RIP Alan Ryan (1943-2011), author of Dead White and Cast a Cold Eye

Bronx-born horror writer Alan Ryan has died of pancreatic cancer, according to reports from Shocklines, Nancy Holder, and Brian Keene. Last year I read and liked his third novel Dead White; his other novels are Panther (1981), The Kill (1982), and Cast a Cold Eye (1984), the last of which sits on my shelf so far unread.

Recently I've a read a couple of Ryan's many short stories, published throughout the 1980s in various anthologies like Shadows and Whispers. As an editor he compiled Halloween Horrors (1986), a fave of my teenage years The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories (1987), chilling stories by famous female writers in Haunting Women (1988), as well as the first in the long-running horror anthology series Night Visions, In the Blood (1984).

"... horror fiction offers some pretty extreme critical situations, extreme in the sense of being even more than life-threatening. It offers a set of conventions that allow a character to be challenged in a way that threatens perhaps everything he believes in - very basic things, including his grip on reality. I'm interested in seeing what characters will do when confronted by some ultimate evil - not something as trivial as losing a job or a girlfriend, the sorts of things that so much mainstream fiction is about - but really dark, unfathomable evil, evil that is cruel and random in the way it frightens and inflicts pain."

From Ryan's interview in Faces of Fear (1985).

Dead White by Alan Ryan (1983): A Cacophony of Clowns

We all know good writing and we all know bad writing, but what about the stuff in-between, writing that simply exists on the page without any atrocious similes or tone-deaf dialogue or unbelievable coincidences, no passages that take poetic flight or shine with human insight, writing that only tells a story quietly and efficiently? I hardly knew it was possible to write in such an unadorned manner until reading the paperback original Dead White (Tor, Nov 1983) by Alan Ryan. A detailed moment here or there in the narrative made me think this book was Stephen King-lite, but even that is inaccurate as King's style is famously colorful, homespun, and even vulgar; Ryan can barely be said to have a style at all. Which isn't necessarily a criticism, for the story itself, as well as the suspense generated by short, time-stamped chapters, is just enough to keep a casual reader's interest.

The setting is comfortably familiar: the New York Catskills town of Deacons Kill is beset by an enormous snowstorm that cuts it off from whatever civilization exists outside it. Endless, but not quite tiresome, descriptions of the hushing nature of snow abound. In fact that got me to ruminate that, at least to me, cold weather seems quintessentially "horror" in the same way that a very hot weather seems quintessentially "crime." Think of At the Mountains of Madness or The Thing, The Terror, The Dead Zone, or The Search for Joseph Tully, then think of Body Heat or the greenhouse opening scene in The Big Sleep, or the entire sub-sub crime genre of "Florida noir" and writers like Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford, James W. Hall, and Carl Hiaasen. But I digress.

Into this snow-blasted landscape comes a mysterious old train bearing the legend Stanton Stokely's Stupendous Circus. And you know what comes with a circus. Yep, clowns. Ryan does creepy clowns pretty well; nothing too blood-chilling but still. As for the characters, I almost want to call them cliched: the stern but kindly old doctor, the first-time sheriff who knows everyone in town is waiting to see if he'll screw up, the young woman who is learning to assert herself, the beleaguered husband and the harridan wife, the bratty little kid, the superstitious old black woman, the weird circus ringleader who speaks with polite gentility, and oh yeah, those ghostly clowns that float and cavort silently in the snow. Ryan takes all the time in the world to get to where he's going, but it's an inoffensive little journey, a slow build to a fair-enough climax. Dead White does what it does just well enough so it doesn't seem a waste of time. If that sounds like a recommendation, it is; if not, that's cool too.