horror, page 3 of 57

Earlier this year, an idle whim made me wonder what sort of fiction Farnsworth Wright produced. As editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940, he presided over its Golden Age, publishing key works of weird fiction and sword & sorcery, and establishing the careers of writers such as H P Lovecraft and Robert E Howard — as well as, it has to be said, rejecting some of their best works, including At the Mountains of Madness. So what about the products of his own imagination? I expected there to be a collection of his stories out there, but couldn’t find one, so I started looking up the tales in online scans. ISFDB listed 9 stories, but as I got into the project I found twice that number available in magazine scans online — though admittedly, most of them don’t contain any sort of fantasy or weird element. But once I’d started I got more and more interested and ended up with a collection of 19 stories and 9 poems (two of which are translations), enough for a slim volume (though I did drop one story, which I’ll explain below), so I decided to bring one out — not because I think Wright is likely to catch fire with a modern audience, just that I thought other people might, like me, be curious.

Wright had a pretty wide experience of life, and his fiction reflects that. He served in the First World War — mostly as a translator, in France — and three of his stories, “Enemies”, “The Vow” and “Lonesome Time” are about the war. Mostly they show him thinking through how it’s possible to fight for one’s country while believing very strongly in the wider brotherhood of humanity — something he actively engaged in by learning, teaching, and translating into Esperanto (including Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”).

Both before and after the war he worked as a reporter, and his fiction features several stories of reporters, including a rookie in a last-ditch attempt to hold onto his job (“In the Depths”) and an experienced reporter investigating a suicide that seems more like a murder (“The Silent Shot”) — a story that also features a near-forensic description of a bullet wound to the head, which makes me think Wright must have seen such a thing (though I suppose he had ample opportunity during the war). He also worked as a music critic, and music features in both a comic tale of an opera star living beyond his means (“Out of the Frying Pan”), and a more serious, lyrical tale of a creative genius’s path to musical greatness (“The Stolen Melody”).

A couple of tales touch on a traumatic event that occurred when Wright was in college and went into the sea with a friend called John P Rauen. Both got into difficulties in the currents around a deep submerged hole and while Wright managed to keep himself above the surface until he was rescued, Rauen drowned. As John Locke says in his biography of Wright in The Thing’s Incredible: The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, this traumatic underwater struggle made its way into Wright’s story “In the Depths”, but it’s even more evident in “The Pole-Star”, published in the February 1921 issue of boy’s magazine The Open Road. This is about a trio of boys who go on a swimming trip and one gets into serious difficulty — made only the worse by being under a fairground fortuneteller’s curse that he’ll die when he next sees the pole-star.

There’s another, rather surprising, class of stories in Wright’s output, to do with the moral edification of young women. “Mother” and “The Medal of Virtue” are both about young women being brought into a realisation of how much they’ve strayed down the wrong path. In the former, the “wrong path” involves the wearing of stockings and hanging around with young men who smoke. Egad! “Mother” is a particularly interesting tale — not so much as a piece of fiction, as in the fact that it came from the future editor of Weird Tales. It’s the story of a shopgirl who embarks on a career in a chorus line in search of a little more excitement and better pay, who’s given the opportunity of her first solo performance when she impresses everyone with her suggestive embellishments to a song called “Shimmy, Jimmy”. What makes this story particularly notable is where it was published, a journal called The Light, “the Official Organ of the World’s Purity Federation”, whose byline was “The White Slave Traffic and Public Vice Can and Must Be Eliminated”. This from the man who, just over a decade later, would be putting Margaret Brundage’s art deco nudes on the cover of Weird Tales, often in scenarios with a distinct air of bondage about them (and not a stocking in sight!)…

Wright’s fiction only really turned toward the weird once he got involved in Weird Tales — initially as its chief slush-pile reader, then as its editor (whereupon he used the pseudonym Francis Hard for his own fiction). His early efforts, “The Closing Hand” and “The Teak-Wood Shrine” are a little crude, the former in particular being nothing but a camp-fire scare, but his later weird stories are a bit more sophisticated — though never, it has to be said, anywhere near the likes of the writers Weird Tales is remembered for: Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and so on. They also, quite notably, stay away from the supernatural. Wright favours poisonings and madness rather than monsters and ghosts — apart from one foray into the blatantly fantastic, “An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension”, where the weird is employed entirely for humorous purposes. Or, should I say, “humorous” purposes.

