Sweet Halloween Swag!

And straight from the publisher! An editor from Penguin Books contacted me a couple weeks ago saying how much he enjoyed this blog and would I be interested in their new horror offerings for the Halloween season? Would I?! These three trade paperbacks—The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell, Perchance to Dream by Charles Beaumont, and Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti— have each been given beautiful new covers that I believe accurately reflect the fictions therein. Thoughtful intros/afterwords are provided by folks like Ray Bradbury, Laird Barron, Jeff Vandermeer, and even William Shatner. These are welcome and affordable editions (the original Ligotti paperbacks from the 1990s are ridiculously expensive today) that will look terrific on your bookshelves. Get ready for some midnight reading...

Throwback Thursday Yog-Sothothery

(An Amazon review I wrote back at the turn of the century...)

Finally, Howard Phillips Lovecraft seems to be getting some due from the mainstream literary world. First it was that long Joyce Carol Oates essay from 1996 in the New York Review of Books, than it was the "Annotated Lovecraft" updates from Ballantine/Del Rey a couple years later, and now Penguin Classics has seen fit to bestow the American reading public with The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Wow, I can't imagine what readers of Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, and T.S. Eliot will do when confronted with the likes of Yog Sothoth, the Goat with a Thousand Young, The Great Old Ones and that nasty ol' Cthulhu....

Seriously: this stuff is incomparable. Lovecraft's creation of the Cthulhu Mythos (or "Yog-Sothothory" as he referred to it in a charming light-hearted moment) heralded a new age in supernatural fiction. So vivid, so cosmic, so vast and imaginative, it is the equal of Middle Earth, of Oz or Wonderland. HPL's view of humanity and the cosmos is deeply, dark, nihilistic, and he used symbolic structures of his neuroses—political, sexual, racial, dietary—to portray that view.

As for the stories themselves, the cornerstones are "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) and "The Colour Out of Space" (1927); they will still be read a hundred years hence for their controlled atmosphere of cosmic dread and awe. His skill at evoking a slowly dawning sense of terror is unparalleled in these tales. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931)—not too shabbily adapted in a 2002 film as Dagon—and "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1934) are later stories that are a bit wordy but still powerful, unsettling, and unforgettable. Man's place in the cosmos is revealed as paltry and inconsequential; his physical being rendered as mutated and degraded. Space and time become meaningless. The climactic chills will remain with you for ages.

Others in this collection include "Rats in the Walls," "The Outsider" and "The Hound." The latter two reveal his penchant for evoking Poe all too derivatively (although the erstwhile Poppy Z. Brite wrote a reverent Goth-punk update of "The Hound," "And His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood"); "Rats" is one of his major early works, the artist coming into his own.

Lovecraft forced horror and supernatural fiction out of its old world infancy of vampires, ghosts, and devils and into the adult, modern world of a cold, uncaring, nearly malicious universe that we can scarcely comprehend. While Lovecraft's prose at times leaves much to be desired, the power of his imaginings is unique and convincing. This collection belongs on the bookshelf of serious readers everywhere. S.T. Joshi is a marvelous editor and biographer of Lovecraft, and his efforts should not go unheeded. Kudos to Penguin for finally adding H.P. Lovecraft to their catalog of Twentieth Century Classics.

The Unfinishing

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The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, ed. by Alan Ryan (1987): At Dawn They Sleep

My my, but is this a tasteful, refined anthology of vampire stories! It simply drips pedigree like so much blood from a fanged maw. The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories (Penguin, Oct 1988), for the most part, stars classy creatures of the night, so refined and polite you could practically invite them to the publisher's cocktail party (after all this is Penguin Books we're talking about; it simply wouldn't do to have the hosts drained before the petits fours are served - leave those kinds of déclassé shenanigans for the folks at Zebra). I really appreciated that late editor/author Alan Ryan (Cast a Cold Eye, Dead White) chose such stories, which convey weirdness, unholy hunger, and chills with understatement and insinuation. Although he notes in his short introduction that the writers included "explore the vampire myth in new ways... the variety of twentieth-century vampires is dazzling," there is very little re- or de-mythologizing of the monster here: reading these stories in the 21st century, I was pleasantly surprised to see that all the traditional tropes are present and accounted for - in fact, this is where they were created. Sometimes you just want old-school.

What's most satisfying is the sheer quality of the writing itself. Some writers go for subtle intimation; others for pulpy thrills; still others prefer thoughtful, genteel bloodletting. Ryan did a stupendous job of gathering all kinds of vampire fiction, dating back nearly 200 years, into one volume, and it's all very good to great. I've dipped in and out of this book since I was in high school, but only these past couple weeks did I really make an effort to read (almost) all of it; I'm happy to report this antho is a must-have, an absolute must-have, for horror and/or vampire fiction fans - as well as plenty other folks who like great short fiction. Plus you can't deny the pure black-winged awesomeness that is the Edward Gorey (below) cover.

