New Terrors, edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980): There's a Place for You In Between the Sheets

Throughout the 1980s paperback horror boom, there was no shortage of horror anthologies. Sure, prior decades had seen their share of tomes of short horror fiction, but often they were mixed with tales of science fiction, fantasy, and crime. The American paperback original edition of New Terrors (Pocket Books, October 1982), showcased writers of various genres right there on the cover. As the '80s wore on this practice was seen less and less and horror anthologies began to feature solely horror writers. For the most part, horror anthos were a treat, even if they were uneven; useful for voracious readers to sample writers they were unfamiliar with, to see what short sharp shocks they could deliver, to learn in a bite-size morsel who might be worth reading an entire novel by and who might be best to avoid.

Pan Books UK, 1980

The American edition doesn't include all the stories as the 1980 original from across the pond, but it does have an utterly delightful cover. Lisa Falkenstern, illustrator extraordinaire, painted vivid portraits of the macabre that have become icons of the era. Sure, okay, the lovely wrapped in bedsheets doesn't exactly align with what's going on between the covers (heh) but who cares? Did anyone ever try to return a book because what was depicted on the cover never actually occurred inside?

As an author Ramsey Campbell is one of the modern horror greats, that hardly needs to be stated, and he is no slouch as an editor either. For New Terrors he's chosen short works of various styles and themes, but which are wrought with fine instruments, presented with an artist's care, then deployed just so for maximum horror impact. The authors wield scalpels, not sledgehammers. The caliber of imagination at work here and the general quality of the prose in its service is impeccable. There is no jokiness, no ill-timed humor, very little grue. The writers strive for elevated implication rather than spell-it-out twists. For the most part the writers succeed at this distinctive style of quieter horror—indeed, many if not most stories have a Campbellian quality to them.

Aickman (1914-1981) 

New Terrors reveals its high pedigree from the first. It begins with one of Robert Aickman's inimitable stories, "The Stains," and it is the longest tale here at nearly 60 pages. Stephen is a middle-aged widower who visits his brother at his small parish in the British moors, where Stephen goes on long lonesome walks. He meets a young woman collecting lichen-covered rocks for her father; Stephen's brother is an amateur expert on the topic but she seems unimpressed, and knows her illiterate father won't care either. This is Aickman's version of "meet cute." He entices the girl to meet him the next day, and they do, exploring an abandoned primitive country home which contains an old mattress in a small room upstairs, where:

...every night the moon shone across their bed and their bodies in wide streaks, oddly angled. "You are like a long, sweet parsnip," Stephen said. "Succulent but really rather tough." "I know nothing at all," she said. "I only know you." The mark below her shoulder stood out darkly, but, God be praised, in isolation. What did the rapidly deteriorating state of the walls and appurtenances matter by comparison with that?  

Allusive, symbolic, literary, lightly weird: yep, this is vintage Aickman, and it won the 1981 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. I appreciated its mild earthy eroticism, the "stains" that creep up on Stephen and slooowly subsume him. Give yourself some time to savor this mature master.

Wellman (1903-1986) 

"Yare" by Manly Wade Wellman is written in his own country grammar, which I can enjoy in doses very small. But Wellman's pen is sure and fine as he characterizes well rough-hewn working men with good trustworthy hunting dogs and backwoods superstitions that turn out to not be superstitions at all. One man has been summoned: "Hark at me good. It ain't no fox that we come out here tonight to have the dogs run." A tale of rural dark fantasy, it's good, but I think it would would have been more at home in Stuart David Schiff's Whispers anthologies.

One of Steve Rasnic's earliest stories, "City Fishing," has two men and their two young sons going out on a fishing trip. Simple. Except they had to physically restrain the mothers:  Jimmy overhears his mom: "You can't take them!"... then there was a struggle as his dad and Bill's dad started forcing the women to the bedrooms. Bill's mother was especially squirmy, and Bill's father was slapping her hard across the face to make her stop. His own mother was a bit quieter, especially after Bill's mother got hurt, but she still cried. Yikes. The travelogue that follows grows more surreal as the men drive into a city that grows more and more decrepit but buildings begin to appear hung down from the sky on wires. Is this an initiation rite of toxic masculinity? Perhaps; its weirdness stands on its own.