(And, speaking of “humorous” — that tale I left out. One of Wright’s stories for Weird Tales was “The Great Panjandrum”, and I decided to leave this one out because, a humorous tale, it relies entirely on racial stereotypes for its humour, while also being disappointing as a story — I kept expecting a twist of some kind, but there was none. So, in the end, it was easy to leave out.)

If I were to say anything about Wright’s later fiction it’s that it seems to be playing with the idea of the double. Characters who share a name turn up in a couple of stories — “The Medal of Virtue” and “Poisoned” — while characters who suffer a complete moral transformation, until they become their own opposite, can be found in “The Picture of Judas” and, again, “The Medal of Virtue”. (And a link between apparent enemies is a theme from his earliest tales, the war tales.) His longest story, “The White Queen” is very much of the era of the The Sheik (1919), and the whole Orientalist-romantic-fantasy of a young woman being abducted by/falling for the menacing/commanding/ravishing (in both senses) desert-dwelling prince of the east.

Wright’s fiction is no must-read (I’m not over-selling this, am I?), but I found it interesting enough, considering his importance as a figure in the history of modern weird fiction. The Snake Fiend and Other Stories (which also contains all the poems by him I could find) is out now in ebook, kindle and paperback. There are a few illustrations reproduced (some of which I did my best to rescue from moiré-pattern hell). For, like me, the idly curious.

The full table of contents and other details can be found here.

Ramsey Campbell’s second novel was published in 1979, though in a version that was edited without his knowledge; subsequent editions from 1983 onwards have the full text.

Most of the novel follows John Horridge, an unemployed middle-aged man living on disability benefit (for a limp he gained as a boy while working for his window cleaner father, whose self-absorption and alcoholism following his wife’s death led to the accident). Having had to leave the house where he grew up, Horridge now lives in Liverpool’s Cantril Farm Estate — an actual place, built in 1965 and renamed in the mid-1980s as Stockbridge Village, in an attempt to give it a new start. Cantril Farm, the scene of riots in the early 80s, was named “one of the worst estates in Europe” by actor & DJ Craig Charles, who grew up there. Certainly, Horridge detests it — but Horridge detests virtually everything: women with jobs, fellow bus passengers, “the shirking classes”, children, modern music, modern everything. He has a particular fascination-hate for homosexuals, and at the start of the novel is obsessing over some local murders of young male prostitutes. Passing some flats on Aigburth Drive (Horridge spends his days wandering the city, to get away from Cantril Farm), he thinks he sees the murderer — an evidently gay man who looks like the photo-fit in the papers. Horridge phones the police, and sits on a nearby bench to watch the arrest — then is horrified to see the police leaving without the man. Later, in his flat, he happens upon his father’s cut-throat razor:

“He pushed the razor hastily away, but kept gazing. The timing of his find—now, when he felt so vulnerable, so desperately in need of self-defence—could not be ignored.”

In Horridge’s world, there are no coincidences. If a man looks like the photo-fit of a murderer, he is the murderer; if a razor turns up, it’s there to be used. As we follow him about — rather too closely, as we can’t help being dragged into his grubby mental world — we come to learn that he often strays into paranoid delusions, increasingly so as the book goes on: everyone’s secretly trying to trick him, and the police, the radio, and the newspapers are in on it too. He gets access to the flats where his intended victim, Roy Craig, lives, even being let in and offered a cup of tea by one of the other residents, who thinks he’s a detective hired by Craig to find out who’s making the anonymous, threatening phone calls he’s been receiving (and of course it’s Horridge who’s been making them). But when he kills Craig, it’s only the start of a downward spiral even deeper into paranoid madness, leading to the need for further killings.

The novel doesn’t only follow Horridge, but also Cathy Gardner, a young librarian who lives in one of the top flats. She’s married to Peter, who has just quit the library service to, he says, finish his studies, but it seems more likely he doesn’t want to work and would rather spend his days smoking pot. Peter is, perhaps, edging into Horridge territory, resentful of having to work, despising the complacency and petty power-plays of his fellow workers, clinging to a belief in the radical politics of the late 60s — along with its fading hippie subculture — but without taking any political action other than to argue unpleasantly with Cathy’s more obviously bourgeois friends. Cathy, meanwhile, wants to start a family, hoping having a child will wake Peter up to life, their marriage, their future. But to do so, she knows, they need to move out of their flat and get a house, though everything seems out of their price range. And then Craig’s murder occurs in the building lobby, and the place feels even less like a home.

