Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell (1980): Lot of Water Under the Bridge... Lot of Other Stuff Too

This is one paperback horror novel in which the creepy cover art actually recreates the imagery contained within the story itself. O huzzah! The second of Michael McDowell's many paperback originals published by Avon Books, Cold Moon Over Babylon (Feb 1980) takes its title very seriously: throughout the novel, the moon and its "light" reveal guilt and terror, hiding only temporarily the ghosts - and worse - of innocents slaughtered. This cold moon grows immeasurably large in the eyes and nightmare visions of Babylon's worst denizen, the result of his actions now seen all too clearly in that bleaching, blue-silver, not-quite-blinding light. There is no place to hide from the consequence of misdeed.

(Some spoilers ahead) Cold Moon is a novel I've been waiting to read for a few years now, and read it excitedly over the holidays. Back in my used bookstore days of the late '80s I remember countless copies of it crossing my hands, yet the eye-catching silver-blue of the cover art never quite captivated me enough. Shame, because this is a work that, like most of McDowell's (all out of print) output, I can now recommend without hesitation. Would I have liked Cold Moon back then? Perhaps not; this is horror solidly in the mainstream. Characters, quickly sketched, have believable dialogue and motivation; solid structure keeps you reading. Indeed, McDowell had stated in interviews how he preferred being a writer of paperback originals, books sold monthly on drugstore racks.

His style however is not cheap, cloying or sentimental, and McDowell strikes a welcome tone of moodiness and doom in his prose. His death scenes are some of the most surprising and affecting of the era; there is a prosaic, shocking realism to them that one finds less in horror than one would think. The very first ones appear on the second page and wow, was I not expecting them. McDowell just reels out the words without bothering to create suspense. It works; you know no one is safe in the book, you know any old horrible thing could happen at any time.

UK paperback, 1985 - also with accurate cover art!

Babylon is a tiny town in Florida's panhandle, just scant miles from the Alabama border. Nearby is the River Styx, a slow-moving, rattler-infested river in a sparsely populated part of the town. The crumbling old bridge that spans it is maintained by Jerry Larkin, 20-something son of deceased Jim and JoAnn Larkin. The remaining family -  Jerry's sister, 14-year-old Margaret, and their elderly grandmother Evelyn, Jim's mother - try to maintain the blueberry farm that is their only source of income, but that's a losing proposition. Then Margaret goes missing walking home from school one afternoon. Her grandmother  is terrified of the worst, suspecting immediately foul play, while Jerry takes a more practical approach by explaining Margaret is visiting a friend, and is hesitant at first to call Sheriff Ted Hale. But a storm, a bad one, is coming, and Evelyn can't bear the idea of her beloved caught in the deluge, but as the rains come the news will be dire: the next morning, Margaret is still missing.

But the reader knows just what's happened to Margaret. Without hope or mercy she is dispatched just within sight of her home, her grandmother's window, tossed carelessly from that bridge her brother tends into the shallow muddy waters of the Styx. This is not a mystery novel, and the reader soon learns the murderer's identity as well. It's precisely who Evelyn suspects: a man named Nathan Redfield, the estranged son of Babylon's widowed, wealthy bank owner, a man with a lust for money and high school girls. But there's no evidence, just Evelyn's fear of Nathan because the Larkins owe the bank money, and could lose their farm. Sheriff Hale, however, suspects poor Warren Perry, the school's vice principal; he was the last to have seen Margaret alive. Then Margaret's body is pulled from the Styx by a fisherman's errant hook - a sad and pathetic moment of human tragedy - and Nathan easily supplies Hale with bloody evidence for Perry's guilt when more dead bodies turn up.

Ashen and faintly luminous, the head and the neck rose from the Styx waters, still turning softly in that same unvarying rhythm... 

