Scorpion by Michael R. Linaker (1980): Animal Magnetism

Poor Old Blighty: the once regal lord of the world would, throughout the 1970s and '80s, find itself overrun again and again by hordes of vermin which laid waste to so many of its proud, if overly class-conscious, innocent citizens—in the pages of paperback horror fiction, of course. Blame James Herbert, of course (certainly the threat from the natural world could be traced back to Wyndham and Wells, but probably found its true footing in an unassuming 1952 tale by Daphne Du Maurier's blown up to existential proportions by one Alfred Hitchcock) but it was Big Bad Jim who unleashed The Rats in 1974 and truly made the country a feeding ground for all creatures great and small. America was of course overrun as well, but there was something in British culture that was especially ripe for the taking, suffering cats, dogs, crabs, slugs, and worse (gah, do teenagers count?!).

And so we come to Scorpion (Signet Books, Feb 1981), a very slim offering from author Michael R. Linaker (b. Lancashire, 1940). Originally a writer of Westerns set in America, he apparently gained the notice of someone at New English Library and was commissioned to write one of their popular horror novels. At least Linaker had a familiarity with the English language, and knew how to deploy it with some idea of suspense and efficient characterization.

Now I don't really have much to say about the storyline once you've read this back-cover copy. In fact it's about as big a spoiler as can be; intrepid characters go off in search of the cause of these mutated monsters when the answer is right there: radiation leak! Of course anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of evolution knows that radiation causes animals to grow from teeny-tiny critters to five-inch long death dealers with a knack for finding the tenderest parts of the human anatomy. I mean duh.

The cover art makes clear that sex-and-gross-death will be mingled and prevalent, and readers hoping for such lurid shenanigans will not be disappointed. At least by 1981 standards; MMV for readers raised on latter-day product of similar nature. Linaker isn't shy, as the novel progresses, with doling out the wretched horrors visited upon the helpless victims. And also of course they are drawn to only the hottest ladies, I mean otherwise why bother?

The scorpions advanced from every direction, scuttling swiftly across the floor. A few became entangled in the long, silky blonde hair, and in their frantic efforts to free themselves began to lash out with their stings. Venom, injected into the soft flesh of Casey's neck, spread swiftly into the bloodstream. Numbing agony exploded inside Casey's body and she jerked helplessly as tortured nerves emitted spasms. The pain of the stings helped to alleviate the pain caused by the ripping, tearing pincers as other scorpions shredded warm flesh from her bare legs. Blood began to stream from the countless wounds, streaking the tanned flesh, pooling on the floor beneath her body. 

Original New English Library ed, June 1980

Sectioned into three parts (hey! just like a scorpion!), each with a pretentious title ("Encounters," "Engagements," "Invasion"), Scorpion follows the template of all books of its type. Characters are introduced, given a quick backstory (usually incredibly class-conscious; in fact the guy who identifies the culprits is a rough-hewn working stiff, "Er, whatcha call 'em, a scorpion!"), and then shuffled off this mortal coil posthaste. A scene in a supermarket, with scorpions marauding dozens of (female) shoppers, is a show-stopper. Two villain-types, involved with the responsible nuclear plant, are dispatched with max grody pain and suffering, so there's that.

Otherwise Linaker gives more depth to his expendable players than he does to his mains, so you might mix up some of the doctors perplexed by all the "bee sting" vics suddenly dying in excruciating, mystifying pain. Requisite love angle introduced, breakfast-in-bed scene during a lull in arachnid apocalypse, blame is placed at modern world advancements (though not as blatantly as in some novels; here's it's more a given), and quick wrap-up climax holds things at bay for now but... the sequel would scuttle from the darkness, and a third was perhaps promised by Linaker, maybe even with the scorpions arriving in the States, but it never happened. Whew!

Allan crouched beside the woman's body. He couldn't help noticing, despite the mutilations, that she had been young and very attractive.

The Surrogate by Nick Sharman (1980): Father Do You Wanna Bang Heads with Me

Malevolent doll alert! Yes indeed, that mainstay of '80s horror fiction is at it again, a supernaturally-possessed innocent child's toy goes on a murderous rampage, controlled by the evil whims of a man so hateful and angry and resentful that he operates from beyond the grave. Nick Sharman (aka A.G. Scott, both pseudonyms of Norwegian/British author Scott Grønmark) also wrote Childmare, an intensely grim novel of a teenage riot in the James Herbert tradition. I found that novel to be solid horror entertainment, so have been looking forward to The Surrogate (Signet Books, July 1980) for some time now. The cover is replete with the coming  (and going) decade's hallmark imagery: solitary child, evil doll, leering old man. Oh, and the requisite King blurb at the top, too, almost literally overshadowing the actual author's name!