There’s a lot, in this novel, centring on anxiety about home. None of the characters really feels at home where they’re living, and Horridge in particular is exiled from any sense of it. Cantril Farm comes across more as a mental state than a place to live, and a bad one at that:

“Hardly a path in Cantril Farm ran visibly straight for more than a few yards; the walks sank into concrete valleys, or plunged straight through the hearts of tenements. The whole place reminded him of the mazes with which scientists tormented rats.”

And though we might be tempted to think this is just because we’re seeing it through Horridge’s warped vision, Cathy later gets a glimpse of where he lives:

“She couldn’t have borne living in such a place. It must be like a cage. She would have gone mad.”

“Cage” is right. Inside Horridge’s flat is no better. Nothing separates his window from the public walkway “except an unfenced patch of grass”, meaning kids are always running up to his window, banging on it, then running off. The rooms

“seemed scarcely larger than interview cubicles, and as featureless. He’d left the walls plain white, thinking they would look clean. Often they made him feel trapped in nothingness.”

He revisits the house he grew up in, only to find it, mid-demolition, an empty shell. Some animal or person has even used one of the upstairs rooms as a toilet — which might well be a metaphor for how Horridge views his life. Later, he returns to it again, thinking he might hide out in it, shell though it is, but by this point it’s been completely knocked down. He feels “as though his innards had been ripped out.” Home — a place to feel safe, a place to be oneself in a hostile, confusing, or at least challenging world — is, in this novel, absent, yet the removal of even this remnant of a home-that-once-was is infinitely painful.

Horridge’s relation to home, then, is to be alienated in his current dwelling, while nostalgically longing for a past he can never return to. Cathy’s need for a new home is more future-oriented — she wants to save her marriage, move on and have a child — but feels just as trapped, and just as unsafe, where she is. For both, their current dwellings — no longer feeling like homes — have become traps, and in Horridge’s case at least it’s a trap that’s squeezing his already unstable mental state well past the crisis point.

Starting with the first complete edition of The Face That Must Die — the 1983 hardback from Scream/Press — this novel has come with a substantial autobiographical introduction from Campbell, “At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour”, which outlines what had been happening in his life before the writing of this novel, focusing on his mother’s undiagnosed schizophrenia. The novel itself was hard to place with a publisher, and Campbell writes of how “of all my stories [this] seems the one most prone to provoke unease or worse… There’s no doubt the book is very dark.” Which feels like an understatement, coming as it does from a horror writer. But perhaps its the underlying hopelessness, rather than the bursts of psycho-killer horror, that have this effect.

Perhaps now, when we’ve had the likes of American Psycho with its unrelenting exposure to the mind of a deluded psychopath, and when Campbell himself has developed his paranoiac prose style to wrap his readers in a whole gamut of states of unease, The Face seems less strikingly dark, but it retains, even as a horror novel, a feeling of underlying pessimism, a sort of relentless grubbiness to its world, and not just as seen through Horridge’s eyes. Something about its alienated style, its dowdy realism and feeling of the bleak gaps that divide people’s hopes, relationships, and entire realities, fits in with the sort of British horror/crime films that were produced earlier in the 1970s — often tawdry-feeling serial-killer thrillers, the likes of The Fiend, Assault, Revenge, The Black Panther, The Offence (particularly the first half hour, before the stage adaptation kicks in) and Hitchcock’s Frenzy. There was just something in the film stock, the newsprint, the concrete estates — a high-contrast bleakness that took the 1960s colour out of life. In all ways.

Barker began writing his Books of Blood stories at the start of the 1980s — bizarrely enough as a relief from the intense work of playwriting (his initial career being as a playwright, actor, and director of the Dog Theatre Company). They were, at first, intended only for himself and his friends, and for the sheer joy of doing something new. But later, realising he might be able to make a go of these things, he had them typed up as a 600-page manuscript and handed it to his theatrical agent, who tried Gollancz (who turned it down), then paperback publisher Sphere Books, under the misapprehension they published Stephen King. Sphere accepted, and took the unusual approach of releasing them in three volumes simultaneously (Barker had thought of the stories as one book, The Book of Blood), and putting this then-unknown author’s name as part of the title. They even used his art for the covers. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood volumes I to III came out in March 1984.

