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.

Favorite Horror Stories: "The Night Ocean" by R.H. Barlow & H.P. Lovecraft (1936)

I believe it's common knowledge among fans of weird horror fiction that H.P. Lovecraft spent an inordinate amount of time writing letters, collaborating with other writers, and revising/editing their in-progress works. In 1936, the year before his death, Lovecraft assisted with the manuscript of his friend, young R.H. Barlow (1918-1951), a budding writer who entered the fabled "Lovecraft Circle" when he was only 13. Barlow, who later became a respected anthropologist specializing in early Mexican history, would take his own life when a student cruelly threatened to expose Barlow's homosexuality.

"The Night Ocean" is a perfect example of what weird fiction is, can be, and should do, a bridge between the work of an old master like Algernon Blackwood and future authors such as Thomas Ligotti and Ramsey Campbell. Noted HPL scholar S.T. Joshi has stated that the finished work is 90% Barlow's, although I think often it was attributed solely to Lovecraft. It was the last piece of fiction Lovecraft worked on, and was first published in a magazine called "The Californian" in 1936. Much later it was included in Arkham House's 1970 collection of Lovecraft's collaborations and revisions, The Horror in the Museum (it was the last story, deemed worthy of the buildup). In 1980 it was included in the Zebra paperback Weird Tales #2, as you can see at top; Necronomicon Press issued a chapbook of it in 1986, while I myself only read it for the first time in 2012, and it has lingered in my mind ever since. I've read little else like it.

After a period of arduous creative activity, a painter, our nameless narrator, sets off to the beach near the town of Ellston for a respite in a somewhat remote little cabin on a lonely stretch of seaside. A solitary sort, he long ponders the failure of imagination to recount our past and the influence of locale and psychological state on individual human feeling, and our inability to capture our inward visions: "Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it." His tendency towards introspection is engaged more and more in proximity to the rolling sea, which hearkens back to humanity's first days, and he witnesses "a myriad of ocean moods." The sun, the clouds, the shimmering light, the morning mist, the lace of sea foam, all of these things affect him, but it is "the ocean which ruled my life during the whole of that late summer."

A series of drownings occur, and of course our guy begins to ruminate upon what the sea hides in its dreadful brooding depths, knowing that no sharks patrol these waters:

The people who died—some of them swimmers of a skill beyond the average—sometimes not found until many days had elapsed, and the hideous vengeance of the deep had scourged their rotten bodies. It was as if the sea had dragged them into a chasm-lair, and had mulled about in the darkness until, satisfied that they were no longer of any use, she had floated them ashore in a ghastly state.

 

Descriptions of the night-time filtering through into the day, causing a grey pall over the landscape, are unsettling; our preternaturally perceptive protagonist observes that "the beach was a prisoner in a hueless vault for hours at a time, as if something of the night were welling into other hours." Nothing creeps me out more than that in-between time of certain moments of dusk or dawn, and now the whole area is cast in that light? *shiver* But it's more than that:

There was an alien presence about the place: a spirit, a mood, an impression that came from the surging wind, the gigantic sky, and that sea which drooled blackening waves upon a beach grown abruptly strange... a loneliness crept upon me... made subtly horrible by intimations of some animation or sentience preventing me from being wholly alone.

Vague as it may be, something is happening: a strangely carved metal bead found washed up on shore; figures cavorting one rainy night outside the house who freeze with "cryptic blankness... in the morbid sunset" when our narrator waves at them to come in from the downpour. When he looks out the window, they are gone. And what of the foul, decaying thing that is bandied about in the surf the next morning? He is offended by "the presence of such an object amid the apparent beauty of the clean beach," but knows intuitively that "it was horribly typical of the indifference of death in a nature which mingles rottenness with beauty, and perhaps loves the former more."

 

The atmosphere grows progressively darker from here, as he puts together the drownings and the thing in the surf and a "perception of the brief hideousness and underlying filth of life." This shit is getting to him, and it might be a good time to head on out of Ellston Beach. But not before one final glimpse of something "which ventured close to man's haunts and lurked cautiously just beyond the edge of the known..."

