It's Bound to Take Your Life

Nicely done, Zebra! Even if it does remind me of both Dead and Buried and Cold Moon over Babylon.

 

The Brains of Rats by Michael Blumlein (1990): Just Agony. Not Death.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown," H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote in the introduction to his own Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927). To that, might I be so bold as to add that the emotion of fear is also one of the most subjective? While it's true that most humans are afraid of most of the same things - spiders, snakes, disfigurement, public speaking, etc., etc., - when presented with fictional/artistic accounts renderings of things which are meant to scare us, our reactions will often be vastly different, based on the tenor of our private imaginations. Horror fans still argue over, say, whether The Blair Witch Project or The Shining were scary; naive readers want to know "the scariest books to read" for Halloween; fans of Lovecraft games and films find his stories "corny"; lists are compiled of the scariest this, that, or the other in horror entertainment and arguments rage in the comments section. 

I don't participate in that discussion anymore: I don't read horror (or watch horror) to be scared. It's purely aesthetics for me; I simply love horror's palette, its recurrent images and themes and motifs, or new twists on said images and themes and motifs. Darkness and doom and death and despair, I love that shit. But it doesn't have to affect me directly, I don't have to be made to feel like someone or something is standing behind me or outside the window, that there is immediate and unavoidable danger lurking out there. If you're like me, if you get what I'm saying... read on.

This brings me to The Brains of Rats. With its intrinsic intelligence, its peerless caliber of prose, and over all, the stinging whiff of antiseptic which masks the stink of deceit and decay, the collection by Michael Blumlein (a practicing physician) is one of the landmarks of '80s/'90s horror fiction, a challenging yet rewarding work that offers the grimmest of delights for the reader looking not for another gorefest or spook story but for tales that disturb, bewilder, perplex, amaze, that unseat everyday perceptions so that the familiar seems strange and horrific but also... fresh, ready for new appraisal even.

Blumlein's visions emerge whole and complete, his mind's eye surgically sharpened to shock us from our stupor, to provoke us to question, to answer perhaps as well. His calm, unemotional prose reveals a desire to be absolutely clear and precise about difficult, uncomfortable subjects and ideas that often resist resolution - yet beneath that calm surface rages an emotional tumult. Although you won't see it in demonic contortions or blood-spattered climaxes; you will instead feel a quiet subtle whispering that touches your subconscious but leaves your brain tingling and your butt clenching. I just wouldn't describe the stories in Brains of Rats as scary - but they are still unsettling in a very great way.

I first read this collection in early 1991, spending about $30 on the original Scream/Press hardcover (below). It blew me away. So for ages now, having sold off my copy more than 10 years ago, I've wanted a revisit. While vacationing throughout Colorado, I found this Dell 1997 paperback reprint. These are stories Blumlein wrote throughout the 1980s, under the radar, for publications like Twilight Zone, Omni, Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as more experimental, even postmodern mags like Interzone and Semiotext(e). Once you've read these stories you'll see why. If you're into J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, classic cyberpunk, that kinda thing, you'll appreciate Blumlein's icy new world.

I even reread a couple during my vacation, lounging around when not sightseeing, but eventually gave it up: the stories probed deep into pain, terror, confusion, grief, in a very immediate, intimate manner. There was no comfort, no ease, no escape - obviously not vacay reading. To begin, let's take the utterly stunning "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" for example: written in 1984, it concerns a then-current real world political figure and... well, some spoilers ahead.

Were it not so detached "Tissue Ablation" would be the blackest of satiric comedy; imagine Burroughs's Dr. Benway becoming one of America's most lauded surgeons. The story however is written in the exact style as it sounds: academic medical (you might get your Gray's Anatomy handy). This distances the reader only a tad; soon one realizes the enormity of the procedure being performed and - it can't be. Not that. It is nearly unimaginable, but with the good doctor detailing every slice, every incision, every removal in the most exacting words, we can see all too well the madness before us.

I would be lying if I claimed that [the patient] was not in constant and excruciating pain... In retrospect, I should've carried out a high transection of the spinal cord, thus interrupting most of the nerve fibers to his brain, but I did not think of it beforehand and during the operation was too occupied with other concerns.

Oh man. In retrospect. Oh holy shit. This is where science fiction meets horror, and the punchline, as it were, is devastating. We're never given a reason as to why the world now works as we see here; the conviction of the piece, and its resolution, are the sole reason why. Politically "Tissue Ablation" is a raging, maddened polemic; artistically it shares roots with Swift's "A Modest Proposal." As a work of horror, it is truly "horrible" yet not without its own kind of cold efficient beauty. It's one of the strangest - and best - stories of '80s horror.