They were something different in the then-booming horror market, very much unlike its leading author, Stephen King. As Douglas Winter puts it in his biography of Barker, The Dark Fantastic:

“His stories exercised an unbridled enthusiasm for the lush and the lurid, pushing at taboos of sex and violence, yet confirmed an unparalleled ambition and audacity.”

King, though, certainly does excess — perhaps more self-consciously than Barker, in whom it feels like a natural mode — but anyway that’s not the real core of what Barker brought to the genre. As well as being explicit in terms of blood, gore, and bodies, Barker was explicit with the more philosophically religious elements in horror fiction: he wasn’t just out to shock, he was after revelation, transformation and transcendence, even if it was of a dark kind. As he’s quoted in Winter’s biography:

“The kind of horror I like drags things into daylight and says, Right. Let’s have a really good look. Does it still scare you? Does it maybe do something different to you now that you can see it more plainly — something that isn’t quite like being scared?”

There’s a strong feeling in these stories of a highly creative talent let loose on an unexplored domain, rushing around and trying all sorts of ideas, approaches, modes and genres, squeezing them to see what juice they’ll produce in his particular hands. There are ensemble pieces and narratives focused on just the one character (even a rare first-person story), there’s realism (the non-supernatural “Dread”, about its protagonist’s philosophical education thanks to a man who believes that the only subject of any “worthwhile philosophy” is “the things we fear, because we don’t understand them”, and goes on to give practical, personalised lessons), there’s fable (“Hell’s Event”, about a once-a-century race that decides who will rule the next hundred years: Heaven or Hell), there’s something close to comedy (“The Yattering and Jack”, about a minor demon’s attempts to break the mind of a stubbornly disbelieving gherkin-importer), and something close to a love story (“Jacqueline Ess—Her Will and Testament”, in which a woman gains the ability to reshape flesh with her mind, but her attempts to learn how to use this new power from the powerful men in her life only show how shallow power is compared to passion, which is so much harder to find).

Some, for me, don’t work so well and perhaps betray the fact that Barker, though highly creative and an obviously gifted writer, was still learning his craft. “Pig Blood Blues”, about an ex-policeman newly hired to teach woodwork at a Remand Centre for Adolescent Offenders, who discovers the whole facility has taken to worshipping a seemingly possessed pig in the centre’s farm, felt to me as though it could have done with a slower pace, a longer build-up. It’s as though Barker, impatient to see where this idea would end (it’s a rare case of one his tales leaving its revelations till the end), hurried through the elements that might have turned this into a novel: character build-up, growing hints about what was happening, and so on.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that “Skins of the Fathers” and “Rawhead Rex” were among the first to be written, as they’re both less satisfying in their overall story structure, while also having some of the rawest laying out of themes that I can imagine were bubbling around in this young male creator’s psyche: themes of monstrous fathers and victimised sons. In Barker’s fiction, though, that word “monstrous” can have a far different meaning to its normal, daylight, usage. In “Skins of the Fathers”, for instance, we have two types of monstrous father. There’s Eugene, who considers it his absolute right to have everything his own way, and to abuse his wife Lucy and son Aaron as much as he likes. He’s clearly monstrous, but in Barker’s world, calling him that would be an abuse of the term, because there are also, in this tale, actual monsters, and these are, it turns out, Aaron’s real fathers: ancient creatures of the desert, a varied mix of weirdly beautiful or downright incomprehensible beings who have come at last to reclaim their son and awaken him to the powers that are his birthright. I can’t help reading this story as, in some ways, a creator’s self-remaking fable, in which he disowns the traditional ideas of (as it’s put in the story) “hand-me-down machismo” (something that might have been especially important to a gay writer like Barker), in favour of something weird, marginalised, secretive and perhaps forbidden, but also magical, transformative and creative.

