82: [1980] JONATHAN CARROLL - The Land of Laughs
Thomas Abbey, the son of a famous film star, is obsessionally interested in the works of Marshall France, a mysterious children’s writer whose classic books include The Land of Laughs, Pool of Stars, Peach Shadows and The Green Dog’s Shadow. Spurred by Saxony Gardner, his girlfriend, Abbey decides to attempt a biography of his hero, who chose to live a reclusive life in Galen, Missouri, and whose estate is jealously guarded by his daughter, Anna. Abbey and Saxony travel to Galen, and after some teasing the author’s heiress agrees to let Abbey attempt the biography. However, it soon develops that Galen isn’t quite the middle American idyll it seems to be: tragedies are shrugged off by the population, some of the local dogs can speak, and a weird kind of predestination appears to rule everyday life. The author has added to his bizarre reputation with The Voice of Our Shadow, Bones of the Moon, Sleeping in Flame, A Child Across the Sky, Outside the Dog Museum, After Silence and From the Teeth of Angels, along with the novella Black Cocktail and a short story collection entitled The Panic Hand.
***
The best novels resist easy categorization, and there’s a point in The Land of Laughs where the protagonist, Thomas Abbey, says that he hates horror books and novels — sentiments which we suspect Jonathan Carroll himself shares. Nevertheless, Carroll is writing a horror story of a sort, and he understands that the best moments of terror are mental rather than physical and lie in the collision between the mundane and the extraordinary, the sudden juxtaposition of the familiar with the bizarre. The Land of Laughs has several moments of high terror, the more effective because they do not come until the reader is well into the book. We are lulled by plenty of realistic narrative while at the same time kept uneasy by the macabre overtones of the writing itself. This is perfectly illustrated very early on when Abbey enters a bookstore and comes upon a rare edition of a book by his beloved author, Marshall France. “I staggered over to the desk,” Carroll has Abbey tell us, “and, after wiping my hands on my pants, picked it up reverently. I noticed a troll who looked as if he had been dipped in talcum powder watching me from the corner of the store.” This is an arresting image, and even though we swiftly discover that the troll is simply an ordinary storekeeper, we have a presentiment that darker things lie in store for Thomas Abbey. Carroll continues to tease us with hints of the grotesque or aberrant: Abbey’s girlfriend collects marionettes; Abbey himself collects masks and lives in the psychological shadow of his famous movie-star father, now dead; the character of France’s daughter is ambiguous to say the least. Carroll sustains the tension masterfully. Ensconced in France’s midwestern hometown, Abbey starts work on France’s biography. But deceit and manipulation lie everywhere, not least in Abbey’s secret affair with France’s daughter. More than ever, we know he’s courting disaster. One of the women in the town is serving dinner when Abbey momentarily sees her as “Krang coming out of the kitchen [with] the wide empty eyes that betray the joy in the mouth’s full, happy smile”. Krang is a character from one of France’s books. Soon afterwards Abbey arrives home to find the friendly household dog asleep on his bed. It’s talking in its sleep. Now the terror of the place begins to take hold as Abbey discovers that the townsfolk are literally the creation of Marshall France and that he must complete the biography in order to keep them alive. This is no Ray Bradbury small-town America. “You finish that fucking book, Abbey!” one of the inhabitants tells him. “You finish it or I’ll cut your fucking balls off!” The Land of Laughs is in part a meditation on the seductions of creativity (one of the impressive things about the book is the way in which Carroll makes the reader believe that France’s books really exist) and in part the study of a slide into madness. The three-page epilogue has Abbey hiding in Europe after having escaped France’s hometown. He’s begun the biography of his father and has brought him back to life as a result. Or, to read it another way, his madness is now total and all the bizarre happenings in the book are seen to be a product of the narrator’s mind. Strongly characterized and beautifully paced, The Land of Laughs combines elements of fantasy and horror into a piece of modern American Gothic which is ultimately sui generis. — CHRISTOPHER EVANS
83: [1980] RICHARD LAYMON - The Cellar
Malcasa Point, California. The Beast House is a local tourist attraction, the site of at least eleven gruesome murders between 1903 and 1977. To Malcasa Point come Donna Hayes and her daughter Sandy, fleeing from Donna’s recently released homicidal maniac/child molestor husband, Roy. Judgement Rucker, a mercenary, has been hired by Larry Mayhew who once survived an encounter with the beast of the house — to kill the creature. Donna and Jud fall in love at first sight, and resolve to deal with both Roy and the beast. However the creature that lurks inside the old house turns out to be only one of a whole brood of human and inhuman monsters and destroying them isn’t as easy as it seems. Richard Layman’s first novel is a violent, fast-paced, cynical chiller modelled on contemporary horror movies like The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Friday the 13th (1980). Laymon returned to Malcasa Point in The Beast House (1981) and has subsequently turned out many similar entertainments in the splattery vein of The Woods Are Dark; Out Are the Lights; All Hallows’ Eve; Resurrection Dreams; Flesh; Funland; The Stake; Darkness, Tell Us; Blood Games and Alarms.
