By Bizarre Hands by Joe R. Lansdale (1989): Apocalypse Wow

If you were a horror fiction reader in the late 1980s and paid attention to such things, you knew that Joe R. Lansdale was being marketed, if that's not too strong a word, in a manner not seen since probably Clive Barker. Their respective publishers knew, even if they couldn't put their finger on it exactly, that these writers were incredibly special (this has nothing to do with the individual styles of Barker and Lansdale, which are markedly different, only that they both went further, deeper, harder, than other even very good writers of that age did) and deserved to be widely read. Check out the cover copy, front and back, of By Bizarre Hands (Avon Books, Sept 1991): "Renegade Nightmare King"?! "May Be Hazardous to Your Health"?! These types of superlatives reach higher than the usual boilerplate encomium, and worked to entice readers who wanted more than just the latest humdrum hack horror.

I was ecstatic to be reading Lansdale for the first time in various anthologies; like many readers I'd never read anything like him. Sure there was the Vonnegut and the Twain, the Mencken and the Joe Bob Briggs, the King and the Matheson and the Bradbury, here and there a whiff of Elmore Leonard and Harry Crews (I noted these last two much later as I had not read them on my first encounter with Lansdale). But still there was something original, tough and sure and daring that sang beneath those familiar notes... and I wanted more.

Around '90 or so I paid big bucks for a signed copy of Joe's short story collection, the 1989 hardcover edition from specialty publisher Mark V. Ziesing. Consisting of his earliest as well as his major stories, I devoured it, loved it, but sometime later, during a bleak broke span during my college years, I had to sell off a major chunk of my limited-edition horror collection, so it was bye-bye By Bizarre. Ah well. Then a month or so ago a TMHF pal emailed a link to this Avon paperback edition from 1991, adorned with the same illustration as the hardcover, thanks to usual suspect JK Potter; it was in good shape and at a fair price, who doesn't love that. Sold! So it's great to have By Bizarre Hands back on my shelves. Couldn't wait to revisit Lansdale's singular landscape of horror, black humor, science fiction, crime, and whatever the hell else he puts in.

Lansdale often succeeds at impossible tasks, with setups that would make lesser writers blanch (or not even realize what deep waters they were in), and pulls them off with a tough, vulgar, self-conscious but not arch energy. He may wink at you but it's not a cute wink of "Hey we both know this is ridiculous" but a wink of devilish glee, acrobatic mischief, "You can't believe I'm getting away with this, can you?!" Like a sort of Tarzan swinging through the jungle hoping a vine will appear in the nick of time, you can't fault him because it all kinda takes your breath away even when his moves are occasionally clumsy or crude. His confidence and his trust in his own instincts, talent, character sketches, and unique vision thrills the reader, makes the reader forgive those tacky lapses scattered about (as if Lansdale were afraid of upsetting social niceties in the first place). YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Let's get to the goods, right from the opener. "Fish Night," hearkens back to Bradbury's love of dinosaurs and other creatures of our earth's past, but lacks any wide-eyed nostalgic innocence. Nostalgic for the ravenous extinct monstrous creatures which swam that prehistoric sea, perhaps... "Duck Hunt" satirizes male camaraderie and companionship, machismo and violence masquerading as such. The terrific title story was also published in the first Borderlands (1990); I wrote a little about it here. It's tasteless, sure, sometimes you think, "Jeez, Joe, I didn't need to know all that," but that's just Joe: he's gonna give it to you straight, maybe chase it with pickle juice and gasoline. Then light the match.

Ever read any of the Black Lizard pulp reprints from the 1980s? Not just Jim Thompson, but Dan J. Marlowe, David Goodis, Charles Willeford? Written with pulp muscle and refusal to sugar coat with any moralizing, Lansdale presents the criminal lifestyle as-is, no returns, no refunds. More than one tale here reminds me of those stark, sere, brutal crime novels, particularly "The Steel Valentine" and "The Pit." "I Tell You It's Love" revels in the romantic sadomasochism of James M. Cain. "Down By the Sea Near the Great Big Rock" is almost whimsical, a Gahan Wilson cartoon come to life. And three stories became three novels: "Boys Will Be Boys" part of The Nightrunners; "Hell Through a Windshield" is the beginnning of The Drive-In; "The Windstorm Passes" became The Magic Wagon. All are must-reads, both the stories here and the actual novels themselves.

