Lost Angels by David J. Schow (1990): See the City's Ripped Insides

Despite David J. Schow's reputation in the late 1980s as a young horror writer who could gross out readers and critics at 10 paces with tales of pustular zombies redolent of rot and gore, the longish stories of Lost Angels (Onyx/Mar 1990) are anything but. The five stories in this collection are filled with true-to-life details about relationships romantic and platonic, fables about city life and industry careers and urban societal pressures. But in slips just a touch, just a bare breath of the weird or the satanic, something arcane yet organic that butts up against all that steel and glass and marble and silk and black leather of Los Angeles near the end of the century.

Yep, though Schow himself jokingly coined the term "splatterpunk" which defined a whole subgenre of horror from about 1986 to 1995, he is actually most adept at thoughtful works, maybe verbally manic and overwrought and a bit too self-consciously hip (well, '80s hip anyway, which is kind of awkward), but more concerned with basic human conflict rather than supernatural doings. Any such goings-on tend to be abstract metaphors for the elusive qualities of friendship, loyalty, honor, betrayal, identity, sex, and love - very much in the style of Harlan Ellison circa Strange Wine (1978) or Shatterday (1980), I realized upon this rereading: modern guys, often broken, often clueless for all their state-of-the-art status trappings, dodging the landmines of contemporary sexual politics. You wouldn't know it from the weird neon biker imagery on the 1990 cover, however.

The lead-off story, "Red Light," is, as you can see from the cover above, an 1987 award-winning tale set San Francisco and not originally intended to be part of this LA-based collection. The central conceit - that fame devours - is certainly timeworn by today's paparazzi-dazzled media, but the carefully detailed setting and relationship between the photographer narrator and his long-lost love win out. I believe the story it's referencing is Robert Bloch's "The Model," or maybe Fritz Lieber's "The Girl with Hungry Eyes."

Babbage Press revised edition, 2000

The grim sexual underbelly of Hollywood and fellows like Aleister Crowley form "Brass." It's always awkward learning about your parents' sex life. When you find out your father was part of a sybaritic cult then consorted with demons and now one may be after you in the form of a brilliant and gorgeous soulmate? Chilling. "Falling Man," despite its director main character and behind-the-scenes glimpses of TV production, which I usually like, unfortunately overstays its welcome at over 60 pages. "Pamela's Get" was just a little too oblique for me but has a nicely realistic depiction of female friendship at its core. "Monster Movies" sweetly finishes the collection and pays reverence to the child in the man, the one who worshiped at the late-night TV altar of The Mummy and The Creature but who may have lost his faith as an adult in the corporate world and happy-hour martini bars.

While it hits some false notes - particularly in its hyper-verbal dialogue, which is sometimes cringeworthy in its affectedness - and seems at times like it's perhaps just playing grown-up, Lost Angels is a worthy collection from the era; Schow's got a knack for realism as well as fantasy. Nothing really scary here, except for dreams deferred and hopes lost and loves betrayed. Nah, those things aren't scary at all.

Horror Fiction Help! Do You Know This Book?

I received an email the other day from someone who'd discovered Too Much Horror Fiction while trying to find a horror novel they'd read years ago, but could not recall the title of at all. In the email they described the book to see if I knew it, but I must confess, the description leaves me at a loss! So I offered to put up the description here to see if any of you horror fiction fans can help. Does any of this sound familiar?

It's about a husband and wife who murder a little girl in order to get inheritance money. The little girl is a sister of either the husband or wife, but I can't remember which. The couple bury the girl after they murder her, but she comes back and haunts them as revenge.

The little girl (maybe around age 8-12) is really evil when she comes back, and she makes the couple do crazy and disturbing things. For example, the husband (I think his name was Jeff) is found ripping apart the family dog and eating it.

I think the cover of the book has a picture of a creepy little girl covered in dirt (since she was buried after she was murdered).

They date the book to about 20 or 25 years ago, so it's from the classic horror paperback era. And I have to say it does sound pretty cool, but one thing I've learned while writing this blog is how much horror I have not read. Any ideas, readers? Thanks!

Update 8/14/10:
The book is Nightmare Child by Daniel Ransom (St Martin's Press 1990). Thanks to reader Garry!

Devil in the Centerfold: Horror Fiction Magazines of the '70s and '80s

Horror fiction thrives in short story form. Starting in the 1970s this aspect of the genre was reinvigorated after lying fallow for decades after the demise of Weird Tales magazine and others of its kind of the 1930s. Dozens of new magazine titles, self-published and not, specialized in publishing stories from up-and-coming writers, as well as more famous names (which were placed prominently on the cover, of course). Most of the magazines didn't last more than a few years or a handful of issues. Virtually every horror writer of the 1980s had their start in one or more of these magazines so I find it entirely appropriate to explore them a bit here.

