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Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

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by Orrin Grey




  Contents

  Praise for Orrin Grey’s Guignol & Other Sardonic...

  Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

  Other books by Orrin Grey

  Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

  Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales-1

  Dedication

  Epigram

  Introduction by Gemma Files

  Dream House

  The Lesser Keys

  Guignol

  Shadders

  The Blue Light

  A Circle That Ever Returneth In

  Programmed to Receive

  The Well and the Wheel

  Haruspicate or Scry

  Dark and Deep

  Invaders of Gla’aki

  Baron von Werewolf Presents: Frankenstein Against the Phantom Planet

  The Cult of Headless Men

  When a Beast Looks Up at the Stars

  Afterword & Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Orrin Grey’s Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

  “In this career-spanning collection, Grey assembles 14 peculiar tales of horror into a veritable smorgasbord of horrific thrills and chills. […] This collection is a must-read for hardcore fans of horror…”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “In his third and arguably best collection, Orrin Grey spreads his black wings and takes us on a thrill ride into his limitless imagination. Through musty attics and mist-shrouded crypts, down soot-choked chimneys and into mysterious portals to faraway planets we ride, emerging at the end buzzing, a little dizzy, and most certainly changed. Cinematic, dark, and daring, Guignol is a book that will bring out the monster in you… and let it feed.”

  —Matthew M. Bartlett, author of Gateways to Abomination

  and Of Doomful Portent

  “To say that Orrin Grey is a phenomenal writer is like saying the Phantom of the Opera knew his way around a pipe organ. Nobody evokes classic terrors while simultaneously offering a melancholy, beautifully macabre world as brilliantly as Grey.”

  —Christopher Slatsky, author of Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales

  Praise for Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

  “Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts is a fantastic follow-up to Grey’s first collection, Never Bet the Devil. This is the kind of writing that shows what can still be done with the classical weird.”

  —Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

  “This is an outstanding collection, one to which you will return again and again long after the house lights have come up.”

  —Daniel Mills, author of The Lord Came at Twilight

  Praise for Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts (cont’d)

  “The horror genre is a many-splintered thing. Grey collects those splinters, mixes and matches them, concocting a beast of a collection that is as fun as it is scary, as charming as it is chilling.”

  —Philip Gelatt, director of They Remain

  “In his latest collection, Orrin Grey not only pays homage to the classic horror films of yesteryear, he tears down the silver screen to reveal the true horrors that lurk on the other side. Fans of H. P. Lovecraft, Vincent Price, and the Hammer horror films will feel right at home.”

  —Ian Rogers, author of Every House Is Haunted

  “Orrin Grey’s work specializes in old-school horror iconography—Universal monster movies, Roger Corman Poe adaptations, found footage epistolary narratives—run through a pop-culture blender set on frappé, and Painted Monsters (whose title derives from a quote from Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, with old Boris Karloff playing a version of himself while commenting on a version of his career) proves no exception to this rule. The result: inventive, assonant, literally dreadful. If you’re looking for something between Ray Bradbury’s headlong genre-bending fabulist glee and the Insidious movie franchise’s unapologetic vaudeville creep, then Grey’s your man.”

  —Gemma Files, author of Experimental Film

  “Orrin Grey’s roots (or should I say tentacles?) run deep, squeezing the best from horrors both classic and obscure, twisting them in his own particular way. He’s a fine storyteller who’ll pull you in, and so will Painted Monsters. Don’t miss it!”

  —Norman Partridge, author of Dark Harvest

  Guignol

  & Other Sardonic Tales

  Other books by Orrin Grey

  Anthologies:

  Fungi (with Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

  Chapbooks:

  Gardinel’s Real Estate (with M. S. Corley)

  The Mysterious Flame

  Collections:

  Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings

  Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

  Guignol

  & Other Sardonic Tales

  Orrin Grey

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

  © 2018 by Orrin Grey

  This edition of Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

  © 2018 by Word Horde

  Cover art © 2018 by Nick “The Hat” Gucker

  Cover design by Scott R Jones

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-939905-42-0

  A Word Horde Book

  www.wordhorde.com

  For Clive Barker, Richard Matheson,

  Ray Russell, and Roger Corman.

  In spite of Virtue and the Muse,

  Nemesis will have her dues,

  And all our struggles and our toils

  Tighter wind the giant coils.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Introduction

  Gemma Files

  I often say of other writers whose work I particularly enjoy that I long to eat their brains (just a slice! A tiny, energizing piece!), and I think this impulse to consume what I love has a lot to do with the fact that all writing—especially horror writing—seems to find its origin in a tangled mixture of obsession, imitation and covetousness. And Orrin Grey ranks especially high on that list, possibly because we’re so similar in our interests and patterns, except for the fact that he makes it all look so damn easy, the monster-loving skeleton bastard.