Lee (1947-2015) 

Filled with graceful contours and female perception, the late Tanith Lee's "A Room with a Vie" (that's not a misspelling) has no mythic dark fantasy, but an English country vacation home, a rented room, a former tenant now deceased, and Caroline, who must get away. But escape from one's past and personal problems is impossible in horror, and her "hallucinations of fecundity" will bring the room to life. "Oh, Christ, please die," she said. Her lucid prose, even when depicting impossibilities, as well as a tinge of black humor at the climax, make Lee's story a standout.

"Tissue" by a young Marc Laidlaw has some unsettling imagery of the flesh as you might guess by its title, and it works beautifully. Macabre, insane family issues come to the fore when a young man brings his girlfriend to meet his father after the death of his mother. Dad's idea of family? "One optimally functioning individual organism." Laidlaw gets literally under the skin with some startling imagery and ideas, assisted by certain Campbellian touches. Another high point.

Shaw (1931-1996) 

Bob Shaw was a beloved Irish science fiction writer. His "Love Me Tender" reads like a '40s crime story with an escaped convict named Massick on the lam, trudging through muddy forest, following train tracks, a city boy in a prehistoric landscape. He comes upon a shack and an old man drinking whiskey, sorting dead butterflies for the university nearby, talking about mimics and lookalikes. When Massick gets a look inside the shack's sole locked door, he's eager... but of course all that stuff about lookalikes wasn't idle chatter, and the common noir trope of femme fatale becomes all too literal. Good stuff, great payoff.

Another science fiction author offers another very good story: "Kevin Malone" by the highly-regarded Gene Wolfe. A couple in dire straits answer an ad for free living arrangements in exchange for "minimal services." Oh my god, seriously people?! Do not do this ever. Though brief, in his stately, sophisticated prose Wolfe's literate story bewitches: I felt that pricking at the neck that comes when one reads Poe alone at night.

Reed (1932-2017) 

"Chicken Soup" is about Harry, who loved being sick, and thus develops a rather unhealthy relationship between Harry and his mother. Another writer known for SF as well as mystery, Kit Reed, in addition to be a revered professor and who died last fall, ventures into domestic Shirley Jackson territory, with perhaps a hint of Harlan Ellison's 1976 darkly comic story of Jewish guilt, "Mom." Like all happy couples they had their fights which lasted only an hour or two and cleared the air nicely. Reed wraps it all up in traditional horror manner. Not bad. Neither "The Pursuer" by James Wade nor "The Spot" by Dennis Etchison and Mark Johnson rose higher than "that was okay" for me: the former is a rescue from 1951, an "urban horror" not unlike Beaumont or Matheson; the latter is, as Campbell even notes "more allegorical than most of the tales in this book," make that "too allegorical for its own good."

Wilder (1930-2002) 

New Zealand SF/F author Cherry Wilder contributes "The Gingerbread House," which has some familiar touches but a couple fresh notes. Amanda visits her brother Douglas, newly divorced and cranky as hell, living in a German cottage owned by a madwoman now in a sanitarium. Together they face ugly secrets about themselves: he may have killed a child in a hit-and-run, she suffers from anorexia (a rare acknowledgement of the disease in that day).

"You must stop running away." 

"So must you," he said, with a reassuring touch of the old self-righteousness. "Yes," she said, "yes, I promise. I'll eat... I'll put on ten pounds, twelve. Only we must leave this house... this is a rotten place. It plays tricks." 

His eyes swiveled nervously in the direction of the cupboard. 

"You may be right," he whispered.

