Quick Review

Been having some interesting conversations in the bookstore lately about genre.  One of the great benefits of working in a large store has always been the diversity of the staff; a lot of people means a lot of very different reading, among my younger coworkers specially.  There are unapologetic fans of everything from poetry to mysteries, and, as one might think in a bookstore with the best selection of Science Fiction in the region, more than a few enthusiasts and students of everything from classic space operas to the most cerebral of "speculative fiction."  Beyond the obvious retail utility of all these opinions mixing, it is refreshing to hear so many readers open to other people's recommendations, and recommendations from outside the membership, as it were.  As the traditional, now all too last-century, divisions of genre have been breaking down, and literary fiction becomes less and less a matter of critical and or academic canon,  it can be rather thrilling to hear, for example, from a fan of Aimee Bender why a fan of the weirder works of Joyce Carol Oates -- me -- might enjoy The Girl in the Flammable Skirt -- which I very much did.  Is there anyone still who would dismiss either writer as a "horror writer"?

I want to say a word though in defence of genre.  Even as contemporary, fine artists continue to explore and mix the pop and the respectable in ever new and interesting ways, there's something to be said for those who can craft a well-made, satisfying, entirely conventional object.  Not every chair needs less than four legs, not every thing needs to be new.

When I was a boy, my graduation, if you will, from little kids' comic books -- Little LuLu and Scrooge McDuck and the like -- wasn't so much to super hero books, which always rather bored me, though I read them, but rather to horror.  I loved horror movies.  I loved horror comics.  I'm just old enough to have caught the tail of the last silver age of horror comics.  The still shocking productions of the Fifties; full of the most graphic gore and violence, had already been suppressed,  but there were still amazingly clever artists and writers producing wonderfully twisted stuff.  I couldn't get enough of it, in part at least, I should think, because my mother, bless 'er, found the lot of it repugnant.  "What," she used demand with appropriately Victorian gestures of dismay, turning from Tales of the Crypt, "what appeals to you in that nasty stuff?!"  Exactly.

I won't review the whole history of the form.  Another day.  I will say that at nine, I did not really appreciate the more Hitchcockian stories of murderous infidelity and revenge.  I liked monsters: bloodthirsty, fiendish, deformed, and yes, now and then, misunderstood -- though I had yet to have much appreciation of satire, or comedy in general, so I did not like trick nightmare awakenings, joke endings and the like.  I liked monsters with consequences, and threatening mystery.  Still do.  (Though I like to think I've grown into a sense of humor.  Little boys can be so very serious.)

I very seldom read comic books as-such anymore, at least not by the issue, so I tend to only come across new things when published in book form.  Thus the new-ish book from Image Comics, Severed.  Everything about this one immediately appealed to my vestigial nine-year-old-boy: from the title to the design, even to the wonderfully familiar trick of the monster peeping through the shredded cover.  Yeah!

The book itself did not disappoint.  Written by two Scotts, Snyder & Tuft (sounds like a forgotten vaudeville "Dutch" act,) and handsomely drawn by one Attila Futaki, this is the best of what fidelity to form can do.  I was put in mind immediately of the best remembered monsters of my childhood.  What's different about this is the time clearly taken, and the care.  There is a visual lavishness, an attention to detail and pallet, and a more leisurely, or better, a more cinematic pace to the frights that tells of a labour undertaken from love, for the pure pleasure in making a thing well, rather than to a deadline or just as a job of work.

The monster here is likewise a familiar enough fellow; the friendly adult who actually means to eat you up -- think Hansel & Gretel, by way here of Hammer Studio.  There's a classic framing device and most of the story a remembered nightmare from childhood.  (I won't spoil the pleasure of the thing for anyone by noting too the absolutely correct and suggestively indefinite ending.)

A very professional job, this, and happily so, though improved, as I've said already by the entirely modern resources of enthusiastic young artists paying tribute to the horrors of a bygone time.  (Even the historical setting in a pre-electronic age, but in a time not so remote from modernity as to indicate the traditional, and safely remote fairytale was a perfect choice.)

I might cavil here or there with the unwelcome reminders of the original, serial  publication; the time taken by the monster with our protagonist feels a bit unjustified by his talents and charms, the necessity of stepping behind a curtain more than once to make what is pretty much the same shock as the last time, but this is quibbling  stuff.  The shocks are good ones and as satisfying as a familiar roller coaster.

What I like best here is the very avoidance of unnecessary and self-conscience explanation or fustian myth remaking, or sneaking parody.  (Fantasy as genre has much to answer for, and not the least of it, the grinding anthropology of begats and back-stories.)  I also hate winking.  This is the thing well done, and without irony, or embarrassment.

for all my enjoyment of variation and innovation, for genre-flipping and commentary, there is nothing better, when the night is coming on, and the window's open to let in the air and the dark, than a well-made monster before bedtime.

The Clerihew in a Flammable Skirt

AIMEE BENDER

If you know a willful creature,
And you've half a mind to teach her,
You would do well to send her
The latest Aimee Bender.

"my final and irrevocable overthrow"

I'm missing the latest readings of Creepy Tales! at the bookstore today. Wish I were there. Today's readers have neither of them done this sort of thing before. I've listened to both, in rehearsal, and I expect both stories will go off well. The M. R. James story that D. will be reading, "The Ash Tree," is a classic. The other, that our own N. will be doing, Aimee Bender's "Marzipan," is one of those marvelously weird modern stories that rather defies category. It isn't really a supernatural story in the traditional sense; no ghosts or things going bump in the night, but it certainly describes a reality unlike our own, at least in the details, while commenting in a very funny and surprisingly touching voice, about what it is to be a family, accept the unexpected, cope. I didn't know Aimee Bender's work before N. brought me this story. It really is quite wonderful, specially as N. reads it.

