Chet Williamson Born Today, 1948

"Books don't scare me. When I read horror, I don't read it really to be scared. I read it to be moved..."

Chet Williamson, in Dark Dreamers, 1990

 

Spectre by Stephen Laws (1986): Down at the Rock and Roll Club

For 1980s horror fiction aficionados like me, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as when you buy an old paperback based solely on its promising cover art and then finding, upon actually reading the book, that the contents deliver on said promise. Now, ironically, the photo-realistic cover for Spectre (Tor, July 1987) by Stephen Laws—featuring some young denizens of that amazing decade in various stages of disappearance—doesn’t exactly scream “Horror! Terror! Dismemberment!” So why pick it up?

Because that's precisely what struck me about the cover, thanks to the talents of J.K. Potter, a renowned artist who’s illustrated countless volumes of horror fiction: its utter lack of tacky tasteless imagery (aside from an oversize sweater or two). I was drawn to Spectre because it promised, perhaps, quiet chilling scares, rather than the full-on assault of so much ’80s horror, often done with all the finesse of Leatherface working his saw. Did the novel deliver on its promise of quiet horror? Actually, no: Laws’ novel is filled with tentacles and teeth, torn limbs and slashed throats, abhorrent rituals and hungry gods… but it’s all done with the finesse of Hannibal Lecter preparing you dinner.

1986 UK hardcover

Not quite a coming-of-age story, Spectre introduces the reader to a group of inseparable friends from Byker, a blue-collar town in Newcastle in the northeast of England. Although they grew up together, and dubbed themselves the Byker Chapter, Laws doesn’t spend too much time detailing their childhoods like, say, Stephen King; he flashbacks mainly on their university years a decade ago. It’s the present, as they enter their 30s, that Laws is concerned with. The horrific death of one of the Chapter opens the novel, as Phil Stuart languishes drunkenly in his flat, TV and radio blaring to vanquish the fear and depression that has plagued him for weeks. A photograph of the last night the Byker Chapter spent together comforts Phil, a charm against his panic, but it works no longer: unbelievably, he seems to be fading from the photograph. He knows that can mean only one thing. And alas, he is correct.

After Phil’s introductory demise, we meet our protagonist Richard Eden, drinking with his memories at a nightclub called the Imperial. He’s 10 years older than the others partying in this disco, which was once a movie theater at which he and the others in the Byker Chapter saw many a Hammer horror film in the 1960s (Laws has dedicated Spectre to Peter Cushing). Richard’s wife has left him and her new boyfriend has humiliated him, and soon he will learn one of his old friends has been murdered horribly. Employed as a lecturer at a college, his coworkers are still sexist morons, and the one person he hopes to feel a connection with, the beautiful and smart Diane Drew, susses him as an emotional wreck. When Richard pulls out his own copy of that Byker Chapter photo, he sees Phil is gone… and so now is another, Derek Robson. It all makes Richard think of the “spectre,” an inside joke between the friends, a word used as shorthand for all the horrible things that could go wrong in one’s life, whether a schoolyard bully or an absent parent, a police siren in the night or, indeed, the deaths of one’s old schoolmates.

NEL reprint, 1994

What better way to get back on one’s feet than to get drunk and then investigate the death of one’s former mate? Richard enlists the help of a colleague of Derek’s, who coincidentally was also Derek’s landlord. Together they pay a visit to the scene of the crime—and so begins one of the more effective scenes of horror I’ve read recently. I read it one morning over coffee before work, and was excited at how convincing Laws presents and pulls off the two men’s encounter with—wait for it—a ventriloquist’s dummy. What could have been laughable is rendered with a physical realism and dream logic. It happens about 50 pages in, and while I was quite enjoying Spectre up to that point, it was this sequence that convinced me Laws truly knew how write a horror novel: his characters were real enough, with just the right amount of back story to explain motivation and relationship, while his skill in offering up the horror genre goodies as well was rather an unexpected treat. I spent my whole day at work marveling over that scene in my head, eager to get back to the tale and see what else Laws had in store.

