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

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

Lansdale and McCammon, c. 1990

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

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

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

Pulphouse Paperbacks, 1991, art by Doug Herring

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

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

Dark Harvest 1989 hardcover, art by Rick Araluce

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

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

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

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

Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks by Richard Christian Matheson(1987): Do the Ultra Twist

Long before Joe Hill made horror a family tradition, Richard Christian Matheson was born of legendary Richard Matheson and began cranking out short-short genre fiction that appeared in The Twilight Zone and Night Cry magazines and 1980s anthologies edited by Charles L. Grant, Dennis Etchison, and Stuart David Schiff. While his name alone could have gotten him published, Matheson garnered much attention in the field on his own skill for stripping his stories to the absolute bone, with some consisting solely of one-word sentences or very nearly that. During an era in which horror showed a tendency to bloat and stuffing, some editors and readers found Matheson's pared-down work refreshing, while still maintaining edge and bite. For a short while he was aligned with the splatterpunks, mostly because he was young and had a background in television (you know--so modern) and palled around with Skipp, Spector, Schow, et. al. My first experience with him was in 1986's Cutting Edge, which included "Vampire." It's just two pages of:

In the '80s I found it quite striking, and the title is more metaphor than literal. Today, I dunno, it seems more gimmicky than powerful. Which is the problem with Matheson's whole style of clipped brevity: does it engender more chills for the reader, is it essential to the story to be told so? What's frustrating about this wildly uneven collection (first published by Scream/Press in 1987, Tor Books paperback July 1988) is that the style is in service to stories that are threadbare and obvious, rife with twists and fillips that depend only on leaving out crucial details. Oh, the servant is a human and the served is a robot! Oh, they're not people, they're endangered whales! Oh, the little girl is death itself! If he'd just told us that stuff at the beginning then maybe there'd be an interesting story. Stories often end just when they should be beginning. They seem like tales told inside-out, writerly warm-up exercises to get to the good stuff. Except that never really happens, not like I remembered from first reading Scars in the early '90s.

Too many scenarios are redolent of moldy "Twilight Zone" and "Night Gallery" tropes: beware "Sentences," "Obsolete," "Intruder," "Beholder," "Incorporation." Did Rod Serling come over and babysit a young Matheson?! Treacly beyond endurance, "Holiday" rolls out a real Santa Claus, while the 60-page teleplay for an episode of the Steven Spielberg-produced '80s TV anthology "Amazing Stories" is well-nigh unreadable. Ballplaying kids and their grampas and dopey dogs in a Norman Rockell town... oh god, spare me. Please. Try to read "Cancelled" without cringing at the ridiculous slangy stream-of-consciousness and labored satire of crass network television shows. "Conversation Piece" was done with more subtle chills, sincerity, and thoughtfulness by Michael Blumlein with his "Bestseller." Graphic unsettling violence rears an ugly head--or ugly bump--in "Goosebumps," a bit of meta-horror that would be silly were it not for the image of a guy stabbing a butcher knife into his own mouth. It's still silly but now it makes you wince, so...

Is it ironic that "Graduation," which I'd read in Whispers, is probably Matheson's best work, and it was his first published? Written with strength and style and its only gimmick is the letter-writer's references to "you-know-who" and even on this second read I have no idea who that's supposed to be. Unreliable narrators can be great devices for horror but not when the reader has no way to grasp the truth. Still, I found it vivid and unsettling; "Graduation" has a precision that briefer works lack. Other standout works--the aforementioned "Vampire," "Mr. Right," "Red," "Dead End"--can be found in various anthologies. Editors chose wisely (Paul Sammon included the broiling, LA's burning, high-pressure radio-DJ nightmare "Hell" in Splatterpunks). I believe it was "Red" that got Matheson attention in the first place, and how could it not? It's about SPOILER a guy picking up parts of his daughter's mangled corpse off the road after he accidentally dragged her behind his car. Of course Matheson doesn't spell that out like I just did and while it's pretty shocking it kind of stretches the boundaries of belief. Would the police and EMTs even allow that?!