Much of Brains of Rats concerns gender differences both at the biological and the social  strata, a theme which appears in nearly every story. These are ideas virtually never addressed in horror fiction of this era. Are we defined by our brains? Our genitalia? Some intermingling of each? Is what we think of as "natural" simply what our bodies are? Is mind not nature? The title story begins with the detached authority of a science textbook, even when it becomes about more than simple - or not so simple - scientific facts. The cadence is almost hypnotizing, and finally ominous:

The struggle between sexes, the battles for power are a reflection of the schism between thought and function, between the power of our minds and powerlessness in  the face of our design. Sexual equality, an idea present for hundreds of years, is subverted by instincts present for millions. The genes determining mental capacity have evolved rapidly; those determining sex have been stable for eons. Humankind suffers the consequences of this disparity, the ambiguities of identity, the violence between the sexes. This can be changed. It can be ended. I have the means to do it.

Blumlein lulls you with his matter-of-fact languor, but when the physician narrator turns on a dime to state his ability, you're left almost breathless. Characters represent at times perhaps not individual people but states of mind, philosophies, idealized members of the opposite sex. As he continues, offering snippets of evolutionary biology, autobiography, history, and philosophy, the amorality shocks but the conceit intrigues. More, we say, even as we recoil. More.

I felt almost in familiar territory with "Keeping House," a tale that wouldn't have seemed too unusual from Ramsey Campbell's pen. In first-person narration, a woman details how she and her husband purchase a house, one of a pair of identical structures built next to each other. The couple disagrees which to buy. Would it have mattered? Something seems wrong from the start; she blames the house next door. Her efforts to exorcize this "entity" through will power - I found a way in my mind to merge one wall of the house with another, eliminating perspective and the lessons of vision. Solid forms I deconstructed, melting their complex geometries into simpler dimensions - then reminded me of Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. Then, our narrator notices filth and noxious odors everywhere, can't stop cleaning, disinfecting, comes to think her very own family, husband and infant daughter, are responsible; even her own sexuality is suspect. The final lines seem almost foreordained even as her behavior seems almost incomprehensible. Marvelous and accomplished stuff, definitely a high point of the collection.

Blumlein's first novel, 1987

Others: "The Wet Suit," with its quiet, uneventful denouement, could almost be a piece of realistic New Yorker-style fiction, except the wet suit of the title belongs to the deceased father of a middle-class family whose son learns of its vast fetishistic importance in the man's life. An importance, the son learns, everyone else in the family already knew... More Ballardian insanity in "Shed His Grace," all video mediation and clinical political pornography. Some classic cyberpunk stylings feature in "Drown Yourself" and "The Glitter and the Glamour." The former is (almost) straight out of Gibson's Burning Chrome, in which two androids "meet cute" in a wailing nightclub, while the latter reads like sentences were edited out, perhaps, to leave only an impressionistic jangle in the mind as we subconsciously put the story - future clone of some schmaltzy lounge singer? - back together again.

And most unexpectedly, Blumlein can break your heart: in "The Thing Itself," friends and lovers grapple with sickness and love and death. Myth, poetry, imagination: the real and the unreal at once, all intertwine to make peace with finality. The climax, perhaps a eulogy, perhaps a dream, perhaps only a journal entry or unmailed letter, is nearly the most touching I've ever read in horror fiction.

I remember the last morphine shot, the one that let you lie back, that let the knotted muscles in your chest and neck finally ease. The room was dark, your friends circled the bed like a hand. One by one they told the stories, they made a web of memories with you at the center.

Not the usual "unputdownable" or King-style encomiums 

And finally, "Bestseller," one of the bitterest, saddest tales about the economics of earning a living by the written word as any by Karl Edward Wagner or David J. Schow or Lovecraft, even.

The monkey sits on our head, we sit on the monkey. I finish the book, and an hour later the doctor calls to say that my young son has cancer. Cancer. What is the heart to do? Between exhilaration at completing the book and this sudden grief, my heart chooses the later. It is my son. They want to cut off his leg.

It is also the most startling, making literal a metaphor about one "breathing life" into one's art. Simply spectacular.

And the intro: oh, look, it's by our old pal Michael McDowell, the late lamented author of seminal '80s horror works like Cold Moon over Babylon, The Amulet, and The Blackwater series. It is a perceptive and faintly envious piece: I urge you to read it before the stories - you'll find no spoilers. McDowell states that "Blumlein's is a dignity of narration delineating madness and aberration. Even the stories that are 'predictable' such as the Who's-the-Android narrative of 'Drown Yourself' become treatises on passion and obsession." Indeed.

