The Haunted Weblog

Monday, September 30, 2002

1-2-3-4 I Feel Sick – Send for the doctor quick quick quick. I’ve felt better. Spent most of the day in bed, hope to be on my feet tomorrow. No links today, but a little story.

Oracular Me – I was walking home from the grocery store yesterday when I saw a red-tailed hawk over my head. It was flying toward a ledge on the side of the building I was walking beside. It landed, but it seemed to have landed poorly. Its wings were out and it seemed to have hit the ledge at an angle. It dropped off the ledge, twisted around, and flew away from the building with a pigeon in its talons. What I had thought was a clumsy landing was a direct hit. It flew across the street and landed on the roof of a single story building. It stood there, as if on guard for any challengers. Since the ornithologically correct name for a pigeon is a rock dove, I decided to take this as an omen. I mean, a hawk kills a dove. Do I have to draw you a picture?

Book 9:26 PM [+]
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New Nightmares – I don’t read a lot of first novels. Sturgeon’s Law is not to be taken lightly, and I don’t have the infinite time to spend with writers who don’t have strong reputations. But Cemetery Dance gave Night Terrors a good and intriguing review, and I knew of author Drew Williams from a couple of email lists I subscribe to, so I thought I’d give it a try. I’m glad I did. I think I just got in at the ground floor of an interesting literary career.

As first I thought I had made a mistake. If you read a lot of horror you tend to get a little jaded. Page after page of apparently random misery, death, suicide, madness, and nightmares roll past you, and after a while you begin to yearn for something original. The nasty bits here are brutal, shocking, and well written, but I was anxious for more. The central idea of a supernatural being that can enter nightmares, playing with the minds of his victims for his own nefarious purposes, didn’t sound like it was going to play out into anything too original. As one of the characters in the book says “I don’t have time for this Freddy Krueger shit.”

But about halfway through the book kicks into high gear. The dream invading demigod isn’t content to mess with minds. He needs to sow fear, death, and destruction in the real world. The final climactic battle is everything it should be, a small Hell on Earth paralleled by a hellish battle inside of human minds. This all works because of deftly drawn, believable characters and William’s first-rate descriptive skills. Characters that would have been stock villains in lesser hands are fully formed and even somewhat sympathetic. Surreal dreamscapes are made real.

While I might have wished for a little tighter editing of the first part of the book, I’m not sure what could have been cut, as it all seemed to play out in the complex yet fast-paced conclusion. If you are a fan of hardcore horror you could do a lot worse than this first-rate debut.

