Hundredfold Horror (A Review of Nightmare #100)

This January has brought the 100th edition of horror’s preeminent monthly magazine, Nightmare. Appropriate to such numerical milestone, Issue #100 goes big: 262-pages-worth of whopping content. Special features include a celebratory retrospective in which staff members and frequent contributors share their favorite items from Nightmare‘s history, and an interview between longtime editor John Joseph Adams and his incoming replacement Wendy N. Wagner–one that furnishes plentiful insight into their personal aesthetics as well as their sense of the current state of the genre.

Orrin Grey is the guest writer of this month’s “The H-Word” column. His “Victims and Volunteers” essay offers a fascinating survey of the horror film’s evolution over the past century. Grey uses the historical marker of warfare–and the shifting public perspective onto such violent spectacle–to trace a key distinction: “If World War I and II were Dracula–a terrible and foreign evil that needed brave souls to confront it–then the war in Vietnam was the Sawyer family in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: random, indiscriminate, and unshakably American.”

The hallmark of Nightmare, though, has always been its horror fiction. Issue #100 forms a veritable mini-anthology, rounding up ten short stories (five original). Considering the reprints first:

The very title of Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself” boldly announces where the narrative is headed, but the dark joy of the piece resides in the journey itself. While taking Rabelaisian appetite to the bizarro extreme, the story also serves up pointed remark about human rapaciousness.

In Victor Lavalle’s “Up From Slavery,” an Amtrak train derailment sets the stage for greater Lovecraftian wreckage. A revisionist take on the Cthulhu Mythos reminiscent of the author’s lauded novella The Ballad of Black Tom.

Gemma Files’s “Thin Cold Hands” combines dark fantasy with stunning scenes of body horror, and is suffused with the writer’s usual exquisite imagery. Drawing fairy lore into present-day context, Files crafts a haunting first-person tale of maternal love and concomitant dread.

Tananarive Due’s “Last Stop on Route Nine” starts as a wrong-turn/car-horror narrative and then supercharges it with eeriness and vicious witchery. With its deft interweaving of social commentary and the supernatural, “Last Stop” maps out a story that would make for a perfect adaptation as an episode of HBO’s Lovecraft Country.

Sessions with a hypnotist to quit smoking prove anything but commonplace when they transpire in Laird Barron’s recurrent setting of the Broadsword Hotel (which makes The Shining‘s Overlook seem like Shangri-La). A title like “Jaws of Saturn” promises wild carnage in store, and the story’s climax delivers no shortage of slaughter by a cyclopean monstrosity.

In regards to the issue’s five original works of fiction:

Desirina Boskovich’s “I Let You Out” runs on pure nightmare fuel: that quintessential childhood fear of the monster lurking in the closet. Don’t expect a generic setting, though, as Boskovich sketches scenes of distinctly Midwestern horror.

Reading like a podcast transcript, Adam Troy-Castro’s “Rotten Little Town: An Oral History” traces (with richly sinister undertones) a hit occult-western TV series whose broadcast run was shadowed by strange developments and macabre mishaps. The titular show sounds like one that horror fans would flock to, but they wouldn’t want to run into the creative forces behind it.

Maria Dahlvana Headley’s “Wolfsbane” is a modernized fairy-tale/feminist fable that channels Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. The story scores a slew of critical points against predatorial masculinity, but any potential tendentiousness here is leavened by the narrative’s extraordinary inventiveness (which includes insurrectionist breadmaking).

A con game goes horribly awry in Stephen Graham Jones’s “How to Break into a Hotel Room.” The fun of watching the protagonist operate in the first half of the story is matched by the dread that arises when his past transgressions catch up to him at last. Jones once again proves himself a master of unsettling detail.

For me, the issue’s standout story was Sam J. Miller’s “Darkness Metastatic,” a frightfully timely tale of social-media fearmongering and the incitement of mindless violence. A sophisticated app taps into humanity’s worst impulses, the hatred and dread that cancerously riddles the body politic. In the “Author Spotlight” for the story, Miller admits that he aimed to create a “creepy dread-filled atmosphere” and flat out “scare the shit out of people.” At that he has succeeded brilliantly: this might be the most disturbing, unnerving work of horror fiction that I have read in years.

If ever there was an issue that readers should pay the $2.99 purchase price for (rather than just sampling the magazine’s contents in segments posted weekly to its website), this is it. The bonanza of bonus material makes this a Nightmare that horror lovers can’t do without.