At times the narrator overindulges in his moodiness, as amorphous images, observations, and feelings tumble over one another in a manner that may slow some readers; I certainly had to take a break here and there. But the cumulative effect of Barlow's careful observations cannot be dismissed or ignored: "The Night Ocean" is a powerful work of eerie suggestion, of the supernatural qualities that lurk in various aspects of our natural world, of a reality beyond human ken that affords us a momentary glance at its incomprehensible secrets, something like the call of the void, "an ecstasy akin to fear." I feel as though Lovecraft may have inserted very subtle allusions to Innsmouth and the Deep Ones (the carven metal bead, odd figures emerging from the waves, and more) into Barlow's poetic, philosophical treatise on insignificance, which the unknowable sea appears to represent. Knowing that Barlow would kill himself lends a real poignancy to passages like this:

I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted thing.

Barlow reaches for and achieves, I believe, a secular, sermon-like quality as he wraps up his tale, a drawing together of experience and emotion into a solemn whole of profound insight into the human condition... yet is aware that he can never truly capture in these "scribbled pages" what has happened to him. Awed and humbled before an oceanic universe, as this circle closes, he can only offer, and take refuge in, the balm of nothingness.

Vast and lonely is the ocean, and even as all things came from it, so shall they return thereto. In the shrouded depths of time none shall reign upon the earth, nor shall any motion be, save in the eternal waters.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908): Into That Great Void My Soul'd Be Hurled

An unassailable classic of supernatural horror and science-fantasy, The House on the Borderland is a cosmic hallucination, a phantasmagoria of time dilation and psychedelic imagery, a monster mash of mind-expanding terror and loneliness across multiple dimensions and numberless aeons. William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) reached for the stars and beyond and gave us a novel that would deeply affect and influence H.P. Lovecraft (and of course many other genre writers); indeed HPL never hid the fact that he was indebted to Hodgson's visionary delirium [update: not as much as I'd previously thought; see comments]. It is the well from which so much weird fiction has sprung. But is that well still worth visiting today?

...perched almost at the extreme end of a huge spur of rock that jutted out some fifty or sixty feet over the  abyss. In fact, the jagged mass of ruin was literally suspended in mid-air. 

That's the house itself, as described by the two men who are tramping through the "dismal and and sombre" wilds of west Ireland. They come upon a striking landscape, a rushing waterfall and an enormous rocky cavern. Across it stands this house on the borderland, its crumbled remains high above the abyss. One of the men finds a crumpled old notebook in the debris; before the men can make their way back to their camp, an eerie wailing rises from the woods. Filled with "haunting dread," they hightail it out of there and read the manuscript later. Said manuscript is a nameless narrator's account of his life before this house fell...

Arkham House, 1946, cover by Hannes Bok

A widower who lives with his spinster sister and dog Pepper, the narrator relates how he'd moved into the garden-surrounded house 10 years before, that locals had said the devil built it, and that as years passed he became "aware of something unseen, yet unmistakably present, in the empty rooms and corridors." I'll say. Soon he's exploring the lightless depths of that chasm--"the Pit," he calls it--and battling with loathsome swine-monsters who swarm over the house! And that's not all.

One evening, the narrator is sitting in his chair and finds everything about him has become an insubstantial mist, and begins the first of several bodiless travels through the space/time continuum. It's the kind of thing would put the climax of 2001 to shame; eventually he's zipping along the cosmos, watching the Sun die, the earth freeze, stars born, collapse, and reborn. At one point he sees his own lifeless body still sitting in a chair and all covered in dust, sees his own home on a vast Plain in some other reality, crawling with creatures as in his own reality. Cosmic horror, complete with its incomprehensible deities and endless vistas, begins here.

Far to my right, away up among inaccessible peaks, loomed the enormous bulk of the great Ass-god. Higher, I saw the hideous form of the dread goddess, rising up through the red gloom, thousands of fathoms above me. To the left, I made out the monstrous Eyeless-Thing, grey and inscrutable. Further off, reclining on its lofty ledge, the livid ghoul-Shape showed--a splash of sinister colour, among the dark mountains. 