I will state it plain: The Brains of Rats is excellent, a rarity in '80s horror fiction, an adult work of brave and bristling smarts, skill, and fearlessness, as true and honest and uncompromising as the genre gets (which it so often isn't very). These stories are not for those who think horror is only skeletons and slime and gore and ghosts, who long to identify with everyday-folks protagonists, who want tidy oh-so-that's-what-it-all-meant finales, who want to step vicariously into the driver's mind-seat of the insane. So the stories aren't "scary" - Michael Blumlein has given us something better, unparalleled in power: a freezing, eye-watering blast of fear and pain from the most desolate and despairing of mysterious countries, that one of meat cradled within our skulls.

The Amulet by Michael McDowell (1979): The Valancourt Books Edition

Good news, vintage horror fiction fans: Michael McDowell's debut 1979 horror novel The Amulet has been brought back into print by specialty publisher Valancourt Books. As you can see, it boasts an introduction by another TMHF fave, the now-retired Poppy Z. Brite, which features some background on the writing of the novel and McDowell himself. Also of note: to my great surprise and complete delight, quotes from this blog are featured both on the back of the book - I've become a blurb! - as well as in Brite's intro. What! It's true. Anyway, I don't think you'll be disappointed if you drop a few bucks for this nicely-produced title from a publisher who knows just what it's doing. We can hope that more of McDowell's incredible '80s horror fiction will be treated in just the same way. Purchasing info here.

 

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...

Blackwater IV: The War by Michael McDowell (1983): But Nothing Really Matters Much, It's Doom Alone That Counts

Using his considerable storytelling skills in The War, the fourth book (April 1983) in Blackwater, his pop-lit Southern-Gothic-lite paperback-original miniseries, author Michael McDowell tantalizes us with stronger, stranger glimpses of what goes on down there in Perdido, Alabama with that whole Caskey family. McDowell tells much of his grand tale at a far remove, describing the impact of WWII on the townspeople, particularly how this business of war fills the Caskey family coffers; Oscar Caskey signs a lucrative contract with the US government to produce much-needed items such as utility poles, and lord, as Stephen King might put it, how the money do roll in. His daughters, formerly estranged sisters Miriam and Frances, now in their late and young teen years respectively, form a speechless bond over car trips to the beach every morning. There, Frances - truly her mother Elinor's daughter - finds an exhilarating and illuminating connection to the sea. Other Caskey kids beget trouble, or look to the faraway war for a new frontier.

In general the Caskey children are growing up and moving on, falling in love and starting careers and seeking wartime assignments, all which bear hard on the previous generation, who are now facing growing gracelessly, hopelessly old, a losing proposition no matter how much money the family has. Some, like imperturbable Elinor (whose sudden appearance in Perdido during a flood began the tale entire), welcome these changes, and foresee a future of success and happiness never experienced during the reign of late-but-not-lamented matriarch Mary-Love Caskey. But aging Uncle James sees his beloved young nephew Danjo eventually shipped off to Germany, and worries and frets and foresees nothing but his own death...

1985 Corgi UK edition, cover art by Terry Oakes

But then McDowell zooms in close for those intimate revelations so essential to the Blackwater saga. Miriam seems to be turning out like Mary-Love, full of secret plans withheld from the family, impatient, imperious. Servicemen hang around Perdido at a dancehall on the lake, much to Lucille Caskey's delight. James's daughter Grace, once a phys-ed instructor at a girls' school (yes, make of that exactly what you will) returns to Perdido and ends up discovering she loves the country life, using Caskey money to begin a small farm outside of town. A new character is introduced: Billy Bronze, a handsome and intelligent (but of course) North Carolina corporal stationed nearby. His strong character impresses Elinor, who every Sunday invites soldiers to the Caskey home for a hearty after-church meal. Billy, raised by an abusive albeit wealthy father, realizes the unique quality of the Caskeys, and guilelessly plans to marry into them.

But not only were there a great many Caskey women, the women were in control of the family. Billy had never seen anything like it, and the whole notion fascinated him. He loved being around the Caskeys, and had grown very quickly to love them all... Oscar seemed rather put upon, and might have been utterly powerless had he not enjoyed at least superficial control fo the mill. James Caskey had abdicated his rights entirely, and had become a kind of woman himself. Danjo was a strong, masculine boy, but one trained nevertheless to believe that real power and real prestige lay with women and not with men.

I saw lots of these in used bookstores in the early '90s... and never bought 'em.