Book 12:59 PM [+]
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The Haunted Cabin – Sounds like a nice place to get away. A quaint cabin by the lake, complete with hot and cold running ghosts. Mildly creepy story, but what struck me is that the cabin is on the shore of Donner Lake. If there is anyplace in America that has earned its angry lingering spirits, it is there.
Book 11:25 AM [+]
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Nazis. I Hate Those Guys – Amazingly weird story in Pravda about an archeological dig in the Ukraine that found some victims of the most bizarre department of Nazi Germany. Ahnenerbe was a research society created by Himmler. They were into just about everything that was freaky, including the occult, vivisection, and science fiction-type weapons. If anyone was going to go after the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, it would be them
Book 8:53 PM [+]
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Bits to Bits – My maternal grandfather died before the twentieth century was half over. His body was laid out in the house where he had lived, and the townsfolk came to offer condolences. Death, they knew, was part of life. After the wars we tried to forget that. We compartmentalized death, made it something separate. Our departed were shipped off to funeral “homes.” Drop ‘em off, leave, get on with it. Eventually we invented drive-in funerals. We don’t have to get close to the grieving relatives; death is again separated from life. Now comes the funeral for our decade. Why even show up when you can be a virtual presence? Yes, the funeral webcast is now available. It seems that each generation gets the end that they deserve.
Book 8:03 PM [+]
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Toys For Future de Sades – Some Australian parents have their knickers in a twist over some delightful children’s toys called Stretch Screamers. They are cute little dolls that look like monsters, mummies, Martians, and ghouls. They are elastic, so you can stretch them and squeeze them. And when you do, they scream in agony. You can strangle your new pal too. When you do that a big bubble will rise from your victim’s throat. I can’t imagine what those parents are upset about. The manufacturer’s website features crappy Flash animation and unpleasant screeching sounds.
Book 7:22 PM [+]
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Totally Cool! – But a bit fishy, and very evil. Now you can proclaim your worship of the Old Ones to the world with an Esoteric Order of Dagon T-shirt. There are a lot of cool things at Sigh Co., and I thank die puny humans for showing the way.
Book 10:15 PM [+]
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Japan Takes A Giant Step Backwards – For the first time since democracy was imposed upon them half a century ago, the Japanese courts have banned a novel. It cannot be published, and the author has been ordered to pay a large fine. It seems that a character in the novel was inspired by a real person, and it was decided that people have a right not to inspire fictional characters.
Book 10:17 PM [+]
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Freeze Dried People Powder – This is the best idea for corpse disposal I’ve heard of in a long time. You’ll be quick frozen, then pulverized to powder with sonic waves. Sure, it lacks the old world dignity of burial or the Viking romance of cremation, but it makes up for it in science fiction-y coolness. Think about it. You explode in a cloud of dust! What an exit.
Book 8:34 PM [+]
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Rule Britannia! – The British Fantasy Awards have been announced. I see that The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 12 won for best anthology. No surprise there. It was pretty good, but it had a fairly obvious British tilt, editor Stephen Jones's protestations to the contrary not withstanding.
Book 7:43 AM [+]
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Spooky Art – Tired of being a pale imitation of Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson has decided that he now wants to be a pale imitation of Clive Barker. An exhibit of his paintings in Hollywood has drawn raves from fellow empty headed celebrities. The images are disturbing, scary, horrific . . . ah, who cares? Ever since I read this article in The Onion last year I haven’t been able to look at Marilyn without wanting to giggle.
Book 6:38 PM [+]
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Hellish Meme of the Week – Check out the Google search results for the phrase “go to hell.”
Book 6:16 PM [+]
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The Tempest Continues – The horror community is still abuzz over Paula Guran’s essay from a couple of weeks ago. As I said last week, I think the essay was full of sound and fury, but it was so poorly written that it signified nothing. Now E.C. McMullen weighs in with his response. It is a well written essay, but if you choose to skip it because you are already well and truly sick of all this, I won’t blame you.
Book 6:14 PM [+]
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Excelsior! – It just blows my mind that a Pulitzer Prize winning author is going to write the script for the next Spider-Man movie. Are comic book themes now considered to be acceptable grist for the intellectual mill? This Bizarro World am confusing.
Book 11:14 PM [+]
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Wild About Harry – It has been a very good week for Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling. First, she won that idiotic plagiarism suit filed by that awful woman who claimed she invented Harry and the word “muggles.” The plaintiff was fined $50,000 because she is a great big fibber. Then it was announced that Rowling is three months pregnant. All good. Now that she is out from under that cloud, and she has a happy little bun in the oven, perhaps she will sit down at her solid gold writing desk and finish the fifth book.
Book 10:16 PM [+]
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Good Stuff, Good Cause – Shocklines, the on-line horror store, is holding a charity auction at eBay to raise money for the Horror Writers Association and ProLiteracy Worldwide. Some pretty amazing stuff is on the block. You might want to check it out.
Book 9:55 PM [+]
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Fantasy Novel Comes True – In American Gods Neil Gaiman introduces us to Mr. Wednesday, a formerly wealthy and powerful fellow who now makes his living as a grifter. While most of the novel is, of course, impossible, I thought that at least one of the cons seemed remarkably plausible. It seems that someone else had that thought too, as the con was played for real in Winnipeg a couple of weeks ago. Mr. Wednesday might be onto something here, as the thief made off with over $25,000.
Book 9:44 PM [+]
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Fine Wholesome Reading For the Young Ladies – Hitting better bookstores near you next month, a book you didn’t know you needed, until now.
Book 10:00 PM [+]
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Just Singing In the Rain – Authorities in Australia have refused to allow the production of alcoholic milk. They say it will lead to juvenile drinking. Nonsense. It can only lead to wholesome milkbars, where young people and their droogs can relax with their milk-plus and make up their rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The milk with sharpen them up and make them ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, if that happens to be what they are peeting. What could possibly be frightening about that?
Book 9:57 PM [+]
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Eros, Thanatos, and Advertising – An Italian coffin maker has a great new idea to advertise their products – drape nearly nude women over them! What the heck, you aren’t dead yet. Here is an article about it. Here is the web page itself. Scroll down to any of the links under the heading “Cofani funebri e fascino.” Or just click on the link under that for their free calendar. I’m particularly partial to September-October.
Book 10:57 PM [+]
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This Must Be the Best Book In the World – It is the bestselling book in the country. So important, it is required reading in every school and every university. It is a never ending spiritual source, a guide for living in this Golden Age. It makes up for shortcomings in the Bible and the Koran. It is Ruhnama. Never heard of it? Well then, you are not fortunate enough to live in Turkmenistan. I so want to move to there.
Book 10:30 PM [+]
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Tempest in a Cauldron – Last week I linked to a commentary by Paula Guran on the state of the horror genre. It is an interesting piece but a bit vague. It needed to be more specific about the nature of the problem and it failed to present a clear plan to correct it. This week the partisans have at her. One letter writer cheers Paula on but suggests she’ll need some form of armor to deal with the barbs that will be headed her way. Other letters dive right for the ad hominem, achieving nothing more than proving a part of her point. But Nick Mamatas (nope, I’ve never heard of him either) hits at the heart of her arguments, assailing her logic, decrying the non-specific nature of her complaints, and suggesting that all she will achieve is more of the pointless argument and name-calling that has characterized much of the discussion in the field. I’m afraid I have to agree with him. Guran may have a point to make, but I don’t think she make it here.
Book 9:39 PM [+]
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Love-Notes – If you are seriously interested in weird fiction, ghost stories, or the history of contemporary horror, you have one absolute must read. Supernatural Horror in Literature by H.P. Lovecraft is widely considered to be the seminal essay on the study of the genre. Written in 1927 and revised in 1933, it provides a definition of weird fiction, creates a framework for critical analysis, gives a history of the genre, and presents brief, readable plot summaries of its major novels and short stories, placing them in the history and explaining their importance. Lovecraft is free with his opinions, lavishing praise on his favorite writers (Poe gets his own chapter) and criticizing those that don’t come up to the mark. If a student of spooky books wanted a reading list that would provide a grounding in the classics, seeking out the works sited in this essay would be an excellent place to start.

