78: [1978] WILLIAM HJORTSBERG - Falling Angel
New York, 1959. Harry Angel, a Chandleresque private eye, is engaged by the mysterious Louis Cyphre to track down Johnny Favorite, formerly a successful crooner, who is believed to have been institutionalized since the Second World War. Angel soon learns that some kind of switch has been made and that Johnny has dropped completely out of sight. He also finds out that the various witnesses he visits have a tendency to turn up gruesomely murdered soon after. The police also make the connection, and Angel finds himself suspected of mass murder. He also learns about a voodoo cult who meet in an abandoned cavern beneath the New York subway, and begins an affair with Epiphany Proudfoot, their high priestess and Johnny’s daughter. Angel realises that Cyphre is Lucifer himself and that he is after Johnny because the singer has been trying to welch on a deal involving his soul. It seems that Johnny has cheated the Devil by taking on another identity through a magic ritual, but Angel finally deduces — unhappily for all concerned — who his quarry really is. A crackling combination of hard-boiled detective story and Faustian horror novel, Falling Angel borrows a plot element or two from the film Black Angel for its slightly guessable twist ending. It was filmed in 1987 by Alan Parker as Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke and Robert de Niro.
***
In 1978 I was browsing a Los Angeles bookstore when a particular title caught my eye, a Harcourt Brace Jovanovich hardcover. The dust jacket was arresting: a winged angel, gun in hand, prowling above the multiple towers of Manhattan, pursued by an evil-smiling, horned Satan, knife in hand, cloven hoof extending between skyscrapers. All this under a gold-foil sky. I read the inside flap copy. Here were the likes of Stephen King, Robin Moore, and Thomas McGuane showering the novel with all-out raves: “brilliant …”, “compelling …”, “terrific …”, “breathless …”, “spellbinding …”. And when I found out that the plot involved a tough private detective named Harry Angel versus the occult world of voodoo and witchcraft in New York I was hooked. I paid $8.95, plus tax, and Falling Angel was mine. I read the book that same evening — with the hair standing up on the back of my neck. This week, a full decade later, I read it again. My opinion has not changed: it’s one of the top horror novels of the century. It is also one of the century’s finest examples of hard-boiled detective fiction, a novel fully deserving to be shelved next to Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. What Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles in the 1940s William Hjortsberg does for New York in the late 1950s. He paints a grim and poetic portrait of New York’s mean streets in 1959, bringing the Big Apple to raw life. There’s a haunting sense of desolation in his sequence at Coney Island in the off-season, and his portrayal of life inside the plush, high finance office suites of Manhattan is equally convincing. Harry Angel, in dangerous and desperate pursuit of an elusive shadow-self, is a man fated to lose — the ultimate, cynical, hard-headed private eye forced into a nightmarish descent into the netherworld of evil. As he tells his story in classic first-person style, we are with Angel in his doomed quest, graphically experiencing a voodoo ceremony in late night Central Park, then a murder in which the victim’s heart has been ripped from her body, and finally a truly chilling Black Mass conducted in an abandoned subway station during which a squalling baby is sacrificed to Satan. A brutal fight to the death on the underground subway tracks between Angel and a member of the cult is Hammett-tough:
I left the shipping millionaire lying on the tracks to be dismembered by the next train through. The rats would feast tonight.