"But wait!" I hear you saying; "I thought this was a novel of bloodcurdling horror - gimme the goods!" Well, there isn't a lot of horror at all, bloodcurdling or otherwise, in The War; nope, just a scant few moments that bode (un)well for the final forthcoming tomes: an old lunatic man confronts Frances about her mother's origins and the Blackwater river; two teens go missing when they are to report for army duty; a woman is raped and inhuman vengeance doled out. McDowell knows when to underplay and when to lay it all out on the table, sure, but I must report that The War isn't quite up to The Flood or The House in intensity, but neither is it as lackluster as The Levee. It's an easy, entertaining read, comfortable and satisfying. Not everything can be splatterpunk you know.

One last thing, and tell me if I'm crazy: early one morning I was lying in bed, thinking about The War and Blackwater in general, when it hit me: women, water, and the Y-shaped intersection of the rivers, evidenced by this map included in each book. Do you see it? Grove of live oaks? I mean... yeah. I'm not crazy!

Michael McDowell Born Today 1950

One of my favorite paperback horror authors that I discovered after starting Too Much Horror Fiction, Michael McDowell was born sixty-two years ago today. He died of AIDS in '99 but left macabre-pop culture an indelible imprint with having written the screenplays for Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas. Must-reads are his Blackwater series (I still have three volumes to go) and The Amulet, and I'm still waiting to get copies of his Avon novels Katie, Cold Moon over Babylon, and Gilded Needles. How much I look forward to reading them! Today however I've satisfied a McDowell reading jones with "Miss Mack," his first short story (he has not even a dozen), published in Alan Ryan's 1986 anthology Halloween Horrors (October 1987 Charter paperback below).

Is "Miss Mack" any good, worth tracking down Halloween Horrors itself (it appeared absolutely nowhere else), since there was no collection published of McDowell's short fiction? I'd have to say yeah, having just had my spine snapped and my blood chilled to zero by this charming, disarming tale. More Southern folk in some dire straits, meddling matriarchs, and other welcome and effectively unsettling trademarks of his novels. Complete with a merciless, literally unforgiving climax.

McDowell also wrote for the better-remembered-than-watched late-'80s TV creepfest, "Tales from the Darkside." A handful of his screenplay-to-story adaptations are included, although I'm not sure how essential this 1988 Berkley paperback is. I never knew about till earlier today! So... you're welcome?

Blackwater III: The House by Michael McDowell (1983): Power and Greed and Corruptible Seed

The story of the Caskeys, a grand and wealthy yet conflicted Southern family, is far from over: In The House (Avon, Mar 1983), the third book (of six) in the Blackwater series, author Michael McDowell happily returns to the quietly Gothic style, creeping unease, deft characterization, and shocking violence that made me such a fan of the first book, The Flood. The lack of most of these aspects, or their under-use, made the second in the series, The Levee, rather lackluster. Fortunately I trusted McDowell, continued on, and was rewarded with a fantastic little work of horror fiction.

It is now 1929, ten years after the events of The Flood: the Caskeys still preside over Perdido, Alabama in wealth, mystery, and prestige. Mary-Love Caskey reigns over her family with imperious passive-aggressiveness; her son Oscar and his wife Elinor (who arrived from nowhere, it seems, with the flood) raise their timid daughter Frances next door; her brother-in-law, the widowed James, raises his lovely daughter Grace alone; and Queenie Strickland, another relative, raises two unruly children and fears the return of her abusive husband Carl. They hardly notice the Great Depression. That strange crisis of faith and paper so many miles away is nothing compared to the violence Perdido experiences on that very day...

Despite a few "telling-not-showing" mis-steps in the first couple chapters that read more like back-cover copy or McDowell's own notes before fleshing them out, the novel deepens, if not broadens. The crisscrossing currents of emotional manipulation between Mary-Love and her daughter-in-law Elinor are believable as the latter subtly begins her ascent to the Caskey throne in order to control the family fortune:

There was no rancor in Elinor's voice. She spoke as if she stated obvious truths. The very baldness of Elinor's assertions wounded Mary-Love, who never looked at a thing directly, and now had no idea how to confront her daughter-in-law's unexpected forthrightness.

When Mary-Love suddenly falls ill, who is it that cares for her? It is Elinor who puts her to bed in the front room of her and Oscar's home, the room which so frightened their daughter at the end of The Levee, a closet from which emanates an unearthly light (see the cover)... and perhaps something more. Other strange things surface, sometimes literally: Caskey daughters Frances and Grace go for a boat ride to the source of the Perdido River, where all civilization seemed separated from this strange spot by space and time, and when the waters roil, a familiar visage appears from its red-tinged depths.

Rot and corruption arise and destroy weak men while vanity and self-delusion destroy weak women. Then there is the fate that befalls one character: mercilessly beyond all human endurance, an incident of monstrous woe and bodily destruction; truly one of the worst deaths I've ever read in horror fiction. Nearly Barkerian in its unexpected explicitness, I was pretty horrified. A real butt-clencher to be sure!