***
In an era where horror novels are sold by weight, Richard Laymon slices away all the surplus fat and cuts down to the bone. Down to the bone and beyond. The Cellar is fast moving and written in a very cinematic style, using the minimum of detail and description. Even the violent episodes are told in the same sparse manner, with no more emphasis than the rest of the book. (Scenes chosen for the back covers of some of Laymen’s later NEL paperbacks, for example, had to be expanded with more graphic detail by the blurb writers in order to appeal to the potential purchaser.) Laymon never chooses the easy route by revelling in gory mutilation. The literal documentation of slaughter takes no great skill, only access to a textbook on surgery. (Not that this stops several alleged horror authors and their crude accounts of pre-mortem autopsies.) Although he has chosen to aim at the less cerebral end of the horror spectrum, Laymon writes with a style and flair which sets him far ahead of his pulp rivals. In this context, perhaps his most significant achievement is the creation of his characters. They do what real people do: they talk. Much of the action is carried forward via dialogue. Every word counts, and every character is there for the same purpose: to move the plot onwards. They are not created as mere prey, thrown in at random to fill a few pages so that the author can simply kill them off. The shock of their deaths comes because we have grown to know them, not because they have been disposed of as bloodily as possible. For example: one chapter ends with a woman about to be tortured, but we never discover her ultimate fate until much later, when Laymon makes casual reference to her tormentor having lit three good fires in one day. Laymen’s subtle technique leaves far more to the readers, who are free to add their own vivid details to the scenes which he has outlined. The only limit is their own imagination. It seems that Roy is the villain in The Cellar. He has just been freed from jail, having served time for raping his own six-year-old daughter. In his quest for revenge, he slays and steals, brutalizes and burns; he sexually abuses another juvenile girl and even tries to run down a dog. Laymon gradually draws the diverse threads of his novel together. At first the Beast House, scene of several earlier mysterious murders, is subordinate to the mayhem caused by Roy. Laymon appears to be suggesting that there is no one more inhuman than Roy, that there can be no greater evil than that inflicted by man upon man — or upon woman. But there is. What dwells in the cellar can snuff out Roy in an instant, can inflict infinitely worse terror than he ever could. At least Roy granted his victims the release of death. There is no such mercy for those who survive their ordeal in the Beast House. This ultimate scene is written all in dialogue. We may not understand what has happened at first, but after a few lines there is no need for any description of
the obvious. With several well-chosen words Laymon conjures up the truly horrifying fate which awaits those trapped in The Cellar. — DAVID GARNETT
84: [1981] THOMAS HARRIS - Red Dragon
Will Graham, a former FBI agent, is called out of early retirement when his special talents — he is an expert in tracking down apparently motiveless serial murderers — are required. Two middle-class families have been coolly wiped out by a killer who has been nicknamed “The Tooth Fairy” and Graham hopes to catch the psychopath before he strikes again. His problems are exacerbated by the malign influence of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the last murderer he put away, and by his suspicion that he can only do his job if he actually becomes as warped as his quarry. Meanwhile, Francis Dolarhyde — the killer — is furious about the demeaning “Tooth Fairy” tag and tries to get his pseudonym changed by eating William Blake’s painting “The Red Dragon”. Harris’ novel is a state-of-the-art police procedural, and an outstanding examination of the anatomy of madness as exemplified by its hero and villains alike. It was filmed by Michael Mann in 1986 as Manhunter, with excellent performances from William L. Peterson, Brian Cox and Tom Noonan. Lecter returned to even greater success in Harris’ 1988 novel, The Silence of the Lambs, which in turn became one of the top movies of 1991, starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins.