Unlike Childmare, Surrogate is an intimate affair, with only a few characters and smaller stakes. The prologue is a banger, with a defiant boy being locked in a cellar room with rats for disobeying his terrifying despotic father in their huge estate home. Next we meet 30-something Frank Tillson, that little boy now grown. He is a radio talk-show host and is raising his eight-year-old son Simon alone after the death of wife and mother Kathie. Frank is driving back to the family estate, which he has not visited in many years, after the death of his own mother. Summoned by long-time family caretaker Reece, Frank reluctantly goes to see the old man, now being ravaged by cancer and at death's door. The reason? Why, his father's riches, who is to inherit them? The thought of taking his father's money sickens Frank, but the old man has found a loophole: he will leave the fortune to Simon upon his 18th birthday. Frank thinks the man has gone senile, and flatly refuses to hear of this idea. "When you're gone there'll be no coming back," Frank responds (foreshadowing!). "What you've built dies with you. For God's sake don't try and involve the living."

For awhile Sharman is slow to boil the pot, letting the reader experience Frank's daily life as a single, attentive father and as a popular radio talk-show host. Simon is introduced, a well-meaning, polite boy who quietly still mourns the death of his mother. Watching him read endless comic books, Frank wryly hopes he's not "rearing a pop culture junkie." Frank has never told Simon about his hated relation, ever, and when he does now the boy seems uninterested... until he's accosted at school by a man he doesn't know speaking about an obligation. Frank is enraged but not surprised that his father would stoop to such a trick. He phones Reece, who tells him his father did take a drive, but it proved too stressful and he's now in a coma, death expected soon. "Phone me as soon as he dies, Reece, I want to know my son is safe."

Frank escapes into his work, where we meet his producer Eddie, a likeable, middle-aged man of slovenly appearance and hedonistic tendencies tempered by a solid work ethic. His assistant Angela, a timid woman that Frank holds in some contempt for her incompetence if not her sex (and the mystifying allure she holds for Eddie). Sella Masters, an American beauty, is a psychic guest on one of Frank's shows; Frank is amazed to learn she is sincere about it: "You can't believe all this psychic nonsense. We're all adults here you know. Level with us." She agrees to a demonstration of her sixth sense and, as any astute reader will expect, it turns out gut-wrenchingly horrible when she sees the car accident that killed Kathie as well as her funeral, and at the funeral an old man in black watching Simon...

Interrupting this scene of awkward horror there's a phone call for Frank: it's Reece. The old man is dead. One of the enjoyable aspects of the novel is the vintage manner in which everyone drinks and smokes after a shock or while debating supernatural phenomena, and that's just what happens now. And more mysterious events pile on: a spooky figure in some photographs (Frank's a cranky sort, thinks of complaining on his show about a shop that can't develop photos right); malfunctioning radio equipment that screeches in the voice of an angry old man; a wad of cash mailed to Simon; a terrible dinner with Eddie and Angela that leaves Angela screaming and saying she saw a corpse climbing out of the bath; all that sort of thing, all rendered in a staid, realistic style that's neither pulpy nor literary.

1981 New English Library ed with different doll, 

not sure why, does Raggedy Andy not translate?

Soon, sadly, Frank begins to suspect Eddie and Angela are behind these spooky intrusions into his and Simon's lives, sort of Scooby-Doo style, even while Sella the psychic is telling him that Simon is in real danger from his grandfather who is now on the other side, or what have you. He will not be denied! Frank's not crazy about that explanation: "The supernatural doesn't fit into my pattern of beliefs." "Screw your beliefs, Frank!" Sella half-shouted. "We don't have time for that pompous bullshit. You've seen things, for Christ's sake. You've been attacked by a frigging doll!" Ah yes, the doll! Wow, I won't spoil it, but that attack scene is pretty sweet, written in that tone that refuses to acknowledge the ridiculousness of the scenario. Sharman goes it with dead seriousness, knowing that any wink will deflate the horror (The doll glided toward him along the carpet. There were no individual limb movements, it just... glided). The toy once belonged to Kathie when she was a child, so its possession is extra obscene.

The climactic confrontation between father and son successfully brings together all that has come before, and doesn't overstay its welcome. We learn some horrible stuff about Frank's parents' relationship, the death of his mother, that sort of thing. The supernatural explanation seems the only rational one after Simon disappears, and Frank has to make a final trip to the family home he so despises. Some violence and gore, racy sex scene, not bad. The final pages is dark stuff, man. "What's worse than death, Sella?" he demanded again, fury building up inside him. "The boy's alive, Frank," he heard...