One of the very best stories included is "Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back," the title alone which has bounced around in my head for 25 years even as the details faded, is a mean little masterpiece. It's funny, sad, disgusting, outrageous, insightful, empathetic, painful, humiliating, gory, unsettling, a near-effortless melange of SF and horror tropes. His weirdo SF is kinda mind-blowing. I'm not sure what apocalyptic authors Lansdale read—John Brunner? JG Ballard? John Wyndham?—but it's just powerhouse stuff nobody else could've written. Guilt, hatred, regret, only these human emotions survive the apocalypse, along with monstrous thorny vines and mutated animals. Behold the surreality:

The collection concludes with two of Joe's most infamous stories, late 1980s classics that made a splash then and still retain their power decades later: "Night They Missed the Horror Show" and "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folk." The former contains some of the ugliest, most blistering imagery and dialogue for its time, and isn't even really a "horror" story in the generic sense; it's the blackest of noir, maybe. Scorched earth policy here, a glimpse of unfettered human depravity and ignorance, outcast kin to the blistering art and exploitation of, say, Taxi Driver or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or James Ellroy's LA Quartet. If you haven't read "Night They Missed the Horror Show," I can't say you've missed a treat but you have missed a milestone in extreme fiction. The latter tale, from the zombie universe of George A. Romero (RIP!), is a long rambling road story of bounty hunters and the undead, plus lots of Bible talk (a staple of many a Lansdale), gunplay, and gore. You won't be scared but you will be impressed by its colorful energy.

New English Library, 1992

We all are aware of how unique voices can be forgotten, or become cult/fringe favorites, and never find a broader audience. Not so with Joe.  It's satisfying to know that today he has a bigger following than ever, with a movie and TV series adapted from his work (Cold in July and Hap & Leonard, respectively), and more and more award-winning novels. He is a friendly and supportive online presence as well. Reading Joe Lansdale is a free-for-all. For the adventurous, unsatisfied reader who demands more, more, more, I can say get your hands on By Bizarre Hands; it is an essential and uncompromising read.

Valley of Lights by Stephen Gallagher (1987): Watching the Detective

When I need to take a break from reading horror, the genre I look to most often is crime and private detective fiction. On and off for years, and mostly on these days, I've built up a small collection of mass-market paperbacks by writers like Cornell Woolrich, James Ellroy, Jim Thompson, Dan J. Marlowe, Ross and John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Walter Mosley, Jonathan Valin, Charles Willeford, Richard Stark, all in addition to leading figures Cain and Chandler and Hammett of course (some years back I started a blog in that vein—Neat, Clean, Shaved & Sober—but I haven't kept it up, but always mean to restart it!). 

So I was intrigued when I began reading Valley of Lights (Tor Books, Feb 1988) and found it a private detective novel through and through. Can't recall how I'd heard of it or why I bought it recently. British author Stephen Gallagher, who wrote Dr. Who novelizations and other medical/tech thriller-style works, captures that American milieu of cop shops, trailer parks, and skid-row motels and its language well, which isn't that easy (I don't believe Clive Barker quite ever mastered it, and I don't know if James Herbert even ever tried). Gallagher well follows all the detective first-person hallmarks: the hard-boiled insights, the trouble with women, the observations of those he meets and the places they live, and the dogged pursuit of lowlifes. Except this particular lowlife happens to be a body-hopping supernatural being spreading death and mayhem wherever he goes for as long as the being can remember.

This back-cover copy only sets up the first half or so of the novel; then comes a twist that piqued my interest, because I have to say I was not much hooked at all prior. It was all too little too late. Sure, Gallagher can write just fine but the story and pace were tepid; while stakes get higher when the killer kidnaps someone dear to the detective, neither character nor situation elicited much tension and even less horror save for a moment here and there. In its combo of horror and detection it isn't a patch on Progeny of the Adder (1965), Falling Angel (1978),  or Red Dragon (1981).  The ending I admit is disturbing, a bit of vengeance hinted at on this cover of the 1988 New English Library paperback, but again, too little too late. It's a bit of a struggle to even write this review!

The title metaphor works, I'll give it that: lights are lives, of course, lives to be exploited; references to "lights out" and "turned off" and such meaning dead are plentiful, in classic hard-boiled style. The Tor cover art at top reminds me of a computer schematic, however, a hacker floating through cyberspace, but that's a coincidence only. Those are all potential victims. Despite a promising scenario and solid writing, I can't really recommend Valley of Lights to either the serious horror or crime fiction reader.