***
Red Dragon is, quite simply, the most frightening book I have ever read, and surely belongs in the best one hundred horror volumes. I’d be tempted to place it in the top ten, despite the fact that there is no supernatural element in the book. Believe me, it doesn’t need one. Thomas Harris requires no vampires, werewolves, or any of the other stock spooks that make up a good percentage of the menaces of horror fiction. For him, as for William Blake in a quotation Harris uses as an epigraph, “Cruelty has a Human Heart”. Francis Dolarhyde, the monster of Red Dragon, is indeed human, pitiful, terrifying, sympathetic, and all too believable. He is a beast who murders entire families to feed a dark, sociopathic, psychosexual urge, the result of an upbringing nearly as hideous as his own responses to it. His personality and background are impeccably drawn, as are those of Will Graham, the investigator brought out of an early retirement to hunt down the Dragon. For Graham, who in the past has caught serial killers by thinking the way they do, the greatest horror lies in the self-recognition that such an empathic projection causes, the distressing awareness of the magnitude and potential of the evil that lies in his own heart. It is the same horror that confronts Kurtz and Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The basic plot has been used before and since, but precursors of Red Dragon had pulled back, reluctant to expose and explore the cellars of the soul that Harris maps so vividly, while most of those who have followed in his footsteps have substituted either buckets of viscera or a barrage of verbal pyrotechnics for the true and terrifying confrontation that Harris offers. And confrontation is the key word in discussing Red Dragon. To approach this book as an “escape” novel, be it a police procedural or a slasher-on-the-loose story, is shortsighted, though it works on either of those levels. Unfortunately, so do half a hundred otherwise undistinguished novels to be found in any bookstore. Most of these books are content to splash the reader with stage blood and explore the first level of cellars, the most accessible part of the subconscious where the easily definable — and admissible — fears dwell. But the best horror fiction goes below to the sub-cellars, to the places in the mind that we dare not admit exist. Red Dragon is not an escape novel, for it refuses to let us escape. Instead, it makes us confront the worst in ourselves. It shows us the monster in the mirror, the one with our own face, smeared not with stage blood but with the naked emotions of hate and lust and murderous rage. Along with its disturbing theme, Red Dragon is full of wicked pleasures. It is an intensely visual novel, rich with sound and color and telling use of small detail to make large points. All of its characters are brilliantly portrayed, and it is filled with gritty verisimilitude. Harris has done his homework, and it shows, but the fascinating investigative procedures never intrude upon the plot or slow the savage pace. Awful and awesome things happen in this book, but we are not overwhelmed with descriptive and gory detail, for understatement is one of Harris’s greatest virtues. He clearly understands the visions already resident in the imagination of his readers, so he tells us, simply and honestly, of the acts of Francis Dolarhyde. Then we move on, and the memories of what Harris may have allowed us to glimpse for only a moment resonate inside us for hours. The book itself resonates far longer. I have read it three times, and every time I have found something new in it — more to admire in the craftsmanship of the writing, deeper levels, unexpected meanings. Indeed, this last time I saw parts of it as a parable for creating fiction, with Will Graham’s struggles to put a face on the Dragon a metaphor for the writer’s effort to assume multiple points of view and so delineate his characters. But that, of course, is only the reaction of one writer, finding a more innocent reading in order to give his mind ease, to temporarily deny the uncomfortable truths at the book’s core, truths that horror fiction and its readers must ultimately confront, and be richer for the knowledge and the recognition. Buy Red Dragon, read it, shiver at it, remember it — for you will be unable to forget it. It is as real as fiction can be, and as frightening. — CHET WILLIAMSON
85: [1981] F. PAUL WILSON - The Keep
In 1941, a detachment of German soldiers led by Captain Klaus Woermann occupies the Keep, a strange structure which overlooks a pass in the Carpathians but which seems to have been built to keep something in rather than out. A looting sergeant pries a silver cross from the wall, and releases Molasar, an ancient and evil creature who begins killing the Nazis. German High Command sends in SS sadist Erich Kaempffer to sort the trouble out, and he is forced to call in a Jewish historian to explain to the Germans what they are up against. Glaeken, an immortal warrior, is psychically summoned to do battle with Molasar, but arrives to find that the monster has found human allies among those who would see the Nazis out of Romania. A spirited and horrific thriller which declares its debt to Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, The Keep also flirts with the Dracula myth by creating a monster who seems to be a Transylvanian vampire but is actually something much worse! The novel was filmed with bizarre and arty results by Michael Mann in 1985. Wilson’s Reborn (1990), Reprisal (1991) and Nightworld (1992) are elliptical sequels.
