Under the Fang, edited by Robert McCammon (1991): The World is a Vampire

Vampires, vampires, vampires! Loathsome creatures of the night stalking and snacking on humans across the globe! There's no escape! Whatever can we do?!

Nothing, it seems, or very little, to save ourselves. Thus is the setup for the stories in Under the Fang (Pocket Books, Aug 1991, cover by Mitzura), under the auspices of the Horror Writers of America coalition, with editing duties by iconic bestselling paperback author Robert R. McCammon. Akin to the zombie apocalypse anthos based on George Romero's movies, Book of the Dead (1989) and Still Dead (1992), (which of course hearken back to 1957's I Am Legend) all the stories exist in this new world, with each author bringing their own special methods of madness to the proceedings.

McCammon in 1991

Virtually all the vampire anthologies published prior to the early Nineties were collections of classic stories, moldy golden oldies by the likes of Bram Stoker, Polidori, EF Benson, Crawford, Derleth, et al. Esteemed editor Ellen Datlow gave us Blood is Not Enough in 1989 and A Whisper of Blood in 1991, which featured all-new vampiric works by the cream of the genre's crop. I'll confess: I've read neither, even though I've owned them since Kurt Cobain was still alive. But those two volumes seem to be the first that showed that the old symbols and themes of vampire fictions could be given fresh new life at the end of the century. 

The vampires within Under the Fang exist on a spectrum of generic types: the typical night creeper; the almost-zombified monster driven mad by thirst; the brilliant military leader; the scientific sort looking for a way to walk in daylight; the Anne Rice decadent aesthete. Vampires have been dubbed cutesy nicknames, like "suckheads" and "fangers" and whatnot. That out of the way, let's get to the contents: McCammon gets a twofer, first with a metafictional introduction, in the guise of a doomed note from an unnamed narrator:

They've won. They come in the night, to the towns and cities. Like a slow, insidious virus they spread from house to house, building to building, from graveyard to bedroom and cellar to boardroom. They won, while the world struggled with governments and terrorists and the siren song of business. They won, while we weren't looking...

He handily sketches out the scope of the situation in a couple pages, setting us up for the tales to come. Second is his story "The Miracle Mile," of a family's drive to an abandoned season vacation spot and amusement park. Vampires have of course overrun it, and Dad is pissed. With his signature mix of corny sap and derivative horror, McCammon delivers perfectly cromulent reading material. It's just that I always find him square and dull and earnest, and not my jam whatsoever.

McCammon and Sarrantonio, 1990

The recently-late Al Sarrantonio's "Red Eve" is an effective slice of dark, poetic fantasy in full Bradbury mode, which was common for him. I have no idea who Clint Collins is, but his brief "Stoker's Mistress" is a high-toned yet effective bit of metafiction about vampires "allowing" Bram Stoker to write his "ludicrous" novel Dracula... Shades of soon-to-be-unleashed Anno Dracula. Nancy A. Collins had already had her way with the vampires; "Dancing Nitely" is a perfect encapsulation of the modern image of the unholy creature: they all want to live in an MTV video scripted by Bret Easton Ellis. Contains scenes of NYC yuppies dancing under blood spray at an ultra-hip underground vamp bar, called Club Vlad, with a neon Lugosi lighting up its exterior. We may cringe looking back at it today, but back then this style was au courant du jour.

Late crime novelist Ed Gorman delivers an emotional wallop in "Duty," powerfully effective even though I was half-expecting how the turnaround was going to happen. I gotta try one of his full horror novels! Richard Laymon does his his usual schtick of adolescent ogling and rape fantasy scenarios rife with toxic masculinity in "Special," this story ends on an unexpected note of enlightenment. Better than other things I've read by him, but not enough to make me a fan. 

One of those writers whose byline makes me groan inwardly, J.N. Williamson (above), contributes a lengthy, pulp-prose-level Interview with the Vampire-esque work called "Herrenrasse" ("master race" in German, yuck) in which a hoity-toity vampire traps a potential Van Helsing in his apartment. They then engage in a lengthy dialogue of philosophical conceits of bloodsucking. Kinda cool, but Williamson's style can be pompous, overwritten in that pulpy, self-taught style that screams "show-off." Thomas F. Monteleone, he of the wonderful cutting edge Borderlands anthologies, contributes "Prodigal Sun," a brilliant vampire who had been an immunologist who now tries to cure their curse of bloodthirst. Well-written but so-so.

Together, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Suzy McKee Charnas pit their own fictional vamps—Count St. Germain and Dr. Edward Weyland, respectively—against one another in "Advocates," the most philosophically ambitious work here; no surprise, as both women approached the vampire as a concept in their other writings. Could've been better I felt, less than the sum of its parts.

