George R.R. Martin Writes Horror, Too

Photo by David Shankbone

I tend to pick up anthologies randomly at used bookstores instead of actively seeking them out.  Naturally, they can be a mixed bag, but anthologies have introduced me to a number of authors I really like.  For instance, I started George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series relatively recently, not because it had been recommended or because I’d seen the HBO series, but because I’d read a really enjoyable Martin story in an anthology.  It was “The Monkey Treatment” in Masters of Darkness II. 

In “The Monkey Treatment”, first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, Martin introduces us to Kenny, an obese compulsive over-eater.  Martin lovingly describes Kenny’s disorder in a way that makes the reader never want to eat again, before moving on to the real fun, as Kenny meets a formerly obese friend, who is now svelte, though haggard.  His friend introduces him to a new diet, the monkey treatment, administered in a back-alley “clinic”:

“…a high-pitched chittering sounded suddenly from behind him, sharp and rapid as fire from a machine gun.  Then another voice took it up, then a third, and suddenly the dark was alive with the terrible hammering noise.  Kenny put his hands over his ears and staggered through the curtain, but just as he emerged he felt something brush the back of his neck, something warm and hairy.”

Things go rapidly downhill for Kenny now that he has a monkey on his back.  Martin states that he wanted to write a story that was “genuinely funny and genuinely horrifying”, and he succeeded.  It was a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula awards.  

In his note about the story, he also compares the marketing of fiction to selling ice cream, everything in a separate tub:  “…I’ve always been the sort who gets scoops of two or even three different flavors on my sugar cones.”  That’s what I like about Martin: he’s able to blend genres unexpectedly and inject a lot of novelty into his writing.

“The Monkey Treatment” led me to the entertaining science fiction novel Hunter’s Run (which Martin co-wrote with Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham), some of the Wild Cards series (which I found overwhelmingly dull, even Martin’s contributions), and finally to A Song of Ice and Fire, which was highly enjoyable until A Feast for Crows.  Fevre Dream (vampires and 1850’s Mississippi paddlewheelers), and his werewolf novella “The Skin Trade” are next on my list.  

The Fontana Book of [mostly] Great Ghost Stories, Volume I

In his allusion-rich introduction to the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, Robert Aickman states that “there are only about thirty or forty first-class ghost stories”.  The long-running Fontana series published several hundred, and most were at least pretty good.  Aickman, who edited the first eight volumes of the series (1964-1972) before turning over the reins to R. Chetwynd-Hayes, suggests that many of the best are from the early Twentieth Century, “The pre-1914 Eden with the snake only just stirring”.  Indeed, almost half of the stories in this volume are from before the First World War.  

The Travelling Grave, by L.P. Hartley, is a unique, bizarre tale of a deadly contraption perambulating around an English country house.

The Ghost Ship, by Richard Middleton, cozily describes the effect of a ghostly pirate ship running aground in a turnip field adjacent to an already-haunted village.

Squire Toby’s Will is one of J.S. LeFanu’s classic chillers, involving a family squabble that continues after death.

William Hope Hodgson’s The Voice in the Night is an overwrought tale of fungus among us.

Three Miles Up, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, concerns the explorations of two young men on a canal boat.  Three Miles Up originally appeared in the Howard/Aickman collaboration We Are for the Dark, and it is so Aickman-esque I have a feeling that writing it was a very close collaboration indeed.  Aickman himself was ambiguous about this, as quoted here. I haven't read the rest of Howard's stories from We Are for the Dark, but this blogger has.

D.H. Lawrence’s The Rocking-Horse Winner is memorable and sad, a cautionary tale about the pursuit of riches.

The Wendigo, by Algernon Blackwood, is a story I first read as a kid, and the cry, “Oh, oh!  My burning feet of fire!” has always stuck with me.  Rereading this tale of a Canadian woods-spirit was a great reminder of Blackwood’s mastery of the horror and mystery of wild places.

The Crown Derby Plate, by Marjorie Bowen, is a succinct and creepy tale of mistaken identity, but one of the less memorable stories in this collection.

As he did in six of his eight Fontana collections, Aickman includes one of his own, The Trains, first published in We Are for the Dark.  It concerns two young hikers who come upon a house by an isolated but busy rail line.  Despite my great enjoyment of Aickman, I have to admit that The Trains is not one of my favorites.  It has its moments.

The Old Nurse’s Story, by Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell, is the most old-fashioned ghost story in the collection (not surprisingly, since it was originally published in 1852).  It contains nothing unexpected, but it satisfies.

The collection finishes with Seaton’s Aunt, by Walter de la Mare, in which the titular character exerts a malign influence on her young nephew and the reader is never quite sure if the supernatural is involved.  De la Mare makes you wish poor Seaton would just get haunted by ghosts instead of being haunted by his aunt’s psychological torture.

Nitpickers, of which I am usually one, may remark that not all of the works in the collection are strictly ghost stories, but all in all, the first Fontana Collection of Great Ghost Stories does provide a number of great stories, and some good ones.