It’s obvious that Laws has based these characters’ experiences on his own, and ably conveys it in these pages; the Imperial must be a real place as well, I decided (and the author’s postscript proved me right). The characters that work there could be people you'd actually meet: young single-mother bartender Angie; Josh, who hides his true nature from mates; and doorman/bouncer Paul, exploiting his "power" over anyone he dislikes (which is mostly everyone). Too many horror paperbacks seem written by people who have no ability to capture the real world, the one of friends and lovers and colleagues, work and play, “writers” who don’t care about character or plot but only the next shock. If these authors realized that shock is heightened only when we care about characters, have some insight into what they fear, what they hold dear, what loss will mean to them...

Sphere Books, 1988 

Richard now realizes he must track down the other people in that photo, old friends he hasn’t been in touch with for years. Drinking again at the Imperial (lots of drinking in this one, which I totally dig), he is surprised to see Diane arrive with some friends. They engage in some banter that isn’t embarrassing at all to the reader, and find they actually rather like one another. When Diane reveals that her mother had been a psychic, Richard dares to tell her about what’s going on his life… and it doesn’t scare her off. She offers to help him track down the other people in the photo, three men and the lone woman, Pandora Ellison. But this proves unnecessary; returning from work one evening to Richard’s home, they are met by two men in his doorway: Joe McFarlen and Stan “the Man” Staftoe, two more of the Byker Chapter. They’ve all been depressed, feeling trapped and hunted, and have tracked Richard down first. All are determined to get to the bottom of the Photo of the Disappearing Chums.

Memory is one of the strangest tools of the human brain; Laws literalizes its tenuous quality using that photograph. Music, too, evokes the powerful sense of our past, emotional cues buried deep and forgotten but brought to instant life the moment, as here, “Layla” is heard (he uses it to punctuate and underline various scenes, and this well before Scorsese used it the same way in Goodfellas). It’s this kind of personal sentiment that lends depth to his tale; it reminded me of when one dreams of memories of things that never happened, thus lending one's actual dream a palpable sense of heartbreak. The survivors of the Byker Chapter are racing against something worse than heartbreak, of course.

Laws in 1985

Along the way we learn that Pandora had told each of the men that she loved him alone and wanted to sleep with him, and then she did. She broke each of their hearts, unbeknownst to the others, and moved back to her parents and broke off any contact with the Bykers. Eventually, after much horror and death—all exquisitely rendered—Richard, Stan, and Diane arrive in the Cornish port town of Mevagissey, looking for Pandora’s family. Which they find, and then learn the answer to Pandora’s deceit and departure. It’s a doozy: Greek myth and occult orgies, an Aleister Crowley wannabe and an unholy motherhood, and a vision of humanity extinct. Now that’s a horror novel!

French paperback, 1992

In every way, Spectre is a success, and I was delighted that a book I bought on a whim, solely because of its cover art, turned out to be such a pleasure to read. Stephen Laws doesn’t reinvent the wheel here, and many scenes and characters are comfortably familiar. But his prose presents fresh insights, his depiction of English life and streets and architecture authentic and gritty. Best of all, he never hesitates to ramp up the horror with a vivid eye for the grotesque, and a ready pen to describe it: from a sludge monster rising from a developing tray in a photo lab, to a clay sculpture coming to life and embracing its creator; from a stuffed grizzly bear in a museum exhibit mauling a man in his own office, to electric-blue tentacles shooting from a TV screen; from an old woman with no face and a bloody gash for a mouth who explains all to the intrepid survivors, to a blood-drenched finale on the dance floor reflected in the glittering glass of a revolving disco ball—Laws lays on the ’80s horror good and thick.

But not too thick; Spectre doesn’t even reach 300 pages, and can be speedily read in a day or three, which was another thing I appreciated about the novel. In that '80s era of bloated bestsellers, paperbacks with over-large type, and novellas padded out to novel length to give merely the impression of value for money, a sleek torpedo of a horror novel like Spectre is a welcome addition to the genre.