The Horror Show, debuting in 1986, is fondly remembered for its J.K. Potter covers and for first publishing Poppy Z. Brite.


You can see the names on the covers that would soon be famous in the field: Lansdale, Brite, Ligotti, Schow. And certainly many more folks just disappeared from the scene. Night Cry was the horror spin-off from Twilight Zone magazine. Great girly-mag style covers here!

Cemetery Dance came a little later but is still going strong today, 20 years later, and has also published hardcover books from all the best writers. Well, probably some crappy writers too, I'm sure.

These '70s magazine covers for Whispers have no authors listed but actually it's the first of its kind, edited by Stuart David Schiff, and intended as a throwback to the pulp fiction days of yore. In the late '70s he started editing paperback anthologies under the same title; I remember reading them probably in 7th or 8th grades and am trying to track down some for review here.

The glossier Midnight Graffiti has already been covered on this blog here. These following covers are from magazines I'd never heard of until now. I've seen some of them on eBay but they're going for more than I like to pay for vintage horror fiction stuff. If you want to see more stuff like this, Locus magazine's archives are indispensable.

The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas (1980): Vampire Walks into a Psychiatrist's Office...

Today it's almost tiresome to ponder the mythic fluidity of the vampire throughout history and how it reflects (heh) the fantasies and fears of the culture from which it's sprung. Vampires have been twisted this way and that, rendered fangless and impotent, but when Suzy McKee Charnas wrote The Vampire Tapestry in the late 1970s the field had not yet been taken over by the de- and re-mythologizing character of Anne Rice's work. Less a horror novel than a psychological deconstruction of an outsider, Tapestry has a smart and original tale to tell, thankfully unblighted by the shallow vagaries of popular culture. Indeed, this vampire haunts the halls of academe.

Dr. Edward Lewis Weyland is an anthropology professor of a gentlemanly, iron-haired age as well as a non-supernatural vampire. Drawn as a ruthless and precise predator, he has no kith or kin, walks about in daylight, and needs no earth from his homeland in which to sleep. Beneath his tongue is an unobtrusive stinger with anti-clotting saliva that can penetrate human flesh and draw out fresh blood. His haughty and surly brilliance allows him to pass through the mortal world with few noticing his true self.

Charnas tracks her creation through five different "adventures" in her novel so that we see how Weyland subtly alters his behavior to either escape danger, establish his identity, or to embrace a victim. Actually Tapestry is more like five interrelated long stories than one entire novel. Weyland sometimes missteps and ends up in danger, as in "The Island of Lost Content." He meets a near-worthy foe in "The Last of Dr. Weyland" and reappraises his thoughts of humanity (Not cattle, these; they deserved more from him than disdain). "A Musical Interlude" finds Weyland shaken after he is introduced to Puccini's opera Tosca, the high drama of which causes him to flash back to his own life centuries earlier.

The best is probably "Unicorn Tapestry" in which Weyland is forced to see a psychiatrist in order to keep his job as a professor and thus hide his vampirism. She tries to get him to empathize with his victims, which he refuses to do. Charnas spends a great deal of time detailing the work of this doctor, a middle-aged woman who, in spite of herself, develops serious feelings for Weyland even as she delves deeper into his pathology.

Endurance: huge rich cloak of time flows back from his shoulders like wings of a dark angel. All springs from, elaborates, the single dark primary condition: he is a predator who subsists on human blood. Harmony, strength, clarity, magnificence - all from that basic animal integrity. Of course I long for all that...

We can see the changes in vampire mythology just by tracing the imagery in the paperback covers. The original paperback edition at the top, from Pocket Books in 1981, hearkens back to Lugosi's dinner-party attire, along with a strong, very masculine jaw to suggest the eroticism that was so prevalent in the myth at the time. In 1986, with the Tor Books reprint (labeled oddly as SF/Fantasy), we see now a brooding, more European-looking fellow whose hand seems tensed and rigid; after Rice, the deluge of sensitive vampires mooning over their horrible undeath and blood thirst.

The 1992 trade paperback cover has a figure clad in a cape, apparently about to perform some bit of magic like Barbara Eden in "I Dream of Jeannie," and also is somehow deformed. The most recent edition, from Orb Books in 2008, with its bare tree limbs and shadowy figure, seems more like a Halloween decoration than a real book cover. I can say that not one (maaaybe the one from Tor Books) of these inaccurate covers captures the tone or style of Charnas's book, which is rooted in the psychological realism of a fantastical nonhuman.