Ramsey Campbell's The Influence

I read The Influence (1988) in yet another Tor edition with a great keyhole cover (recently I’ve had to resist an urge to collect books with keyhole covers – someone must do it).

In The Influence, young Rowan’s great-aunt Queenie dies, but doesn’t want to stay that way.  It appears she might be trying to use the little girl as a gateway back to the land of the living.  Queenie’s a well-realized character, a believably poisonous influence on others in life and beyond.  Can Rowan be saved from her malice?


Like most of Campbell’s work, The Influence is set around Liverpool, but the city doesn’t play a major role.  Instead, Queenie’s house, nearby Wales, and the routes between them are the locations.  As always, Campbell provides us with a lot of geographical details, so entwined with the story that the places are almost like characters themselves.

Campbell is skilled at providing his protagonists with mundane stresses along with the supernatural ones; Rowan’s dad is an underemployed electrician, there’s marital strife, and Rowan was a “mistake” who worries about burdening her parents.

Despite the familiar elements, The Influence strays a little from Campbell’s usual style; it has more of a traditional, almost old-fashioned feel to it.  The most memorable part of the story is Rowan’s solitary trip back from Wales to Queenie’s house after a series of traumatic events.  Campbell makes it lonely, bleak, and menacing.  The novel loses steam later on, but overall The Influence is an enjoyable chiller.

Ghost Music: Probably not a good introduction to Graham Masterton

I know I’ve read some of Graham Masterton's short stories; I just can’t remember which, where, or when.  I do know that Ghost Music is the first of his novels I’ve read, and it probably wasn't a good place to start.

Ghost Music’s protagonist, Gideon Lake, is a successful composer of advertising jingles, who moves into a Greenwich Village apartment and begins an affair with the mysterious Kate, his downstairs neighbor.  She has a crass and menacing real estate agent husband, Victor, is consistently described as cold and bony, shatters glass with her screams when she climaxes, and continually dodges Gideon’s questions.  Nonetheless, he’s infatuated; Masterton tells us this, but he doesn’t show us – there’s an odd lack of real emotion in the relationship. 

It’s hardly a spoiler to say that Kate’s a ghost, since Masterton makes it abundantly clear to the reader; this makes the reader want to smack the dull and unquestioning Gideon for having no clue until Ghost Music’s finale.  As Kate sends him tickets and keys to the houses of her friends in Stockholm, London, and Venice, Gideon very slowly begins to realize that he has a “resonance” that allows him to see dead people.  But what are they trying to tell him? And how are Kate and Victor involved?

Much like Gideon and Kate’s relationship, the whole novel seems lacking in emotion, hastily tacked together for the sake of convenience.  There’s nothing of the lyrical infatuation of, say, Richard Adams’ The Girl in the Swing, and there’s nothing to raise the short hairs on the back of your neck, either.  The dialogue is mostly flat and unconvincing, and, like Ramsey Campbell in The Grin of the Dark, Masterton seems to have trouble making his American characters sound American – Britishisms sneak in (Gideon repeatedly refers to his “beezer” after getting punched in the nose).  Add a stereotypical gangster henchman who says “dollface” sixty years too late, Gideon’s lovingly clichéd description of Kate’s “dew-soaked lily petals”, and a hastily tacked-on bit about shady organ transplants before the disappointed ending, and the whole thing ends up seeming weak and a little silly. 

Despite this disappointment, it’s too early to give up on Graham Masterton; he's a prolific writer and perhaps Ghost Music just wasn't his best effort.  I need to check out some of his earlier novels like The Manitou and see if they have more to offer.

Anthology Review: The Museum of Horrors

Anthologies are a great way to discover writers.  As a youngster, I expanded my horror horizons by reading Marvin Kaye anthologies like Devils & Demons, encountering for the first time a whole host of great writers from W.W. Jacobs to Tanith Lee.  Kaye did have the unfortunate habit of adding a lot of stories by his friends, and sometimes by himself, which were of lesser quality.  As a rule, though, it’s rare to find an anthology with strong stories throughout (except for The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, which was just about perfect).

I recently read The Museum of Horrors, which is no exception to the usual unevenness.  It’s an eclectic 18-story collection edited by Dennis Etchison, who received a World Fantasy Award for his efforts.  At first I assumed the anthology had the theme suggested by the title, especially with the Joyce Carol Oates opener “The Museum of Dr. Moses”, in which the titular character, a retired coroner, shows off his museum of medical specimens to his wary stepdaughter.  I’m not a huge fan of Oates, and found this story too lengthy for what it was.  Only one other story, Charles L. Grant’s forgettable “Whose Ghosts These Are” really touches on the theme, although S.P. Somtow’s exotic, genre-transcending “The Bird Catcher” sort of brushes against it.  It might have been a constricting theme anyway.