Hodgson was a badass athlete/author and died in battle in WWI

The ending itself you've read a million times before, but in the early 20th century I doubt it had been done much before then. Lovecraft popularized it but it quickly became a hokey cliché and I think you'll agree. And after the whirlwind of interstellar visions I think you'll find the climax a bit underwhelming. But. If you reorient your imagination by jettisoning from your memory the fiction it inspired, then House works like nothing before it. Even Hodgson's old-fashioned and comma-riddled prose can't impede on the power of some of the more hypnotic, disorienting passages.

Ace Books, 1962, cover by Ed Emshwiller, accurate depiction of events within!

House is almost two books in one, and my reaction to it was in places mixed. I enjoyed the adventure/horror of the narrator's battle with the Swine-people in the first part of the narrative but later found the seemingly endless pages of space-travel tedious. There seemed to be no anchor to the flights of fancy; just more and more riffing on the bizarre nature of traveling through the space-time flux, colored globes floating about, the sun speeding across the sky and changing colors, the world spinning faster and faster into the void--much like Lovecraft's fantasy tales, which were never my favorite of his. But Lovecraft shares with Hodgson a fascination, an obsession really, with the unexplored deeps beneath homes, beneath the earth, of places where other realities can slip through into ours, of an indifferent malevolence threaded through the very warp and woof of our universe.

Lots of good paperback editions have been released over the years, as you can see. My copy is the red one at top, Carroll & Graf, 1983 with cover by Richard Courtney; it and this one from Sphere, 1980 with cover by Terry Oakes, play down the cosmic angle in favor of the hulking, drooling, terrifying swine-people--and you'll note how prominently Lovecraft's name is featured on most covers (the quote is from his famed and essential Supernatural Horror in Literature).

The midnight-blues of this edition from Freeway Press, 1974 evoke the emptiness of outer space and the utter solitude the narrator feels when he's hurtling through it.

Manor Books, 1977. I'm struggling to recall if an ear of corn played any role in the story; that looks like a farmhouse on drought-struck land; pretty sure this cover was meant for a different novel entirely; E. Salter is the artist.

Panther Books, 1972. The ever-stunning Ian Miller's jacket art is delectably creepy and awesome; it well captures the wonkiness of Hodgson's visions.  

So in whichever edition you may read House on the Borderland, it'll be easy to see how it achieved its hallowed place in the pantheon of classic horror fiction. It's not always scary but it is always weird. He wrote other highly-regarded fantasy novels, like The Night-Land (1912) and The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" (1907) but it's upon this House which Hodgson's reputation is built.

Thomas Ligotti Born Today, 1953

And there is nothing in the sky, nothing I can see through the window. There is the moon, of course, high and round. But no shadow falls across the moon, no churning chaos of smoke that chokes the frail order of the earth, no shifting cloud of nightmares enveloping moons and suns and stars. It is not a squirming, creeping, smearing shape I see upon the moon, not the shape of a great deformed crab scuttling out of the black oceans of infinity and invading the island of the moon, crawling with its innumerable bodies upon all the spinning islands of inky space. That shape is not the cancerous totality of all creatures, not the oozing ichor that flows within all things...

from "Nethescurial," collected in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991). Read my short review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer here.

Bad Brains by Kathe Koja (1992): You Got the Silver

How fear the void when the void is where you live?

Ready for a long luxurious swim in the grimy waters of another Kathe Koja novel? Thought you were. March 1992 saw the publication of her second novel from Dell/ Abyss, that ambitious little imprint that wanted to put an experimental edge into horror fiction. Appropriately titled Bad Brains, it features an artistic, alienated, rather unsympathetic protagonist whose world is collapsing into a nightmare of surreality and neurological despair (much like Nicholas, the main character from Koja's 1991 Stoker Award-winning debut novel, The Cipher).

Depression would be a huge psychological improvement for Austen Bandy, a young man whose wife Emily has left him and who then finds so have his skill and passion for painting huge oil portraits of sphinxes and other human-animal hybrids. Once he accidentally cracks his head wide open - his grieving bitter head - he begins having seizures and sees things. Or rather, one thing that bleeds into everything, a dustdevil of fluid, liquid, mucus; silver, almost scalelike, delicate as fish skin and stretching out, elongating...