The book’s prime figure of evil, Louis Cyphre, is drawn in brimstone and Black Magic, a character who bedevils the dreams of Harry Angel and whose power is absolute. Hjortsberg’s heroine bears a name worthy of a James Bond thriller, Epiphany Proudfoot, an expert practitioner of voodoo and erotic sex. But even this strong woman cannot save Harry Angel from his self-created fall. A superb tour de force, Falling Angel achieves the impact of a .45 slug to the chest. You’ll keep your lights on at night after reading this one. — WILLIAM F. NOLAN
79: [1978] WHITLEY STRIEBER - The Wolfen
Brooklyn homicide cops George Wilson and Becky Neff investigate the gruesome murder of two patrolmen, and discover the existence of a pack of wolflike superintelligent urban animals. The Wolfen, who have survived down the centuries preying on the unwanted and outcast, realize that they have been exposed and set out to silence Wilson and Neff. Strieber’s first novel gives the werewolf myth a radical rethink, much as his later books would, less successfully, reinterpret the vampirism (The Hunger, 1981) and black magic (The Night Church, 1984) themes. The Wolfen remains his best-written best-plotted solo novel. It was filmed with the “The” dropped from the title in 1981 by Mike Wadleigh, with Albert Finney as an unlikely New York cop, but Wadleigh’s issue-heavy two-and-a-half hour cut had to be trimmed and rearranged by an uncredited John Hancock into a slick thriller only tinged with pretension.
***
In the mid-seventies, Whitley Strieber lived near New York City’s Central Park. There he enjoyed the quiet of late night strolls until the night he was in the Literary Walk, going toward Bethesda Fountains, and noticed something in the trees nearby that appeared to be following him, pacing him step for step. The movement proved to be of canine origin — but it wasn’t simply one dog, loose in the park that night. Rather it was a pack of some eight or ten feral dogs of various sizes. Strieber beat a hasty retreat, but the thought of those creatures stayed with him — “The wildness of these animals in the middle of the city”, was how he later described it. Eventually that incident became the springboard for his first novel, The Wolfen, and an ongoing theme that can be found in his work, in various guises, up to the present day. With hindsight, it’s easy to look back on his career to study this theme of alien beings coexisting for millennia with the human race. It also became Strieber’s method of redefining hoary aspects of the genre in which he began his career. The Wolfen examined the possibility of werewolves existing on the fringes of society and also postulated an intriguing origin of the vampire myth — a question he went on to address in an entirely different manner with his next book, The Hunger. Subsequent novels investigated secret societies (Black Magic and The Night Church) and faeries (Catmagic), and while he strayed from that theme for his next few books, which dealt with environmental concerns, he returned to it once again with Communion. The difference with Communion is that, with it, Strieber no longer considers his present work fiction. The imaginary parasitic aliens of his earlier novels have been replaced with mysterious others that, Streiber assures us, really do exist. But whatever one’s feelings on Strieber’s current projects, nothing can diminish the power and originality of his earlier work. The Wolfen in its day, and upon rereading at the present time, retains all of its strengths. Foremost of these is the care with which Strieber revealed the novel’s preternatural element. The presence of the Wolfen is with us from the first page until the last, but the reader comes to understand their nature only at the same time as the principal protagonists. At that point, the storyline occasionally switches perspectives to the Wolfen’s points of view, where Strieber does an admirable job of conveying their alienness — though not so much so that the creatures lose their impact through becoming indecipherable. They are presented as a race of carnivorous hunters — not noble savages as they were portrayed in the film version of the book, but more in the manner we’ve come to understand from documentation of other carnivorous creatures, such as Serengeti lions and the like. Because of this, the Wolfen remain believable in the context of the work, a very real menace with which the characters must deal. The novel’s other strong point is Strieber’s understanding of how, if one wishes the preternatural to be effective, the natural world must be conveyed to the reader in clear, unaffected terms. Because of this The Wolfen reads almost like a police procedural as we follow the workings of the NYPD’s investigation into the escalating horror of the Wolfen’s presence in their city. The characters are fully drawn, with concerns that oper
ate beyond the confines of the storyline. The novel’s background and action were conveyed with just the correct amount of detail and power to effectively tell the story. And while Strieber’s prose became more assured in later books, The Wolfen remains far more than merely a competently told first novel. To this day it stands up as one of the classic works of fiction to emerge from the horror genre, a book that will undoubtably be read and re-read by enthusiasts in the field for many years to come. — CHARLES DE LINT
80: [1979] DAVID MORRELL - The Totem
Nathan Slaughter, a small-town police chief in Wyoming, is confronted with a series of strange incidents. A corpse apparently revives and frightens a coroner to death, animals turn savage overnight, children go mad, and outbreaks of irrational violence disrupt the smooth running of the community. It develops that a strange strain of rabies has originated in a hippie commune degenerating up in the wilderness, and soon the town is under siege. Following his brutal and horrific thrillers First Blood (1972) and Testament (1975) and the ambitious Western Last Reveille, David Morrell in The Totem turns to more explicit horror, mixing in supernatural elements and a scientifically-rationalized form of vampirism/zombiehood/lycanthropy. Recently, with Blood Oath (1982) and the Trilogy commencing with The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), he has revitalized the international espionage genre with a heavy dose of Gothic complication. Plot similarities between The Totem and the film I Drink Your Blood (1971) are probably coincidental, but the book might be one of the inspirations for Shaun Hutson’s Erebus (1983).
