Locus, July 2014

by Locus Publications

  The only incident that ties Jamie’s memoir of his childhood to events described in the seemingly disconnected prologue is a brief dream sequence in which Jamie sees Blackmore Island and Fell House. That attraction becomes more pronounced in his adult years when he purchases Blackmore Island sight unseen, with intent to turn Wild Fell into a bed-and-breakfast. A local historian fills him in on the unsavory details of the original Blackmores, a wealthy family whose patriarch took an unhealthy interest in his daughter, Rosa. Jamie eventually learns that Rosa’s middle name was Amanda, and that she was rumored to have unholy skills that may have played a role in her father’s being stung to death by wasps. As discoveries in Jamie’s adult life begin to resonate with events from his forgotten childhood, and clues seeded surreptitiously in past incidents begin to flower in the present, it becomes clear that Jamie’s acquisition of Wild Fell has been engineered by forces more sinister than simple coincidence and more irresistible than fate.

  Ghost stories, by their nature, involve a collapsing of time that allows the past to intrude unnaturally into the present and the present to coexist uneasily alongside the past. By the end of Wild Fell, past and present become not only inextricable but also indistinguishable from one another. In the novel’s tour-de-force climax, Rowe provides a rationale that explains all of his tale’s mysteries without diminishing their eeriness. Wild Fell is proof that a capable writer can still work a refreshingly original variation on one of horror fiction’s oldest themes.

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  Richard Chizmar’s anthology Turn Down the Lights appears under the imprint of Cemetery Dance’s book publishing arm, begun a few years after the magazine’s launch in 1988. Its ten stories are original, but most of the contributors are Cemetery Dance stalwarts and, as Chizmar writes in his warmly nostalgic introduction, they are ‘‘as responsible for Cemetery Dance existing today as I am myself.’’

  Stephen King leads off with ‘‘Summer Thunder’’, a post-apocalyptic tale of the survivors of a nuclear holocaust facing imminent death from radiation poisoning. It’s a nicely understated On the Beach-type exercise in which King eschews the scenes of horrifying devastation so common to works in this subgenre to focus on quiet moments in which characters meet their fates with compassion, grace, and dignity. It’s worth reminding readers that King first appeared in Cemetery Dance in 1992 with an over-the-transom submission, a generous gesture from horror’s leading writer and a tribute to Chizmar’s editorial acumen. Peter Straub’s tongue-in-cheek ‘‘The Collected Stories of Freddie Prothero: Introduction by Torless Magnussen, Ph.D’’. presents the texts of ten brief stories, written by an author between the ages of five and nine in language whose increasing articulateness over time hints with increasing horror at his familiarity with an otherworldly realm unknown to adults. ‘‘Dollie’’, from Clive Barker, is vaguely supernatural in its account of a crudely carved wooden doll that serves a young girl in a variety of capacities over her long lifetime.

  Cemetery Dance became one of the leading publishers of dark suspense in the mid-’90s, when horror fiction began to cross-pollinate regularly with hardboiled crime and psychological suspense fiction. Solid contributions in this vein featured here include Ed Gorman’s ‘‘Flying Solo’’ a noirish story about a terminally ill vigilante who puts his final years to beneficial use, and ‘‘Incarnadine’’, which tells of a horrifying semi-human simulacrum brought to life through Norman Partridge’s trademark blend of hardboiled crime and inventive supernaturalism. Brian James Freeman’s ‘‘An Instant Eternity’’ concerns a photographer who tries to help a young girl through a minefield-seeded landscape in a war-torn third-world country; the story is straight suspense, but its horrifying scenario doesn’t seem out of place among the other stories.

  There are two stories of backwoods horrors: Steve Rasnic Tem’s creepy ‘‘Lookie-Loo’’, which strays into the darkest and farthest-flung corners of Manly Wade Wellman territory in its description of the bizarre life forms that thrive in mountain wilds unknown to all but the unluckiest humans, and Ronald Kelly’s ‘‘The Outhouse’’, a tale of a childish prank that unleashes supernatural monsters cut from the cloth of the horror fiction of the 1980s and ’90s. In ‘‘The Western Dead’’, Jack Ketchum retrofits a period western with flesh-eating zombies of the present day. Bentley Little, who made a name for himself in Cemetery Dance (among other magazines) with surreal, offbeat stories of strange people and their stranger quirks serves up more of the same in ‘‘In the Room’’.

