Nightlife by Brian Hodge (1991): Tonight in Jungleland

Another novel that I loved when I first read it and have been looking forward to rereading for this blog is Brian Hodge's Nightlife (May 1991), the second title from the Dell/Abyss line of paperback originals (which had begun with Kathe Koja's The Cipher). At the time, I'd never read anything by Hodge, but I was sufficiently impressed by the goals set by Dell for this supposedly new style of horror - one of more psychological realism and fewer supernatural cliches - that I bought it almost immediately upon publication. Nightlife was Hodge's third novel and it did mine a rather new landscape for horror: the South American rain forest and its psychoactive plants , which the native tribes use as part of their ritualistic communions with hekura, the demon-spirit underworld.

Hodge imagines a monstrous mind- and body-altering entheogenic drug stolen by a drug kingpin from a primitive and violent Venezuelan tribe, the Yanomamo, who've kept it from modern civilization for ages. It doesn't just cause hallucinations; it melds bodies into flesh-and-bone animal hybrids, which is why the tribe who cultivated the drug are the most feared in the jungle. An ambitious drug dealer dubs it "skullflush" and launches into the "city-soft bodies" (as the back cover puts it) of the denizens of Florida's, er, nightlife. But then one young male native, Kerebawa, trained in civilization's ways and language by a doomed missionary who was actually converted to the Yanomamo's beliefs, comes to Tampa to retrieve it before it can wreak its demonic havoc on us American pussies who never engage our, you know, spirit animals.

Pan UK paperback 1993

Now, this kind of human transformation is in one sense familiar horror territory: Jekyll and Hyde and werewolves reside near one another on this mythic map, but Hodge goes Schultes instead of Stevenson; it's more Chagnon than Chaney Jr, Huxley more than Henry Hull. You can tell Hodge did his anthropological research, if at times a little too obviously since incorporating facts about the infamous Yanomamo tribe is tricky in a narrative. The flights of infinite metaphorical fantasy when characters snort the drug seem underwritten, or rather perhaps too earnest and literal - people seeing to the edge of the cosmos or getting in touch with their own personal demon-animal inside them, that sort of thing; peering into the broken places and seeing what a modern world cannot heal.

Like a lot of splatterpunk stories - which this novel definitely is not - Hodge is concerned with the betrayers and the betrayed and the wounds his characters carry around like a totem. But I could only take so many "soulful" and "desperate" confrontations between Justin and April, the new lovers on the run from the skullflush-addicted drug dealer, and ruminations upon "what went wrong" in the past. Tightening this baby up by 50 or 75 pages I think would not have hurt at all.

Hodge's next two novels, Deathgrip (1992) and The Darker Saints (1993), were also published by Dell. I know I read them but can't recall much, but I always recalled Hodge fondly. For years I wondered what he had been in up to as I never saw any of his books again; once I was able to find info about him on the internet it turns out he began writing crime novels around 2000. Rereading Nightlife, that now makes sense: it's not scary at all, there is the detailed drug trade and narco cops, the attendant thugs and bodyguards with quirky tastes befitting more educated men, the last-ditch machinations of losers trying to get their lives back together, and then there's Kerebewa, that resourceful Yanomamo warrior. I don't think Hodge ever actually met a Yanomamo warrior, but Kerebewa's culture-clash moments and his loyalty are at once corny and endearing.

Current ebook

These aspects seems more like something you'd find in a Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, or Donald Westlake crime novel than in horror fiction. I'm not saying Hodge is anywhere near as good as those guys - god, who is? - just that today I can see who his inspirations probably were. His action set pieces are maybe overdone but I think he should get points for the set-ups, and the whiz-bang climax is good. And I found a 1990 interview from just before Nightlife was published, and I had one of those "oh shit" flashbacks: I recalled that I'd read this same interview back in the day and read my first Hiaasen novel because of Hodge's recommendation. I knew I remembered Hodge fondly for a reason.

