The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (1988): Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement

Bought this battered, chewed-up (natch) first edition paperback copy of The Silence of the Lambs (St. Martin's Press June 1989) off the 10-cent rack at a local bookstore last week and spent the next day and a half utterly immersed in it. Larry King's "double-dare-ya" is no joke, guys, as there's no putting this one down. About 10 years ago I read Red Dragon (1981) and was duly impressed, although today I remember little of it; I put off reading Silence for so long because the movie is so etched in my - and everyone's - imagination. But what struck me most about the book is that while Thomas Harris gets credit for creating one of the great pop villains of all time, his female protagonist is every bit that villain's equal. Before Hopkins and Foster even stepped before the camera, Hannibal Lector and Clarice Starling had been created and depicted with total mastery and psychological realism.

I've wondered before if Silence can be considered horror, and after reading the novel I'm still not sure if it is or not. The violence and degradation is presented so starkly that there is nary a whiff of exploitation or gleeful malevolence in Harris's intent. However, in this edition I found, the original paperback from 1989, you can see who the book was being marketed to originally, with Clive Barker's blurb emblazoned prominently on the front cover... something quite noticeable in its absence on the later movie tie-in edition.

While reading it the film buff in me marveled at the screenwriter's adaptation of such a psychologically taut and precise work; he knew just what to leave in and what to leave out. What got left out works wonderfully in the novel but would have weighed the film down: Starling's precarious place as a rookie on such a treacherous case, Crawford's dying wife, the intricacies and political jostlings of the FBI Academy, Lector's maroon eyes and six fingers on one hand, and especially, the hideous history of Jame Gumb presented in almost police-report detail.

Harris is that kind of popular writer that can move a story forward with power, with conviction, but doesn't stint on those tiny insights into human nature that convince you you're reading something real, by a writer who's lived and isn't just repeating what he's heard. Describing the crude dirty joke to Crawford that gave Gumb the serial-killer nickname "Buffalo Bill," Starling discovered she had traded feeling frightened for feeling cheap. Of the two, she preferred feeling frightened. Later, when in a rural funeral home processing the monstrously wounded victim found in a river, Crawford knows he made the right choice in plucking Starling from school to help in this case:

Crawford saw that in this place, Starling was heir to the granny women, to the wise women, the herb healers, the stalwart country women who have always done the needful, who keep the watch and when the watch is over, wash and dress the country dead.

One of the men who had a relationship with Gumb describes him well and truly, chilling in its simplicity: You always felt the room was a little emptier when he came in. Whew. That's good. And poor Catherine Martin, Gumb's current victim, who in that horrid hole dreams the dark came into her, insidious, up her nose and into her ears, damp fingers of dark proposed themselves to each opening of her body.

As for Lecter, he is quite what we saw in the movie version, although Dr. Chilton (god, that asshole!) and imposing orderly Barney both have insights into his nature that are quite penetrating: Lecter is not afraid of pain, of solitude; no, what he fears most is boredom and indignity. A mind as vast and all-consuming as Lecter's cannot bear those things, and it is with these coins that Starling attempts to bargain...

If you've seen the movie but haven't read the book thinking there's no point: read the book. If you've read the book but not seen the movie - what? - then see it and marvel over its wonderful adaptation to the screen. If you've done both, do both again! I think both are popular culture in its finest hour, horror or not.

Next, Lecter dropped a note to Dr. Frederick Chilton, in federal protective custody, suggesting that he would be paying Dr. Chilton a visit in the near future. After this visit, he wrote, it would make sense for the hospital to tattoo feeding instructions on Chilton's forehead to save paperwork.

Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror, edited by Paul Sammon (1990): The Filth and the Fury

We're all aware of the origins of the term "splatterpunk" aren't we? Feels like I've covered it a million times before, and if you have any interest in horror fiction you probably have a fairly good idea of its practitioners and artistic aims already. But just like every offshoot of a mainstream genre, people disagree over its identification and meaning. Basically, "splatterpunk" describes a small faction of horror writers in the 1980s and early 1990s who, while bestselling horror (or "horror") novelists were giving cozy, polite thrills to unadventurous readers, wanted to shake up conventional generic expectations. And they pissed off quiet horror writers like Charlie Grant, Dennis Etchison, and even Robert Bloch himself with their "there are no limits" attitude.

For me, though, not solely gore for gore's sake were the splatterpunks; this wasn't just shock tactics without substance. No, these young writers wanted to fuse extreme violence and horror (the "splatter") with a confrontational social sensibility (the "punk") to provide a countercultural, more streetwise take on our collective fears at the end of the century. It was not just extreme violence and viscera and degradation - psychological insight into alienated characters was as essential as blood-on-the-walls-and-ceiling taboo-smashing.

Editor and film critic Paul Sammon, who'd previously produced documentaries on Platoon, Dune, and most famously Blade Runner, was so enamored of the movement he put together Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror. And even though virtually every author in this anthology states that they are not splatterpunks, it's obvious the stories themselves are, and that's really all that matters. They're willfully ugly and despairing and silly and angry and unflinching, sometimes all at once. This book was pretty much my jam back in the day; I remember eagerly buying my trade paperback copy of it at the 1991 Weekend of Horrors Fangoria Convention in New York City, and it's never left my collection.

Me in NYC 1991; in that bag is this book!

After a short intro from Sammon, the bar is set very high with the first story: Joe R. Lansdale's utterly harrowing "Night They Missed the Horror Show." I've read this several times over the years and it never fails to feel like a solid punch in the gut. Redneck racism, one of Lansdale's staples, is exposed in all its soulless and dehumanizing excess. He pushes our snouts right into the rawest filth. It'll leave you feeling hollowed out and horrified. Is it art? It's unforgiving and the bleakest of the bleak, so... yes? Yes. A modern classic it is.