  Of course, it helps that as fellow self-taught film historians/genre geeks, Grey and I share a set of references so encyclopedic that we’ve had whole conversations consisting entirely of the primal fan(atic)s’ back-and-forth: “Have you seen [X]? Well, but how about [X]?” Both of us have garburator imaginations, our engines apparently fuelled alike by digesting a span of wildly competing influences, letting them ferment, then spitting them back out onto the page. But while my own interests tend to exit me Cronenberg-style, in a lumpy mess of filth and blood, Grey’s come out polished and complex, as interlocking puzzles hiding sudden existentially dreadful surprises, like little Lament Configurations.

  And now here’s his latest, named not only after its titular tale but the legendary Théâtre de Grand Guignol (1897-1962), that infamous Parisian stage show specializing in amoral, grotesquely realistic horror plays—one of the first cultural influxes of splatter/torture porn, in a lot of ways, though its creators took equal inspiration from Grimm fairytales and the black paintings of Goya, the yellow rags, Sensation literature and Penny Dreadfuls of the Victorian era and the much-decried excesses of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies, from Titus Andronicus to The Duchess of Malfi. Hypersexual as well as gruesome (shows were often attended as a sort of foreplay), the Grand Guignol rode that still-undeniable line where horror gets so over the top it becomes humor for all it was worth, routinely finding the happily shocked guffaw hiding inside every scream. They al
so pioneered the use of special effects onstage, using putty, fake knives and bladders to test the limits of the allowable—audience members in the front rows could pretty much expect to get splashed, especially since the troupe kept a fresh-mixed vat of fake blood simmering behind the scenes every night.

  Can readers expect to stumble out the back of this book soaked in gore and horny as hell, then? Maybe not, but they can expect to receive a download straight from Grey’s ever-boiling brain along with each weird narrative, a meta-tastic mixture of supposedly tired old tropes enthusiastically Frankensteined together to make something far more fresh, its DNA soaked with jokes so in- they turn outwards once more. You absolutely don’t have to get all the shout-outs to enjoy these stories, either, though Grey’s notes may well send you spiralling down an endless click-hole of research, decoding each shadow on the wall until you feel at least semi-satisfied you might have finally found (most of) Waldo: Roger Corman, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Universal monster movies, pre-Hayes Code film history/rumour run wild; Hammer horror and Amicus from Cushing and Lee to Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires; Toho-inflected J-horror from yurei to kaiju; Doctor Who and Nigel Kneale, Choose Your Own Adventures and D & D; pulpy Noir served hot, with a heaping side of cheese. A constantly sparkling film of artifice, only thinly applied over a shit-ton of existential truths.

  At all points along the creative curve, Grey remains both a gentleman and a scholar of our own much-decried genre...he never stops learning, which means his fans never do, either. So enter this freakishly inventive cabinet of curiosities if you will, every story providing a redly drippy skull-window straight into the id-vortex of a modern horror master—gape in awe, laugh out loud, feel your mental mouth start to water.

  Or, to put it another way: God damn, you may very well exclaim, as you finally emerge; Gemma, you were right. Those really are some tasty, tasty brains.

  Dream House

  It was the last night of the Festival, and we were all sitting around one of the long tables out behind the Moon and Sixpence. It was cold enough that my feet were freezing and my hands were shoved into the pockets of my jacket when not gesturing or picking up a drink. Above us, a suitably gibbous moon dipped in-and-out behind clouds that would’ve otherwise been invisible.

  There were still a couple of movies playing, so the back patio wasn’t too crowded yet, but I’d talked Simon out of watching Curse of the Crimson Altar on account of it being five minutes of awesome and an hour-and-change of people walking around in dark houses, so we were staking out the table ’til the Festival ended and the last movies let out. Simon was telling me about some French movie he’d seen this year that came off as a poor man’s John Carpenter, one that seemed to get worse every time he mentioned it.

  As the table gradually filled up, the conversation twisted and turned—as conversations like that, in places like those, always do—and somehow or other we got on the subject of Lovecraft in old TV shows. Maybe there was a panel on it, or someone was suggesting one for next year. They’d showed the Stuart Gordon “Dreams in the Witch House” that year, and Nick mentioned that “Pickman’s Model” episode of Night Gallery, which I’d always loved. I told him it was my favorite adaptation of the story, and someone else—probably Ross—agreed. Sooner or later, of course, somebody brought up Dream House.

  There wasn’t anyone at the table who hadn’t seen at least a few episodes—some back when it was still on the air, most of us on reruns on Saturday afternoon when we were kids, or on those two-episode VHS packs that floated around video stores for a while—and nobody had much that was nice to say about it, beyond that it had “potential,” the faint praise with which we damn things that we want to like but can’t quite. Mostly, we all agreed that it barely counted as Lovecraftian, for all its swinging and missing in that direction, but then a voice brought up the lost episodes.

