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intertribalI decided to check out several horror books (novel / short story collection) this summer and read them. I tried to pick both un-read classics and newer ones. Also, Stephen King is like my barometer in horror fiction, which is why he's mentioned in (almost) every review. This is part of the reason I need to read more horror! Anyway. In the order I read them:
1. The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (1959).
This is the mother of modern haunted house stories. You can see where King took "inspiration" from her for both The Shining and Rose Red. The idea of houses as beings unto themselves - in this case insane and manipulative and ever-desiring of more humans to "take in" - must have started here. It's a pretty atmospheric book - no gore and only implied ghosts - but it was extremely difficult to put down and is a very fast read (which doesn't mean the writing was simplistic, because it's excellent). Basically, a scientist has launched an expedition to Hill House and the protagonist, Eleanor, is one of the psychics he's invited to "wake it up" (yeah, Rose Red basically copied this part). And Hill House eats at Eleanor, which is very real for the reader because you are positioned with Eleanor, who is both crazy and extremely sympathetic.
Because of its paranormal elements it's labeled horror, but The Haunting of Hill House belongs with the likes of Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (this could be considered a sister to "The Yellow Wallpaper," a story that I really think everyone should read). There's a lot of feminist themes in this one, and I mean that in the best sense possible. It's very much about gender roles and their intersection with mental stability (Eleanor's best friend/antagonist/love interest is the perky, beautiful Theodora). The insane house just plays on those themes, teasing and aggravating the raw emotional nerve.
I don't know how this book would read to a reader who was more of a Theodora, or a Luke. But as an Eleanor type - the high-functioning kind - it was like having someone stick their finger in your artery and swish it around. I understand it's been made into movies, but none of them seem to be honest about the book. This isn't for some slapdash B-movie director - this one needs a visionary at the helm. A must for anybody interested in "women and horror" as an issue, and I'm infinitely glad I read it - and really happy to have been a Shirley Jackson Award nominee.
2. 20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill (2007).
I have to say it: Joe Hill's dad is literally Stephen King. That said, they write with totally different styles. Hill is more heart and soul and literary persuasions, whereas King is more blood and guts and utilitarian speech. I will tell you straight up that 20th Century Ghosts is neither very scary nor very creepy, but I don't think Hill is trying to scare the pants off anyone. He uses the paranormal to write literary stories, following the argument that if it's "weird," it's horror (an argument I've tried to convince myself of, but in vain). But anyway. The first story, "Best New Horror," is very good. It's a satire about the horror publishing industry, and the protagonist is the editor of the horror collection of the title. It's dead-on, unfortunately.
The second story, "20th Century Ghost," I couldn't get into. Okay, I have a really strong bias in horror fiction - I hate, double hate, loathe entirely the "performance ghost" genre. You know, the ghost of a former lounge singer who goes back and plays the piano and clinks the glasses on the bar, the sort of shit you see on "America's Most Haunted." I just find these stories boring and trite and pathetic and I don't know who would enjoy them, but I guess somebody does because horror writers love to pull out ye olde "performance ghost."
So, moving on. "Last Breath" and "Dead-Wood" were both short, creepy, and wonderful - about people's dying breaths and the ghosts of forests. The kind of stuff Hill should spend more of his time on, because there's not a lot of horror writers with the patience or skill to pull off that kind of story. Unfortunately, I can't say that any of the writing held my attention enough to plow through the rest of the book. I'm sorry, Joe Hill! Maybe I'll try you again some other time when I'm in a more literary mood?
3. The Descent, Jeff Long (2001).
[Disclaimer: My review here covers the first 1/3 of the book, at which point I could not bear to go on reading. Therefore, it cannot be taken as an overall assessment of The Descent, which I will note I picked up in the first place because of several glowing reviews on Amazon.com]
No, this is not the cave spelunker movie, but they have in common underground humanoid monsters. If you know any Lovecraft, or have even heard of Hollow Earth theory, the whole subterranean nether-world premise is nothing new. That being said, the first chapter, where a Himalayan mountaineering expedition stumbles into a cave and find a mummified corpse inside, is spectacular - and I mean, spectacular. Grotesque, scary, unbelievably bold in terms of what Long was putting on paper. I had really high hopes for the rest of the book.