***
The door crashed open and he hurtled through it, slamming it behind him, breath coming in gasps. The door to the sitting-room was open and he blundered through, vaulting the coffee table, landing with a crash on the sofa. The beginning of The Totem … ? Is it hell! That was me coming back from the bookshop after I’d bought it. Having read Morrell’s earlier novels (First Blood and Testament) his third book looked like a bit of a departure for him, but it is written with the same breathless speed of its predecessors. The Totem is one of the few novels I’ve ever read in a day — usually I’m lucky if I get through two chapters in a week. But once I’d started reading it, the rest of the world could have disappeared in a ball of flame for all I cared. Immersed in it? God, if I’d been any more involved I’d have drowned … I chopped the dog’s legs off so it wouldn’t want walking, nailed my fianceo the front door to keep visitors away and ploughed into Morrell’s book. It’s like the literary equivalent of an aerobics work-out. By the time you’ve finished you can hardly breathe. You can reel out all the cliches you like for Morrell’s superb handling of a horror story that is constructed like a thriller and which, if you analyse it (I’m not going to but you can), is occasionally an extension of some themes he explored in First Blood (the scene where Rambo crawls through the cave full of bats being the one which immediately springs to mind). As I say, the cliches to describe The Totem are endless but I mean it when I say that this novel moves at such a pace it makes the bullet train look like a shunter. If it was a car its number plate would be “Turbo Speedburst Maniac”. When I say it moves, it moves. I’m getting tired just thinking about it … At times you feel as though you should be hanging on to your seat in case you fly off. The thing about the book which also makes it so admirable is that the speed never overshadows the characters. I mean, the central character’s name is Slaughter, for Christ’s sake … With a name like that you can’t go wrong. Quite appropriate too, especially in the scene where … No, why should I? Read it for yourselves. There is of course the other tiny detail which I’ve so far neglected to mention and that is that The Totem is one hell of a frightening novel. Well, I counted at least two changes of underwear and that was just reading the blurb! The set pieces are beautifully constructed, the short chapters accentuating the speed of the novel. In fact, now I come to think about it I hate David Morrell: With The Totem, he’s written a book which set a standard few authors could ever come close to in the horror/thriller genre. Yeah, I hate him. He’s a genius. Buy it, borrow it, steal it. But for God’s sake read it. The Totem isn’t a rollercoaster ride, it’s a high-speed journey on a Harley Davison, straight towards a brick wall. Living dangerously? Damn right. Only problem is, the brakes don’t work … — SHAUN HUTSON
81: [1979] PETER STRAUB - Ghost Story
Milburn, New York. A group of old men who call themselves The Chowder Society, linked by their long-ago involvement in the drowning of the strange Eva Galli, meet regularly to tell each other ghost stories. Don Wanderley, a writer of occult novels, returns home to Milburn after his involvement with Alma Mobley, the latest incarnation of shapeshifting Eva, which has led to the death of his brother. During the siege of a vicious winter, Don and the Chowder Society have to face up to the ancient and deadly monster woman. Straub’s third novel, patterned in its use of the background community on Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, is a conscious attempt to evoke the shades of the classic ghost stories ofM. R. and Henry James, Hawthorne, Poe and others within the framework of a complex and multi-faceted modern Gothic plot. Its success established him as second only to King as the leading figure in contemporary horror. The 1982 film, directed by John Irvin, is a travesty of the material, despite a strong cast of veterans and the very creepy Alice Krige as the many faces of Eva.