Wagner (1945-1994)

".220 Swift" is one of Karl Edward Wagner's long, major works. It's a sweaty, claustrophobic tale of two men heading into a cavern in a North Carolina hillside, inspired by, as Wagner put it, "archaeological curiosa." Solid dialogue, solid grounding in reality, solid everything, it has all the components that made Wagner a legend in his lifetime. While I could do without passages about guns and ammo (it's the title), I realize this is something Wagner knew intimately. And Campbell's own contribution "The Fit" also hit my horror sweet spot; it also features everything that makes Campbell great. Rather alienated young man spends holidays with his aunt who is a dress-maker. She runs afoul of local crone named Fanny Cave (I kept imagining her in her cottage, her long limbs folded up like a spider's in hiding) who lives down by the water. Notes of uncomfortable sexual tension and inanimate dress dummies and clothing that take on sinister agency appear—Eventually I managed to sleep, only to dream that dresses were waddling limblessly through the doorway of my room, towards the bed. Add a shuddery finish and you've got a maybe a precursor to his classic The Face That Must Die. 

New Terrors ends on a celebrity note, and Stephen King's name looks great on the cover, but wow has this one always been one of my least favorites by the man. I first encountered "Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game" in Skeleton Crew, when it was published some years after first appearing here, and in that collection it was rewritten for whatever reason and to whatever effect. Either version is a lesser work. One creepy image can't make up for these characters' drunken, tiresome, pointless antics. "This is his strangest story," Campbell notes, sure, but it offers little else.

Taken as a whole, New Terrors does feature some terrific writing, effectively horrific scenarios, and a couple first-rate stories, but today, some weeks after reading it, I'm hard-pressed recalling specifics about the lesser stories. Strong works from Aickman, Lee, Laidlaw, Wolfe, Wilder, Wagner, and Campbell; okay ones from the others and a couple "why bother?" equal around a 75 or 80% competency rate, so like a C+ or B if we're grading. However that Falkenstern cover is an A+ on its own merits, I think you'll agree!

Feral by Berton Roueché (1974): Stray Cat Blues

This sleek, efficient little thriller won't let go once it gets its claws in ya! I read Feral (Pocket Books, 1975/Avon reprint, 1983) in one lazy, sunny, mildly hungover afternoon, eagerly eating up every gruesome morsel Berton Roueché was serving. First time I ever heard of it was in King's Danse Macabre, in which he writes it's "one of that select handful [of books] that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading." Indeed. Feral is a soufflé of a suspense/horror novel, barely 125 pages in paperback, offering light, satisfying entertainment with little cause for regret.  It's got some butt-clenching scenes of feline violence, but not too many, although you can still practically feel those claws slashing and razoring your flesh. Ouch.

Boy, do I like horror novels written by people who know how to really write, and don't need to show off. Roueché was a writerly dude, employed by The New Yorker mag for 50 years, also penning medical mysteries, and one of those books inspired early episodes of the hugely popular TV show "House." Huh, whaddya know? His clean, plain, unencumbered prose is disarming, with a natural flow to it that's a pleasure to read, which lends a quiet believability to unbelievable events--even the characters can hardly believe what's happening before them.

Feral also gave me the kind of setting I enjoy more and more in my vintage horror, that of the vacation home in an idyllic locale--here, we're in Amagansett, Long Island (where Roueché himself lived), a little seaside community for the well-to-do. City folks come up for the summer, then head home as autumn arrives. The novel begins a bit like a travelogue as Jack and Amy Bishop buy a 1920s farmhouse near the ocean (but ick! There's a dead cat in the bedroom closet. Bad omen!). Turns out to be a huge mistake. 

Many of those summer vacay-ers ditch new pets on the side of the road before leaving the town, unwilling to bring the animal with them into the city. I know it's pretty difficult to imagine today, but yep. In fact, the otherwise likeable Jack and Amy do the same thing with a kitten they're given, reluctantly, but Jack rationalizes to his wife, "What else can we do? We sure can't take her into town. That would be awful. She's a country cat. She'd die penned up in that apartment." So they drop it off near homes obviously inhabited with families, and hope for the best. We don't see little Sneakers again, but when countless cats are left roadside this way, what else can be expected to happen? They return to their natural state. This action also makes the couple complicit in the horror that's coming.

