Horror: The 100 Best Books

by Jones, Stephen

  93: [1984] MICHAEL BISHOP - Who Made Stevie Crye?

  Mary Stevenson (“Stevie”) Crye, a young widow trying to make a living as a freelance writer, faces a crisis when her typewriter breaks down. The machine is repaired by Seaton Benecke, a strange young man whose pet/familiar is a sinister capuchin monkey, but it develops the habit of writing on its own, interrupting the narrative with its own additions, side-tracks, dreams and nightmares. Stevie tries to deal with the havoc wrought by the typewriter’s imaginings, and becomes convinced that Seaton is horribly involved in what is happening to her. She also retaliates by becoming a writer of fiction herself, and twisting her real life into a fairytale, “The Monkey’s Bride”. The punch line is a black joke twisting the cliche of the infinite number of monkeys with the infinite number of typewriters. Best known for his idiosyncratic science fiction, which includes A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975), And Strange at Ectaban the Trees (1976), Stolen Faces (1977), A Little Knowledge (1977), Catacomb Years (1979), Transfigurations (1980), Under Heaven’s Bridge (1982, with Ian Watson), the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time (1982) and the collections Blooded on Arachne (1982) and One Winter in Eden (1984), Michael Bishop here enters the horror genre with a playful, incisive, tricksy novel. Its impact is considerably enhanced by the photographic illustrations of J. K. Potter.

  ***

  Although contemporary horror at its best is a true home for valid insights into the psychopathology of modern life as well as for genuine experimental writing, yet many ghastly events in horror novels are fundamentally absurd if you stop to think. The writerly trick is to persuade readers through mimesis, compelling style, and tension (alias fear) not to think with their reason, their day-mind, but with their night-mind, their dream-mind. The ludicrous still peeps through, and some of the most effective grotesque horror (such as Stephen King”s) actually uses and forefronts the joky ludicrous — before ripping the carpet of hilarity and sanity away again to commit abominations. Who Made Stevie Crye? had a rough ride to publication, being bounced by big American commercial houses as impossible to classify, hence difficult to market. That was because it is a unique parody of the horror genre itself, funny, savage, and compellingly believable rather than flipply comic. Thanks to Jim Turner, astute editor at Arkham House, Stevie finally appeared from that vintage source of Lovecraftiana, native home of cherished genre horrors predating the mass cloning of schlock horror — there to be graced with notably more elegant production than most books. Stevie is more than parody. It’s meta-horror, perhaps the first application of meta-fiction to horror. It’s a fiction which selfconsciously constructs itself and critiques itself, and its adoptive genre; wherein the heroine’s scary, hallucinatory experiences are written for her by a spooked typewriter, and where a delirious melting of reality occurs akin to Philip Dick’s weirdest SF drug-fugues, terminating in the philosophic surrealism of a team of monkeys tapping typewriters in the attic. En route, delicious moments of parody abound, both chilling and archly wry, such as Cujo’s vehicle siege re-enacted by a goofy basset hound whose dementia is that of “a desperate rush-hour commuter”. Ludic metaphors proliferate as part of the roguish, folksy, though also hyper-literate tone. “Where were today’s Faulkners?” complains Stevie after wading through book reviews of such titles as Afterbirth and Shudderville, irked by the spectre of writers “whoring” into horror for the big bucks. This possible angry motive for undertaking Stevie is quite transcended by the author’s humour, elegance, serious playfulness, and love, an alchemic transmutation of gut-themes into artistic gold. Yet Stevie is truly scary, and the story makes pungent psychological sense even as it swallows its own tail (and tale). It is also decent and empathic, with believable, quirky, three-dimensional, Southern small town characters, especially Stevie herself, courageous, sad, bitterly good-humoured, whose reality may be torn apart, though her flesh and sanity are not ripped. “Not merely horrifying but fundamentally contemptuous of civilized human feeling”, is the comment on the hexed typewriter’s narrative of Stevie’s loved daughter melted in bed, the slasher side of horror; an important distinction, this. As for salvation, the repair of the daughter’s gutted toys by the little girl in trance — out of parodied Disney as much as Poltergeist — is glossed by the motherly black roadside prophetess as a product of “subliterary paranormal energies”. Here is a humane, trickster kaleidoscope questioning a genre and a market, and fiction, and reality too — yet exquisitely spiced with human reality — and delivering the eerie chill of the occult and the illicit, curdling the blood but also warming the heart. — IAN WATSON

