Recommendation: Things We Leave Behind by Mark West

This is Mark West's second collection of short stories, featuring 18 tales: two new, the rest published in various anthologies over the years. As such, it contains a number of West's stories that I've already read and admired, including 'Come See My House In The Pretty Town' (folk horror plus scary clowns), the genuinely creepy 'Mr Stix' and 'The Witch House', and the surreal 'Time Waits...' Special mention here must go to 'The Bureau Of Lost Children', possibly West's finest tale, a panic-inducing story about a father losing his son in a crowded shopping centre.

Lots of the stories in Things We Leave Behind feature father/son relationships, or are about family more generally. The majority of West's protagonists are fathers and husbands, and the supernatural forces they face are scary not just because they are dangerous but because they risk disrupting the family unit. This is particularly clear in the stories 'Last Train Home' and 'Fog On The Old Coast Road'; in both, the protagonist is trying to get home to his family and is stopped from doing so by the horrors of West's fiction. I particularly liked the latter of these two pieces: a creepy ghost story with a fantastic last line.

I was rereading some of Stephen King's early short stories at the same time as reading Things We Leave Behind and there's a clear influence at work, transposed to these shores and made very British. It's there in the everyman/woman protagonists that populate his work; there too in the fact West writes wonderfully well about childhood and being a kid.  But there's a seedier, gorier side to his fiction as well, as shown in 'The Taste Of Her' and 'The Zabriskie Grimoire'. These are stories not ashamed to acknowlege horror's seedier roots; indeed in 'The Glamour Girl Murders' to relish in it.

A final theme, like so much horror fiction, is the past and its influence on the present. It informs 'Mr Stix' in which a childhood terror passes from mother to daughter, 'What Gets Left Behind', a superb story about a man returning to the site where his childhood friend died, and my favourite of the stories new to me here: 'What We Do Sometimes, Without Thinking'. This is a superbly realised piece about the past, childhood, and a haunting that feels both Jamesian and contemporary at the same time. Like the book as a whole, it's highly recommended to all horror fans.

Things We Leave Behind  (UK | US)

A-Z Of Books

I saw this blog challenge thingy on the site of the excellent horror author Thana Niveau who picked some great books. So I thought sod it, I'll give it a go too. Because it's basically just another excuse to talk about books... not that I really need excuses.

AUTHOR YOU’VE READ THE MOST BOOKS BY: A score-draw threeway between Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King and Terry Pratchett.

BEST SEQUEL EVER: The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe by Douglas Adams.

CURRENTLY READING: A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood - as you might expect, so far this is bloody brilliant. Oh and I'm also rereading The King In Yellow.

DRINK OF CHOICE WHILE READING: Currently a glass of Marston's Pedigree. 

E-READER OR PHYSICAL BOOK: I read both; in fact I'm normally reading a book on each at any given time.

FICTIONAL CHARACTER YOU WOULD HAVE DATED IN HIGH SCHOOL: Knowing my luck, Carrie White.

GLAD YOU GAVE THIS BOOK A CHANCE: Emma by Jane Austin. I guess my view of what Austin was like was coloured by half-watched TV adaptations. But she's so much more cynical and astute than her reputation for period romance might suggest.

HIDDEN GEM BOOK: Ice Age by Iain Rowan. A stunning collection of weird-creepy-shit stories.

IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR READING LIFE: I've mentioned this before on here, but when my Dad handed me a copy of Salem's Lot from his bookshelves.

JUST FINISHED: The Wanderer by Timothy J. Jarvis, which was fantastic, and the The Best Horror Of The Year 6 edited by Ellen Datlow.

KIND OF BOOKS YOU WON’T READ: Anything where it's so obviously been written aiming for a film adaptation. Plus anything where the blurb is some kind of mashup such as "Like Harry Potter in Space!" or something equally repellent & cynical.

LONGEST BOOK YOU’VE READ: Not sure really. Vanity Fair? Anna Karenina? Crime & Punishment? Spot Bakes A Cake? 

