Night Visions: In the Blood, ed. by Alan Ryan (1984): Growing into the Grave

Plucked this guy off my shelves at random, it's spooky season, right? The inaugural title in the long-running anthology series launched by specialty press Dark Harvest in November 1984, Night Visions 1 was intended as being a showcase for the best original short stories by the leading figures in both horror fiction and dark fantasy. Charles L. Grant was pretty well-established already as an author and editor, Steve Rasnic Tem had been a rising figure in genre fiction, publishing stories in various SF&F publications as well as Grant's Shadows series, and British fantasist Tanith Lee had already published two dozen novels by that year. Berkley Books reprinted the hardcover in paperback as Night Visions: In the Blood, in April 1988, named for one of Grant's stories. (Dig that cover art, totes appropriate, but I'll be damned if I can make out that tiny artist signature on bottom right; it looks so maddeningly familiar, so just out of reach. I'm determined to ID it however.)

In his erudite introduction, Alan Ryan (1943-2011) provides a background and the impetus for this anthology, making note of how the short story has always held a sort of precarious position in American letters, and how horror is often at its very best in the format. Writers who speak on panels at fantasy conventions very often find that their audiences are most knowledgeable and most vociferous when the subject is short fiction.

Grant (1942-2006) was famed for his understated, elusive, and whispered brand of horror fiction; for some readers, entirely too understated and elusive. His stories here, seven in all, read pretty much the same as all the other Grant I've read: sometimes good, sometimes meh, and a couple times excellent. My tastes have moved past Bradbury-esque small towns at night, cold winds blowing autumn leaves across empty streets and onto regular folks' porches and windows, with kids climbing trees, dads in the garage and moms in the kitchen, grampas in the easy chair. Sure, behind those windows lurk realistic "horrors" like the indignities of aging, disintegrating marriages, childhood nightmares, coming back home to family strife... but his touch is often too gentle, eschewing as he does most violence and bloodshed.

That said, I will note the highlights of his contributions. He's adept at putting in that final turnabout line that might give the reader an intellectual chill, and, especially in the title tale, ably describes the true aches and pains of loved ones' mortality: it was the dying he saw [in her] every day for a year, the wasting, the shrinking, the growing into the grave from the inside out.

Grant in 1981 (photo by Jeff Schalles, from Grant's FB page)

"That's What Deaths Are For" and "Family" well utilize his penchant for trapping his characters in a metaphysical hell, forced to relive/re-enact trauma for, well, eternity (at least, that's what I think is happening; Charlie Grant, master of elusion). "And We'll Be Jolly Friends" is a perfect example of Grant's melancholy M.O., and I'm not surprised it's the only story of his here that was reprinted, collected in his best-of Scream Quietly in 2016. Small town, parents, friendship, memory, wounding, death, and worse: present and accounted for, in Grant's slightly fractured, stream-of-consciousness prose:

go crazy
no, you ain't, you're just scared man, that's all
yeah, well, I don't wanna die
then stop bitching and hang on
jesus, i'm tryin', i'm tryin'

Tem in early 1980s, (photo by Karen Simmons, from Tem's FB page)

Next up are Tem's stories, also seven in number, and generally my favorites here. Tem's approach seems to me to be the most "modern," and one that other writers would employ as well. At times he can be, like Grant, a mite too obscure, but his mix of surreality and the quotidian hit me in the sweet spot. "The Men and Women of Rivendale" hides its menace till the end, hinting with imagery of mouths and red eyes again and again, subtle but insistent. "Spidertalk" won me over, with a frightened child, a caring teacher, and a menace both outside and inside the schoolhouse. The end of this one is shivery apocalypse, a common human fear becomes overwhelming both as symbol and substance; a perfect example of Eighties short horror fiction. But her fear was a living thing with a mind of its own,  that would not respond to her own sense of reason. 

In "Punishments," our father-narrator speaks disquietingly about his unfathomable daughter, ruminating on the alien nature of our offspring, how difficult it is to raise, nurture—and punish—these wayward creatures. When the baby moved away from us, crawling on the floor, she was back and head in her roomy flannel nightgown. I'd swear she was a crawling torso, born without arms and legs. And when I finally saw those little hands and feet I'd swear they were prosthetic appendages, so unnatural they seemed.