Unfortunately, in the chapters that followed I ran up against a couple things I couldn't get past. First, the chapters that follow are very "international," but boy can you ever tell they were written by an American. It reads as though Long did wikipedia research and read some Lonely Planet in order to explain to you that Srebrenica was a "killing field" as if he's parlaying some local info that every adult shouldn't already know. His protagonists are a sadly all-American cast of goodie-goodie-good-guys (except for a couple random Europeans, people of other nationalities don't talk) - none of whom are racist, they just think foreigners are "savage" or "fiend"-like, but that's cuz they are, goddamnit, those African lepers making sacrifices to pagan gods have crossed the line from pathetic to horrifying! I about cried when Long set a chapter in Indonesia (identified only as "Java". He also says that gamelan music takes a lifetime to learn to like, which sure explains why they play it in hotels to greet tourists). And this is why Stephen King sets all his stories in Maine! I felt that any substantial international experience Long has did not show - which is really very unfortunate.
I might have been able to keep going if not for the sense that this book was shaping up to be more of a thriller than a piece of horror fiction (and not just because the scares stopped in chapter one) - which explains the action-adventure feel and the annoyingly unrealistic characters used to info-dump (the worst was the beautiful, spunky nun from Texas, but the slew of rugged individualist heroes got old fast too). Ultimately it was this thriller vibe that made me realize that I didn't know why I was reading this book, since I do not enjoy thrillers and I do not read writers who mishandle Indonesia (and seemingly ignore post-colonial race dynamics) - I stopped reading Sam Winchester's critically-acclaimed Krakatoa for this same reason. So the book went back to the library. The first chapter, however, will live forever in my heart.
4. Books of Blood, Vol. 1-3, Clive Barker (1984).
I'd only been exposed to Clive Barker through this Sci-Fi B-movie, The Plague, which wasn't so good. I don't blame him for that because Books of Blood is really, really fantastic. It's a collection of short stories, five or six per volume, and he explains what a "book of blood" is in the first story of the first volume - literally, it's apparently when legions of ghosts grab you and carve stories of their violent deaths onto your body, but Barker's real point is that we are all books of blood. Barker's awesome because he wields the blood and guts with the boldness of say, the first chapter of The Descent, but he's got writing chops up there with Joe Hill and at times, Shirley Jackson. There are, of course, a couple clunkers - Barker's not so good when he's being more light-hearted, like in "The Yattering and Jack," and he too pulled out the dreaded "performance ghost." But the non-clunkers are frequent and magnificent.
In volume 1, "The Midnight Meat Train," "Pig Blood Blues," and "In The Hills, the Cities" are all A+ stories. It's funny, because "In The Hills, the Cities" is also based in the former Yugoslavia (like parts of The Descent), but it feels infinitely more real and poignant because Barker treats all his characters like actual human beings, not caricatures/props. You'd think it would be easy. "Midnight Meat Train" is mostly a fine piece of gore about a serial killer in New York subways that takes a mind-blowing turn at the end, one that lifts it up into the sublime.
Volume 2 is a little more solidly "good" instead of either "ho-hum" or "great," but "Hell's Event" - a really fun, adrenaline-filled story about demons trying to win a human marathon in order to destroy democracy (great to see sports in sf!) - and "The Skins of the Fathers" - an absurdly fantastical story set in the Southwest about monsters in the hills (and in our veins) - are both great. To my surprise, I actually wanted to read the "performance ghost" in Volume 3's "Son of Celluloid" - but seeing as how it's about the ghosts of movies taking root in a disembodied tumor, it was kind of different. "Rawhead Rex" is gruesome, no other way to describe it, and I felt the ending was lacking, but damn if the rest of the story wasn't horrific. "Scape-Goats," on the other hand, is one of the most lovely, macabre pieces of purely existential horror I've ever read, about a ship-wrecked quartet of young people on an "empty" Northern island. To put it simply, Barker totally gets the idea that horror should be a meditation on the world and humanity and all the darkness therein. Can't say enough about these stories, really.
5. The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson (1908)
If Hill House is the mother of the modern haunted house story, then House on the Borderland is the father of the Lovecraft monster-god story. Fittingly, it's also older, lesser-known, and more deranged than Hill House. In one sense, the style is very old-fashioned (obviously) - half-utilitarian, half-needless prose, describing every little detail of every little action - you know how it is with most writing of this period. On the other hand, as the story continues the style begins to have the effect of a much more recent phenomenon: the Blair Witch Project.
The bulk of House on the Borderland is purportedly a discovered "manuscript," and unlike, say, Heart of Darkness, which is clearly just a framed fictional narrative, there's a slap-dash, seemingly amateur, random quality to the writing, much like Blair Witch's unpolished acting and "bad" camera angles, that make House on the Borderland seem like it could be real. A lot of Lovecraftian stories have this quality - like it's just insane enough, and just un-literary enough, and just out-of-bounds enough, that it feels eerily real. Apparently some people don't like this, but I find it a very interesting reader experience, if one that I wouldn't want to repeat too often.