MAJOR BOOK HANGOVER: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. An absolutely stunning achievement. But Christ, it makes most end of the world novels seem like Enid Blyton.

NUMBER OF BOOKCASES YOU OWN: Eight.

ONE BOOK YOU’VE READ MULTIPLE TIMES: The Waste-Land & Other Poems by T.S. Eliot. The language is so breathtakingly poweful and precise, sometimes I just reread the same lines.

PREFERRED PLACE TO READ: Somewhere with a view of the sea.

QUOTE THAT INSPIRES YOU FROM A BOOK YOU’VE READ: I'm not going to pick anything trite and inspirational, I'm just going to pick what I consider to be one of the most perfect openings to a novel ever written. It's inspirational because it's what I'm aiming for, and constantly falling short of:

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Shirley Jackson

READING REGRET: That I'll die before I read everything I want to, even if people stopped writing now. And yet, non-reading people get to live on average the same length of time. There's no justice; their years should be mine.

SERIES YOU STARTED AND NEED TO FINISH: The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks.

THREE OF YOUR ALL-TIME FAVOURITE BOOKS: Three? Three? Jesus, it was bad enough picking five for a recent interview. So here's three that I didn't include there:

1. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
2. House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
3. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

UNAPOLOGETIC FANGIRL/BOY FOR: Ramsey Campbell. He's the guvnor.

VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS RELEASE: Too many to mention, obviously, but I'm very much looking forward to The Grieving Stones by Gary McMahon.

WORST BOOKISH HABIT: When I'm reading and someone comes to talk to me and I look like I'm listening to what they're saying, but really I'm still thinking about the book...

X MARKS THE SPOT: START ON THE TOP LEFT OF YOUR SHELF AND PICK THE 27TH BOOK: The Woman In The Dunes by Kōbō Abe.

YOUR LATEST PURCHASE: Bodies Of Water by V.H. Leslie and Oh! The Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss, for my daughter because it was one of the readings at her Naming Day.

ZZZZ-SNATCHER BOOK (LAST BOOK THAT KEPT YOU UP WAY TOO LATE): Phonogram 3: The Immaterial Girl. I love these graphic novels, in which music really is magic. There's some fantastic use of pop-cultutral imagery and references in this third volume, especially when the protagonist becomes trapped in a murderous version of the video for Take On Me. And the Appendix, explaining all of the musical references is a delight, so I stayed up late reading it and looking up various music videos on the internet.

A Lovely Blog Hop... with added Dinosaurs

I've been challenged by my friend and all round good egg Mark West to join in the Lovely Blog Hop to talk about some of the things that have shaped my life and my writing. The blog was started by romance writer Sue Moorcroft, and I particularly like the fact that via Mark she’s forced a whole load of horror writers to participate in something ‘lovely’. We’ll never live this one down…

At the end of this post, you’ll find links to some blogs and writers I like. The writers have all agreed to participate in and continue this Lovely Blog Hop.

First Memory

I’m not sure I trust ‘first memories’ as objective statements of fact; I suspect that what your subconscious choses to remember as your ‘first memory’ may say quite a lot about your personality. So with that in mind…

I remember a recurring dream I had when I was very young which I’ve never really got to the bottom of. I was in a garden; to one side was a brick wall and to the other climbing plants on a frame. Everything was hyper-real, the plants vividly green, the bricks bright orange in the sun. I walked forward and the wall and the plants seemed to close in on me, forming a corridor. It got narrower and narrower, so that I could feel the rough brick scratch against my face and smell the sap of the plants… (can you really feel and smell in dreams, or is this something my subconscious has added later?)

As I pressed forward through the corridor of plant and brick and the view suddenly opened up in front of me, and I could see the ocean. There was something about the enormity of the ocean in front of me after the confined space of the garden that seemed terrifying.

It was here where I’d wake up.

Books

I can’t really remember not enjoying books and reading. Books about dinosaurs were an early passion (see below) and I also remember as a child reading Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and a science fiction series about a space warrior who had every bone in his body replaced with metal. I remember being slightly older and reading Agatha Christie books from my Grandma’s bookshelves–this obsession ended abruptly when I got to the end of Dead Man’s Folly and I realised the final pages, including the one which said who the murderer was, were missing. My wife bought me a copy twenty years later so I could finally find out.