1985 Corgi UK edition, cover art by Terry Oakes

But all is not misery: I was charmed by the lives of widowed James Caskey and his young teenage daughter, Grace, and found the chapters about them a pleasure to read. The sweet and unaffected child Danjo Strickland, the result of Carl's rape of Queenie, goes to live with James after Grace reluctantly leaves for college (all the Caskeys live within yards of one another and have traded off children before). And it's always satisfying when someone like Mary-Love, a perfect example of imagined victimization, gets her comeuppance: when Oscar finally refuses to speak to her any longer after she turns down his request for money owed him to save the Caskey mill, it is particularly painful because it wasn't public; she therefore couldn't represent herself as a martyr.

I really had a blast reading The House this past weekend during a mini-vacation, swept up into its story and its people, McDowell's sure, even style, and the note of uber-creepiness upon which this book ended. I can only hope - and trust - that the rest of the Blackwater series is as horrifically satisfying.

This List Goes to 11: Best Vintage Horror Reads of the Year

The best, and/or my favorite, horror reads of the year. List is random because I'm so lazy.

The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris (1988) - A pinnacle of pop success that is also a damn great novel. Don't avoid it, as I did, because of the iconic nature of the movie adaptation.

The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty (1972) - Ditto. It's kinda like if Dostoevsky's novel Possession (aka Demons) were about, well, literally that.

The Amulet, Michael McDowell (1979) - Paperback original that transcends its origins. The grim South and a series of strange murders. Find a copy.

Son of the Endless Night, John Farris (1984) - Large-scale horror with heft that doesn't stint on the quality of writing nor on the blood and gore.

The Shining, Stephen King (1977) - Third read's the charm.

Anno Dracula, Kim Newman (1992) - A must-read for Dracula fans, a delightful mash-up of history and horror. One of the most enthralling books I've read in years.

The Girl Next Door, Jack Ketchum (1989) - What you've heard about it is true. What you haven't heard about it is that it's got a soul, and that makes all the difference.

Incubus, Ray Russell (1976) - Wish more vintage novels were this outrageously tasteless and fun to read. Gruesomely sexual and terribly sexist... or sexy. I can't decide which.

The October Country, Ray Bradbury (1955) - A must-read horror classic. Why I didn't read this 20-odd years ago I have no idea.

Echoes from the Macabre, Daphne du Maurier (1978) - Merciless stories of the random fates of men and women. The way she wields a pen is murder.

The Dark Country, Dennis Etchison (1982) - Jim Morrison once described the Doors' music as feeling "like someone not quite at home." Etchison's stories are the same... and he's not afraid to aptly quote Mr. Morrison once in a while either.

Other good stuff: Clive Barker's In the Flesh and The Inhuman Condition; the anthologies Cutting Edge and Shadows; The Tenant by Roland Topor; and Peter Straub's Ghost Story. I hope to get to review/collect some Machen, Blackwood, Crawford, and other classic writers in 2012... see you guys then.

Blackwater II: The Levee by Michael McDowell (1983): In the Darkness by the Riverbed...

A few years after The Flood, the first book in the Blackwater series from the late Michael McDowell, a man named Early Haskew comes to the small Alabama town of Perdido to engineer the construction of, of course, The Levee (Avon, Feb 1983). Accepting an invitation from matriarch Mary-Love Caskey, Early moves in with her and her 33-year-old spinster daughter known as Sister. Readers know that Early has stepped into a family riven by strife and competition and manipulation, and when he is "courted" by Sister the tension rises. Mary-Love's daughter-in-law Elinor Caskey takes a dim view of Early's work, denying that a flood will ever again rise in Perdido. What does the mysterious and willful Elinor, rescued from the flood by, and now wife of, Mary-Love's son Oscar, know? How could she ever know such a thing? Well...

Meanwhile, the children play: Grace Caskey, Zaddie Sapp, and John-Robert DeBordenave, the young, mentally feeble son of one of the prominent Perdido sawmill families. Oh, the small cruelties the other youngsters inflict upon him. But another cruelty awaits him, one that pales before the taunts of thoughtless children, a cruelty beneath a foggy moon at the black river's edge and in the arms of a grimly determined woman. Definitely one of the few high points of the novel.

John Robert turned his face slowly and sadly back to the river. He stared before him at the levee construction and the muddy water that flowed silent and black behind it. What little mind and consciousness the child possessed was being burned away...

