Ariel by Lawrence Block (1980): Mommy's on Pills, Baby's Got the Chills

Slowly and magically, like trick photography in a television commercial, the baby's face lost flesh and turned to a gleaming skull. And the woman, too, was a bare polished skeleton wrapped in a shawl. And she drew away, the skeletal infant in her arms, floating through the closed window and out into the night.

Oh, what Zebra Books could have done with a book cover from that passage! Here's a paperback I bought on a whim at Powell's last year, despite its lackluster photo-negative cover art. Now that I've read the novel I see the image misleading and so is the stark tagline tapping into the always-popular "evil child" theme. That baby is a victim, not the perpetrator! Poor baby.

 

In the crime world, Lawrence Block (b. 1938, Buffalo NY) is a writing giant, with a career that reaches back to the pulpy paperback era of the 1950s. Over the years I've read a couple of his books featuring hard-boiled hard-drinking (or recovering alcoholic depending on which novel in the series one reads) NYC PI Matthew Scudder. They were solid, enjoyable reads—dark, melancholy, mortal—and although I'll read more, Block lacks a certain indefinable quality I like in my crime writers; his style didn't click with me in the ways that, say, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, James Lee Burke, or James Crumley do. Something ineffable is missing.

That's also the problem in Ariel, Block's mainstream 1980 thriller (Berkley paperback January 1982). Requisite parts are there for a terrific creepy potboiler: creepy kid(s), dysfunctional family, unaccountable death/accidents, even an decades-old framed portrait of a mysterious woman found in an attic that seems to mesmerize the titular character. However these aspects never gel into a seamless satisfying whole; Block plays it straight down the middle, never veering into exploitative pulp nor deepening into literate character psychology.

Roberta and David Jardell live in an expensive old home in tony Charleston, South Carolina, with their adopted 12-year-old daughter Ariel and newborn son Caleb. Despite living a charmed life, all is not well: since the unexpected conception of Caleb, Roberta has withdrawn from Ariel, who strikes her more and more as an unlovable, unfathomable child, somewhat wiser than her years. David is preoccupied with work and doesn't understand his wife's reluctance to mother Ariel now so he tries to connect with the girl, even while he comes to resent Caleb—because Caleb is not his child either, but the illegitimate offspring of Roberta's affair with slick family man Jeffrey Channing.

 1980 Harper Collins hardcover

Roberta sees a ghostly woman in a shawl with a baby at night in her bedroom; soon she finds Caleb dead in his crib. Connected? That would be crazy. So she comes to reluctantly think Ariel may have had something to do with Caleb's death. She turns to her Valium, her therapy, and her lover Jeff Channing. Ariel retreats to her bedroom, confiding worldly thoughts and concerns in her diary and practicing her flute (a sound that drives Roberta to almost Lovecraftian madness: Ariel with her flute, a devilish smile on her lips. Followed now not by rats but by all the town's children, the innocent children, and all of them looked like Caleb, and—). The two regard each other warily in that old house, with David an unwitting referee.

Probably my favorite character was Erskine Wold, Ariel's school pal, a budding creepster and too smart for his own good, whose parents seem detached from his own life; he's constantly making suggestive remarks to Ariel, remarks his 12-year-old mind probably doesn't fully comprehend yet (he's also uncanny and shrewd: when Ariel asks him if he wants to have children, he replies "Are you kidding? Actually bring something into your house that's going to know what a total shit you are? That would be really stupid, Jardell.") Together they begin keeping an eye on Channing, who lives with his family in a nearby perfect-Charleston neighborhood. In turn, Channing begins keeping an eye on Ariel...

Carroll & Graf, 1996

There are many good scenes throughout the novel, particularly one at Caleb's funeral, in which Block takes us inside the main characters' thoughts: Ariel sardonically notes Channing's "blank good looks..." He could be the master of ceremonies on a new game show: The Funeral Game—pick the right coffin and win an all-expense paid trip to Forest Lawn Cemetery. We also find that Ariel is, literally, gaslighting Roberta (or more accurately she's not gaslighting her—it's a pun that goes nowhere). There's a research run to a real-estate agent and newspaper offices, which I always like. For me, Block most times doesn't go far enough; Ariel lacks true psychological insight and a convincing portrait of obsession. The supernatural intimations remain only that: underwhelming, a dangling thread never tied up.

Aspects of better novels flit through Ariel: the quietly superb Elizabeth; the modern-South haunted house The House Next Door; the classic psych-thriller The Bad Seed. It's a decent book to pass the time, a mild TV-movie of the '80s kinda thing, but I think readers familiar with the other books in the creepy-kid/haunted-house subgenres will find Ariel too frustrating to frighten.