  94: [1985] DAN SIMMONS - Song of Kali

  American poet Robert Luczak arrives in Calcutta, with his Indian wife and baby daughter, to meet Bengali poet M. Das, who has long been thought dead, and pick up for publication Das’ latest work, an epic poem cycle about the goddess Kali. Although he is given the poem, various sinister forces prevent him initially from meeting Das, and he is told by a renegade member of the Kalipalakas, the Kali cult, that the poet is indeed dead and has been brought back to life by the evil goddess in order that he write a celebration of her which will spread her malign influence throughout the world. Although he disbelieves the story, Luczak presses his contacts to arrange a meeting with Das, and his encounter with what remains of the poet has tragic consequences for his family and perhaps the world. A winner of the World Fantasy Award, Song of Kali is a rich and evocative novel. Subsequently, F. Paul Wilson’s The Tomb (1985), Noel Scanlon’s Black Ashes (1986) and Les Daniels’ No Blood Spilled (1991) have echoed its themes, suggesting the presence of an Indian trend within modern horror.

  ***

  Song of Kali is a finely crafted novel of psychological terror in which overt supernatural elements figure but subtly. The author’s aim is to construct a crucible in which human toleration for and ability to deal with violence can be dissected. As an experimental laboratory in which the human psyche can be “tested to destruction”, modern India works just fine. Sense of place, of location, is paramount in much horror fiction. It lies at the very core of Song of Kali. Simmons’ novel demonstrates the horrendous effect setting has upon the human soul. It is an exactingly constructed, brutal, and uncompromising study of the degree to which an evil place may permeate and steep all that makes us human. Song of Kali is set in modern Calcutta, where the author depicts a teeming, festering metropolis far darker and more sinister than any dozen Gothic castles. The novel begins, “Some places are too evil to be allowed to exist. Some cities are too wicked to be suffered.” In precise, darkly lyrical detail, Simmons delineates an urban horror story in which the city itself is the monster. That Calcutta is so vividly realized is an astonishing literary feat. Simmons spent ten weeks traveling through India on a Fulbright Fellowship tour. He spent a grand total of two and a half days in Calcutta. To attempt to write a major novel on so complex a subject after so brief an experience would seem, for most writers, to be the height of presumption. Apparently Simmons was exposed to precisely the right stimuli. He was powerfully struck by the suppurating urban environment in which he became immersed. He came away from the city with voluminous notebooks filled with details, most valuable of which was a book of sketches (Simmons is a graphic artist as well as a writer). He took copious notes on such experiences as meeting with the Bengali poet P. Lai, a protege of Tagore. Lai became an Inspiration for the novel’s mysterious poet, M. Das. While the exotic and powerfully realized setting is integral to the events which befall Simmons’ hapless journalist protagonist, it is not the sole outstanding attribute to which the novel lays claim. Song of Kali, while much honored and admired, has not met with universal acclaim from its readers. The reason seems to be that some come away from the novel not only disappointed by what Simmons seems to be saying, but actively resistant to the author’s thesis. The book’s horrendous climax at first seems to revolve around protagonist Robert Luczak’s discovery that his infant daughter has been murdered solely for the purpose of stuffing the child with
contraband gems to be smuggled out of India. Luczak and his wife do what has to be done to return the corpse of their child home for burial. Little is done — or perhaps can be done about the killers. The second climax comes soon after in the book when Luczak, letting himself be swept into the seductive maelstrom of Kali’s violent song, buys a gun and impulsively returns to India, bent on revenge. This is potentially the stuff of melodrama. Fortunately the author no more yields to the siren call of cheap and exploitative violence than does his protagonist. Much along the line of the similar moral choice posed in David Morrell’s Testament, Robert makes a conscious determination at the final moment not to opt for violence as a tactic. No Rambo, Robert Luczak. He discards his pistol and flies home to his wife and, ultimately, his new family. The insidious seduction of the death goddess has been spurned by a conscious moral act. This is not, it would seem, a wide-screen, Technicolor crowd pleaser. But it does reify the stance of a psychologically violent novel about a violent society as a defensible and indisputably moral work of art. — EDWARD BRYANT