All in all, though, I didn't like The Levee nearly as much as The Flood. I was expecting another bit of chilling mystery and quiet horror; what I got was a naturalistic family (melo)drama set in a small Alabama town in the 1920s. It's not really horror, as it focuses on the daily lives of its characters; only nominally does it feature the whispery supernatural aspects of the first volume. The story drifts along lazily without any real suspense in the conflicts between the various characters: Elinor and Early; two new characters, James Caskey's ex-sister-in-law Queenie Strickland and her thuggish husband Carl; Mary-Love and just about every other person in Perdido. Those conflicts are there, you just don't feel it, McDowell doesn't get under the skin where it counts.

1985 Corgi UK edition, cover art by Terry Oakes

McDowell has an easy understanding of the lengths to which some people - especially Southern women - will go to manipulate others in order to gain or regain power and respect and authority. It reads like a mild soap opera - everything is detailed in such a plain, straightforward manner that honestly it got boring, as if McDowell were simply biding time, building his dramatic arcs for later use. His style becomes more than serviceable and quite convincing when writing about the strange or supernatural, which this second volume mostly lacks. Despite my disappointment with The Levee overall, I haven't been put off the Blackwater series, and I look forward to finishing it in the new year. Speaking of the new year, I hope to acquire copies of his other novels, like Cold Moon over Babylon (1980) and Katie (1982).

Blackwater I: The Flood by Michael McDowell (1983): When You're Lost in the Rain and It's Eastertime Too

What Easter but that first in Jerusalem had dawned so bleakly, or stirred less hope in the breasts of those who had witnessed the rising of that morning's sun?

It is the early morning of Easter Sunday, 1919, and the Perdido and Blackwater rivers of Perdido, Alabama have flooded the small town - leaving only the spires and roofs and chimneys of the town's buildings to be seen above the foul and debris-choked waters. But a small boat containing Oscar Caskey and his black servant Bray Sugarwhite, two men rowing through the wreckage looking for anyone who may not have fled to higher ground days before when the rains began. Suddenly, in an upper-story room of the Osceola Hotel, Oscar catches sight of a redheaded woman - whom he had not seen when he first glanced inside the room. She seems to appear instantaneously, out of nowhere. Upon pulling her into the boat, she says she has survived in this room since the flood began, having apparently slept through the warnings several days before. Bray is suspicious of this survivor, Elinor Dammert, while Oscar is awkwardly intrigued. And Elinor will bring suspicion and intrigue to Perdido; especially indeed to all the ladies of Perdido.

And so begins The Flood (Avon, Jan 1983), the first book of Blackwater, a serialized Southern gothic/horror saga from cult paperback horror writer Michael McDowell. The second chapter is simply titled "The Ladies of Perdido," and we meet them all, from every age and class and color, but at the top is not, as one might expect, Annie Bell Driver, the Baptist Hard-Shell minister, but Mary-Love Caskey, Oscar's mother and part owner of the Caskey sawmill fortune. There's also Sister Caskey, Mary-Love's young spinster daughter, and other women whose husbands run the two other sawmills in town. Gossip flies about Elinor and her burgeoning relationship with Oscar, Perdido's "first gentleman," a kind and courtly man employed by his uncle James, Mary-Love's brother-in-law, at the family lumber mill. Unsurprisingly he is perplexed by Elinor's mysterious arrival: 

"Why did you come to Perdido? Perdido is at the end of the earth. Who comes to Perdido but to write me a check for lumber?"
"I guess the flood brought me," Elinor laughed.
"Have you experienced a flood before this?"
"Lots," she replied. "Lots and lots..."

At 189 pages, The Flood is a solid read with McDowell's sure hand settling us into this genteel sawmill town now besieged by natural, and perhaps unnatural, tragedy. The machinations and manipulations of the Caskeys are fascinating as McDowell develops them economically, without getting bogged down in psych 101 or a backstory of neuroses. Mary-Love has a house built for the not-so-surprising marriage of Oscar and now-schoolteacher Elinor, but will not sign the deed over to them; Mary-Love keeps Sister always under her thumb in a contradictory position; Mary-Love attempts to sully James's erstwhile wife Genevieve's reputation as that of a selfish drunk. McDowell well understands Southern life: how the land and the rain and the flood stain lives, and how family power predominates, especially matriarchal power (which features strongly also in his The Amulet (1979) and The Elementals (1981)):

Oscar knew that Elinor was very much like his mother: strong-willed and dominant, wielding power in a fashion he could never hope to emulate. That was the great misconception about men... there were blinds to disguise the fact of men's real powerlessness in life. Men controlled the legislatures, but when it came down to it, they didn't control themselves... Oscar knew that Mary-Love and Elinor could think and scheme rings around him. They got what they wanted. In fact, every female on the census rolls of Perdido, Alabama got what she wanted. Of course no man admitted this; in fact, didn't even know it. But Oscar did...

