Horror: The 100 Best Books (31 page)

***

It is difficult, when one has finished reading F. Paul Wilson's
The Keep
, to imagine anything essential to the genre's form which was omitted. Whatever a reader or reviewer of horror fiction thinks primary -- necessary in the sense of originality of idea, basic to tight plotting and its progression, desirable in characterization and imperative in terms of suspense, surprise, and the inexorable buildup of the total storyline from event to event, chapter to chapter -- seems to me present in Dr. Wilson's masterwork. I include the qualifying "seems to me" from a sense of fealty to the proprieties, but I will be inclined toward becoming passionately disagreeable if anyone wishes to quarrel over this admittedly extreme viewpoint. More a matter of sheer opinion, I think, is the further thought that this novel wouldn't be the worst choice in the world as an exemplar held up for would-be novelists working in any modern genre (including the mainstream -- which could use an infusion of originality, plot, suspense and so forth). Many new writers who have the good sense to check into what's selling in the realm of their literary bent are often heard (when one listens) to remark, "Even I can write something better than that!" It would make a pleasant change if novices were exposed to a novel which elicits a sense of respect for the writing craft. And the overwhelming majority of newcomers to any sort of novel writing are not about to write a book even fractionally so fine as
The Keep
. The fact that it was conceived and brought to full term by a young man who is a full-time, practicing physician -- who was also engaged in creating richly-inventive science fiction -- causes a lifelong Sherlockian to reflect about reincarnation, and to wonder, "Whatever happened to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?" Not that it was Dr. Conan Doyle whom Paul Wilson cited on his acknowledgments page; those fantasists were Lovecraft, Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, undeniably with sound and sometimes-obvious reason. Yet it's just as true that Wilson, as was true of Sir Arthur in detective fiction, is one of the few frequent practitioners of horror who deals conspicuously with questions of good versus evil; with mythology and the supernatural. Unlike many popular authors -- some of whom object to the "horror" label mainly because it's
de rigueur
to do so -- Dr. Wilson often permits his characters the motivation of morality or immorality, self-identification with entrenched rules of faith and decent conduct, nihilism and sin. He thereby endows them with a timelessness absent from much of modern fiction. "Molasar was evil," Theodor Cuza concludes, in
The Keep
: "That was given: Any entity that leaves a trail of corpses in order to continue its own existence is inherently evil." Which is not at all to say that his supremely well-crafted novel advances the simplistic notion that its characters (mirroring real people) are all black or all white, virtuously devoid of those psychological shadings so dear to those engaged unceasingly in a sentimental search for better ways to forgive the unforgivable. From the start of his book, Paul Wilson uses as his viewpoint character Captain Klaus Woermann. The period is the Second World War, a time when, as a small boy, I believed all living Germans were Nazis and that Nazis were the embodiment of evil. It's hard for me to conceive of a protagonist for whom, as a reader, I was less likely to care; when I read Woermann's message, "
Something is murdering my men
," I thought,
Good
! But this German officer is not one "to abandon a position"; the fight has "gone out of his heart", he paints, he has two sons and detests the SS, he is "intelligent and precise", and he's "no longer in command of the Keep" because "something dark and awful" has "taken over". And when, at the end for Klaus Woermann, he prays, "
Dear God, if you are my God
," I was reminded that human beings may work for or ruefully support endeavors of evil, but that its source, and the origins of its opposite, stem from elsewhere. Let us not make too much, however, of the serious intent or elements of
The Keep
; not when it is the perfect product of a master storyteller who is here at his endlessly entertaining best. Instead, let's refer again to the echoes of the great storyteller Conan Doyle to which I listened raptly right up to the penultimate period of this readable book. Good Glaeken, running through Dr. Wilson's symbol of evil, grapples with his opposite number on the parapet of the Keep. "Together," he writes, "they toppled over the edge and plummeted down." Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty "tottered together upon the brink of the fall" and Dr. Watson believed they went "reeling over, locked in each other's arms . . . deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water". Wilson's contrasting pair awaited "the shattering impact with the stones invisible below"; Holmes saw Moriarty when "he struck a rock". Ultimately, both figures of courage and goodness -- each in his own way immortal -- triumph. Contemporary horror, in common with most so-called "modern fiction" regardless of the year of publication, is written to sell, be read, establish the author, and persuade the powers that be -- readers among them, if he or she is fortunate -- to allow the cycle to occur all over again. And there is nothing wrong with that, I suppose; it's far worse when the author is merely an imitator or sets out to craft a classic and falls woefully short. Novels that last, particularly in that which is too loosely called "genre fiction", are the soul of serendipity; delightful happenstance as the product of immense creative effort. I feel sure
The Keep
is one of the only four or five such enduring novels I've read in contemporary horror. -- J. N. WILLIAMSON