 

 

Skin Fic: Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Tales, Ranked–#12, #11, #10

[To read the previous countdown post, click here.]

 

12. “The Skins of the Fathers” (from Vol. 2)

Appropriately, the desert procession of “monumental creatures” at the start of the story is considered by the viewpoint character “a carnival of some sort,” because Barker’s approach here in “The Skins of the Fathers” is nothing less than carnivalesque. Societal norms are upended and genre expectations are challenged: the narrative–which reads like a prequel to Cabal–clearly favors the so-called monsters over their human antagonists (the intolerant inhabitants of the ironically-named community of Welcome, Arizona, whose sheriff is a “hick-town Mussolini” leading an “army of mean-minded, well-armed people” on a lynching mission against the demonized “savages”). Barker relishes the opportunity to describe the Fathers’ “extraordinary anatomies” and to depict instances of incredible metamorphosis, but he also concludes with one of the most horrifying and unforgettable set pieces in the Books of Blood canon. The overbearing humans get cast down into the literal muck, as the Fathers-induced “rising mire” engulfs the militants and then promptly concretizes. Those who are trapped with parts of their upper bodies exposed become unwilling participants in a terrible tableau (the labels given them–the Torso, the Head, the Mouth–suggest a reduction to the status of freakshow exhibit). They might have escaped asphyxiation, but their partial burial leaves them in an unenviable situation: before help could be fetched from Welcome, “the wilderness would have had the best of them. The sun would have boiled their brain-pans dry, snakes would have nested in their hair, the buzzards would have hooked out their helpless eyes.” In this scene of Boschean nightmare, the human devils get their due.

 

11. “Son of Celluloid” (from Vol. 3)

Barker’s penchant for using the base of crime narrative as a springboard to dark fantasy is once again in perfect evidence. Barberio, a bullet-wounded and unwittingly cancer-riddled escaped prisoner, holes up in a secret niche behind the screen of a Movie Palace; as he dies, the air around him–supercharged by the emotional energy moviegoers have projected toward the film screen over the years–catalyzes his cancer sells and revives him as the titular mutant. Like some glamor-wearing vampire, the Son of Celluloid cloaks himself in movie images and draws vitality from rapt/entrapped viewers: “I need to be looked at, or I die,” he admits. “It’s the natural state of illusions.” The result is one wildly visual (in a perfect world, David Cronenberg would have adapted Barker’s novella as an episode of Masters of Horror) and unabashedly visceral tale. In its guise as Marilyn Monroe, the monster stashes a previous victim’s eyes inside the starlet’s most private part; in its true state, this “dreaming disease” is the epitome of grotesquerie (“It was a filthy thing, a tumor grown fat on wasted passion. A parasite with the shape of a slug, and the texture of raw liver….it brought to mind something aborted, a bucket case.”). There’s substance to go with all the splatter, though, as seen in the story’s jab at Westerns. Harassed by the Son of Celluloid in the form of John Wayne, the character Ricky reacts: “This face, so mockmanly, so uncompromising, personified a handful of lethal lies–about the glories of America’s frontier origins, the morality of swift justice, the tenderness in the heart of brutes.” Nevertheless, a sense of celebration overshadows critique; Barker’s cinephilia (and wit) is splashed all across the page (my favorite moment is when the bogey quotes Bogie–“Here’s looking at you, kid”–as it manifests as “a single vast eye”). The author appears to have had great fun scripting “Son of Celluloid,” creating a delightful frightfest that fans can devour like a heaping tub of buttered popcorn.

 

10. “In the Flesh” (from Vol. 5, In the Flesh).

The mundane is invaded by dark marvel, as the Pentonville prison becomes the site of “spiraling nightmare.” A narrow jail cell proves no safe haven from otherworldly phantoms, as well as a portal to a bizarre dream city in a desert wasteland (the “assemblage of charnel houses” is gradually revealed to be a “murderers’ metropolis”–a hellish realm where dead criminals are forced to occupy the rooms where their violent deeds were committed, and to ruminate on their mortal sins). New inmate Billy Tait, a nascent shapeshifter, has come to Pentonville hoping to make supernatural contact with his notorious grandfather Edgar, a multiple murderer who was executed and buried on the prison grounds years earlier. No willing tutor, though, the ancestral convict instead runs a con game, duping his grandson into taking his place in the necropolis so Edgar can escape into reincarnation. Billy’s cell mate, the protagonist Cleve, doesn’t fare much better. His visits to the dream city haunt him (dooming him to take up eventual residence there) even after he wins his release from Pentonville, because he’s now sensitive to the populace’s omnipresent bloodthirst: “They were everywhere, these embryonic killers, people wearing smart clothes and sunny expressions were striding the pavement and imagining, as they strode, the deaths of their employers and their spouses, of soap-opera stars and incompetent tailors. The world had murder on its mind, and [Cleve] could no longer bear its thoughts.” The novella both hearkens back to “The Book of Blood” (“I read somewhere: The dead have highways,” Billy tells Cleve. “You ever hear that? Well…they have cities, too.”) and looks forward, in its concerns with crime and punishment, with infernal debt and its discharge, to The Damnation Game. Sinister-toned and creepy to the extreme, “In the Flesh” constitutes a masterwork of horripilation.