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 Nightrunners by Joe R. Lansdale (1987): Head-On Collision Smashing in Your Guts

Everybody remembers their first Joe R. Lansdale story.

Mine was "Night They Missed the Horror Show," which I read in the 1990 anthology Splatterpunks in January 1991 (its first appearance was in 1988's Silver Scream but I must've missed it somehow). To say I was unprepared for this black-hearted tale of racist hillbilly snuff-film purveyors and the Texas high-school hellraisers who inadvertently stumble upon their doings is an understatement. Like a sucker punch to a soft belly or a club to the base of the skull, "Horror Show" leaves you stunned, out of breath, a hurt growing inside you that you know won't be leaving any time soon. Hasn't left me this quarter-century later. I know Lansdale (b. 1951, Gladewater TX) would have it no other way. 

Funny thing was, I craved that feeling. Sought it out. So within a couple months I'd tracked down Lansdale's 1987 novel The Nightrunners (Dark Harvest hardcover 1987, paperback by Tor, March 1989). I recall coming home one afternoon from the bookstore I worked at with my brand-new copy, going into my room, locking the door and then reading it in one white-hot unputdownable session. That had never happened to me before; I usually savored my horror fiction over several late nights. But The Nightrunners wouldn't let go. Lansdale's skill in doling out suspense and the threat/promise of the horrible things to come was unbeatable, evident from the first. He even tells you flat-out, after quoting a newspaper article about victims of a "Rapist Ripper," that "no one knew there was a connection between the two savaged bodies and what was going to happen to Montgomery and Becky Jones." You know you got to keep reading after that! 

The Joneses are a young married couple, living in Galveston, Texas, whose lives are shattered when Becky, a teacher, is raped by young men who were once her students in high school. She is haunted by the event, months later, can't even bear her husband's Montgomery touch. The nightmares are horrific re-enactments, almost as if her rapists are living in her head. Monty is a pacifist professor and he can't deal with how ineffectual the crime makes him feel; it throws his entire life philosophy into doubt. A conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, he worries that it's cowardice, not conviction, that may be his main motivation. Becky is horrified rather than being relieved when Clyde Edson, the teenage scumbag sociopath who led the attack and the only one caught by police, hangs himself in his jail cell: she'd seen his death in a vision. Monty, with his "sociological thinking," and a therapist try to explain it away, a result of her trauma, but Becky knows something worse is waiting. Monty's plan? Take her away to their friends' isolated cabin in the woods. Surely, they'll be safe there!

 Kindle edition, 2011

Honorable, stand-up guy Clyde never named his accomplices, and so they're still out there, tooling around the night streets in a black '66 Chevy, eating up the lonesome Texas highways ("Its lights were gold scalpels ripping apart the delicate womb of night, pushing forward through the viscera and allowing it to heal tightly behind it"), looking for trouble, always first to draw when it shows up. Like a mini-Manson, Clyde drew the disaffected to him, into his poisonous orbit; a crew of violent losers with nothing to lose. His best bud Brian Blackwood, however, is different:  together the two of them fancy themselves Nietzschean "supermen" (or, as Blackwood writes in a journal, "It's sort of like this guy I read about once, this philospher whose name I can't remember, but who said something about becoming a Superman. Not the guy with the cape"), ready, willing, and able to topple civilized society and live by muscle and wit, appetite and anger. AKA rape and murder, of course. And revenge.

1987 Dark Harvest hardcover

Here's where things get strange: one night Brian dreams, dreams of a god shambling up a black alley "and somehow Brian knew the shape was a demon-god and the demon-god was called the God of the Razor." Lansdale shifts from his tale of gritty crime and violence into something surreal and grotesque. It is, in its way, absurdly beautiful.

...tall, with shattered starlight eyes and teeth like thirty-two polished, silver stickpins. He had on a top hat that winked of chrome razor blades molded into a bright hatband. His coat (and Brian was not sure how he knew this, but he did) was the skinned flesh of an ancient Aztec warrior... out of nowhere he popped out a chair made of human leg bones with a seat of woven ribs, hunks of flesh, hanks of hair, and he seated himself, crossed his legs and produced from thin air a dummy and put it on his knee... the face the wood-carved, ridiculously red-cheeked face of Clyde Edson. 