I had a lot of time to read as a teenager because my group of mates at that point all lived in the next village along, and so to arrange to see them involved some planning and effort. So at weekends and during the holidays I had a lot of time on my own to read (and later to write–see below). Which sounds sad and lonely but it wasn’t for a kid like me. My Dad had bookshelves crammed full of paperbacks so I was never short of something to read, and it was during these days that I discovered writers like Mervyn Peak, Asimov, Stephen King, Stoker, Mary Shelly… anything I could get my hands on really. It’s an odd thought, but I sometimes wonder if that simple fact that my friends all lived in the next village along had as much impact on my becoming a writer as anything else.

Libraries

I was constantly in the local library as a kid, especially in the summer holidays. Like many children I had a period when I was obsessed with dinosaurs and I was just leaving this obsession behind when I found a dinosaur book in the library that somehow I’d never seen before. When I took it to the desk it turned out it was an actual scientific book on palaeontology that had had been misfiled in the children’s section. I was so crestfallen that they said if my parents approved they’d give me an adult library card so I could take it out.

So from the age of twelve I had an adult library card. I was so proud. And as I moved into my teens, I found this offered other pleasures than merely dinosaur books…

As a student I always liked university libraries too (both that of my own university and the Bodelian Library), and the sense that they contained books about everything: toxicology, Peruvian harp music, dead languages, map making, Narnia, recipes, dinosaurs (obviously), nuclear war, magic swords… Like Borges’ infinite library, hidden in plan sight if we just know how to navigate the dusty aisles of books.

What’s Your Passion?

Books. My family. Books. My friends. Books. A fine curry. Books. Indian Pale Ales. Books. The Headington Shark. Books. The music of Bob Dylan. Books. Twin Peaks. Books. 

I secretly still like dinosaurs very much too.

Learning

I’ve always enjoyed learning–not necessarily learning stuff by rote, but learning new concepts and ideas. I studied Literature and Economics at university, and since then I’ve gone through phases of reading books about linguistics, game theory, cosmology, chess, the environment… 

And writing, of course, is a kind of learning. Which leads nicely into:

Writing

The first thing I can remember writing seriously was a piece of creative writing when I was in the final year of my GCSEs; I wrote a horror story after having recently discovered Stephen King. I can’t remember the plot of that first story, but I remember it had a sex scene in (and at sixteen I wasn’t following the ‘write what you know’ rule here…) because King’s books did. But I didn’t dare show it to my English teacher with that scene, so I wrote another story. This one I remember a bit more, although I wish I didn’t: a man had a transplant operation of some kind, which somehow caused the personality of whoever the organ had come from to inhabit his body. Don’t laugh, we all have to start somewhere. 

After GCSEs were over it was the summer holidays. As I said above, I had a lot of time to myself during school holidays. So somewhat bored one day I looked again at the first story I’d written and spotted a way to ‘improve’ it by rewriting it. So I did. 

And I’ve never really stopped since then, although there have been pauses. I studied Literature at university and I wrote a lot of different things as a student–some horror, but also realistic and experimental stories, some god-awful poetry, a kind of wannabe Martin Amis novel in the form of a self-help book. It took me awhile–by which I mean years–to understand that, whatever small talent I have for writing is more narrowly focussed than my reading tastes. But that’s fine. It was all useful, I think–all the failures, the dead-ends, the botch jobs–in learning how to be a writer. I recently recycled one line from that horrendously bad novel–one single line from 70k words that has always stuck with me–when I found its proper home seventeen years later in The Quarantined City, a serial that I’m writing for Spectral Press. The two pieces couldn’t be more different both in terms of genre and, hopefully, quality but as that sentence proves, they’re both me

Mark’s original post can be found here.