Nathan's nightmarish visions, hallucinatory and unreal, provide the book's best moments. Margaret Larkin will not rest easily, and in cinema-ready scenes featuring the watery black-haired girl ghosts of classic Japanese horror, Nathan begins to see her form beneath the streetlamps along deserted Babylon roads, at cemetery gates, in the bank he works in, in the restaurant where he makes his crooked deals. She leaks grainy Styx muck and mud from her mouth and her eyes are empty and the moonlight is everywhere, the moon is all wrong, so bright he dare not look directly at it... Damn if McDowell doesn't revel in some classic horror imagery: in corpses crawling out from graves, in the grue of corrupted flesh, and in revenants floating above the Styx and slithering through the forest. These parts are fucking brilliant.

...all without color, a liquid, a phosphorescent grayish-white...

If there's any flaw in CM, it's that ultimately it's only a simple revenge story, and that the final quarter or so of the novel is taken up only with the ghostly pursuit of Nathan and his attempts to elude it. A more expansive and elaborately-plotted story could have included more detective work by Sheriff Hale, or efforts by wrongly-accused Warren Perry to find the killer himself. Something other than the one-dimensional route to the (gruesome, yes) climax, which reveals nothing new about past events. This is not a major failing, but the thinness made it seem like a missed opportunity for McDowell to turn CM into an even more potent, satisfying work of horror.

The eyes opened, but behind the gray lids was a flat infinite blackness, blacker far than the muddy Styx in that shadow of the rotting bridge...

 
Still, why quibble? Cold Moon Over Babylon is a must-read, (and, I'd forgotten, recommended in King's Danse Macabre), filled with bone-cracking moments of haunting dread, despair, and death. Michael McDowell is gone, but let us not forget what horrors he so humbly brought us.

Those terrible eyes were without surface; the lids opened directly onto noisome void and nonentity, and the black holes were fixed on the darkened window...

Off Season by Jack Ketchum (1981): At Night Everything Hunts

You see that tagline up there, bold white against the starkest of blacks, a not-so-discreet arrow of crimson, a barely-visible title? It says The Ultimate Horror Novel. This kind of thing makes me, has always made me, skeptical. Not even skeptical; when I see that encomium so obviously from the PR dept of a paperback publisher, it's not even something worth considering as truth in the first place. In fact, it puts me in the opposite direction: this is hype to cover hackwork, and I walk away. But. That tagline...

Ketchum today

It's not so far wrong, actually. Surprised? I was, some. But considering it the ultimate horror novel in no wise means it's to be considered the best horror novel. Which is fine. But Off Season, the first novel from Jack Ketchum (long-standing pen name of Dallas Mayr) and published in July 1981 by Ballantine, features some of the most primal images of human fear in the starkest terms - just like that cover art - so primal that they are nearly mythic. Off Season can be seen as an ur-text for the horror genre in that it reduces all fears to their simplest form. In this way it could be the ultimate horror novel. However it gets this aspect from its adherence to the structure and style of films like Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, I Spit on Your Grave, et. al. So if you crave the utmost originality in your horror fiction, Off Season might not be your season. But according to Ketchum himself, these films were the impetus for his novel: "It seemed to me that there was something the movies were doing that the books were not doing. And that was going at the violence very directly and in your face."

And that's just what Ketchum sets about doing in Off Season.This is not a pulpy roller-coaster ride or a cozy chiller. This is horror that knows few, if any, bounds, with nary a whisper of the supernatural or the Gothic. It's a highly disturbing and graphic novel that lulls you with well-sketched characters and then hammers you with breathtaking horror, never flinching or blinking in the face of utmost atrocity. Then it ends. It bears almost no resemblance to any horror fiction before it. The Sawney Bean-inspired cannibal clan is so unlikely as to be almost supernatural; credulity may be strained.