Brian Hodge, 1991

On to the finest stories within: my favorite was Brian Hodge's "Midnight Sun," which is so well-conceived in scope and execution I daresay he could've written an entire novel using his scenario. Muscular and convincing, its setting of a military outpost in frozen wastes makes it a standout; the conflict, not only between humans and vampires but also between vampires themselves give the story a real moral heft. A close second was "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," by Chet Williamson, in which a loving husband and wife experience tragedy and woe after escaping into a cabin in the woods. Tough, moving, unsettling stuff. 

Surprisingly, Lisa Cantrell (above), she of The Manse "fame," pulls out a little winner in "Juice." It ain't moonshine this good ol' boy is making a living from. "Does the Blood Line Run on Time?" by Sidney Williams and Robert Pettit, is one of the real bangers here, an action-adventure-horror offering that is oh-so Eighties in just the right way. Williams wrote a few horror paperbacks around then, and now I'm considering adding them to my want-lists.

Other stories here, by authors both known and unknown, run up and down the scale from ok sure fine to oh well whatever nevermind. This might not be the best antho of the era I've ever read, but the quality of prose is very high—this was the HWA, after all—even if the story itself doesn't quite succeed. Me, I could've done with some more graphic bloodshed/drinking, or classic Lugosi/Lee-style vamp action in the good old Les Daniels' tradition. No matter; your mileage may vary as well (PorPor Books enjoyed it maybe a smidgen more than I did). Overall, I'd say Under the Fang is an easy recommendation for your horror anthology and/or vampire fiction shelves.

Night Visions: In the Blood, ed. by Alan Ryan (1984): Growing into the Grave

Plucked this guy off my shelves at random, it's spooky season, right? The inaugural title in the long-running anthology series launched by specialty press Dark Harvest in November 1984, Night Visions 1 was intended as being a showcase for the best original short stories by the leading figures in both horror fiction and dark fantasy. Charles L. Grant was pretty well-established already as an author and editor, Steve Rasnic Tem had been a rising figure in genre fiction, publishing stories in various SF&F publications as well as Grant's Shadows series, and British fantasist Tanith Lee had already published two dozen novels by that year. Berkley Books reprinted the hardcover in paperback as Night Visions: In the Blood, in April 1988, named for one of Grant's stories. (Dig that cover art, totes appropriate, but I'll be damned if I can make out that tiny artist signature on bottom right; it looks so maddeningly familiar, so just out of reach. I'm determined to ID it however.)

In his erudite introduction, Alan Ryan (1943-2011) provides a background and the impetus for this anthology, making note of how the short story has always held a sort of precarious position in American letters, and how horror is often at its very best in the format. Writers who speak on panels at fantasy conventions very often find that their audiences are most knowledgeable and most vociferous when the subject is short fiction.

Grant (1942-2006) was famed for his understated, elusive, and whispered brand of horror fiction; for some readers, entirely too understated and elusive. His stories here, seven in all, read pretty much the same as all the other Grant I've read: sometimes good, sometimes meh, and a couple times excellent. My tastes have moved past Bradbury-esque small towns at night, cold winds blowing autumn leaves across empty streets and onto regular folks' porches and windows, with kids climbing trees, dads in the garage and moms in the kitchen, grampas in the easy chair. Sure, behind those windows lurk realistic "horrors" like the indignities of aging, disintegrating marriages, childhood nightmares, coming back home to family strife... but his touch is often too gentle, eschewing as he does most violence and bloodshed.

That said, I will note the highlights of his contributions. He's adept at putting in that final turnabout line that might give the reader an intellectual chill, and, especially in the title tale, ably describes the true aches and pains of loved ones' mortality: it was the dying he saw [in her] every day for a year, the wasting, the shrinking, the growing into the grave from the inside out.

Grant in 1981 (photo by Jeff Schalles, from Grant's FB page)

"That's What Deaths Are For" and "Family" well utilize his penchant for trapping his characters in a metaphysical hell, forced to relive/re-enact trauma for, well, eternity (at least, that's what I think is happening; Charlie Grant, master of elusion). "And We'll Be Jolly Friends" is a perfect example of Grant's melancholy M.O., and I'm not surprised it's the only story of his here that was reprinted, collected in his best-of Scream Quietly in 2016. Small town, parents, friendship, memory, wounding, death, and worse: present and accounted for, in Grant's slightly fractured, stream-of-consciousness prose:

go crazy
no, you ain't, you're just scared man, that's all
yeah, well, I don't wanna die
then stop bitching and hang on
jesus, i'm tryin', i'm tryin'

Tem in early 1980s, (photo by Karen Simmons, from Tem's FB page)

Next up are Tem's stories, also seven in number, and generally my favorites here. Tem's approach seems to me to be the most "modern," and one that other writers would employ as well. At times he can be, like Grant, a mite too obscure, but his mix of surreality and the quotidian hit me in the sweet spot. "The Men and Women of Rivendale" hides its menace till the end, hinting with imagery of mouths and red eyes again and again, subtle but insistent. "Spidertalk" won me over, with a frightened child, a caring teacher, and a menace both outside and inside the schoolhouse. The end of this one is shivery apocalypse, a common human fear becomes overwhelming both as symbol and substance; a perfect example of Eighties short horror fiction. But her fear was a living thing with a mind of its own,  that would not respond to her own sense of reason. 