The writers I have nominated, for their sins, to continue this blog hop are:

Jasper Bark

Martin Cosby

Tracy Fahey

My Dad, IT, And Me

A quick heads up to say that I've a guest blog up over at the King For A Year site. The brainchild of Mark West, the project aims to get 52 reviewers to review 52 Stephen King books throughout 2015.

My own piece is a rather personal take on what is, to my mind, one of his greatest books: IT (or CA  as it always pleases me to see it called in French bookshops). You can read my review here.

Fictional Emotions; Emotional Fictions

'I Hated This Book!' - it was one of those arguments on Goodreads where both sides had become entrenched before I even saw the thread. Arguing about whether a book was any good or if it "sucked". The whole thing was completely impenetrable unless you'd read the YA book in question, but the arguments seemed the same as a thousand other similar threads and reviews: "I didn't like the main character one bit!"; "I finished this book and I felt nothing..."

I felt nothing - that was said as if it should end all discussion (although no arguments are ever won or lost on Goodreads) which seems reasonable enough. Isn't that why we read - to feel? But it got me thinking - what exactly do we mean when we say this? It seems to me there are a whole range of ways books can create an emotional response, and many of the endless and tedious arguments about reading are caused by a failure to acknowledge one or more of them.

I've put some very loose and blurry definitions of different types of emotion response to fiction below; no doubt these are biased towards my own reading and writing preferences. Comments, criticism and additions very much welcomed below the line.


1. Experiencing the emotions the main character(s) are experiencing

This is probably what most people think of when they think of an emotional response to a story: the main character is excited and so you feel a vicarious excitement, the main character is conflicted and hence so are you. Much commercial and YA fiction is written to create just this kind of response, and it seems to me to be the driving force behind the idea that a story should have a POV character that is sympathetic; that there shouldn't be too much of an emotional leap required from the reader.

Much so-called literary fiction claims to be more 'sophisticated' than commercial fiction merely because the character you are invited to emotionally identify with for the duration of the story is unattractive or abnormal in some way: a murderer (The Outsider), a child murderer (Beloved), a child lover (Lolita). And this seems a good thing to me; one of the reasons reading is a valuable activity is precisely because it allows you to emotionally experience the world from someone else's perspective, which may be radically different to your own. And it's the reason I find the commercial insistence that the central character of a story should be someone the reader can easily identify with so dispiriting. 


2. Experiencing different or conflicting emotions to what the main character(s) are experiencing



Sometimes the emotional response the reader feels to what a character is going through is conflicting or at odds with what the character themselves would be feeling. Put simplistically, if a chapter about a villain's downfall is told from the villain's point of view, the reader will be experiencing some kind of positive reaction to the villain's own frustration and woe. More interestingly, someone like Jane Austin is great at writing scenes where the characters appear, even to themselves, to be acting civilly and rationally but the reader can perceive the more human and subjective reasons, such as pride (and, um, prejudice) for their behaviour underneath. In Austin's case this doesn't necessarily stop us from also empathising with the characters, but in a book like Carrie it might, at least to an extent. Carrie's actions are in one sense perfectly understandable, and in another monstrous; and the different points of view in the story dramatise this paradox.


3. Atmosphere 


Of course, emotions don't have to have anything to do with characters at all; it's an odd fact about writing that almost anything, no matter how inanimate, can be be described emotionally. This is especially important in horror writing, where a sense of dread is frequently achieved by describing everyday locations in such de-familiarising ways that they seem full of portent and threat. Think of the brilliant opening to The Haunting Of Hill House - the sense that something is very wrong about the house is palpable but there is no viewpoint character to be experiencing this; it's all in our heads. And of course this kind of effect is not just limited to fear or tension; a good writer is selecting every detail to evoke whatever mood is desired.


4. The thrill of well-written sentence

Being able to actual write well is of course key to evoking any emotional responses in the reader. But separate and beyond that, I think, is the way a well crafted sentence can evoke an emotional response like a piece of music can - by the way it sounds:

"And I said I do, I do.So daddy, I'm finally through [...]If I've killed one man, I've killed two—The vampire who said he was you."