Now it's a tragedy when a baby dies and only a fool would say otherwise, but it's a far cry from being the end of the world. She was not the first woman on earth to have a baby and God knows she was not the first woman on earth to lose one. If she's going to run around the block every time something in her life takes a nasty turn, she'd be well advised to sleeping a track suit. It's a hard life and it doesn't get easier the more you see of it. All you get is used to it.

The Paperback Covers of Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars

The 167th anniversary of Bram Stoker's birth was this weekend, on Saturday the 8th. In previous years I've featured the paperback editions of Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm; this year, check out the mostly impressive covers for The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903), a less well-known work of Stoker's, about one man's attempt to resurrect an ancient Egyptian queen.  

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908): Into That Great Void My Soul'd Be Hurled

An unassailable classic of supernatural horror and science-fantasy, The House on the Borderland is a cosmic hallucination, a phantasmagoria of time dilation and psychedelic imagery, a monster mash of mind-expanding terror and loneliness across multiple dimensions and numberless aeons. William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) reached for the stars and beyond and gave us a novel that would deeply affect and influence H.P. Lovecraft (and of course many other genre writers); indeed HPL never hid the fact that he was indebted to Hodgson's visionary delirium [update: not as much as I'd previously thought; see comments]. It is the well from which so much weird fiction has sprung. But is that well still worth visiting today?

...perched almost at the extreme end of a huge spur of rock that jutted out some fifty or sixty feet over the  abyss. In fact, the jagged mass of ruin was literally suspended in mid-air. 

That's the house itself, as described by the two men who are tramping through the "dismal and and sombre" wilds of west Ireland. They come upon a striking landscape, a rushing waterfall and an enormous rocky cavern. Across it stands this house on the borderland, its crumbled remains high above the abyss. One of the men finds a crumpled old notebook in the debris; before the men can make their way back to their camp, an eerie wailing rises from the woods. Filled with "haunting dread," they hightail it out of there and read the manuscript later. Said manuscript is a nameless narrator's account of his life before this house fell...

Arkham House, 1946, cover by Hannes Bok

A widower who lives with his spinster sister and dog Pepper, the narrator relates how he'd moved into the garden-surrounded house 10 years before, that locals had said the devil built it, and that as years passed he became "aware of something unseen, yet unmistakably present, in the empty rooms and corridors." I'll say. Soon he's exploring the lightless depths of that chasm--"the Pit," he calls it--and battling with loathsome swine-monsters who swarm over the house! And that's not all.

One evening, the narrator is sitting in his chair and finds everything about him has become an insubstantial mist, and begins the first of several bodiless travels through the space/time continuum. It's the kind of thing would put the climax of 2001 to shame; eventually he's zipping along the cosmos, watching the Sun die, the earth freeze, stars born, collapse, and reborn. At one point he sees his own lifeless body still sitting in a chair and all covered in dust, sees his own home on a vast Plain in some other reality, crawling with creatures as in his own reality. Cosmic horror, complete with its incomprehensible deities and endless vistas, begins here.

Far to my right, away up among inaccessible peaks, loomed the enormous bulk of the great Ass-god. Higher, I saw the hideous form of the dread goddess, rising up through the red gloom, thousands of fathoms above me. To the left, I made out the monstrous Eyeless-Thing, grey and inscrutable. Further off, reclining on its lofty ledge, the livid ghoul-Shape showed--a splash of sinister colour, among the dark mountains. 

Hodgson was a badass athlete/author and died in battle in WWI

The ending itself you've read a million times before, but in the early 20th century I doubt it had been done much before then. Lovecraft popularized it but it quickly became a hokey cliché and I think you'll agree. And after the whirlwind of interstellar visions I think you'll find the climax a bit underwhelming. But. If you reorient your imagination by jettisoning from your memory the fiction it inspired, then House works like nothing before it. Even Hodgson's old-fashioned and comma-riddled prose can't impede on the power of some of the more hypnotic, disorienting passages.

Ace Books, 1962, cover by Ed Emshwiller, accurate depiction of events within!

House is almost two books in one, and my reaction to it was in places mixed. I enjoyed the adventure/horror of the narrator's battle with the Swine-people in the first part of the narrative but later found the seemingly endless pages of space-travel tedious. There seemed to be no anchor to the flights of fancy; just more and more riffing on the bizarre nature of traveling through the space-time flux, colored globes floating about, the sun speeding across the sky and changing colors, the world spinning faster and faster into the void--much like Lovecraft's fantasy tales, which were never my favorite of his. But Lovecraft shares with Hodgson a fascination, an obsession really, with the unexplored deeps beneath homes, beneath the earth, of places where other realities can slip through into ours, of an indifferent malevolence threaded through the very warp and woof of our universe.