In "Punishments," our father-narrator speaks disquietingly about his unfathomable daughter, ruminating on the alien nature of our offspring, how difficult it is to raise, nurture—and punish—these wayward creatures. When the baby moved away from us, crawling on the floor, she was back and head in her roomy flannel nightgown. I'd swear she was a crawling torso, born without arms and legs. And when I finally saw those little hands and feet I'd swear they were prosthetic appendages, so unnatural they seemed.

As gross as you might imagine, "Worms" finds a snobbish, racist, classist woman offended by her neighbors, and her comeuppance. Tem elevates this classic horror setup with his descriptive prose and quirky characterization. "The Overcoat" wowed me, a grimy glimpse into family strife and downtrodden lives, mixed with effective grue and imagery. In fact, to me, it is an almost proto-splatterpunk tale in that it highlights urban decay and uses it and its unfortunate denizens as a mirror for the human psyche, in stark contrast to the middle-class nuclear family units that generally populated the genre. It was always a case of when you should call the cops. Most of them time you didn't... You shut your door and turned up the TV. Pretty soon it was just white noise. I wasn't a saint.

With her darkly fantastical tales of myth, legend, and family legacy, prolific British author Tanith Lee (1947-2015) stands in contrast to the more grounded works of Grant and Tem. Her characters have names like Sephaina, Marcusine, Araige, Jenver, and one always wonders, are they gods? immortals? vampires? otherworldly creatures beyond our ken? Surely they cannot be merely human. Her style seduces, sucks you into a breathless world of high drama, high culture, secrets, lies, and illicit lusts between (sigh) family members. Only once had she ever discovered herself in the wish that Jenver were not her brother, that the notion of making love with him did not revolt her...

Loved "Simon's Wife," top-tier stuff, a realistic tale of modern love and adultery. A woman travels to a married man's home while his wife is away, and faces her fears head-on when Simon is called away on business for a few hours the morning after their consummation. Unnerving, at times unpleasant, but for me, a real winner. I wandered this house like a ghost, no familiar possession of mine in sight, a lost traveler without a landmark... landmarks of Simon's wife, whose name I did not yet know, whose picture I was forming by irresistible slow degrees.

Her other stories, "The Tree: A Winter's Tale," "The Vampire Lover" and something something about a unicorn, I mostly skimmed: Lee's writing is sure and strong, all blood-drenched—yet not particularly scary at all—fairy-tale vibes, but my taste for that kind of medieval lore and imagery is practically nil. Still, I'm sure others whose tastes do run in that direction will find them perfectly satisfying.

All in all, In the Blood is a perfect little starter for getting familiar with the more sophisticated styles of Eighties horror: literate yet chilling as it exposes the secret recesses we hide, highlighting those fears without resorting to excessive bloodshed or random limb-pulling (although there is a bit of that, here and there). You've got Grant's homespun domestic horrors of the everyday; Tem's sometimes surreal, sometimes esoteric, sometimes gritty entries; and Lee's lush, romantic, adult Gothic dark fantasies. Splatterpunk would come along in a year or two to rabble-rouse the grown-ups, sure, but much of what is written here is as about as good as horror fiction got back then. In the Blood will allow readers to look back and get a taste of these three authors' personal worlds of darkness, and what grave discoveries they have revealed.

Ghouls in My Grave by Jean Ray (1965): Dig Up Her Bones

This past spring I was visiting San Diego to meet up with family and on the drive down that way lucked into finding a delightful little bookstore, Artifact Books (not to be confused with Artifacts bookstore in Hood River, OR). I poked around a bit, found a small horror section, and then found the long boxes of bagged vintage paperbacks, various genres, but mostly fantasy and horror. Unfortunately for me, I already owned most of what I was looking through, but the titles were definitely highly collectible.