The next year, Jack and Amy come to like Amagansett and their home so much they decide to stay year-round, to the envy of their friends who have to work in the city (Jack is a science magazine editor). They find a stray dog and name it Sam, and at the vet's are given a guilt-inducing earful by him about vacationers who ditch their pets:

"But you can't exactly blame the cats. I'm more inclined to blame the people that put them there. I mean the folks that come down here for the summer and get a little kitten for the kids, and then when it's time to go back to the city, they dump it off at the side of the road. Sink or swim. And the trouble is, it usually manages to swim. Those people make me really mad." ... Amy gave me an anguished look. I knew how she felt. I felt a little sick myself... We hadn't just dumped Sneakers. Not really. And yet, of course, we had. It was just that we hadn't realized.

But they begin to notice cats around their home, while they're driving down a deserted road at night, then during the day, and not just one or two mangy strays; there are usually three or more, mistaken for dogs at first because of their size, and often seen gorging on dead animals in a field or by the side of the road. Locals begin commenting that no one can find birds to watch on the nature trails, and a stable owner notes he has no rats creeping about his property this season. The first real note of terror happens off-screen, as it were, when Jack and Amy hear of a friend nearby who's bitten by a stray cat she tried to feed and falls seriously ill... then dies several days later. One fall day Jack goes out to cut down a tree for firewood with Sam and:

I sensed a movement... it was a dirty white cat with a missing ear, and it sat watching me from behind a screen of lopped-off branches. There was something odd about its gaze. It was a natural look. It was too steady, too fixed, too tensely concentrated. It held my eye. I stared compulsively back--and saw another cat... the tumble of branches was full of cats. I counted seven. I counted eight of them. I counted eleven crouching cats watching me through the branches....

With his skilled pen, Roueché quietly ratchets up suspense here, and I swear I could sense those yellowy eyes glaring at me too. And Sam is nowhere to be found, so you know that's not gonna turn out well.

1977 Pan Books, UK, retitled The Cats

Jack casts around for help, accessing some scientific literature that's of little use, contacting the police department with the same results. They put him in touch with the dog warden, who doesn't know how to handle cats. He does inform Jack there's no law against shooting 'em, but Jack does not relish this idea. Still, he buys a small-bore shotgun: There was something about a gun. It made a difference. It made all the difference. I wondered what I would do without it. Even the thought of it was a little scary. Jack shoots a few cats but this only scares the others off for awhile, and they return, in larger numbers, their yowling filling the air at night. And then one day it happens: countless cats have flowed out of the woods and essentially have the Bishops trapped in their home. He calls the police for help, and they send one young lone rookie...

Original 1974 hardcover 

The final chapters are filled with a sort of despairing tone as the men of Amagansett fight the crazed animals, whose numbers seem to impossibly increase; one might think of James Herbert's The Rats, from the same year, but Roueché is a much more tasteful and restrained writer (no tawdry sex scenes here!) so the climax has no pulp hysteria, but it's still unsettling because it's matter-of-factly written--as I said, you can still practically feel those slashing claws, writhing bodies, piercing fangs. The subtle implication is that humans are at fault for this nightmare scenario, but the point is not belabored, yet it is obvious. The ending at first seems cliched but I think it speaks more to newfound paranoia than generic trickery.

Feral isn't a forgotten horror masterpiece or anything, but it's a gripping high point of the "animals gone amok" subgenre, and probably better written than any others. You can find copies for cheap and I definitely recommend you do. Set aside a free afternoon for Feral--but put Fluffy away first.

I'll Let You Be in My Dream if I Can Be in Yours: The Erotic Horrors of Thomas Tessier

I was fortunate enough to discover the horror novels of Thomas Tessier (b. Waterbury, CT in 1947) back in 1989, when I began working in a used bookstore just out of high school. Horror junkie that I was, my favorite authors were still limited to King, Lovecraft, Barker, Campbell, and a few of the splatterpunks. So I was grooving on the fact that I had access to all the beat-up old paperbacks in our horror section; it was time to branch out.  At the time of course I was an aspiring horror writer myself, so I wanted to know who else was out there and what else had been done, and read the writers I'd only heard of who were horror masters.

