horror, page 3 of 63

An impulsive re-read of King’s third published novel, from 1977, which I’m going to follow soon with his more recent sequel, Doctor Sleep. (Which feels like it was published only a couple of years ago, but I see it came out in 2013, and King has no doubt written a score of novels since then.)

Recovering alcoholic and would-be writer Jack Torrance, recently fired from a teaching post after assaulting a pupil who’d slashed his tyres, gets a job (thanks to a much wealthier ex-drinking buddy) as winter caretaker at the remote Overlook Hotel. Perched high in the Colorado mountains and mostly unreachable from late October to April, the Overlook has a murky past, as one of the locals at the nearest town, Sidewinder (forty miles away), muses at one point:

“Murder had been done up there. A bunch of hoods had run the place for a while, and cut-throat businessman had run it for a while, too. And things had been done up at the Overlook that never made the papers, because money had a way of talking.”

To top it all, a previous winter caretaker, Delbert Grady, had slaughtered his wife, two daughters, and then himself. All in all, it’s a nasty brew of bad psychic residue. But, desperate for a job and a chance to make it as a writer, Jack sees it as the perfect opportunity to finish a play he’s working on. Plus, he’ll be completely out of reach of alcohol, so that temptation will be removed. The trouble is, the Overlook is as haunted as Hell itself, and it’s hungry for more souls—most hungry of all for Jack’s five-year-old son Danny, who has a strong telepathic ability, “the shine”.

As a haunted house novel, it builds interestingly on Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House (and perhaps the only reason King didn’t use an epigraph from that novel is he’d already used it for Salem’s Lot). Both King’s and Jackson’s books are about a haunted place whose haunter isn’t so much an individual spook, as a sort of evil consciousness all of its own, a consciousness you can never be sure was ever human, but which certainly wants to collect human souls. In both, there’s a sensitive character particularly vulnerable to both the hauntings and the haunted place’s invitation to be part of it.

King adds a few turns of the screw to Jackson’s idea. First of all, the sensitive character here is a child—and though in some ways this makes Danny more vulnerable to the Overlook than Eleanor is to Hill House, in others it makes him more resilient, as he doesn’t have her sense of hopelessness. Jack, on the other hand, is a mess of weak points for the Overlook to needle at: he has a temper, is haunted by his own father’s alcoholism and violent rages, and is tottering on the edge of a host of failures:

“He had failed as a teacher, a writer, a husband, and a father. He had even failed as a drunk.”

Perhaps the most intriguing difference to Jackson’s haunted house is that the Overlook, of course, is a hotel. And that doesn’t just mean every room holds a potential spook. The luxurious and remote Overlook seems to sum up the dark, oppressive threat of excess wealth and leisure. There’s something inherently sinister, almost evil, about the idle rich—and the Overlook is where the rich go to idle. Its most characteristic haunting is a 1940s-era party, though I don’t think we’re ever told exactly what evil occurred at that event—it’s as though the very air of wealth, idleness, and power are enough. At one point, the hotel’s evil is explicitly likened to money:

“Little by little a force had accrued, as secret and silent as interest in a bank account.”

And its leverage over Jack is in good part down to his poverty—he has no choice but to stick to this job, however supernaturally dangerous it starts to seem, as it’s that or the very real dangers of divorce, joblessness, and a return to alcoholism.

For me, one of the best aspects of the novel that the film (which I’m much more familiar with) all but leaves out, is Jack’s researches into the Overlook’s history. In the basement, piled high with boxes of receipts, old newspapers, and the occasional scrap of juicy history, he finds a scrapbook in which someone has pasted a record of all the dark goings-on at the hotel—those that made it to the papers, anyway. It leads Jack to want to write about the hotel’s history (though this may be just the hotel itself trying to charm him into staying) and he at one point muses that the Overlook “forms an index of the whole post-World War II American character”, rife as it is with the evils of excess riches, misused power and organised crime.