(You can see that the cover artists--Joanie Schwarz and Gary Smith--actually read the book! God how I love that Tor cover) Brian learns that Clyde is possessed by this God of the Razor, and now Clyde is going to inhabit Brian and together they're going to find Becky and, in Clyde's charming parlance, "cut the bitch's heart out." With the God of the Razor there to guide their hand. And if Brian fucks up, there's a razor to be ridden on the Dark Side... forever. Idiot minions in tow as well as a bored teenage couple looking for kicks, Brian/Clyde begin their night run, rumbling through the countryside in that black Chevy, laying waste to any and all who get in their way. No one will be spared.

Woeful cover art for Carrol & Graf 1995 reprint

I haven't mentioned the many characters that inhabit the novel, men and women living the hardscrabble Texas country life Lansdale knows so well, using humor and sex to ease pain and poverty. Some of the folks seem like stereotypes but Lansdale always invests a knowing detail into them. He doesn't belabor characterization, but he knows it hurts the reader more when he hurts characters we care about. The teenagers are irredeemable evil, yes, smart yet deluded or stupid and easily led. Monty continually questions his manhood; Becky struggles to contain her fears and begin a normal life again. Despite the depths of sexual violence that Lansdale plumbs here--and make no mistake, he plumbs deep, disturbingly, humiliatingly deep, and there are moments where you'll want to put the book down and try to shake out an image from your head that he's put there--there is always an element of humanity; he balances his cold steel razor fear with an understanding of people in extreme situations. We can survive, if we fight. And if we can get our hands on a frog gig, all the better.

2013 trade reprint, dig the '70s color scheme

Don't get me wrong: The Nightrunners is not a noble book; it is mean, it is nasty, it is ugly as hell in places and it doesn't flinch, ever. It's also vulgar and crude and clumsy--the less said about a flashback to Monty and Becky's "meet cute" scene the better--obviously the work of a writer not yet in command of his craft. But beneath its exploitative surface beats an energetic heart. In cinematic terms, the novel is kind of a hodge-podge of '70s and '80s horror, thriller, and crime entertainment. Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is the obvious inspiration, I think, but one can also sense young Wes Craven and Sam Raimi nodding approval, while the Coen Brothers hang around in the background. Richard Stark and Elmore Leonard peek in every once in a while too. Going back to the '60s you can sense an AIP "wild youth" vibe when Lansdale describes that rumbling black Chevy and the teenage troublemakers inside.

1992 French edition: Children of the Razor!

Lansdale likes his humor icy black, Texas-corny, and in the direst of situations. While not as effortless as it would be in later novels, his bleak sarcasm and smart-ass attitude is threaded throughout Nightrunners. Doesn't always work; this attitude can seem callous, particularly in the humor the teens find in hurting people. Some readers might find this a turn-off. Still, it's what distinguishes him from a couple other extreme writers of horror from the same era, Jack Ketchum and Richard Laymon. He's not as dour as the former or as dreary as the latter. He's unclassifiable. Joe R. Lansdale is his ownself, as he's always said, and I believe him. You will too. 

In the years since this early novel, Lansdale has become more and more prolific (and even better at this writing thing), moving out of the cult ghetto, winning major awards (2000's The Bottoms took the Best Novel Edgar Award) and having film adaptations made (2002's Bubba Ho-Tep and 2014's indie crime flick Cold in July, based on his 1989 book). His personal Facebook page is filled with his terrific and honest advice about writing and the writing life. I've read quite a few of his '80s and early '90s novels and stories (try The Drive-In from '88, the short story collection By Bizarre Hands from '89, or Mucho Mojo from '94) and enjoyed them, but it is The Nightrunners that has stayed with me best: it is pulp '80s horror fiction at its rawest, nastiest, most unforgiving, most relentless. Behold the God of the Razor... but don't say I didn't warn you.

This post originally appeared on Tor.com in slightly altered form.

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (1981): Terror the Human Form

Featuring the infamous first appearance of dreaded Dr. Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter, perhaps the most iconic, most powerful, most thrillingly nightmarish of modern pop-fictional villains, the bestselling Red Dragon is a police procedural par excellence, depicting the cutting-edge techniques of serial killers and their profilers with utmost clarity, thanks to the brilliant honed sheen of Thomas Harris's prose. I don't have the space to go into everything I enjoyed about Red Dragon; the entire story and characters are perfectly imagined and executed (sorry). We peer not only into the broken jagged minds of murderers driven mad by an early life of neglect and deformity, but also the brilliant, tireless lawmen who go after them no matter the personal consequences.