Lots of good paperback editions have been released over the years, as you can see. My copy is the red one at top, Carroll & Graf, 1983; it and this one from Sphere, 1980, play down the cosmic angle in favor of the hulking, drooling, terrifying swine-people--and you'll note how prominently Lovecraft's name is featured on most covers (the quote is from his famed and essential Supernatural Horror in Literature).

The midnight-blues of this edition from Freeway Press, 1974 evoke the emptiness of outer space and the utter solitude the narrator feels when he's hurtling through it.

Manor Books, 1977. I'm struggling to recall if an ear of corn played any role in the story; that looks like a farmhouse on drought-struck land; pretty sure this cover was meant for a different novel entirely.

Panther Books, 1972. The ever-stunning Ian Miller's jacket art is delectably creepy and awesome; it well captures the wonkiness of Hodgson's visions.  

So in whichever edition you may read The House on the Borderland, it'll be easy to see how it achieved its hallowed place in the pantheon of classic horror fiction. It's not always scary but it is always weird. He wrote other highly-regarded fantasy novels, like The Night-Land (1912) and The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" (1907) but it's upon this House which Hodgson's reputation is built.

Demons by Daylight by Ramsey Campbell (1979): The Sunshine Bores the Daylights Outta Me

Another vintage horror fiction paperback cover that has precisely nothing to do with its contents. This May 1979 Jove reprint of Ramsey Campbell's first non-Lovecraftian short story collection Demons By Daylight features some strikingly vivid cover art. But as I recall, there are exactly no snake-demons horny for hot human ladies in silver space-age bikinis in these tales. Somebody forgot to tell artist unknown that. While it would indeed catch a bookbuyer's eye, it's a little Heavy Metal for me.

Oh well the artist probably had no idea his painting would be used for a collection of shorts about unsettling urban decay, pasty-skinned and alienated Englishmen, and quiet, oblique madnesses that flitter at the edges of a bright noon and beyond. I read this Carroll & Graf edition from 1990 over a decade ago, trying to get back into horror fiction, but was distinctly underwhelmed and very much disappointed, as I knew I'd liked a lot of Campbell's HPL-style stories. These seemed fuzzy and unfocused and quite tepid. Honestly Demons by Daylight (along with Caitlyn Kiernan's Silk and John Shirley's Wetbones) put me off horror for many years. Fortunately, I came back to it... thanks, ironically, to his Dark Companions collection.

Original Arkham House hardcover

The Drive In (1988) and The Drive In 2 (1989) by Joe R. Lansdale: At the Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

"I would rather die as part of a movie than live as part of the normal world."

A genre unto his ownself, Texas-born-and-bred Joe R. Lansdale is the author of crime novels that up the ante for violence and cruelty, horror novels and stories that mine the blackest vein of humor and perversity, Westerns turned inside out as well as award-winning mainstream fiction. And The Drive In and The Drive In 2 are a bewilderingly weird combination of all of the above. I think if Joe Bob Briggs wrote novels this is how they would turn out: gory, grim, gleefully outrageous, and obsessed with bad movies, written in a down-home, vulgar, smart-alecky drawl: Had I been Jesus Christ, I'd have come back from the dead, made myself big as the universe, gotten the world between two bricks, and whammo, shit jelly.

I was lucky enough to discover them in 1991 after reading Lansdale's debut novel, The Nightrunners. The two books are sadly out-of-print in their wonderfully colorful Bantam Spectra "science fiction" editions (which I found in mint condition in a comic book store ages ago), but are back in print in a new collection that also includes a third volume, which is brand-new and I have not read.

A meteor unlike any ever seen (The comet smiled. Split down the middle to show us a mouthful of jagged saw-blade teeth) swoops down and then disappears over The Orbit, an enormous six-screen drive-in move theater specializing in horror and exploitation movies on Friday nights in a small East Texas town. In its wake it leaves The Orbit seemingly hanging in outer space, an island adrift in an utter blackness that fries anyone who tries to touch it into a vomitous goop. What follows is an outrageous horrorshow in which the movies that play over and over (Texas Chainsaw, Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, etc.) on the enormous screens cannot hold a candle to the horror the characters are now trapped in. It's a bit like Stephen King's "The Mist" except not quite as dreary but still as existentially, well, fucked. People start to get a little crazy - which, in a Lansdale novel, means a lot crazy.