Perhaps disappointingly, perhaps wisely, King doesn’t trace the Overlook’s evil back to a definite origin. (It’s the film that has it being built on a Native American burial ground.) The feel is, rather, that the accumulation of human evils somehow coalesced into something new and far worse—or perhaps attracted some non-human supernatural evil that could take advantage of it all, like the investment banker to all those little deposits of lesser evil. In a way, this aspect of King’s work echoes David Lynch, another American artist who has a real sense of evil, the way it can latch onto and exaggerate human evil, elevating it to a supernatural dimension.

As I’ve said before (in my re-read of IT), I think King’s at his most effective when his supernatural darkness needs human beings to work through—when he unleashes the pure supernatural he can go over the top for my tastes, into realms that are no longer scary. In this book, I think he does that with the topiary animals, who I just can’t find scary. (Perhaps because I keep imagining an attempt at what I think is a hedge squirrel in a road not too far from me, which convinces me that no hedge animal could look as detailed, or expressive, as King makes his.) The other thing about the hedge animals is it opens up the question of, if the Overlook can animate these things, why doesn’t it animate other things inside the hotel itself and simply kill the Torrances that way? Strangle them all with fire-hoses, for instance, or bash their heads in with doors? It’s much better when it needs Jack to do its work for it, and Jack’s slow descent into paranoia and self-justification in the need to murder his family is what makes The Shining so chilling.

King has spoken about how it was only sometime after writing The Shining that he admitted to himself he was an alcoholic, and that some of his darker thoughts went into Jack. But I think a fuller portrait of the author comes through in Jack’s relationship with Danny. As much as King might have been a less exaggerated Jack, inside he’s surely a Danny: the sensitive, intelligent kid trying to deal with an overwhelmingly difficult and dangerous world. (As Dick Hallorann says: “The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain.”)

King famously dislikes Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of the novel, but for me it’s hard not to see and hear Jack Torrance as Jack Nicholas. Kubrick drops some of King’s ideas (and as one of these is the hedge animals, that can’t be all bad), swaps King’s roque mallet for an axe (surely a more sturdy tool, even if the roque mallet comes with associations of idle luxury while the axe is a workman’s tool), and best of all adds those images that linger in the mind: the blood gushing from the lift doors, the spooky not-twins-who-look-like-twins, that 70’s carpet pattern. In a way, these images, though they’re not in King’s novel, still fit the spirit of King’s writing, as they’re like the catchphrases and (bracketed thoughts the characters are trying not to think) he peppers his text with. Plus, Kubrick’s film has that 70’s bleakness in its high-contrast film stock, an added element to any supernatural film.

First published in 1984, The Ceremonies is an expansion of Klein’s 1972 novella “Events at Poroth Farm”. He worked on the novel for about five years (while also editing The Twilight Zone Magazine), and it came out in the midst of the 1980s horror boom. Lauded by Stephen King among others, it sold enough to go through a number of reprints, was nominated for the 1985 World Fantasy Award, and won the 1986 August Derleth Award. So far, it’s Klein’s only novel.

Despite being a massive book (608 pages in its recent PS Publishing edition), The Ceremonies has a small cast and a not-very-complicated plot but, once I’d got used to its steady pace (the supernatural elements build up nice and slowly), it didn’t feel padded—at least, not in terms of character and plot.

The main character is Jeremy Freirs, nearly thirty, divorced, and (in the words of the book’s main antagonist) an “insignificant little academic with no family and no prospects”, “a solitary soul, lonely and suggestible”, who decides to go off on a country retreat (despite the fact he’s never really been much outside New York) to get some reading done for his PhD on “The Gothic Imagination”. To this end, he responds to an ad offering accommodation for the summer at Poroth Farm in New Jersey. The Poroths, it turns out, are a young couple, recently returned to the husband’s birth-town of Gilead, seeking to make a go of this long-abandoned farm. They are also—as is the entire town of Gilead—members of a Amish-like sect, the Brethren of the Redeemer, who believe in doing without electricity and many other mod cons, “living the way the Lord wants us to, living just like the people in the Bible”. But the Poroths are in debt, and in need of Jeremy’s money, so they’re prepared to overlook the fact that he comes from decadent, heathen New York. Just before going away to Gilead, Jeremy meets Carol Conklin, a young woman working as a part-time librarian (and who only recently spent six months in a convent, intending to become a nun), and convinces her to visit him during his stay at Poroth Farm.