So anyway, here's the plot: the unnamed narrator, the manuscript's author, is an old man living with his sister Mary and beloved dog Pepper in an isolated mansion in Ireland. The house is surrounded by wild gardens, and beyond the wild gardens is a big ravine called The Pit. Things start coming out of The Pit - horrible humanoid Swine-Things that force the narrator et al. to hole up inside the house. The narrator also has these psycho metaphysical visions where he goes first to a mountainous "arena" in The Plain of Silence (which is surrounded by gigantic mythological gods of destruction, like Kali and Set), then watches the Earth die, then goes floating around other planets and the Dark Sun and the Dark Nebula and... uh, yeah. I must admit, I got a little lost. But thankfully the story brings us back to the House, maligned now not by Swine-Things but by the Thing from the Arena, which is really a gigantic Swine-Thing... and it all ends very creepily, of course. Hodgson clearly started something huge in horror fiction here: "cosmic horror," monsters of incredible unknown and incredible powers, huge hidden parallel worlds... overall, good stuff. It's in the public domain, so I recommend taking a gander.
1. The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (1959).
This is the mother of modern haunted house stories. You can see where King took "inspiration" from her for both The Shining and Rose Red. The idea of houses as beings unto themselves - in this case insane and manipulative and ever-desiring of more humans to "take in" - must have started here. It's a pretty atmospheric book - no gore and only implied ghosts - but it was extremely difficult to put down and is a very fast read (which doesn't mean the writing was simplistic, because it's excellent). Basically, a scientist has launched an expedition to Hill House and the protagonist, Eleanor, is one of the psychics he's invited to "wake it up" (yeah, Rose Red basically copied this part). And Hill House eats at Eleanor, which is very real for the reader because you are positioned with Eleanor, who is both crazy and extremely sympathetic.
Because of its paranormal elements it's labeled horror, but The Haunting of Hill House belongs with the likes of Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (this could be considered a sister to "The Yellow Wallpaper," a story that I really think everyone should read). There's a lot of feminist themes in this one, and I mean that in the best sense possible. It's very much about gender roles and their intersection with mental stability (Eleanor's best friend/antagonist/love interest is the perky, beautiful Theodora). The insane house just plays on those themes, teasing and aggravating the raw emotional nerve.
I don't know how this book would read to a reader who was more of a Theodora, or a Luke. But as an Eleanor type - the high-functioning kind - it was like having someone stick their finger in your artery and swish it around. I understand it's been made into movies, but none of them seem to be honest about the book. This isn't for some slapdash B-movie director - this one needs a visionary at the helm. A must for anybody interested in "women and horror" as an issue, and I'm infinitely glad I read it - and really happy to have been a Shirley Jackson Award nominee.
2. 20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill (2007).
I have to say it: Joe Hill's dad is literally Stephen King. That said, they write with totally different styles. Hill is more heart and soul and literary persuasions, whereas King is more blood and guts and utilitarian speech. I will tell you straight up that 20th Century Ghosts is neither very scary nor very creepy, but I don't think Hill is trying to scare the pants off anyone. He uses the paranormal to write literary stories, following the argument that if it's "weird," it's horror (an argument I've tried to convince myself of, but in vain). But anyway. The first story, "Best New Horror," is very good. It's a satire about the horror publishing industry, and the protagonist is the editor of the horror collection of the title. It's dead-on, unfortunately.
The second story, "20th Century Ghost," I couldn't get into. Okay, I have a really strong bias in horror fiction - I hate, double hate, loathe entirely the "performance ghost" genre. You know, the ghost of a former lounge singer who goes back and plays the piano and clinks the glasses on the bar, the sort of shit you see on "America's Most Haunted." I just find these stories boring and trite and pathetic and I don't know who would enjoy them, but I guess somebody does because horror writers love to pull out ye olde "performance ghost."
So, moving on. "Last Breath" and "Dead-Wood" were both short, creepy, and wonderful - about people's dying breaths and the ghosts of forests. The kind of stuff Hill should spend more of his time on, because there's not a lot of horror writers with the patience or skill to pull off that kind of story. Unfortunately, I can't say that any of the writing held my attention enough to plow through the rest of the book. I'm sorry, Joe Hill! Maybe I'll try you again some other time when I'm in a more literary mood?