A collection of short material written between 1972 and 1981,
The Dark Country
demonstrates the quiet, modern American Gothic strain of which Etchison is a master. Typically, he writes of the horrors that stalk motel car parks ("It Only Comes Out at Night"), laundromats ("Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly"), or all-night drug stores ("The Late Shift"). This volume also contains a loosely connected series of science fiction horror stories ("The Machine Demands a Sacrifice", "Calling All Monsters", "The Dead Line") about organ transplants. Etchison is among the most exquisitely depressing voices in modern horror and the title story of this collection won both the 1981 British Fantasy Award and the 1982 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.

***

In a world brutalized by televised overkill from Beirut and Northern Ireland, it takes a Master of the Horror Genre to set his stories in the late 20th century and come up with anything more gut-churning than what passes for everyday life. Dennis Etchison is such a Master and
The Dark Country
is such a collection. Eschewing the gore of the Texas Chainsaw set he gives us instead the understated atrocity -- the inference rather than the actuality, the razor-blade as opposed to the hatchet. Just beneath the surface of his stultifyingly ordinary world something unspeakable is going on. Victim and reader alike are lulled into a sense of false security, only to be caught on the hop by the unexpected outrage. For Etchison works on two levels. In reading him we become his victim and he plays us like the expert angler plays the fish. One moment we are swimming, womb-warm in well-known waters, the next we are hoist on the impaling hook, torn into the killing air and left to thrash out an agonized death in an alien world where even the elements conspire against us. There are echoes of Poe in these first-person narratives and yet the subjects are uncomfortably contemporary. The preoccupation with premature burial is replaced by an equally chilling but updated terror, felt at some time by all of us, that when our time comes to go, gently or otherwise, into that dark night, we might instead be prevented and preserved, quail's eggs in aspic, brain-dead yet breathing, so that our vital organs may be torn from our shuddering flesh and sewn into other bodies, other lives. Read "The Dead Line" before you sign that Donor Card. Or, on second thoughts . . . don't. Each of these stories has been crafted with the delicacy of a miniaturist so that what we end up with is a series of small, disturbing masterpieces. From "The Pitch", in which a super salesman slices off his own particular corner of the food processing market to "We Have Been Here Before" which reminds us that not all psychics are saintly souls, each is a tiny gem. Most of the tales begin innocuously enough, the settings mundane in their normality -- the supermarket, the launderette, the motel bedroom. The characters are ordinary too. Rather like us. They leave us with the distinctly unpleasant feeling that anytime now . . . or at least one of these days . . . maybe . . .
The Dark Country
is the kind of book which, days after laying it aside, causes one to look more closely than usual at the parking attendant with the secret smile or draw back a hand from the waitress as she presents us with the cheque, for fear that her blood-red nails might be tipped with just that. Etchison cradles us in the palm of his hand, almost persuading us that we are travelling well-trod ground, secure in the knowledge that we have read it all before. Only when our defences are down do his fingers tighten around our vulnerable flesh and begin to squeeze . . . Like the hungry lips of the "Daughter of the Golden West". I defy any red-blooded male, having read that one, to ever again submit to a fellatious tongue without at least a
frisson
of apprehension. -- SAMANTHA LEE

Although best known for his violent and sophisticated series of heroic fantasy tales featuring Kane, the immortal Mystic Swordsman, Karl Edward Wagner has been contributing a number of highly original horror stories to small press magazines and anthologies since the 1970s. His first collection,
In a Lonely Place
, was published as a paperback original in 1983 with an introduction by Peter Straub, and contains "In the Pines", "Where the Summer Ends", "Sticks", "The Fourth Seal", ".220 Swift", "The River of Night's Dreaming" and "Beyond Any Measure". It was reprinted the following year in hardcover by Scream/Press with an extra story, "More Sinned Against", and a new afterword by the author. His untimely death in 1994 robbed the field of one of its major talents, and his final fiction was collected in
Exorcisms and Ecstasies
.