It is a flawed gem, to be sure. It occasionally alludes to concepts of racial memory and the notion that different racial types produce different myths and stories. Lovecraft felt that Celtic peoples, Northern Europeans and Jews in particular have an affinity for the weird story. This nonsense is only a minor distraction, and can perhaps be forgiven as the theories that Lovecraft are parroting here were seriously considered by some anthropologists at the time. It is an unfortunate fact that Lovecraft’s letters do show that in such matters he was sadly ill-informed, and it is probably not going to far to say that he was a racist.

Other flaws are of a more literary nature. He was only human, and could not have read all of the literature that went before. Some errors were corrected in the later revision, but some were not. J. Sheridan LeFanu is given short shrift, even though scholars have identified him as one of the major weird writers of his time, and the essay completely fails to mention Oliver Onions. Finally, the text is, of course, written in Lovecraft’s own unique style. I love it, but I know that some people just can’t get into it. Pity, I think they miss a lot.

The reason I’m going on about this is that I recently read an annotated version of the book. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature is edited by and has notes by S.T. Joshi. Joshi is probably the world’s leading Lovecraft scholar. He has written a biography, annotations of his fiction, edited collections of Lovecraftian criticism and scholarship, and even wrote a book that attempted to track down every book in the old man’s library and trace the influence each volume might have had on his works. If anyone is going to take on the job of adding footnotes to this essay, it would have to be Joshi.

But that still leaves us with a question. At a very reasonable $15, is this edition really worth that much more than the inexpensive Dover edition? Or would you rather just read the text on-line for free? Do you need this new edition?

