Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  The narrative of A Child Across the Sky is much less taut than those to be found in Carroll’s earlier works, and it carries a considerable burden of extraneous material. The plot sometime gives the impression that the author is floundering among its convolutions, not altogether certain about what is relevant and what is not. Despite long passages devoted to enlightening the reader about the links between the characters and those of the two preceding books none of those links is of any real consequence, except to remind us repeatedly of the thesis on which their plots turn. That central tenet of Carrollian philosophy is: if that which we delight in imagining were somehow to become real, its actuality would be nightmarish. When applied to horror films, this would seem to be obvious enough, but Carroll is far too skillful a writer to belabor the merely obvious, and he succeeds in making the point unexpectedly sharp with the aid of a particularly ingenious double-twist ending, which is neater than any of those contrived in his earlier works.

  The question which is at stake throughout the plot of A Child Across the Sky is what the suicidal film-maker achieved by reprocessing the substance of his own and his friends’ childhood nightmares into cinematic horrorschlock. Did he succeed in making evil so glamorous that his films have become a corrupting force? Did he, tacitly or formally, sell his soul to the devil in return for the gift of showing people the hidden horrors of their own inner nature? And did he, in the fortuitously missing scene, succeed so well in pleading Satan’s case that he went beyond the permission which God grants for the devil’s work to be done on earth? The plot, incessantly scratching away with questions of this kind, gets far enough under the skin of arguments about the power of cinematic images to show up the pathetic simple-mindedness of common-or-garden arguments about kids imitating screen violence, without actually revealing a more sophisticated mode of discourse which might take its place.

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  Both Campbell and Carroll are well-established writers of fiction, with secure reputations, whose use of imaginary films as motifs has slotted into natural places in the sequences of their works. Their use of such motifs is entirely natural, given that Campbell did long service as a film critic and that Carroll’s father was a notable Hollywood scriptwriter (he has also been involved in film-making himself). It is interesting to compare and contrast their efforts with the work of a writer whose career to date has been much more obviously involved with and fascinated by the cinema, but who has only recently turned to the writing of novels: the film critic and historian Kim Newman.

  There is an obvious overlap between Newman’s career and Ramsey Campbell’s, in that the latter’s ability to find fascination in the quest to recover a lost horror film of the thirties draws abundantly upon his long experience as a film reviewer. Like many writers of horror fiction Campbell is a very witty speaker, and he occasionally favors SF conventions with hilarious talks on the follies of ancient horror films whose very ineptness makes them enjoyable. The frequent achievement of belated popularity by extraordinarily bad films, which become classics by virtue of their makeshift special effects and desperate plotting is testimony to the expertise which modern viewers very quickly cultivate in seeing the artifice behind cinematic illusions, and being able to laugh at its occasional idiocies. But there is more to this than the mere comedy of incompetence, and our relationship with old, tarnished illusions is also remarkably sentimental; a fact made clear in Ancient Images, and much more elaborately exploited by Newman’s fiction. Since Newman turned to novel-writing he has produced cinematic fiction in amazing profusion, and with a uniquely boisterous zest which will surely make him one of the leading fantasy writers of the 1990s. The fortunes of his works may also provide a curious litmus test of the precise extent to which the contemporary mythologies of popular culture have been formed and focused by cinematic imagery.

  The Night Mayor is a thriller set in a future where information technology has advanced to the point where the media can hook in directly to people’s nervous systems. The equivalent of today’s Hollywood hacks are “Dreamers” who assist experience-synthesizing computers with their plotting and characterization, adding a humanly creative touch to what is basically a mechanical process. When an ingenious supercriminal “escapes” from imprisonment by establishing his own private dreamworld within the information network, the only people with the necessary expertise to hunt him down and destroy his dream—lest it expand to corrupt and conquer the entire information-world—are the said hacks. One of them is promptly conscripted by the powers-that-be, which are here uneuphemistically called the Gunmint.

  Alas, the first hunter sent into the dream is all-too-quickly absorbed by it and reduced to the status of an imperilled character; a second agent must therefore be conscripted and sent in to rescue and combine forces with him. In order to carry out their mission successfully the two Dreamers must adapt their strategies and expectations to the “rules” of the Secondary World they are invading—which, as it happens, is compounded out of the imagery of a particular sub-genre of the old-fashioned and obsolete “flattie” films whose influence on their own dubious art-form inevitably remains considerable. The sub-genre in question is American films noirs, and the private universe over which the Night Mayor reigns supreme is essentially a compound of all such films, populated by countless avatars of Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and their numerous contemporaries.

  The breezily pyrotechnic action and mock-casual style of The Night Mayor combine well to make it a very striking book, extraordinarily vivid and very witty. It does not merely borrow the special artifice of the film noir to construct its scenarios, but also conducts a quirky interrogation of the essential appeal of such films, and contrives in its own narrative frame to offer a distorted reflection of their assumptions about the possibility of heroism in an institutionally-corrupt world. As a dream-subversion story it is more extravagantly funny than any of its predecessors, and much more intensively recomplicated; it is not a long book (especially by today’s word-processor-inflated standards) but it is crammed full of detail and movement in a way which admirably reflects its homage to the cinema.