If this makes Blackwater sound more like a soap opera than a horror novel, I can see why you'd think so. But fear not: the creeps come, oh do they. Quietly McDowell stacks mystery upon mystery in a precisely calculated manner that keeps the reader turning pages, without straining credibility. Mary Bell Driver discovers Elinor naked submerged in the muddy red waters of the Perdido, undergoing some transformation. A young boy is swept up into the powerful junction between the Blackwater and Perdido and drowns, perhaps by something that lives at the bottom of the whirlpool, where it grabbed you so tight your arms got broken and then it licked the eyeballs right out of your head. There are those things and more. The foreboding black, gray, and red menace of gloom and doom on the cover are no cheat; you get what's promised there. 

Michael McDowell (1950 - 1999)

So far, McDowell's got me hooked. In cheaper paperback originals - and some hardcover bestsellers - chapters end with ridiculous cliffhangers, but McDowell ends his on some oblique note of unease or flat statement of uncomfortable fact, whether it be death, dismemberment, or a stand of water oak trees planted by Elinor that seem to grow overnight. Unassumingly soap operatic in its human conflicts, it does not hammer home horror; it insinuates and alludes and caresses. I know I can trust him as an author. The situations and the characters drive the narrative, not the other way around, which makes The Flood so readable.

Don't know why I was never interested in the books when I used to see countless copies of them in my old used bookstore; besides those unique covers I guess I thought they were cheap. Without the guilt or cheapness, without falsity or contrivance, this first volume in the uniquely serialized Blackwater saga bodes very, very well for the rest of the series... and bodes very, very grimly for all of Perdido's drowning souls.

The Amulet by Michael McDowell (1979): Better Believe Somebody's Gonna Get Hurt Tonight

Michael McDowell's first paperback original horror novel from Avon Books is, simply, a must-read for us horror fiction fans. Set in Alabama during the Vietnam War era, The Amulet begins with a devastating moment of violence on an army firing range and ends with a chill whisper as the circle closes. In between is an exquisitely drawn depiction of class and racial strife in small-town Southern life... and death. The first five or six chapters are told with little to no dialogue, just McDowell masterfully spinning a tapestry of the harsh realities of the unforgiving people and landscape of Pine Cone, Alabama.

But it could be said also that there is a great vitality in the mean-spiritedness of the town's inhabitants. Sometimes they are creatively cruel to one another, and there were seasons in which Pine Cone was an exciting place to live--if you were a spectator, and not a victim.

Original 1982 UK paperback

Twenty-year-old Sarah Howell works on the assembly line in the munitions factory, endlessly putting in three screws into the rifles that will go off to the boys fighting on the foreign front lines. Her husband Dean was to be one of them, but it's what happens to him in the prologue that sets the horrific events in motion. He isn't killed but he might as well be dead; his face is swathed in bandages and his brain has been nearly pulverized. Sarah and Dean's mother Jo care for him now in Jo's home, and Sarah bitterly realizes her permanent widowhood in which she must always bear her husband's corpse at her side.

1996 UK reprint

A word about Jo Howell: repulsive. She's Jabba the Hut in human form, an obese, ugly, lazy, hateful, petty, manipulative, bickering old bitch who makes Sarah's life hell... and with the titular piece of jewelry that she gives to an old friend of Dean's, she practically razes the town and the factory down to the very dirt that people strive so hard to rise above. She may profess ignorance of the powers of the amulet and its origins, but Sarah pieces together the evidence of Jo's outrage at Dean's condition and what made him that way, and the unbelievably violent and meaningless deaths of the innocent that tear through Pine Cone this hot summer of 1965.

Take a look at the cover image at top from Avon (thanks to the great fantasy illustrator Don Ivan Punchatz). You're getting exactly that! The amulet gets passed inadvertently from victim to victim; Sarah nearly goes out of her mind with fear trying to figure out just how that happens. With her superstitious next-door neighbor Becca, they try to track its path, but can never quite manage to stop the amulet's power. Effortlessly McDowell lets us into the minds of the people who wear it, and how it suddenly makes them commit the most horrible deeds - horrible deeds that seem all too rational to the people who perpetrate them: the mother who cannot stand her screaming children, the wife who realizes her husband is cheating on her, the teenage babysitter who just knows how to discipline an infant...