As gross as you might imagine, "Worms" finds a snobbish, racist, classist woman offended by her neighbors, and her comeuppance. Tem elevates this classic horror setup with his descriptive prose and quirky characterization. "The Overcoat" wowed me, a grimy glimpse into family strife and downtrodden lives, mixed with effective grue and imagery. In fact, to me, it is an almost proto-splatterpunk tale in that it highlights urban decay and uses it and its unfortunate denizens as a mirror for the human psyche, in stark contrast to the middle-class nuclear family units that generally populated the genre. It was always a case of when you should call the cops. Most of them time you didn't... You shut your door and turned up the TV. Pretty soon it was just white noise. I wasn't a saint.

With her darkly fantastical tales of myth, legend, and family legacy, prolific British author Tanith Lee (1947-2015) stands in contrast to the more grounded works of Grant and Tem. Her characters have names like Sephaina, Marcusine, Araige, Jenver, and one always wonders, are they gods? immortals? vampires? otherworldly creatures beyond our ken? Surely they cannot be merely human. Her style seduces, sucks you into a breathless world of high drama, high culture, secrets, lies, and illicit lusts between (sigh) family members. Only once had she ever discovered herself in the wish that Jenver were not her brother, that the notion of making love with him did not revolt her...

Loved "Simon's Wife," top-tier stuff, a realistic tale of modern love and adultery. A woman travels to a married man's home while his wife is away, and faces her fears head-on when Simon is called away on business for a few hours the morning after their consummation. Unnerving, at times unpleasant, but for me, a real winner. I wandered this house like a ghost, no familiar possession of mine in sight, a lost traveler without a landmark... landmarks of Simon's wife, whose name I did not yet know, whose picture I was forming by irresistible slow degrees.

Her other stories, "The Tree: A Winter's Tale," "The Vampire Lover" and something something about a unicorn, I mostly skimmed: Lee's writing is sure and strong, all blood-drenched—yet not particularly scary at all—fairy-tale vibes, but my taste for that kind of medieval lore and imagery is practically nil. Still, I'm sure others whose tastes do run in that direction will find them perfectly satisfying.

All in all, In the Blood is a perfect little starter for getting familiar with the more sophisticated styles of Eighties horror: literate yet chilling as it exposes the secret recesses we hide, highlighting those fears without resorting to excessive bloodshed or random limb-pulling (although there is a bit of that, here and there). You've got Grant's homespun domestic horrors of the everyday; Tem's sometimes surreal, sometimes esoteric, sometimes gritty entries; and Lee's lush, romantic, adult Gothic dark fantasies. Splatterpunk would come along in a year or two to rabble-rouse the grown-ups, sure, but much of what is written here is as about as good as horror fiction got back then. In the Blood will allow readers to look back and get a taste of these three authors' personal worlds of darkness, and what grave discoveries they have revealed.

Razored Saddles, ed. by Joe Lansdale & Pat LoBrutto (1989): One-Half Hillbilly and One-Half Punk

Boasting cover art that strikes a sweet spot between absurd and awesome, the wonderfully-titled Razored Saddles (Avon Books paperback, October 1990) rustles up a heap of horror/SF/western/whatever short fiction to boot. Edited by the always-welcome Texan Joe R. Lansdale and co-conspirator Pat LoBrutto, the anthology collects a hatful of recognizable genre names of the day, plus a few new to almost anybody. I remember this tome way back when thanks to that cover (thanks to Lee MacCleod) and its regrettable joke categorization on the spine, "cowpunk." But Western-themed anything had always been low in my interest level, and it pains me to say that my holiday reading of Razored Saddles reminded me why.

Lansdale and McCammon, c. 1990

Another of Robert McCammon's pleasant, inoffensive horror tales, "Black Boots," begins the anthology. A cowboy is being followed across the desert by a gunslinger wearing the titular objects. He stops in a dusty small "town" to drink some watered-down whiskey but soon sees "Black Boots" at the door of the saloon. Ironic tragedy follows. Its touches of surrealism are well-noted, but McCammon's simplistic style neuters the creepiness and final twist.