But a surprise was in store, for suddenly I was face to face with the gaping grinning skull adorning the purple cover of Ghouls in My Grave, a thin 1965 paperback from Berkley Medallion, by Belgian author Jean Ray. Huzzah! I'd only been looking for this guy for decades! Sure, I'd seen it online, at pretty high prices, and who knows in what condition it was actually in, but now I had it in my hands. It was priced at $40, which is about the very highest I will go on vintage paperbacks, but I felt fate and good luck were at work here, and who am I to blow against the wind?

Then I saw the owner at the checkout desk, tattooed fella in a metal shirt who seemed just about my age, and figured I was safe asking if he'd ever heard of Paperbacks from Hell... "Oh, yeah, I love it, love Grady Hendrix!" So I let him in on who I was, and we chatted for quite a little while. Can't recommend this spot highly enough; if you're ever in the area, stop in, browse awhile. Be sure to check out the glass case filled with Arkham House hardcovers too!

On to the book of tales at hand: two of the stories collected here are surefire weird fiction classics, longer works that whisper of cosmic madness and the unknowable, almost malevolent universe. One is a gloomy sea adventure, "The Mainz Psalter," while the other is a kind of proto metafiction tale entitled "The Shadowy Street." Both were originally written in French in the early Thirties, published in the 1932 collection La croisière des ombres ("the cruise of shadows," a reference to "Mainz Psalter"), and would've been a perfect in an issue of "Weird Tales" along Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch, and the like.

Both stories see Ray utilizing the tale-within-a-tale (and even another layer after that) technique to heighten the horror. In "The Mainz Psalter", a mortally wounded sailor regales the crew of the ship that rescued him with a story that evokes William Hope Hodgson, Lovecraft, and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Aboard the titular craft, a series of bizarre occurrences hint of the otherworldly. "The Shadowy Street" is in part about a man who discovers a street seemingly hidden in another dimension, but that is only part of the ambitious narrative...

Jean Ray, pseudonym of Raymundus Joannes de Kremer (1887-1964)

The other stories here lack the formal sophistication of the aforementioned; fine enough tales, yes, but more reminiscent of general horror pulp of the Thirties and Forties. There's an interesting vampire story I had not read before; strange goings-on in a hotel closed for the season; a man invents a dastardly cousin in order to get close to a woman; a graverobber who meets his unexpected match; a cursed artifact that once belong to famed British occultist John Dee... You get the idea. Translated from French by Lowell Bair, Ray's style is erudite, dry, and precise, with an elevated, cosmopolitan tone that tinges the macabre with a sense of irony.

I first became aware of Ghouls in My Grave after reading Danse Macabre, Stephen King's essential 1981 tome of boomer memoir and horror criticism, where he includes it in an appendix of important 20th century horror fiction. For many years I searched for the book, to no avail, and virtually never heard anyone discuss it or author. Closer to 20 years ago I watched the movie adaptation of his 1943 Gothic novel Malpertuis, I think solely because it was by the same director as 1971's Daughters of Darkness, one of my personal genre lodestars. Malpertuis wasn't even translated into English, as far as I could determine, until 1998.

For a writer considered "forgotten" or "obscure," I found plenty of online articles and reviews on him and his output; I feel caught a little flat-footed in this post, as I was expecting to have to do a deep dive and come back with some uncut gems but turns out plenty of folks have been there first. Oh well. At least the online prices for this paperback have gone down to around $20-$25, which I'd say is pretty fair for you collectors. So if mysterious, ambiguous, pulpy tales of gloom, doom, and hapless Europeans receiving supernatural comeuppance are your thing, digging up a copy of Ghouls in My Grave could be quite a reward.

Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, ed. by Ramsey Campbell (1988): A Feast of Fiends

Despite it coming out at the height of the Eighties horror boom and published by genre giant Tor Books, I have no recollection at all of Fine Frights: Stories That Scare Me. An anthology of short stories compiled by the great and prolific Ramsey Campbell, the subtitle is the seller here: a story that can frighten one of horror's premier authors will surely reduce regular readers to a slab of shivering Jello. I've owned my minty-fresh copy of the book—never reprinted—for well over a decade, after finding it a library book sale and paying a whopping single dollar for it. The Jill Bauman cover, while perhaps not one of her most accomplished, references one of the stories therein; and if you look closely at the bottom brick on the right corner, you can see her sig: "Jill."

Campbell in 1988, photo by J.K. Potter

Campbell has assembled a dozen stories that he has deemed his favorites, and are actually only "a sampling" of the short works that have scared him over the years. Some of the names readers of science fiction will recognize more than horror fans, some stories are decades old and virtually forgotten, while others are—were—contemporary of the time but had not yet made their bones. I can assure you that, whenever a particular story was written is of no matter; these are top-flight tales of terror, with (almost) each one containing masterful soul-freezing moments of fear, unease, or shock.