Yep, The Amulet is a near-perfect example of a paperback original horror novel. Author McDowell graces us with a truly despicable villain, a sympathetic heroine, a vivid and engaging sense of place and time, and yes, scenes of unsettling, inventive violence and horror and bloodshed. The innocent suffer, yet perhaps no one's hands are clean; the factory that creates mechanisms of death and employs so many in the town stands in for our complicity in the violence that stains not just faraway lives but those in our very own homes.

Obtain The Amulet by any means necessary.

Quite literally, The Amulet makes a great beach read!

Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror, edited by Douglas E. Winter (1985)

Perhaps the most prominent critic of horror fiction during its 1980s reign was Douglas E. Winter. When not lawyering in Washington DC, Winter was interviewing authors, reviewing their books, and even writing his own horror stories, also appearing at horror conventions on writers' panels and generally taking seriously a genre too often plagued by uncaring or condescending mainstream literary critics. He edited several major horror anthologies, but more importantly, he published nonfiction studies of the field, starting with the newsletter Shadowings: A Reader's Guide to Horror Fiction, before moving on to one of the earliest studies of Stephen King, the appropriately-titled The Art of Darkness (1982). Then, Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror.

Winter handily defended horror fiction against those who saw it as disposable, tasteless, trite, misogynistic, irrelevant. True, lots of horror is exactly that, but Winter knew who had the goods and could deliver unique and powerful work: not only big and expected names like King and Straub and Matheson and Bloch, but also lesser-known writers like Michael McDowell and Dennis Etchison. He was also an early champion of Clive Barker (whose biography he wrote in 2001). And in Faces of Fear, Winter lets these writers, and more, do the talking. In his understated but thoughtful introduction, Winter notes that he avoided questions about various specific works in order to have a more general insight into the writers' private lives. Wisely, the interviewer Winter discreetly disappears so that virtually all we hear are the writers' words themselves.

Everybody's got some kind of good insight into the writing of horror, as well as the struggle of simply living the writer's life. Some authors discuss their writing habits, or whether or not they're scared by what they write, or if, indeed, they even like being referred to as a horror writer. Things start, appropriately enough, with Robert Bloch (author of Psycho!!!) and his days of correspondence with Lovecraft himself. Detailing his decades of cranking out horror and suspense fiction, he does lament the tendency towards graphic violence in the 1980s, wondering, "What's going to come out of those people who think Night of the Living Dead isn't enough?" (Of course, this was just before the splatterpunks, but I'm sure Bloch couldn't imagine what the kids today are getting up to now with their bizarro fiction.) Then Richard Matheson tries to demythologize the modern reverence towards "The Twilight Zone"; admirable, sure, but definitely unsuccessful. To him, at the time, it was simply a decent writing job.

1990 Tor Books reprint

Just about all of them reveal that people think they must be somehow warped or disturbed to write horror. After detailing his harrowing experience of nearly being a target of Charles Whitman, Whitley Strieber comes off as a complete crank; I'm surprised his author photo shows him wearing a jaunty fedora and not a tinfoil hat or a crown of oranges. Ramsey Campbell's mother descended into mental illness. Otherwise, these guys are as normal as you or me... take that for what it's worth!

Ramsey Campbell

Charles L. Grant's interview takes place in Manhattan's Playboy Club (how's that for dating this book?!); James Herbert talks lovingly about his poverty-stricken upbringing and then jet-setting lifestyle as an ad agency exec before he decided to write novels for a living. The only woman interviewed is not Anne Rice - these interviews were done well before Rice had published her second vampire novel - but the mysterious V.C. Andrews. Um, not my thing whatsoever.

James Herbert

T.E.D. Klein

T.E.D. Klein, Dennis Etchison, and Clive Barker have terrifically good things to say about genre writing and the world's perception of it, why pop culture is often savvier about our lives than more so-called respectable pursuits, about horror and why audiences crave it (Klein doesn't even really like the genre, and resigned his post as Twilight Zone magazine editor around this time). Major-leaguers Peter Straub and Stephen King finish up the book with a real flourish in a dual interview. King of course talks of his hatred of being a brand-name, even back then, and reminisces about his days as a college "revolutionary" in the late '60s when he realized he actually did like middle-class life. But I'd say my favorite piece here is about the late Michael McDowell, who unequivocally states his love of being a paperback original writer and how he came to disdain the arid and judgmental nature of the academic literary world. An utterly refreshing attitude!

Michael McDowell

There is plenty more in Faces of Fear for the real fan of '80s horror fiction: it's a way to see how horror had changed since the pulp era, how it thrived in the paperback boom, and how it even grew up, a little. It's hard to believe the book is a quarter of a century old, but many of the writers are still in print; the ones who aren't are, if this blog and its readers are any evidence, still read and remembered and rediscovered anew.

Douglas Winter