Tessier's name was unknown to me, however. Maybe it was the Ramsey Campbell blurb on the cover of Finishing Touches (originally published in 1986, Pocket Books paperback from 1987), or maybe it was the promise of illicit thrills in those ribbon-bewrapped, ruby-tipped female hands that drew me to the book and take it home (why, I could take home any book I wanted!). Impressed by it, I then read a couple of his other books—The Fates, Shockwaves—and rather enjoyed them all, but when I began this blog, I realized I couldn’t recall anything about them! Weird. Time for a reread...

Rereads can be tricky things, especially when a quarter century has passed between. Readers change, mature, move on, give up, crave more challenging (or less challenging, whichever) literature. What was once revelatory at age 18 seems obvious and banal at 35. The opposite, happily, was true with Finishing Touches. I couldn’t believe how I’d forgotten the powerful dark undercurrent of eroticism that propelled it. Perhaps it was because it evinced a maturity I was unfamiliar with on first read, a sense of obsession I couldn’t quite grasp yet.  So many horror writers utilize the scary power and mystery and thrill of sex to snag undiscriminating readers, or they think publishers are more likely to buy a book with graphic or tawdry sex than one without. Whichever it is, few horror writers have written novels which so successfully fuse our erotic lives and our nightmare lives.

And I don’t mean to sound crass but to put it another way, Tessier writes like he’s actually had adult sexual relations with another adult, rather than the usual juvenile T n’ A that was so prevalent in horror of the day. Now sure that kind of approach can be good for a laugh or an easing of tension, but when in Tessier’s more literate, more intimate approach (he began his career as a poet), he illustrates how sex and horror entwined can create fiction of a most disturbing kind.

I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours. This clever little line from an old Bob Dylan song sounds innocuous and playful enough, but in  Finishing Touches, it takes on a dreadful, terrifying enormity. American Thomas Sutherland, just out of medical school, idle and alone, visiting London for six months before deciding what the rest of his life will be. He casually meets an older, odd little cosmetic surgeon drinking alone in a pub. Roger Nordhagen invites him out for nights of carousing in which Sutherland gets to see a London of elite establishments, the likes of which tourists never see. One such place fulfills dark fantasies, a playpen for the pampered few.

But these dark fantasies will pale and recede once Sutherland meets Nordhagen’s assistant, Lina Ravachol. All alabaster features and raven-black hair, confidence and mystery, she soon has Sutherland willingly in her thrall. Sutherland is astonished that she desires him sexually, and their acrobatic, fantasy-driven trysts make him forget all about his past American life. Step by step Sutherland descends, all too believably; he seems a willing participant. How could he not be? Eventually Lina and Sutherland forge an unimpeachable bond in a moment of orchestrated horror, of sex and death, with an unwitting young woman (orchestrated, that is, by Nordhagen and Lina herself). Sutherland is now complicit, his darkest fantasies made flesh and blood, and Nordhagen can reveal himself as a modern Marquis de Sade.

Espousing a philosophy of cruelty, its necessity and ineluctability, the good doctor now shows Sutherland his life’s work, deep beneath his London offices, his medical talents have reached their fullest and most depraved potential. And it is obvious he wishes the young American and Lina to continue his mad work after his death from drink. Sutherland dares to ask, why?
  

 “Why, why, why.” Nordhagen’s face brightened with interest. “You might as well ask why the Mayan civilization collapsed, why Kennedy rode in an open limousine in Dallas, why we came down out of the trees. What is why? There is no why; there is only now, and this, this now.”  