"Thirteen Days of Glory" by Scott A. Cupp upends a famous Western showdown with a decidedly transgressive aspect. Freedom must be for everyone or for none at all. Not bad, rather daring, probably offensive to some and liberating for others. Cupp's story is engaging and yet sad, one of the few here that are memorable.

"Gold" by Lewis Shiner is strong, well-told, tinged by magic-realism (a style much favored by genre writerly-writers), set in Creole swamps with strong characterization, but it ends with a damp whimper as it goes into mind-numbing financial details. A huge letdown.

Pulphouse Paperbacks, 1991, art by Doug Herring

David J. Schow's "Sedalia" is just... weird. Not fun weird, not weird weird, but just kinda what? weird, a proto-bizarro tale of ghost dinosaurs, maybe some kind of fossil fuel metaphor. Taking its title from the old-as-dinosaurs TV show "Rawhide," we've got "drovers" herding those ghost dinos in some future Los Angeles. It's marred by juvenile talk of dinosaur poop and incomprehensible politics, although I appreciated the fact that characters refuse to call a brontosaurus an apatosaurus as it "seemed too-too." 2015 showed that was correct.

Introduced by the editors as a bit of "Weird Tales" or EC Comics, Ardath Mayhar's "Trapline" is precisely that: a fur-trapper and a gory comeuppance. Sure, why not, whatever. The late Melissa Mia Hall, whose short fiction I've enjoyed in the past, contributes "Stampede," about a single mom and her obnoxious brood and her attempts to raise them right. Realism to spare, sure, but wow those kids suck.

Dark Harvest 1989 hardcover, art by Rick Araluce

Two of my least favorite '80s horror writers, F. Paul Wilson and Richard Laymon, join the rodeo but get bucked off. Respectively, "The Tenth Toe" and "Dinker's Pond" aren't as bad as some works I've read by these guys, but they're both flat and immature, corny and obvious. Several names were new to me, even for a almost-30-year-old anthology: Lenore Carroll, whose "Eldon's Penitente," with its theme of pain, suffering, loss, and guilt, is rather memorable; and Robert Petitt, who swipes Lansdale's title and uses it all-too-literally in an SF tale.

Science fiction features in Al Sarrantonio's "Trail of the Chromium Bandits" and Gary Raisor's "Empty Places." Neither did anything for me, although the latter's mawkishness struck me as particularly lame and derivative of both Lansdale and Ray Bradbury. Neal Barrett Jr's tale of a Native criminal "Tony Red Dog" reads like Elmore Leonard-lite when it is readable at all, which it isn't mostly thanks to a constant barrage of character first and last names. Howard Waldrop's metafictional academic treatise on Western movies, "The Passing of the Western," strains even the most patient reader with its faux film history. God it was a grind getting through these stories.

The final three tales offer some surprises. Lansdale's own story, "The Job," is a mean little bugger with a nasty twist, a pre-Tarantino riff about two articulate killers and their unexpected target. I hope you like racist slurs, though. Richard Christian Matheson offers "I'm Always Here," with his usual pared-down prose, utilized here to solid effect in a story about a dying country singer in the Hank Williams mold finds a new lease on life. It's way better than most of the stories in Matheson's Scars. And for the finale, there's Chet Williamson and his too-cutely titled "'Yore Skin's Jes's So Soft 'n Purty...'" Man, there's a horrific climax waiting for you here.

That "cowpunk" novelty can't sustain an entire anthology, and the few tales here that I kind of enjoyed aren't essential reads by any means. I know every author has more and better work elsewhere; head out on the trail searching for those doggies, and let Razored Saddles fade into the sunset.

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.

Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart, edited by George R.R. Martin (1986): Love Comes in Spurts

"Bad horror stories," writes editor George R. R. Martin in his perceptive introduction to the anthology Night Visions 3, "concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy's genitalia." Go on, I'm listening. "Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy... about loneliness and alienation and psychosis... the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with itself."