Think A Monstrously Decaying Blood-Limned Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Or think Cronenberg's films like Spider or The Dead Zone. For better or worse, Koja drills into Austen's every hurt and weakness and casts all in a drizzly grey light or a harsh winter cold. The atmosphere this creates can be suffocating, even tedious, in its insularity. Here, human interactions are stilted and ineffective (just wait till Austen visits mom!); grime and grease tinge every surface; homes and clothes are worn out, threadbare; food and coffee always foul; sex, ugh; hopelessness and hard-won creativity mingle to create a stew of incipient insanity. But is it Austen's psyche that's wounded, or is it his very brain?

Read the back of the paperback (such accolades!). It's pretty accurate but it only hints at the sanity-shattering silvery snotty serpent thing that threads and drips and convulses and glides now in Austen's vision, befouling corners, mirrors, faces, beer bottles, then out the nose and ears because it is inside Austen's brain. And when the brain, where our true self resides, surges silver and pink and rebels against its own best interests, why it will show you just what it's up to, when you look in the silvered mirror:

I am standing here seeing it, I am seeing it

and took off the top of its skull

where the brain is

and inside, the most delicate writhe, each lobe filigreed, threaded and girdled with silvery death in all its masques and manifestations, in all its irrevocable forms: the elegant pulse of an aneurysm, an extravagant clutch of tumors concealed like an oyster's pearl, clots like molded caviar and each molecule burning, shining silver light on the bone chips ragged and blood like the swirled center of a dubious treat; and nestled in the rich middle like eggs in a nest, eyes.

1996 Dell reprint

Minor spoilers ahead! But transcendence - come disguised as an illness - awaits. After finding no mere medical doctor can cure him, Austen embarks on a long squalid car trip to see his ludicrous mother, then finds a new friend with lunatic father issues, and on till Emily reappears, unsmiling, unsympathetic, certain that Austen can never get past all that Art 101 bullshit and accept the responsibilities of his life without her. Then Austen hears from a gallery owner acquaintance back home that he's sold some of Austen's old paintings, and they're all changing: but in everything one constant: the relentless drip of a color so pale it was nameless; but if he had to, Peter said, he would call it silver.

Cover & stepback art by Marshall Arisman

Soon they all find reclusive Dr. Quiet and Dr. Quiet can help, gets Austen painting in a frenzy again (I assume his portraits look much like the creepy Marshall Arisman cover art), starts using terms like "the stone of folly" and "duende" and "limbic borders" or some such, and reveals through videotapes of monstrosities - some of the novel's best moments - that Austen might not be alone in his sore world. Or he might be. Everything Koja depicts, everything Austen encounters, could it all just be code for the blasted crumbling architecture of Austen's brain, starved of its art, its love, its vision, its power of creation, that machine of luminosity and magic...?

...to cross the border where the air itself is glass burned black... not only live and die for your art but become it, go past it, eat it bloody and alive and make it over to devour again and again like Cronus eating his children, ignoring their screams because what is is what must be and in all the rooms in the house of art there is only one altar, one half-seen silver priest and one demand

UK paperback 1993

As you see, Koja's prose style is all edge and poetic deconstruction, stripped bare and decorated in discomfort. A weird poet of the crumbling and the crazy. This is no epic novel of horrors human and hellspawned, but a novel of inner horror, which I find captivating; I like her anguished artist characters who suffer for their (lack of creating) art, who twist and turn helplessly through a worn-out world, insides spilling out as they search for answers to a madness that seems more than chemicals misfiring. However I understand not everyone is so enamored of arty characters engaging in what could be seen as self-indulgent self-pity... "Shut up and paint!" you want to yell at Austen at times, but he really does have a physical ailment, so that seems a bit impolitic, no?

I read and liked Bad Brains when it came out, as Koja's writing appealed to my growing appreciation for uncompromising non-horror authors like Burroughs and Ballard and Celine, and lately I'd been wondering if it would it hold up for a second read, over 20 years later. Well, I couldn't put it down for the last 70 or 80 pages, the nightmare ratcheting up, and a strange haunt lingered about me for days afterward... proof that Koja, for all her stylistic eccentricities and lack of providing a real plot (Austen himself has no plot), effectively creates dread, suspense, fear and, okay, bewilderment. But what finally awaits Austen and the people he's, let's face it, dragged passive-aggressively along with him - everything ends in silver: messy, unpredictable, bizarre - I hope haunts you too. But that's no big surprise.

