Black Static Horror Magazine #2 Page 8
God Laughs When You Die is an impressive collection. While some stories may seem lacking in substance and the level of violence could deter readers, there is no doubting Boatman's prose skills, his flair for a telling line or metaphor, the anger that informs his work and willingness to push at boundaries.
James Cooper is the exception that proves the rule, having first seen publication with a novel. His debut collection, You Are The Fly (Humdrumming paperback, 179pp, 8.99 pounds), contains sixteen stories, four co-written with Andrew Jury. It comes with the subtitle Tales of Redemption & Distress, but madness and metamorphosis might be more appropriate terms. In tone he reminds me of Poe, has the same obsessive quality and attention to minutiae, with the ghost of Roderick Usher breathing down the reader's neck as we turn the pages.
Opening story ‘The Other Son’ is a fine example of what Cooper does best, with echoes of Poe's Valdemar in the son of the title who suffers from a rare mental condition, believing that he is a corpse. The story of his deterioration and eventual death is told through the eyes of his brother (who is also the ‘other’ son—Cooper is nothing if not ambiguous), each event minutely detailed, with a subtext that hints at abuse in the family unit. It's a story that takes an impossible situation and makes it believable through the simple trick of regarding what happens as mundane, everyday, so that we cannot help but be moved by the characters’ plight, however far outside our own experience it falls. In title story ‘You Are the Fly’ Jud finds distraction from his unhappy relationship with Shelley in studying a housefly, but this displacement activity develops into an obsession that further alienates his lover. Cooper piles on the details, each step of Jud's descent carefully mapped out, closing with an image of transformation every bit as shocking and macabre as that in Cronenberg's The Fly.
Insects play a pivotal role in several of these stories, as with ‘Shortly Comes the Harvest', whose protagonist tries to save a friend wracked by grief, his feelings of loss manifesting in culinary excess, the consumption of insects and rats. Reading this story it's impossible to say when exactly the line is crossed, at what point an eccentricity blossoms into madness; we can only join with the narrator in wondering what could have been done differently. ‘A Frailty of Moths’ takes a surreal, Kafkaesque slant, as a man stands in a queue, no revelation as to why, then gets ushered off to a rich man's abode, an insect collector whose guests are transformed into moths. It's a strange story and doesn't quite fit with the rest of this collection, one which holds the interest but doesn't deliver on the expectations raised by the scenario, with the sense of an elusive something going on in the background, always tantalisingly out of reach.
The desperation of the grief stricken husband trying to resurrect his wife in ‘Hollow Heart’ comes over well, but at the end all we have is an unnecessary reprise on the themes of The Monkey's Paw and Pet Sematary. King's back catalogue is touched on in several of these stories, as with ‘In Fetu’ which reprises a core concept of The Dark Half, that of twins with one foetus absorbed by the other, but Cooper gives it an interesting twist and produces something sharper and more poignant than the King novel, detailing the mother's abnormal response to this situation. In ‘All He Wrote', co-written with Jury, the whole King canon of the writer as protagonist is reprised with a famous author who cannibalises the life of his greatest fan for his masterwork, only for the fan to exact a terrible revenge, the story questioning our criteria for greatness and how writers use what is given them.
Of the other collaborations with Jury ‘And So Departs’ is the best. It opens with a man discovering a body hanging from a tree in his garden, cleverly switching direction over and over again, so that by the end the reader is not exactly clear who is dead and who is alive, and with the worm of guilt consuming the central character.
For my money the best story in the book, ‘The Constant Eye’ is told from the viewpoint of a man looking back on a period in his childhood, when he ended up befriending Mattie, the school's designated victim, only to discover that the boy has a terrible gift, something even more frightening than the bullies who prey on him. Again comparisons with King are apposite, especially Carrie and The Body, but Cooper owns the material. Insightful about the world of children and the mentality of the bully, beautifully written and convincingly characterised, this is a compelling and moving story of power and responsibility, the revenge of the pariah.