Arranged chronologically, we begin with the usual suspects undead: Varney the Vampyre, Carmilla, Dracula. No surprises there. It's easy to see why "Dracula's Guest" was a deleted chapter from Stoker's original Dracula (1897); not bad in and of itself, it adds little to Harker's journey to Dracula. I didn't reread J. Sheridan Le Fanu's pre-Drac "Carmilla" (1872) but lordy how I love its first movie adaptation, Hammer's The Vampire Lovers (1970)! That counts, right? Sure it do. M.R. James presents a tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale - I think - for "An Episode of Cathedral History." Other supernatural classicists like Algernon Blackwood, E.F. Benson, and F. Marion Crawford come around too, in good form all. Solid foundations for the horrors to come...

On, then, to the classic pulp writers, who knew a thing or two about vampires - and what they didn't know, of course, they'd make up. "The Drifting Snow" is one of the few non-HPL tales I've read from August Derleth; it's marvelous, a tale of delicate understated terror. Again, horror mingles well with a frozen landscape. What lurks out in that winter wonderland you see out the window of your cozy country home? Nobody you'd wanna meet after dark, that's for sure. Stephen King had to have been thinking of Derleth's story when he revisited 'Salem's Lot in "One for the Road."

Gerard de l'Automne was meditating the rimes of a new ballade in honor of Fleurette, as he followed the leaf-arrased pathway toward Vyones through the woodland, begins "A Rendezvous in Averoigne." Brimming with purply, pulpy poetic prose as only Clark Ashton Smith (above) can write, the story's exoticism and decadence herald late 20th century modern vampires à la Rice (who is absent from this antho as she never wrote a short story).

The foods were rich and of strange savor; and the wines were fabulously old, and seemed to retain in their topaz or violet depths the unextinguished fire of buried centuries. But Gerard and Fleurette could barely touch them; and they saw that the Sieur du Malinbois and his lady did not eat or drink at all... the stifling air was laden with unformulable menace, was constrained by the spell of a black and lethal necromancy.

Moore wrote many SF stories featuring her proto Han Solo; here, with Shambleau herself

"Shambleau," the first and most famous story by early female speculative fiction writer Catherine L. Moore, is an overheated tale of horror-fantasy-science fiction straight from Freudian depths. It's pretty awesome: a space pirate named Northwest Smith rescues a feral young woman from a Martian mob and discovers those ancient Earth myths just might be based in reality after all. It's rife with perverse sexual imagery, all writhing wetness and delicious revulsion:

In nightmares until he died he remembered that moment... a nauseous, smothering odor as the wetness shut around him - thick, pulsing worms clasping every inch of his body, sliding, writhing, their wetness and warmth striking through his garments as if he stood naked to heir embrace.

No surprise it became a big hit with the Weird Tales crowd. An erotic horror classic!

The foggy, moonlit courtyard of an abandoned dwelling, perfect setting for a vampire tale, features in Carl Jacobi's "Revelations in Black" (see a cool comic book adaptation of it here). Stuff I love also featured: a bookish guy obsessed with a mysterious tome and a lovely lady of the night. Not that kind of lady, however: That face - it was divinely beautiful, the hair black as sable, the cheeks a classic white. But the lips - ! I grew suddenly sick as I looked upon them. They were scarlet...

 My god how I hate this cover

Moving into modern day with Fritz Leiber's essential, oft-anthologized "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes," about an urban photog and a model fit for the new world of advertising and consumerism. Familiar names Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, Ramsey Campbell, and Charles L. Grant all have good solid work included, stories in their own inimitable voices and styles. Two excellent stories I've reviewed elsewhere on this blog: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's "Cabin 33" and Suzy McKee Charnas's "Unicorn Tapestry." Expectedly, "Pages from a Young Girl's Diary" is Robert Aickman's stately, measured, interiorized account of said young English girl's introduction to a mysterious gentleman at a turn-of-the-century ball while her well-to-do family vacations in Italy.

In some ways the most romantic thing of all is that I do not even know his name. As people were beginning to the leave the party, he took my hand and this time held it, nor did I even affect to resist. "We shall meet again," he said, "many times;" looking so deeply and steadily into my eyes that I felt he had penetrated my inmost heart and soul... I could only murmur "Yes," in a voice so weak that he could hardly have heard me...

Aickman tiptoes in his own manner up to a finish of fate accepted, something I rather enjoy in my vampire tales. "Pages" won the 1975 World Fantasy Award for best short fiction, and is a shining example of that classiness I was talking about.