Dell/Abyss Books: The Paperback Covers

It was 20 years ago this month that the Dell/Abyss line of contemporary horror fiction began publication. Yes, 20 years! Ah, I remember it well. This imprint from Dell Publishing was spearheaded by Bantam Doubleday editor Jeanne Cavelos in an attempt to give the paperback horror genre a boost of originality and conviction - and, of course, a boost in sales - as it had long been plagued by tired cliches and half-hearted imitations of better books and writers. The appropriately-named Abyss was intent on publishing works that plumbed dark depths of psychology and the supernatural not for cheap, exploitative, escapists thrills but for more disturbing and revelatory chills. This kind of horror was interiorized, found not in a Gothic mansion or small town overrun by vampires but in the blasted landscape of the human mind.

The Abyss paperback originals used striking cover design - haunting, creepy, anguished faces and tormented bodies, albeit perhaps sometimes a tad clumsy - to separate themselves from the anonymous bloody skulls, graveyards, and evil babies then on horror covers. The icon on the spine of its books was a mark of distinction; indeed, Abyss even had a mission statement:

Launched in February 1991 with Kathe Koja's stunningly bleak and unsettling The Cipher, Abyss published one title a month, ending up with more than 40 titles overall. Most of the authors were first-time novelists, or at least writers with only a few books under their belts, but in the case of MetaHorror (July 1992), an anthology edited by ever-present '80s author Dennis Etchison, the line also featured well-known horror masters. Women writers were plentiful - the most successful was easily Poppy Z. Brite, but also Tanith Lee, Nancy Holder, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Melanie Tem - and guys like Brian Hodge and Rick R. Reed really got started here. What they all had in common was a desire to do something new with horror fiction. But, for various industry reasons, Abyss folded later in the '90s and my love of current horror pretty much went with it.

Obsessed, Rick Reed (July 1991)

Deathgrip, Brian Hodge (June 1992)

I'm not exactly sure how I first heard of the Abyss books; it may have been a Linda Marotta review in Fangoria, or maybe a review from the Overlook Connection catalog. Reading Koja, Brite, Hodge, and others back then was a revelation, one of the most exciting times I've had as a horror fiction reader. I doubt all the novels and two short story collections were as "cutting edge" as promised, but I always loved the ambition and the effort. Some writers launched new careers, others weren't heard from again. I've read a handful over the years but nothing could compare to Koja's first two novels, or Hodge's Nightlife (March 1991). Still, the Dell/Abyss line was a great moment in paperback horror, and deserves to be remembered today. Most titles are readily available used, cheap (ah, except The Cipher, which has now gone to collectors' prices!) on Amazon, eBay, ABE, and the like. The following are a random sample.

Whipping Boy, John Byrne (March 1992)

Facade, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (February 1993)

Lost Futures, Lisa Tuttle (May 1992)

Post Mortem, ed. by Paul Olson and David Silva (January 1992)

X, Y, Michael Blumlein (November 1993)

Anthony Shriek, Jessica Amanda Salmonson (September 1992)

Shadow Twin, Dale Hoover (December 1991)

The Wilding, Melanie Tem (November 1992)

Tunnelvision, R. Patrick Gates (November 1991)

Making Love, Melanie Tem & Nancy Holder (August 1993)

Dusk, Ron Dee (April 1991)

Dead in the Water, Nancy Holder (June 1994)

Bad Brains, Kathe Koja (April 1992)

Shadowman, Dennis Etchison (January 1993)

You can read here a long, detailed, scholarly look at the nuts-and-bolts of the Dell/Abyss line, "The Decline of the Literary Horror Market in the 1990s and Dell's Abyss Series": What makes the Abyss line a cultural phenomenon worthwhile of study is its self-conscious positioning within the declining horror market. Its marketing strategies, text selection, and construction of a commodity identity speak volumes on the horror market and its transformation at the time.

This image thanks to Trashotron