All this is true and all this is (mostly) what I want in my horror fiction. Sure sometimes you need to know six ways to kill a vampire, and who doesn't love a good rat chomping? But for this, the third volume in Dark Harvest's long-running hardcover series Night Visions (published in paperback by Berkley, March 1988), Martin has chosen well and wisely the kinds of the stories he's described, and almost to a one, they show the width and breadth of what good horror is. Or at least was, in the mid-1980s.

First, two of the biggest names of '80s horror, Ramsey Campbell and Clive Barker. Campbell at this time was already fairly well-established as both an editor and an author, while Barker, hot off the Books of Blood, was the rising star, the enfant terrible, the upstart splatterpunk. Fellow traveler Lisa Tuttle, while much less known, had been writing SF/F shorts for years, and even co-authored a fantasy novel with Martin. Her 1985 collection (published in the UK only) Nest of Nightmares was well-received, and she also appeared in the seminal horror anthology Dark Forces in 1980. Together these three writers provide perfect contrast to one another. Let me not quibble: Night Visions 3 is as good a horror anthology as I've read lately; I enjoyed it immensely (a far cry from my experience with Night Visions 2).

 

First up are seven short stories from Campbell, and lemme tell you, these are classic Campbellian works (I know, I know). Lone, lonely characters are sloooowly immersed into a world askew, rural or urban, seeing distorted faces seen in tree trunks and deserted windows, hearing rhythmic whispers tangled up in their ears, threading through thought and deed, and deaths obscurely predicted and decidedly met. Everything seems to happen just at the jagged edge of perception, where one's identity bleeds out and some kind of violence - whether physical, psychological, supernatural - begins to breathe. 

I read all seven over about three or four days and honestly they flickered off and on in my head the entire time I was not actually reading them; "Looking Out," "Bedtime Story," "Root Cause," "This Time" and "Beyond Words" were all so so good, Campbell at his peak. Listen:

His wife lay face up beside him, her mouth gaping. She might have been panting in her sleep, except that her chest was utterly still. No, the sound was coming from the face that quivered above hers, the jowly face with its tongue gray as slime and its tiny pink eyes like pimples sunk in the white flesh. He thought of a bulldog's face, but it was more like a noseless old man's, and its paws on her chest looked like a child's hands.

Tuttle and Martin, 1970s

Now I've read a few of Tuttle's horror stories over the years and I've liked them just fine. After reading the three longish ones here - "The Dragon's Bride," "Another Country," and "Riding the Nightmare" - I hope to move on to at least one of her '80s novels. Yeah, she's good - an entirely different writer from the more stylized Campbell and Barker, her prose almost a palate refresher. Her depiction of male/female relationships is a welcome one, a healthy one - Campbell has almost none, and Barker's is beyond the pale - a believable one. Relationships she describes however don't necessarily end happily.

I don't want to make a whole thing about it but what makes Tuttle's stories so, as I said, refreshing, is the ease with which she writes about women. Which you didn't always find in 1980s horror fiction (quelle surprise!). In "Riding the Nightmare" (the basis for the cover art of the UK paperback above) Tess O'Neal rides the treacherous line in a ménage à trois when a nightmare from her childhood creeps back into her slumber. Then a pregnancy threatens to tear the whole relationship asunder. What terrifying revelation does a child bring? Only this: this baby girl made her feel not only love but also fear and frustration and pain. Motherhood was not as instinctive as she had believed it would be. And only that nightmare will give understanding.

"The Dragon's Bride" might have been my favorite work in Night Visions 3. It's interesting people doing interesting things. A young man picks up a shy young woman in a bookstore and learns she knows as little about her past as he does. Together they journey to the English countryside after the aunt who raised her commits suicide. Young man realizes he may, as the saying goes, have gotten more than he bargained for. Dragons, snakes, sex, caves, vaginas, father issues: "Dragon's Bride" has it all, plus a great - ahem - climax.