Or if poetry's too much for you on a blurry Saturday morning, how about this from Douglas Adams:

“He turned slowly like a fridge door opening.”

I'm not sure there's much point in trying to explain that - you either get it or you don't. Either feel the rightness of those words in that order, or you don't. Subjective, sure. But as much a part of the reading experience as anything else.

5. Game-playing, Plotting, and Climaxes

The plot of a book drives much of the character's emotional responses, but we as reader's can respond to it on an entirely different level as well - because we know it is a plot. This is best described as that feeling we get at a 'twist' ending to a story, or when the murderer is revealed at the end of a whodunit. In a sense, the author and the reader have been playing a game, the reader trying to guess the ending, the writer trying to stop them (whilst still playing fair and leaving enough clues). There's something pleasurable about being tricked by something like The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd and then having that trick explained to us at the end. And that 'Aha!' moment of realisation is an emotional response that came only come from a story, not from life, which doesn't play games.

More broadly, just knowing a story is nearing its end shapes our emotional responses to what occurs. We don't have to think, for example, about what the events of Romeo &Juliet mean to the poor sods who are left to pick up the pieces in the months and years afterwards because we're already back outside of the theatre, blinking in the light.


6. Intellectual Emotions


I read somewhere that we all belong to one of two camps with regard to facts: those people who think it's only worth knowing something if it's of use, and those who value knowledge for its own sake regardless of its usefulness. The fact that I've remembered this, when it's never been of the slightest use in my life, probably shows what type of person I am.

I think for at least some people the use of intellectual ideas in a piece of fiction triggers a peculiar kind of emotional response, one which is hard to describe (we really should have a specific word for it). Novels like Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot work almost entirely because of this play of intellectual ideas - and that's the best way I can describe it, as "play". Like the music of a piece of poetry, this is one you either get or you don't, I think. 


7. Fill In The Blanks

I'm pretty sure we all know that as readers we bring our own emotional baggage and experiences to a piece of fiction. And some books play on this by presenting events in such a flat, blank canvas way that we are tempted to fill in the void. We ascribe motivation, beliefs and emotions to characters based on their actions without any textual justification for doing so. Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis (indeed, nearly all of Easton Ellis's books) seems to me to work at least in part because of this - it presents to us scenes so flat it's like an itch we can't quite scratch. 

And of course, if what you're after from a book is a likeable hero or heroine with whom you can share their ups and downs, this itch might drive you to close the covers before you finish it. Which is fine; it would be a boring world if we were all the same. But on that principle maybe avoid ranting about how you couldn't relate to the characters at all! on Goodreads. If only because, no arguments are ever won or lost on Goodreads.


8. And Finally, One For The Authors:

That crippling sense of bitter envy and self-doubt when you read something so bloody good it makes any talent of your own seem insignificant and counterfeit in comparison. That.

A Halloween Horror Quiz: The Answers

So, without further ado here are the answers to my Coffin Hop 2013 quiz:

1. This is the cover of the first Stephen King book I read, Salem's Lot. I've always loved this cover - I wrote about it in an old blog post called My Dad, Stephen King, and Me.

2. Since posing the question, I've found on some forums there's some debate about this question, depending on whether you count off screen kills, and the dog. For the purposes of this quiz, if you answered 5, 6 or 7 you get a point...

3. The opening lines of Ghost Story by Peter Straub

4. The closing lines of Frankenstein

5. Triangle

6. Shirley Jackson

7. Catherine Deneuve, Repulsion

8. The Navidson Record

9. Christine

10. The real life Pennywise is terrorising Northampton...

The Ritual & Wilderness Horror

I recently finished The Ritual by Adam Nevill, a horror novel set, to quote the blurb, in "the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle". It's a fine novel, albeit one that I felt lost a bit of steam in its second half. It's also a very pure horror novel too: it's essentially about a group of friends lost in the woods, with 'something' stalking them. Even more essentially, it's a book about the fear of death.