The Elementals by Michael McDowell (1981): Just a Meanness in This World

Using the well-worn but welcome literary trope of a rich and influential Southern family who suffers grief and hardship, The Elementals is Michael McDowell's fourth paperback original horror novel from Avon Books. Meet Mother Marian Savage, matriarch of the Savage family from Mobile, Alabama. Although her strangely ritualistic funeral forms the novel's prologue, her spirit, for lack of a better word, hovers about her adult children and grandchild as the story continues. But it is not only Mother Savage who will hold nightmare sway over her brood ("Savage mothers eat their children up!"). With touches of the Gothic and the surreal, McDowell has wrought a not-quite-ghost story that's both intimately real and metaphysically unreal.

Surviving son Dauphin Savage and his wife Leigh, as well as Leigh's family the McCrays - mother Big Barbara, brother Luker, and his 13-year-old daughter India - try to escape the oppressive weight of mother's memory by spending the summer at Beldame, a bit of land on the Gulf with three Victorian homes on it. The family summers here have been going on for decades. With them is Odessa Red, the Savages' long-employed black servant, who knows virtually every secret there is about the family. Even, perhaps, why two of Beldame's homes are livable, but the third is, astonishingly, slowly being buried beneath an enormous dune of blinding white and sugar-fine beach sand. Indeed, it is piling into the rooms through every crevice and crack; it did not merely encroach upon the house, it had actually begun to swallow it... sand covered the entire front of the house to a line well above the verandah roof.

McDowell smartly pays out his story in even, rational measures, never overplaying it as he gives mild hints through dialogue, image, and circumstance that something unnatural is going on in that third house. This vacation won't be pleasurable: Big Barbara's given up her bourbon-soaked afternoons and worries about her crumbling marriage to local politician Lawton McCray, who wants to buy Beldame from Dauphin for oil drilling. None of the adults will go near the third house; Luker and Dauphin have vague disturbing memories of it from their childhood.

When India, the bright, charmingly foul-mouthed, New York-born young teenager driven to lassitude by the maddening heat during the day and the dead-silent blackness of night, becomes fascinated by the third house, she asks Odessa to help her take pictures of it. Odessa might be uneducated and superstitious but she's loyal to the family, goes along with the girl. Later, India shows her father the photograph:

It was a photo of the verandah showing the handsome curve of the dune that was overtaking the side of the third house. But Luker saw at once the fat gray creature that was huddled behind the low porch railing.... Luker thought that it might be the animated fetus of an elephant. Its white pupil stared out into the camera lens.

"It makes me want to vomit," said India matter-of-factly.

*shiver* And just what are the "elementals" you ask? Wisely McDowell alludes to them subtly; they are something like three-dimensional hallucinations, living between the very molecules of the air, the land, the sea, the house. They are human weaknesses and wounds and rot and heat and they can recreate themselves as us... imperfectly. The beleaguered family will battle them, but hopelessly, and one will see with their very own eyes the full extent of the power of the elementals.

Overall The Elementals made me think of those morbid 19th century photos of families posing with their dead children, which is quite a tone to recreate. Sadly it's out of print - as are all of McDowell's novels - but I'd love to see The Elementals (inexpensively) reprinted with a more accurate and evocative cover; there are plenty of weird and striking images from which to choose, not the least the house filling with sand; also apparitions with sand spilling out of their mouths; a lone black-and-orange sail on the Gulf horizon; and a monstrous blind baby that can still find its way by using its huge misshapen ears to hear the final tortured breaths of its victims...

Update 2014: You can now purchase a new trade paperback edition of The Elementals from Valancourt Books! Click here.

The I Am Legend Book Archive

Richard Matheson's 1954 I Am Legend is probably the most influential horror novel of the 20th century. Over the years I've owned various paperback editions of it, having first read it during summer break in high school. I had this Omega Man tie-in version from the early '70s.

So I started thinking about other editions of it, and while looking I came across The I Am Legend Book Archive. I love finding other horror obsessives who catalog their mania in minute detail, but I don't think I've ever seen a blog that focuses solely on one book. Pretty cool. Check it out.