While The Silence of the Lambs is much more well-known both as book and movie, I'm sure many readers are on familiar terms with Red Dragon as well. Again, Lecter isn't necessarily the main villain. Will Graham, only 38, is an early-retired "special investigator" for the FBI, asked by his former supervisor, Jack Crawford, to help find the serial killer dubbed "The Tooth Fairy" (because of his biting fetish) who has just murdered two whole families in their homes. Graham left the force when he was very nearly killed by Dr. Hannibal Lecter several years earlier. Lecter was captured and imprisoned right after but Graham still lives with the scars, mental, emotional, physical. This is a brilliant backstory for both characters; putting such a dramatic event in the past is a stroke of genius on Harris's part. For Graham, going back into the field looking for a monster, just as he's started a new life with a woman and her son... well, it's beyond the last thing he wants to do.

Back cover of reprint, Bantam Mar 1987

No surprise, Red Dragon can be depressing reading, a grim, immersive experience one can get uncomfortably lost in, unable to come up from its suffocating depths for breath. Airless, without any attempt at a creeping atmosphere that would place it firmly in the horror genre (yet it is rightfully included in Newman and Jones's Horror: 100 Best Novels), this is realistic fiction told in a toneless prose that withholds judgment. It is amoral and matter-of-fact about the grossest of human depravities. This is precisely Will Graham's grotesque talent, what makes him the only man for the job, why Crawford is so desperate for his help: Will Graham can slip inside a killer's mind and see all from his perspective without the clouding effects of socialization, morality, and compassion:

 Often his thoughts were not tasty... His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved... His value judgments... could never keep up and direct this thinking.

Obsessed with an apocalyptic painting by English poet William Blake, from whose works the title comes, Francis Dolarhyde is the 42-year-old serial killer Graham is after. With grandiose fantasies of his Great Becoming, Dolarhyde is held in a strange thrall to Blake's painting The Great Red Dragon: Never before had he seen anything that approached his graphic thought. He felt that Blake must have peeked in his ear and seen the Red Dragon. For weeks Dolarhyde had worried that his thoughts might glow out his ears. When the narrative begins Dolarhyde has already murdered two families, the Jacobis and the Leeds - he chose them after seeing their home movies, which he develops in his day job at a film processing company - and is planning on a third (Families were mailing their applications to him every day). A classic if over-melodramatic psychopath, he is utterly detached from his victims; they are only a means to an end: becoming fully the Red Dragon itself. The dead were not people, they...

are not flesh, but light and air and color and quick sounds quickly ended when you change them. Like balloons of color bursting... they are more important for the changing, more important than the lives they scrabble after, pleading.

Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.

Original 1981 hardcover with Blake's conception of the Red Dragon

Francis Dolarhyde's dire childhood is relayed in all its sad and shocking array, a tale we know all too well now that serial killers are cultural mainstays (thank in large part to Harris's fiction). These may be the most gripping parts of the novel: born with facial deformities (he looked more like a leaf-nosed bat than a baby... Springfield in 1938 was not a center for plastic surgery. In Springfield you wore your face as it was), abandoned by his mother, left in an orphanage. Five years later, his grandmother comes for Francis. For the first time someone smiles when they see him. His deformed mouth makes speech nearly impossible. However, Grandmother Dolarhyde insists he tell her his name. We are shocked, heartbroken, and filled with the knowledge that it all begins here.

The child's face brightened. The big boys had helped him with this. He wanted to please. He collected himself.

"Cunt Face," he said.

And eventually, grandmother threatens to cut off his penis if he continues to wet his bed. Her mental health collapses. Francis learns to cope through killing chickens on his grandmother's farm (the peace was endless and all around him). The horrifying connection is made, the emotions become entwined in a waking nightmare: Francis sat silently at his place, opening and closing his hand on the memory of an eye blinking against his palm. Sometimes in bed he held himself to be sure he hadn't been cut. Sometimes when he held himself he thought he felt a blink. God god that line crawled up my spine. There are plenty others.

Original paperback, Bantam Oct 1982

Today we are also familiar with the people who chase these killers, the profilers who can parse out their identities from things insignificant to the untrained eye. The agents and detectives after Dolarhyde are professional men who, with icy resolve, do a very serious and very dangerous job. Underneath they are sick with fear that they will not find Dolarhyde before he slaughters another thriving American family. Harris engages in no cop-show hysterics, no macho thundering, no young hotshots fighting against the system and defying their by-the-book superiors. Nope. Jack Crawford, based on the first FBI profiling expert John E. Douglas, knows he has to stand back and let Graham do the ugliest work inside his head and at the scenes of the crimes, and he needs calm, reflective quiet. And a good chilled martini or three doesn’t hurt either.