Sure, the reader will notice lapses in believability, like even though Frank is desperate to find his son, there are moments when he's like, "Oh he's probably back at the apartment" or something along those lines. These child-in-jeopardy plots don't work today; we can't really exploit them for suspense any longer since the reality is so unbearable. Dialogue, too, is creaky, the old amateur mistake of having every character say each other's names a dozen times in one conversation. The novel would've made a cracking good flick during its day, certainly not a classic, maybe in the style of adaptations of The Sentinel and The Manitou, with a virile British lead (Alan Bates? Albert Finney?) and maybe Jane Seymour or Jenny Agutter as Sella (doing a half-assed Yank accent). The novel is barely 250 pages, and even that's padded out some, but for a diverting vintage horror read, The Surrogate is a solid choice. 

Frank then saw another narrower passage leading off to the left. The stench was thickening. It was almost tangible, as though the basement complex were his father's diseased insides and he [was] approaching nearer and nearer to the center of corruption.

The Woodwitch by Stephen Gregory (1988): There's Fever in the Funkhouse Now

Well, there's nothing for it: another vintage horror novel read in 2017 that promised much but delivered little. Despite the endless reservoir of talent that Stephen Gregory shows with his ability to craft a tasty line of prose or pinpoint an indelicate bit of human psychology, The Woodwitch (St Martin's Press paperback/Nov 1989) is a frustratingly narrow story, insular to the point of absolute zero, and disagreeably disgusting. Gregory's first novel, 1986's The Cormorant, was a doom-laden, penetrating work of deep obsession. Woodwitch is that too, but less as well. Sure, there are lots of quoted encomiums printed front and back, accurate, sure, but what they leave out is that the book is mostly a grimy slog of a read. 

Our protagonist is uber-clueless buffoon Andrew Pinkney, guilty of the worst kind of turd-human behavior: smacking his date in the head for laughing at his limp penis. And that's it: that's the impetus for this shortish novel about a man's spiraling descent into madness (and where it stops, nobody know—er I mean you can probably guess). I suppose for many men that would be plenty enough reason, penile humiliation is the worst thing ever of course, but reading a whole book about it? Whew. I mean there's no room to breathe, and every breath one can draw is poisoned by enough rot and maggoty decay as to test any reader's tolerance.

The tale begins in a Welsh forest with Andrew traipsing about with his dog, a small collie called Phoebe. Phoebe is his only companion, an eager, bright, sometimes willful dog (but I just described a dog, didn't I, any dog); together they discover a badger corpse in the woods. Of course Andrew picks it up and takes it back to the cottage they're staying in and hangs it in the work shed. "You're perfect," he says to it as it drips maggots. Of course. Next, a jog back to the beginning so we can get a full dose of the square courtship between Andrew and his solicitor colleague Jennifer, a severe older woman, an amateur artist and naturalist who, on their romantic walks together, likes to point out various flora and fauna in their Latin scientific names. Hot stuff! No, it's rather charming.

Finally they get down to it, miserably, and Andrew fails at being a man, because that's what a man is of course ("Was that it?" the woman asked. That was it. "Heavens! What a lot of fuss about nothing!") and she sees his failure and begins to laugh. And Andrew simply punches her right in the mouth. Horrified at what he's done, Andrew calls cops and an ambulance; Jennifer is whisked away (no damage which a little dentistry could not repair), while their boss vouches for Andrew's good name and behavior so he is not charged. Boss suggests time off for both, which angers Jennifer, but Andrew takes him up on the offer of using the boss's holiday cottage so "then he could come back whenever he liked, refreshed and wholly recovered from the shock he had had." Well I am certainly glad of that, imagine how awful and oppressive and traumatizing it must be to have to punch a woman in the mouth, you totally need a vacay after that shit.

1989 UK paperback

As for Jennifer, who knows, she disappears from this madness. She will only continue to exist as a fantasy in Andrew's mind... because he's got this great idea about how to win her back. Her fascination with flora and fauna has subtly influenced his own behavior. How about a little joke at his expense, to show her he's not such a bad guy? He'll give her the gift of fungus! He'll grow it himself out of a blooming animal carcass. And not just any fungus, but the stinkhorn, or Phallus impudicus, a wretched-smelling thing sticking six inches up out of the earth, oozing oil-green and viscous black... the forest's unashamed caricature of the human phallus, at which the ancient peoples of the mountains had marveled for century after century... the object of their wonder and witchcraft, a totem, a thing to be prized and loathed and feared... What a great idea! Send her one of those, ha-ha, see I'm a fella can laugh at himself!

You won't believe how much mileage Gregory gets from describing the lewd, dripping stinkhorn fungus, the busy little maggots burrowing inside the badger and (later, after a trip to the grim seaside) the swan corpses, the damp, suffocating weather. It's overwhelming, it's disgusting (not in any moral sense, but literally so) and ultimately: boring. As. Hell. Even when Gregory turns an apt phrase about one of these aspects, the reaction is "Oh, well done," not "Holy shit, the implications of this for the character's mental state is now clearer and scarier!" Just page after page of this obsession, All there was in the world, in the entire universe, was the man and his dog, enveloped by the night. Sure, there are creepy sheep about, staring at them through the dense overgrowth, sheep that haunt Andrew's dreams like marauding women...