Horror fiction has always suffered under a surfeit of bloodsuckers stalking across paperback book covers where they were depicted as aristocrats or lusty dandies, as well as Stoker-approved monsters from the Freudian id. Today, we see them as teenagers, as Fabio-style paranormal lovers, as lonely housewife-friendly boyfriends. It's a cliche to ponder this creature, as I noted, even trite, because isn't it obvious? We have met the vampire over and over and he is us. But Charnas suggests at the end of The Vampire Tapestry that this predator who tries so hard to gain psychological distance from his prey may come to see some of himself there after all.

Cut! Horror Writers on Horror Film, edited by Christopher Golden (1992): Looking for Horror in All the Wrong Places

Quite often horror fiction is just a hobbled rehash of monster movie/haunted house/slasher conventions and cliches. I can't imagine - but I envy - what it must have been like for authors such as Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Sheridan LeFanu, et. al., to write horror fiction without having horror film as an influence. Cinema looms over virtually writer working in the field since the late 1930s, and even a sort-of classic like Stephen King's It is filled with riffs on the movie monsters of yesteryear. And from what I gather, current horror fiction seems like it's either zombie fetish mania or extremely graphic brutality (and terrible, terrible covers, but of course you all knew that). But reading Cut! Horror Writers on Horror Film is a pleasure because (most of) the writers contribute funny, knowledgeable, and insightful articles and interviews about horror film and how it's shaped them and their fiction... for the better.

Cut! editor Christopher Golden includes lots of the 1980s writers I've covered here at Too Much Horror Fiction. John Skipp and Craig Spector have a seriously impressive, if jokingly written, piece on how horror can be found in all kinds of movies, from The Deer Hunter to Sophie's Choice to Lethal Weapon to The Wild Bunch. They also rightly note that horror filmmakers don't utilize non-bestseller horror fiction enough. Joe Lansdale ruminates on the cheap, nasty pleasures of drive-in B-movies, blood and bare breasts while Ray Garton ponders the considerable merits of Annette O'Toole and Nastassja Kinski in the 1983 remake of Cat People. Charles L. Grant insists that black-and-white is the only way to film a horror movie, lauding Val Lewton above all others. T. Liam McDonald gives a nice little history of the Hammer horror studio output. Clive Barker talks about arthouse and foreign oddities - indeed, Barker's interview drove me to see films such as Les yeux sans visage, The Holy Mountain, and In a Glass Cage. He considers Taxi Driver a horror film and he is perfectly correct.

Showing eminent good taste, Anne Rice talks of her love for Bride of Frankenstein, Angel Heart, and Blade Runner and how Rutger Hauer is the only actor who could ever play the Vampire Lestat (!). Ramsey Campbell declares that at the time of his essay (1992), the scariest movie character he'd seen recently was not any horror serial killer but Joe Pesci as Tommy in Goodfellas. Philip Nutman and Paul Sammon, two horror journalists/editors, have in-depth critical pieces on the masterful and must-see films of David Cronenberg and David Lynch, respectively. Another editor, Douglas E. Winter, explores the filmography of Dario Argento. Horror comic book illustrator Stephen Bissette proves himself a fierce film critic when he looks at horror-fantasy throughout the entire history of cinema.

But there are some real boners in here, though. I mean, really, really bad. John Farris draws a blank when asked to name his favorite horror movies. Kathryn Ptacek writes a silly and amateurish piece on cannibal films while saying she doesn't like cannibal films. Ed Gorman tosses off a lame page or two about Wes Craven. There are more overly-chummy, embarrassingly earnest intros with corny in-jokes by Golden. I swear, I don't know what it is about collections like this that invite that attitude. Other authors present fair-to-good analyses of Fatal Attraction, The Haunting, and the giant bug movies of the 1950s.

Ultimately it's Skipp and Spector, Barker, and Campbell who really get at the heart of this essay collection, that horror as a genre is larger than most people think it is and its cliches can be avoided by looking elsewhere for terrifying entertainment and inspiration. Simply, it's as Ramsey Campbell puts it: Horror fans who look for their horror only in films and books labelled as such are cheating themselves.

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson (1958): When Shall We Live?

Calling Shirley Jackson a horror writer is inaccurate, but her style of thrusting disparate groups of people into unpleasant and bizarre situations seems to warrant it. Her emphasis on the psychological effects of imposing family homes with grim histories, as in her classics The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, places her firmly in the Gothic tradition. The Sundial, Jackson's fourth novel, is an enigmatic work about the Hallorans. Ensconced in the family estate, they come to believe, based on the fevered imaginings of a spinster aunt, that the world is literally ending.