 

 

Robert R. McCammon: The Early Paperback Covers

I read recently that bestselling '80s horror-fiction scribe Robert R. McCammon refuses to allow his first four novels to be republished today as he feels they're lacking in quality. That may be; I've never read them. It's true! Despite his overwhelming popularity in the late 1980s, I was never much interested in his work, for whatever reason. Every time I mentioned that I liked horror fiction back then, someone would invariably bring him up (or Koontz or John Saul, two other writers I had very little to no time for). I think I read the first few pages of his oft-acclaimed epic Stand-like novel Swan Song (1987) but remained unmoved; then perhaps a short story or two from Blue World (1990) or Book of the Dead (1989). Ah well.

These first four novels, Avon paperback originals all, are varying in terms of cover art quality; I think we can agree that Night Boat (1980), above, is the coolest of the lot. I've heard it's a pretty decent Nazi-zombie read.

They Thirst (1981) Pretty pedestrian but there's at least a kindertrauma associated with it.

Bethany's Sin (1980) Ladies and wild stallions. 'Nuff said.

Baal (1978) Wow, did they give the design job to the night janitor, or the new artist on their first day? Terrible.

McCammon's next two novels, Usher's Passing (1983) and Mystery Walk (1984), were published in hardcover by Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, while the first paperback editions were from Ballantine. The pumpkin house-mouth is kinda interesting.

These older paperback covers aren't nearly as well-known as the Pocket Books reprints of later years, after Swan Song became a NYT bestseller in '87. They all followed the template that book set with the creepy same font, half circle moon, and vanishing point perspective, thanks to artist Rowena Morrill. All out of print today, these later editions were staples of many a horror fiction bookshelf. Just not mine, however.

Other Horror Biz

I've been a bit busier than usual, as well as waiting on the snail mail delivery of a whole new stack of horror novels, so I haven't been able to post here as much as I'd like this past week. However there are several blogs of note I've been reading which I believe all horror fiction fans should be aware of. The Mighty Blowhole has a new post on outrageously tasteless and ridiculously silly horror paperback covers, some of which I've posted here but most which I have not run across myself. The amazing image above, of Stephen George's Nightscape, is but a taste...

Bill R. at The Kind of Face You Hate - this season known as The Kind of Face You Slash!!! - has been delving into contemporary horror writers, something I don't do too often. This is of course to my own detriment. This Brian Evenson sounds like the real deal, apparently an awesome amalgam of J.G. Ballard, Thomas Ligotti, Poe, and Jim Thompson.

And the always-awesome Retrospace has a collage of Dracula paperback covers and a look back at cinema's greatest vampires.

This weekend I started a cool '80s horror novel that has some stellar Amazon (and elsewhere) reviews, and have just gotten about halfway in; I expect the review to be up tomorrow or Wednesday. But again, busy: apparently there's some sort of horror-related holiday on the horizon.

Horror: 100 Best Books (1988), edited by Stephen Jones & Kim Newman

When I first read Horror: 100 Best Books it was a revelation, and caused me to search out and read Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, Wagner's In a Lonely Place, Marasco's Burnt Offerings, Klein's The Ceremonies, as well as a handful of others that have sat on my shelf unread in the many years since. That'll happen. Although it's a bit disconcertingly diverse, it is still an indispensable guide for the horror fiction fan as a reference book. It may be over 20 years old - yes, there is a second volume - but you still need it. I finally actually bought a used copy and it fits my parameters here well.

Jones and Newman are both are well-known horror scribes and editors, Jones for his Best New Horror anthology series and Newman for my personal favorite book on horror film, Nightmare Movies. It may have been better had they themselves chosen the 100 best books, rather than enlisting various horror fiction authors, present and past, to choose their favorites. Authors contribute an essay on their choice. Joe Lansdale goes for Ray Bradbury's The October Country - honestly, I would have never guessed. Harlan Ellison on Clark Ashton Smith! T.E.D. Klein on Machen! Poe on Hawthorne! Uh, Guy N. Smith on Charles L. Grant? Don't think I'm going to delve into Marlowe's Dr. Faustus any time soon, but thanks anyway, Clive Barker. The Gothic moldy-oldies of the 19th century are are present and accounted for: The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Melmoth the Wanderer.