  Despite the nostalgic element in its celebration of film noir stereotypes The Night Mayor is essentially a book of the video age. Because he has been a film fan for so many years Newman has spent a significant fraction of his adult life watching films in the cinema and on TV (whether broadcast or videotaped). He reads books too, and might reasonably lay claim to being something of a connoisseur of horror fiction as well as the several film genres in which he is most interested, but the world of his imagination is very elaborately stocked with visual imagery inherited from the cinema. His particular stocks are undoubtedly fuller and more coherently-organized than those which most of us have, but they are no longer so different in kind as they would have been ten years ago.

  Newman’s other fiction is equally cinematic in style and substance although its borrowings are not always so straightforward or so obvious. Indeed, the relationship between The Night Mayor and Newman’s other works is very interesting in respect of the overlapping of resources and techniques and the transplantation of material from one medium to another. Some reference is made in the course of The Night Mayor to a Dreamer named John Yeovil, and there are similar irrelevant references in certain literary works signed Jack Yeovil to a film-maker named Kim Newman; Newman and Yeovil are, of course, one and the same. “Jack Yeovil” has so far only published two novels and a handful of short stories, all of them set in imagined universes derived from games marketed by Games Workshop, but several others are scheduled for release in the near future; the most interesting of these stories in the present context are those set in the imaginary universe of a board game called Dark Future, whose history has been extravagantly elaborated by Newman and Alex Stewart.

  Even Yeovil’s heroic fantasies show the very heavy influence of the cinema in both method and action. Drachenfels (1989) has a quasi-Medieval setting but it concerns the staging o
f a grand dramatic event, which allows the plot to inflict a series of ghoulish horror-film set-pieces upon actors who are busy reconstructing a horror-film plot of their own. The novel borrows its structure and pace from that most absurdly unlikely of sources, the Busby Berkeley film Gold Diggers of 1933. This methodology has much more obvious and extravagant effects, however, on Newman’s pseudonymous Dark Future stories, the first four of which are “Route 666” (in the anthology of the same title edited by David Pringle, 1990), Demon Download (1990), Krokodil Tears (1990), and Comeback Tour (1992). All are part of a series which is ostensibly a sequence of violent horror stories concerning the attempts made by an immortal summoner of demons to facilitate an apocalyptic invasion of an alternative earth as it approaches the year 2000. In fact the series—like The Night Mayor—is really a comedy, because its horror motifs and its graphic violence are used to comic effect, in a fashion which is much more familiar in the cinema (and also in comic books) than in text stories.

  The cinema’s tradition of comic violence is, of course, well-established—it goes back to the visual gags employed in silent films and extends through countless cartoons of the Tom-and-Jerry variety. The tradition of comic horror is of more recent provenance, first becoming obvious in certain films made by Roger Corman and continuing into such modern classics as The Evil Dead. In both traditions, though, film-makers exploit the fact that the viewer knows that what is happening is a mere illusion of animation or “special effects” in order to to make chains of events which would seem utterly horrible if they were assumed to be real into macabre jokes. Literary equivalents of the same strategy can be found in many items of urban folklore and in stories by such writers as Robert Bloch.

  The relationship between the viewers of comic horror films and their material is essentially that of the connoisseur rather than the consumer, because the normal conventions by which the viewer suspends disbelief and pretends that what is happening on screen is real are teasingly called into question, requiring the simultaneous comprehension of two narrative levels. Newman does exactly the same thing in his Yeovil novels—which must not be read naïvely if they are to be properly appreciated. (Undoubtedly there will be some onlookers who, like the diehard opponents of comic-book horror, will think them quasi-pornographic, but they will be missing the point, as they invariably do.) Some of the jokes are glaringly obvious but effectively trivial—like the parody of Hitchcock’s Psycho which figures in Krokodil Tears—but others are awesome in their temerity. The invocation of the Lone Ranger as deus ex machina in Demon Download is the kind of thing which writers rarely dare to do when operating under their own names for fear of being thought silly, while the re-costuming of the infamous Tasmanian Devil (familiar to fans of animated cartoons) as an all-too-human psychotic mass-murderer sets new standards in sick flamboyance.

  The Jack Yeovil novels belong to a literary subspecies which constitutes the despised undergrowth of contemporary SF and fantasy—the Shared World story. Like B-movies, therefore, they operate on the margins of a field which is already marginal in terms of its cultural respectability; like the best (and worst) B-movies, however, they undoubtedly have the potential to attract a cult following and enjoy subsequent recognition as revealing and fascinating products of their time and their art. The Dark Future novels in particular exhibit a glorious lack of inventive inhibition which Newman might not be able to keep up forever, and they should be treasured while they last. The Night Mayor aspires to a higher level of literary sophistication, but it is mercifully content to be a modest kind of Main Feature; Newman may have absorbed the lessons of cinema history sufficiently to approach with caution the idea that his natural destiny is to make big-budget super-epics. His second novel under his own name, Bad Dreams (1990) is similarly uninflated, but rather more substantial than The Night Mayor; its cinematic borrowings are more subdued, but nevertheless obvious to the alert eye.