The novel begins as the family returns from the funeral of Lionel Halloran, the son of the home's owners. Immediately the accusation is quietly made that Lionel's mother, the stately and authoritative Orianna Halloran, pushed her own son down the great stairs. One day soon after, Aunt Fanny, the sister of Lionel's father, gets lost in the vast gardens surrounding the estate and there envisions her own father - Lionel's grandfather, the man who had the house built - telling her From the sky and from the ground and from the sea there is danger; tell them in the house. There will be black fire and red water and the earth turning and screaming... the father comes to his children and tells them there is danger.

Orianna takes this to heart but slowly usurps Aunt Fanny's authority of revelation and writes up rules for the new world. Only the 12 people who come to live at the house are to be part of the new world; the villagers down below? Not so much. As per Jackson, matters of identity and social role predominate. Characters invert their expected personalities: widow Maryjane Halloran never grieves for Lionel; the child Fancy Halloran becomes wise and almost mocking of her elders; Essex, hired to catalog the vast library, ends up burning it bit by bit; governess Miss Ogilvie, told to refrain from giving up the secret of apocalypse, ends up telling the young counterman in the village's five-and-dime (who tells his fundie mother, which leads to a blackly hilarious confrontation between two end-times groups).

The young daughter of Mrs. Willow, an old friend of Orianna's, attempts to leave and has a humiliating and disturbing experience with the driver of the car Orianna hires to drive her into town (easily my favorite sequence in the novel). The Hallorans deign to hold a party for the oft-disparaged villagers the night before the end of the world. What follows then is a brittle and brutal comedy of upper-class manners.

With Jackson's arid wit and merciless tone, The Sundial plays out almost like a morality play or fable, albeit one without an actual moral to be learned. WHAT IS THIS WORLD? states the engraving on the title object, as old Mr. Halloran was fond of strange epigrams of the Dale Carnegie sort; however the epigrams engraved throughout the house were done by a rather literary sort so instead of the banalities of Carnegie there is the confusing and ironic enigma of WHEN SHALL WE LIVE IF NOT NOW?

Readers may feel a bit like Aunt Fanny when she cannot find her way out of the topiary maze (just like the one Kubrick added to The Shining), feeling like the answer is around the next bend, but Jackson refuses to play that game. When the end comes there is neither bang nor whimper; there is only a cast of ugly and foolish characters who think the sun shines on them alone.

Firestarter by Stephen King and More: Children in Heat III

More creepy kids and their raging fire fetish! There is the virtually-unknown - let's make that entirely-unknown - William Dobson, with his all-too-aptly titled Child of Hell (1982); then the stalwart Ramsey Campbell with The Influence (1988), another in his long line of paperbacks from the Tor horror line; and perhaps the ultimate novel of a fire child, Stephen King's Firestarter (1980).

Dobson's book seems like a straight ripoff of King's bestseller; I only bought it for its cover (kid with bowl cut, check) and its ad absurdum title. I mean, virtually every single creepy kid book could be called that; it's like titling your horror novel Good Versus Evil or Scary Monster or Do Something Stupid and Die. Ugh.

Campbell's eighth novel has some respectable blurbs on it and seem like it'd be a decent read but I really think I prefer his short stories. Compare this cover to The Nameless or someone else's work of flaming youth, Audrey Rose.

The only of these that I have read is Firestarter, King's sixth published novel. I've always thought of it as a lesser novel of his, though I'm sure it has its fans. The paperback cover art is the same as the hardcover, which I like. King has said that during the late '70s and most of the '80s he was writing books like it, Cujo, Christine, and The Tommyknockers, et. al., while drunk or jacked up on cocaine and therefore doesn't remember actually writing them at all (why, those are the same reasons Drew Barrymore doesn't remember making the movie, haw-haw). I myself recall almost nothing about reading it, so I guess we're even.

UK movie tie-in edition

Michael Whelan's cover for the 1980 limited edition hardcover

Interview with the Blogger

Joe Monster, of the mighty and fearsome horror blog From Beyond Depraved, was kind enough to include me in his brand-new Demented Dialogues feature, in which he interviews horror bloggers of all kinds. He asked terrific and insightful questions both about my thoughts on horror in general and about my blog in particular. I had a great time talking about some of my favorite stuff in the world. Hope you enjoy it!

Meanwhile, I've got a hot stack of newly-acquired horror paperbacks and am just waiting for the right moment of inspiration to decide which I read next! Why, there's Shirley Jackson, Robert W. Chambers, Poppy Z. Brite, Suzy McKee Charnas, Les Daniels, Ira Levin. I might even settle in with a reread of a King or Lovecraft classic, who knows? See you guys soon.