Lansdale his ownself

One of the few non-American writers in the movement was the esteemed (and bestselling) Clive Barker. But of course. His Books of Blood changed the nature of horror fiction in the 1980s. "The Midnight Meat Train," with its ludicrously graphic title, is one of his most vividly realized and icily graphic tales: a city that feeds on innocent lives, a race that exists solely so that humanity can ignore it, a god that demands the ultimate fealty, a man whose urge to know leads to a horrible new life. Another classic:

It was a giant. Without head or limb. Without a feature that was analogous to human, without an organ that made sense, or senses. If it was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all moving in unison, budding, blossoming, and withering rhythmically...

"Film at Eleven," from actual unapologetic splatterpunk John Skipp, of Skipp & Spector fame, springboards from the on-air TV suicide of Pennsylvania politician R. Budd Dwyer and the spousal abuse of a diehard Oprah fan. The final effect of eternal recurrence seems almost cruel, but it implies that justice does not come easy. Not bad. I've written before of my appreciation for Douglas E. Winter's zombie parodies of contemporary literature, and here it's "Less Than Zombie." Capturing Bret Easton Ellis's style of anomie and privileged rich-kid sociopathy perfectly - And, oh yeah, the thing with the zombies - it ironically prefigures Ellis's American Psycho. It's also the first time I encountered the curb stomp, nearly a decade before American History X.

Recently deceased splatter film connoisseur Chas. Balun presents an essay, "I Spit in Your Face: Films That Bite," on the most extreme gore movies of the day: loverly films such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Nekromantik, Last House on Dead End Street, and Roadkill. He warns "hipsters" not to act too blasé when confronting these flicks; they'll knock those sniggering grins right back through their teeth, or something. Awesome.

Freak-show fiction became something of a thing after Katherine Dunn's masterful Geek Love (1989) was published, and that's where "Freaktent" comes in: Nancy A. Collins is a solid writer which gives the story a real grounding for its natural physical atrocities: Images of children twisted into tortured, abstract forms like human bonsai trees swam before my eyes. Mediocre TV horror-movie director Mick Garris sleazes it up with "A Life in the Cinema," about hack horror director who adopts a soul-and other things-sucking monstrous turd baby for his next exploitation flick; it's a real charmer. The lost chapter from Ray Garton's Crucifax is presented here, so grotesque his publisher excised it from its paperback edition, but I seriously prefer "Sinema," which appeared in Silver Scream. Read that one instead.

Hugo Award-winning Martin in the 1970s

Although today he's known as an outrageously popular fantasy author, George R.R. Martin wrote a matter-of-factly horrific science-fiction story in 1976 which is included here, "Meathouse Man." It's the oldest story collected, but it's also one of the very best, an emotionally complex story of a man, his work, and unrequited love. Oh, and zombie sex on distant planets called corpseworlds. Probably the best-written and most affecting piece in the anthology: He slept with a ghost beside him, a supernaturally beautiful ghost, the husk of a dead dream. He woke to her each morning.

Spector, Lansdale, Matheson, Schow, Garton, McCammon, & Skipp:

Yes, The Splat Pack c. 1986/7

TV writer Richard Christian Matheson (yes, the son) contributes two of his short-short fictions, "Red" and "Goosebumps." Short sharp shocks, nicely done. Reminds me that I'm still trying to find a decent copy of his collection Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, which I lost ages ago. Another British writer, Philip Nutman, who interviewed many filmmakers for Fangoria mag, presents a grim picture of the bloody-minded futureless 1980 youth of his home country in "Full Throttle." Tough stuff; I can practically see the young Tim Roth and Ray Winstone carousing in a movie version.

Also included are solid stories of varying grit and grisliness by Edward Bryant ("While She Was Out," years later made into a film), Wayne Allen Sallee ("Rapid Transit," first in a trilogy of short urban terror tales), and Roberta Lannes ("Goodbye Dark Love," which I'd first read in Cutting Edge) also feature, each probing the depths of contemporary non-supernatural horror with an emphasis on character. The worst in the anthology is truly Rex Miller's "Reunion Moon," which I'll not even describe except to say it's a piece of shit.

Splat poster boy David J. Schow is not included here for various reasons, as Sammon explains, but it's just as well because I prefer his non-splat work. I thought J.S. Russell was a Schow pen name but it's not; Russell's "City of Angels" reads just like one of Schow's stories, so I think it was a fair guess: Porqy, he's got this thing about the nuts and how they're the "bestest part"... he's been talking about baby nuts for days. "I figure," he says, "they got to be more tender. Tastier, like lamb or baby corn," and pops them in his mouth like wet jelly beans.

Splatterpunks finishes with Sammon's 75-page (!) essay on the movement, "Outlaws." While it's unearned and ridiculous to compare these writers to hallowed transgressors like de Sade, Baudelaire, William Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard, as he does, trying to give weight to a fleeting literary moment that was named as an inside joke, he certainly helped me get to reading lots of those folks back then. It's okay to simply be a graphic yet thoughtful horror writer but I guess he didn't feel that way. He includes an extensive splat reading list and influences (and presciently notes that Ballard's Crash would be a perfect David Cronenberg, uh, vehicle).

Like a lot of anthology editorials of its day, "Outlaws" is overwrought and overly generous to the practitioners. Virtually none of the authors appreciate the label, and only a handful are still active today. Only Garton and Lansdale continue to publish well-received novels; Skipp is only recently back after a long hiatus; Barker has slowed down his publishing pace considerably. These authors transcended the style. A lot of splatterpunk might seem like a shallow, adolescent pose, a "look how gross and rebellious I can be" kinda thing, but plenty of it has heart - and guts - to spare.

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

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

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

2002 edition from Louisiana State University Press

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

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

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

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

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

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