  Like all pioneers, Kim Newman may face some difficulties in attracting an audience into what is effectively an undercolonized literary niche. The English-language publishing industry is nowadays so obsessive about standardized packaging that it routinely mistreats authors who do not quite fit, and it is not impossible that Newman may suffer the temporary indignity of seeing his work marketed by publishers and booksellers as “horror” to people who will frown at his irreverence for the schlocky icons of their standard fare (nor is it impossible that the entire GW Books project, and “Jack Yeovil” with it, will founder on the rock of its own dilettantism, which has so far been expressed in atrocious book-design, haphazard scheduling and incompetent distribution). He is, however, far too good a writer to be obliterated by such accidents of fate; he deserves to be reckoned the most energetic, vivacious and colorful member of the emergent generation of British fantasy-writers.

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  Kim Newman’s wholesale borrowing of cinematic artifice and its peculiar aesthetics is mostly in the cause of fun, but Bad Dreams does begin to exploit the horrific aspects of modern cinematic imagery more straightforwardly, and to an effect which is much more scarifying than flip or comic. Like Ramsey Campbell, Newman is aware of the fact that the obsessive fascination which some people have developed for cinematic nastiness is itself rather scary, and cause for anxiety. A film critic, who must maintain a certain distance from the objects of his appraisal, in perhaps not the best person to tackle this anxiety head on, but the relevance of Newman’s work is not significantly compromized by its calculated irreverence. Carroll’s examination of the issue is more dignified and more earnest, as one would expect from a former teacher of courses in world literature, but it is curiously subverted by his own apparent doubts about the true lesson to be learned from Philip Strayhorn’s remarkable career.

  In the end, the particular magic of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Bloodstone is as elusive as the bits of film containing that magic which the central characters of Ancient Images and A Child Across the Sky chase hither and yon, without ever quite catching up with them. Similarly, the shadowy black-and-white world where it always seems to be raining can never be stabilized even in the powerful fixative imagination of the Night Mayor and or his gone-native pursuer. Such images have already burrowed so deeply into the fantastic inner world of our private thoughts and daydreams that they have become as ominously mysterious to us as our own dreams.

  The imagery of the movies is now part of the hard core of our shared experiences of fantasy, which allows us to communicate with one another through the media of jokes and allusions, scary tales and convoluted allegories. Because that imagery is so vivid it helps enliven our lives; and because it is shared it does its bit to help bind us together into a community of like-minded beings; but because it has its nightmarish aspects, it also feeds our common anxieties. All of this is amply displayed in Ancient Images, A Child Across the Sky, and The Night Mayor, and we are likely to encounter much more of it in the fantastic fiction of the 1990s.

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  Say, who was that masked man, anyhow—and what was that thing that I couldn’t quite make out…???

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  Note (1995): The entire GW Books project did indeed founder on the rock of its own dilettantism, and seems to have foundered yet again after a temporary resurrection by Boxtree—but “Jack Yeovil” continues to produce books for other publishers and seems likely to continue his shadow career for some time to come.

  H. G. WELLS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

  On 24 January 1902 H. G. Wells delivered a lecture to the Royal Institution, whose text was subsequently published under the title, “The Discovery of the Future.” The lecture was, in effect, a series of afterthoughts to his pioneering work of futurology, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Human Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901), which was by then entering its fifth edition. Wells began the lecture by describing two types of mind, whose outlook on life is sharply contrasted:

  It will lead into my subject mos
t conveniently to contrast and separate two divergent types of mind, types which are to be distinguished chiefly by their attitude towards time, and more particularly by the relative importance they attach and the relative amount of thought they give to the future of things.

  The first of these two types of mind—and it is, I think, the predominant type, the type of the majority of living people—is that which seems scarcely to think of the future at all, which regards it as a sort of black non-existence upon which the advancing present will presently write events. The second type, which is, I think, a more modern and much less abundant type of mind, thinks constantly, and by preference, of things to come, and of present things mainly in relation to the results that must arise from them. The former type of mind, when one gets it in its purity, is retrospective in habit, and it interprets the things of the present, and gives value to this and denies it to that, entirely with relation to the past. The latter type of mind is constructive in habit; it interprets the things of the present and gives value to this or that, entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen.

  While from that former point of view our life is simply to reap the consequences of the past, from this our life is to prepare the future. The former type one might speak of as the legal or submissive type of mind, because the business, the practice, and the training of a lawyer dispose him towards it; he of all men must most constantly refer to the law made, the right established, the precedent set, and most consistently ignore or condemn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself. The latter type of mind I might for contrast call the legislative, creative, organising, or masterful type, because it is perpetually falling away from respect for what the past has given us. It sees the world as one great workshop, and the present as no more than material for the future, for the thing that is yet destined to be. It is in the active mood of thought, while the former is in the passive; it is the mind of youth—it is the mind most manifest among the Western nations; while the former is the mind of age—the mind of the Oriental.