Highlights from The Museum of Horrors include a solid Ramsey Campbell contribution, “Worse than Bones”, about a particularly nasty ghost who communicates via notes in the margins of a book of ghost stories.  Tom Piccirilli’s “Those Vanished I Recognize” is memorable and dreamlike, and Conrad Williams’ “Imbroglio” is the tale of a serial killer’s depredations from a young boy’s perspective.  Another serial killer tale, “Hammerhead”, comes from the late Richard Laymon; it’s enjoyable if your tastes run towards the graphic and nasty.  Robert Devereaux’s Judas story, “Apologia”, isn’t horror, but it is well-written and entertaining.

Some of the other stories, like Susan Fry’s “The Impressionists in Winter” are horror and well-written, but not very memorable.  Gordon Linzner’s “Author, Author” is clichéd, and Peter Atkins’ “King of Outer Space” seems out of place.  Melanie Tem’s fantasy “Piano Bar Blues” is lackluster.

The biggest disappointment, however, comes from Peter Straub.  For unknown reasons (although perhaps to display Straub’s name prominently on the cover), Etchison included a near 50-page fragment by Straub called “Perdido”.  A tale of a fantastic mountain resort, it is only a fragment, and a boring one at that.  Straub sees fit to end it with a note about how he dreamed the story and then never had time to finish it, putting it in a binder.  It should have stayed there, as it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. 

Straub’s fragment and some of the complete stories make The Museum of Horrors a little more uneven than most anthologies, but the highlights make it worth a look.

The Internet Archive: Some horrible horror films, and a few good ones

When  I first started looking for obscure horror films, back before my Netflix subscription, I found the Internet Archive and its science fiction and horror film collection.  The Internet Archive is a “digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form”, a vast compendium of software, texts, audio, and film of all sorts.   

Most of the horror films in the collection are ones likely to be featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, like Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Killer Shrews (1959), and Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966).  That said, you can also find some true classics, including Nosferatu (1922), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Carnival of Souls (1962) (well, the last one’s debatable, but I liked it).  There are also some esoteric ones like an early Frankenstein (1910) and 1920’s The Golem, Japanese giant monster movies, even video nasties like Driller Killer (1979).  And there are wonderful titles like Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973), I Eat Your Skin (1970), and The Phantom Creeps (1939).

The Archive search function isn't the best, and some uploads have formatting issues, but it's still a great place to browse for old and obscure horror movies.

Frankenstein, 1910

Ancient Images: Stay out of the Tower!

 

I’ve been a fan of Ramsey Campbell for a long time.  I came across “Cold Print” in the excellent Lovecraftian anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Volume II and went looking for more.  This led to Demons by Daylight, Campbell’s second collection of stories, and the first, as he admits in the forward, in which he was finding his own voice and leaving Lovecraft imitation behind.  Next came novels (The Hungry Moon and the wonderfully titled The Doll Who Ate His Mother were early favorites), and I had fun hunting for more of his seemingly innumerable short stories in various anthologies. 

My latest Campbell read is his 1989 novel Ancient Images.  I loved the lurid keyhole cover (left), but ended up being less enthused about the book itself. 

Ancient Images starts promisingly, with the rediscovery of a never-released horror film, Tower of Fear, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.  Film editor Sandy's friend Graham, the rediscoverer, soon meets a grisly fate and the film goes missing; this sets Sandy off on a road trip to find it and find out more about the lurking fear which seems to surround it.  Those associated with the film are reluctant to discuss it, and many have met grisly fates of their own... or begin to meet them as Sandy digs deeper.  Even her cats bite the dust.

 

So far, so good.  Campbell's signature writing style, where everyday objects and scenes are imbued with horror, is present here, and he also includes some interesting film history.  But Ancient Images quickly starts to drag.  Sandy isn't a very engaging protagonist.  When supernatural beings being to manifest themselves, they aren't very engaging either.  They also appear too often - it seems like Sandy sees (or thinks she sees) something lurking in the bushes every other page or so.  The lurkers are described as having flowers in their eyes, which somehow detracts from their horror.

As Sandy peels back the shroud surrounding Tower of Fear, the plot veers into shades of The Wicker Man, with pagan/harvest/fertility themes.  There's a creepy scene in a dark tower (of fear), and some lurking scarecrows (or are they?).  A wandering band of hippie-types called Enoch's Army is introduced.  I'm not sure why they were included or if there was a real-life parallel to them in 80's England.  The plot could have done fine without them.  Enoch's Army, Sandy, and the plot all stagger towards the oddly idyllic village of Redfield, where the wheat grows really, really well.  Then there is a lackluster and anti-climactic conclusion.    

I felt that Ancient Images might have worked better as a short story; as a novel, it wasn't entirely cohesive and seemed padded to reach novel length.  I kept comparing unfavorably to Campbell's more recent film-related novel, The Grin of the Dark.  The real disappointment is that the enjoyable concept of a forbidden, cursed, and ghastly horror film doesn’t really come to fruition.  When Sandy finally tracks down the film and views it, it doesn’t seem all that ghastly, and even worse, there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason for supernatural forces to take the trouble to haunt it.

Ramsey Campbell's still one of my favorite horror authors.  I just didn't feel this was one of his best efforts.