 

 

Lore Report: “By Design” (Episode 162)

Fairy tales help us dream of a better life, teaching us that brighter days lay ahead. But where there is light, there are also shadows; where there are people, there are problems. And wherever there are stories of happiness, there are also tales of the darker sides of life. Because the deeper you delve into history, the more it reveals a painful truth: not everything’s that enchanted is safe.

Episode 162 of the Lore podcast explores the locus classicus of fairy tale settings: the medieval castle. Host Aaron Mahnke guides listeners on a tour of Europe’s most storied fortresses, including Bran Castle in Romania (popularly, if inaccurately, regarded today as Dracula’s Castle) and Austria’s Moosham Castle (a site associated with both witch trails and werewolves). The episode’s title refers to Houska Castle (in the Czech Republic; pictured above), a Gothic structure strategically built atop an alleged hellmouth so as to serve as a barrier against the nocturnal spillage of demons from the underworld. Mahnke’s narrative also details the castle’s connections to Nazi occultism, but given the episode’s central positioning of Houska Castle, one wishes that Mahnke had expanded the discussion and spent some more time in this dark abode. Overall, “By Design” builds up an impressive list of tales of haunted/haunting castles, and does a fine job of connecting the world of the fairy tale with the folklore that surrounds specific historical locales throughout Europe.

 

The Night Stalker at 49

On this date in 1972, The Night Stalker premiered as the ABC Movie of the Week (garnering the highest ratings for any made-for-TV film up to that time). The movie introduced the world to that bloodhound of an investigative reporter, Carl Kolchak, here tracking the story of a series of killings in Las Vegas in which the female victims have been drained of vital fluids via a bite to the neck. Nearly a half-century now after the initial airing, it’s no terrible plot spoiler to note that the perpetrator proves to be not some psychopath with a Dracula kink, but the real supernatural deal.

The Night Stalker forms an indisputable landmark of televisual American Gothic. With Darren McGavin playing a wisecracking, working class Van Helsing, the film imports Bram Stoker’s classic vampire narrative, reworks it and roots it in a modern urban setting. Stephen King has praised the film in his study Danse Macabre (poignantly dubbing Kolchak “more Lew Archer than Clark Kent”), and The Night Stalker can be detected as an influence on the author’ own fiction (e.g., Salem’s Lot, “The Night Flier”). This hard-boiled/horror hybrid has also proven seminal to the paranormal-investigation subgenre, most notably in the case of The X-Files.

With its fine pedigree (Richard Matheson furnished the script for producer Dan Curtis), The Night Stalker unsurprisingly became an instant hit with audiences. The film also holds up remarkably well to a 2021 viewing. Barry Atwater is a frightful, and decidedly physical, menace as the vampiric antagonist Janos Skorzeny. The film’s protracted climax, in which Kolchak searches the vampire’s Gothic household lair (where Skorzeny’s latest victim is held captive as his personal blood bank), is the quintessence of thrilling suspense.

Thanks to the success of the film, the Kolchak character would develop into a pop cultural icon, appearing in a subsequent made-for-TV movie, a short-running but long-revered TV series, and countless works of fiction. Forty-nine years later, though, it is still The Night Stalker that represents the height of Kolchak’s story-hunting, monster-encountering glory.

 

Skin Fic: Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Tales, Ranked–#15, #14, #13

[To read the previous countdown post, click here.]