What none of them know is they’re being subtly manipulated by an old man, who calls himself Rosie, but whose name was originally Absolom Troet. Born on Poroth Farm in 1868, he encountered, in the woods, an alien creature that had crashed there more than five thousand years before. It had been waiting all that time for a fitting servant to bring it back properly to life, whereupon it will “transform” (or perhaps destroy) the world. One of young Absolom’s first actions as its servant is to murder his entire family and cover it up as an accidental fire. He then makes two attempts at the ceremonies that will bring his master back, both of which involve the grisly murder of a young woman—once in 1890, the other in 1939, both on the rare conjunction when there’s a full moon on Lammas Day. (He seems to have skipped 1901 and 1920.) Both attempts fail. Now—1985, which is the next full moon on Lammas Day—he’s determined to see the ritual all the way through.

One of the book’s real strengths is characterisation. We spend a lot of time with these few characters, and they never seem dull or unconvincing. Sarr Poroth, for instance, despite having strict religious ideas, is prepared to accept others for what they are and not be too judgemental—he himself partially left the Brethren when he sought to become a teacher. One of the high points of the novel is the story he tells of his one and only trip into New York, where he was robbed of the little money he had, and proceeded to walk through the massive city in search of the thieves, a journey that turned, increasingly, into a vision of Hell. His wife, Deborah, though she shares his views, is lively and fun (most of the Brethren view her as “frivolous, high-spirited”, which is, to them, a negative). Even the main antagonist, Rosie, presents himself as a spritely old man with a sense of humour (“Satan? Who’s he?”) and a wide-ranging generosity, while inside he’s seething with judgement and a desire to basically destroy the world. Carol comes across as somewhat naïve and easily manipulated, but mainly because she likes to see the best in people. (It’s also why Rosie chose her—he needs someone he can lead through a number of arcane ceremonies without her suspecting.) Jeremy, meanwhile, is something of a slob, a man whose attempt to get fit is beset with excuses, and whose main focus actually seems to be trying to get laid—either by Carol or, at times, Deborah, despite her being the wife of his host. Still, despite him being no hero, and certainly not admirable, it feels like a true portrait—he’s not exactly prepared to face the incursion of a cosmic-level horror, but who is?

Of the inspiration behind the novel, Klein said (in a 1985 interview with Douglas E Winter, in Faces of Fear):

“The Ceremonies is, in many ways, an attempt to update Arthur Machen… in that it’s about the same things that pleased me in Machen…”

In particular, he’s talking about Machen’s “The White People” (which he has Jeremy read by moonlight, leading him into a trance-like performance of the first of the ceremonies). And there is certainly that feeling of a magical reality hidden just behind the day-to-day world, accessible by obscure and traditional rites, songs, games, and rituals. (As Rosie knows: “The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone.”) But whereas “The White People” is all about the horror of this other world of strange magic simply existing, The Ceremonies takes things in an apocalyptic direction which Machen never did. The novel is much more like Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”, with its rural setting, black magic rituals, and the coming of a cosmic entity that intends to wipe humankind off the Earth.

But, whereas Lovecraft links his black magic rituals to advanced science, Klein never really questions why there’s a need for these ceremonies in order to resurrect his alien monster. If the creature is alien, why are the ceremonies linked to it so rooted in traditional world cultures? (It arrived five thousand years ago, yes, but in a remote part of the world.) Why does the magic work on it at all? But, really, it doesn’t matter—this novel isn’t about presenting a worldview in which magical ceremonies make some sort of modern sense. The ceremonies are just things you have to do. As Rosie ponders at one point:

“There are always steps to follow, rules to be observed. Funny, that he of all people should have to play by the rules.”