Well, maybe. It all depends on what you why you want it. If you are a serious student of weird fiction and Lovecraft, then you probably already have the book. The annotations are principally of interest to such scholars. Lovecraft mentions a fictional book, and the footnote suggests how this may have influenced his creation of the Necronomicon. Lovecraft mentions a writer, it is certainly interesting to find out that he met the man when he was a child, or that one of his many correspondents had suggested that he read that author. But if you are not that serious about this odd field of scholarship, and you are just reading it to learn something about the subject, most of the notes are just trivia. The bibliography of works and authors mentioned is quite useful, but you could do quite well by reading the Dover book with a highlighter or looking here. Joshi’s bibliography is more useful for serious scholarship, as it includes publication information and cites criticism of the works. Joshi’s essay at the beginning of the book is interesting, but again it is aimed at the serious scholar and for the average student of the weird is hardly indispensable. I also have a couple of quibbles. The footnotes are at the end of the book rather than on the same page. This required a lot of page flipping and although you get used to it after a while, it is a bit annoying. Also, Joshi makes one odd little error. In one footnote about Sax Rohmer he refers to Fu Manchu as a detective(!).

My conclusion: the serious scholar probably already has this. The casual scholar might as well save eight bucks and get the Dover edition.

Book 9:03 PM [+]
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Dead People Are Scary – How can I not link to this story? It combines two of my favorite things, stupid criminals and necrophobia. Thieves break into a funeral parlor, then freak out because there is a dead guy there. What in the name of Yuggoth did they expect to find in a funeral parlor? Great heaping bags of cash? Caches of gold bullion? A mint condition copy of Action Comics #1?
Book 4:59 PM [+]
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King of the Monsters! – Up in Toronto a theater (or theatre in Canada) group is putting on a play that features Godzilla as a character. I hope those corporate monsters at Toho don’t hear about it. If they’ll go after Davezilla imagine what they’ll say about this. Ironic, when you think about it. As the article points out, Godzilla is a symbolic representation of WWII era Japanese imperialism. Now, it seems, the creature is looking to add Davezilla’s weblog to his co-prosperity sphere. Perhaps we’d better break out the plans for the oxygen destroyer again.
Book 9:23 PM [+]
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Inspiration For Writers of Horror Stories – This first hit the news a couple of years ago, and has just re-surfaced because officials have announced that it will probably remain a mystery forever. A small airplane with eight men in it is flying over Australia. The pilot radios air traffic controllers and asks them to stand by. And that’s it. Somehow all eight men have died (or become completely incapacitated). The ghost plane flies over the outback, runs out of fuel, and crashes. How? Why? No one will ever know.
Book 10:29 PM [+]
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All the Amenities – My dream house has come onto the market. It is a refurbished chapel with built-in crypt – and it comes pre-stocked with four corpses! Who could ask for more?
Book 10:17 PM [+]
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I’m just going to avoid Romania for a little while – Before she died Orensia Constantin’s mother said that she did not want her daughter to bury her right away. She should wait because an angel would arrive from the east before the burial. So Orensia waited. A few months go by, the angel is late, and the neighbors in her apartment building are starting to complain. Naturally, the police show up and plant the late Mrs. Constantin in the ground. Hygienically wise I’m sure, but theologically a bit of a risk. What if that angel shows up and is expecting to see mom there? From what I’ve read, you don’t want to piss off an angel. The ones in the Bible don’t exactly act like Della Reese. I mean, some of those guys have two heads and flaming swords and such. I might have given her a little more time, just to be on the safe side.
Book 9:51 PM [+]
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Evil! Pure and Simple From the Lunchroom! – What stale hell is this? I have seen awful things in my day. I have seen the implements of torture used in the Inquisition. I have seen malignant gnomes dancing the tarantella. I have seen satanic rites that utilized a goat, a staple gun, and a videotape of Pia Zadora. But nothing, nothing prepared me for the horror that is Actual Pictures of Real School Lunches From an Elementary School in Virginia. You have been warned. (I found this via Looka. What demon whispered the URL into his ear I hope never to know.)
Book 9:03 PM [+]
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Searching for something weird? – Need to find nameless terrors? Looking for the city of R’lyeh? Want to know what Nyarlt'hotep has been up to lately? Well, check out the dread search engine with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy all its own: Cthuugle.
Book 8:42 PM [+]
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Sticker Wisdom – I saw a great bumper sticker today. It said “Buckle Up! It makes it harder for the aliens to suck you out of your car.”
Book 10:48 PM [+]
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Family Values – Paula Guran has a thoughtful, angry commentary about the current state of the horror genre over at Locus (via Bookslut). She starts by tracing the development of horror as a marketing category, the boom in the 70s, and the inevitable bust. That brings us to today, where she sees small cliques of writers and publishers, writing for each other, publishing each other, and blurbing each other. Nothing of value is produced. Now, perhaps I am missing something here, but I can’t help thinking, so what? So what if microscopic small presses produce derivative crap that no one reads but themselves? As an incomplete reader I read what I like. I listen to reviewers who have a proven track record with me, or who write such a well reasoned review that I am compelled to check out what they are talking about. I listen to recommendations from people whom I know are not fools, and ignore those from people who are. As an unfinished writer I strive to create something that isn’t crap. The fact that the horror community is not a fully functional family doesn’t seem to matter. Ms. Guran is a mighty fine editor (the latest issue of Horror Garage is the best staple bound thing I’ve read this year) and her thoughts on horror are always of value, but I’m left wanting to know why a strong tribe is valuable, and what exactly ought to be done to achieve it.