Not a moment is wasted as we begin: "Child's Play," by respected Danish literary author Villy Sorensen (pic above), worms right under the skin. Written in the early Fifties, its unassuming title belies the story's utter remorseless cruelties; it's underwritten in a sly, chilling manner, almost like child-speak. This is fitting, as we meet the two little brothers, never named, who happen upon a smaller boy named Peter. A highlight of the entire anthology. "Shut up! We must clear this up before mother gets home."

Two of the best authors of the day are represented: Karl Edward Wagner's classic "More Sinned Against" has been one of my personal favorite horror tales since I first read it back when I was in high school, when it appeared in David J. Schow's essential 1988 antho Silver Scream. Two people trying to make it in the sleazy show-biz environs of Eighties El Lay, with all the ups and downs that requires. This bit of comeuppance is rife with Hollywood grit 'n' glamour, and what happens after the glitter fades. The ending is a total banger, unforgettable lo these many decades later. Candace couldn't have endured it all if it weren't for her selfless love for Rick, and for the coke and smack and pills and booze.

Thomas Ligotti's "The Greater Festival of Masks" is from his Songs of a Dead Dreamer, just after its small press pub in 1985, but prior to the mass market release; only then would his name would gain more and more recognition. All the Ligottian trademarks are here: nameless city, crooked streets, eerie moonlight, shops of bizarre accoutrements, and reflections upon identity and reality. This is not my favorite Ligotti story, but its essence of the esoteric is so strong, so pervasive, its climax so uncanny, I can see why Campbell chose to include it. For these are the declining days of the festival when the beginning and the end, and the old and the new, the existent and the nonexistent all join in the masquerades.

One of the dozens of anthologies in which "Thurnley Abbey" appeared, 1984

Dating from the early years of the 1900s, both "Thurnley Abbey" by Perceval Landon and "The Necromancer" by Arthur Gray work wonders with the musty trappings of classic ghost stories. While the former has to be one of the most anthologized around, Campbell notes in his little intro that he found many of his readers didn't know Landon's story at all; Gray's work is a brief, erudite, M.R. James-style spooker. While these old-fashioned tales-within-tales can, to some modern readers, seem a little dusty and remote, I can assure you they retain their ice-cold powers. "I know that my heart stopped dead, and my throat closed automatically."

"The Fifth Mask" by British author Shamus Frazer (pic above) is certainly a precursor to the output of both Campbell and Ligotti. A nervous man reminisces over double whiskies about a frightful occurrence from his boyhood, when he and a pal, on the Fifth of November, were out and about pranking while wearing masks, which was the style at the time (published originally in 1957, there are several uses of the n-word to describe said masks here). But someone has beat them at their own game of disguise... The entire dank and anxious mood is one that must have affected Campbell greatly, because many of his works have precisely the same vibe. She was as thin as her voice, dressed all in black... there was a stucco wall behind her, patched and discoloured as a gravestone, and the ghosts of winter trees rising above and losing themselves in the twilight.

"The War is Over" by David Case is original to this anthology, so maybe Campbell commissioned it. It is grim. Case wrote two cult horror/Gothic novels, Fengriffen and Wolf Tracks (1971 and 1980 respectively, both back in print from, who else, Valancourt Books), but was not overly prolific. This tale is set just after WWII, but the main story is one of enemy soldiers. This one has teeth and no mercy. "The brave soldier was not then so brave. He pleaded, he begged. He called upon God. Soon he could no longer plead with words, for he had no tongue."

From 1963, "The Horror at Chilton Castle" by Joseph Payne Brennan (above) is, I believe, fairly well-known among horror aficionados. I first read it some 10 or 12 years ago, and haven't forgotten it. Brennan was a respected mid-century horror/fantasy writer whose work stretches back to the Weird Tales era; his "Slime" is one of the great novellas of pulp horror ever. Here, Brennan evokes time-honored horror tropes with his narrator traveling through Europe looking for his ancestors. He hopes to visit the legendary Chilton Castle, to which his family has distant connection.

In a pub nearby the castle on a storm-lashed night, he ruminates on its spectral legends, and chances to meet someone who can give him a tour of the place—and, well, things go on from there. Strongly and vividly written, "Chilton Castle" is another fine example of Fine Frights... and the inspiration for the cover art. It would've made one helluva an episode of "Thriller"!

There were variations of the legend. Without doubt the original tale had been embroidered down the centuries, but the essential outline of the story concerned a secret room somewhere in the castle. It was said that this room contained a terrifying spectacle which the Chilton-Paynes were obliged to keep hidden from the world.

The four remaining stories are from science fiction authors; I'm sure that Campbell was reading them in magazines in his adolescence. This is to be expected: before the Paperbacks from Hell era, and even well into the Seventies, horror itself was cloaked in terms of SF, mystery, thriller, suspense, Gothic, speculative, fantasy, et al. Still, the authors know how to pluck a nerve ending.
 