  95: [1985] CLIVE BARKER - The Damnation Game

  Convict Marty Strauss is offered parole on the condition that he takes a job as bodyguard with multi-millionaire Joseph Whitehead. Whitehead has made a fortune through his association with Mamoulian, an immortal Faust-tumed-Mephistopheles who now wants to back out of the bargain he has made. Strauss and Whitehead’s daughter Carys are caught up in the struggle between the tycoon and the human monster, and realize that something apocalyptic is in the offing. Meanwhile, Mamoulian’s zombie associate Breer — The Razor Eater — lurks threateningly in the background, and a pair of comic relief American evangelists are co-opted into the service of Evil. Clive Barker’s dense and complicated first novel is a variant on the themes of Dr. Faustus and Melmoth the Wanderer, and established him as one of the genre’s leading lights.

  ***

  The book opens with an extraordinarily perceptive description of Warsaw in the Second World War, ravaged and mutilated, a dreadful, devastated landscape, a micro-cosmic hell. It is just such a terrain that Clive Barker traverses so painstakingly in his work, a terrain that is both provocative and dangerous. Yet it is a mark of his skill that he does so without falling into the trap that has claimed so many of his contemporaries, that of self-indulgence, the cult of the cheap thrill. Although his reputation has inevitably grown to some extent around obvious hype, his work cuts far below the surface of superficial ugliness and violence to expose deeper layers of human suffering beneath. In The Damnation Game he is uncompromising and ruthless in his examination of the human condition, and the result is at once electrifying, horrifying and compelling. There are five meticulously drawn principal characters, each interlinking in the Damnation Game scenario, which is their own personal Apocalypse, the torment they endure as a result of their own sin. “Everything’s chance,” says Marty Strauss, a gambler and thief who has sacrificed all he possessed to feed his hunger. On parole from prison, he is to act as bodyguard to the multi-millionaire Joseph Whitehead, whose huge empire grew up from his own scavenging, gambling days in the Warsaw of the opening scenes. Whitehead tells Marty that there is no external God, and no Hell: there is only our own appetite, to which we are all slaves, although there is always a price. Our soul is the stake in this Game. In The Damnation Game this retribution is largely epitomized by Mamoulian, the self-styled Last European, who is many things: the personification of our worst fears and our darkest desires, guilt incarnate, the very Devil. He is almost vampiric in his power, able to raise the dead, forcing them to serve him without a shred of compassion, torturing and manipulating to satisfy his own insatiable greed. His main servant is the resurrected Breer, the Razor-Eater, whose gradual disintegration is both appalling and pitiful, his guilt eating into him physically, cancer-like. Breer is one of the most remarkable creations in modern fiction, his humanity, though like his body victim to damnation, giving him a dimension that makes him far more abhorrent than any vampire or demon. It is against Mamoulian that Marty has to pit himself, gradually realizing that this is no ordinary opponent, but one of supernatural magnitude. Whitehead’s daughter, Carys, controlled by her decadent father through heroin, is also the victim of the Game, and Marty finds in his love for her a fresh purpose, a will to break free of the impending Deluge. Clive Barker draws on the human fears of his creations, their frailties (fear of loneliness, of age, of death) as well as the more visceral terrors, exposing them to the nerve equally as effectively. The physical horrors are at times obscene, though the book is designed to shock, to put before us the excesses of the psyche, the darkside of the soul. There may not be an external Creator, but built into us, Barker asserts, is a leveller, and we are the instruments of our own judgement, our own executioners. Like Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, The Damnation Game faces us with truths we may not want to know: it is not a book to be taken lightly. — ADRIAN COLE

