The Cormorant by Stephen Gregory (1986): Everybody Knows That the Bird is the Word

A novel not much talked about in horror fiction circles but which deserves to be, and  which fortunately is in print and readily available today, The Cormorant (paperback St. Martin's Press, Dec 1988) is a work of relentless obsession, with an ever-spiraling narrative that deepens dangerously right before the reader's eyes. British-born author Stephen Gregory, in his first novel, has produced a work that is beautifully written, daring in execution, and horrific in a literate, intimate way. There's a sense of unavoidable disaster looming over everything that happens - something I always find quite appealing in my horror fiction. I had the book read in two days, beginning it practically the moment I tore it out of its mailing package!

 

The unlikeliness of the drama only adds to its verisimilitude, and Gregory's abilities as a writer give The Cormorant an earthy believability. That title is no metaphor or poetic allusion: the story concerns a man who inherits from his dead uncle an actual cormorant, a coastal bird of prey that is not quite goose, not quite crow, not quite gull. There is chaos and disbelief at first when the bird explodes out of its crate in the dramatic opening pages, honking and rasping, awkwardly spreading its oily wings, reeking of dead sea life and squirting shit all over the family living room. Like other animals that invade our domestic tranquility, this avian has an identity all its own, and isn't afraid of asserting it with ominous authority - no surprise when early on the narrator states the cormorant was a Heathcliff, a Rasputin, a Dracula...

1996 White Wolf reprint, great cover by John Van Fleet

The condition that this city family inherit their late Uncle Ian's Welsh cottage rests upon their caring for his cormorant. While narrator's wife Ann shudders at the cormorant's demonic arrogance, their baby Harry giggles, gurgles bright-eyed, and reaches out for the bizarre bird. And after awhile, the narrator and the bird form a reluctant companionship, even possibly an admiring one, as the bird made an art out of being vile, [and] it was somehow endearing, such candour. He builds an enclosure for his inheritance - named, in a moment of flashing insight, Archie - at the bottom of the garden, and it seems to find him an acceptable part of its environment... Archie was thriving, growing into a sleek and haughty creature.

1980s UK paperback

The narrator must be haunted by an image we see only pages in, even as he and Archie learn to fish together -  a mutually beneficial partnership seen since time immemorial - and the family begins to mold their lives around such an unruly, malodorous beast. Early on the reader learns how Uncle Ian died, ostensibly from a heart attack on his boat, and it was not pretty, not with Archie nearby, cleaning a few soft morsels of flesh from its beak. Slowly author Gregory builds his atmosphere of dank unease, chilly foreshadowing, and grey, shadowy dreams in which the narrator gets only a glimpse of Uncle at family funerals. One night the couple finds little Harry standing in his crib, concentrating on their back yard, oblivious to his astonished parents standing behind him:

Archie too was awake. The cormorant stood in the full silver beams of the moon, head and beak erect, wings outstretched. Utterly motionless. Utterly black. Not a tip of a feather trembled. It was an iron statue, a scarecrow. It was a torn and broken umbrella, a charred skeleton.

St Martin's Press hardcover, 1988

There are many vivid and unsettling scenes of the family (and neighbor)  strife that Archie causes, partly because of his outrageous behavior, partly because Ann resents the narrator's growing eccentricities, partly because baby Harry seems somehow obsessed with the bird. The reader might have the feeling at times that perhaps old Uncle Ian somehow resides within the cantankerous Archie, gaining pleasure from his épater le bourgeois attitude, loutish manners, arrogant squirts of shit out his tailfeathers. Over and over a whiff of Uncle's ugly cigar smoke, a gray man's shadow hanging about, and Harry becoming mesmerized in a creepy way by Archie as he preens in the back yard, by the lights of the Christmas tree, by the flames of the fireplace...

I thought these hints might lead to a moment of revelatory horror; the bird might be a sort of revenant of working-class Uncle Ian, terrorizing this middle-class family for pleasures he never had; or the uncle could even be a spirit that comes to inhabit little Harry. But this ambiguity never clears (which is why I suppose the novel won a literary award, the *clears throat* Somerset Maugham, for best book by a writer under 35). No matter, really; perhaps the horror is heightened this way.

Current Valancourt Press edition

Gregory is a skilled writer (and author of at least two other novels I'd love to read, The Woodwitch and The Blood of Angels), and his depiction of the cormorant's physical nature and appetite is done with a poet's pen and a zoologist's eye. Building his story carefully and grounding it with effective passages about the landscape, the weather, the sea, its tang and its scent and its eternal return, he never lets us forget that  nature is ever-present, bearing down its indifferent powers upon all earth's creatures. An occasional moment of  uncomfortable sexual suggestion will rise to the surface as well, usually between man and wife, but other places too, the connection between man and beast, owner and the owned. The family bath scene alone...!