  Chizmar refers to Turn Down the Lights as ‘‘my own little celebration party 25 years later.’’ In celebrating his magazine’s legacy with stories by some of its more representative writers, he has also put together an anthology that celebrates the diversity and eclecticism of modern horror fiction.

  SHORT TAKES

  Robert W. Chambers is another writer whose work got an unexpected boost in popularity earlier this year when Nic Pizzolatto, the writer for HBO’s crime drama, True Detective, referenced Chambers’s 1895 short fiction collection, The King in Yellow, in his scripts and interviews about the program. Stark House’s omnibus The Slayer of Souls/The Maker of Moons gives readers an opportunity to sample two of Chambers’s lesser-known works of weird fiction. Like The King in Yellow, The Maker of Moons, first published in 1896, featured a mix both supernatural and non-supernatural stories, several of them loosely connected by a recurring motif (another narrative trick Chambers first deployed in The King in Yellow). The editors of this volume have excised the three non-supernatural stories and the links connecting the first three of the five stories that remain. The title tale is one of Chambers’s better short fictions, a story that begins as an investigation into the persons responsible for the artificially manufactured gold that is starting to turn up in the marketplace and how it relates to a species of grotesque crablike creatures, before it takes a sharp turn into romantic fantasy. The Slayer of Souls, first serialized in 1919 and published in book form in 1920, treats at novel length ideas introduced in ‘‘The Maker of Moons’’. Chambers wrote it after more than two decades as a bestselling writer of society novels and shop-girl romances and the book is definitely an acquired taste. It concerns the Yezidee, an Asian cult of devil worshippers, who have poisoned the minds of communists, socialists, unionists, and other leftist groups intent on overthrowing the social order, and their pursuit to America of a young woman who has mastered their supernatural secrets. Floridly overwritten and featuring a number of outrageously contrived weird menaces, the novel is essentially a lurid yellow-peril tale of the type that was just starting to appear in the pulp fiction magazines of the day.

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  One of the so-called ‘‘Three Musketeers of Weird Tales’’ (along with H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard), Clark Ashton Smith was a poet who learned early that he was more likely to put food on the table selling short stories rather than verse to pulp magazines. The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies is a long overdue compilation of Smith’s best weird fiction and poetry, whose Penguin Classics imprimatur confers canonical status on his writing. Smith excelled at the creation of lushly decadent fantasy realms that bore such names as Hyperborea, Zothique, Poseidonis (Atlantis), and Xiccarph (actually another planet). He described them in ornate, lapidary prose, and populated them with grotesques such as the one-handed thief Satampra Zeiros (‘‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’’), the aged wizard Malygris (‘‘The Last Incantation’’), the doomed sorcerer Pharpetron (‘‘The Double Shadow’’), and the possessed shepherd boy Xeethra (‘‘Xeethra’’). Smith also wrote tales of Averoigne, set in medieval France and featuring everyday people confronted by horrifying manifestations of their worst superstitions (‘‘Mother of Toads’’). He contributed occasional stories to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, among them ‘‘Ubbo-Sathla’’, about the grim fate of an anthropology student who delves too deeply into the primordial past, and ‘‘Genius Loci’’, which features none of the usual Lovecraftian nomenclature but masterfully conjures the sense o
f cosmic outsideness associated with Lovecraft’s tales. Smith also wrote science fiction, including ‘‘The City of the Singing Flame’’, one of the most popular stories published in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, but he also made hardcore fans uneasy with his blends of science fiction and graphic horror, among them ‘‘The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis’’. In addition to 18 short stories, S.T. Joshi, the editor of this volume, has included 17 prose poems and 42 poems from Smith’s vast verse output, among them the visionary masterpieces ‘‘The Star-Treader’’ and ‘‘The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil’’. These fever dreams of fantasy were Smith’s strong suit, and he was unparalleled among his contemporaries at inventively evoking beauty and terror, often in the same poem. Smith was also a painter and sculptor of the weird and, in a nice touch, the publisher has chosen one of his paintings for the book’s cover art.