1989 US hardcover

Things get more interesting when Andrews meets a teenage brother and sister who live on a nearby farm caring for the sheep and kennel with hounds for fox-hunting. They mock him to his face in Welsh, but the girl, Shan, calls him "Pinkie" and seems amenable to conversation. They have a few pints in a woodsy lodge bar, something seems off. The novel's best sequence takes place on Halloween night, a party at this hotel bar, and the drunken, hallucinatory chaos which ensues. Told prior by Shan that folks would be in costume, Andrew bedecks himself in the weakest, lamest excuse for a vampire outfit ever, then with Phoebe at his side he trods in his wellies through the woods to the bar. Shan is flirty, her brother moody, the crowd oddly desultory. Phoebe becomes pathetically sick, distressing and angering the other drinkers and the barkeep asks them to leave. This leads to a bizarre attempt at a tryst with young Shan back at Pinkie's cabin, encrusted in dirt and soot, enticing Andrew on; there's wine, drunkeness, mockery, humiliation, even animal cruelty, I mean really. You can imagine the outcome of this seduction.

In the firelight, it looked as though some disgusting torture had been practised on the girl and was about to be resumed, for her body, skeletal and black, appeared to have been burned, branded and charred by the naked man who once again loomed over her

2015 Valancourt Books trade paperback

This whole sequence is very unsettling, I mean even the fungus gets a voice: In its effortlessness, its arrogance, its brazen lewdness, the stinkhorn sneered at him and said, "Look at me, Andrew Pinkney, and compare your flaccid maggot of a cock with mine!" The story continues on, I put the book down for weeks, ugh, same thing, then when it all wraps up there's hardly a surprise. Sure, with novels of obsession (Campbell's Face That Must Die, Tessier's Rapture, McDowell's Toplin, Koja's Cipher) that's often the case. I guess this time I was just exhausted by the literalness.

Once I read a rock critic who said something like the double-entendre lyrics of AC/DC were so obvious they were single entendres. That's the issue here too: Gregory is so on-the-nose with the symbolism of the fungus it's not even symbolism any longer; his conceit takes away any work on the reader's part: In Wales, Andrew Pinkney, having failed dismally in his last attempt to rear a home-grown erection, could sit back and enjoy these surrogates as he relaxed beside the fire. The sexual psychology here is all too obvious. This book isn't truly terrible, it has its moments like many horror novels I've overall disliked, but wow is it a bleak, dismal, dreary read with little payoff. I still recommend The Cormorant, but The Woodwitch left me unsatisfied. Traipse this dank darkness at your own peril.

Somewhere in the gloom, it seemed that something had crawled away to die and now was being dismantled by the silently working teeth of the maggots. The smell arose like a vapour exhaled by the earth itself, and then it was gone again, as if Andrew had imagined it, as though the stink were conjured in the darkest recesses of his own mind, to appear and disappear like a memory.

Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman (1975): The Image Within

It is probably a mistake to label Robert Aickman (1914 - 1981) a horror writer. While his stories have been featured for decades in a myriad of horror fiction anthologies, I believe he was uncomfortable with confining his output to any single tradition; Aickman preferred to label his works as "strange stories." To me, this seems right and apt. Another word I'd use to describe his stories is "uncanny," since they rarely adhere to generic conventions but instead move subtly around them, hinting at unconscious drives, highlighting how the real world and the real people in it may be illusions obscuring darker forces at work. Odd occurrences do not add up; the killer does not remove a mask and identify himself, because we aren't sure there's a killer at all, but only time and chance and that what might be called fate. You might not be surprised when I suggest Aickman is a bit of an acquired taste.

Aickman has long been a favorite of adventurous readers who search high and low for the forgotten or the overlooked, the challenging and the obscure; in recent years his reputation has grown and grown, and  his books have been brought back into print by several publishers. After years of fruitless search myself, I recently bought, for a few dollars more than I generally like to pay for old paperbacks, a copy of Cold Hand in Mine (Berkley Books reprint 1979, cover art by Michael Whelan). The paperback's spine reads SCIENCE FICTION but that is ridiculous: these are quiet, literate tales of creepiness; the front and back ad copy oversell it and I wonder of buyers' remorse back in the day...