It's a bit UK-heavy, and features a Lovecraft collection you won't find Stateside, Cry Horror, nor will you easily find Ramsey Campbell's Dark Feasts, Michael Bishop's Who Made Stevie Crye?, or Nigel Kneale's Quatermas series that I've been looking for since I first read Best Books in the early '90s. My major quibble is that many of the specific titles chosen are unavailable anywhere, except as expensive collector's editions.

As for the essays themselves, I found David J. Schow's piece on All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By particularly insightful; Peter Straub's words on The Shining particularly ass-kissy; Al Sarrantonio's insights into 'Salem's Lot virtually absent; Stephen King's into Burnt Offerings, debatable. Then Craig Spector on Deathbird Stories correctly and acppropriately notes both its power and its dated "hipness" while Edward Bryant nails Song of Kali's nightmare precision.

Non-disputable classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Island of Dr. Moreau, Ghost Stories of Antiquary, Haunting of Hill House, etc., are duly included. More surprising are modern fiction titles like John Gardner's Grendel and Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, or literary classics like Macbeth, Heart of Darkness, Northanger Abbey, and The Trial, as well as dystopian 1960s SF novels like John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up and J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World.

There are plenty of spoilers in these essays, so tread carefully. The Recommended Reading list included at the end is amazing and overwhelming and, ultimately, kind of disheartening. I am never, never, ever, ever, gonna be able to read all them books. Damn and damn again.

The Search for Joseph Tully by William H. Hallahan (1974): Trapped Under Ice

Another bestselling title unknown and forgotten to the general public today but which gets spoken of with much awe and respect by genre fans is The Search for Joseph Tully. Creating an inescapable mood of wintry dread hanging over a soon-to-be-demolished historical apartment building in a disused part of Brooklyn, author William H. Hallahan skillfully brings together two disparate stories in a frigid climax of suggestive '70s horror. Its use of seances, hypnosis, medieval occult thought, and Catholic heresy dates it enjoyably, its genealogical-research angle is more effective than anyone would think, and Hallahan's smooth spare style gives you just enough detail to let your imagination do some work. Sure, modern horror fiction fans might find it too spare and too tame, might find that it doesn't give the goods except in tiny measured doses at too-distant intervals; they might find it that, true, but I found it highly readable and satisfying.

Basically, I raced through Tully (perhaps a bit too quickly; there's some of that, whatchacallit, symbolism here I fear I missed) and its story of Pete Richardson, an editor who is plagued by night terrors, waking each night to a strange whooshing sound, convinced someone is about trying to murder him. His rather eccentric apartment co-dwellers don't do much to disabuse him of this notion. In fact, they alternately insist on holding a seance, or hypnotizing him, or regaling him with ancient Church heresies and the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno. As their apartment building is threatened with being torn down by the wrecking balls getting closer daily, each neighbor moves away, leaving Richardson horribly alone, cold, frightened, perhaps paranoid or even mad.

1974 hardcover

The other story is of Matthew Willow, a young man on the titular search. Hallahan wrings solid suspense from the tricky, painstaking work of genealogical research that in other hands could become dry and boring. Joseph Tully was an 18th century wine merchant from England who with his sons tried to set up a vast wine company in the mid-Atlantic States, but tragedy and war prevent success. Hallahan gives quick, detailed sketches of the harrowing frontier lives of Tully's descendants in pre-Revolutionary New Jersey and New York, then as wild and unsettled as the West, and as wild and unsettling as any scene of violent supernatural horror. We get caught up in the little victories and distressing dead-ends of Willow's seemingly endless trips to city archives in libraries, churches, basements and bookstores. Why is Willow searching for Joseph Tully? Just know that he is, that's all. Being quite a research nerd myself, and with my copy of the 1977 Avon paperback (with a relevant if uninspired cover) giving off that wonderful old bookstore smell, I was quite charmed - and sometimes chilled - by this aspect of the novel.