Book 10:12 PM [+]
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I am a man of words. There are other forms of expression – pictures, music, dance, all powerful and beautiful in their own way. But for me it is always words. Sometimes spoken, usually written, words have always been my friends. But on this day they abandon me. Mere language seems inadequate to express my feelings. One year ago I felt horror, anger, misery, and grief. I felt emotions I can’t even find words for. I find that anything I try to say about September 11 seems flat, banal, inadequate. So I won’t say anything. Instead, I’ll just point out Dave Barry, whose words speak to the heart, and James Lileks, whose words speak to the mind.
Book 11:08 PM [+]
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True Weird – Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Threshold is what H.P. Lovecraft called “The true weird tale.” He said that “(a) certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

Three friends break into the dark waterworks tunnels at the edge of the city. There they experience something terrible and inexpressible that changes their lives. Now, with one dead by her own hand, another escaping into the bottle, and the third paralyzed by mourning, they are met by a strange albino girl, who claims to have killed demons, and that an angel told her to call on them for help with the fight.

Threshold’s greatest strength and greatest weakness is its poetic use of language. Kiernan writes beautifully, but sometimes her writing distracts from the story and interrupts the pace. As you read you hit a wonderfully written descriptive passage, which you may well enjoy, but at the same time you are anxious for the style to settle down and the story to continue. Most annoying of all is Kiernan’s frequent use of words that have been jammed together. Silverbright. Grayblack. Powderwhite. The same thoughts could have been conveyed without these stupidpointless portmanteau neologisms. Cut those out and the power and poetry of the writing would have better served the story. As it is they distract from it. However, it is the power and poetry of the writing that makes this novel even possible. What we are building up to through the book, what we face in the end, is the impossible, the indescribable. It is outside of time, outside of human comprehension, and impossible to describe with the written word. The almost impressionistic narrative conveys the awful otherness as mere descriptive writing could not. While slightly flawed by occasional distracting rhetorical flourishes, this novel, with its well drawn three dimensional characters, its beautiful mood-setting writing, and its cosmic, mind-bending horror, is an excellent contemporary addition to the library of anyone who appreciates weird fiction. Here in the Haunted Library it is on the shelf with Blackwood, Machen, and Lovecraft.