***
It’s obvious from Ghost Story that Peter Straub loves genre horror fiction, and indeed he has many times professed great admiration for Stephen King, with whom he was later to collaborate. But on the evidence of this, his best book, Straub is most entertaining when he is not consciously working within the genre, just flirting with it. Ghost Story is a serious work of mainstream fiction which takes as its subject a writer of horror fiction (“A nice exercise in genre writing. More literary than most.”) who transforms real-life horrors into art, or so it seems at first. Later it seems as if the real-life horrors may in fact be his art, as if he somehow dreamed them into existence. The title of the book is a very careful choice; it is a ghost story and it is about a ghost story, and within it are many ghost stories, including those told by four men almost old enough to be ghosts. The word “ghost” flickers wittily into and out of its pages. At the very end, as Don the ghostwriter chops up what may be a wasp and may be something female and infinitely more dangerous, a passing observer remarks “That thing ain’t ever gonna give up the ghost.” I don’t want to sound pretentious, but I think Ghost Story is partly a book about how we create within our own minds the things that most frighten us. On the surface it seems that the terrible woman whose initials are A.M. (Alma Mobley, Anna Mostyn et al.) has a solid, external reality: that she is a manifestation of some ancient shapeshifting nature spirit, now feeding vampire-like on the imaginations of the humans she destroys. But the subtext seems to be that she is in some sense created by human imagination. (I think therefore I A.M.) It is no accident that she is both destroyed and most vividly brought to life by a writer. (Even the elderly lawyers have the names of the two writers, Hawthorne and James, who between them created in the real world a kind of consensus image of the New England guilt, which is partly what this story is about.) The theory that A.M. was dreamed up by Don also explains the mysterious exchange between man and creature that is returned to throughout the story. At the beginning, narrator to little girl: “‘What are you?’ She smiled all through her amazing response. ‘I am you.’” Or near the very end, dead brother to narrator: “‘You invented these fantastic beautiful creatures, and then you “wrote” yourself into the story as their enemy. But nothing like that could ever be defeated.’” If Alma is a beautiful poem, as the book suggests — “Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?” — Don is her author. (But then, how real are Don and even Straub, whose surrogate Don is? The uncertainty runs deep, for at the key moment when allure turns to horror, when Alma, sexual athlete and monster, turns round in the darkness, we get this, though it takes us most of the book to find out: ” ‘You are a ghost.’ You, Donald. You. It was the unha
ppy perception at the center of every ghost story.”) We will always as humans write such monstrous, lovely poems the book suggests. Somehow we need them, and feed on them just as they feed on us. The moral outrage we feel at the vanity and cruelty of A.M. and her disciples is outrage at something dirty and attractive in the corner of our own minds. And that dirtiness, of course, is the other great attraction of Ghost Story. I refer to its central metaphor, which is especially forceful for any male Australian of my age who grew up in a puritanical and sexually repressive society. A.M. is fundamentally a female horror. What is it that peeping Toms see through her window, what is it that she shows foolish old men in bedrooms, something so horrible that it drives them mad, their faces locked in a rictus of fear? The real answer is surely vagina dentata. This novel is fundamentally about repressed men appalled at the sexuality of woman, their strength, their darkness; the wetness, the cavernousness, the dangerousness of their sexual parts. Peter Straub’s amusingly bitter insight into this question might usefully be extended to all horror fiction, where the succubus, the lamia, so often makes her vilely seductive lair. “The horror! The horror!” as Kurtz said when he reached the Heart of Darkness up that long Freudian, dank yet somehow tranquil river that Conrad so beautifully describes in another, related, classic. — PETER NICHOLLS
Horror: The 100 Best Books Page 23