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  Chiliad: A Meditation is old Clive Barker in a new package. Barker originally wrote this two-part novella to serve as brackets to the short stories Douglas E. Winter commissioned for his 1997 millennial anthology Revelations, each of which explored the horrors of a defining event in a specific decade of the 20th century. Barker’s story is narrated by a nameless writer who sits beside a river (a symbol for the flow of time in either direction, as he tells us) and writes down the visions that it conveys to him. The first part of the novella, ‘‘Men and Sin’’, is concerned primarily with the murder of Agnes, a woman living in what appears to be medieval times, and the efforts of her mate Shank to avenge her death. Shank kills the wrong man as Agnes’s murderer, and dies along with him. The novella’s second part, ‘‘A Moment at the River’s Heart’’, parallels events in the first with its account of a modern man, Devlin Coombs, who resorts to psychic means to learn the identity of the man who brutally murdered his wife and dumped her body at the riverside. Coombs finds out what he wants to know, much to his dismay, but he also discovers that his wife’s murder is but the latest in a cycle of murders that stretches all they way back in time to that of Agnes. As a meditation on the human capacity for violence, and how violence begets violence, Barker’s tale resonated with the incidents in the stories that its two parts originally bracketed. Absent its original context, though, it still works fine as a standalone story, and Barker tempers its horrors with scenes of beauty and sacredness. The book features dustjacket art and interior plates by artist Jon Foster.

  –Stefan Dziemianowicz

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  REVIEWS BY CAROLYN CUSHMAN

  The Nightmare Dilemma, Mindee Arnett

  Murder of Crows, Anne Bishop

  Mirror Sight, Kristen Britain

  Skin Game, Jim Butcher

  Midnight Crossroad, Charlaine Harris

  Witches in Red, Barb Hendee

  Valour and Vanity, Mary Robinette Kowal

  Emilie & the Sky World, Martha Wells

  Mindee Arnett, The Nightmare Dilemma (Tor Teen 978-0-7653-3334-6, $17.99, 380pp, hc) March 2014. Cover by Kate Forester.

  Kids at a magic school save the magic world from a plot to take over the government in this young-adult fantasy novel, sequel to The Nightmare Affair. The basic ideas aren’t new, but Arnett manages to make them fresh with plenty of distinctive touches, and the young half-Nightmare Dusty makes a fun protagonist: smart, but with a tendency to do whatever she’s told not to. The student body is an interesting mix of humans and various non-humans, with some interesting variations in abilities and even racial issues. Various elements of legend (Atlantis, King Arthur) crop up in unexpected ways. Plus, there’s a mystery to solve, as teachers ask Dusty and her dream seer partner Eli to use their Dream Team talents to look inside the mind of an unconscious student, to see if they can discover who attacked her. But something is interfering with Dusty’s abilities – and then her evil ex-boyfriend returns to school. Could things get any worse? Of course they can, and it makes for a fun multi-layered mystery, with the occasional obligatory red herring and gut-wrenching suspicion of friends, as well as a spectacular conclusion.

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  Anne Bishop, Murder of Crows (Roc 978-0-451-46526-9, $26.95, 354pp, hc) March 2014. Cover by Blake Morrow.

  The second novel of The Others finds conflict between humans and supernaturals building, with the Humans First movement gathering steam. In this world’s version of North America, the Others – shapeshifters, vampires, elementals, and more – are in control, keeping humans restricted to a few cities where they are carefully watched by Others living in ‘‘courtyards.’’ The presence of humans in Lakeside Courtyard is unique – and makes them both targets and leaders as tensions increase. The new drugs that make the supernatural Others lose control or turn humans into berserkers keep turning up unexpectedly, with horrifying results. Meanwhile, the human cassandra sangue (blood prophet) Meg Corbyn has won the hearts of many of the courtyard’s inhabitants, in particular the leader Simon Wolfsgard, a wolf shifter who has never been friends with a human before. He’s discovering that her being female may be more of a complication than the fact that powerful humans want her back… humans who have no clue what they’re really up against. Thriller elements mix with personal relationships and rare moments of comic relief for an engrossing read, with a solid conclusion that leaves room for more.