Floating Dragon by Peter Straub (1982): Bind the Devil a Thousand Years

After reading a couple of thin, unsubstantial, craptastic pulp horror novels, I needed a book written by someone on a friendly professional basis with the written word. And with just a glance at my bookshelves, I knew Peter Straub was my man. Best-known for his 1979 bestselling mainstream horror classic Ghost Story, as well as two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman (1984) and its sequel Black House (2001), Straub has been publishing quality literary horror novels since the early 1970s. Floating Dragon is a typical example of Straub's talents and thematic concerns, a long novel filled with ghostly - or perhaps not ghostly - doings, upper middle-class marital strife, vaguely malevolent children, somewhat experimental narrative disjointedness, the disorienting conflation of place and time, and a self-consciously literary narrator, a pedigree that's at once John Cheever and M.R. James.

Set in idyllic seaside Hampstead, Connecticut, in 1980, populated by snooty folks whose roots go back to the bloody battles of the Revolutionary War, Floating Dragon establishes a solid sense of place but it is time that Straub bends and jumbles immediately. Events occur simultaneously in different chapters, future events are revealed like spoilers as asides and in visions, and past events creep up everywhere ("Pasta is prologue," quips one character when being served overdone fettuccine at an unfortunate dinner party). The novel begins with the 1980 murder of Stony Friedgood, a promiscuous housewife who seems to have picked up the wrong man at a local bar.

At the same time, Stony's husband Leo is called to a secret government defense plant to help do damage control on a chemical spill. DRG-16, a new kind of nerve gas, has turned three men into slush as it seeps out of its containment tank and soon becomes very nearly conscious, a malevolence creeping across the land. By the time Leo returns home it is high above Hampstead and already causing death and hallucinations, but his dead wife in their bed is no hallucination; in fact, she was not even killed by DRG; it was another, older, more transcendent evil, one that has returned each generation to this town and is known by many names in men of ugly hungers and strange eyes, men who meet awful fates for their awful deeds: Gideon Winter, Robertson Green, Bates Krell... Many names, but ultimately one: the Dragon.

As many other characters are introduced, we slowly see four that stand out; each of them has a family line that stretches back centuries in Hampstead. Graham Williams, an aged alcoholic novelist who never recovered from being called out by Joe McCarthy, living alone in a book-filled home; Richard Allbee, a former child TV star who's returned to his hometown after years abroad in London; Patsy McCloud, a vibrant woman slowly losing her self-possession to her abusive husband; and young Tabby Smithfield, a 12-year-old boy with an alcoholic father. Williams has done his research on Hampstead and explains that the four of them had ancestors who murdered Gideon Winter. Now more women are being killed and Williams fears that his past confrontation with madman Krell may explain what is going on again now.

As a prose stylist Straub is one of the very finest in horror and his slow and sure reveal of this New England town beset by horrors both real and imagined is masterful and enthralling. The "thinking cloud" isn't necessarily fatal and much creepiness is found in the bizarre behavior suddenly exhibited by the townspeople. He digs deep into the sheer wrongness of what's happening to Hampstead and boy, it's disturbing. His set pieces are magnificent, full of towering and mind-numbing terror and harrowing images of a gleeful and savage inhumanity. Characters react realistically and I believe I felt a palpable sadness and shock when some of them died. The carnage is astonishing in places. Those policemen in the movie theater... the children who drown... the likable young reporter who ventures into Krell's old home... that tidal wave of blood and mangled bodies. And that's barely a scratch on the surface.

(One thing that I did not expect about Floating Dragon was its similarity to Stephen King's 1986 epic horror novel, It. Both have vast, intertwining back-stories, concern the horrible crimes of the past and their effect on people as well as place, and have an evil force that's cyclical in nature against which a disparate group of people with various weaknesses and special powers band. Even the actual horrors that Straub dreams up seem replicated by King in his novel...)

There is so very much to recommend about Floating Dragon that I don't think anyone will be surprised to find out that the climax of this 600-page novel doesn't quite seem worthy of what's gone before. I'm almost to the point where I don't even like reading the ends of some novels because I just know they're going to be a letdown as they rush - or meander - to tie everything up. I didn't dislike the hallucinogenic climactic battle between good and evil but it's certainly not the best thing about the novel; surely its many, many brilliantly done scenes of calamity and woe are that. The horror fan's cup do runneth over. Yep, still and all, Floating Dragon is an absolute '80s horror fiction must-read.