That might sound a trite, even pointless description - aren't all horror novels about the fear of death? After all, what else is there actually to be afraid of, underneath? Maybe that's true, but it's surprising how many horror books and films pussyfoot around the issue. Very few put us inside the head of someone facing death for any length of time. The gory kills, the entrails and innards spilt in the worst horror films and fictions actually seem a distraction, a sensationalist focusing on the external side of death. The real horror is inside.

The Ritual dares to show us the thoughts of someone who believes they are going to die for a very long time. The sense of dread, of hopelessness, is almost palpable and is as scary as anything I've read for a long time.

Maybe the starkness of the wilderness setting increases this feeling. After all, the central characters are in a hell of a mess before the supernatural element really makes itself known. They are lost, wet, alone, running out of food and a couple of them are injured, slowing the group down. They're suffering that modern dislocation that comes when suddenly, somehow in the middle of our routine lives we can be mortally in danger: they were on holiday for Christ's sake, and now this... But theirs is also an ageless fear, too: the fear of being lost in the woods.

It's the same fear Stephen King plays on in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - one of his best books I think, because it's so simple: the titular girl is also lost in the woods and scared she's not alone. It's a very different book, both in terms of plot and tone, to The Ritual but there's a similarity there. As there is with The Terror by Dan Simmons, another book where the horrors of the Arctic wilderness the characters can't escape (stranded this time, rather than lost) almost seem to dwarf the supernatural element of the plot.

So why, we might ask, do these books even need a monster - is it a mere sop to the horror audience? A set of stabilisers that these writers can't write without?

Well no, I don't think so. I think it's important to the effect of these stories, and The Ritual in particular, that the 'thing' is barely described, a shadowy but constant presence at the characters' backs. No matter how far they walk, it keeps pace with them; no matter where they hide it seeks them out. It's like Death itself, in fact. Not so much a symbol, but an externalisation of the character's plight.

But, these being stories, the monster can also be evaded, fought off- temporarily and at great cost it can be defeated. Sometimes we can make it out of the wilderness, of the woods we have got lost in. Despite a sense of hopelessness as great as any I've encountered in a novel, there are brief moments of respite in The Ritual, of light and hope. But I won't give the game away about whether they are ultimately groundless or how the novel ends - this really is one you need to read yourself.

The Ritual (UK |US)

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say...

Most of the strange stories I've featured in this column to date have been short, controlled tales – paranoia and fear mounting to a single moment of horror. Whilst the best of these stories might imply a lot, they definitively state very little.

House Of Leaves is not that kind of story.

This is a huge novel (and one you must read in its physical version rather than as an ebook, as the photographs in this post will indicate) with multiple plots and sub-plots, typographical tricks, footnotes and diversions. It tells the story of ‘The Navidson Record’, a film by a renowned photographer about a very singular house.

The book takes the form of an academic treatment of the film, discussing its themes and veracity. This has apparently been written by Zampano, a blind man who dies in mysterious circumstances. His manuscript is recovered by a second character, Johnny Truant, who interprets the Zampano notes and The Navidson Record in his own way, as well as chronicling the breakdown he suffers whilst reading the material, despite the fact that he can find no evidence that the film even exists.

So the book is in effect one narrator annotating the notes of another narrator about a film neither can ever have seen (one doubting it is real, the other being blind) and that even if it does exist might just be a fake anyway. I think.

Added to this, the book is a labyrinth (and that word is chosen deliberately) of other stories, from Johnny’s tall-tales told to impress girls to historical accounts of people shipwrecked in the Arctic. The book also features seemingly never-ending lists (of architectural features, famous photographers, ghost stories etc.), mirror-writing, poems, and letters with a secret code. There are 'quotations' about the Navidson Record from people like Derrida, Camile Paglia, and Stephen King. There are a number of seemingly trivial mysteries that nevertheless prey on the mind: why is the word house (or any translation thereof) in a different colour & font to the rest of the text? Why is every reference to the Minotaur myth crossed through?

This book achieves ambiguity not through sparseness of detail but through a surfeit of it.