The cave was hot and moist around them, she was hot and moist, embracing him, and then he felt the dragon moving, still alive, and he tried to free himself, but she held tight, and it was too late. As he came he shouted. The orgasm seemed to empty him of everything, pain, pleasure, memory, desire, understanding. He lay, stunned, on top of her, unable to move, as he waited for his personality to come back from wherever it had gone.

Which brings us to, finally, the infamous novella that gave the paperback its subtitle and the world a new pantheon of monsters, "The Hellbound Heart," Barker's hellish fable of love, romance, and otherworldly sadomasochism. I wonder about those who read it before its movie adaptation Hellraiser was released in 1987, and what they thought: did they think it was, or wasn't, as good as the book? Were the Cenobites what they'd imagined? Clear your mind of Pinhead and the Chatterer, for what Barker presents in impeccable prose is mostly insinuation: scars, hooks, wounds, stench, deep-sea phosphorescence. The first chapter captivates with its originality, its visionary power, with Frank Cotton opening Lemarchand's box and summoning the Cenobites:

He had expected sighs, and languid bodies spread on the floor underfoot like a living carpet; had expected virgin whores whose every crevice was his for the asking and whose skills would press him - upward, upward - to undreamed-of ecstasies. The world would be forgotten in their arms. He would be exalted by his lust, instead of despised for it. But no. No women, no sighs. Only these sexless things, with their corrugated flesh.

 

Original Dark Harvest dustjacket, Oct 1986 

 

Sure, there's more - there's always more with Barker - but there's not as much as you'd think; he could have more thoroughly fleshed out (pardon the pun) characters both human and not, given us more of the Order of the Gash, the Engineer, the backstory of Kirsty and Rory (renamed Larry in Hellraiser), because I had no idea why Kirsty kept turning up. She's not his daughter as in the film, which makes sense. Why would imperious, beautiful Julia permit one of Rory's former lovers - is that right? - to be part of their married life? I really don't know.

What I do know is that "The Hellbound Heart" showcases Barker's immense talent, his untouchable talent, for twining the repulsive and the seductive; for limning the limits of desire and the thirst for knowledge. Characters do not shy away from horror, at least not for long; they confront it, embrace it, confound it, bargain with it - as Kirsty does, promising Frank back to the Cenobities, to which one replies: "...And maybe we won't tear your soul apart." Gee, thanks guys! (Also includes the line "No tears please. It's a waste of good suffering," case you were wondering.)

Barker's original sketches for Pinhead and Frank Cotton, 1986

 

Julia could not see Frank's eyes, but she felt them sharpened beyond pricking by envy and rage. Nor did she look away, but stared on at the shadow while Rory's moans increased. And at the end one moment became another, and she was lying on the bed with her wedding dressed crushed beneath her, while a black and scarlet beast crept up between her legs to give her a sample of its love.  

 

So, yeah: Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart. So good it hurts. And you wouldn't want it any other way.

Cast a Cold Eye by Alan Ryan (1984): Blood Will Follow Blood

The late Alan Ryan really hit a high note with his Irish ghost story Cast a Cold Eye (Tor Books, Jul 1984/cover art by Jill Bauman). Contributing to its success is the vivid sense of place, somber prose, and convincing characterization, as well as a slowly mounting sense of dread reaching out from a horrific past which can never be forgotten. Yes, a ghost story that has its roots in the real-life horrors of the Great Famine.

Writer Jack Quinlan comes to the rocky, sea-lashed coastal Irish village of Doolin, meets a young lovely lass named Grainne at the local bookshop, and begins working on his book about the Famine. The developing relationship between the two is drawn well and truly by Ryan, and he handles their differences - he a well-traveled published New York author, she a Catholic virgin still under the yoke of her parents - with a sensitivity that speaks of experience. It's a relaxed give-and-take between two real people that really grounds the story.

Dark Harvest hardcover, 1984

But as Jack researches the Famine, he soon finds himself face-to-face with people who seem to have stepped whole and starving from that horrible era: a ragged man unconscious in the mud on the side of the road, vomiting green rot; a young girl who was only bone covered in skin in tattered clothes; tortured shapes milling through the cold fog and damp air and mud surrounding his cottage. He puts this all to his readings, an overworked imagination, but still dreams of facing his own corpse. Soon he meets Father Malcolm Henning, the local priest and seanachie, a sort of historian and storyteller in one. Father Henning wields a gentle hand over Doolin, both in church and in the pub: the two most popular places for these provincial people.