I bought a hardcover copy of Painted Devils (1979, never issued in paperback) years ago because, of course, Danse Macabre. And to be honest, I never really took to him: the few stories I read in that collection seemed affected, remote, intellectualized to a sanitary degree. Reading Aickman takes a little more patience than many readers are willing to give, perhaps; it's more akin to reading the classics of James, Blackwood, Machen, and that crew, even though he was writing through what I loosely call the modern era. That is to say, his type of fiction, was somewhat out of style. I mean, that Whelan cover art up there, there's nothing like that in the book, either in imagery or mood. As you can see below, the hardcover editions featuring Edward Gorey's macabre gentility reflect a bit more accurately the uncanny chills you'll find inside.

These stories generate little heat; no melodrama, no generic twist, no jump scares, no slow dawning of horrible realization. When the "horror" occurs, rarely does it overly alarm or unduly concern anyone. The polite thing seems to be to ignore it... for that whisper of other worlds, or even an intimation that our perception of this world is flawed and incomplete, not up to the task, is simply intolerable. Characters view these things askance, never head-on.

Anyway. First story I read in the collection was "The Real Road to the Church," about a young woman’s rental home, her memories of the men in her life, and a creepy country parson who hints at esoteric uses the village had for her house. I found it weak, anemic, Aickman's style doing more to obscure than illuminate, and the twist, as it were, was a common one. Not off to a great start.

Next up, "Niemandswasser" (Aickman is nothing if not a continental author) was better, thank the gods. A young German prince stays at his family’s abandoned seasonal home on Lake Constance. Accompanied by a—friend? Lover?—the prince ponders the local legend of a dangerous something in a part of the lake called No Man’s Water. He consults an old professor of his, who intones, as old professors in these types of tales are wont to do:

If any man examines his inner truth with both eyes wide open, and his inner eye wide open also, he will be overcome with terror at what he finds. That, I have always supposed, is why we hear these stories about a region of our lake. Out there, on the water, in darkness, out of sight, men encounter the image within them.

 

Then come "The Hospice" and "The Same Dog," both highly readable, intriguing, with clearly delineated settings and such. The former is about a traveler who gets lost and winds up dining at a sort of hotel/waypost filled with overly-attentive aides and oddly-behaviored guests. The latter is a tale of a mundane childhood struck by tragedy. Neither story concludes with what you'd call a resolution, but their utter unwillingness to is what echoes in the reader's mind. "Pages from a Young Girl's Diary" is excellent, meticulously wrought; I'll give you a hint as to its contents: "It was really strange to have Mamma's blood in my mouth. The strangest part was that it tasted delightful; almost like an exceptionally delicious sweetmeat!" I believe this was my intro to Aickman, back in the late '80s/early '90s when I first read this anthology.

"Meeting Mr. Millar" was another high point of Cold Hand for me. A would-be literary pornographer relates his story of "a haunted man rather than of a haunted house." Mr. Millar moves his business into the house the narrator rents a room in. Now telephones are ringing constantly, people banging about all hours, but just who is Mr. Millar? He invites the narrator into his office for a drink of sherry but shows little of himself: "Though everything was in a sense wide open, nothing was revealed from first to last." At one point the narrator is wakened in the middle of the night and what follows is a terrific scene of a midnight creep through darkened halls to peer down a stairwell, the most "horror" moment in this whole book, and the climax, such as it is, horrifies as well.

1988 UK paperback

After failing to engage with the final story, "The Clock Watcher," at any level, I went back to the beginning: "The Swords" is a major work (rightly collected in the 1987 anthology The Dark Descent, David G. Hartwell's towering anthology that traces the horror story's evolution through the 20th century), more immediately interesting and accessible perhaps to the general reader than some of Aickman's other more opaque tales. With its careful layering of social and sexual unease, set in a dreary English town that features a half-hearted amusement park, and the utterly perplexing ritual of the titular objects, "The Swords" is a haunting weird classic.

There was nothing in particular to be seen... The bed looked as if some huge monster had risen through it, but nowhere in the room was there blood. It was all just like the swords.

As I thought about it, and about what I had done, I suddenly vomited. 

Faber & Faber 2016, Tim McDonagh cover illustrating "The Hospice"

There were moments throughout Cold Hand in which I was reminded of Ramsey Campbell, of Dennis Etchison, but in general Aickman is a writer unto himself. This is not always a good thing. At its best, Aickman's craftsmanship is lovely, with care taken to ensure each word and phrase and parenthetical aside heightens the reader's understanding, illuminating even common thoughts and feelings with a fresh light. However other times I was left adrift, either disinterested in the details (foreign royalty, World War I, fancy boarding schools for sickly rich kids, clocks) or unsure of just what Aickman was trying to impart upon the reader. More than once I had to stop and reread passages several times to ascertain what exactly was happening. Stories would end and some small comprehension would be whisked away from me. Am I a poor reader, or is Aickman fucking with me? Or is this all an example of the uncanny? I still kinda don't know.

Ramsey Campbell Born on This Date, 1946

Greetings 2017! Let's start the new year appreciating Ramsey Campbell and the paperback covers for the UK editions of his books. Of course several years ago I posted the US Tor covers. Enjoy them all!