***

Karl Edward Wagner is among the most important and accomplished contemporary writers to have emerged from the tradition of the horror story, and In a Lonely Place (graced with delicately menacing illustrations by Ron and Val Lakey Lindahn) is one of the most impressive horror collections to have appeared for quite some time. Where many recent horror writers appear to have learned too much of their craft from their own generation, Wagner draws strength from his considerable knowledge of the history of the field. Indeed, In a Lonely Place demonstrates the development of the genre from the landscapes of the Gothic novel through the ghost story and pulp fiction to the modern self-consciously psychological horror story, and does so with a good deal of individuality and unexpectedness. Wagner isn't a writer who seeks to conceal his influences, as the title of the book -- with its clustering references to Bogart, Nicholas Ray, Dorothy B. Hughes and Walter de la Mare -- makes clear. (The assumption that the reader will note the references also implies that Wagner is a writer to be read attentively.) Thus the earliest tale, "In the Pines", a ghost story which perhaps isn't only that, acknowledges its echo of The Beckoning Fair One", though the reader may be more struck by the ways in which it prefigures
The Shining
, published three years later. "In the Pines" is the first statement of one of Wagner's recurring themes, the swallowing up of characters and their psychological conflicts by a vividly imagined, almost hallucinatory landscape. If "In the Pines" incorporates Wagner's tributes to several aspects of British supernatural fiction, not least a piny whiff of Algernon Blackwood, "The Fourth Seal" both reaches further back, to Faust, and deserves to be hailed as a progenitor of the modern tale of medical horror where the mad doctors are not so much visionaries, misguided or otherwise, as professionals who have sold their souls to the job. That the tale derives from Wagner's observations of medical school makes it even more dismaying. The reader may turn with some relief to "Sticks", one of the few original Lovecraftian stories of the seventies, a witty and touching tribute to
Weird Tales
and in particular to the artist Lee Brown Coye. With its enigmatic landscape strewn with lattices that seem on the point of turning into symbols, the story also reinvents the Gothic in terms of the psychedelic decade. ".220 Swift" was written partly with a Lovecraftian anthology in mind, but found a home in an anthology of newer terrors. Though both Lovecraft and Machen loom in its shadows, it reaches back to an earlier myth, and its scenes of underground terror are all Wagner's own. "Where the Summer Ends" is the most sustained tale of terror in the book, but "The River of Night's Dreaming" may be the finest story; it is certainly the most variously disturbing, and a masterpiece. In this story Wagner uses Robert W. Chambers' mysterious symbol
The King in Yellow
as personally as Lovecraft did in reconceiving it as "The Necronomicon". "The River of Night's Dreaming" repays especially attentive reading, and offers Wagner's finest nightmare landscape to put the reader in the mood. "Beyond Any Measure" is both an unusually powerful treatment of the confrontation with the Other and an enviably original variation on the theme of vampirism, firmly rooted in the conventions of such stories. With their erotic explicitness, these last two tales might have had difficulty being published until recently, and the story that followed, "More Sinned Against", was rejected by a horror anthologist who lacked the courage of his genre on the grounds that the drugs used by the characters were insufficiently disapproved of, a doubly absurd objection to the story. "More Sinned Against" is the first example of a bleaker phase of Wagner's work, where the landscape is mostly psychological. Other examples may be found in his later collection,
Why Not You And I?
, alongside such stories as "Sign of the Salamander" and its oblique sequel, "Blue Lady, Come Back", remarkable rediscoveries of the merits of pulp writing. Lately Wagner's short fiction has seemed limited by a bitterness akin to that apparent in Cronenberg's
The Brood
and Amis's
Stanley and the Women
, and it is to be hoped this is a darkness he needs to live through in order to emerge refreshed. The contemporary horror story would be much poorer without the full range of his intelligence and imagination and often audacious originality. -- RAMSEY CAMPBELL