And there remains the fact that, despite the interruptions and longueurs, there is at the core of this book a truly frightening and original horror story. The Navidson Record starts with the Navidson family moving into a new house, and Navidson realising his house appears to be a fraction of an inch bigger on the inside than the outside: Lovecraft’s crazy geometry rewritten on a domestic scale. Soon after, a door appears in the house that wasn't there before, that appears to open onto a small, dusty corridor… which is clearly occupying the same physical space as the garden outside the house. Navidson, and later others, explore the corridor, and they soon realise the space behind the door is potentially huge (infinite?), and shifting and protean... and there might be something in that impossible space with them. The sheer impossibility of the house, initially represented by that small fraction of an inch, becomes something experienced on a far vaster scale. Added to this is the very human drama played out between Navidson and his wife Karen, who desperately wants her husband to stop exploring the house, and between Navidson and his estranged brother Tom. The book contains several moving moments of catharsis as well as it's brain-frying detail.

House Of Leaves seems to me a stunning achievement, a book that will become a true classic of the genre (despite the fact that no genre can really contain it). It meshes post-modernism with a strong knowledge of horror tropes, and comes up with something absolutely original. It contains enough intellectual stimulation to fuel a thousand post-graduate essays, but with enough twists and turns of the plot to turn it into an addictive page-turner too. Despite its size it’s compulsively readable, and re-readable – I've read it three times now and found new pleasures and confusions each time.

In fact, typing this, it occurs to me it's a love story, too.

Absolutely essential reading.

Big Bulky Horror Novels for Halloween

Halloween is an odd time of year, when people who never normally watch horror movies or read ghost stories seem to find an excuse to do so. The webpage of a national newspaper might discuss a short story by Robert Aickman, and a respectable broadcaster might devote an hour to an informed discussion of European horror films.

 

I'm probably guilty on this blog of discussing the more obscure aspects of horror fiction, at the expense of commercial books that a wider audience will have heard of. So in tribute to Halloween and the temporary mass celebration of all things scary, I've decided to do a post on my favourite BIG horror best-sellers. These were the kind of books that introduced me to the genre when I was a teenager and it’s unlikely I’d be reading Aickman & Co. if I’d not read the likes of King and Simmons first.

 

I've imposed some strict rules on my selections here: no tricksy post-modernism (sorry, House Of Leaves); no psychological ambiguity (bye bye Turn of The Screw and Hill House); nothing old (stop moaning,  Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde) and no short stories or novellas (adiós just about every weird, under-appreciated book I've ever featured here). Instead, these are the block-busters. The writers of cracking action scenes with unambiguously evil villains. At least three have been made into movies, and the other two should be.

 

I guess it’s obvious from the above that this list would include King, so I thought I might as well start with him. IT is probably my favourites of his horror novels, and it exemplifies the kind of book I'm talking about here: vast, with a sprawling cast of characters, and a ‘big bad’ who has been responsible for decades of fear in the Maine town (of course) of Derry. The story takes place across two timelines – the characters repeat scenes from their childhood as flawed and weaker adults… King’s handling of this, and the creepy effects associated with time repeating itself, are a highlight of the novel and really call into question those people who think he can’t write with any subtlety. (Just because the books I'm talking about here are big bulky blockbusters doesn't mean they’re big bulky dumb blockbusters.)

 

For me, Ghost Story is Straub’s best book by a country mile – forget the singular title, this book should really be called Ghost Stories, containing as it does multiple stories told by a group of old men know as the ‘Chowder Society’. Straub takes the Stephen King approach of using an American small town as a setting for his horrors, and as a microcosm of society as a whole, but this is distinctly his own style. As the story progresses it becomes clear that each of the individual ghosts and monsters are just facets of the real evil; that each of the separate stories being told, are in fact just elements of one story after all.

Probably the most ‘arty’ book in this list, and arguably not horror, being told as it is from the point of view of a monster. But there are bigger monsters in this tale than the vampire doing the talking, and the real horror may be the slow falling away of his humanity… I like this book for it’s lavish set pieces (the whole book is nothing more than a series of set pieces, really) and the darkly luxurious feel of the prose, particularly in its descriptions of night-time New Orleans and Paris. Maybe this was the start of the trend towards Twilight and everything bad associated with that, but here the vampires still have a decadent, almost nihilistic  edge. (Everything else I've read by Rice, including the sequels to this, I've not liked at all.)