3. The Descent, Jeff Long (2001).
[Disclaimer: My review here covers the first 1/3 of the book, at which point I could not bear to go on reading. Therefore, it cannot be taken as an overall assessment of The Descent, which I will note I picked up in the first place because of several glowing reviews on Amazon.com]
No, this is not the cave spelunker movie, but they have in common underground humanoid monsters. If you know any Lovecraft, or have even heard of Hollow Earth theory, the whole subterranean nether-world premise is nothing new. That being said, the first chapter, where a Himalayan mountaineering expedition stumbles into a cave and find a mummified corpse inside, is spectacular - and I mean, spectacular. Grotesque, scary, unbelievably bold in terms of what Long was putting on paper. I had really high hopes for the rest of the book.
Unfortunately, in the chapters that followed I ran up against a couple things I couldn't get past. First, the chapters that follow are very "international," but boy can you ever tell they were written by an American. It reads as though Long did wikipedia research and read some Lonely Planet in order to explain to you that Srebrenica was a "killing field" as if he's parlaying some local info that every adult shouldn't already know. His protagonists are a sadly all-American cast of goodie-goodie-good-guys (except for a couple random Europeans, people of other nationalities don't talk) - none of whom are racist, they just think foreigners are "savage" or "fiend"-like, but that's cuz they are, goddamnit, those African lepers making sacrifices to pagan gods have crossed the line from pathetic to horrifying! I about cried when Long set a chapter in Indonesia (identified only as "Java". He also says that gamelan music takes a lifetime to learn to like, which sure explains why they play it in hotels to greet tourists). And this is why Stephen King sets all his stories in Maine! I felt that any substantial international experience Long has did not show - which is really very unfortunate.
I might have been able to keep going if not for the sense that this book was shaping up to be more of a thriller than a piece of horror fiction (and not just because the scares stopped in chapter one) - which explains the action-adventure feel and the annoyingly unrealistic characters used to info-dump (the worst was the beautiful, spunky nun from Texas, but the slew of rugged individualist heroes got old fast too). Ultimately it was this thriller vibe that made me realize that I didn't know why I was reading this book, since I do not enjoy thrillers and I do not read writers who mishandle Indonesia (and seemingly ignore post-colonial race dynamics) - I stopped reading Sam Winchester's critically-acclaimed Krakatoa for this same reason. So the book went back to the library. The first chapter, however, will live forever in my heart.
4. Books of Blood, Vol. 1-3, Clive Barker (1984).
I'd only been exposed to Clive Barker through this Sci-Fi B-movie, The Plague, which wasn't so good. I don't blame him for that because Books of Blood is really, really fantastic. It's a collection of short stories, five or six per volume, and he explains what a "book of blood" is in the first story of the first volume - literally, it's apparently when legions of ghosts grab you and carve stories of their violent deaths onto your body, but Barker's real point is that we are all books of blood. Barker's awesome because he wields the blood and guts with the boldness of say, the first chapter of The Descent, but he's got writing chops up there with Joe Hill and at times, Shirley Jackson. There are, of course, a couple clunkers - Barker's not so good when he's being more light-hearted, like in "The Yattering and Jack," and he too pulled out the dreaded "performance ghost." But the non-clunkers are frequent and magnificent.
In volume 1, "The Midnight Meat Train," "Pig Blood Blues," and "In The Hills, the Cities" are all A+ stories. It's funny, because "In The Hills, the Cities" is also based in the former Yugoslavia (like parts of The Descent), but it feels infinitely more real and poignant because Barker treats all his characters like actual human beings, not caricatures/props. You'd think it would be easy. "Midnight Meat Train" is mostly a fine piece of gore about a serial killer in New York subways that takes a mind-blowing turn at the end, one that lifts it up into the sublime.
Volume 2 is a little more solidly "good" instead of either "ho-hum" or "great," but "Hell's Event" - a really fun, adrenaline-filled story about demons trying to win a human marathon in order to destroy democracy (great to see sports in sf!) - and "The Skins of the Fathers" - an absurdly fantastical story set in the Southwest about monsters in the hills (and in our veins) - are both great. To my surprise, I actually wanted to read the "performance ghost" in Volume 3's "Son of Celluloid" - but seeing as how it's about the ghosts of movies taking root in a disembodied tumor, it was kind of different. "Rawhead Rex" is gruesome, no other way to describe it, and I felt the ending was lacking, but damn if the rest of the story wasn't horrific. "Scape-Goats," on the other hand, is one of the most lovely, macabre pieces of purely existential horror I've ever read, about a ship-wrecked quartet of young people on an "empty" Northern island. To put it simply, Barker totally gets the idea that horror should be a meditation on the world and humanity and all the darkness therein. Can't say enough about these stories, really.
