Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  I wish that I was thinking of Kenzie, regretting the distance that I have always kept between us, but mostly I’m thinking of myself, of the stench of that dying calf, and other memories that I thought time and distance and ritual had scrubbed away. The stone has stayed too long on the surface of the pond, and now those circling creatures below have started to rise.

  The figure steps out of the darkness, and I know it immediately, even as I know that it is impossible. The severed goat head drips black blood down across that familiar chest, and the hammer rests in those familiar hands. Its steps are mechanical, like a puppet being pulled forward by invisible cables, like the figures in one of those mechanized dioramas in a penny arcade. It steps forward, one foot, then the next. The hammer rises in its hands; a spring being wound tighter and tighter.

  I look up at the stars that seem like they’re being blotted out by the goatman’s shadow, and wait for the blow to fall.

  Author’s Notes: If “Baron von Werewolf Presents” traded in my pleasant childhood memories of watching monster movies on TV on Saturday mornings, this story makes use of my nostalgia for the local movie theatre in the little town where I grew up, albeit turned to somewhat darker ends. A lot of the rest is also culled from my actual childhood, from my grandma’s old house and my own troubled relationship with my dad, though it’s been repurposed and retrofitted to make the story work.

  Originally written for a “goat worship” issue of Travis Neisler’s Ravenwood Quarterly which sadly never came to pass, the title comes from the excellent 2014 film Black Mountain Side, which I saw at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, though not the same year as the scene that kicked off the first story in this collection, lo those many pages ago.

  This is its first time in print.

  Afterword & Acknowledgments

  “Cruel” is not a word that I would normally associate with my own stories. After all, I’m the guy who wants to write “fun horror,” right? And cruel stories are rarely fun.

  I say “rarely,” but the fact is that cruelty can sometimes be fun, can’t it? Especially fictional cruelty. Someone like the Marquis de Sade would certainly have said so, and it’s difficult to look at old-fashioned implements of torture and not see a certain macabre glee in their design. Then there is, of course, the Theatre du Grand Guignol, from which this collection and its title story take their name. The plays put on in that theatre were pretty much uniformly gruesome, grotesque, and, yes, cruel, yet I bet the audience had a hell of a time.

  I took the subtitle of this book from the title of a collection by a French symbolist writer with the imposing moniker Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, or perhaps from a later collection of 150 stories by another French writer, Octave Mirbeau. Both collections were called “Contes cruels,” though the former was more often translated as “Sardonic Tales” than cruel ones.

  The so-called conte cruel gave its name to a whole school of fiction, though, of course, the fiction existed long before Villiers de l’Isle-Adam inadvertently christened it. Poe himself wrote no shortage of contes cruels, which H. P. Lovecraft describes in Supernatural Horror in Literature as “a class peculiar to itself,” one in which “the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors.”

  Few enough of my stories—even the ones in this collection—would qualify for the appellation, and yet, as I was putting together the stories for this book, I found a streak running through them. Not quite cruelty, perhaps, but something akin to it. The protagonists of horror short stories rarely lead charmed existences, and their fates are seldom kind, even in my stories. But the sting in these particular tales was perhaps a bit fiercer than in my previous work. There was a little less light in the darkness, a little less hope, a little more acceptance of death and things worse than death.

  How did Swinburne put it, in the stanzas that lent a title to yet another gathering of horror stories, this one by Manly Wade Wellman and possessed of possibly the best title any horror collection ever got? “At the door of life, by the gate of breath / There are worse things waiting for men than death,” a sentiment that would be echoed by no less a personage of horror than Count Dracula himself, as embodied by Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s 1931 classic.

  It’s a sentiment that the protagonists of most of these stories would probably find it difficult to disagree with, by the time their tale is told, though there is a kind of hope, often for the worst among us, in unexpected places. Sometimes monstrousness is a place to hide, after all, the only refuge we have left when we can find no succor and the world makes no room for us.

  If my last collection was inadvertently about “death, and what comes after,” as I said in my afterword for Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, then this book is inadvertently a catalogue of the high cost that we pay for surviving trauma, and the ways in which the past never really leaves us nearly as far behind as we might like.

  When I was assembling my last collection, my father had just died. As I was writing the stories in this one, I was working through therapy to deal with abuse and trauma, stemming from when I was extremely young. I’m not a big believer in “channeling my pain into writing,” or what-have-you—if it works for other people, that’s great, but it seldom does for me—but I can’t deny that some of the pain I was trying to process found its way into these stories, regardless of my intentions.

  So, while these stories may not be intentionally cruel, the worlds they depict often are. Yet, I hope at least, that they are not without their fun, too. These stories range farther afield than any I have collected before—to realms of sword-and-sorcery, to science fictional cities, to alien worlds as imagined through stop-motion animation, and to the Kansas City of the 1920s, when it was still the “Paris of the Plains”—even as their protagonists find themselves drawn, time and again, back to where they started from, to a place they tried so hard to leave behind.

  ***

  Any book like this is a collaborative effort. While I may spend the time writing the stories and being way too picky about what order I put them in, plenty of other people are involved at every stage, from the earliest appearances of each of the stories on through actually making this book a reality.

  This is the second collection I’ve done with Ross Lockhart at Word Horde, and I’m extremely happy that he chose to have me back, and grateful to him for helping to put together another great-looking collection. Not to mention Nick Gucker for the lovely (is that the right word in this situation?) cover art, and to Gemma Files for the introduction.

  Whenever you write a few collections, you always run into the danger of repeating yourself in the acknowledgments, or of leaving people out. So I’ll also just say that I’m grateful to everyone who gave one of these stories a home over the years, and to everyone who read this book. And, of course, to my wife, who has always been my first reader and best and most critical editor, and who was an enormous help with all of these stories, even though they are, in general, a lot more unpleasant than she would prefer.

  About the Author

  Orrin Grey Grey is a skeleton who likes monsters, as well as a writer, editor, and amateur film scholar who was born on the night before Halloween. Guignol is his third collection of weird stories. You can find him online at orringrey.com.