Horrible cover from Carroll & Graf, 1997, but at least they brought it back in print awhile

Lansdale scores some easy points with his narrator's attempts to find meaning in a universe that would let something like this happen ("Give me something to blame this on. A random universe with no god, evil or otherwise, is just too much for me"), but hey, Jack is only 18 and two of his buddies have been struck by strange lightning and fused into the Popcorn King, an insane demi-god that promises salvation to those who'll worship him. But once Jack decides it's tentacled aliens shooting their own movie, his much more level-headed friend Bob tells him, "Always got to have something to believe in, don't you, Jack? Astrology, Christianity, now B-movie gods." Bob and Jack figure out a way to escape The Orbit, but end up crucified for their pains.

Picking up right at the end of the first book, The Drive In 2: Not Just One of them Sequels introduces dinosaurs on the loose, carnivorous film stock, and a young woman who, adept at martial arts (like Lansdale himself), survives The Orbit apocalypse but meets up with Popalong Cassidy, a monstrous dude that maybe could have stepped whole and breathing from Videodrome. Now the world seems to be on a soundstage existing for the pleasure of alien filmmakers. Really. Truly.

I don't know if I'd recommend reading these two back-to-back, for as much as Lansdale can be ridiculous and satirical with his characters trapped in a cartoony, absurdist nightmare, he doesn't shy away from the uglier, more realistic depictions of people pushed to extremes. It got kinda overwhelming actually. Still, The Drive In and The Drive In 2 really are unique in the annals of horror fiction; a two-shot bizarro sci-fi/pulp horror/apocalyptic-comic paean to trash culture in a world that's probably forgotten what "double feature" even means.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti (1985): Fascinating to Observe What the Mirror Does

But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality - which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair.

The reclusive Thomas Ligotti writes hermetic, maddeningly quiet and exotically bizarre short stories populated by professors, physicians, poets and painters who slowly but surely find that the universe is fractured, unknowable, and ravenous. His 1985 collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer contains rich, dense stories with titles like "Les Fleurs," "Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes," "Dr. Locrian's Asylum," and "The Chymist," which reveal a baroque and decadent view of reality twisted and askew just so. Speculates the narrator of "The Sect of the Idiot":

To suffer a solitary madness seems the joy of paradise when compared to the extraordinary condition in which one's own madness merely echoes that of the world outside...

Many of Ligotti's protagonists go almost willingly into this madness, to the edge of the world where an endless ribbon of road continues into space by itself, as the drunken children's book author of "Alice's Last Adventure" puts it while she ponders the identity of her most famous storybook character. Ligotti also displays a charmingly creepy self-referential tendency in "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror" and "Notes on the Writing of Horror." I've always been a sucker for the horror story that is also about horror fiction.

On the one hand, there's the writer who can't face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing to do with him; on the other hand, there is the one who faces it all too well: that the telling of a story has nothing to do with him.

The cover blurb about shelving this work between Poe and Lovecraft certainly piqued my interest in Ligotti when I found a copy on its first paperback publication (top, Carroll & Graf June 1991). Fellow traveler Ramsey Campbell provides the laudatory introduction: "He belongs to the most honourable tradition in the field, that of subtlety and awesomeness rather than the relentlessly graphic." Ligotti has nothing like Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos but still hints at awesome powers and entities that flit and gibber just beyond the scope of one's perception. And is the "dead dreamer" of the title an oblique reference to the Great Cthulhu itself? According to the cover illustration... uh, well, no.

Ligotti's worldview is one of pessimism and despair, his philosophy born of the perception that what we see as reality is merely a false mask obscuring an unimaginable, even unfathomable truth. He reveals our own distorted reflection, in a foggy mirror, in a glass of Scotch, in the swirling waters of the bath drain, in the cracked lenses of antique spectacles, where we see our aging faces, our corrupt nature, our final doom (It had dozens of legs and looked all backwards and inside out). But then as Professor Nobody says, Horror is more real than we are; and who are we to disagree?

Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon (1961): Somebody Put Something In My Drink

Usually known as a classic science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon reworked vampire mythology with his short 1961 novel Some of Your Blood. George Smith is not an undead creature of the night but a young American soldier with a blood thirst. Profiled by a military psychiatrist, Sturgeon presents a sympathetic view of his protagonist pretty much at odds with virtually all vampire fiction to date.

This first printing paperback original from Ballantine Books was a pretty good eBay score recently; in like-new condition, reasonably priced, but the spine is a little off which always kinda bugs me--would it kill booksellers on eBay to photograph their books at an angle so you can see the condition of the spines? I can't be the only one who thinks about stuff like that. But how can you not dig that title font, so jaunty and rakish? The impressionistic man and woman at the bottom of the cover? Love that midnight blue as always. Back in the '90s I bought the reprint from Carroll & Graf, which has kind of a spooky cover but is really nothing on the original:

Pretty sure that's always the case. Somewhere though there has to be an exception, don't you think? I can't be the only one who thinks about stuff like that.