1991 sequel

I don't really feel it necessary to get into the plot and character specifics; you can find those in reviews all over the internet. I'd rather talk more generally about what's going on in the novel, how Ketchum's style, even in this debut work, is careful, measured; at rare moments it even achieves a dark thoughtful poetry. Power lies in its matter-of-factness, in the precise control he has over what the reader experiences. The long character-driven build-up works well, and the conflicts and desires in his young people are rooted in an experiential reality (you'd be surprised - or perhaps you wouldn't - how many horror novelists, if their writing is to be taken at face value, have no idea how humans talk, think, behave, and interact; if they have had those experiences then their writing shows nothing of it, shows only what they've learned through TV commercials). You believe in these characters, for the most part, and it's so satisfying to read a writer who can convey that easily. These aren't Stephen King-style characterizations, of course, but for a paperback original, they're something unexpected.

1999 Overlook Connection hardcover, unexpurgated edition

Off Season's horror is the realization we are nothing but meat to a bizarre cannibal tribe, that the identities we cradle within our skulls are invisible and worthy of no consideration. The horror is in the full awareness of our impending death by dismemberment, of a violation so beyond the realms of human decency as to be dizzying. Watch as your severed limbs are piled around you, your mind reeling. Watch as your friends and lovers are broken before you and set aflame. Watch as you are eaten alive. Then, when you have the chance to retaliate, watch as you become as vile, as depraved, as degenerated as your enemy.

He was keeping her alive as long as he could, and she participated in her torture by her body's blind attempts to survive it. Didn't she know that it was better to be dead now? What awful fraud animated her? Her will to live was as cruel as he was.

 

Ketchum in '81

Ballantine Books printed up hundreds of thousands of copies of Off Season, even sending out this advance reader's edition (above) to booksellers in January 1981, along with other promotional items. And the outcry was immediate: no bookseller wanted to sell what they considered "violent pornography." Ketchum's career as a novelist was almost over before it'd begun. While it gained some word-of-mouth sales and became a cult title, it wasn't till the advent of the internet that the author's work became better known. The republication of it in 1999 included material excised by the publisher originally for being too violent. I can't even imagine what that'd be!

2006 Leisure Books reprint, unexpurgated edition

As with his The Girl Next Door, I read Off Season in one go; it's got a merciless propulsion to it, a sense of doom that will not be avoided, like a clockwork collision course. Can I recommend it? I'm not sure: it's the kind of book that can get you wondering just why we read books like this: there is no enjoyment in it, no secret thrill (god, I hope not), no escape, nor does it inspire you to get other people to read it. It's an endurance test, really, and when you get to the end, what have you gained? Simply a badge that states "I Survived Off Season"? I don't really have an answer other than: you do it to see if you can take it.

As they stood in the kitchen facing each other nobody said a word for a few minutes. There was nothing left to do but what they had said they would do, and now that seemed enormous and filled them up with a kind of awe.

The Paperback Covers of Shaun Hutson: Ain't Nothin' but a Gorehound

Well, nobody asked for 'em but here they are: the covers of Shaun Hutson's pulp horror paperbacks from the 1980s, all published by Leisure Books. Hutson's reputation is that of a goremonger for gore's sake and often gets lumped in with the splatterpunks. Me, I'd put him in with Guy N. Smith, pale imitators of James Herbert, and not to be confused with Barker or Schow or Lansdale et al. Still, this being a horror fiction blog and all, I feature Hutson because he was pretty central to the paperback boom of the era.

1985 UK paperback

Some of you may have read my review of Slugs (1982), Hutson's most infamous work; while it had energy and gleeful carnage, it was rather a shitty Xerox of Herbert's The Rats. Yes, this stuff has its place in horror, when you want to put your brains on vacation, but honestly Hutson's never interested me at all; I generally want a lot more from my horror fiction than sleazy grody pulp. But I have to say these cover images are really cream of the crop of excessively graphic '80s horror paperbacks! Enjoy.

Admittedly, The Skull (1982/Leisure 1989) is pretty reductive for a horror paperback cover; not only is it a skull, but it's a skull with fangs.