The narrator of ‘The Skin I'm In’ is a self-harmer who lives with his mother, who herself has mental problems in that she is on occasion taken over by another personality, the tension between the two a sure recipe for disaster, though the real appeal of the story lies in the matter of fact and thoroughly credible depiction of the characters. It's a high note with which to end a collection by a young writer with a gift for portraying off the wall mental states, making us believe in them and care for the people involved regardless of the damage they inflict on others and, more often, themselves.
With a host of short stories and two novellas under his belt, Gary McMahon has more publication credits than any of these writers, and that's reflected in Dirty Prayers (Gary Friar Press paperback, 287pp, 7.99 pounds), which contains twenty five stories. Harlan Ellison is an obvious influence, with echoes of Deathbird Stories in the religious imagery that recurs, and the various Psalms that appear as interludes between each grouping of stories. McMahon lacks Ellison's élan, but there's the same feeling of anger barely held in check, of raw emotion about to explode on the page. More than any of these writers, even Boatman, McMahon writes from the gut, with each story a body blow to the reader. However fantastic, his fictions are rooted in the material and emotional squalor of our everyday world, tales of the displaced and dispossessed, fuelled by rage and disgust at the lack of common humanity that breeds these conditions.
Opener ‘Do Not Be Alarmed’ sets the tone with Brent, a man who feels the world around him is going to hell in a hand basket, this social malaise given voice by the alarms that constantly disturb his nights, like the hunting cry of some beast off in the urban jungle. When his wife inexplicably goes missing Brent abandons his life to search for her, following the alarms wherever they lead until he learns the terrible truth of what has become of the woman he loves. It is a story without pity, in which the modern world swallows up the innocent and betrays the rest, with the constant wail of the alarms as background music in a dystopia of our own making, one that has now assumed an identity and energy of its own.
'The Bungalow People’ is a sad, bitter story, with an elderly couple left alone to die by their family and society, clinging on to the hope that somebody actually cares, but of course all in vain, McMahon's words an indictment of a world which allows such indifference. ‘The Dead Kid’ has a man haunted by a corpse, that of a boy murdered by his former partner, who has now moved on to somebody else, as if it is their love which is left dead on the front lawn, the outward manifestation of feelings turned sour, of all the things lost to time and circumstance. ‘The Man in the Chimney’ is a figment of the imagination of a lonely woman who begins to obsess about what he may be doing while she is out of the house, this obsession coming to both dominate and give her life meaning. McMahon's assured prose and measured pacing elevate the story above the absurdity inherent in the situation to deliver something that is sinister and yet, in its coming full circle ending, strangely comforting.
Abusive fathers, cheating husbands and lovers are characters who appear over and over again in McMahon's fiction, as if he is trying to grapple with masculine roles in the noughties against a backdrop of outmoded machismo. Clay, the protagonist of ‘A Grown Woman', cannot control his temper and all of his past relationships have ended badly. He is finally brought to heel by an archetypal female who cannot be tamed, his masculinity completely undermined, but also with the sense that his suffering is deserved, something he has brought on himself by refusing to confront his own failings. In another story the hero becomes ‘Incommunicado', bereft of his ability to communicate with other people,
who only hear swearing and obscenity from his lips. He is a man disenfranchised from his own life through being inarticulate, the concept a powerful metaphor for our inability to converse meaningfully with each other. In ‘My Name Is’ a young girl is picked up by men in cars, who take her home and she forces them to admit that they abused her as a child. Though none of them are the actual offender they all find catharsis through confession, as if culpability and guilt are inevitable by-products of the male condition.
The protagonist of ‘Borrowed Times’ is a ghost in his own life, incapable of achieving anything, only having borrowed all the things he thought constituted his happiness, with McMahon's use of the second person reinforcing this sense of ineffectuality, that the protagonist is only a spectator, incapable of affecting events. There's a similar feel to ‘My Burglar', the story of a professional thief who believes that by breaking into people's homes he somehow manages to experience their lives, but when he is interrupted in his work feels that he himself has been robbed.