"Cutting Down" by Bob Shaw (above) is by far the most graphic story included, a piece of Eighties grue originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. I have absolutely no idea how he rates as a science fiction writer, but as a horror writer he does admirably. An Irish author who got his start in SF fandom, here Shaw gets right at one man's disgust, and the lengths he goes to to relieve himself of this ill. Another tale of comeuppance, oh so vaguely reminiscent of Stephen King's "Quitters, Inc." He drove a roughly estimated cubic centimeter of the fluid into his wife's bloodstream, withdrew the needle and stepped back, his breath coming in a series of low growls which he was unable to suppress.

Okay, I kind of guessed where Peter Phillips's (above) "Lost Memory" was going, but still found it fairly gruesome. A Fifties SF tale through and through, in which awkwardly made-up words, clunky characters names, and stilted "scientific" dialogue and description run amok while information is clearly withheld from the reader solely for an effective twist at the end. Not really my kind of thing at all, but I can imagine being a kid back then reading it for the first time, yikes. Chur-chur was muttering to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger's skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple.

Not last, but least: John Brunner's "The Clerks of Domesday" is not completely terrible, I get the chilling implications of the narrator's paranoid delusions, but found the execution tedious. Brunner was connected to the New Wave of SF of the late Sixties and Seventies with prophetic novels such as Stand on Zanzibar, The Shockwave Rider, and The Sheep Look Up, and while this story seems to fit his dour predictions and predilections, it was the only one I struggled to finish. It had never been published prior to Fine Frights and has never been reprinted again.

Our final story is from the mighty Philip K. Dick (above), an early work, dated 1954, entitled "Upon the Dull Earth." If at first it is obscure, it will become haunting and forlorn; Dick's powers at evoking an emotional response was there from the beginning of his career. A young couple, angels, stars, an alternate plane of reality; a myth of the underworld, and lost in it. Dick's long interest in spiritual lives, esoteric religion, heretical beliefs, day-to-day reality versus cosmic illusion: all here. It was a terrified reflection that showed out of the mirror above the bowl, a face, tear-stained and frantic. The face was difficult to catch—it seemed to waver and slide. Grey eyes, bright with terror.

There you have it! And it should be no surprise that Ramsey Campbell has assembled such a high caliber anthology; the various styles of horror represented gives the book a wide appeal. It's a no-brainer: Fine Frights is a fine feast, a repast of morbid morsels that belongs on the shelves of any and all paperback horror collectors.

Favorite Horror Stories: "Shambleau" by Catherine L. Moore (1933)

One of horror's great scenes is when Jonathan Harker is confronted by three vampire women—the "weird sisters"—in Dracula. As one of them kneels at Harker's side, he hears the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, then he closes his eyes in langourous ecstacy, waiting for the moment when her sharp white teeth will pierce the flesh on his neck... Wonderful stuff (till of course the Count rushes in and ruins this tender moment). And I thought of this bit of sexual dread when I first encountered Catherine L. Moore's famous 1933 pulp horror/science fiction story, "Shambleau."

This was Moore's first story, believe it or not, and its popularity hasn't dimmed since it first appeared in the November 1933 edition of Weird Tales, having been included in dozens of science fiction and horror anthologies across the globe. There is something so primal about this work that nine decades have not dulled its power, and I think it operates as a kind of ur-text for erotic horror.

Featuring a semi-heroic character that Moore would use again and again named Northwest Smith, "Shambleau" at first comes across as standard pulp for its day: Smith is a space pilot, an outlaw, a smuggler, going about business in a kind of Wild West city called Lakkdarol, an outpost on Mars: a raw, red little town where anything might happen, and often did (Smith is obviously a precursor to Han Solo; this type of pulp adventure is just what George Lucas would repurpose for the Star Wars universe). 

A wild mob is chasing down a berry-brown girl in a single tattered garment whose scarlet burnt the eyes with its brilliance. Smith draws his laser gun in defense of the poor creature as she evokes a kind of sympathy in him, even though he's no hero. He talks down the mob, who keep shouting "Shambleau!" The leader informs Smith "We never let those things live," but Smith informs him that Shambleau is his, he's keeping her. This puzzles and astonishes the crowd; as they disperse, the leader spits out at Smith: "Keep her then, but don't let her out in this town again!"

Obviously relieved, this girl known only as Shambleau cannot speak much English, and Smith is perplexed by the bloodthirsty disgust the mob had evinced towards her. Their brief conversation is halting, but she manages to get out, "Some day I—speak to you—in my own language" (nice foreshadowing!). Smith knows he needs to get her someplace safe, like back to his sparse, rented room. As they walk, he notices others on the streets staring after him and the turban-headed alien girl in disbelief.