***
It is difficult, when one has finished reading F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep, to imagine anything essential to the genre’s form which was omitted. Whatever a reader or reviewer of horror fiction thinks primary — necessary in the sense of originality of idea, basic to tight plotting and its progression, desirable in characterization and imperative in terms of suspense, surprise, and the inexorable buildup of the total storyline from event to event, chapter to chapter — seems to me present in Dr. Wilson’s masterwork. I include the qualifying “seems to me” from a sense of fealty to the proprieties, but I will be inclined toward becoming passionately disagreeable if anyone wishes to quarrel over this admittedly extreme viewpoint. More a matter of sheer opinion, I think, is the further thought that this novel wouldn’t be the worst choice in the world as an exemplar held up for would-be novelists working in any modern genre (including the mainstream — which could use an infusion of originality, plot, suspense and so forth). Many new writers who have the good sense to check into what’s selling in the realm of their literary bent are often heard (when one listens) to remark, “Even I can write something better than that!” It would make a pleasant change if novices were exposed to a novel which elicits a sense of respect for the writing craft. And the overwhelming majority of newcomers to any sort of novel writing are not about to write a book even fractionally so fine as The Keep. The fact that it was conceived and brought to full term by a young man who is a full-time, practicing physician — who was also engaged in creating richly-inventive science fiction — causes a lifelong Sherlockian to reflect about reincarnation, and to wonder
, “Whatever happened to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?” Not that it was Dr. Conan Doyle whom Paul Wilson cited on his acknowledgments page; those fantasists were Lovecraft, Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, undeniably with sound and sometimes-obvious reason. Yet it’s just as true that Wilson, as was true of Sir Arthur in detective fiction, is one of the few frequent practitioners of horror who deals conspicuously with questions of good versus evil; with mythology and the supernatural. Unlike many popular authors — some of whom object to the “horror” label mainly because it’s de rigueur to do so — Dr. Wilson often permits his characters the motivation of morality or immorality, self-identification with entrenched rules of faith and decent conduct, nihilism and sin. He thereby endows them with a timelessness absent from much of modern fiction. “Molasar was evil,” Theodor Cuza concludes, in The Keep: “That was given: Any entity that leaves a trail of corpses in order to continue its own existence is inherently evil.” Which is not at all to say that his supremely well-crafted novel advances the simplistic notion that its characters (mirroring real people) are all black or all white, virtuously — devoid of those psychological shadings so dear to those engaged unceasingly in a sentimental search for better ways to forgive the unforgivable. From the start of his book, Paul Wilson uses as his viewpoint character Captain Klaus Woermann. The period is the Second World War, a time when, as a small boy, I believed all living Germans were Nazis and that Nazis were the embodiment of evil. It’s hard for me to conceive of a protagonist for whom, as a reader, I was less likely to care; when I read Woermann’s message, “Something is murdering my men,” I thought, Good! But this German officer is not one “to abandon a position”; the fight has “gone out of his heart”, he paints, he has two sons and detests the SS, he is “intelligent and precise”, and he’s “no longer in command of the Keep” because “something dark and awful” has “taken over”. And when, at the end for Klaus Woermann, he prays, “Dear God, if you are my God,” I was reminded that human beings may work for or ruefully support endeavors of evil, but that its source, and the origins of its opposite, stem from elsewhere. Let us not make too much, however, of the serious intent or elements of The Keep; not when it is the perfect product of a master storyteller who is here at his endlessly entertaining best. Instead, let’s refer again to the echoes of the great storyteller Conan Doyle to which I listened raptly right up to the penultimate period of this readable book. Good Glaeken, running through Dr. Wilson’s symbol of evil, grapples with his opposite number on the parapet of the Keep. “Together,” he writes, “they toppled over the edge and plummeted down.” Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty “tottered together upon the brink of the fall” and Dr. Watson believed they went “reeling over, locked in each other’s arms … deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water”. Wilson’s contrasting pair awaited “the shattering impact with the stones invisible below”; Holmes saw Moriarty when “he struck a rock”. Ultimately, both figures of courage and goodness — each in his own way immortal — triumph. Contemporary horror, in common with most so-called “modern fiction” regardless of the year of publication, is written to sell, be read, establish the author, and persuade the powers that be — readers among them, if he or she is fortunate — to allow the cycle to occur all over again. And there is nothing wrong with that, I suppose; it’s far worse when the author is merely an imitator or sets out to craft a classic and falls woefully short. Novels that last, particularly in that which is too loosely called “genre fiction”, are the soul of serendipity; delightful happenstance as the product of immense creative effort. I feel sure The Keep is one of the only four or five such enduring novels I’ve read in contemporary horror. — J. N. WILLIAMSON
Horror: The 100 Best Books Page 24