The Brethren have ceremonies, too. Most of them are obvious religious rituals (getting together to pray and sing, for instance), but some have a more folk-horror air to them, such as a planting ceremony that ends in the baking of a star-shaped loaf of bread, which everyone eats. This, it turns out, is a vestige of a far older ceremony where the loaf would have been man-shaped, and before that might well have been an actual human being who was consumed as part of a savage earth-fertility ritual. The feeling is, then, that the civilised world we all live in and know is underpinned by something far more savage and dark. Jeremy, with his New York ways, is clearly the most “civilised” in terms of his being divorced from nature and its life-cycles; but the Brethren, though they work with the land, are still not fully in touch with its genuine savageness. (As indicated by Deborah’s futile attempts to stop her many cats from killing tiny creatures.)

In a way, it’s nature that’s the real cosmic-level reality of The Ceremonies: its insects and snakes and tangled woods. The alien thing itself is described as “outside nature and alone”, and the random processes of nature play a role in the foiling of its plan, too—just as nature foils the Poroths’ plan to make the farm a working concern. Like the alien, Jeremy is “outside nature”—he hates the bugs that constantly invade his living space, and is allergic to cats. Both the alien and Jeremy are described as “alone”, and it could even be said that, in his sometimes singleminded attempts to bed Carol, he’s a little like the alien, which needs Carol as a virgin sacrifice in its final ritual. The difference is, Jeremy’s desire turns to love (maybe not entirely convincingly), which the alien’s would never do.

Despite its length, I didn’t think The Ceremonies really engaged with its own themes enough to make them stand out and be analysed too much. It also had a few loose ends (like, what happened to Sarr Poroth’s mother, the only character to be aware of what Rosie was trying to do?). But its strength lies in its characterisation, and the slow, subtle build of the supernatural horror element to a grand conclusion. I certainly enjoyed reading it, I just don’t know if it left me with anything that would make me return to it, as a novel.

The original novella, “The Events at Poroth Farm”, works better as weird fiction—and even better on a re-read, when you can spot the subtle early signs of things going wrong. The characterisation is still there, and the compression and unanswered questions make it work much better. Klein is certainly good at this longish short form (see also his collection of four novellas, Dark Gods), and it’s a pity he hasn’t written more.

Published in 1910, The Human Chord is perhaps Blackwood’s most weird-fiction-friendly novel, which makes it fitting it has been republished by the British Library as part of their Tales of the Weird series.

The story centres on 28-year-old Robert Spinrobin, a somewhat ineffectual fellow, wandering through life via a series of secretarial posts (much as Blackwood himself did for a while), but with an ultimate aim of somehow, somewhere, finding his very own “authoritative adventure of the soul”. He responds to an unusual ad:

“WANTED, by Retired Clergyman, Secretarial Assistant with courage and imagination. Tenor voice and some knowledge of Hebrew essential; single; unworldly. Apply Philip Skale.”

Applying, Spinny (as he’s mostly known) finds himself in an isolated house in Wales. Skale is an impressive figure, tall, deep-voiced, and intent on pursuing a certain “philosophical speculation” “wheresoever it may lead”. This speculation is that “Everything in nature has its name, and he who has the power to call a thing by its proper name can make it obedient to his will.” Some names, though, are more complex to speak than others, particularly when it comes to “the so-called ‘Angels’; for these are in reality Forces of immense potency, vast spiritual Powers, Qualities, and the like”, who are “all evocable by correct utterance of their names.” Skale wants to utter “a certain complex and stupendous name”, for which he needs four voices: himself (bass), his housekeeper (alto), her niece Miriam (soprano), and a tenor. So far, twelve young men have applied for the latter role, but all have failed to harmonise, in various subtle ways, with the others. Spinny, though, fits perfectly — not only providing the tenor, but instantly clicking in other ways with young Miriam. (Though is there a significance in his being the thirteenth applicant?)

There are, though, risks. Housekeeper Mrs Mawle is deaf and has a withered arm thanks to Skale’s fumbled attempt to speak her true name. To mispronounce the angelic names is “to attract upon yourself the destructive qualities of these Powers”, and unleash far greater levels of mayhem. Skale, however, is utterly confident that with his new assistant’s E-flat, they can proceed.