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  Kristen Britain, Mirror Sight (DAW 978-0-7564-0879-4, $27.95, 775pp, hc) May 2014. Cover by Donato Giancola.

  A shattered mirror mask sends Green Rider Karigan almost 200 years ahead into a strangely steampunk future in this fifth book in the Green Rider series, a considerable departure for the series. Shattering the mirror mask at the end of Blackveil transports Karigan into a very bleak future in which little remains of the world she knew. Even the magic is mostly gone, and in its place are strange technologies that have given rise to new industries and massive pollution. The kingdom is gone, subsumed by a totalitarian empire, and women have almost no rights. Karigan finds refuge with an eccentric archaeologist of the Preferred class, and sets about trying to find out just what happened to her world, determined to find a way back home and stop this horrible future from happening. The new world she’s trapped in is quite fascinatingly strange, quaintly Victorian in some aspects and ominously different in others, but it feels a bit contrived, more nightmarish than real. Still, it makes an entertaining backdrop for adventure and the final resolution feels right, with the story coming full circle – at least for Karigan – and leaving hope for her world’s future, while dropping plenty of hints of struggles to come.

  Reviews by Carolyn Cushman continue after ad.

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  Jim Butcher, Skin Game (Roc 978-0-451-46439-2, $27.95, 454pp, hc) June 2014. Cover by Chris McGrath.

  Harry Dresden already knows that being the Winter Knight for Queen Mab is a horrible job – but she finds a way to make it worse, ordering him to help one of his biggest enemies. The task? Help the Denarian Nicodemus Archleone steal the Holy Grail from Hades, lord of the underworld. To do it they’re going to have to break some laws in the surface world as well. Harry’s got his smart mouth and the Winter Knight’s strength to help him, but if he’s going to live with himself he needs to find a way to fulfill his obligation to Mab and hers to Nicodemus – without a huge body count or Nicodemus acquiring massive new power. It’s all a huge caper, with lots of deceptions and unexpected twists – some a little unfair, since Harry is the narrator, but I’ve forgiven him for hiding crucial information from the reader before – and some rewarding encounters with old friends along the way.

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  Charlaine Harris, Midnight Crossroad (Ace 978-0-425-26315-0, $27.95, 305pp, hc) May 2014. Cover by Hugh Syme.

  Harris kicks off a new supernatural mystery series with this quirky tale of Midnight TX, a tiny town in the middle of nowhere with some very odd inhabitants. Phone psychic Manfred Bernardo is a newcomer, looking for a quiet place to work handing out fake ‘‘readings’’ over the phone while figuring out where he’s going with his very re
al psychic abilities. Somehow, he gets caught up in his new neighbors’ lives, and when a body is found in the park he helps dig into the locals’ secrets to find out what happened. There’s some crossover here with Harris’s other series, not just the supernatural series featuring Sookie Stackhouse and Harper Connelly, but also her mainstream mysteries, and dedicated fans should delight in figuring out how the worlds fit together. It’s an interesting mystery, but lacks a strong focal character, and the supernatural elements seem superficial compared to Harris’s other supernatural series. The small-town mystery elements predominate, and fans of sexy, sordid vampire goings on are likely to be a little disappointed.

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  Barb Hendee, Witches in Red (Roc 978-0-451-41416-8, $7.99, 325pp, pb) May 2014.

  Sister seers Celine and Amelie try to uncover what’s been turning soldiers into giant, deadly wolves in this second novel of the Mist-Torn Witches series. The transformations are happening at silver mines belonging to Prince Anton’s father, who orders Anton to stop them. The sisters agree to help, donning red capes that disguise them as healers, but the deplorable conditions at the mines dismay them as much as the mystery. They also encounter other Móndyalítko there, traveling folk stuck working at the mines by misfortune, who can tell the sisters much they don’t know about that side of their heritage – and about shapeshifters. The investigation gives the novel a near standalone plot and keeps things moving while background intrigues and the sisters’ personal lives – with hints of romance here and there – tie it all together for an engaging read.