  I didn’t recognize the woman doing the talking, but by then that was true of about half the people around the table. She was sitting on the other side of Jesse, and I thought I remembered her coming back with him from one of his trips to the bar for drinks. The corner she was sitting in was the darkest on the patio, her back against the bulbous tree that broke up the back fence line. Her features were mostly lost to shadow, but she was smoking a cigarette, and when she took a pull the glow from the cherry would flare up enough to illuminate the edges of her face, which seemed a little worn and creased, not that any of us were looking our best in the dim patio lights at the dregs of the Festival. I asked around afterward, but nobody seemed to know her name, or remember seeing her anyplace else during the weekend.

  When she mentioned the lost episodes, someone at the other end of the table laughed and said something like, “Yeah, they’re probably great, since nobody’s ever seen them.” She let out a sigh, the cherry on her cigarette bobbing like the bouncing ball in an old sing-along. “They’re around,” she said. “They were on YouTube for a while, but they got pulled down.”

  “The story goes,” Cody said, because of course, if anybody knew the story, it was going to be Cody, “that they used to circulate them on recorded tapes, back in the pre-Internet days. Some kid supposedly watched them and then cut up his family and asphyxiated himself with a garbage bag taped around his head. That got more press than the show ever did, even if it’s probably not true.”

  “Early days Marilyn-Manson-made-me-do-it stuff,” someone else said, nodding, remembering the legend now. “Wonder if anyone ever got sued over that.”

  The initial speaker shook her head, ground out her cigarette on the tabletop so that the shadows swallowed her face again. “Naw,” she said, “nobody ever got sued, because there wasn’t anybody left.”

  The next morning, most everybody besides the locals flew out, and I drove up with Simon to spend a couple of days in Seattle before heading home. We stayed up late watching The Lurking Fear and Virgin Witch in his apartment, but I couldn’t get the conversation about Dream House out of my head. I’d seen maybe seven or eight episodes over the years—it used to play late at night on one of the channels that we got when I was growing up, after Renegade and Kung Fu but before Beauty and the Beast with Ron Perlman, so I usually didn’t stay up late enough to catch it.

  Now, though, my curiosity was piqued, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, skimmed through episode synopses and cast lists until I came to a headline that simply said “Tragedy” in big black letters.

  It seemed that a fire had broken out on set during principal photography. All told, ten people died as a result of the blaze. Investigators expected arson, but according to Wikipedia no arrests were ever made in connection with the disaster, which was partially responsible for the show folding after shooting less than a season’s worth of episodes. A couple of the main actors died in the fire, or at the hospital later as a result of smoke inhalation, including Judy Becker, the woman who played Jennifer Cristain/Lady Jenny, the show’s main star.

  Digging a little deeper, I found that our nameless Dream House fan hadn’t been wrong. Nobody involved in the show was still alive. A few people who had played bit parts in individual episodes were still around, some of them had even gone on to have real acting careers, and the actress who played a little girl in the third episode was going to be in a movie opposite Ryan Gosling next year. But anyone who had played a recurring character or been involved in writing, directing, or shooting the show was dead. Not one had survived the show’s cancellation by more than five years.

  The reasons for those that I could find reasons for spanned the range of typical Hollywood causes of death—from cancers to car accidents, drug overdoses and suicides, and at least one disquieting mass-homicide about which I could find almost no detailed information online. I was reminded of the rumors about the various fates of the people involved in making Manos—famously the “worst” movie ever shown on MST3k, though for that particular plum my pick might have to go to Hobgoblins. This, though, seemed a little more real, the tragedies and mysteries a little easier t
o verify.

  Before I closed my laptop and turned in for the night, I sent an email to Shawn, asking him about the so-called “lost episodes.” He’d helped me track down hard-to-find flicks for my Vault of Secrets column before, so I figured if I knew anyone who could find the Dream House episodes, it’d be him.

  I didn’t hear back from Shawn until after I’d gotten back to Kansas, but the email he finally sent me had links to two of the “lost episodes” in it. “The most innocuous ones, I’m told,” he said. “There’s supposed to be one more, the really bad one, but I couldn’t find hide nor hair of it. Not even a plot synopsis. Seems like it disappeared into the wild blue yonder.”

  It took a few days of post-trip recovery and catching up on work before I managed to queue up the episodes. I watched them downstairs in my office, on my laptop, with all the lights out and my headphones on. They looked like shit and sounded worse, and had obviously been recorded by hooking two VCRs together. The picture swam and shifted, like when we used to try to pirate pay channels on my friend’s cable when we were kids. One minute the dialogue was so muted that I couldn’t make it out, the next I was snatching my headphones off to keep from being deafened.

  The first episode seemed like a pretty standard series entry. It focused on the Jennifer/Lady Jenny character, one actress playing both the young woman who came to open Dream House back up and turn it into a bed and breakfast, and the young wife of the slave owner who ran it back when it was still a plantation. It was the main thing I remembered from late nights watching the series as a kid, lots of flashing back and forth between the past and the present. It got a lot of mileage out of that portrait-in-the-entryway-looks-exactly-like-me trope that Gothic movies love so much.

 

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