Preparing for this project of month-long readings has been a marvelous excuse for me to read all sorts. In addition to the two grand volumes of American Fantastic Tales from the Library of America that first inspired the idea of reading stories every Saturday in October, I've been reading and collecting up ghost stories and the like from all over for months now. Algernon Blackwood and Mrs. Margaret Oliphant had a reprint, at my request, from our Espresso Book Machine, Homer. I've gathered up various Dover books -- always an excellent source for classics at affordable prices, and specially strong when it comes to the Gothic. What I've gone in search of all over the place though are the classic anthologies I remember reading as a kid, and any others of the same style; substantial collections, with marvelous covers and wide selections of ghost and ghoulish stories from authors beginning usually with Poe and then coming down to whatever the original date of publication. I've written here already about a couple of my better discoveries.

Now, just because our readings are already set for the month, I haven't stopped looking. This trip to Portland, and that means to Powell's, I couldn't resist having a look just to see what might be had in the way of ghost stories and the like. In the "Gold Room," where the bookstore's cafe is and where they keep the genre stuff, like mysteries and SF, I found a whole wall of Horror. The selection was much as I expected: endless rows of pulp in uniformly black jackets depicting soppy vampire romance, slavering zombies, and the sadly usual retreads, reruns and revolting gore. There were the full runs of Stephen King and Anne Rice, and half a shelf each of genre stalwarts like Lumley and Straub, and then just... all the rest. It's depressing to think that there might be a reader working his or her way from A to Z on these gloomy shelves. Like eating nothing but candy corn. I like candy corn, but as a steady diet? Sick making.

I finally had to ask the clerk a second time where the ghost stories might be. He'd explained this to me once already -- just at the top of the stairs on the left -- but I hadn't turned the corner sharply enough after the Science Fiction anthologies and the embarrassingly large selection of Warhammer books, and I'd missed it. Poor man finally had to get up from his desk and show me. There they were. Barnes & Noble have reprinted in cheap hardcovers a number of the standard collections I remember from childhood. I can't usually bring myself to actually buy a Barnes & Noble reprint, even used. Feels wrong, somehow, perhaps disloyal. I contemplated buying a collection of Irish ghost stories from among the B&N books, but then my eye fell on an old friend, a book I only dimly remembered from the hours I spent reading in a dark corner of the unfriendly little library in my home town. I recognized the spine of that old Modern Library Giant, but wasn't sure until I'd seen the front of the dustjacket, shown above. Yes! The very book. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.

"52 Stories: Over 1000 pages," it says, right there on the cover. I remember the thrilling potential in those words when I was all of nine or ten. By then I'd gobbled up all of the standard Poe and was hungry for more. Here it was then that I first read Bierce's "The Boarded Window," and Saki's "Sredni Vashtar," M. R. James' "Casting the Runes," and Le Fanu's "Green Tea." The copy I found at Powell's tells me on the flyleaf that "Charlotte Ruthkowaki" read her way through this handsome Giant, "June 7, 1962 to July 15, 1963." That gave me a delicious shiver. The latter was the day I was born. What more supernatural encouragement did I need yesterday to buy the thing? Done.

So last night, since I won't be back to Seattle today in time to attend our Saturday reading, I stayed up all hours reading ghost stories to myself. Some that I've avoided as too long or too familiar when we were still planning our events, I decided to read again, probably for the first time since I'd read them as a boy. The Ambrose Bierce story gave me just the same jolt of horrible surprise I must have felt then. I'd quite forgotten what happened in that squalid little cabin in the woods. Reading both of the Poe stories included, and reading "The Black Cat" aloud to just the four white walls of my hotel room, proved to be about the best time I've had on this trip. (That, and discovering Kenny and Zuke’s Delicatessen just across the street from my usual hotel, the Mark Spencer -- just a happy stroll up the street from Powell's. I ate the second half of my enormous and deliciously authentic chopped liver sandwich while I read Poe's stories. That may explain what kept me up late; the stories and that sandwich. Well worth it.)

The amazing thing about discovering this old book and finally rereading some of these genuine masterpieces -- mit a masterpiece of "gehakte leber" no less -- has been the thrill of tasting what really is the best again. There is a reason anthologists tend to repeat. (There's a reason my sandwich has too, but still well worth it, trust me.) While we consciously, for the most part, avoided giants like Edgar Allen Poe for our readings; over-familiarity, of the name if not the actual stories, sometimes somewhat difficult language and the kind of long sentences that don't always trip so easily from contemporary booksellers' tongues, a cruel lack of sentimentality regarding animals that would be unpalatable for a modern audience, there is still a very good reason to read these stories again.

The narrator of Poe's "The Black Cat," is one of the first and best of that unreliable line of murderous psychotics that have been holding the American reader in their sway now for more than a century. I can't think of a more genuinely unsettling first person story than that of poor Pluto's murderer, or a perverse voice it would have been greater fun to assume, reading to the ghosts gathered in my hotel room. When I'd done, I could almost hear a cat yowling, indignant, from the street below. I might have offered a bite of my chopped liver, by way of appeasement, if I'd thought of it. Instead, I got up and closed the window before I went so tardily to bed.

So it seems my greediness for great ghost stories and related terrors is far from stated, even now. Just as one may still be surprised to find an authentic and delicious bit of Yiddishkeit in Portland, Oregon, of all places -- who knew? -- so, by turning an unexpected corner in a familiar bookstore, one may yet find another, thoroughly creepy and enjoyable old friend, just waiting to be remembered.

More. That's what I want.

Evidently, I am indeed a lost soul.

(I should have asked for an extra pickle. Can I get an extra pickle? It was a really good pickle, just not so big as maybe it should have been. I'm not complaining, you understand.)