1976 UK paperback

Honestly, I reveled in Tully's lonely, despairing, fatalistic tone. Chapters are short, enigmatic, vaguely existential - indeed we get several references to the idea that the birth of existential man was in the death camps of WWII. There are lots of people looking forlornly out of windows onto landscapes of frozen fields and streets and rundown cities trapped in snowy desolation, while the apartment building slowly empties out beneath swirling winds and high clouds moving out towards the black waters of the North Atlantic. Everywhere there is palpable cold and frost and snow and slush, and all the while terrors whisper across generations, mysterious terrors of vengeance and lost souls unmoored from justice and eternal rest, which only man can render unto man, no matter what.

Animals by John Skipp and Craig Spector (1993): A Bloody Disgrace

John Skipp and Craig Spector's sixth and final horror novel together, Animals (Bantam Nov 1993, cover art by Joe DeVito), is rife with the type of emotional as well as physical pain and humiliation that they explored in all their works. Despite their reputation as splatterpunks - or maybe because of - they always tried to depict realistic human relationships. Here, they delve into the psychic turmoil of 35-year-old blue-collar Syd Jarrett's divorce and its aftermath. In an out-of-the-way rundown blues bar in rural Pennsylvania, Syd meets the improbably hot and sexually ravenous Nora and his life is torn asunder. Nora is, of course, a werewolf. She wants to make him one too. But she is on the run from her ex, a sort of alpha-werewolf named Vic. What will happen when these night-time worlds collide? Surely you can guess.

But the thin, over-worn metaphor of werewolves who represent the dark, repressed nature of ourselves is expressed in tone-deaf, hey-buddy-check-this-out "prose" that seems less like writing than like two guys yelling a story at you in tandem. I don't know if Skipp and Spector had simply run their creative streak dry, were under a tight deadline, or had personal issues, or were simply bored, but virtually everything about Animals is lousy. Nora wants Syd to confront his psychological wounds caused by his ex-wife's adultery and the rage he felt to the man who cuckolded him, because that's what werewolves do: make you confront the beast within. I know horror likes to literalize its metaphors but this one is so obvious and trite and anemic it hardly registers.

The relentlessly graphic sex and violence is approached like sniggering 13-year-old boys who've just discovered Hustler magazine and Faces of Death videotapes. Every character comes across as an utter dated dork, straight from central casting circa 1987: women wear leather bustiers and fishnet stockings; men have one earring and stubble and drink from cans of Budweiser and bottles of Wild Turkey (Nora drinks copious amounts of Southern Comfort - barf) while driving muscle cars; a bartender is a world-weary sort who's seen it all; Syd's boss is a corrupt, crooked weakling. I know these characters are working-class Pennsylvania types, maybe Skipp and Spector did some research, but it makes for underwhelming fictional companions, more The Onion's Jim Anchower than flesh-and-blood human beings.

The cliches pop up thick and fast and the puns would make Robert Bloch groan. He was hell with names, but he never forgot a face. And even if he did, hers was in the trunk. A car moves through the night like a shark through dark waters. Kisses are deep and soul-searching. Sex is the raging bone dance. Well, that last one isn't a cliche; it's a ridiculous and juvenile original. The bad guy laughs wickedly, the moment of truth arrives, and werewolf survivors lick their wounds. See what they did there?

Animals was published in 1993, which was a distinct end of an era for me. I was still reading horror, but I was moving backwards toward classic writers like Machen, Jackson, le Fanu, Blackwood; modern horror was pretty much over as far as I was concerned. Bookstore shelves were more and more taken up with Koontz and King and Dell/Abyss had folded. Sure, there were a few titles I picked up here and there over the next couple years: Kathe Koja's Strange Angels and Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse (both of which I liked) and The 37th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw (which I didn't ) but overall this was the end of keeping up with new publications.

And so I distinctly recall the publication of Animals and how I thought, "Yeah, no, I'm kinda over this stuff; besides, a werewolf novel about 'the animal in all of us'? No thanks." Even Clive Barker's encomium on the cover did little to assuage my suspicions. After I began this blog and saw that copies of the novel were going for up to $15 or $20 online, I wanted to see just what I'd missed (no, I didn't pay that much; found an oddly pristine copy in a local used bookstore). And I see that I was exactly and precisely right in my impression that the book was one long, grim, cringe-inducing horror-fiction cliche.

Guess you won't see that as a cover blurb. Sorry, guys!