PS: Working on a new review of a late-'80s anthology I read over the holidays. Did not enjoy it at all but wanted to start the new year on a more positive note.

The Reaping by Bernard Taylor (1980): Make It Real Not Fantasy

Who doesn't love a creepy fetus with devil horns smirking at you from the womb on a horror paperback  cover? That thing's practically about to wink at you, isn't it? There's no actual evil fetus in The Reaping (Leisure Books, Feb 1982) so that might bum some of you out; no, Bernard Taylor (British author of quiet, effective horror novels like Sweetheart, Sweetheart and The Godsend) doesn't stoop to such crass imaginings. Taylor is more interested in taking his sweet, character-developing time, guiding the patient reader through a subtle psychological tale of grown-up concerns and fears before deploying the malevolent goods in what I found to be a satisfying, unsettling, and successful climax. Sure, I mean it's kinda ridiculous after all the care that's gone before, but I can overlook that. The book is out and done before 250 pages are up.

The Reaping isn't the type of novel I'm gonna get in deep about, you can get the gist of it from back-cover copy. You wouldn't get it from that freaky fetus cover, but Taylor writes well of intelligent, thoughtful yet flawed adult humans and their often painful relationships, their disappointments, their compromises and their regrets (as I've said before, many many horror writers have no idea how to describe adulting). I mean, the main character is an artist who, when not painting the commissioned portrait, relaxes with the novels of Muriel Spark and Thomas Hardy. With the subject of his painting, the mysterious and shy and lovely Catherine, he discusses the novelistic merits of the Brontë sisters. Don't know about you but I like when characters in horror exist in the real world and not just as fodder for supernatural or psychopathic evil.

 1992 Leisure reprint

Rigby's desire to actually be an artist, working and paid and successful, rather than just a widowed shop owner who lost children in a car accident several years prior, motivates him to accept that commission. But what strangeness ensues in that countryside estate! And hot sex. And the most cringe-worthy massage this side of George Costanza. Guess he should've known... Suspense builds in workmanlike style, heading toward a finale the clues to which I actually was unable to spot and which I think Taylor kept well-hidden. But it all makes sense in the end, which is more than I can say for other novels, right?
 

1980 UK hardcover, Souvenir Press: quite accurate

Want a none-too-taxing read written by a grown man who knows his way around the English language, who presents his characters in a relaxed, believable manner, and who can raise a goosebump or two about the invisible machinations some people will undertake to gain ultimate power? Maybe check out The Reaping: it's not gonna change your horror-loving life or anything, but don't you want people to see you reading a book with such delightful cover art? Of course you do! *wink wink*

The Smell of Evil by Charles Birkin (1965): Who Could Write This Book of Cruel

I rather wish that the stories in The Smell of Evil were more in line with the moody, melancholy vibe of the paperback cover for the 1969 Award Books edition. Instead, British-born author Charles Birkin (1907 - 1985) offers up blistering contes cruels with a kind of demented genius; there's not a moment of moodiness or atmosphere anywhere at all. Editor Dennis Wheatley perceptively notes in his intro, however: "Young writers are always sadly handicapped by lack of experience; whereas anyone who has been through a war, met a great many people in all walks of life and had to face a number of crises on their own, must have automatically acquired a wide knowledge of places, events, unusual happenings and varied emotions. Charles Birkin has this advantage...."

This is all true, no doubt. The wide-ranging settings and types of characters are a pleasure appreciated (in fact I was put in mind of Barker's approach to Books of Blood 20 years later) and well-deployed. The baker's dozen of tales contained are ingenious clockwork toys, ready to snap and trap hapless folks within their merciless jaws. Which story element, I wondered while I read, will be the tripwire? I wanted to like the stories more than I did; I didn't mind that for many I could guess the twist; or the dated sociopolitical stances; or the lack of the supernatural (featured in a couple tales, and not very original at that). What I minded was the unremitting cruelty, the vagaries of fate that scoop characters up to dash them upon the rocks, the utter misanthropic (and often sexist and racist and homophobic) nature of each and every tale.

It's not that I dislike that merciless ironic last sentence-style reveal of an unimaginable horror; Birkin does it very well. But a whole book full of them makes for some dispiriting reading. Perhaps if I'd read a story here and there—indeed, I first read the title story over two years ago and enjoyed it on its own—I'd have been more satisfied. I don't know. Anyway, there were some positives. In "The Smell of Evil" a novelist on an island holiday learns of a horrific scheme to bilk a young mute heiress out of her inheritance. It's the only first-persona narrated work in the collection; its denouement benefits greatly from the technique, a reaction of rage against an unconscionable breach of trust.