When you look at Matheson's TV-ography as a writer, it's prolific but the quality is actually rather dismal. Highlights include such well-loved but not terribly brilliant shows like "Three's Company," "Knight Rider," "The A-Team," and "The Incredible Hulk," as well as not so-well-loved and not terribly brilliant shows like "B.J. and the Bear" and "The Powers of Matthew Star." With that in mind, the horror stories make more sense: they're not changing the world, they're just entertaining you for 22 or 45 minutes or so. But they're entertaining you not because they've got a new vision; they're entertaining you because it's the familiar dressed up in unfamiliar garb. The only raison d'être is that twist, that surprise, so anything that would get in the way of that--character, dialogue, realism--is jettisoned. As I said, perhaps in the 1980s a writer could have gotten away with this--and obviously, he did!--but today, as a much more experienced reader and fan, I find Matheson's approach to horror fiction incredibly jejune.

I began to think of this collection as high-concept horror: ideas that seem intriguing at first but are little more than tiny gimmicks, not actual stories about real people and situations. His penchant for writing stories made up of one-word sentences is interesting at first, but when it's over you think, That's all? Despite the introductory encomiums from Stephen King and Dennis Etchison, I was very little impressed with Scars, and despite the Matheson family name, found it not very distinguishing at all.

Shadows 2, edited by Charles L. Grant (1979): Darkness at the Break of Noon

A step back into the slowly gathering Shadows; this the second volume in Charles L. Grant's famous horror series of short fiction. I own the complete set, thanks to some very impressive library book sales I was lucky enough to attend, but I haven't been reading them in order (see my previous reviews for vols. one and three). The hardcover from Doubleday was published in 1979 (cover below); I own the 1984 Berkley paperback reprint adorned by a Halloween skull that appears nowhere in the stories (is that Bogart on the hardcover? He shows up in one, though).

Anyway, Shadows 2 is more, and even more so less, of the same: whisper-quiet short horror fiction of traditional chills and shivers, mostly filler and mostly too tame and polite to offer any real horror. The paucity of imagination is unsettling in itself: two stories feature the same style of twist ending; one features the hero dispatching a witch by dumping a bucket of water on her; while others simply disappear the moment you turn the page, wispy and insubstantial, either too obscure or too dull to elicit much reaction.

None of the stories are outright bad, and even the more staid, traditional ones are at least pretty well-written and engaging. More than once I was reminded of TV shows like "Night Gallery" or "Tales from the Darkside," so take that as you will. Let me however concentrate on the good: "The Chair" by novelization master Alan Dean Foster (seen below in 1980) and a Jane Cozart, about a couple out antiquing who find the titular object in a closed-off portion of a shop, the owner of which has eyes "green as a young kitten's." Should've left that chair there! The taut climax benefits from a surprise image that's funny and unnerving at once.

Another good entry is "Dead End" by Richard Christian Matheson, known for his stripped-down prose and short-short fiction. Here he uses the time-honored rite of a married couple arguing in the car as they get more and more lost, in every way possible, looking with no success for their destination. Matheson's writing is mature and ably carries the obvious metaphor all the way to its foregone conclusion. 

Intriguing and oddly affecting, "The Closing of Old Doors" by Peter D. Pautz has its protagonist rising from the grave--a story that idly imagines the unlikeliest of zombie apocalypses, long before that scenario became a cliche:

A multitude so great that, given the mere ability to move, to walk uninhibited, could stroll their way to power. With time at their leisure, and bodies stayed from decay by their need, their pent-up frustration, such an ungodly throng could rise to ascendancy by their presence alone, by sheer numbers. An election here, a lobby there. Referendum, plebiscite; even their own candidates. All secretly. No reason to invite physical resistance. Use democracy, the will of the people.

"Seasons of Belief" by Michael Bishop I could've sworn I'd read elsewhere but turns out I was wrong. Cute one about parents scaring their children with a story about the "grither," a creature who lives in the wreck of an ancient ship in the ice floes of the Arctic Circle (cool!). Fun suspense as the parents tease their offspring; ending of course you can guess. And finally, ironically, two stories included here are top works from major writers: "Mackintosh Willy" from Ramsey Campbell (pic below) and "Petey" from T.E.D. Klein. I'd read both of these before and on this reread found them just as excellent as the first.