Erebus (1984/Leisure 1988) is the personification of darkness in Greek mythology as well as a region of the Underworld, so yeah, great horror title! I love the intensity on the vampire's face - he's got a real Ray Liotta vibe.

The inevitable sequel to Slugs came in the form of Breeding Ground (1985/Leisure 1987). This has a Tor Horror look to it, but it's nothing too outrageous.

Holy shit, this cover for Spawn (1983/Leisure 1988) is amazing! Reminds me of mad-scientist science-fiction pulp from the '50s. Check out a good review at PorPor Books blog - thanks for the pic!

Aaaaaaahhhhh!!! With its obnoxious and intense cover art, Shadows (1985/Leisure 1990) is as far removed from the vintage Charles L. Grant identically-titled anthology series as you could probably get. It's also about psychic healers and whatnot, which is one of my least favorite sub-sub-subgenres of supernatural horror. Ah well.

And as for Charlie Grant's Shadows, well, check back real soon!

The Crabtastic Mr. Smith: The Dell Paperback Covers of The Crabs Series

For your crustacean delectation, I present these paperback editions of Guy N. Smith's infamously crass yet undeniably charming Crabs series. Which is about giant man-eating crabs. Which of course you knew. Originally published in England by New English Library and Grafton, during the late 1980s the series was repackaged for American consumption by Dell. To which I'm sure pulp-horror fans shouted a heartfelt Huzzah!

At the top, you'll see Night of the Crabs (UK 1976/Dell 1989) The original (but not the first published in the States; that was Killer Crabs). But this cover doesn't give you a sense of scale so there's no way to know that they're GIANT CRABS. Boo. But check this out!

Killer Crabs (UK 1978/Dell 1989) Okay, here you can see this is a GIANT CRAB. Also, I'm assuming, a KILLER CRAB. Read it early this year.

The Origin of the Crabs (UK 1979/ Dell 1988) The crabs have crossed the pond!

Crabs on the Rampage (UK 1981/Dell 1988) Is that crab drooling?

Crabs' Moon (UK 1984/Dell 1988) Now that's an ENORMOUS CRAB! But what makes me happiest about this cover is the correct use of the plural possessive apostrophe, which is quickly becoming obsolete because people are illiterate.

Crabs: The Human Sacrifice (UK 1988/Dell 1989) What the eff is going on here?! Why is a GIANT CRAB using a knife?! Why is it sacrificing anything? Is it a special ritual knife the crabs brought over from Old Blighty? Does anybody know? Most of these Dell editions are collectors' items and not easily found; I don't think I'm gonna spend $20 to find out. However, they are available as something called an "ebook" which I'm led to believe is a book that is not printed on paper between two cardboard covers and that you can't find after diligent searches in musty old used bookstores. That, truly, is a tale of horror unlike any I've ever known...

The crabtastic Mr. Smith himself

The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum (1989): How Do the Angels Get to Sleep?

Whew, where to begin? The Girl Next Door has, in the near quarter-century since its publication, achieved a notoriety few other modern horror novels can match. It was the third novel from Dallas Mayr, written under his now-famous pseudonym Jack Ketchum. Now, I hadn't even heard of Ketchum or this book until the last five or six years, I guess around the time it was reprinted by Leisure Books. None of his other vintage-era books, Off Season (1980), Cover (1987), or She Wakes (1989), look familiar to me, and he didn't start getting nominated for the Bram Stoker Award till the mid-'90s by which time I'd stopped reading modern horror, so it seems the book's reputation grew as a result of the reprints and the internet. Which isn't to say it isn't deserved, because it is. Oh is it.

The Girl Next Door is loosely based on the mind-curdling 1965 torture/murder case of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens. While some readers, if not most, may balk at the depths to which Ketchum goes in "recreating" what happened, he fills out his book with enough convincing details so that the matter never seems exploited or cheapened. Ketchum is, for better or worse, a reliable and insightful guide as he delves into these places of heartlessness and cruelty found not in the supernatural or the extraterrestrial but, well, literally, next door. He presents it all in plain strong prose that neither titillates nor overstates; he is in command of his words and images in a way a cheap and foolish writer - whose ranks in the horror genre are legion - could only ever dream.