'Pray Dirty', which opens the third section, is the story most reminiscent of Deathbird Stories and one of the finest in the collection. The tenants of a rundown housing estate summon a god to settle scores with their grasping landlord, the story told from the viewpoint of an outsider and the details externalised more than in most of the other stories, but with a concern for the downtrodden at its core, along with the realisation that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. In the short ‘To Invocate His Aid’ a grief stricken father employs a black magician to raise the spirit of his dead daughter with mixed results, the action as gruesome as the end result is gratifying. ‘Like A Stone', the tale of a man returning to the town of his childhood and confronting the sins of his past, I praised highly on its original appearance in the anthology Bernie Herrmann's Manic Sextet (for details refer to ttapress.com). It's a story that tackles timeless themes of guilt and loss, one of the most keenly felt and moving pieces in the book.
In ‘Raise Your Hands’ the world turns against a man, inflicting violence on him for no reason, though there is the suggestion that actually this is what he desires, payback for some past, never specified transgression. Finally in ‘Face the Strange', a story inspired by the work of Arthur Machen, a man haunted by the memory of his girlfriend returns to the place where she died and is granted a vision of nature that helps him come to terms with his loss. It is a beautifully written and evocative story, the fitting end for one of the year's best collections of short fiction, a book that provides conclusive proof the short story is in good hands.
* * * *
What is it about the short form that appeals to you?
Gary Fry
To paraphrase Nietzsche, I regard short stories as I do a cold bath—quick in, quick out. The immediacy of such a shock to the system is what short stories do best. Which is not to say that the finest short fiction provides only shocks. No, sir. It can be delicate and insidious, as well as brutal. Whatever the case, the common denominator is that condensation of effect: every word matters. Its language is at least as important as the events it depicts. Good short story writers are good writers; the form demands an unforgiving level of literary skill. Long may they continue to be published and read!
Michael Boatman
My favourite stories draw you in quickly, get you to care about the lead character and then mess him up bad. Real bad. They place the protagonist on the razor's edge of an extraordinarily difficult situation, one far beyond his ability to deal with, and then force him to deal with it; deal with it or die, maybe lose a limb or be forever transformed. I love anthologies. A great horror anthology should come at you from a dozen different directions, fast and violent like a gang rape in a prison shower. Maybe there's a slim chance of escape but probably not. Unlike involuntary sodomy, however, the reader should come away bruised, dented ... and ready for more.
James Cooper
The best short stories are reflections, of someone, somewhere, reaching out. It's like that shocking glimpse you catch of yourself as you walk past a mirror, when what you're expecting to see doesn't always present itself. For a moment the space that your body seems to occupy is unfocused, as though your reflected world has been twisted beyond its natural state, and you discover something in the blurred image that's almost impossible to define. This is why the short story is so important to me both as a writer and a reader. Because somewhere in there I always see reflected back at me the best and worst of who I am.
Gary McMahon
I think the short form appeals to me most because it's the perfect literary venue to examine a moment, a feeling, an emotion—something brief and fleeting and unforgettable. A good short story is a sort of concentrated snapshot from the life of a character, and in skilled hands so much can be said and revealed and suggested in a few thousand well chosen words. Scars that last a lifetime can be made in not much time at all.
