personal stuff that goes through the exaggerator device and tom foolery mechanism that is my imagination. But I’m fucked if I could tell you what that stuff was or how it actually comes about. I’d probably be too embarrassed to tell you even if I did know.

  CP. Do people have their own personal nightmare of the horror? For example I find shipwrecks absolutely terrifying – they are still ships and still in the water so what’s the problem?

  RH. Probably yes. I assume you mean an actual ship wreck as in a thing at bottom of sea or a location rather than being in a ship wreck. This is not one I share but I can see the logic in the illogic here. Ship wrecks as locations (rather than events) are interstitial. They are things in the wrong place; they are at the bottom of the sea rather than floating on it. They are something from the world of the living and activity that has been misplaced into the realm of stillness and a realm where humans don’t belong. They are a reminder of death. They are graves. They are a reminder of our vulnerability and the precarious nature of our lives. Man and his technology beaten by nature despite his cleverness.

  CP. Is there a literal binary opposite of the uncanny?

  RH. How can there be a literal binary opposite to something that by definition cannot be located or defined? Dunno. A chest of draws from Argos. Erm, in literary terms Social Realism I guess. Journalism?

  CP. Some of your fiction focuses on humans as a source of food – ‘The Spider Elf’, ‘The Tattooed Man’,’ The Thing That Drank David’s Wife’,’ Foul Christ’ – why is this?

  RH. Because people being eaten is a very unpleasant and yet funny idea. The reason for this is different in each case; usually comic in one way or another. And usually down to either a practical jok
e, me taking the piss out of someone… or some equally immature reason. So, in the case of ‘The Spider Elf’ I did actually try and write a children’s story . . . and it was a children’s story until right at the very end when I got bored and thought ‘fuck it I’ll have the elf thing eat the kid’s head, I can’t be fucked with this anymore’. With ‘The Thing That Drank David’s Wife’ being eaten is really – I guess – a not very veiled allusion to rape. My reason for this is cos I was at an academic conference once and some tedious and self-righteous woman started berating me for writing horror (not that she’d ever read any of my stuff) cos it was – she maintained – all about violence against women and essentially about rape and so on etc. So I wrote a rape comedy as a means of saying ‘fuck you’ to her. The joke being that when it was published in Dark Horizons I was able to go up to her and say ‘You know you said that horror was about rape and violence against women? Well thanks for the idea… I tried it out, and look it worked. I’ve had this story published. Thanks for your help.’ Sanctimonious cunt.

  CP. Your writing sometimes comes across as offhand . . .

  RH. I just think that enhances the comic effect. Bathos. Dead-pan humour.

  CP. How has Lovecraft influenced your writing?

  RH. Immensely. He was a great strategist. The master of making the unseen and never-seen creepy. A writer who really knew the art of alluding to and never revealing ‘the horror’. Whatever his limitations, he was great at the ‘sleight of hand’ of horror writing.

  CP. How has your interest in horror/terror/the uncanny developed since you first started writing at 18?

  RH. Tricky to say really. I think what has changed is my attitude. I think when I was 18 I thought horror fiction was something I was writing for as a job until I could jump ships into ‘literature’, whereas now I’m older I think I’m confident enough to stand up for the claim that horror does have literary and poetic potential, and that I exploit that potential.