It's told in first person by David, 30 years after the horrific events, which occurred when he was about 12 years old. His regret and sadness and confusion set everything in motion. Pondering his three failed marriages, he attempts to tell the story. The whole story, without faltering, of when teenage Meg Loughlin and her 11-year-old sister Susan come to live with David's next-door neighbors, the Chandlers, after the girls' parents are killed in a car crash. Ruth Chandler, a distant relation to the Loughlin girls, middle-aged, a heavy smoker and drinker but not without her looks, is well-known to all the kids living on the tree-lined, dead-end street as the parent who will give beers to them while they hang out with her own pre-teen sons Willie, Woofer, and Donny. Her husband left the family years earlier, running off with another woman (which explains some of her future behavior towards Meg).

David becomes smitten with Meg in a not-quite-romantic way; he's three years younger than her anyway, but spends some nice, memorable moments with her early in the story. Cute, sweet, well-done, a yearning without knowing quite what one is yearning for. Which makes the following descent the more upsetting. When the boys try from a tree outside her window to spy on Meg undressing and are denied it, David's response is bitter and black: I could have smashed something. I could have torn that house to bits. That surprised me; it could have come straight from one of James Ellroy's noir crime novels, for sure (more on Ellroy later).

Overlook Connection Press 2002

The most difficult thing about reading the book is that you know where it's going. When it happens - when Ruth's abuse of Meg begins - it happens fast but it also happens slow, if you know what I mean. The pall of inescapable doom threads through the early narrative, a malevolence hovering over every scene of innocence. It waits. It waits. It will not be denied. There is simply no other word for what happens: torture, physical and mental and sexual. First restricted from eating on her own, Meg then physically defies Ruth in front of David and other boys. Outraged beyond measure, and with the help of her sons, Ruth ties her up in the abandoned bomb shelter in the basement and the horror starts. This goes beyond the "horror" genre into what Douglas Winter talked about: that horror is not a genre, but an emotion. An emotion that's going to settle in and stay awhile.

There are things you know you'll die before telling, things you know you should have died before ever having seen. 

I watched and saw.

Since Ketchum structures the novel as a troubled adult looking back on a traumatic occurrence in his past, The Girl Next Door reminded me of Stephen King's novella "The Body" (found in Different Seasons from 1982, and the basis for Stand By Me. I guess I don't need to tell you that). Still utterly haunted by Ruth, adult David slips in at times and explains why this or why that, and especially how he was able to stand by while Ruth orchestrated such horror and why his friends went along. And it simply makes sense. Kids are powerless. Kids are supposed to endure humiliation. Adults control every avenue of kids' lives. I find this especially convincing in children growing up in the early 1960s, when adult authority was divine order. The divide between the world of children and the world of adults was vast and unbridgeable. Why didn't he try to tell? Meg actually does, once, to a cop who doesn't take her very seriously. This causes the boys to begin to feel a vague contempt for her. (Let's not forget Matt Dillon's immortal words in that teenage riot classic Over the Edge: "A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid"). Because, as David reminds us:

Shit, [adults] could just dump is in a river if they wanted to. We were just kids. We were property. We belonged to our parents, body and soul. It meant we were doomed in the face of any real danger from the adult world and that meant hopelessness, and humiliation and anger.