(This post originally appeared on Tor.com)

Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks by Richard Christian Matheson(1987): Do the Ultra Twist

Long before Joe Hill made horror a family tradition, Richard Christian Matheson was born of legendary Richard Matheson and began cranking out short-short genre fiction that appeared in The Twilight Zone and Night Cry magazines and 1980s anthologies edited by Charles L. Grant, Dennis Etchison, and Stuart David Schiff. While his name alone could have gotten him published, Matheson garnered much attention in the field on his own skill for stripping his stories to the absolute bone, with some consisting solely of one-word sentences or very nearly that. During an era in which horror showed a tendency to bloat and stuffing, some editors and readers found Matheson's pared-down work refreshing, while still maintaining edge and bite. For a short while he was aligned with the splatterpunks, mostly because he was young and had a background in television (you know--so modern) and palled around with Skipp, Spector, Schow, et. al. My first experience with him was in 1986's Cutting Edge, which included "Vampire." It's just two pages of:

In the '80s I found it quite striking, and the title is more metaphor than literal. Today, I dunno, it seems more gimmicky than powerful. Which is the problem with Matheson's whole style of clipped brevity: does it engender more chills for the reader, is it essential to the story to be told so? What's frustrating about this wildly uneven collection (first published by Scream/Press in 1987, Tor Books paperback July 1988) is that the style is in service to stories that are threadbare and obvious, rife with twists and fillips that depend only on leaving out crucial details. Oh, the servant is a human and the served is a robot! Oh, they're not people, they're endangered whales! Oh, the little girl is death itself! If he'd just told us that stuff at the beginning then maybe there'd be an interesting story. Stories often end just when they should be beginning. They seem like tales told inside-out, writerly warm-up exercises to get to the good stuff. Except that never really happens, not like I remembered from first reading Scars in the early '90s.

Too many scenarios are redolent of moldy "Twilight Zone" and "Night Gallery" tropes: beware "Sentences," "Obsolete," "Intruder," "Beholder," "Incorporation." Did Rod Serling come over and babysit a young Matheson?! Treacly beyond endurance, "Holiday" rolls out a real Santa Claus, while the 60-page teleplay for an episode of the Steven Spielberg-produced '80s TV anthology "Amazing Stories" is well-nigh unreadable. Ballplaying kids and their grampas and dopey dogs in a Norman Rockell town... oh god, spare me. Please. Try to read "Cancelled" without cringing at the ridiculous slangy stream-of-consciousness and labored satire of crass network television shows. "Conversation Piece" was done with more subtle chills, sincerity, and thoughtfulness by Michael Blumlein with his "Bestseller." Graphic unsettling violence rears an ugly head--or ugly bump--in "Goosebumps," a bit of meta-horror that would be silly were it not for the image of a guy stabbing a butcher knife into his own mouth. It's still silly but now it makes you wince, so...

Is it ironic that "Graduation," which I'd read in Whispers, is probably Matheson's best work, and it was his first published? Written with strength and style and its only gimmick is the letter-writer's references to "you-know-who" and even on this second read I have no idea who that's supposed to be. Unreliable narrators can be great devices for horror but not when the reader has no way to grasp the truth. Still, I found it vivid and unsettling; "Graduation" has a precision that briefer works lack. Other standout works--the aforementioned "Vampire," "Mr. Right," "Red," "Dead End"--can be found in various anthologies. Editors chose wisely (Paul Sammon included the broiling, LA's burning, high-pressure radio-DJ nightmare "Hell" in Splatterpunks). I believe it was "Red" that got Matheson attention in the first place, and how could it not? It's about SPOILER a guy picking up parts of his daughter's mangled corpse off the road after he accidentally dragged her behind his car. Of course Matheson doesn't spell that out like I just did and while it's pretty shocking it kind of stretches the boundaries of belief. Would the police and EMTs even allow that?!

When you look at Matheson's TV-ography as a writer, it's prolific but the quality is actually rather dismal. Highlights include such well-loved but not terribly brilliant shows like "Three's Company," "Knight Rider," "The A-Team," and "The Incredible Hulk," as well as not so-well-loved and not terribly brilliant shows like "B.J. and the Bear" and "The Powers of Matthew Star." With that in mind, the horror stories make more sense: they're not changing the world, they're just entertaining you for 22 or 45 minutes or so. But they're entertaining you not because they've got a new vision; they're entertaining you because it's the familiar dressed up in unfamiliar garb. The only raison d'être is that twist, that surprise, so anything that would get in the way of that--character, dialogue, realism--is jettisoned. As I said, perhaps in the 1980s a writer could have gotten away with this--and obviously, he did!--but today, as a much more experienced reader and fan, I find Matheson's approach to horror fiction incredibly jejune.