"Text for Today" is a silly trifle of literal cannibalism set in Papua New Guinea; "The Godmothers" is kitchen-sink realism without mercy as it puts a child in grave danger. "Green Fingers" was my favorite of all: a well-observed story of a WWII Nazi officer and the unsuspecting woman he coolly romances. The twist crept up on me slowly as Birkin takes his time setting it up with an unforgiving depiction of self-deception and willful delusions. The original nature of zombies features in "Ballet Nègre" but feels icky for other reasons. "The Lesson" is kind of like a "Mad Men" party gone horrifically wrong (don't get drunk around children), while "'Is Anybody There?'" flirts with ghosts and psychic drama in an agreeable way. The brutal climax of "The Serum of Dr. White" is bitter and hopeless as a mysterious doctor attempts to treat a disfigured young girl.

Tandem UK edition, 1965

The teenage ruffians of "'Dance Little Lady'" could be right out of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, but they go down one of the darkest paths known to humanity. The whisper of otherworldliness works well in "Little Boy Blue," another family on a holiday that ends in tragedy. "The Cornered Beast," meh, freak-show escapee. "The Interloper" is quite good in and of itself but its sexual politics are, um, troublesome: a tropical island of lesbians who've left civilization and men behind deal with a wounded man who stumbles ashore. At first it seems Birkin is showing some sympathy to women who've endured such humiliation and violence at the hands of men; the climax reveals otherwise, I think.

The final story, "The Cross," is a predictable bit of science-fiction that uses nonsense words to hide its turnabout. It's been done before. Throughout, Birkin's prose is unfailingly British: crisp, precise, mature, stuffy sometimes and irreverent at others. Fine with me. It's just that, as I said, the unforgiving quality, the bleak ends and meaningless deaths, the utter lack of humor, scares, wit, and/or creepiness (that Tandem UK paperback cover is irrelevant as well) add up to a work I'm not sure I'd recommend to readers of traditional horror fiction. Proceed, if at all, with caution.

Clive Barker's Books of Blood: The Berkley Editions, 1986

June 1986 saw the first American paperback edition of the first volume of Clive Barker's unparalleled short-story collection Books of Blood. Vols. II and III followed later in the year (for those keeping score, August and October respectively). Sure, the covers were adorned with rubbery face-masks but there's no denying the power within, and the sober back-cover copy still delights. These are essential horror reads. As fellow Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell writes in his intro:  

When it comes to the imagination, the only rules should be one's own instincts, 

and Clive Barker's never falters.

It's a Jungle Down There

Dark Dance by Tanith Lee (1992): Going to the Darklands

Oh my Goth is this a lovely cover! Taken right from the back of a Siouxsie Sioux record or ripped from the pages of Propaganda magazine, it's a perfect image to appeal to the reader who wants romance tinged with a hint of death and black nail polish: Let her taste the forbidden, the erotic, the evil... Yeah, potential readers of 1992's Dark Dance know who they are. The bats have left the belfry...

Tanith Lee is a writer I've been meaning to read for over 20 years. A prolific British author whose many, many paperback novels combined elements of fantasy, horror, science fiction, myth, and fairy tales, it was her recent death, alas, that made me realize I needed to do that now, and so I picked up Dark Dance, the only book of hers I own, published by Dell as a title in their ground-breaking Abyss line. Like many novels from Dell/Abyss, it isn't only/just/quite a horror novel. Nothing is scary, or even meant to scare, but there is foreboding and threat, a gloomy old house near a cliff-side overlooking the sea, a secret family made of members of indeterminable age clad in black, and the promise of illicit pleasures. We are in Gothic romance territory here, as will become clear early on.

The dance begins on a foggy London day as 29-year-old Rachaela Day arrives at her paltry job in a dingy dank bookshop (She hated computers, they frightened her. She liked old things... she was happy only with printed words). Her mother, a bitter and resentful woman, has been dead several years, and Rachaela's found herself utterly thankful for the release. She knows little about her father, who pretty much disappeared before she was born, although her mother complained about him and his ne'er-do-well family, the Scarabae (a weird name to go with a weird fly-by-night man). Into the bookshop then comes a man with a letter for Rachaela, from a law firm representing her father's family: as the back cover of Dark Dance tells us, the Scarabae beckon to Rachaela, inviting her to their family estate by the sea. And all travel expenses included!

Desiring something more in her life but unsure what, she accepts the summons to the Scarabae home after her apartment building goes up for sale, quitting her bookseller job in a fit of pique (I was a bit disappointed when this segment concluded; I do love tales set in dusty old bookstores!) and is driven up the seaside coast. In the house, faceless and black but for its one lit window (I told you we were in Gothic romance land!), she is met by Miss Anna and Mr. Stephan, very old, thin as twine, one female and oen masculine,and at that borderline of age where the sexes blend, these two had sustained their genders. At dinner she meets the  rest of the Scarabae, more than a dozen, each with their own role save the oldest, Uncle Camillo, who labors under some kind of juvenile dementia, galloping about the endless halls and rooms as if on a horse only he can see. One of them at least was insane.