Back in his room, Smith tries to get the girl to eat, but she will not. He tells her she can stay safe here, and he goes out to do his business: Smith's errand in Lakkdarol, like most of his errands, is better not spoken of. Man lives as he must, and Smith's living was a perilous affair outside the law and ruled by the ray-gun. He returns that evening, drunk on “segir,” or Martian booze, and is surprised to see Shambleau still there. Yes, he's drunk... and suddenly horny. They embrace...

Her velvety arms closed around his neck. And then he was looking down into her face, very near, and the green animal eyes met his with the pulsing pupils and the flicker of—something—deep behind their  shallows—and through the rising clamor of his blood, even as he stooped his  lips to hers, Smith felt something deep within him shudder away—inexplicable,  instinctive, revolted. What it might be he had no words to tell, but the very touch of her was suddenly loathsome—

With a cry of "God!" he pushes her away, recalling that wild look in the eyes of that street mob. Shambleau falls to the floor and her turban slips. Smith had thought her bald, but no, quite the opposite is true:

a lock of scarlet hair  fell below the binding leather, hair as scarlet as her garment, as unhumanly  red as her eyes were unhumanly green. He stared, and shook his head  dizzily and stared again, for it seemed to him that the thick lock of crimson had moved, squirmed of itself against her cheek. 

Smith blames this "squirming" on too much too drink, tells the girl to sleep in the corner, and then gets into bed, where he dreams strange dreams beneath a dark Martian night, of some nameless, unthinkable thing ... was coiled about his throat . . . something like a soft snake, wet and warm, sent little thrills of delight through every nerve and fiber of him, a perilous  delight. He is like marble, rigid, unable to move, fighting against it, till oblivion takes him and then, bright morning. Dismissing this “devil of a dream,” he tells Shambleau she can stay again, but he'll be leaving Lakkdoral in a day and after that, she'll be on her own.

C.L. Moore, c. 1940s

It was not until late evening, when he turned homeward again, that the thought of the brown girl in his room took definite shape in his  mind, though it had been lurking there, formless and submerged, all day. "Formless and submerged," you say? Freud would, as it's said, have had a field day. Shambleau still has not eaten, still speaks in halting English obscurities like "I shall—eat. Before long—I shall—feed. Have no  worry." Smith brilliantly asks her if she lives off blood, and she scoffs: "You think me—vampire, eh? No—I am Shambleau!" Well, that clears things up. 

 

Where I first encountered Shambleau

That night brings a fuller realization of the horror that is Shambleau, and Moore spares nothing in her efforts to reveal what a danger to the rational human this alien is. Smith wakes to see Shambleau teasing him as she undoes her turban, allowing those scarlet locks to writhe and glisten in an obscene tangle, drawing Smith in helplessly. It's as if he recognizes what she is...

And Smith knew that he looked upon Medusa. The knowledge of that—the realization of vast backgrounds reaching into misted history—shook him out of his frozen horror for a moment, and in that  moment he met her eyes again, smiling, green as glass in the moonlight,  half hooded under drooping lids. Through the twisting scarlet she held out  her arms. And there was something soul-shakingly desirable about her, so that all the blood surged to his head suddenly and he stumbled to his feet like a sleeper in a dream as she swayed toward him, infinitely graceful,  infinitely sweet in her cloak of living horror.

Jayem Wilcox’s illustration for Weird Tales

Moore goes on in this amazing pulp fashion, overheated prose all silken seductive slidings, wet and glistening tentacle tresses like serpents, eager and hungry as they crawl towards this man frozen in fear... and desire. As she embraces him, she murmurs, "I shall—speak to you now—in  my own tongue—oh, beloved!" Whew. Smith is bewitched, nearly hypnotized, a drug addict now, his identity subsumed into the hungering that Shambleau is, welcoming mindless, deadly bliss. 

this mingling of rapture and revulsion all took place in the flashing of a moment while the scarlet worms coiled and crawled upon him, sending deep, obscene tremors of that infinite pleasure into, every atom that made up Smith. And he could not stir in that slimy  ecstatic embrace—and a weakness was flooding that grew deeper after each succeeding wave of intense delight, and the traitor in his soul strengthened and drowned out the revulsion—and something within him ceased to struggle  as he sank wholly into a blazing darkness that was oblivion to all else but that devouring rapture. 