Told in first person in a clear strong voice by a man who slowly comes to face the fact that he can plumb depths of moral—and sexual—insanity, but remain psychologically intact and even thrive, Sutherland is well aware of his descent. “There was a malignancy in me I could not explain away,” he states clearly. An exploration of men and women and the madnesses and obsessions they can succumb to and embrace, and even, perhaps facing extinction, use to forge meaning in the teeth of raw dumb nature, Finishing Touches resembles no other horror novel I’ve read. And even at the end Tom and Lina (whose namesake she seems to aspire to) desire to be a part of that nature, “instead of trying to steer it ourselves, we would have to learn to let it go its own way. Death and terror will follow, like leaves falling out of trees.”

Rapture followed in 1987; the story of a cool, calm sociopath, Tessier’s prose and conviction rivet the reader to the page. While Rapture isn’t as decadent or perverse as Finishing Touches, eros plays a large motivating factor in the disintegrating mind of Jeff Lisker’s growing obsession with an old high school friend (platonic, however), Georgianne. Both are now in their thirties and living successful lives on opposite coasts. When Jeff’s father dies he goes home for the funeral and tracks down Georgianne, in full stalker mode. He follows her from her home and pretends to “accidentally” bump into her as she runs errands. Soon he’s having dinner with her and her husband Sean, whose sarcasm, condescension, and impatience simmer barely below the surface (or is that just Jeff’s insecurity?). Jeff also meets Bonnie, their brilliant teenage daughter just out of high school—Bonnie, who looks not unlike Georgianne 20-odd years ago. Jeff’s fantasies kick into gear...

In one moment, Jeff decides he will simply take Georgianne from Sean. That’s all there is to it. No matter how. Georgianne will fall into his arms, and Bonnie would come after.

 Sean was on the way out; he just didn’t know it yet. And why not? Why the fuck not? “Take her,” he said aloud. “I’ll just take her!” And as he said this over and over again, he fell in love with the words, what they meant and the sheer beautiful sound of them. He seemed to be completing a sentence he’d begun to form during some previous incarnation. 

Tessier is also adept at the psychological study. His great trick in Rapture is that he so slowly guides us into Jeff’s mind, its rationalizations and inventions, its almost charming delusions, its grandiose planning and seeming lack of guile, that we don’t quite realize just how crazy he is—and when we do, his plan still makes perfectly logical sense. It’s why the book is so readable: it’s all easily believable, since the characters and situations feel so real. In writer of lesser skills, a couple of twists in Rapture would seem forced; Tessier makes them seem like destiny.

He had treated the whole thing like a problem at work... you let it simmer in the depths of your brain, and sooner or later the answer will come to the surface. It was, he reckoned, an essentially creative process.... He belonged to the select handful of individuals who had the courage, imagination, and sheer will to create their own destinies.  

One step follows another, problems arise and are dispatched, all leading deeper and deeper into a conflagration of desire and death. “Desire” is key as well, as Tessier understands and presents sex not as exploitation, but as human nature. Jeff’s sex life, as well as his fantasies, are on full view in Rapture, and in this, we truly see his self-absorption. Women are to be dominated, to play along with his every whim, they are to pretend; they are not real in and of themselves. When the novel opens, he’s having sex with a woman young enough to still be living with her parents (“You won’t tell your parents?” “Not if you come back.” “You got me.”). Jeff’s almost willfully letting himself be blackmailed, but we know it’s only a game he’s playing... and the reader is even a bit sympathetic, which is the scariest thing of all.

I own most of Tessier’s novels now and look forward to reading them all, although I’m not sure if they can top the darkened sexual nature of Finishing Touches and Rapture (to a lesser extent, his 1979 novel The Nightwalker also has a twisted sexual element). Tessier doesn’t simply toss in a peep-show of naked flesh willy-nilly; his horrors spring from honest exploration of our erotic impulses. His precise, sinuous prose, his empathic sense of human failure and delusion, and his effortless ability to pinpoint and expose the secret self that drives and even dooms us all make Thomas Tessier a horror writer that will satisfy the discerning horror fan.

(This post originally appeared in slightly altered form as part of "The Summer of Sleaze" on the Tor.com website)