Campbell (above) won the 1980 World Fantasy award for "Mackintosh Willy," and it's apparent from its opening lines that this work is leagues beyond the other entries. In full control of his horrors, he even denies the piece's very title:

To start with, he wasn't called Mackintosh Willy. I never knew who gave him that name... One has to call one's fears something, if only to gain the illusion of control. Still, sometimes I wonder how much of his monstrousness we created. Wondering helps me not to ponder my responsibility for what happened at the end.

A group of children taunt a tramp who "haunts" a local park lake, and then one day the narrator finds him dead on a bench. Of course that's not all, not by a long shot, and in his distinctive style, Campbell casts everything in a distorted, greasy film:  

He had turned his radio louder; a misshapen Elvis Presley blundered out of the static, then sank back into incoherence as a neighboring wave band seeped into his voice... I could see only the dimming sky, trees on the far side of the lake diluted by haze, the gleam of bottle caps like eyes atop a floating mound of litter...

I enjoyed the very subtle, very subtext conflation of sex and death and the implication that the narrator looks back now on this horrific event from his childhood and understands all too well his "responsibility." Classic Campbell. The cozy-drunk dinner-party setting in a ramshackle farmhouse in rural Connecticut of Klein's "Petey" appealed to me greatly. The long tale unfolds at a leisurely pace, two storylines woven together: one, a suicidal madman in a straitjacket and the cranky orderly caring for him; the other, two dozen middle-aged people exploring the impressive farmhouse recently renovated by owners and party hosts George and Phyllis. Lots of talking and kidding by old friends, while George experiences a fit of IBS--"he never knew the things his mind contained until his stomach told him"-- then explores the attic, where he finds bottles of rotting animal fetuses, each labeled "PD#13, PD#14," and so on. Factor in Tarot card-reading and French folktales about "le petit diable," so that when the two stories coalesce, they form a single horrifying picture...

Sad to say, but without the Campbell and Klein stories, Shadows 2 is a decidedly minor anthology, and you can get those two stories in Dark Companions and Dark Gods respectively. I know Grant hated how the splatterpunks rose up a few years later, and that horror in general became more graphically violent, but that's simply how the genre evolved; it couldn't sustain itself on the mostly meek and mild stories herein. There is no use in trying to deny it: Shadows 2 is for horror fiction completists only; everyone else can step into the light.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (1977): A Craft of Love

My tale had been called "The Attic Window," and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops, but New England didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance.

- Lovecraft, "The Unnamable" (1925)

In the early 1970s, a young military dentist named Stuart David Schiff began a seeming inexhaustible labor of love by putting together a little magazine of original horror and dark fantasy stories, which he titled, in a nod to HPL, Whispers. Finding the horror genre lacking in outlets for good writers, Schiff simply created one himself, was able to offer money, and attracted the attention of an impressive roster of scribes, both the classic - Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman - and the (then) newly minted - Dennis Etchison, Karl Edward Wagner, Ramsey Campbell, as well as folks never heard from again. Illustrators too, were welcomed, some hearkening back to the original Arkham House days, like Frank Utpatel and Lee Brown Coye - Schiff's editorial senses were impeccable.

Whispers #1, July 1973 - great cover art by Tim Kirk

Later in the decade anthologies of the best stories were published in hardcovers, and then, of course, came the paperbacks. In February 1977 the first Whispers paperback was released, from Jove/HB. You can see the cover art below, by Rowena Morrill, and how it features not a single real image of horror; it seems more fantasy-oriented, I mean, what is that, a dragon, and a princess? (Actually it's inspired by Wellman's adventure tale of Native American mythology, "The Dakwa").

At the top you see the June 1987 Jove reprint and its startling cover art by Marshall Arisman, intimating distorted psychological states in the sleek metallic sheen of a modern world, terror for the end of the century. But that's not what Whispers is; the terrors of Whispers are of the comforting old-fashioned sort, evil fantasies vividly told, well-oiled engines of weirdness and frightful fun that invoke demons and devils, Lovecraftian entities, vengeful madmen, landscapes of legend and myth, and other staples of the much-loved pulps era... with a few new twists.