* * * *
Five Favourite Horror Stories
Gary Fry
'Just Behind You’ by Ramsey Campbell x ‘The Cast’ by Nicholas Royle x ‘Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad’ by M.R. James x ‘Man From The South’ by Roald Dahl x ‘The Willows’ by Algernon Blackwood
Michael Boatman
'Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy’ by David J. Schow x ‘Night They Missed the Horror Show’ by Joe R. Lansdale x ‘Gramma’ by Stephen King x ‘The Pit’ by Joe R. Lansdale x ‘Danger Word’ by Tananarive Due & Stephen Barnes
James Cooper
'The Mezzotint’ by M.R. James x ‘The Monkey's Paw’ by W.W. Jacobs x ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson x ‘The Crowd’ by Ray Bradbury x ‘Chiliad’ by Clive Barker
Gary McMahon
'The Dark Lands’ by Michael Marshall Smith x ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’ by Harlan Ellison x ‘It Only Comes Out At Night’ by Dennis Etchison x ‘The Scar’ by Ramsey Campbell x ‘The Willows’ by Algernon Blackwood
* * * *
OLD DEVIL MOON by CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
(Serpent's Tail paperback, 296pp, 7.99 pounds)
In the introduction to his first collection of short stories in nearly five years, Christopher Fowler catalogues a miscellany of recent news stories that show how reality has far outstripped ‘dark’ fiction in its ability to deliver shocks to the system, while by way of afterword there's an interview in which he sets out his own thoughts on writing in general and crafting short stories in particular. Between these two book ends we get twenty two short stories which show that the master has lost none of his old magic, a collection that is as diverse as it is substantial, with quality the only common denominator.
Opening story ‘The Threads’ is one of several which deals with the English abroad, assuming the airs and graces of empire lost and inevitably coming a cropper. The villain of the story, the male half of an English couple in North Africa, steals a valuable carpet from a local dealer only to find himself on the receiving end of some particularly nasty just desserts. It's a satisfying twist in the tail piece, but the real strength of the story lies in the contrast between the disdain and aloof selfishness of the European and the native sense of community, with everyone looking out for each other. ‘Cupped Hands’ covers similar territory, its amoral Englishman leaving his native lover to her fate and falling in with a mercenary's plan to blackmail a town by withholding its water supply, but in this instance Fowler allows his protagonist a change of heart and he is able to redeem himself. One of the best stories in the book, ‘Identity Crisis’ concerns a man who exploits modern technology to take on the identity of others, finding himself stranded in a sinister Spanish town, as if Highsmith's Ripley had wandered into Tryon's Harvest Home. Beautifully told, its twists and turns a delight, deftly setting us up for the shock ending in which identity becomes even more problematic, with something very dark and menacing at the narrative's heart, this is quintessential Fowler.
Several stories come with a Victorian setting, as with ‘The Lady Downstairs', a Sherlock Holmes pastiche in which it's Mrs Hudson who solve
s a crime, simply through being more in tune with the lower classes than the Great Detective, the story tapping into the reader's natural joy in seeing a clever clogs brought low. There's something of melodrama about ‘Heredity', another slice of Victoriana, in which a plot by childless aristocrats to steal their maidservant's son is foiled. It's a feel good and unabashedly sentimental tale, and doesn't quite fit with the rest of this collection, except in the sense of demonstrating how wide Fowler's range is. Further proof of that, if needed, comes in the anarchic, knockabout comedy of a visit to ‘The Night Museum', which houses exhibits celebrating the exploits of some of the lesser known explorers of the Victorian age, the author's imagination in overdrive and tongue firmly in cheek as he throws up oddity after oddity, as if to ask the reader, “how much more of this are you prepared to swallow?"
The same mocking sense of humour, albeit in a more modern and media savvy vein, informs ‘That's Undertainment', a catalogue of films “intended to provide entertainment and pleasure", but which do “the exact opposite, to the point of horror". Fowler's satirical broadsides seldom miss their mark, and one can only regret that their intended targets will, almost certainly, never read this story. Hollywood itself is the setting for ‘The Uninvited', another highlight of the collection and reminiscent of Bradbury classic The Crowd, with a party going actor seeing the same, sinister group of people at each function, and a similar tragic aftermath on each occasion. The ending will be transparent to anyone who was alive during the 60s, but Fowler's build up is assured and the story is far more than its sting in the tail denouement.