 

15. “Hell’s Event” (from Vol. 2)

The damnation game’s afoot in this fast-moving piece in which an ostensible London charity event to raise money for Cancer Research actually serves as a high-stakes race between humanity and the denizens of Hell (which is hoping to claim as its winner’s purse “enough souls to keep it busy with perdition another age”). The grim fates suffered by the various human runners as they are tracked down one by one by Hell’s representative give the narrative the feel of an 80’s slasher film, but Barker is also interested in making social commentary here. The black character Joel Jones, who has caught wise mid-race to the infernal shenanigans transpiring, thinks: “And he was not afraid of darkness; he was painted in it. Wasn’t that what made him less than human as far as so many people were concerned? Or more, more than human; bloodier, sweatier, fleshier. More arm, more leg, more head. More strength, more appetite. What could Hell do? Eat him? He’d taste foul on the palate. Freeze him? He was too hot-blooded, too fast, too living.” But the real horror, and the real joy, of the story comes from Barker’s depictions of devilish creatures (with features like “a fan of knives” or an animate wound–“oily bone locking and unlocking like the face of a crab”) and the icy Ninth-Circle hellmouth (in the bowels of London building) from which they spring.

 

14. “The Age of Desire” (from Vol. 4, The Inhuman Condition)

This sexually-charged recreation of the Frankenstein myth forms one of the most realistic (i.e. non-supernatural) and frightfully plausible narratives in the Books of Blood canon. What begins as your basic police procedural (the investigation of a murder scene at a laboratory) steadily unfolds into something darker and more disturbing.  Jerome, a nondescript everyman, transforms into a human monster and goes on a rampage of indiscriminate rape after volunteering as a research subject for a potent aphrodisiac drug (one that “operates directly on the sexual imagination, on the libido”). Following his escape from the lab, Jerome commits a slew of sexual violence, against others as well upon himself (in a scene guaranteed to make any male reader cringe, Jerome rakes his own member bloody while humping away at a niche in a brick wall). But like Mary Shelley before him, Barker elicits sympathy for his murderous monster, the tragic victim of a mad doctor. Some of the most moving sections of the story are those that delve into Jerome’s “spinning, eroticized brain” and present his viewpoint, his ecstatic yet catastrophic state as he is immolated from within by his uncontrollable, artificially-stoked lust.

 

13. “Pig Blood Blues” (from Vol. 1)

Barker’s poetics and politics are clearly revealed in this early Books of Blood entry. The setting of Tetherdowne is called “a Remand Center for Adolescent Offenders but it was near as dammit a prison.” This bastion of “Law and Order” doesn’t appeal to the protagonist, the new employee Redman, who–in a passage that serves as a perfect gloss for Barker’s colorful and uninhibited artistry–thinks: “Minds weren’t pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and numbered in order of influence, one marked ‘Cunning,’ the next ‘Impressionable.’ They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.” A place of entrapment and an unsettlingly repressive institution, Tetherdowne grows even more Gothic as a site of violent death, ghostly return, and the monstrous presence of a possessed, man-eating sow (beautiful and grotesque, “a seductress on trotters,” the beast is both feared and worshiped by the cult-like boys remanded to the prison-farm). “Pig Blood Blues” reads throughout like a mix of “Children of the Corn” and Lord of the Flies, but in its gruesome conclusion reaches the level of true, Wicker Man horrific-ness.

 

 

Lore Report: “Shell Game” (Episode 161)

 

Life, just like Viking graves, is often full of surprises. But one thing is certain: warriors have always lived lives of pain and suffering and death. Every battle had the potential to be their last. And when faced with all that risk and fear, those warriors found ways to cope, often through the stories they shared. And, yes, those stories from the battlefield can be frightening, and sometimes even drove people mad. But if we want to dig into them, we need to be aware of an undeniable truth: sometimes the darkest places to look for folklore are also the most dangerous.

Episode 161 of the Lore podcast furnishes another answer to the question posed in the classic Edwin Starr song: what war is really good for is the development of folklore. Host Aaron Mahnke begins by surveying the relevant figures from Egyptian, Greek, and Norse mythology, and then outlines the types of soldierly superstitions that have arisen throughout history (e.g., premonitions of death, use of charms, alleged assistance by ghostly figures). A significant portion of the episode is devoted to the angels said to have rallied to the cause of British forces in the World War I Battle of Mons; the narrative grows even more intriguing by its entanglement with a contemporaneous weird tale written by Arthur Machen. The concluding segment shares some positively ghoulish lore surrounding the trench-warfare notion of “No Man’s Land.” Because battlefield superstition is such a fertile topic, one wishes that Mahnke had dug up a few more stories like this, but listeners will still find “Shell Game” well worth playing.