  96: [1985] PETER ACKROYD - Hawksmoor

  In the early 18th century, Nicholas Dyer, an architect and associate of Sir Christopher Wren and Sir John Vanbrugh, is commissioned to design and erect seven churches around London. Dyer, who has made an ambiguously Faustian bargain with a man named Mirabilis, uses his churches to write a mystic design across the map of the city. In the late 20th century, a series of murders by strangulation are taking place in Dyer’s churches, baffling the police. Inspector Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose life parallels Dyer’s in many details, becomes obsessively interested in the case, to the dismay of his superiors. Hawksmoor is certain that an answer lies among the city’s vagrant population and within the walls of the churches. Peter Ackroyd’s Whitbread Award-winning novel is a dazzling mix of literary pastiche, historical recreation, subtle haunting and metaphysical detective story. Ackroyd is a novelist, historian and biographer whose other subjects include Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Chatterton, Charles Dickens and the Great Fire of London.

  ***

  In the company of 99 horror novels, an appreciation of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor could simply linger over its catalogue of horrors, for it offers horrors aplenty both of the flesh and of the spirit. The awful things limned therein, brutality and madness lapped in ordure, are but surface eruptions, however, signals of more truly awe-full mysteries. For indeed, Hawksmoor is a Mystery in the archaic sense, embracing as it does a sense of the writer’s craft cunningly displayed while hinting at more arcane matters, for this Mystery is not least a sombre meditation on the occult in all shades of meaning. More than one genre mingles in the overall design, police procedural and historical melding with supernatural horror; each follows its own receipts yet the whole transcends its parts, attaining a literary form splendidly sui generis. Ackroyd has an authentic genius for literary pastiche, best demonstrated in Dyer’s confessions, which restore in vivid Baroque prose the full “Terrour and Magnificence” of Augustan London. The cold austerity of the modern passages corresponds accordingly to Hawksmoor’s bleak alienation, but his London remains one with Dyer’s, a haunted labyrinth where past and present flow into one another in intricate patterns of recurrence. Many voices clamour therein, addressing the author’s concerns; one that rather speaks through him is T. S. Eliot, most clearly in the obsession with physical corruption, coupled with sexual loathing, and the vision of London as a “whited sepulchre”. Images and events, be they a catch phrase, a murdered child’s name, even a plot twist, echo across the centuries, as do subtler adumbrations of character, in a psychotic tramp’s sufferings and, more significantly, in the duality of Dyer/Hawksmoor. Within this skein of resonances stand fixed constants: Dyer’s churches, built by the Light of Reason to celebrate Darkness. Ackroyd’s novel is itself a masterpiece of construction opening on many perspectives, yet though he lets the arguments of Reason shine, the Shaddowes are not dispelled. Senseless horrors, too, remain constant in Time. Time is, indeed, the essence of the Mystery, the contemplation of an unfathomable void. This is truly a work of suspense, for even as the author cunningly unfolds the pattern o
f the Mystery by degrees, he reveals the surrounding Abyss without illuminating its depths. Hawksmoor is much more than an intellectual entertainment, however. Its power, and greatness, lie not so much in brilliant technique as in sombre tone. If there is a coda to Hawksmoor, then Dyer states it early on when he declares “There is no Light without Darkness, and no Substance without Shaddowe.” A Metaphysical melancholy pervades the work, and more than this, deep tragedy in the suffering of its lost souls, caught in the unseen meshes of time. There is much irony, but little humour in Hawksmoor, save that as black as night Indeed, the Darkness so overwhelms Hawksmoor as to exceed even Ackroyd’s stated intentions, fashioning a Dark Glass in which we the readers see ourselves, each caught in Time like ants in amber. Such Shaddowes as these pall the lowest depths of filth and cruelty; if this is not horror, I do not know the meaning of the word. — R. S. HADJI