Will Graham's bravery is a testimony to this commitment and seen early. At night he walks through the home of the Leeds family, the second group of murder victims, after investigators have left. What clues did they miss? All that's left are the bloodstains, whose patterns hold secret codes that Will must crack. He was an old hand at fear. He could manage this one. He simply was afraid, and he could go on anyway. He could see and hear better afraid... Walking around a bloodstained house at night in which people had been mass murdered only days before? Holy shit that freaked me out. Imagining myself doing it? Out of the fucking question.
 

Early '90s Dell reprint after Lecter became famous

It's no surprise Dolarhyde is a Lecter fan, and his letter to the good doctor is discovered just after Graham visits Hannibal in the Chesapeake Hospital for the Criminally Insane. This really sets the chase in motion. While not as dramatic or intimate as Clarice Starling’s visit to Dr. Lecter, Graham’s seeking out of him is an act he realizes that he must do if he is to stop the Tooth Fairy. Unlike Starling, Graham has a past with Lecter, so he's unnerved to talk with him again. Why wouldn't he be? Lecter makes the most of this time to fuck expertly with Graham's head: "Do you dream much, Will? Do you know how you caught me? The reason you caught me is that we're just alike!" Good God. I know that's become a cliche, killer and cop psychological twins, but Harris makes it work. We revisit how Graham realized Lecter was the killer he was looking for years before. It was this image, the Wound Man illustration from a Middle Ages surgical text, that was the final clue.

It's this kind of esoteric detail that makes Red Dragon an especially fascinating read, one that makes you want to - carefully! - Google asides in the story and dialogue, like references to medical textbooks and forensics methods and physical deformities and psychological tests and of course Blake's biblical art and poetry. Harris inserts tiny details about people's lives and possessions that read like real things observed with a restless mature eye, not simply made up on the spot and tossed into the mix. Even while writing of monsters, Harris is a fully sensitive humanitarian, taking a minor note - the rising color of someone's face, a deft hand on a shoulder, a speech tic, a particular lack of sympathy - and letting it bloom with import. Characters, even ones we meet a single time, live and breathe and exist; we can imagine them outside the narrative itself. Harris follows the stone-carved dictum for all creators of fiction: show, don't tell. Harris implies; the reader infers. Harris can do more damage with one understated sentence - "Cunt Face," he said - than many horror writers can do in a 400-page novel. The ending? Fine and deep and true and haunting. I fucking love it.

Wow. Maybe I need to start looking into large-print book covers too.

If not the equal of Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon is as good a precursor to it as possible (I find Clarice Starling a more captivating and sympathetic protagonist than Will Graham). It is not a novel to approach lightly; it is not simply a popular bestselling thriller to kill a few hours on a flight or waiting at the dentist (oof). Yes, it moves with lightning speed but Harris never lets the reader to get lost in the settings. Whether it’s a film processing lab, an insane asylum, a police headquarters or a newspaper-printing press, Harris writes of them with an authenticity and economy learned from his days as an AP reporter. Sometimes the suspense is unbearable as we move between two worlds so effortlessly, sucked into a drama filled with moments we recognize - the frustrations of work, fraught relationships with spouses and offspring, even budding romance - and those we hope in a million eternities never to face.  

Red Dragon needs nothing supernatural or otherwordly to horrify, it simply and honestly confronts and exposes a nightmared world. It's one of those books whose unrelenting nature will snatch you up and carry you away, leaving you bleary-eyed and sleepless, an aching emptiness inside you from peering into all the darknesses people can hide... and the flesh- and mind-rending terror they can visit upon their fellow man without remorse.

Joe R. Lansdale Born Today, 1951

Happy 62nd to the one and only Joe R. Lansdale! As you can see by these paperback covers, Joe can do it all: splatterpunk, thrillers, westerns, crime, dark fantasy, science fiction. If you haven't read Lansdale... what are you waiting for?!

 

 

 

 

 

Let's Go Play at the Adams' by Mendal Johnson (1974): The Last and Only Day

Innocence is the most frightening sight of all.