 

An absolute whopper of a book, which has a premise that makes it sound like the worst tripe imaginable: ‘mind vampires’ have been controlling human affairs for decades. But this was back when Simmons was at the top of his game (by contrast his last book was one part plot to nine parts Tea Party ranting) and he plays the idea of mind vampires with a completely straight bat. They become almost the ultimate villain, responsible for humanity’s evils both big and small. And like all the best villains they are completely compelling. The odds seem ridiculously stacked against the human heroes and despite the simple good versus evil plot, the book has an air of desperation in places that makes it stand out.

 

The most recent book on the list and yet another one about vampires. I don’t know if Lindqvist has read Interview With The Vampire, but given it’s English-language ubiquity it at least seems likely he might have. One of the minor characters in that book might have been the inspiration for this one – a child vampire. A creature that has lived for centuries but still has the body of a kid. In some ways this is the darkest of the books in this list, with its setting of an 80s Swedish housing estate, and its background themes of addiction and child-abuse. In this setting the child-vampire is only partly horrific, and the tale of her relationship with a lonely schoolboy has a real emotional core, twisted and bleak, but there. The kind of book that gives best-sellers a good name.

Feel free to mention your own big bulky favourite horror novels in the comments...

Weird Tales; PD on Smashwords; BIG Skeleton

Book Review: The Modern Weird Tale by S.T. Joshi

I do enjoy books about the theory of horror fiction, particularly those that focus on newer authors - most academic textbooks are slanted towards older, 'gothic' works. There are few books around which deal with modern horror in an intellectually robust way, but S.T. Joshi's are among the best of those that do.

The Modern Weird Tale is the follow up to The Weird Tale and The Evolution of the Weird Tale, and it is mainly concerned with authors from Shirley Jackson onwards. Joshi basically groups the writers into two camps - those he likes (people like Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, and TED Klein) and those he doesn't (mainly 'bestseller' authors such as King, Anne Rice etc.) There are also some writers discussed that it is downright odd to classify as 'weird' - Thomas Harris?

The main flaws in the book show when Joshi discusses writers he doesn't like - he seems to think he is skewering them with objective barbs, whereas viewed from the outside the subjectivity of his tastes is obvious. Thus Stephen King is castigated, in part, because his characters are middle-class people with middle-class woes. "Who cares about people like this?" Joshi says, without every wondering how that sentence would sound applied to any other social group... Similarly The Exorcist and its explicitly Christian viewpoint doesn't square with Joshi's atheism, and so by his logic must be a flawed book... Of course Joshi is quite entitled to like what he likes (and often I agree with him) but his apparent belief in his objectivity is annoying.

The most aggravating issues occur when Joshi critisizes an author he doesn't like for a 'flaw' that he is happy to ignore when applied to writers he does like. So some of Stephen King's stories come under fire for not explaining how and why the supernatural in them came to be - a claim that could be made against no end of weird fiction, including lots of those featured here.

Fortunately, Joshi is far, far better at explaining why he loves writers he loves - the chapters on Ramsey Campbell, TED Klein and Shirley Jackson alone are worth the price of the book. Here he really shines, highlighting themes and connections that I missed even on books I've read loads of times. I've never read any Thomas Tyron, but Joshi's discussion of The Other and Harvest Home really makes me want to - his writing is infectious in these sections, erudite but not dry, pointing out strengths (and weaknesses) of books with clarity and accuracy. (Only the chapter on Robert Aickman is somewhat disappointing, largely because Joshi seems unsure quite what to make of him...)

So - a good book to argue with, but a better one to be inspired by.

---

In other news, Penny Dreadnought: Omnibus! Volume 1 is now available from those good folks at Smashwords (as well as Amazon UK | US). Rejoice!

And finally.... is this the best set for anything ever?