Editor Schiff today

Almost to a one, the stories Schiff has compiled are solidly entertaining. Whispers starts off strongly with "Sticks." Originally written as a kind of horror writer's in-joke, Karl Edward Wagner's (pic below) story mixes Weird Tales art, anthropology, and vague cosmic malice to terrific effect, and it has become a classic in that Mythos; it won the 1975 British Fantasy Award for best short story and has been reprinted plenty (you'll also note its striking similarity to a popular indie horror movie that came along two decades later). Amazingly enough it was inspired by real-life events! A pulp horror artist comes across a strange collection of bundled lattices of sticks in the lonely woods of upstate New York.

It should have been ridiculous. It wasn't. Instead it seemed somehow sinister - these utterly inexplicable, meticulously constructed stick lattices spread through a wilderness where only a tree-grown embankment or a forgotten stone wall gave evidence that man had ever passed through.

And things just get worse from there. Really worse. Pretty great, unique, disquieting, although I could have done without the little explanatory afterword included, just a paragraph down from the story's final doom-laden lines.

Whispers #9, July 1976- eerie art by Steve Fabian

I've noted before that with the explosion of paperback horror in the 1980s the quality of the writing itself suffered much, but that in the '70s the genre was still populated by professional authors who could actually and truly write. How refreshing! There is the delicate style of Robert Aickman's (pic below) tale "Le Miroir," in which the most complex of ordeals sometimes finds its own resolution, and now Celia sat before the beautiful mirror or looking glass, now in one new dress, now in another, and intermittently without troubling to put on a dress at all.
 

Dark fantasy elder statesman Fritz Leiber's penchant for horror set in the current day appears in "The Glove." A tale of rape and guilt written in a smartly casual manner, Leiber's narrator wonders, Gloves are ghostly to start with, envelopes for hands - and if there isn't a medieval superstition about wearing the flayed skin of another's hand to work magic, there ought to be. Although I'm not a fan of sword-and-sorcery, and Brian Lumley's "House of Cthulhu" is firmly in that field with its medieval vocabulary and dialogue (speaking in "ayes" and "Os" and names with lots of Zs, Hs, and Ys), the story began to charm me, especially because of its skin-crawl climax and Cthulhu references.

Weirdbook Press, 1984

Some comic relief too: Bob Bloch contributes a mordantly self-referential piece, "The Closer of the Way" (his first book was entitled The Opener of the Way; get it?). "Mirror, Mirror" has a classic deal with the devil gone wrong, Ray Russell's satiric swipe at vain Hollywood types. You'll dig the Cockney cannibal of "The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man" by Robyn Smith. And Richard Christian Matheson's "Graduation" is an epistolary tale of a college student's clever, insightful, but not-quite-self-aware letters home; he keeps mentioning you-know-who but, sadly, I'm not quite sure who that was... but I don't think I'd want to be there when he comes home for spring break.

Matheson - Man I gotta find & reread his Scars

And Whispers ends with a bang: "The Chimney," one of the best Ramsey Campbell stories I've read. A child learns of Santa in the worst way, much too young, a fiend on television:

I'd seen two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping toward. They weren't going to wake up! "Burglar!" I'd screamed. "No, dear, it's Father Christmas," my mother said. "He always comes out of the chimney."

Perhaps if she'd said "down" rather than "out of"...

This is one of Campbell's straightforward tales of quiet creeping dread, and the payoff lingers, finding that our deepest childhood fears resonate throughout our - and perhaps others' - entire lives. Stellar stuff. And winner of the 1978 World Fantasy Award for best short fiction.

Doubleday hardcover, 1977

And so many other satisfying tales of vintage weirdness, perfect for reading while curled up before the proverbial fireplace: "The Pawnshop" by Charles Fritch; "Goat" by David Campion; another with a good Lovecraft vibe, "The Willow Platform" by Joseph Payne Brennan. There are darker, more realistic stories here too, especially Etchison's murder-on-coed-campus "White Moon Rising," which hints at the fragmented types of stories he'd produce for the next several decades. But mostly Whispers presents carefully-crafted works that evoke the 19th and early 20th century masters, just the kind of horror that Lovecraft himself always loved.