I began to think of this collection as high-concept horror: ideas that seem intriguing at first but are little more than tiny gimmicks, not actual stories about real people and situations. His penchant for writing stories made up of one-word sentences is interesting at first, but when it's over you think, That's all? Despite the introductory encomiums from Stephen King and Dennis Etchison, I was very little impressed with Scars, and despite the Matheson family name, found it not very distinguishing at all.

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 Texas high-school hellraisers who inadvertently stumble upon real-life horrors 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.

The Kill Riff by David J. Schow (1988): Ain't It a Shame To Be Shot Down in Flames

Another re-read of a novel I loved back in the horror hey-day. There is no horror as fans know and love it in David J. Schow's 1988 novel The Kill Riff (Tor paperback published May 1989), despite it bearing the icon of Tor's horror line; this is a suspense thriller through and through. The most accurate blurb about is from Penthouse, that bastion of literary acumen, and it states the novel's high-concept succinctly: "Gives us the nightmarish psychology behind the systematic murders of a heavy-metal band." A dark nightmarish tune, Schow's first novel is all revenge and madness and the toll it all takes on the human psyche. Like lots of Schow's short fiction there is no supernatural element, and none is necessary. People can do crazy all by themselves.

Schow, early 1990s

Middle-aged Lucas Ellington, fresh out of a stint in a fancy, relaxing psychiatric "home," is attempting normalcy again. His beloved daughter was trampled to death at a performance by LA's heavy metal bad boys Whip Hand, Lucas went over the deep end and threatened Gabriel Stannard, the lead singer, but today, Lucas just wants to drive up to his cabin in the California wilds and chill, alone. He touches base with his business partner, Burt, with whom he runs an advertising company, as well as the female psychiatrist, Sara, who might be falling in love with him. Both think Lucas is well on his way to recovery... but he is not. In his still-fevered brain, Lucas wants to lay the members of Whip Hand to waste, kill 'em all, no mercy, and hidden in that secluded cabin is an arsenal direct from any Nam vet's worst nightmare... or wet dream.

The Kill Riff revels in a noxious stew of toxic masculinity. Lucas is obsessed with Whip Hand, stung by visions of his daughter's last moments worshiping at the rock'n'roll altar. He begins filling a room in that cabin with records and tapes and videos and posters of the band. Planning murder on large, media-saturated scale is a delicate and involved business, as the band has broken up and the members all play in different bands, so Lucas must navigate tour itineraries and concert hall logistics and backstage passes. His Nam experience make all that cake. Meanwhile we meet Gabriel Stannard, the cool and charismatic rock god who knows the whole circus is a sham to "make the teenies cream" but realizes, as his old bandmates are picked off one by one, that Lucas Ellington is gunning for  him, and that's as real as it gets. With the help of his bodyguard Horus and bald maniacal guitar player Cannibal Rex, Stannard amasses his own arsenal for a final showdown. Cue collision course straight for chaos in the final chapters, immovable object meets irresistible force.

There are some terrific moments of tension scattered throughout Kill Riff, scenes that Schow treats with loving care: Lucas stalking the catwalk of a concert hall while a metal band goes through its ear-splitting pyrotechnics and thousands of kids in screaming worship; an abused young woman standing up for the first and final time to her grinning terrorizer; an injured sheriff crawling to his patrol car to radio for help. Gripping stuff in Schow's singular, stinging prose. No surprise he began writing more crime thrillers later in his career long after that whole splatterpunk thing was over. He throws in some twists that are just devastating, devastating I tell you! That's what I remembered most about the novel: the unexpected events that change everything.