Warner Books UK, Feb 1993

Removed from the world at large, the family's only contact a hired driver, with rare trips into a desultory village some miles' walk away for supplies, Rachaela spends malingering days and nights in the home. The reader feels the claustrophobia of the Scarabae estate, its bizarre stained glass windows and winding halls, locked doors and silent inhabitants. She hears snippets of the family history: superstition, outcast, pogroms, escape, told in hundreds of years. Vampires? Perhaps. She learns her father is called Adamus and he lives in the tower (of course!) but he comes and goes as he pleases, a mystery almost even to the others. He seems to spy on her in the night, accompanied by an enormous black cat. When she finally confronts Adamus, it goes about as well as expected:

"You dropped me like a lost coin. Less than that."

"I meant to make you. I tried with many women. The Scarabae seed is reluctant. It inbreeds better. But your stupid and soulless mother had, surprisingly, the correct ingredients to accommodate me..."

"All her life she hated you and what you'd done. She made me pay for you."

Rachaela resents Adamus, certainly, and comes to resent her captivity, which she's told again and again is a freedom. But just as I was beginning to feel a little worn out by the constancy of Rachaela's entrapment in the house, she makes her escape, back to the village she'd visited earlier for supplies. Rachaela misses the infrequent train to London, sits in a church to pity herself, and then turns round to see... Adamus. Who's come for her, who seduces her there in the church pew:

"Yes, I want to fuck you. Come back and be fucked by me."

"Now you're speaking the truth, you bastard."

"Now I'm speaking the truth. What's the problem? The family will be thrilled. They'll revel in it. It's happened over and over, mother with son, father with daughter. Brother and sister. Two-thirds of them are inbreedings of one kind or another, several twice over. A charming little intimate orgy has been going on for centuries. Secret pleasures of the house. And what other values hold you back? The criterion of the church, of morality and the world? It's nothing to you. Come to me and let me give you what you want."

It works. In an erotic trance, she lets Adamus sweep her back to the house Scarabae. What follows is a night of torrid sex, imagined with stylish high-minded eroticism by Lee (A harp string plucked in her loins... glissandi of fires. He kneeled in prayer between her thighs, his face cruel as an angel's... Her own tongue moved on him in sympathetic sorcery) till the next morning, when Rachaela is disgusted and angered by what's transpired. Once again she escapes, and this time, she will not return. In a way she will not need to return, for now she has brought a bit of the Scarabae with her: Rachaela learns she is pregnant with her own father's child. Like her own mother, she is merely a vessel for this immortal family, nothing more than an incubator. The plan all along. It's all too clear why Rachaela's mother was so horrible to her. Will Rachaela be like that to her own child? There's an unsettling scene when she visits a doctor to try to get an abortion but he patronizes her ("Children are wonderful things. Special... Think of all those women who long to bear a child and are unable..."). Ugh. The patriarchy!

The narrative moves up over a chapter and little Ruth is now seven, mostly cared for by motherly neighbor Emma, whose adult children are grown and gone. Rachaela regards Ruth with distaste, unsurprisingly, but Ruth is no abused or put-upon child; she's secretive, weird, self-possessed, and actually rather ugly (that strange white face of an elf). When Emma moves away, Rachaela and Ruth are wary of one another, estranged in the same flat, till a few years pass and Ruth begins to learn of the Scarabae, and a strange man is lurking about, and Ruth herself will escape to that darkened house by the sea, clad in black, searching for the man who fathered her. It is Rachaela's worst fear realized: for Ruth to be the child-bride of Adamus: Just before midnight Scarabae's betrothed came downstairs. She looked like a bride in Hell, in her dress of blood...

I found Lee to be a lovely and melodic writer, with prose that sings (to a Yank like me) in that British lilt, reminding me at times of Ramsey Campbell or Clive Barker. Language must serve the story, and so Lee can use "maenad" and "bacchanant" in the same paragraph and get away with it. More than get away with it; she escorts you through a hazily-lit twilight world of ambiguous vampirism and motherhood, her protagonist a young woman who abhors her mother and has never known her father. When this dark dance is over, she will know her father in ways which will make her abhor herself. Rather than creeping you out, Lee's approach to events seem removed from the real world, occurring in some demimonde where myth and fable entwine.

If you're in the mood for a kinda slow, moody, insular novel with sharp tinges of the Gothic but no horror to speak of, told in a style that's perceptive and sensual, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Dark Dance. Vampires? One never knows for certain. But one thing is: I will definitely be reading more Tanith Lee.