This compelling but squicky little cult novel by one-time author Mendal W. Johnson is the kind of book that makes you reevaluate what you read for entertainment and why - I mean, why was I somewhat disappointed that Let's Go Play at the Adams' wasn't as disturbing an experience as I'd... uh, expected (not hoped; no, surely not that)? You can tell just by the reprint cover art (Bantam Sept 1980), with its exploitation and fetishization of sexual abuse, that moral discomfort will be in full effect ("A novel of lingerie horror"? Oh, wait, oops). There's also a promise of rare and illicit thrills. Johnson has written a very strange work that offers credible motivation - at first - for a group of five seemingly normal kids who, during one hot rural summer week while their parents are away on vacation, tie up their downy blonde 20-year-old babysitter and... well, you know.

These five children and young adults -  Dianne, 17, John, 16, Paul, 12, Bobby, 10, and Cindy, 9 (they've dubbed themselves the Freedom Five in a bit of stick-it-to-the-man early '70s counterculture vernacular) - have upended one of the most basic social conventions: that kids and adults are basically two different species and that the adults are the superior ones. And now, they've captured an adult. They shouldn't have been able to, even with all the planning, because of that bedrock social convention, but here they were, out in the open, breaking the law between children and adults, and nothing was happening. They ignored the taboo, and no lightning fell. 

This transgressive thrill motivates them, especially for grubby, twitchy 12-year-old Paul, but ultimately they know and resign themselves to the bald fact that they are entirely responsible and answerable for their own actions, no matter what comes next. They get unknowingly existential, as when Bobby explains to the captive: "Like when we were all figuring out if we could do it, it seemed like something we had to do. Like if you think you can do something, you have to"... till the end, when they realize someone has to pay for the end result of their hellish "fun." 

 Original non-exploitative 1975 paperback

Loosely based, as you may have guessed, on the torture/murder of Sylvia Likens (like Jack Ketchum's much more accomplished 1989 novel The Girl Next Door), Johnson's work goes down dark avenues and doesn't want to come back. Horror fans will want to keep reading, but they might find, as I did, that Johnson seems conflicted as to why he wants to go to those cruel and twisted places; is his motivation to show us the darkness so we can better understand it? Or is the author secretly getting off on the whole sitch? Judging by the endless descriptions of the knots and ropes and other items that bind poor Barbara in more and more uncomfortable positions, these S&M aspects seem less depictions of fictionalized reality than Freudian slips from Johnson's repressed fantasies. 

As for characterization, the tormentors are well-drawn, particularly budding sociopath Paul and oldest sister Dianne, who has some commonality - no matter how denied - with their babysitter. But Barbara is more blank cipher than sympathetic victim and often Johnson intellectualizes her plight rather than giving us the raw, naked hysteria and then detachment that I can only imagine would be real. The author saw Let's Go Play as a political allegory (read here), which honestly I didn't even think of while reading. I suppose if I ever read it again it will be all I can think. This makes me ambivalent about the novel.

 Mendal W. Johnson (1928 - 1976)

 

The final chapter, a shuddering repercussive fadeout that gives no quarter and no ultimate answer, is as unremittingly sad as it is, at moments, difficult to read. It will most likely haunt you afterwards. In the epilogue, we learn of the intimate guilty and ambiguous thoughts of Barbara's one-time roommate Terry as she grieves: Barbara, I hated you for being so easy and simple and happy. You deserved it, I hated you, too...Beauty, I knew you, and I never want to see you again... Goodness, go out of the world so that we can live in it. This seems so ungracious, so unseemly, so terrible a thought to have about a murdered loved one that it actually has a ring of truth. In his own sometimes awkward, sometimes pretentious manner, Johnson might be on to something.

That is some tagline

When he's not focused on babysitter bondage, I believe Johnson is saying that instead of ennobling us, beauty can make us feel lesser beings by showing us its unattainability; that we are cramped and craven, as it awakens in us whispers to dole out pain and humiliation, a torturous desire to topple beauty, to stain it in the dirt-crusted earth from which we can never escape. As if beauty were somehow an escape from the harshest of life's realities, as if it were some ideal beyond the everyday banalities we must endure. How dare beauty remind us, by its very existence, that we'll never possess it? 

The difference tonight - her nakedness - did not much affect Bobby. Barbara appeared to be sweet, defenseless, and all that, but to him, she was also a trifle repugnant. The raw thrust of genitals and hair was a little too much for him at his age; everything was overscale compared to his own slight build. Her nudeness was simply another grotesque item in Bobby's troubled week.