 UK paperback, 1990

But those twists aren't enough. The problem is that the scenes linking these set pieces vary in quality and reader interest level. Lucas discussing Whip Hand trivia with a cynical record shop manager rings true and cute, and Schow has a skill with detailing old friends Burt and Lucas and how they talk to one another. But rocker Stannard is a just a spoiled, posturing douchebag, so it's no fun listening to him expound on anything, and all his hanger-ons and bandmates are complete creeps. Why do I care if they stand up to Lucas? Anything to do with Stannard's slinky Euromodel girlfriend Sertha is just wasting time. Once Lucas's true self is revealed, the less of him the better. Minor characters pop in and out, often more interesting than the leads. You just want Lucas and Stannard to meet, draw their weapons, and kill each other, get it all over with! Blast away guys, nobody's gonna miss ya. Both men get what's coming to 'em, but will you still care by the end?

Schow loves the minutiae of subconscious motivation, self-reflection, repressed fears, idle speculations, and the contemporary (well, '80s contemporary) Los Angeles lingo of ad firms, psychiatry, and show-biz schmoozers. That's an area Schow has always mined in his short fiction, in his own particular style. His characters talk and talk and talk, diving deep into their own heads and trying to get inside others'. They are hyper-articulate but at times the reader will definitely think, People don't actually talk like that (unless everybody was snorting coke off-page; I mean the setting is 1980s LA). Between that and their dorky jokes, the dialogue alone can be exhausting. And Schow's experience as a men's adventure scribe mean lots of details about weaponry. This can be difficult to integrate into a narrative, and my personal tolerance level for gritty realistic odes to the AR-15, the M16, and the AK-47 is virtually nil. It's not that Schow doesn't work this stuff in well, it's that I tune out for it.

 UK hardcover, 1989

I wasn't too taken with Schow's depiction of the '80s metal music scene either. As a dedicated reader of Circus and Hit Parader from 1983 till about 1988 (basically a generation in pop music), I think I can call foul on some of it. He's got guys in metal bands playing keyboards, guys with bald heads and names from the punk scene, dudes with muscles and Mohawks. So he's not describing WASP or Motley Crue or Dokken or Iron Maiden or Judas Priest or Motorhead, but actually more a band like the Plasmatics. Which actually kind of makes sense, because out of all those folks the only person I can imagine taking up arms against a rabid, raging father bent on vengeance would be Plasmatics singer Wendy O. Williams. What, I'm supposed to think Vince Neil would do that? Ha! Hardly. Is that Schow's point, all these wannabe badasses in metal bands thought they were all walking the mean streets but at heart they were really just pussies? Maybe so. Gabriel Stannard, beholden to the bullshit bad-boy code, sure ends up paying a high price trying to prove he's the real deal. Ironic, no?

I really wanted to like Kill Riff on this reread, because I loved it way back when (even though I had the same complaints about the band stuff) but I only enjoyed the book in fits and starts, and can't really recommend it, even to readers, like me, who have loved his short stories. Oh well. And I haven't given up on Schow at all: what I really want to do now is track down a cheap copy of his 1990 horror novel The Shaft, which for whatever reason was never published in the States. I mean, you can't beat this cover:

New Series at Tor.com: The Evil Eighties

Over at Tor.com, Grady Hendrix and I have begun another series on horror fiction. This one is "Evil Eighties," and first up is my look at John Farris. Happy Friday the 13th!

If You Got Blood, I Want It

The Face That Must Die by Ramsey Campbell (1979): I'm Determined and I'd Rather See You Dead

When it comes to horror titles, Ramsey Campbell's first two novels, 1976's The Doll Who Ate His Mother and 1979's The Face That Must Die, must be considered as some of the most provocative of their day; in their tasteless glories they shout like cheap tabloid headlines. Yet within the books readers will find an imagination that is fine and not crude; sensitive and not exploitative; authentic and not postured. Indeed, the introductory essay included with the 1985 Tor edition, "At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour," is Campbell's well-known account of his worsening relationship with his mother as she sank into dementia over many years. These days mainstream memoirs and fiction of life with crazy parents are a dime a dozen, but Campbell's piece has no distancing irony or comic effect. Harrowing and sad and enlightening, it is Campbell's explanation for ''why I write what I write," and readers can come to their own conclusions about how this influenced The Face That Must Die.