The kids know better than to try to tell. Telling is bullshit. Telling makes things worse. Telling is an insult and a cheat. The kids even play what they call "the Game," a questionable past-time which, when Ruth learns of it, wants to play. And that makes it all even easier for the kids to go along... it's all a game, right? If Ruth says it's okay, well, it's okay for the kids no matter what is inflicted upon flesh ("You said that we could cut her, Mrs. Chandler"). This is when David admits he "flicked a slow mental switch [and] turned off on [Meg] entirely." Because How could she be so dumb as to think a cop was going to side with a kid against an adult, anyway? So I think Ketchum does a dead-on job of getting into a mindset that would become a willing witness to Hell, even drink a Coke and play crazy eights while doing so. It is totally believable.

2005 Leisure Books reprint

So other neighborhood kids get involved and it's all just normal, they're spending boring summer afternoons in the basement of the Chandlers', hey, didja hear, they got a girl down there and they... do stuff to her. When describing the sniggering remarks and dispensed humiliations and then the torturous cruelty in unflinching detail, Ketchum is carefully dispassionate, even when things turn, unsurprisingly, sexual for the young boys, as well as for Ruth and even a young neighborhood girl (at first Ruth restricts the boys from touching Meg after she's been stripped, not because molestation or rape is wrong but... because who knows what diseases this whore has. Did you just feel your throat close up? Good). He has David wonder if it all would have happened had Meg not been so pretty, had her body not been young and health and strong, but ugly, fat, flabby. Possibly not. The inevitable punishment of the outsider. But he reconsiders as he looks back on it:

But it seems to me more likely that it was precisely because she was beautiful and strong, and we were not, that Ruth and the rest of us had done this to her. To make a sort of judgment on that beauty, on what it meant and didn't mean to us.

Notice it says 'Terror,' not 'Horror'

It's this kind of insight that allows Girl Next Door to work so well when you might think it couldn't: This is true, this is how people who do these things think. Debase, degrade, deflower. Once the words I FUCK FUCK ME are burned onto her stomach - yes, you read that right - it's as if the boys lose interest; Meg has been reduced to a nothing. David tries to help her escape, and he fails. He tries to tell his father, then his mother, but cannot find the words to express something so... so. I mean, could you? Knowing you knew the whole time? David realizes he's the only one who has the imagination to conceive of the enormity of what's going on. I think that's what makes this book stand out from other "extreme" horror novels. The darkness may be complete, but it is true and real.

You may not be surprised to learn that I read The Girl Next Door in a one-sitting white-heat rush, utterly compelled and spellbound, my eyes burning and wet by the end. I could feel a thick sadness in my chest and shoulders. But it's not without its faults, and I can't really go into the major one because it's a spoiler, but I understand it. I do. I've seen it in other books and films too. Can't really blame Ketchum either, I suppose. But none of the faults are the result of the subject matter or the graphic detail; this is an "extreme" novel done right, with an understanding and an honesty I found utterly sincere.

Look at it again, in case you forgot how dumb it was

This is no tawdry paperback filled with high-school horror hijinks, as the clueless cover implies; there is no fun nor ridiculous cheese. In fact, that Warner Books cover art is one of the most insidious of paperback horror covers ever, an affront to both readers and the book itself (I don't blame artist Lisa Falkenstern; it's likely she had no idea what cover she was illustrating). Who the fuck okayed it? Someone who doesn't give a shit about books, that's for sure.

In some of the Amazon reviews I skimmed over after finishing I saw that many people hated the fact that Ketchum fictionalized the Likens case, but so what? What Ketchum does with the novel is quite similar to what Ellroy did with The Black Dahlia: take a real-life case of murderous savagery and fictionalize it, inventing characters so as to probe the psychology of those involved in a way unavailable to us normally, to attempt an understanding of the weakness, the fear, the rage, that could lead to such incomprehensible acts. In this respect Ketchum's book has more in common with crime fiction than it does with horror fiction. Which is absolutely fine with me. Horror fiction or crime novel or a hellish concoction of both, or perhaps something else entirely, The Girl Next Door gets my highest, but most reserved, recommendations.

Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror, edited by Paul Sammon (1990): The Filth and the Fury

We're all aware of the origins of the term "splatterpunk" aren't we? Feels like I've covered it a million times before, and if you have any interest in horror fiction you probably have a fairly good idea of its practitioners and artistic aims already. But just like every offshoot of a mainstream genre, people disagree over its identification and meaning. Basically, "splatterpunk" describes a small faction of horror writers in the 1980s and early 1990s who, while bestselling horror (or "horror") novelists were giving cozy, polite thrills to unadventurous readers, wanted to shake up conventional generic expectations. And they pissed off quiet horror writers like Charlie Grant, Dennis Etchison, and even Robert Bloch himself with their "there are no limits" attitude.

For me, though, not solely gore for gore's sake were the splatterpunks; this wasn't just shock tactics without substance. No, these young writers wanted to fuse extreme violence and horror (the "splatter") with a confrontational social sensibility (the "punk") to provide a countercultural, more streetwise take on our collective fears at the end of the century. It was not just extreme violence and viscera and degradation - psychological insight into alienated characters was as essential as blood-on-the-walls-and-ceiling taboo-smashing.

Editor and film critic Paul Sammon, who'd previously produced documentaries on Platoon, Dune, and most famously Blade Runner, was so enamored of the movement he put together Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror. And even though virtually every author in this anthology states that they are not splatterpunks, it's obvious the stories themselves are, and that's really all that matters. They're willfully ugly and despairing and silly and angry and unflinching, sometimes all at once. This book was pretty much my jam back in the day; I remember eagerly buying my trade paperback copy of it at the 1991 Weekend of Horrors Fangoria Convention in New York City, and it's never left my collection.

Me in NYC 1991; in that bag is this book!

After a short intro from Sammon, the bar is set very high with the first story: Joe R. Lansdale's utterly harrowing "Night They Missed the Horror Show." I've read this several times over the years and it never fails to feel like a solid punch in the gut. Redneck racism, one of Lansdale's staples, is exposed in all its soulless and dehumanizing excess. He pushes our snouts right into the rawest filth. It'll leave you feeling hollowed out and horrified. Is it art? It's unforgiving and the bleakest of the bleak, so... yes? Yes. A modern classic it is.

Lansdale his ownself

One of the few non-American writers in the movement was the esteemed (and bestselling) Clive Barker. But of course. His Books of Blood changed the nature of horror fiction in the 1980s. "The Midnight Meat Train," with its ludicrously graphic title, is one of his most vividly realized and icily graphic tales: a city that feeds on innocent lives, a race that exists solely so that humanity can ignore it, a god that demands the ultimate fealty, a man whose urge to know leads to a horrible new life. Another classic:

It was a giant. Without head or limb. Without a feature that was analogous to human, without an organ that made sense, or senses. If it was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all moving in unison, budding, blossoming, and withering rhythmically...

"Film at Eleven," from actual unapologetic splatterpunk John Skipp, of Skipp & Spector fame, springboards from the on-air TV suicide of Pennsylvania politician R. Budd Dwyer and the spousal abuse of a diehard Oprah fan. The final effect of eternal recurrence seems almost cruel, but it implies that justice does not come easy. Not bad. I've written before of my appreciation for Douglas E. Winter's zombie parodies of contemporary literature, and here it's "Less Than Zombie." Capturing Bret Easton Ellis's style of anomie and privileged rich-kid sociopathy perfectly - And, oh yeah, the thing with the zombies - it ironically prefigures Ellis's American Psycho. It's also the first time I encountered the curb stomp, nearly a decade before American History X.

Recently deceased splatter film connoisseur Chas. Balun presents an essay, "I Spit in Your Face: Films That Bite," on the most extreme gore movies of the day: loverly films such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Nekromantik, Last House on Dead End Street, and Roadkill. He warns "hipsters" not to act too blasé when confronting these flicks; they'll knock those sniggering grins right back through their teeth, or something. Awesome.