No, this author isn't afraid of his terrors, which are quietly obsessive, compelling, bewitching, moody, all weaving a spell over the reader without "resorting" to any kind of bloodshed or graphic violence. Chills are applied masterfully; we are drawn along as the narrator is consumed by his fascination with the bird. The Cormorant is wholly an original novel, building to a fiery climax of overwhelming, heart-rending horror. It's so, so pleasurable to let an author take the reins and lead you down a dark and sinister path, a writer fully in control of the experience, taking you to a point you could feel coming the moment you began reading. I guarantee it: readers won't soon forget Archie the beastly cormorant.

Dagon by Fred Chappell (1968): This Very Night, Evermore

Here's a short novel from the kind of author one doesn't normally associate with the Cthulhu Mythos: a former North Carolina Poet Laureate and English professor named Fred Chappell. In Dagon, his third novel (first paperback edition 1987 from St. Martin's Press), he culls both the Southern gothic tradition and Lovecraftian tropes to produce a weird, unclassifiable whole. Written in that writerly style that prides itself on paragraphs that go on for two pages while describing in poetic prose the fetid decay of the region that seeps into the psyches of its characters, Dagon isn't just a horror novel: "My purpose in Dagon was not simply to scare people or thrill them," Chappell says in Understanding Fred Chappell. "You can do that by making a loud noise. I wanted to disturb them in a different way... the horror story is only the surface. There's a great deal of literary intention below that."

Contemporary Southern fiction has never done much for me; I find much of it too self-conscious and overwrought, often dripping in a prose so purple that pulp writers would blush. However, its concern for family lineage, the almost mystical power the very land itself has on its inhabitants, its religious strangeness and hypocritical perversity is not so far removed from Lovecraft's own fiction. I've no idea why Chappell was drawn to the Cthulhu Mythos for this novel, but both August Derleth and Karl Edward Wagner heaped praise upon it. Mostly it's a grim journey through psychological degradation and the loss of individual will, filled out with Southern-fiction staples like murder, adultery, strange religious rites, weird locals, backwoods degeneracy, creepy fish-faced women... Hey, wait a minute!

2002 edition from Louisiana State University Press

Peter Leland is a young preacher who inherits his grandparents' farmhouse in the North Carolina mountains. He comes to live there with his wife Sheila so he can work on his book about Puritanism and paganism in America (Dagon here is not Lovecraft's Dagon but the fertility god referenced in the Old Testament... or is it?). The opening chapter, a densely-written section as Leland explores his new home, had what I took to be some slight foreshadowing: In the left door his image stood, hands still over his face, and he was all cut into pieces in the panes... Which you can also see on the cover of the original 1968 hardcover here.

But Leland, while pondering dark and guilt-stricken theological notions for his book, becomes erotically obsessed with a neighbor's ugly yet mysteriously alluring daughter, Mina: She had no nose, Mina, any more than a fish. She deeped in oceans of semen. Events then take a turn for the absolute worst - Chappell strains credibility here - and soon Leland is away with Mina and on the road in an old car through the South's tangled backwoods. Along for the ride is teenage hillbilly-punk Coke Rymer (those Southern names!), who challenges Leland every chance he gets; Leland's response is to drink more of Mina's lethal moonshine. Ultimately Leland wants to give up all his earthly powers of autonomy, allows himself to be monstrously tattooed, thus encouraging Mina to take him to a finality from which he can never return.

Here, was this an inky bird struggling into shape? Really, were these great fish? Or bared unjoined tendons? Was this a clot of spiny seaweed?... A worm?... the design, if it could be called a design, appeared on him like a great lurid continent thrusting itself out of the sea.

(The interior cover above well recreates this, if you look close you'll see the head of Dagon casting a shadow as it rises from a young Warren Beatty's perfect pecs. Pretty sure it's the work of Peter Caras).

Interestingly, Chappell's novel has two endings, and I've read that he was unsure which to use: the penultimate chapter is the horrific one, while the true end of the book is a bizarre moment of, yes, Lovecraftian transcendence. I dug both. So, here, it's the destination that counts, while the journey is just too... not-horror enough for me, unfocused. Fans of Lovecraftian fiction will not find enough Dagon action; lovers of Southern fiction will be confused by references to Cthulhu and "Їa ftagn" and such. That "blinding terror" tagline on the sickly green cover is misleading, although the shackles feature in an effective scene of creepiness and Southern gothicism. Ripe with imagery and smells of rotting earth, dank vegetation, and a debased sensuality, Dagon works in places but left me unsatisfied in others; it's an intriguing and original entry in the Cthulhu Mythos but I'm simply not sure how successful of one.

On an unrelated note: I was recently interviewed by After Dark in the Playing Fields. Care to hear even more of my opinions and deathless insights into vintage horror fiction? No? That's cool. But if you do, why, click here!

Ghost Story by Peter Straub (1979): Old Man Take a Look at Your Life

"What was the worst thing you've ever done?"

"I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me... the most dreadful thing..."