Campbell in 1980

Face is the story of the aptly-named Horridge, a nobody kind of fellow in a precisely-drawn Liverpool, whose growing paranoia is exacerbated by his obsession/revulsion with an overweight, effeminate older man who lives in his Liverpool neighborhood. After reading in the papers about a "man whose body was found in a Liverpool flat was a male prostitute" and studying the accompanying suspect police sketch, Horridge comes to realize "he had seen the killer three times now, in as many days. That was no coincidence. But what was he meant to do?" His conviction that random events are a secret code to him alone is unshakeable.

Horridge finds out the man's name is Roy Craig by searching through library records (and mildly creeping out library clerk Cathy Gardner, who with her long-haired boyfriend Peter actually lives in the same building as Craig), Horridge begins systematically stalking and harassing the man. Craig's homosexuality—Horridge is correct in his presumption—offends him to his core: "If he was a homosexual he was perverted enough for anything." Which of course means he will continue to kill, and must be stopped by any means necessary--actually he can be stopped by any means necessary, because Horridge is doing away with degenerates and doing society a favor.

Campbell does a solid job of making the reader feel uneasy. Everywhere, things seem off: conversations are snippy, irritated, impatient; graffiti stains walkways and alleys (Horridge keeps seeing the word "killer"); the wheezing buses are crowded and smoke-filled; twilight is always seeping into Horridge's apartment; his limp is painful and insistent; library customers are resentful, grumbling at the clerks wielding petty powers (in a scene Campbell admits is autobiographical); fog prevents everyone from seeing clearly. Liverpool is as much a character as Horridge or Cathy or Peter, and at times even seems conspire against Horridge; he sees the tower blocks, rundown flats, loud pubs, grimy gutters, grey skies, and bare concrete as one big institution, a prison ready for its cowed inmates. Everywhere the banal, the mundane, threaten to swallow the sane and insane alike; the suffocation is palpable.

Sometimes he thought the planners had faked those paths, to teach people to obey without questioning... the tunnel was treacherous with mud and litter; the walls were untidy webs of graffiti. All the overhead lights had been ripped out. He stumbled through, holding breath; the place smelled like an open sewer... A dread which he'd tried to suppress was creeping into his thoughts—that sometime, perhaps in fog, he would come home and be unable to distinguish his own flat.

Immersed in Horridge's psyche, the reader is also both fascinated and revolted by his thought processes as they cycle through mania and grandiosity, memories of a painful childhood, and his ever-present desire to clean up the filth (moral and literal) he sees growing everywhere around him. Every tiny detail, every sliver of dialogue, every simile, drips with an uneasy threat of everything about to fall apart, as if reality itself were trembling on the precipice of chaos. Campbell allows us a few views outside of Horridge's, but overall we feel as he does: threatened, maligned, powerless. Then he lashes out in anonymous—and unwittingly ironic—calls to Craig: "Just remember I'm never far away. You'd be surprised how close I am to you."

 1st UK paperback, Star Books Dec 1979

The novel also offers some insights into contemporary British life. Craig's backstory of his marriage breaking up is sad and all too common, I'm sure. His wife discovers his gay porn, is horrified, and her last words to him are, "I think I could have borne it if it been another woman." In his opening essay, Campbell talks about his non-use of illicit drugs, but he sure gets the details right describing the dregs of late '70s drug culture, the desultory nature of trying to score, the hangover of 1960s radical politics ("I bet he thought I'd have to be middle-class and polite. No chance, brother"), and the nagging suspicions that the Establishment is just waiting to pounce. Peter and Cathy are growing apart due to his continued use of marijuana and LSD; they're a counterculture couple suffering relationship ills of the bourgeois. They and Craig, along with bohemian artist Fanny who also lives in the building, will have their confrontations with Horridge, moments in which a razorblade flashes its brilliance in dingy rooms...