“Rawhead Rex”, on the other hand, presents us with an outright monstrous father in both meanings of the word: a child-eating monster whose only purpose is to eat, kill, destroy, and dominate, but whose one weakness is the the equally archetypal image of the female as source of life. What Rawhead Rex and the monsters in “Skins of the Fathers” have in common is they’re presented as ancient creatures who father children on human mothers. In “Rawhead Rex” the subsequent pregnancies kill the mothers, but in “Skins of the Fathers” the monsters, rather than men, are women’s natural partners for generating offspring:

“Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men… What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation. Within mere eons, the worst rooted out the best; the women were made slaves, the demons killed or driven underground, leaving only a few pockets of survivors.”

“Midnight Meat Train” is another story to feature a root race of non-human (or once-human) fathers. Here, the protagonist escapes becoming a victim of what seems to be one more New York City serial killer, only to find this killer had in fact been working for the city — not the government, but for the “City Fathers”, a race of ancient and perhaps once-human elders who have among them the “Father of Fathers”, the “original American”, who is most certainly not human:

“If it was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all moving in union, budding, blossoming and withering rhythmically. It was iridescent, like mother of pearl…”

But the most general theme that links these stories — and the books Barker would go on to write, too — is the transformative effect of contact with the darkness. That contact, for Barker, is never an end-point, as it so often is in horror; it’s always a door to be opened, a curtain to be lifted, a secret to be brought into the light. From “Midnight Meat Train”:

“You shouldn’t have seen this: it’s not for the likes of you,” he said, taking another step towards Kaufman. “It’s secret.”

Which recalls my favourite line from Barker’s 1987 film Hellraiser, and one I’m sure recurs throughout his work, in many forms: “This is not for your eyes.” It’s not for your eyes, but Barker’s going to show you anyway.

The one story I’ve heard most often singled out in these early Barker stories is “In the Hills, the Cities”, a weird mix of transcendent vision and tragic horror that pretty much defies categorisation. A couple of lovers, Mick and Judd, are on their first — and, they soon realise, last, because they’re just not getting on — holiday together, somewhere in Yugoslavia. Mick, it turns out, is (to Judd) a “political bore”, while Judd keeps wanting to take side-trips to obscure local churches to see their paintings. He’s not religious, he’s only interested in the paintings’ aesthetics, leading Mick to think that the “complexities, the contradictions, even the agonies that made those cultures blossom and wither were just tiresome” to Judd. Then, cutting through their petty squabbles, comes a vision straight off the cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan to not only transcend their politics-versus-aesthetics debate, but blow it out of the water.

Two towns they pass close to have a tradition. Once a year each makes itself into a single, walking giant, a carefully strapped-and-bound-together ambulant city made of people. Some people are the eyes, some are the teeth, some are the fingers, others are the muscles, the heart, the stomach. These two “cities” then do battle. It is a thing that seems to capture a sort of nobility, as one character says:

“It is the body of the state,” said Vaslav, so softly his voice was barely above a whisper, “it is the shape of our lives.”

But it is also rooted in the madness of the mob:

“Mick saw the leg raised; saw the faces of the people in the shin and ankle and foot – they were as big as he was now – all huge men chosen to take the full weight of this great creation. Many were dead. The bottom of the foot, he could see, was a jigsaw of crushed and bloody bodies, pressed to death under the weight of their fellow citizens.”

It — quite literally — embodies politics and aesthetics, transcending both into something incomprehensible, awe-inspiring, deranged and monstrous. It’s a seemingly allegorical image (as the cover of Leviathan was) but it goes so far beyond any allegorical meaning. (It’s surprising to realise that this, perhaps the most powerful image in Barker’s first three Books of Blood is not supernatural.)

I actually think that “In the Hills, the Cities” is perhaps the only example, here, of something that works despite Barker’s philosophy of “having a really good look”. Although nothing, in the end, is hidden, the reason behind all this remains obscure. Is this an image of transcendence, or of derangement? Had Barker included this image in his later fiction — and he’d soon go on to find his natural medium in doorstop-sized novels like Weaveworld — he’d have to explore its meaning, lay it bare somehow. But I think its power here lies in the way it absorbs and transcends both Mick’s politics and Judd’s aesthetics to become so much more than both, while still remaining almost screamingly incomprehensible. It reaches beyond Barker’s images of transcendence — however dark and magical — to the sublime, in all its terror and mystery, insanity and imagination.