What more bewitching words could a horror fan want as the opening lines of a novel? There is no doubt that Peter Straub intended his breakthrough bestselling third book to be a summation and continuance of its literary forebears. Straub consciously evoked those great ghost-story tellers of antiquary: Poe, M.R. James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, and the like. A reader doesn't have to be familiar with those writers to enjoy Ghost Story, not at all (I've really only a passing acquaintance with them myself) but I'm sure anyone who is will find Straub's allusions done with skill and respect. Just as much as Stephen King's bestselling horror novels of that day, Ghost Story, a critical and commercial success, ushered in the great era of '80s horror. Few modern horror novels can compare with its ambitions.

Back cover of 1980 Pocket Books edition

In fictional Milburn, a small town in upstate New York that's soon to be under siege by a terrifying Christmas blizzard, the members of the Chowder Society meet over whiskey and cigars to keep one another company as age creeps up on them: Frederick "Ricky" Hawthorne, Sears James, Lawrence Benedikt, John Jaffrey, and, till his death one year prior, Edward Wanderley. They are bound by a past more important than their present, a past some 50 years gone but that includes dead women and feral children. Nightmares have become prevalent for all the men since Edward's utterly unexpected death at a party for a beautiful young actress named Ann-Veronica Moore (Edward was a celebrity ghost writer - heh). Ghost stories have become their means of passing time, but they find in the town around them - and in Edward's fear-stricken face in death - hints that their past, their unholy past, is catching up with them. In distress, they write to Edward's nephew Donald Wanderley, who is, of all things, a horror writer.

Pocket Books 1994 reprint

Now I love horror fiction about horror writers! Don's novel Nightwatchers impresses the Chowder Society and is the impetus for their letter asking for aid (I'm their Van Helsing, Don wryly notes). Although this aspect isn't fully developed as it could have been, Don's creative faculties play into what happens later in the novel; it gets rather meta as the book comes full circle. He must tell a story, of course, to gain the old men's trust, and his past also reveals a relationship with a strange woman... who leaves him to be in a relationship with Don's brother David, who ends up dead. Don suspects this woman, Alma Mobley, of the worst, but can prove nothing. When the Chowder Society, or what's left of it, finally tells him the story of Eva Galli, an improbably beautiful and vexing woman they knew in their youth, and of her wretched fate, Don realizes she was a kind of shape-shifter, perhaps even our old friend the manitou. Indeed, Straub gives us a ghost, a werewolf, and a vampire, of sorts: all the horror essentials. She, and her minions, have come back, and the men are now launched into a time when madness offered a truer picture of events than sanity.

2001 Pocket Books edition. Meh.

Straub spins out his long novel in short chapters, mostly, crisscrossing between characters that, early on, can be confusing. I simply wrote the character names on my bookmark, a habit I picked up when plowing through the Russian novels I used to read before the internet came along. Once the characters came into focus for me I found Ghost Story a rich and very readable novel; Straub's style is literary without being pretentious or ostentatious, his ability to create and populate a believable setting is really second to King's if not, at times, the equal. 'Salem's Lot is, without doubt, its structural model, which is interesting: Straub is linking the great old ghost stories of yesteryear with modern large-scale horror storytelling. And while it works, I wasn't as emotionally invested in the novel as I was with his Floating Dragon. It's chilling and chilly, despite its rich tapestry of character and psychology, and remains just at a distance. This certainly could have been an intentional effect on Straub's part.

There is so much going on in Ghost Story I can only sketch out a few details that struck me as essential. Pay particular attention to the vague prologue and epilogue about a man and a little girl; they are of an illuminating piece. The vengeful manifestations of Eva Galli all take names with the initials A.M., which I'm supposing should make you think of identity, as in "I am." The old American ghost stories located the inherent sin and guilt of humanity in the wild woods of New England; this is where Lewis Benedikt confronts a deadly fantasy of his life's guiltiest moment. There is Sears James's astonishing story of the nightmarish little boy Fenny Bate, as filthy and ignorant as our most prehistoric forebears, who evokes his pity but ensures his doom. Other inhabitants of Milburn will meet frigid, horrid deaths as they pay for a sin that was not theirs, against which they have no defense, but is as much a part of the landscape as the fields and forests. Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?

Lovely UK cover art by Tom Adams (thanks to Trashotron)

As its rudimentary title implies, Ghost Story wants to be an urtext of horror, encompassing all the stories that have come before it... and that will come after it. One supernatural battle takes place in a movie theater showing the first modern horror film, Night of the Living Dead. The striking similarity to 'Salem's Lot and, in one tiny reference in the epilogue, to The Shining, is intentional; old and new in one story. The shape-shifting obscenities that terrorize Milburn and the Chowder Society have been with us forever: You are at the mercy of your human imaginations, and when you look for us, you should always look in the places of your imagination... where we make up stories to exorcise demons, but we forget who those demons are. In these tales within tales, characters within characters, mirrors within mirrors, the conceit is that which haunts us is only ourselves: I am a ghost.