Horror and humor mix delightfully well in R. Chetwynd Hayes's "The Werewolf and the Vampire," the kind of story Gahan Wilson would probably love to illustrate. Written in a breezy, British vernacular, these travails of a young man who discovers he's a werewolf and can confide only in a Cockney family of vampires are witty and even charming. Loverly!

And editor Ryan's own story, "Following the Way," has to be one of the most sensitively written stories I've read for this blog. His easy way of relating the intellectual pursuits of a young student at a Jesuit school and the relationship he builds with an older, inquisitive priest who gently tries to convince him to join the order over quite a few years, is utterly authentic; the story carries you along with conviction and its payoff feels just right, even if expected. Especially when expected! I only wish there had been a paperback collection of Ryan's short horror fiction back in the late '80s or so; today it'd be a stone-cold classic.

Tanith Lee's "Bite-Me-Not" wraps up the 600-page anthology; Ryan has saved one of the best of the lot for last. Lee entrances the reader with this truly dark fantasy, rich with strange and medieval imagery - usually something I cannot tolerate (I mean I can't even do Game of Thrones, books or show) - although leavened by sympathetic characters and prose that recalls a half-forgotten fable from the mists of history:

For Feroluce and his people are winged beings. They are more like a nest of dark eagles than anything, mounted high among the rocky pilasters and pinnacles of the mountain. Cruel and magnificent, like eagles, the somber sentries motionless as statuary on the ledge-edges, their sable wings folded about them.

1952 If magazine illustration of "Drink My Blood" - more here

And of course no vampire anthology would be complete without the legend himself, Richard Matheson - someone who definitely knew a thing or two about vampires, and made up what he didn't. Here we have "Drink My Blood," which ends on a chilling note of horror and hope; it's a classic Matheson twist and a story that has stuck with me for a gajillion years since I read it as a young teenager, but under the title "Blood Son." Shy, odd little Jules reads an essay in class. Doesn't go over well.

"When I grow up I want to be a vampire."

The teacher's smiling lips jerked down and out. Her eyes popped wide. 

"I want to live forever and get even with everybody and make all the girls vampires."

Boy, I hear ya buddy. I hear ya.

You Should Play with Madness...

...and watch this pretty amazing 2008 documentary on H.P. Lovecraft, directed by Frank H. Woodward. It's an incredible labor of love, accomplished and thorough, with lots of interviews with horror fiction icons Ramsey Campbell and Peter Straub, as well as horror and dark fantasy giants like John Carpenter, Neil Gaiman, Stuart Gordon, and others (like S.T. Joshi, who wrote the essential - and expensive - biographies of Ech-Pi-El, H.P. Lovecraft: A Life [1996] and the two-volume I Am Providence [2010]). Features lots of great Cthulhu mythos art throughout as it covers not only Lovecraft's reclusive, epistolary life but also the creation and import of his singular and towering achievement in horror fiction, for which I know we are all eternally grateful.

I know it's been out a couple years, but I only got around to it last night - glad I finally did! It's one of the best genre writer docs I've ever seen (up there with Dreams with Sharp Teeth [2008], about the mighty Harlan Ellison). Definitely worth taking 90 minutes out of your day, if you want to know the truth... Oh, and have you guys seen the cover for the recent Penguin Classics Lovecraft trade paperback?! Too clever/cutesy by half, I think.

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

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

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

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

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

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959): The Paperback Covers

Always in print since its original publication over 50 years ago, horror fans should need no introduction to The Haunting of Hill House. You might, however, need an introduction to the various paperback editions of the novel. Above is the Penguin Books edition from 1984... not sure how I feel about all those neon colors, and the odd placement of the title over that guy's head; something might be threatening them, or maybe an intrusive photographer just butted in and they're waiting for him to move on. Who knows...

Editions from Popular Library in 1962 highlighted the fantastic Robert Wise movie adaptation, titled simply The Haunting. I love the image of the woman trapped in the maze; perfectly apt for poor Eleanor.

This cover with the critical blurbs taking up the top half seems to be the first paperback edition. The slightly cartoonish image of Hill House reminds me of something you'd see on an edition of Bradbury's The October Country or The Halloween Tree.

From Warner Books in 1982, both author and title are well-known enough that it can be Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. The simplicity of this cover is just oh-so-slightly malevolent. Nice.

And in 1999 came another movie version, some CGI travesty I've no desire to ever see. The movie tie-in from Penguin isn't too terrible, although Hill House looks more like a Gothic castle than a house. But I'm just glad people are still reading The Haunting of Hill House today.

Current trade paperback edition