Like the femme fatale of a noir story, Shambleau promises heaven but delivers hell. Only the arrival of a space-pal named Yarol saves Smith; Yarol engages in a last-minute feat of derring-do, as he recognizes the alien for what it is, recalling in him ancient swamp-born memories from Venusian ancestors far away and long ago. Moore concludes her wild tale with the two space friends discussing the origins of Earth myths, an alien race, half-forgotten legends, a race older than man... you know the stuff! Yarol insists that if Smith ever sees a Shambleau again, "You'll draw your gun and burn it to hell."

The science-fiction setting of "Shambleau" is beside the point—this story is all about the shivery-delicious erotic abandonment delirium, and that exotic scarlet-maned alien woman who made many striking paperback covers possible. Delving into forbidden sensuality, notions of addiction, and debased pleasures that I'm sure few others were exploring in pulp magazines then, "Shambleau" is fully realized, imagined with audacity, holding nothing back, its voluptuous vibe making it a favorite of 1930s pulp fans and beyond. Not too bad for a brand-new author.

While horror as a genre is so often concerned with revulsion, fear, despair, and the like, Moore seemed to be clued-in to the uncomfortable fact that horror also can explore forbidden, attractive, addictive desires that polite society deem unacceptable. But as psychologists understand, desire and disgust are rarely opposites; they mingle, coalesce, to beckon us towards our doom... and we’d have it no other way.

Favorite Horror Stories: "The Chimney" by Ramsey Campbell (1977)

"Deep down, we are all still as vulnerable as we were in childhood; sometimes it takes very little to break through our defenses," states Ramsey Campbell in his introduction to the 1982 collection of his short stories, Dark Companions. If there's anyone who's developed a mastery of breaking through our adult defenses, it's Campbell with his vast output of short stories and novels since the Sixties. He's one of the writers featured the most here on Too Much Horror Fiction, and while I've read only a fraction of that astounding output—I'd have to put everything else on hold to be able to do a complete read of him!—I've loved a lot of it. And perhaps none more so than "The Chimney," a 1977 tale that first appeared in the dark fantasy anthology Whispers, then later in Companions, and many more books after that.

 

An early example of his patented quiet, slow-burn, off-kilter style, Campbell makes sure that virtually every sentence in this story depicts something "wrong." Whether it's an emotion or a word, a shadow or an article of clothing, a parent or a fellow schoolchild, every thing is cast in an as uncomfortable light as possible. Step by step Campbell delicately puts down each sentence and oh-so-precisely injects un-ease into it, so we are always wobbling off-balance, fearful, in suspense, feeling like our poor unnamed protagonist... knowing that Campbell has something horrible awaiting us at the end. It's one of the purest Campbell stories I know, and rereading only confirms that fact.

 

The first-person narrator is now an adult looking back at the year of his life when he was but 12 years old, when he was "beginning to conquer his fears." Something traumatic happened back then, which he does not wish to attribute to those fears—of which there are many, but it is the titular object which causes the child the most distress: "I even went upstairs to do my homework, and managed to ignore the chimney. I had to be brave," he states. Well aware of how his mother is terrified of him going off to school, and how that seeps into his own experience of it, where children from social classes both above and below tease and bully him. Even those who approach him in friendship are rebuffed in his self-conscious anxiety. 

He tries to gain sympathy from mother by feigning sickness, but all his fears only embarrass father, who has his own problems with a struggling five-and-dime shop. "You only upset the child," father says to mother. "If you didn't go on at him he wouldn't be half so bad... you'll have him afraid to go up to bed next." And it is upstairs indeed where our greatest source of fear is: the chimney. Its firelight causes distressing shadows: "Everything was unstable; walls shifted, my clothes crawled on the back of the chair." He knows he must hide these feelings from his parents; he must conquer his terror of the chimney.

And so Campbell puts his man through the paces: nightmares, sleepwalking, sickness, cranky dad. And my god, does he say in front of a new pal and two girls they've just met that he still believes in "Father Christmas"? It's this last aspect that is actually the crux of this fellow's abject if inchoate fears, when he reveals to us that at three years old he'd seen a Christmas movie on television:

I'd seen two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping toward them. 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"...

The ironic idea of Santa as the origin of night terrors is a believable one: "I lay awake listening fearfully for movement in the chimney: I was sure a fat grinning figure would creep upon me if I slept." Then one Christmas Eve, dear old dad borrows the neighbor's Father Christmas costume... "It was many years before I enjoyed Christmas very much." There are two climaxes, and each rattles the nerves, bringing past and future together into one horrific moment, a vision from that blighted holiday night: "What shocked me most was its size." But these set-pieces, taken together, add up to our narrator realizing he will never conquer his fear, suggesting that it may even have a life of its own... and "that would be worst of all."

"The Chimney" won the 1978 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.

Grady Hendrix, Ramsey Campbell, & me
Providence, RI 2018