Spinny, of course, wonders what that “complex and stupendous name” is — and in this, it has to be said, he’s alone, because it’s obvious there can only be one name Skale is aiming for, and that’s the top one, a name so complex that even four human voices will be inadequate. Skale has, it turns out, already succeeded in somehow trapping the four sounds that make up but the first syllable of that name, which are confined (thanks to a combination of coloured drapes, wax forms, and other esoteric devices) in four of the rooms of his large house. Each of the four members of his “human chord” will utter the sound that unleashes these sounds, which will lead to the formation of a greater sound — itself but the first of the four syllables of the Great Name he’s ultimately intending to speak.

And the aim of sounding that name? To both become part of the named entity and to command it — to become, Skale says, “as gods”. Spinny — little, comical Spinny — is bowled over by Skale and agrees to do whatever he says. But doubts creep in, particularly as his relationship with Miriam deepens — if “deepens” is the word, for the pair are as shallow as puddles. Both are innocents, described as “two bewildered children” before Skale’s awesome endeavour, though this is not the childlike nature-mystic type of innocence that really works in Blackwood’s fiction; these two are more comically innocent, wide-eyed and somewhat blank-minded in the face of everything that’s going on. When Spinny agrees with Skale that, yes, they will become “as gods”, I can’t help wondering what Spinny would do if he actually became “as a god”. And anyway, you can’t have an “adventure of the soul” if you are “as a god”, because a god can’t have peril, mystery, or wonder, nor can its already-ultimate soul grow or change as a result.

Like Blackwood’s 1911 novel The Centaur, this is a story whose main character is presented with two worlds, and has to choose between them. In The Centaur, O’Malley was caught between cosmic nature-mysticism and the modern world of “Humanity and Civilisation”, and, like Blackwood, opted for the former. Here, Spinny is presented with a choice between the world of magic, power, knowledge and being “as gods”, and the more human world of love for Miriam. Skale is a magician who never seems to question that anyone would want anything but power, knowledge and godhood. But when, at the end, he sings his note and the world starts to transform, the vision Blackwood presents is far more of the sort found in The Centaur — where nature is one, already-perfect thing, with no need for a magician-figure to take charge of it — so Skale might not have been satisfied with the results even if he had succeeded:

“The outer semblance of the old earth appeared to melt away and reveal that heart of clean and dazzling wonder which burns ever at its inmost core—the naked spirit divined by poets and mystics since the beginning of time. It was a new heaven and a new earth that pulsed below them… All nature knew, from the birds that started out of sleep into passionate singing, to the fish that stirred in the depths of the sea, and the wild deer that sprang alert in their wintry coverts, scenting an eternal spring. For the earth rolled up as a scroll, shaking the outworn skin of centuries from her face, and suffering all her rocky structure to drop away and disclose the soft and glowing loveliness of an actual being—a being most tenderly and exquisitely alive.”

This is a world of “poets and mystics”, not power-seeking magicians, and in the end, Spinney realises that “the great adventure he sought was only the supreme adventure of a very wonderful love”.

Mike Ashley has called The Human Chord Blackwood’s “one complete hermetic novel” arising out of his time in the Order of the Golden Dawn, which Blackwood joined in 1900. But such magickal occultism was only ever a step on the way to the nature mysticism that was Blackwood’s true “note”, and I can’t help feeling The Human Chord is Blackwood’s dismissal of the quest for magical power as opposed to seeking oneness with a mystical Nature. (Meanwhile, Aleister Crowley’s somewhat snide review of The Human Chord, in his own journal The Equinox in March 1911 — signed “Georgos” — called it the result of “indigestion brought on by a surfeit of ill-cooked Theosophy”.)

This is probably Blackwood’s most accessible novel, if you’re looking for something like the sort of weird fiction he’s known for, but The Centaur is far more characteristic of what he was really aiming at. Spinny is perhaps just a little too shallow to make The Human Chord rise above a parable about the overweening quest for power in a world where simply being human might, in the end, be much more satisfying.