Freak-show fiction became something of a thing after Katherine Dunn's masterful Geek Love (1989) was published, and that's where "Freaktent" comes in: Nancy A. Collins is a solid writer which gives the story a real grounding for its natural physical atrocities: Images of children twisted into tortured, abstract forms like human bonsai trees swam before my eyes. Mediocre TV horror-movie director Mick Garris sleazes it up with "A Life in the Cinema," about hack horror director who adopts a soul-and other things-sucking monstrous turd baby for his next exploitation flick; it's a real charmer. The lost chapter from Ray Garton's Crucifax is presented here, so grotesque his publisher excised it from its paperback edition, but I seriously prefer "Sinema," which appeared in Silver Scream. Read that one instead.

Hugo Award-winning Martin in the 1970s

Although today he's known as an outrageously popular fantasy author, George R.R. Martin wrote a matter-of-factly horrific science-fiction story in 1976 which is included here, "Meathouse Man." It's the oldest story collected, but it's also one of the very best, an emotionally complex story of a man, his work, and unrequited love. Oh, and zombie sex on distant planets called corpseworlds. Probably the best-written and most affecting piece in the anthology: He slept with a ghost beside him, a supernaturally beautiful ghost, the husk of a dead dream. He woke to her each morning.

Spector, Lansdale, Matheson, Schow, Garton, McCammon, & Skipp:

Yes, The Splat Pack c. 1986/7

TV writer Richard Christian Matheson (yes, the son) contributes two of his short-short fictions, "Red" and "Goosebumps." Short sharp shocks, nicely done. Reminds me that I'm still trying to find a decent copy of his collection Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, which I lost ages ago. Another British writer, Philip Nutman, who interviewed many filmmakers for Fangoria mag, presents a grim picture of the bloody-minded futureless 1980 youth of his home country in "Full Throttle." Tough stuff; I can practically see the young Tim Roth and Ray Winstone carousing in a movie version.

Also included are solid stories of varying grit and grisliness by Edward Bryant ("While She Was Out," years later made into a film), Wayne Allen Sallee ("Rapid Transit," first in a trilogy of short urban terror tales), and Roberta Lannes ("Goodbye Dark Love," which I'd first read in Cutting Edge) also feature, each probing the depths of contemporary non-supernatural horror with an emphasis on character. The worst in the anthology is truly Rex Miller's "Reunion Moon," which I'll not even describe except to say it's a piece of shit.

Splat poster boy David J. Schow is not included here for various reasons, as Sammon explains, but it's just as well because I prefer his non-splat work. I thought J.S. Russell was a Schow pen name but it's not; Russell's "City of Angels" reads just like one of Schow's stories, so I think it was a fair guess: Porqy, he's got this thing about the nuts and how they're the "bestest part"... he's been talking about baby nuts for days. "I figure," he says, "they got to be more tender. Tastier, like lamb or baby corn," and pops them in his mouth like wet jelly beans.

Splatterpunks finishes with Sammon's 75-page (!) essay on the movement, "Outlaws." While it's unearned and ridiculous to compare these writers to hallowed transgressors like de Sade, Baudelaire, William Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard, as he does, trying to give weight to a fleeting literary moment that was named as an inside joke, he certainly helped me get to reading lots of those folks back then. It's okay to simply be a graphic yet thoughtful horror writer but I guess he didn't feel that way. He includes an extensive splat reading list and influences (and presciently notes that Ballard's Crash would be a perfect David Cronenberg, uh, vehicle).

Like a lot of anthology editorials of its day, "Outlaws" is overwrought and overly generous to the practitioners. Virtually none of the authors appreciate the label, and only a handful are still active today. Only Garton and Lansdale continue to publish well-received novels; Skipp is only recently back after a long hiatus; Barker has slowed down his publishing pace considerably. These authors transcended the style. A lot of splatterpunk might seem like a shallow, adolescent pose, a "look how gross and rebellious I can be" kinda thing, but plenty of it has heart - and guts - to spare.