5. The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson (1908)
If Hill House is the mother of the modern haunted house story, then House on the Borderland is the father of the Lovecraft monster-god story. Fittingly, it's also older, lesser-known, and more deranged than Hill House. In one sense, the style is very old-fashioned (obviously) - half-utilitarian, half-needless prose, describing every little detail of every little action - you know how it is with most writing of this period. On the other hand, as the story continues the style begins to have the effect of a much more recent phenomenon: the Blair Witch Project.
The bulk of House on the Borderland is purportedly a discovered "manuscript," and unlike, say, Heart of Darkness, which is clearly just a framed fictional narrative, there's a slap-dash, seemingly amateur, random quality to the writing, much like Blair Witch's unpolished acting and "bad" camera angles, that make House on the Borderland seem like it could be real. A lot of Lovecraftian stories have this quality - like it's just insane enough, and just un-literary enough, and just out-of-bounds enough, that it feels eerily real. Apparently some people don't like this, but I find it a very interesting reader experience, if one that I wouldn't want to repeat too often.
So anyway, here's the plot: the unnamed narrator, the manuscript's author, is an old man living with his sister Mary and beloved dog Pepper in an isolated mansion in Ireland. The house is surrounded by wild gardens, and beyond the wild gardens is a big ravine called The Pit. Things start coming out of The Pit - horrible humanoid Swine-Things that force the narrator et al. to hole up inside the house. The narrator also has these psycho metaphysical visions where he goes first to a mountainous "arena" in The Plain of Silence (which is surrounded by gigantic mythological gods of destruction, like Kali and Set), then watches the Earth die, then goes floating around other planets and the Dark Sun and the Dark Nebula and... uh, yeah. I must admit, I got a little lost. But thankfully the story brings us back to the House, maligned now not by Swine-Things but by the Thing from the Arena, which is really a gigantic Swine-Thing... and it all ends very creepily, of course. Hodgson clearly started something huge in horror fiction here: "cosmic horror," monsters of incredible unknown and incredible powers, huge hidden parallel worlds... overall, good stuff. It's in the public domain, so I recommend taking a gander.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 03:26 pm (UTC)Wow, I thought I was only person in the world who had ever read The Descent, congrats (or condolences) for making through 6 chapters. It wasn't a bad little escape when I first cracked the cover back in '01 on a plane trip to New Orleans. But I dusted off the jacket and tried to reread it last year with little success.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 04:56 pm (UTC)I can't remember exactly where I got to - I think the little intellectual squad was starting to go investigate Satan while the evil corporation was... doing something. I couldn't stand the little intellectual squad though, which is the immediate reason I stopped reading.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-17 09:05 pm (UTC)I'm a big fan of Jeff Long, and The Descent is probably my favorite book ever. I've read it at least five times, more than any other book I own (think of me what you will based on that). My tastes in fiction, film and music are such that I long ago gave up trying to defend them to others. It's an exercise in futility that benefits exactly no one, and it's undoubtedly one of the main reasons there's so much vitriol in cyberspace these days. Hell hath no fury like a fanboi scorned, right? However, the fact that you essentially trashed the book after only having read a small portion of it does bother me ever so slightly. I understand that you gave up reading because the book just wasn't doing it for you; nobody wants to waste their precious time slogging through a book they don't like (that's what school is for), but is it fair to review something you haven't fully experienced?
Also, Long was an elections supervisor in Bosnia after the genocide, and he worked with a human rights organization there, interviewing soldiers and civilians about the atrocities they witnessed, so he's probably more familiar with the region and what went on there than the average Lonely Planet reader. Fair enough?
I look forward to reading more of your opinions.
Take care,
Mike
no subject
Date: 2009-08-17 10:44 pm (UTC)I understand and appreciate your point, and I can't say I wouldn't have a similar reaction if someone did the same thing to Heart of Darkness, so no problem there. I'm not going to rescind my objections, but I did attach a disclaimer saying that I was responding to the first part of the book alone, and to pinpoint what exactly I found objectionable in the sections I read - for reasons that are probably very personal to me.
It genuinely surprises me that Long was an elections supervisor in Bosnia after the genocide, but that's really good to know.
I hope that relieves your fury at least a little bit, and I look forward to seeing you around!
no subject
Date: 2009-08-18 01:31 am (UTC)