  97: [1986] LISA TUTTLE - A Nest of Nightmares

  Although it includes the author’s first published story, “Stranger in the House” (1972), this collection consists mainly of short horror stories written between 1980 and 1985. Lisa Tuttle’s speciality is domestic terror, frequently with a feminist slant, focusing on families breaking up, women under pressure and the insidious intrusion of supernatural evil into an already fractured normality. The pieces, many of which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Twilight Zone Magazine include “Bug House”, “Dollburger”, “Flying to Byzantium”, “The Horse Lord”, “The Other Mother”, “A Friend in Need”, “Sun City” and “The Nest”.

  ***

  I had always thought of Lisa Tuttle as a science fiction writer — until I read “The Nest”: in manuscript form, at the 1981 Milford writer’s workshop. “The Nest” is now the final story in Lisa’s “horror” collection, A Nest of Nightmares. One of its two nightmare images is the glimpsed figure of something manlike, black, and flapping like a garbage bag, a figure which appears from, and disappears into, the roof of Pamela’s newly acquired, ramshackle country house; it seems to be constructing a vast nest out of detritus in the loft. At the end of the workshop session on the story, fellow writer Garry Kilworth re-entered the room wearing nothing but a black dustbin-liner, with appropriate head and arm holes. He leapt into Lisa’s lap; she made nervous sounds. It was a very funny moment; it was also one of the most horrifying sights I have ever seen. That said, the spectacle was nowhere near as disturbing as the story itself. In “The Nest”, the “monster” never appears on full stage. Everything that happens, or appears to be happening in the attic, is glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, or from a distant hill; Pam’s sister Sylvia, who has agreed to share the house, is drawn to the loft, to the nest of rubbish, to the creature, but what happens to her there is reflected only in the sounds of her body being rhythmically moved against that attic’s creaking floorboards. This is extremely effective and the stories in A Nest of Nightmares are, on the whole, strong, scary and impressive for just this controlled use of nightmare imagery. Lisa Tuttle is a writer who moulds tension to create the effect of horror, rather than shaping direct and horrific narrative image. And that tension is expertly drawn not just from the interaction of the main character with the supernatural but also by focusing on the main character and her “real-time” agonies. Nearly all the stories in the collection are centred around women. Nearly all the women are in pain. The pain is real, realistic and recognizable. Few of the characters are happy in their personal lives: men have left them; they have left men; fiancare fickle; dreams of sharing a new house founder on the question of privacy in life; one-parent families have career difficulties and guiltily acknowledge that they are neglecting their children (“The Other Mother”); suitors turn out to be corpses (“Need”); hosts in far-off, lonely towns become dedicated to belittling their author-guest out of simple jealousy (“Flying to Byzantium”). Add a secondary supernatural element: horses possessed by ancient shaman forces (“The Horse Lord”); Celtic goddesses, complete with boar avatars, who fulfil neglected children’s needs (“The Other Mother”); dark men who prowl the house at night stealing dolls for nourishment (“Dollburger”), and you have a collection of stories that work on level after level, teasing out recognition of childhood (in particular those awful family mythologies which can be so frightening to a child), fear of the unknown, and guilty acknowledgement of familiar weaknesses in our own personal lives. This is horror at its best because it addresses more than the supernatural. It is good horror, too, because it acknowledges that nightmares are real only in a simple, subjective dimension. There are no ghosts, no living corpses, no skin-robed spirits of old (“Sun City”), no worlds created from imagination in which the imaginer gets trapped (“Flying to Byzantium”) … not for you or me … but there are for the fevered, oppressed minds that might create them. Which is why “The Nest” and “The Other Mother” stand out so well as elegant psychological studies of disturbed minds: the attic, with its pile of rubbish, has become a haven for Sylvia, away from the cloying dependency of her older sibling; the white goddess is an actualizing of the guilt that has been so well suppressed by a mother’s selfishness. The stories in A Nest of Nightmares work on a variety of levels, and are deeply disturbing. — ROBERT HOLDSTOCK