Book 2:45 PM [+]
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Did it say “Abbey Normal” on the box? – Here’s a good reason to change the locks. Someone might break in and steal your brain.
Book 10:21 PM [+]
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Fall Books – A list of forthcoming major books, via Bookslut.
Book 8:13 PM [+]
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Black Cap Cases – Have a butchers at this list of executions in England from 1606 to 1895. There are some great names here. Guy Fawkes, Dick Turpin, Capt. Kidd, William Burke, and quite a few Fenians. The crimes are worth a look too. Mostly murders, some with unpleasant details like “murder of his child,” “murder of a little girl,” or “murder of sweetheart.” That all sound like today’s newspapers, but you know that the past is another world when you see “murder of illegitimate child,” “mutineer,” and “murder of infants; baby farming case.” Then there are John Smith and James Pratt, who surely lived in the wrong century – they were hanged for committing an “unnatural crime.” There are a million stories here.
Book 6:14 PM [+]
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Today I am enjoying a day off from work. This is the first one I’ve had in 13 days. My life will begin returning to something close to normal soon. Of course, normal is relative.
Book 6:06 PM [+]
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Gernsback’s Phallus – Congratulations to Neil Gaiman. His American Gods has won this year’s Hugo Award for best novel of the year. This is the first time (I think) that the same novel won the Hugo (also known as the Science Fiction Achievement Award) and the Stoker Award (given by the Horror Writers of America). It is ironic since American Gods is neither science fiction nor horror. Fantasy certainly, even dark fantasy, but not horror. I think the International Horror Guild was quite right to bypass Gaiman and give their bauble to Caitlin R. Kiernan for Threshold (more about that book in a future entry). It is certainly the best horror novel I have read this year. On the other hand, American Gods is the best novel, regardless of genre, that I have read this year. It is kind of hard to pass up that kind of quality when you are awarding plaudits. I guess there is something essentially silly about literary awards. They tend to lead to some of the most pointless debates (Is it horror or not? Should a children’s book qualify? Is it gay enough, libertarian enough, new enough, long enough, enough already?). Perhaps I should give out my own annual awards. That way I can make and break my own pointless rules at will. Hmmm.
Book 8:10 AM [+]
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Unit 731 – Perhaps you’ve never heard of Unit 731. If so, that is a shame. It should be taught in every school in every land. It holds a special place in the history of human evil, yet it is forgotten, ignored, and denied. Its lessons are discarded, its victims dismissed. It is the permanent, ultimate blot on the soul of the nation of Japan, and as such has been officially disavowed for years. This week a Japanese court finally acknowledged Unit 731.

Unit 731 was a scientific research unit of the Japanese Imperial Army. Their laboratory was Manchuria. Their test subjects were people. If they wanted to know how to use biological agents as weapons, they would infect a village. What works best, anthrax, bubonic plague, cholera? Why not infect rats, then airdrop them on a town or two? What is the pathology of the disease? Take a patient you have infected, wait until he is just about to die, then strap him to a table, open him up, and take a peek. Anesthetic? It might affect the results. Thousands died in such experiments. A quarter of a million were killed through deliberate infection.

Every student of history or medical ethics knows the name of Dr. Joseph Mengele, the Auschwitz “Angel of Death.” Why is it that almost no one knows the name Ishii Shiro? Why is it that most of the monsters of 731 got away unpunished? Because America covered it up for them. Why? So we could get the data. Information about how to wage and defend against biological warfare had become very valuable at the dawn of the Cold War. Valuable enough so that America became an accessory after the fact, trading justice for the fruits of evil.

There is nothing that we can do that will make this right. But there is something we can do that can make it worse. We can ignore it, forget it, and consign it to academic footnotes. Evil thrives in the shadows, and unlearned history tends to be repeated.

Book 7:18 AM [+]
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Autumn Reading – One of my favorite authors, Douglas Clegg, has a new book out. The Hour Before Dark hit the shelves this week, and the buzz is very good. Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review. For those of you not in the book business, that is a very good thing. Quoth PW: "Suspenseful and relentlessly spooky, told in economical prose yet peopled by characters as fully realized as one's own blood kin, this is at once the most artful and most mainstream tale yet from one of horror's brightest lights." Yea, I think this will go on my reading list. Clegg has set up an Hour Before Dark “dark game” message board. Pretty interesting reading.
Book 9:51 PM [+]
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