But Father Henning's tales in the pub are grim and foreboding, filled with gruesome "Monkey's Paw"-style ironies, although they seem to ease the aging pains of a group of old, old men Jack sees around the town. One in particular is John MacMahon, practically a cadaver now, who is treated with a deference that befits a mortal responsibility nearly impossible to bear. Jack is drawn into this circle when Henning confirms that the visions accosting him aren't simply... visions. Perhaps Jack isn't an interloper; perhaps Jack's Irish heritage means that he was meant to come to Doolin, meant for something greater than just writing a book, meant to be part of a ritual where blood is everywhere.

The whole book is a quiet horror, er, delight, despite its nightmarish source, and will make you seek out Ryan's other work (he published plenty of stories in various '80s horror anthologies like Whispers, Shadows, and Year's Best Horror; I've liked all the ones I've read). It'll also make you lament that Ryan didn't write another novel. It's much more effective than his previous work, 1983's Dead White, and evinces a cozy fireside feel one finds in the classic tales of the weird and uncanny. There are creeps and chills to be sure, but the real power lies in the setting and the characters. And I have to say there's a lovemaking scene - that's truly what it is, I can't phrase it any other way - that is about the best I've ever read in a horror novel.  

Cast a Cold Eye is a chilly, atmospheric read in which one can feel the salt spray of the ocean, the icy air working its way inside your clothes, the sense of real history in every stone building and rotting fence, and grasp the sad, earthbound horrors that lurk in the Doolin graveyard. "Blood is everywhere," Father Henning has said, and we will learn the truth of that all too well. I really appreciated this kind of fact-based historical horror, where unrelenting reality collides with our primitive notions of supernatural agents. The ghosts that haunt are the shameful memories of the diseased and the dead, our guilty conscience manifested in shades and shadows that seem to our hand and eye more real than our very selves. 

Night Visions: Dead Image, ed. by Charles L. Grant (1985): I Don't Care About These Words

I had some high hopes for Dead Image, the second in the long-running horror anthology series Night Visions, published by the specialty line Dark Harvest. Everyone involved was writing good stuff throughout the 1980s: editor Charles L. Grant, of course, and contributors David Morrell, Joseph Payne Brennan, and Karl Edward Wagner. But those hopes were dashed pretty quickly, even with the very first story; suddenly I wasn't so excited about reading vintage horror fiction. Pick your critique: dull, lifeless, trite, half-hearted, corny, bland, old-fashioned. I haven't read a clunker like this in ages. Don't believe the back-cover copy: this is not a "landmark collection," and for the most part there is nothing original or nightmarish about the works contained herein. These "craftsmen" have done much better work elsewhere.

Berkley Books, September 1987

Recently I've read a handful of Brennan's short stories in various anthologies and enjoyed them a lot ("The Horror at Chilton Castle," "The Willow Platform," "Jendick's Swamp"). But when he's bad, his stuff is run-of-the-mill horror pulp relying on cliche and traditional "scares" and would barely pass muster for "The Twilight Zone" or "Night Gallery." His effective tale "Canavan's Backyard" from 1958 was rightly lauded highly by King in Danse Macabre. The sequel is here - "Canavan Calling" - and actually it contains my fave horrific scene in the whole anthology. "Wanderson's Waste" has its moments, but his others follow a threadbare template.

Ugh - Morrell's contributions are little more than YA fiction. "Black and White and Red All Over," reads like super lightweight King, and "Mumbo Jumbo" - well, the titles alone are coma-inducing. His title story is a riff on James Dean's legend, but it adds little and offers no insight to it, there's just a tasteless bit of gore for the punchline.