There is one scene I must point out. Horridge goes to the cinema to see a film, but the only title that resonates is the one that contains the word "horror" ("Horror films took you out of yourself—they weren't too close to the truth"). Check it out:

Was it supposed to be a musical? He'd been lured in under false pretenses. It began with a wedding, everyone breaking into song and dance. Then an engaged couple's car broke down: thunder, lightning, lashing rain, glimpses of an old dark house. Perhaps, after all—They were ushered to meet the mad scientist. Horridge gasped, appalled. The scientist's limp waved like snakes, his face moved blatantly. He was a homosexual.

This was a horror film, all right--far too horrible, and in the wrong way.

Yes: Horridge inadvertently attends a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show! One of the funniest and most telling—and most deserved—moments I've ever read in a horror novel (AFAIC all homophobes should have Tim Curry's Dr. Furter shoved in their faces and, yes, down their throats).

Scream/Press hardcover, Oct 1983, art by J.K. Potter

Campbell keeps the story moving quickly as Horridge's fears grow and grow. He's a bit of a walking textbook of serial killer tics and tactics, but it's not just serial killers who display these attributes. His hatred of homosexuality (his hatred of any sexuality: at one point late in the novel, Cathy is running after him, trips and falls, and Horridge hopes the breasts she flaunts have burst); his belief that society is degrading more and more; his hatred of foreigners and anyone different, gay or not; the shades of his disappointed parents hovering about him—is this an indictment of Thatcher-era England? All I know about English culture I learned from '70s punk rock, but this sounds about right. Campbell is also wise to draw a parallel between Peter and Horridge, who are both aware of how out of step they are with modern society and the paranoid fantasies this engenders in them.

Futura UK reprint, 1990

Readers who enjoy the experience of being thrust into the killer's mind will enjoy Face; no, it's no American Psycho or Exquisite Corpse, it's not nearly so deranged or explicit, but for its time it's a brutal expose. A more accurate comparison could be made to Thomas Tessier's Rapture; both books are able to make their antagonist's irrationality seem rational, which is where the horror sets in. Despite a meandering chapter here and there, The Face That Must Die is an essential read for psychological horror fans. Many times Campbell hits notes that only now are we beginning to hear and understand about the minds of Horridge and his like. When Horridge finds one of Fanny's paintings is of himself, he slashes it apart with his beloved razorblade (see the Tor edition's cover, thanks to Jill Bauman); somewhere inside he knows, but can never admit, that the face that must die is only his own.

The Horror Paperbacks of Ken Eulo

Newark-born author Ken Eulo celebrated his 75th birthday this past November 17th, and although I've never read nor own any of his books, they were quite big paperback bestsellers in the 1980s. Certainly I saw dozens of copies of these titles while working in a UBS in the early 1990s but I wasn't ever drawn to them. His trilogy of "Stone" novels--The Brownstone (Oct 1980); The Bloodstone (Oct 1981); and The Deathstone (Nov 1982), all from Pocket Books--are set in the urban enclaves of Manhattan, and today are available as ebooks.

According to ISFDB, there is no artist credit given for any of these titles, and you can tell there are cutouts in the covers so we're missing some nice stepback images. The only actual stepback art I could find online was for the second book, The Bloodstone--and you'll note its similarity to the iconic Flowers in the Attic (1979). That art was done by a woman named Gillian Hills. Not the Gillian Hills, I can hear you saying. Well, brace yourselves: it is the same Gillian Hills! Perhaps she was responsible for the Eulo trilogy as well.

I never tire of skulls with flowing locks; Nocturnal (Dec 1983) really goes for it, bone by bone. The Ghost of Veronica Gray (Aug 1985/cover art by Lisa Falkenstern) would appeal to teenage girls, I suppose, but certainly not to a teenage me.

Pocket Books stopped putting out horror fiction in the late '80s, so Eulo's next couple books were published by Tor. 1988's The House of Caine features a nicely sensual lady vamp, but according to some Amazon reviewers, it's fairly terrible. Then in 1991 came Manhattan Heat, which has an uninspired mainstream cover, very Joseph Wambaugh meets Jackie Collins. According to Eulo, though, it's "about New York City, the underground subways, and zombies." Read a good behind-the-scenes, where-are-they-now interview with Eulo here.

I end asking: anybody read any of these?