"Shrapnel," "Blue Lady, Come Back" and "Old Loves" are Wagner's efforts and if you want to read them, I'd suggest buying Why Not You & I?,  his 1987 collection that they also appear in. Wagner was a grand personality of '80s horror fiction, a giant both figuratively and literally, but I don't think Night Visions is his finest hour. The stories aren't bad, they're just okay. But Wagner's personal interests always come through in his fiction: "Old Loves" is geeky fandom gone awry, while "Blue Lady" - named after a creepy old waltz - involves academic rivalry and plenty of alcohol. "Shrapnel" made no impression whatsoever.

Original hardcover from Dark Harvest, 1985

UK paperback, 1989

These stories are much too earnest and literal in their approach to horror, written in too obvious a manner, lacking either powerful imagery or prose. I really have to wonder what Grant was going for. In his intro he states The sound of horror is not always a scream, which is true, yes, but Night Visions is pretty much a yawn.

Hellbound Hearts: Horror Anthologies of the 1980s

Ah, '80s horror anthologies! These were really my favorites back in the day when I was working in a used bookstore and reading horror fiction with an all-consuming appetite. I ordered these titles like crazy, waiting impatiently for the UPS guy to arrive with boxes of new books ordered from Ingram and Baker & Taylor, ready with the boxcutter to slice 'em open and get at the goodies inside. First up? Why, it's Hot Blood (1990) from Pocket Books! Stories of horror and sex and their twining, by Harlan Ellison, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Graham Masterton, Ray Garton, David J. Schow, Skipp & Spector - oh my cup it do runneth over! I didn't know who Jeff Gelb was, but my days as a teenage Jersey metalhead had made me familiar with Lonn Friend, who edited the essential metal mag RIP.

Of course the Hot Blood series turned into quite a long-running one as the 1990s wore on; there were myriad ways to make sex and horror mix and mingle...

The Night Visions series, originally published in hardcover by specialty horror press Dark Harvest, were reprinted in paperback by Berkley. Lots of great names here, although I really only read a very few.

This series also continued into the '90s. Night Visions 3 from '86 was the first appearance of a little novella by Clive Barker called The Hellbound Heart; I think it was the basis for some movie or other.

Now we reach the Borderlands, and here there be dragons. I will always remember this great series for introducing me to Poppy Z. Brite, Karl Edward Wagner, and Joe R. Lansdale, so as you might imagine, it holds a special place in my own hellbound heart! (Oh look, it was originally published in October 1990 - no matter, it was the '80s up till at least Nevermind, if not Pulp Fiction, hope you don't mind me mixing my pop cultural metaphors.) The Borderlands went on for another four or five books, and were even reprinted by specialty gaming publishers White Wolf, and editor Thomas Monteleone started his own Borderlands Press. I simply must replace my long-gone copies for a reread.

As a young burgeoning liberal dude with female friends who all wanted to be writers (Anais Nin, to a one!) I consciously branched out with Women of Darkness (1988), and recall the bizarre delights of tales by Nancy Holder, Kit Reed, and Elizabeth Massie. Indeed there was a sequel to this as well, but I don't think I ever read it.

Whispers began as Stuart David Schiff's labor of love magazine, then in the late '70s became paperback anthologies, which were reprinted in the '80s by Jove Books, as you see here. Love the tormented silvery faces (predicting the covers of the Dell/Abyss series to come; the artist is Marshall Arisman). The stories herein seem to be much more quiet horror, and names like Charles L. Grant, Robert Aickman, Fritz Leiber, William F. Nolan, Alan Ryan, Manly Wade Wellman, Dennis Etchison, Campbell, Wagner, and the like predominate. Pretty sure I read some of this stuff well before I read even any King, but damn that was a long time ago.

Of course Texas born-and-bred Joe Lansdale his ownself edited an anthology of western-themed horror stories! Nicely titled too: Razored Saddles (1989). This one was labeled as "cowpunk" on its spine, a jokey nod to splatterpunk. Now honestly I've never really cared about westerns at all - something about all that brown dust, brown sand, brown storefronts, and brown horses bores me to impatience (the brown liquor's okay though) - so I've never read this one at all. Surely one of you folks out there has.

Other '80s horror anthologies that I've already reviewed: Cutting Edge (1986), Prime Evil (1988), and Silver Scream (1988). Which ones did I miss?